We’re almost through to the end of June, and that means the weather is going to be insanely hot for the next while. Made some great progress in both teams, but here’s where we are and what’s been going on these past few weeks.
- Death Jesters reached phase 4 for the first time. Always remember, stars go left-right-left. Don’t be the guy who went left-right-right and wiped the raid. We saw about six Phase 4 pulls, and any of them could’ve been the kill. All we had to do was stay alive as we did reach the enrage. There’s some type of aura of buff where when you’re alive, you just happen to deal extra damage.
- Last Call finally crushes Belo’ren. I was a little disappointed it took us longer than the average. I felt we should’ve killed it weeks ago, but between the power creep of Sporefall and the extra raid buffs, it threw off our damage math. Eventually, we settled on going with lusting and using potions on second egg phase. We were sending our 2 minute CDs as they were coming up. First egg phase resulted in Belo’ren going below 60%. It also meant that we could force our 2 minute CDs on the second phase 1 on the various adds. Our goal here was to get Belo’ren down quick to avoid the fifth Dive (or fifth set of adds appearing). But it worked.
- Last Call started working on Midnight Falls. It took us the first hour just to test our interrupt macros and UI elements with the memory game stuff, but it worked.
- There’s been some discussion about replacing underperforming players (whether it’s damage out or just mechanical play or early deaths). This is probably the time to do it, but it’s hard to find people to come in now for it. It also almost feels like a disservice to those who’ve been playing with us from the start of the tier. The problem is that the encounters from Paladins onwards to Alleria and Belo’ren have really exposed the skill gaps and skill ceilings.
- The new Sporefall raid debuted earlier this week with flex raiding. I’ve tried it from 15 ranging through to 25 with just pug mythics, and boy, it was an absolute nightmare over the week. I felt like I logged about 8 or so hours just trying to pug it and use as many rolls as I can. Most raid groups go with adds on the boss and adds in the middle. I saw one raid group go with the left foot and right foot positioning for adds, and that one felt much better. You could assign 2 ranged players to focus the remaining add on its own.
- The release date for the next raid tier has been allegedly leaked, and we’re looking at August 11 for Race to World First to begin. That’s too early. I was hoping it would be after BlizzCon in September. With that timeline, there is no way we’re going to be able to clear Midnight Falls and give everyone a mount. We’ll have to come back to this later in the expansion.
- Speaking of patch information, upcoming class changes and tier set stuff have also been released. I’ll post some more thoughts on it later on in the week. The big focus seems to be on smoothing out the burst and spiky damage (especially for Elemental Shaman) with the goal of making damage more consistent. I like that philosophy because I’ve historically been awful at playing classes with those DPS windows (including Shadow Priest and Shaman). I should’ve played an Aug or a Mage instead.
- This is my official last week of work before my contract ends. I’m a little scared of what’s next. The job market’s been awful for the past year and I worry that I won’t be able to find anything that I can contribute to.