Zskarn and Magmorax Cleared!

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DJs made some big strides this past weekend. One small step for Gnome, and one giant leap for Panda. DJs defeated Zskarn after a few pulls on Friday after some much-needed nerfs and consistency was added. I was only in for a few pulls pre-nerf and I could tell how chaotic it was. We put in a few pulls on Magmorax before calling it a night. The next day after that, we added Magmorax to our kill list. It’s incredible the stark difference in difficulty between these two bosses. Now we’re in the final home stretch that is Echo of Neltharion. The rest of the raid night was spent getting accustomed to Weak Auras and ensuring functionality while familiarizing ourselves with the updated, mythic mechanics. I don’t know about you, but that’s a pretty productive long weekend for us. We’re extending from hereon out until Sark is down.

It’s not likely I’m going to be in for any of the remaining kills on Echo and Commander Sarkareth. I’ve made peace with that, especially with a turbulent weekend schedule coming up that will see me away for 2 out of the next 8 raid nights for the rest of the month. Doesn’t make sense to put me in for progression. I still have to maintain some semblance of readiness in the event I do need to step in but at this point in my raiding career, I’m comfortable in a stable, relief position and not someone that has to be a starter all the time. I’ve basically entered my raiding Clooney years on an NFL veteran minimum salary! I just have to find other ways to contribute. This is why I’m on 3 other raiding teams just to keep my raiding and gameplay awareness up.

Summer months for recruiting continue to be a pain. The past several weeks saw the departure of 5 players. Our roster at some points was down to a perilous 22 raiders overall which is dangerous in the summer. Players often have obligations or travel commitments. Fortunately, we’ve been able to replenish the recruiting pipeline and did pick up some new trial players. I’m optimistic that they’ll work out (which is weird since I’m usually the pessimistic one). The burnout is real and definitely taking a toll. For guilds, the focus should be on keeping an eye on everyone and checking with them to see how they’re feeling. Start rotating some players in if you can afford it, and get some fresh hands and eyes.

At the moment, we’re looking to add a Warrior, an Evoker, a Warlock, and a Balance Druid. I missed out on picking up an Evoker especially with Augmentation coming up quite soon. It’s been identified as a must-have. I think we’re going to need two. Check us out!

Traits of an Effective Healing Officer

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I swear I wrote about this topic somewhere over a decade ago on a different publication but I felt it was time to revisit it. I can’t find it as it might well be lost to the bowels of the internet. There is more to being a healing lead than simply setting cooldowns on a spreadsheet and setting it in advance. After having played in multiple raids with established healing officers, I’ve been so dissatisfied with how they’re running their healers. It often feels disappointing when I’m DPSing during Echo of Neltharion during a raid and then we all wipe to Umbral Annihilation as I glance over and see that we still had 5 raid defensives that could’ve been used. Situations like this turn a surefire progression kill into a well-deserved wipe. It got to the point where I had to step in and just audible raid defensives for the team just so we could get past and move on to Scalecommander Sarkareth. It’s not something I really wanted to do and I regret stepping on the healing lead’s toes like that because I don’t have that authority. They’re a good group but lack the organizational discipline to really advance.

The healing lead serves as the primary point of contact between the raid and the healers. Their role is to establish cooldown usages in advance and make any corrections during progression. Any healer feedback ought to get channeled through them especially if raiders aren’t able to communicate well (because, y’know, no tact).

After years of calling raid defensives and observing other healing leaders, I’ve compiled a list of what traits and styles they all share.

Say something

Communication is key. As a healing leader, step up and start issuing instructions especially early on in progression. Healers are getting used to damage patterns coming in and helping the raid recover from various abilities. Not only that, much of their brain power is going to be spent on just moving around and surviving! They benefit from audio reminders just like everyone else until the encounter becomes so ingrained that it’s no longer necessary.

  • Give specific instructions: Call out player names, then the spell you want them to use. If there’s a time component, tell them to count to 3 then use a Salvation. If it’s ability based, you can say something like, “Handel, on the next Scouring Eternity, use a Rallying Cry.” That will help prime a player to know what to look for and when to use something.
  • Highlight debuffed players: Be prepared to flag individual players with a big debuff or a ticking dot ability on them. Ideally, every healer in the raid should run a glow that flashes players in the raid frames who have been targeted by something. Call it out and remind the healers to target them and for the affected players to use a defensive or a healthstone. After a few pulls, this won’t be necessary.

