Farm Farm Farm Farm... zzzzzzzz

Blast Furnace...

More progress this week as we downed Heroic Blast Furnace!

I'm not a big fan of this fight if I'm honest, it's probably my least favourite in the whole raid.  There are no real challenges, no mechanics to handle... well, none that really matter.

Hmmm... it's difficult to explain what I mean. 
There are lots of mechanics but none of them are particularly challenging, reminds me of Paragons of the Klaxxi in SoO.  There's lots going on but, as long as you mostly get it right, you can just kind of muddle through the rest.

Stay spread out so the damage is under control, hit the right target at the right time and everything just dies. 
Even the Primal Elementalists seem a bit lacklustre - You are supposed to go flat out to kill them in one "shield down" phase but it doesn't really penalise you if you don't, you can just leave one person on there to finish it off while the rest move on.
Maybe the delay means more adds and more Heat for the boss but I can't tell if it really makes a difference.

Having said that, it still irritates the hell out of me that our rogue kept his Blade Flurry on to pad on the Slag Elementals.  There were times on the wipes where we were about 100k short of killing the PE in one go and he still had Blade Flurry on the whole time.

I tried to shift the focus of people to those Primal Elementalists by linking the top dps on them and challenging the other players to catch those top people.
Not sure if it actually had any effect but we 1-shot all of the PE's on the next attempt and pushed into P3 in great shape.

P3 is meant to be a burn (haha) phase but it was a bit of an anti-climax too, we pushed him down so easily we never really seemed in danger.  The regular blasts were comfortably handled by our healers and the big Melt pools were dropped well behind the raid.

We were about halfway round the outside of the room when he died, before Heroism came back off cooldown (and with Blade Flurry still on of course - got to cleave those Slag Elementals). 

Roughly 40 wipes in total to learn the fight and kill it, makes me think we are overgearing these bosses now.

On to Blackhand but, after our triumph on Blast Furnace, the focus wasn't really there and we laughed and joked our way to a few quick wipes before raid end.

Background Downloader...

Patch 6.2 background downloader started this week so, with a mischievous twinkle in my eye, I posted a question in our FB group...
Is it time to extend the raid and go all out for Blackhand?

I knew when I posted that our RL would hate the idea, he has very strong beliefs about doing things in the 'correct' order, but I wanted to open the discussion anyway.

We spend a lot of our raid week every week going over farm bosses with most drops now being disenchanted.  I would rather skip these bosses and try to push guild progress.

I can see some merit in chasing tier sets, they will help us progress on Blackhand and in Mythic content (if we ever get there). 
I'm bored to tears of killing Gruul, Hans and Franz etc. just for the sake of it though. 

The only challenge they offer now is the fight to stave off complacency, which we failed miserably at last night.  5 wipes on H&F because people couldn't be bothered to move properly makes me think I'm not the only person feeling this way.

In my opinion we have all the gear we need to kill Blackhand and move on to Mythic but I have a couple of possible compromises:

1.  Go Backwards
Start on the big guy on a Wednesday and spend the night there.  If we kill him, great! Reset and go to Blast Furnace, then Iron Maidens, and so on.
If we don't kill him, reset it on the second raid night and farm as usual.

2.  Selective Farming
Just kill the bosses that drop tier pieces, then extend and go to Blackhand.

Option 1 guarantees us one full night per week on progress and we still get to farm bosses for miniscule upgrades on the other two nights.
Option 2 should give us two nights on Blackhand but less loot coming in overall.  Not a big deal as most of it goes to DE now but there are still a couple of upgrades out there for people that would be missed.

We won't do either of them.

Our RL is adamant we have at least 4 weeks so will resist all pleas to extend for the next couple of weeks at least. 
He says it's because people still need the loot but I suspect it has more to do with the fact he has just convinced his girlfriend to return to the game and she will need gearing up.  Well, it will be a factor in his decision at least.

Me, though, I'm just bored and looking for the next challenge.