We’re back for another edition of the raid notebook and some quick thoughts.
- Another DJs reclear of Dragons: We managed to reclear Dragons again the second time around. Our first clear only took a whopping 13 pulls, which was far less than what I anticipated. For the record, I thought it would’ve taken triple that amount, perhaps in the 30+ range. They’ve left a blueprint for my guys in Last Call to see if we can follow. I doubt we can do it in 13, but under 30 is not impossible. We did end up putting more work on Paladins this week, but due to some logistical shortcomings (one of our players did not get the assigned Meekauras for Paladins as they were instructed, and another healer didn’t indicate they’d be away). This led to some tension in the raid because boss man was incredibly annoyed. I don’t blame him either, as I’d be pissed too.
- Last Call knocks out Mythic Nexus King and Heroic Bel’oren: We ended up burning Vantus runes on Mythic Salhadaar with these back-to-back 4% wipes. I just wanted to get it down and over with. It’s a hard one with all of the orbs and everything on screen. Very possible to lose visual sight of where your primary orb target is, and I had to make extensive use of the boss frames to target and track it down. I started off with a Mistweaver but quickly made the substitution for a Resto Shaman instead for the extra Spirit Link stability. The Mythic Dreamrift reclear could’ve been better, but I’ve started rotating in newer people who have not seen it yet, so that they can get reps on it and open their vault up for Gazes. There’s still a lot of work to do in minimizing silly mistakes even on farm. We’ll still wipe to early Mythic bosses and it’s always something different, but it’s a result of just sloppy play or absentmindedness. One of my challenges is to try to keep everyone playing at capacity for 5 minutes everytime. We can’t coast through everything just yet. With the time remaining, I felt it was prudent to clear out March. Belo’ren took us about 3 pulls, but it was what I expected. It’s hard to script this one since there are a lot of random elements involved. With Midnight Falls, we saw the 2nd phase just once. It took about 20 minutes to troubleshoot the installs of the Northern Sky Lura map. We had errors ranging from incorrect file placement, or appended file extensions, etc. Crystal damage and grouping needs more attention and reps. There’s a lot of coordination that goes on here, but I’d rather do this now than come back to it later on Mythic (and be in a position to relearn Heroic mechanics on top of Mythic ones).
- Questioning of progression order: I’ve never experienced so much pushback when I wanted to go pursue Heroic March. The feedback I received was that the team would rather continue goiing after Mythic bosses. I understand the sentiment, but I felt it was better for long term growth to at least clear and cap out the Heroic raid tier. It at least gets us that 9/9 Heroic credit. We’ve already started our heroic raid nights at Paladins (with the skip). We’d drop Heroic Dreamrift, but Gaze is still too valuable. We’re at the point where we can drop Heroic Voidspire altogether. There will be limited opportunities for the entire team to raid together as is (between the 3 Heroic bosses including March). I want to still do that to help maximize our team’s play time to that extent before it gets shortened as we progress into Mythic. I’ve never seen Sparty get this kind of pushback when he was laying out the direction for bosses to go after. All of us in DJs weren’t that opinionated about it, and we just did as we were told. The content wasn’t hard, and we’d streamroll it within a few pulls anyway so we could quickly get back to where we were on prog. We don’t need the extra gear to clear out the Heroic Midnight Falls, but we do need time to learn it. Gear from Midnight Falls is still relevant and impactful now (including rings, necks, and trinkets), so it can help our progression on the later Mythic Voidspire stuff before it gets outclassed by gear acquired from the vault. Our raid team is progressing faster than where we were last season with an all-new tank roster, a revamped healing roster, and half our DPS on turnover.
- Raider Self-Improvement and Trial Feedback: I might have to expand on this topic later, but it was brought up internally about some of our newer players and the steps they take for self-improvement. Do we have knowledge that they are reviewing logs, and making the necessary adjustments to on subsequent weeks?
No, it’s assumed.
My stance is that we should make this information and feedback visible to them so that they are aware that they could do better. The opposing stance is that the players should just know and do their own work. I prefer a hybrid model because it demonstrates that we’re aware of their low performance and that we can offer some guidance on what areas to upskill themselves on. If we don’t say anything and take their performance at face value, it hurts both the team and the player because there’s no meaningful feedback. The rest of the team then gets upset and frustrated at each other. The affected player could just have no idea that they’re not performing at their capability. Sometimes the fix can be something as easy as being reassigned to a different target or adjusting their CDs to be more impactful. I don’t like the idea of just assuming and expecting everyone knows what they’re doing wrong. That may work well at a Hall of Fame level, but we’re no where close to that. We still have a myriad of players that are looking to make that AotC jump to CE and haven’t internalized how to self-improve. At DJs, the team likes to stick around after raid or during the week and go over logs with each other just for an extra set of eyes. We’ll even look at our raid videos to see what we could’ve done better on movement or how we can eke out more damage. I’d like to implement something similar, but I just don’t have the bandwidth or the smarts to really pull it off. I can’t expect the team to take me seriously when my Shaman’s damage is not as high as it should be either. I always start off strong out of the gate before the damage just starts falling off over the course of the fight. I have a suspicion it might be related to my bindings. I don’t know. - Mythic Flex: More on this later, but Blizzard did announce the next small raid is going to have a scalable raid component between 15 and 25 players. Pretty neat idea and is a nice way to bridge that gap for AotC guilds who’ve run out of things to do and want to take on another challenge. I have my own thoughts and on this, but I’ll save that for a different post later.
- Last Call Roster: We’re holding firm at 25 players right now after we had that 2 week turnover. Our Evoker Healer has switched to a Holy Paladin. Now we’re entirely Evoker-less. I’d love to add a pair of Aug Evokers onto the team though. Those are also hard to come by.
- New Patch: The big feature I’m looking forward to is that Voidforge stuff with the extra bonus rolls. I know I’ll mostly be spending mine in M+ for that damned Feather out of Windrunner on my Shaman.
Enjoy the new patch today!