We’re about to reach the crescendo of our progression here shortly. We’ve had some more success this past week on both raid teams followed by some setbacks.
- Princess Defeated: Whoo hoo! I hated the Princess fight at first, but the straightforward movement and coordination required might make it a healer’s favourite. One of the things I struggled with during the intermission was that I moved too early into pie slices. But you can’t wait too long to finish a cast; otherwise, you’ll get caught and get crushed. The learning curve on this is much shorter and less intensive than Broodtwister. With the Finery raid buffs and the gear check, it might make more sense to go after Princess first instead. Broodtwister continues to be a cluster of Weak Auras and DPS or interrupt assignments with knockbacks, which will take a lot of initial coordination to set up. I ended up using those potion bombs and throwing it on our DPS to help them out more just to eke out that much more damage. We’ve already put together a tentative road map in place and it looks like it will take us to the end of December for a potential Queen kill.
- Play to your forehand: One of our mages who specialized in Fire switched to Frost on our first day. He wasn’t used to it, and that’s where the faulty logic comes into play when you try to chase what logs are saying. If sims say that Frost is top, but you’re more fluent and comfortable on a different spec, and you try out a spec that you’re unfamiliar with while progressing a boss, you’ll make more compound mistakes. Sure enough, there were a lot of deaths during day 1 of progression just trying to get familiar with it and paid the price because he had to spend a lot of cognitive energy on rotations, proc management, and surviving. Had he stayed fire, much of that would’ve already been ingrained habitually or as muscle memory. He ended up switching back on day 2, and that’s when Princess went down.
- Last Call: Not going to sugarcoat this one either, as we played like absolute crap on the first half of day 1. We had maybe 8 or so wipes to Ulgrax and another 10 on Bloodbound. One of our main tanks was away that weekend so there was a little reprog involved there as our healer took over that tanking spot. I had to partially chew out and remind the team they were better than that after we killed Bloodbound. We also had exactly 20 players with no margin for relying on our bench depth or to rotate underperformers out. There was a moment when I asked if it was even worth trying to go after Sikran with the way we were playing. But no, it was decided that reps were just more valuable and to get pulls in and accustomed to it especially for players who missed out on the previous week of Sikran progression. But once we arrived at Sikran, we started the pull, and everything went somewhat well. Sure, we detonated an image because of proximity, but we survived through it. In fact, we played just well enough to defeat her on the first pull of the night much to my amazement. I was delighted but also quite confused because I don’t know where this came from.
- Roster Issues: We had one healer whose alarm didn’t go off. We had another player who just flat out didn’t show up at all or provide any advance notice of them being away. This put us at 19 players on day 2 and we ultimately went back to clear heroic and try to patch in some missing gear. But we added another Mage (a DJs alternate even), and now another Warlock to help stabilize our depth. Our current needs continue to be an Evoker and a Rogue.
Less than two weeks before my concert performance! I feel quite comfortable going into this one actually.