Mythic Progress Up and Running...

Expectation is quite high in the guild this expansion, with clearing Mythic while it is still current content being the main aim.


We made the first big step to wards that goal this week!


Heroic was cleared with relative ease, taking less than 2 hours with a break in the middle.  SpiderBird is still a mess but the rest are no problem at all.


That left us with an hour to have a go at Nythendra Mythic!


As is the way with Mythic fights now, it is pretty much the same as Normal/Heroic but with a twist to add complexity (and a boat-load of extra damage, of course).


The twist for Nythendra is that she will periodically mind control anyone with 10 or more stacks of the rot debuff.  Thankfully, this wipes the slate clean and you can start again.


As there is no other way to actually drop the Rot debuff, it means that, sooner or later, everyone will be mind-controlled. 
Dealing with this is straight-forward enough... everyone stacks just before the MC comes in and we AoE to break them out.
The key to the fight becomes making sure that there are never too many people MC'ed at the same time.


In an amazing turn-around from everything I have ever learned about raiding, this involves people deliberately standing in the bad stuff to push their stacks higher! 


The best part of this whole mechanic is that it is up to the individual player to work out when to push their stacks and when to hold back.  You have to be aware, not just of your own stacks, but of most of the raid's stacks too, and make a judgement call in the space of a few seconds before the MC.
I love this kind of personal responsibility in fights!


Needless to say, we got this wrong quite a few times :-)
The results varied wildly, sometimes as few as 1 person MCed and, at other times, around 10! 
Eventually we got it under some semblance of control, mainly by pushing earlier and earlier to get people cleared in the first round of MCs.


We were still a bit short though and it looked like we were going to miss out on the kill.  While we were improving all the time with the MCs, it seemed to be the Heroic mechanics holding us back!
Too many times we would come out of a dancing phase with a few people dead... or just surviving but with very high stacks, making the next MC phase impossible.


There was some debate as to the cause...
Was it people just not being good enough at dancing? 
Was it people just getting unlucky?
Was it just too much damage?


I would like to say that people should just be better at dancing but I know from experience, sometimes it just feels like those bugs are out to get you!
It is like something from a cartoon nightmare, giant bugs rising up everywhere you turn, herding you towards inevitable death... that's my excuse anyway.


In the end, whether it was preventable or not, it was decided that there was too much damage for our 4 healers so our priest switched to his Disc spec to help out.
It gave us the breathing space we needed and two attempts later, on our 'famous last go', Nythendra lay dead at our feet!


Nythendra turned out to be a really fun fight.  The added mechanic was enough to set it well apart from the heroic version and even allowed a moment for the Elemental Shaman to shine by using our artefact ability to great effect.


Stormkeeper buffs the next 3 lightning spells by 200% (also now makes them instant!) so timing it's use with the mind controls was incredible!  With a bit of luck (there is a LOT of luck in shaman AoE), it would break everyone out in a single cast!


The huge effect it had was shown when I looked at the logs and compared to the other Ele Shaman in our guild.  He had used his artefact ability on cooldown to maximise the number of uses.
Fair enough in a purely single target fight but Stormkeeper is far more effective with Chain Lightning than Lightning Bolt... I ended up doing over 11 million more damage with the affected spells on each attempt, despite only using it 5 times compared to his 7.
I told him my findings so expect it to be a lot closer next time :-)


Tonight, if we can gather 20 people (more on that another time), we are going for SpiderBird!
With it being an absolute clusterf*ck on Heroic, it should be fun  :-)