It’s possible for the raid leader to double up on this and take over cooldowns in addition to other raid duties, but I recommend splitting it up for the sake of mental bandwidth.

Go Off Script

No good healer spreadsheet survives first contact with any raid boss. You never know what your players will do or how they’ll react to situations they haven’t seen before. I was once assigned to cast Divine Hymn during a certain part of the encounter but we phased it ahead of schedule which negated my part, so I banked it for a future unforeseen situation. To make sure it wasn’t a fluke, we were able to replicate that DPS and it allowed us to move certain cooldowns around knowing it was no longer needed in that step.

  • Keep assessing: Pay close attention to raid health, debuffs, and other mechanics. When things get intense, adjust your healing strategy on the fly because you may find that you need extra defensives due to underestimating damage coming in. This might cause you to use a pre-assigned cooldown earlier than expected and will cause a cascade where everything on the list gets moved up one to help compensate.
  • It’s okay to be wrong: Expect to make bad calls. Live with the decision. It’s better to make a swift decision and communicate it to the team as opposed to not saying anything at all when a change has to be made. Give clear instructions about changes, assignments, or positioning. If you end up being wrong, you’ll know what not to do when you’re in this situation again later.

Fluent with Warcraft Logs

I don’t need to go into too much detail here, but being able to review healing logs of yourself, other healers, and the raid is a big benefit. You’re trying to isolate information that could be destroying your raid and players at various moments in an encounter.

Understand Your Tools

Raid defensives are no longer a healer-exclusive domain. Even the DPS has to step in to contribute! To be an amazing healing leader, you need to understand the strengths of the tools at your disposal and know when to use what. There is a time to use Tranquility and Healing Tide Totem versus Power Word: Barrier and Rallying Cry. Even Darkness has an ideal usage. If the raid group is stacked together, a Spirit Link Totem will do the job. Is the raid spaced out and unable to group up? A Salvation might do the trick.

Organize with Viserio’s and MRT

Much of the healing preparation needs to happen outside of raid. Your best weapons here are Viserio’s cooldown spreadsheets (which can be found on Discord) and Method Raid Tools.  Cooldowns are your secret sauce for maximum healing impact. Once you have them planned out, you can incorporate them as a note into MRT:

  • Know the Encounter: Study the raid encounters and understand when the big damage moments are coming. Herolust counts as a defensive cooldown so if it’s being used on the pull, you do have the 40 seconds of extra cast time to help get you through certain abilities. This lets you delay defensives for later on in the encounter.
  • Incorporate other healers: Pick the brains of your healers if you’re not sure how to react to a given ability. Some have an easier time dealing with certain types of attacks than others.
  • Personals and potions: You can assign personal player defensives and potions or healthstones if the situation calls for something and raid defensives are committed elsewhere.

There are even Weakauras that will ping you when it’s your turn to use an ability.

Don’t Stress About Tanks

More on this another time, but the best tanks I’ve raided with take their own destiny into their hands. They know how to call for and sequence single target cooldowns on their own so that healing leaders don’t have to do it for them.

One of the common tank UIs that I’ve seen has them incorporate single-target defensive timers under their player frames so they can quickly glance at what’s available to them.

Troubleshoot Deaths Like a Pro

Even the greatest healing leaders face deaths on their watch. This will take up a big part of wipes. I like to have a dedicated Deaths Details window in addition to damage and healing.

  • Analyze Deaths: You can’t address player deaths without knowing what killed them. Was the player just being bad or did a healer fumble somewhere? I often take a cursory look at the death log in Details but if I need a more in-depth look, I’ll check death logs on Warcraft Logs along with the replay and time step. I’ll even review video footage I have to add some context. Maybe it was an innocuous positional blunder that resulted in a raider falling over. I’ve been this player before.
  • Give Constructive Feedback: State the facts and list exactly what happened. The point is to not find fault, it’s to find solutions. This might mean the affected player needs to stop being greedy and reposition in advance to prepare for an ability. Or maybe they need a dedicated healer or cooldown to get them through a certain part of the fight. There are multiple ways to solve these situations. But share what you’ve learned with the raid group in a supportive manner. Encourage an open discussion and offer suggestions for improvement. Shut down any attempts at player blame or faults lest it devolves into wasted time arguing which serves no one.
  • Missed assignment needs to be reviewed: Once is okay, but frequent misses are a problem and need to get fixed. During Rashok progression early on, I found myself missing the 2nd cast of Divine Hymn. After looking back, I noticed it occurred because my attention was focused on dodging lava waves and then I would simply forget. I made a more conscious effort to watch the timers and remain more aware of how much time I had left on the cooldown of Divine Hymn so I could prepare myself to channel it when needed.

