Matt’s Misplays

Matt’s Misplays: The Substitute Raid Leader Edition

by

It’s been a few weeks since the last one, but welcome back to Matt’s Misplays! We’ve just gotten to Sark this week and progression has begun. Due to a certain GM being absent, I got called up to step in and heal. Like a good on-call raid leader, I walked in with nary a clue! Our Mistweaver Monk was supposed to be running the show but work kept him late so it fell on me and I had to wing it. Even though I didn’t do many of the calls, I still had to make a few of the decisions since I was the ranking officer in the raid. That meant things like roster swaps, setting break times, battle res calls, confirming wipe calls, and so on. Thank goodness our other Holy Priest was in there to help with playcalling. It’s different running the raid on a new progression boss compared to a farm boss, because when you’re on farm you know exactly how things are supposed to go, but when you’re on progression there’s much more ambiguity and uncertainty.

For example, one common situation is determining what to do with four players dead: Do you keep going or call an immediate wipe?

Sometimes we choose to keep the pull going so we can gain more information or gain more familiarity for those that are alive. Other times we snap-call a wipe to get back in and try again. I can’t remember if I touched upon this topic here before or not, but it’s worth revisiting on its own.

In other news, I’m sad to say that Nomi’s (my Sunday and Monday raid team) have decided to stop raiding. The leaders are all changing schedules and it was no longer tenable to keep that raid group going. I would have considered taking it over but I don’t have the patience or the desire to run and orchestrate a raid team again. There are so many things that need to happen and finding the necessary staff to keep it going. I work better when I can help out in certain areas. With so many characters and alts I want to play and raid on, the time to commit just isn’t there. I just want to raid, man!

Anyway, let’s get to it! I’m sure you’re all excited to see some of the fun and exciting differences. Remember, we’re here to find new ways to die!

One of the first mechanics we encounter in the transition is these holes! When you’re in the intermission phase, you’ll drop a hole that stays both down in the shadow realm and up top in the main platform so it’s crucial to stack them all together in a tidy spot so it doesn’t impact positioning on the main platform. Of course, if you’re too slow like this Panda, you fall right through to your death. Position and timing are crucial. I’m actually surprised I even fit through the hole as a Panda.

Do you know why slippers are sold in pairs? So we can throw one each at these two absolute Fluffernutters who did not drop their circle on the Moon stack! We just established this previously. Those circles have to be stacked together and that’s what our Moon marker is for. In this case, we had what appears to be a Demon Hunter drop their circle away from the Moon and I wasn’t able to accurately determine the other class. Of all the mechanics I wanted to emphasize to the raid team and iron out, this was it. I know for a fact that when the teacher comes back from vacation and people are still farting this mechanic up, someone’s going to get a magazine to the back of the head and I don’t want that to happen. I did my best to dial in and get these mistakes fixed and it worked out as no one ended up to the side in all of the later pulls.

This one’s a Heroic mechanic that should not have happened. Our Demon Hunter gets debuffed with the Infinite Duress and flies out except his angle is off. He should be placed further back because our ranged group wants to be knocked right along the rim of the platform. Instead, some of us get knocked off of the platform altogether. Whoops!

I’ve been guilty of this one. Sark does do a sweeping breath attack periodically and if you don’t move fast enough, you get cut off on the wrong side. In this case, our precious Evoker was a little too greedy and tries to leap but ends up falling short and taking lethal damage. Some things are worth greeding, but this isn’t one of them.

Ultimately, we did end up getting pretty far this weekend. Seeing phase 3 a few times was huge. Now we just need to clean up our phase 2 and get everyone alive. In this second intermission phase, we’re dropping our pools in the middle of the circles except we stayed still too long. What we should be doing is moving forward so that we don’t end up in a potential hole that spawns.

Undoubtedly the misplay of the week, this one’s a Greek tragedy for our resident Shadow Priest. Here we have a Warlock gate established for one of the Infinite Duress knockbacks. The plan is to get knocked to the side and immediately hop the gate back to our starting position. However, what happened here was we had an errant Warlock gate that was online from phase 1 that didn’t get removed. Our Shadow Priest ends up taking the wrong gate and falling to his doom.

