What an eventful week. In the past, I discussed the value of having a raider orientation for the veterans and new trials joining your raid. We held ours this past weekend on Saturday. Anyway, here’s a small roundup of my thoughts before we jump into Delves and Mythic zero dungeons.
- Orientation Day: The energy in the room felt good. Even being on Discord, I could tell there were hints of quiet anticipation and eagerness in the air. This might be the most prepared we’ve been in a while. We covered the usual expectations and went through some early film of all the raid bosses, plus how we intend to handle specific boss mechanics.
- Roster: We’re standing pat at 27 players confirmed with an additional player as 1 day trials (walk-on trials) to see what they’re made of. Both of those players were referred and recommended to us but the raid experience isn’t at the level we’re expecting so this is a way for us to gauge what their ceiling would be and what their raid fundamentals are. I have a future post planned to address how to handle applicants who are referred to us by players on the team. We’re still looking for some more DPS players, though! This has been a great team though as I’m fortunate enough to raid with players where I’m okay playing with everyone. In some previous raid groups, there were people I would just flat-out avoid socializing with, but I don’t have that impression here.
- Nerub-ar Palace: Went through normal and the first five bosses on heroic on day 1. Day 2 saw us knock out the next 2 bosses (Broodtwister and Silken Court). On Queen, we were able to get to first intermission with most of the raid up before we succumbed. Some of these later bosses do instill FPS issues for me but that’s also because I have a 6 year old PC.
- Broodtwister: Great healing encounter. So much to do. Might be in the running for the Rashok of the tier.
- Silken Court: Similar feeling, and there’s definitely a lot going on here. Communication is important here and we had a few players with audio issues that didn’t realize it (Spikes, or poison). Had a heartbreaking 0.55% wipe early on and our newly minted Blood Death Knight could not solo it at the end.
- Queen Ansurek: Great end boss encounter on normal. Much more accessible then previous tiers, I thought. The tuning and balance team knocked it out of the part here. On heroic, it’s quite a big step up. The first phase is the hardest part of the encounter for sure. Much of our efforts was trying to balance the knockups. We opted for overlapping venn diagrams for the two green circles and having the raid stand in between them. Harder intial learning curve, but we believe it’ll help us out more on the long run.
- Dungeons: With the Mythic season opening up soon, this was a great week to get a feel of all the different dungeons. There’s no real dungeon that I’m dreading.
- Grim Batol: I like the changes to it. Wish the bombing run part was longer, but I understand why it was shortened. Last boss is a doozy and took us a bit to figure out. I wish the safe zone was a few yards wider. It’s a tight fit for a panda.
- Mists: I miss this place. It’s like comfort food.
- Siege of Boralus: Mixed feelings about it, but overall not too annoyed at it yet. First boss is a bit of a challenge for players who’ve never played during this time and aren’t familiar with how it works with the explosives.
- Priest play: I need to get my Prayer of Mending numbers up. I used to have a Sonar ping when it was off cooldown but it was disabled and I forgot to re-enable it. I’ve gotten a little better on Fade usage, and I also need to be more liberal with my Desperate Prayer usage. Pretty satisfied with week 1 healing though on the Holy Priest. Lightweaver spec is the way to go right now and I never thought I’d say this, but I do miss Lightwell. I had grown accustomed to it from last tier.
- Delves: Bit of a yo-yo experience here where the Delves were buffed to an extreme high where groups couldn’t proceed as easily as they could earlier in the week when Tier 8 Delves opened. Then Blizzard rebalanced it back. I’d like to see an extra life per player per checkpoint added though. The damage and health pools of the mobs are fine at this point but extra learning chances would make them more forgiving at the +8 level.
- Exploit bans: This one regarding the renown ban seemed a bit too heavy-handed. Our community was affected as we had players who were issued temporary bans because they had linked accounts amongst different family members. None of them were overturned so they lost out on some playing time. I don’t agree with that ban, but I would’ve gone for delayed rewards and had them not activate for another week or two if the players had over some arbitrary number of Renown (like over 17).
Thanks for taking the time to read and I hope you have great Mythic+ week! If you’re still looking for a team to raid with, you can learn more about us on our Raider IO page and apply using the form link in the profile.