Stay Objective

As a healing leader, maintaining objectivity is your secret weapon. It’s all about making fair decisions and fostering a positive raiding vibe. Here’s the game plan:

  • Stay focused: That’s ice cold water running through your veins. Stay cool, even when things get intense. Stay focused on the task at hand and make rational decisions without getting carried away by emotions. Tackle one problem at a time and then move on to the next one over the course of several wipes. Sometimes healers have to compensate for bad mechanical play until the raid gets a better handle on how to get through it.
  • Address conflicts: If conflicts arise, tackle them proactively. Be the mediator and promote open communication. Sometimes a deeper analysis and review can only happen once the raid is over. Don’t let any fights start in the middle of a raid. If things get even more heated, the raid leader might have to step in and tell the player to exit the raid and go for a walk.

Handling the Parse Lords

This will come up once in a while especially with newer healers. They feel left out and want to feel like they contributed. That’s fine if you have the ability to reposition their cooldowns to be more effective (you can even front load them earlier in the encounter). As players get more gear, the raid damage gets higher which also means less opportunity to do any healing. The only way to address this is to reduce the number of healers in the raid. If you have healers that care about that sort of thing, you can plan for it and rotate a healer out or have them play in an offspec role instead.

If it’s on progression, you can hear them out but put your foot down if you’ve already determined the best place to position cooldowns. We have to stick to the healing script to get through troublesome parts of the boss and it builds up that consistency. This does mean that some healers may not rank as high as others but hey, as long as it leads to a boss defeat.

Of all the officerial roles in a guild, being the raid’s defacto healing coordinator is one of the toughest. Expect to work closely with the raid leader when working on strategy together to see what coverage is available at any given point of an encounter. Not only that, prepare to rapidly iterate or change things up after a few pulls once you discover that what you had planned didn’t quite work.

As much as I hate to add this last part, ego management is real. Raiders might often get annoyed or pick on healers who they perceive as not pulling their weight because of a quick glance at healing meters. It’s your job to figure out and pick apart what’s real and what isn’t. Maybe they are slacking. Find out why and what can be done about it. HPS is often fluid and will vary at different parts of the fight. Unlike DPS, healer’s don’t often burn their CDs at the start of an encounter during Herolust.

Good luck out there!

Matt’s Misplays: The Rashok is dead edition

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We got ’em! Rashok has been defeated and that puts us in the 5/9 Mythic club. The first pull of the night was oddly quite close to a kill before we ran out of time (and alive players). It would be another 6 pulls before Rashok fell over. I played my worst that night. An upset stomach throws off your game and focus. This is on top of all the other things Rashok throws at you. As a healer, you have to completely manage your cooldowns. You must remain environmentally aware of the lava waves coming at you and prepare for the big purple cone of death that can crush you. High healing throughput is a requirement with all the absorbs going on. Fade is almost always going to be used on cooldown because there’s almost no wrong time to use it like on a leap or a soak or whatever. It’s a fun encounter to heal but it stretches the synaptic limit of a healer. Credit to the DPS as we were short damage checks on the previous week but we were able to meet and exceed them during the kill week.

  • Join us: Looking for some strong DPS here including Death Knights and Warriors to help us through the summer. Check us out!

Next on our list is Zskarn (and the Z is silent because I was pronouncing it as Zuh-Karn). I’m sitting on the sideline for this one but sheesh if Rashok was bad, this looks infinitely worse.

Only a few misplays made the cut this week, but they’re both me!

This one’s a little sus for me. I thought I cleared the big ol’ cleave, but I didn’t. This has been slowed to 50% speed. But the funnier part is our Windwalker Monk who advanced into it. That was funny. I have to do a better job of stopping my cast and moving closer to Rashok right after that third leap because I know that he’s going to drop that AoE cone somewhere. The best place to be when that goes out is near Rashok since you can simply run through him to get clear of the ability. If there’s one thing FF 14 gets right, it’s the clear lines on where abilities end. Still, this is on me for not anticipating the play earlier and getting into position.

On this play, there was a clearly missed smaller soak on the side here. I saw it too late but I don’t have the jets to get there early enough. Maybe the only thing I could’ve really done was spread out further away from the group before the smaller soaks came out.