This one has my vote. It’s going into the end of year blooper reel.

Thanks for reading, that’s all for this week! By the way, DJ’s is recruiting for the end of tier and heading into the next season. Come check us out!

Matt’s Misplays: The Rashok is dead edition

by

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

by

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

by

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!

Matt’s Misplays: Welcome to Aberrus!

by

Welcome back, everybody! It’s been quite an eventful week with the season 2 launch of new dungeons! Of course, with a new season means a new raid and we step foot in Aberrus, the playground of Neltharion.

Or something.

What an opening week for Death Jesters though. We spent the past two weeks preparing for Aberrus and it paid off in a big way. We cleared 9/9 in normal, then followed up with a 9/9 Heroic, and finished it off with a 1/9 Mythic kill. This was all done in 6 hours and did not require another day. I can’t remember the last time I secured a week 1 Ahead of the Curve achievement. All in all, we distributed over 110 pieces of loot. Sadly, no tier for your favourite Panda Priest but that’s okay. Priority to the DPS first. The faster stuff dies, the less we need to heal.

Anyway, let’s get into it, shall we?

It’s a new raid. There’s new bosses. There’s new mechanics and new abilities. I’ll go a little easy this week.

… Or will I?

Let’s move up to the third encounter that is the Forgotten Experiments. We tackle the dragon versions of Larry, Moe, and Curly. We have the last dragon (Curly) in the air about to strafe the raid. We manage to survive the initial run, but then run back in and manage to bait it back on the return trip.

Oops!

We should have waited on either side for the dragon to pass by and reach the end. Then we can visually track it and see which lane it picks (hopefully one of the outer lanes keeping the middle free). Instead, middle gets strafed again and you can see a few of our players get essentially get bodychecked because they did not keep their head up. The lesson here is to keep your head up and track where the dragon is at all times.

Here we have Rashok and I guarantee you every guild has made this mistake at least once. As raiders, we’re so ingrained to maximize location economy that overlapping circles next to each other so that we have real estate to work with in the arena. Unfortunately, Blizzard likes to remind us that they can break the rules. Here you can see a Rogue deploy his Grappling Hook out into the wall but he just barely misses making the side step adjustment causing the circles to touch and detonating the raid!

Needless to say, we have not made that error since.

Keep your circles at least one panda away from each other.

Here is the Amalgamation Chamber. Players on the Void side get targeted and drop off a giant purple circle. We have our multi-dotters in the middle hitting both the flame and void elemental. Of course, our genius Shadow Priest gets a circle and then… proceeds to travel in the direction of Middle Earth.

Take it backwards, my dude! Missing out on potential damage by dropping that circle off far away like that.

Look at this idiot Panda who completely whiffs a rock throw in Assault of the Zaqali. Either that, or the Zaqali Spiderman just shrugged off the rock I dropped over the side. Anyway, I guess the boulder is thrown in the column based on where the player character is as opposed to where the character is facing.

Let’s move onto Echo of Neltharion which might be the first real, uh… wall that a raid faces. Not everything listed is going to be a misplay. If I recognize a great play, I’ll point that out too. Here is a risky move that paid off. Due to an earlier misplaced fire patch, the raid has no room to go to stay out of the impending fire circles. Our lone Evoker makes the quick thinking play to pop defensives and proceeds to stand in the fire. I did track that and managed to slam as many heals into him before he was able to fly back to group safely.

That is a raid-saving play. But as a team, we should have never put him in that position to begin with.

Some further unfortunate miscommunication here leads to the raid getting split in half. Let this be a lesson in heavy movement encounters to telegraph or direct traffic in advance if you have to make a change. There’s no way we can handle traversing the big fire patch and now we’re cut off away from everyone else resulting in a wipe. This is an example of the raid needing to do a large move fast to get in front and we failed to do that here.