That’s all I got. Best of luck in raid, team!

Matt’s Misplays: Diablo 4 Edition

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Hello to the late edition of Matt’s Misplays! It’s getting more and more difficult to find funny highlights and clips. I’m not sure if it’s because we’re playing better as aunit or if it’s because people keep making the same misplays and I don’t want to feature the same thing every week. I trust everyone had an enjoyable early access Diablo 4 weekend. I’ve only started playing myself on a Barbarian amongst a sea of Necromancers that happens to be my guild.

Quick thoughts

  • The gearing system: Is it too fast? I’ve found myself at 441 ilvl on both Priests and my Elemental Shaman. My Ret Paladin is at 436 and my Evoker’s at 432. I’ll have more thoughts on this later, but something to ponder as we’re about 5 weeks into Aberrus and the Catalyst isn’t even open yet even though we’re a week away.
  • Experiments: Secured my first kill on Experiments this past weekend. Honestly, it sucks and is not fun. The Mass Dispels are critical to remove the debuffs and having two Priests handle that is almost a requirement.
  • Rashok continues: Unfortunately, we did not secure the kill this weekend. We got a few solid looks under 20% but we’re short DPS to get over the top. Hoping this week’s vault upgrades will get it done.
  • Morning Mythic bugs: Today was a strange morning as we all opened our vaults to keys with no affixes. Honestly, it’s nice to roll into a naturally high key dungeon without any extra affixes or worry about Tyrannical or Fortified and see how much everything hits harder or lives longer as is.
  • Recruiting: No change here. Still looking to add a Warrior, Death Knight, Balance Druid, or any other big-time DPS player to help reinforce us for the summer. Come check us out.

On to the misplays!

Imagine this. You’re trialling for a new guild and it’s your first day of raid. On the very first pull of Rashok, you get targeted with a Leap and inadvertently Disengage backwards away from the intended direction to go. Embarrassing right? This happened to our newest Hunter and they absolutely got roasted for it but they took it in stride. It did feel a little laggy over the weekend. I blame all the Diablo 4 players.

Everybody has to be prepared to soak a puddle. It is everyone’s job to look around and make sure there’s coverage. Not a misplay, but I just wanted to highlight the speed of this particular Panda. Watch as he splits the initial lava balls that come through and turns around to speed back into the left soak. Two players happened to have gone to the right and double-soaked that one. This pull could have ended badly.

There are two things wrong in this clip of Kazz. We’ve altered our strategy to spread out and utilize more of the room, but aside from that, the breath mechanic does not change in any of the difficulties. You can see boss timers for abilities and there are many indicators and telegraphs that breaths are incoming. At this level of raiding, you cannot tunnel vision and greed your spells because there is always a chance you’ll get punished for it which is what happened here. Our poor Warlock gets burnt to a crisp (extra crispy, even). On the other hand, I was in a good position and was situationally aware enough to recognize that Kazz was about to breathe fire and I tracked the direction that breath was going. I easily could have fished them out with a Life Grip but I simply chose not to. I should have though. I hate having to be in a position where I have to bail people out of easy situations like this because it builds bad habits on their part. Your boss timers should be somewhere prominent on your screen that you can quickly glance at to see what’s coming up next and try to prepare for it, like the rearview mirror on your car. If you find yourself being blind to timers or not checking them regularly, that’s a sign that you need to reposition it to somewhere more in your peripheral vision so that you can catch it. I’ve seen some players (healers) put it above their raid frames. I’m unsure where DPS would place them other than offset or maybe above their class HUD (if they use any).

Speaking of Panda blunders, watch what happens here. It’s quite subtle but makes a big difference. On Experiments, when bombs get dispelled they spawn and generate mobs that need to be killed. Our strategy involves having all affected players stand on circle marker before Mass Dispel gets cast. I’m the one dispelling here. As the time was coming up to get in position for Dispel, there were two things that crossed my mind:

  1. Favouring speed: Get in position (a slightly loose stack) first to stack, then Dispel
  2. Favouring position: Get directly on the mark even if it means taking an extra second or two before casting Dispel

The mistake here is that I went with option 1. You’ll notice that I wasn’t directly stacked on the Diamond or the Circle marks that came in after. I was worried about being too slow or not getting Dispel off earlier in time so that I didn’t go all the way in. The consequence here is that when I did cast Mass Dispel, the AoE circle that I dropped extended closer towards the rest of the raid forcing the other two raiders to either veer off or fight that much harder and use a defensive to make it through without being hit. I learned that the timing wasn’t as important. Another second or two with the debuff wasn’t going to impact us seriously, but my being off position would have snowballed a bad situation into a worse one.

That’s all for this week! Enjoy Diablo 4, everybody!

Matt’s Misplays: Greed is a Sin

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Welcome back to another week of Matt’s Misplays! We progressed further into Aberrus this week after solving Experiments. This puts us at 4/9 Mythic and now the encounters get harder as we put in some work on Rashok. Our best work was just under 30%.

  • Kazzara strategy change: We modified our approach to Kazz. Instead of slowly trying to maneuver the dragon around the room, we opted to keep Kazz in the center and drop pools off to half the room until it was filled before switching to the opposite side and filling up that area. We relied more on damage and bruteforce here instead of finesse which made the kill much more smoother.
  • Experiments kill: Not sure what changed but we polished this one off in a few pulls. The critical part of the encounter is the last phase with both the bomb and dispel management. It’s a balance of knowing when to dispel and kill the ads.
  • Rashok begins: I’d say this is the big healer check that raids will encounter the first time in. So many balls of fire have to be dodged. Just for fun, consider chain running Uldaman to get practice on evading that stuff but there’s so much to move around that you really have to position and plan heals ahead of time. There are also orbs (Shadowflame Orb) where targeted Searing Slam players must go to. Leap eliminates an Orb which means less damage we take and less healing absorbs to power through.
  • Recruiting continues: Summer is coming and it is rearing it’s head. We’ve already lost a few players due to summer schedules and we’re looking to reinforce our roster. To be specific, we’re actively looking for DPS Warriors, Death Knights, Balance Druid, and a Mage. Check us out!

Let’s move on, shall we?

Took me a while to catch ’em, but we have our first tank blunder! Then again, it’s not entirely their fault. Rashok is a bit of a pain to maneuver and move around. We had just finished dealing with the third Leap and are trying to corral the boss into the middle. But he just decides to stop and then we all combust as a result from the Ancient Fury that gets cast to full. Whooooops! Someone cue that Benny Hill, please!

If you look closely, there are actually not one but two blunders being committed here. The major obvious one is the missed Leap. You see those floating orbs on the left and on the bottom right? One of the Searing Slams must get placed there for Rashok to jump on and neutralize it. This was early on in our pulls and our poor Evoker was still operating on muscle memory and habit in trying to take it out of the raid. Big oomph there! The second misplay is a bit more subtle. If you watch my Priest movement at the bottom, you can see that there’s a small lava wave that comes out and I end up running with it instead of away from it subsequently forcing me to evolve into my angel form. As a Panda Priest, I have practically zero mobility or speed so why I decided to attempt to outrace it is beyond me. Dodge these by strafing east-west instead of north-south along with the lava wave.

Not to be outdone by our favourite Evoker, our Warrior decides to actually click off his Intellect buff in an effort to show them who’s better! He gets targeted with Searing Slam and you can see him start cutting towards the orb on the left before Heroic Leaping away from it. I was so stunned that you can see my Prayer of Mending reminder is still up and I just gave up on the pull because I couldn’t believe what I saw and started cracking up. This is hands down my favourite clip of the week.

What an absolute donut of a Warrior though.

I can’t not hear Space Jam whenever I see this clip. Come on and SLAM! And welcome to the JAM! I had a feeling someone was going to make a blunder like this one because they’re so focused on getting the Slam to the right place that they forget that the Slam can’t touch an existing orb on the ground otherwise it just lethals the whole raid like in this example. Thankfully, this was the only such wipe of the night.

For this last one, if you look up the definition of “greedy” in the dictionary, you’ll end up with this clip. Here we are in heroic Sarkareth. Our resident Panda is downstairs gobbling up noodle shaped objects. He has 9 stacks and has seconds to get out. Why not go for 10 right? Except he can’t, because he’s a Priest and he’s super slow. He grabs the 10th (and 11th because not paying attention), and beelines it to portal 2 and promptly gets winked out of existence before even reaching portal 3. The lesson here is you don’t need 10 stacks of the Haste buff. You can get away with anywhere between 5 to 8 stacks as long as you exit the zone in time and don’t die the way this absolute wagon wheel of a Priest did. Someone definitely isn’t getting bubble tea for a week.

Do. Not. Be. Greedy.

Play it safe!

That’s it for the week and I trust you learned something from the various whoopsies shown above! We’re mortal too!