This above is what should happen. Tanks hulk smash their way through a wall in the direction they want the team to rush through and then drag Neltharion back in the other direction to minimize the fire patch. Keep up this same pattern during the phase 1 push.

There are two examples above here. Again, further miscommunication on our end. We’re instructed to “get inside, get inside!” but we interpreted that as getting inside to the center whereas the intent was to get inside the rock walls where the raid needs to go before the walls come up. Check your terminology here and find a way to distinguish between the rock walls (that are breakable) and outside walls (which is the arena room walls). Make sure your raid understands the difference because if you tell someone with the purple arrow to run to a wall, they need to know which one it is. In most cases, it’s going to be the outside wall since you won’t need them to break any of the rock walls.

Clearly state what your intentions are for the raid by being simple and direct. Phrases like “move to green marker” or “move away from blue” are simple and will work. It also helps to actually have markers down to direct traffic.

Oh noooooo! We left a man behind! When you start seeing the larger orange swirls appear, that is your cue to stop what you’re doing because the walls are about to come up momentarily. You cannot greed your casts in this situation or else you get punished by being isolated from the rest of the raid.

It’s okay, the walls came down about 30 seconds later as we changed phases. This one’s on me.

I did have an opening to grip him over with plenty of time but I just… didn’t.

Every Holy Priest’s worst nightmare comes true here. A Divine Hymn is scheduled to come up during this soak and I proceed to start the channeled cast, but I’m forced to move and interrupt it in order for Hurtling Barrage to be pointed outward.

Actually, I think I had time here before the barrage would come through. So this is on me for taking it too safe and not being greedy. I had time to finish the Hymn then move out. Alternatively, wait for Hurtling Barrage to target, then cast it.

Let’s analyze this phase one death for a second because I see this situation come up often. The player has a Mass Disintegrate and they need to stay still for their team to get rid of their Echoing Howl. A fire is about to land on them and they risk lethal. But if they move out of it, they risk messing up any players that have to clear.

My play would be to rotate character 90 degrees and strafe left (this would move me away from the boss at 100% move speed instead of simply backpedalling at a slower speed). I don’t know if immunities would move the Distintegrate to another target or something.

In actuality, this was a miss by healers because we did not burst this player to full health fast enough causing them to get zapped by the beam (but the fire would’ve melted them anyway if they weren’t going to move). I need to add a frame glow for the target.

It took me about two pulls before I successfully wrapped my head around Infinite Duress. Most healers are quite trigger-happy with their dispel but that’s a mistake. In this example, I get bailed out here by an evoker. I knew I was supposed to run that out, but I mentally spaced and ran it in the wrong direction. Had I been dispelled here, it would’ve knocked the rest of the team off the platform. Instead, I get positioned in such a way that the dispel knocks the team further inward keeping them safe.

I love this moment above because it actually proves that contrary to popular belief, Ret Paladins can think! Watch as our intrepid wannabe warrior steps out and realizes that getting dispelled in his position is going to knock the raid into the two circles. He shuffles over and the dispel is clear to go off resulting in the team getting knocked to safety.

You can figuratively see the gears turn in this one. He literally stops, pauses, and then moves.

At the same time, I have to point out that this is the same man who randomly just speed horse’d into the Terros hole for no reason.

However, not to be outdone, our resident Enhancement Shaman learns from the previous play and beelines it straight to the safe spot. He’s a chess master and has already thought 3 moves ahead. He reached that conclusion way faster than our previous Ret Paladin did. This is an example of learning from other player’s mistakes.

It’s unfortunate that they’ll continue to be overshadowed and recognized primarily for their use in raid as a glorified Windfury dispenser.

That’s all the misplays for this week! I hope you had a good chuckle at a few of these, but more importantly, I implore you to learn from our mistakes. I’m here to help teach you to become better decision-makers in raid. All in all, this is a fun instance with mostly single targets. Great raid to head into the summer with. In the mean time, we are looking to recruit some players to help us in the summer months for Aberrus. We’re looking to add a Mage and a Hunter. Check us out and apply here!