No, it's a SpiderBird! And it's dead!
I was amazed when the Raid Leader decided this was our next Mythic boss. It is supposed to be the next easiest after Nythendra but I'm not sure that applies when you struggle each week to kill it on Heroic!
Struggle might be overstating it a little but it is an absolute mess and we've never made it to the end with a full team.
So it came as no surprise to me that it's taken us a while to move from 1/7M to 2/7M.
We have been plagued by other issues along the way which didn't help... main tank holidays and extreme lag issues amongst other things restricted the pure number of attempts we could manage.
Even on our kill night, we had given it up once because 3 or 4 of the team had so much lag they couldn't continue. We jumped into Trial of Valor heroic (reluctantly for some) as we didn't have enough for Mythic without the lag people but it settled down again so we went back to EN.
More time flying than killing bosses!
Anyway, we got back into Emerald Nightmare and stood in front of Elerethe once more.
Following the pattern of incremental difficulty levels, the fight is very similar to Heroic. Aside from the usual extra damage, the small changes to mechanics add a little complexity for those affected but that's about it.
The most interesting change comes from the 'linked' players during Spider form with two sets of two players being connected by a strange web.
Damage is transmitted down the web to the other player so, when the big feeding time damage comes in, you need to coordinate personal defensive cds or you give your healers a heart attack (we missed one and spiked down to sub 10% HP!)
The web itself knocks people back if they run into it so the linked people also need to move together to minimise the chances of running it over someone.
This was honestly the most interesting change from Heroic and, looking back on it, I wish they had extended it to affect more people each time. Ramp up the coordination needed to survive, I think it might have been too much for the healers though.
Progress was extremely slow, needing multiple wipes for us to come to terms with each aspect of the fight.
It often works out this way when you have mechanics that only target a couple of random people... you can look at Fatboss all you want but most people need to actually experience the mechanics once or twice to learn the fight. If only two people are targeted at a time, it takes quite a few attempts for everyone to gain that experience.
Amusingly, this often leads to some frustration from those that mastered it early.
The best recent example is the winds and passing the ball on Iskar... once mastered, everyone finds it incredibly easy but still gets frustrated when the new guy gets it wrong. Makes me laugh :-)
Sorry, back to the fight...
Progress was slow but it was being made on virtually every attempt. We inched our way through the first platform, refining every step, until we had it mastered.
The linked people ran together in specific directions, people dropped the green goo perfectly out of the way, the tornadoes were dropped well away from everything else and the adds killed almost instantly.
Now start again on platform 2 :-(
Well, we had to get there first. I love warlocks!
The tanks and a couple of healers got priority for the feathers with a free for all for the remainder. Mostly, I just left them to others as we had a warlock gateway for half the journey... when he remembered to put it down.
You would think this is the easy part of the fight, just run halfway across then use the portal or fly over with the wings.
That's it.
We had a spate of around 10 consecutive attempts where someone would use the wings' special ability to kill the spiders halfway across the bridge.
I have absolutely no idea why they were doing this.
I have even less idea why they continued to do it for 10+ attempts despite being told not to, under any circumstances, kill spiders on the bridge.
If you haven't done the fight... there are tornadoes on the bridge, they pick up the green goo left behind by a squashed spider and fling it at the raid! It does a ton of damage so you have to constantly dance out of the way, making everything much more difficult.
Once that was sorted, we were back to the incremental progress on platform two. We mastered the bird form then struggled for a while with the spider form again until, in the end (and when our main tank came back from his holidays!), we decided to run with an extra tank for more control.
This change made a massive difference to how smoothly the fight went and I highly recommend it for anyone progressing on this fight. The linked tanks take all the little spiders while the other takes the boss.
Now we had everything working well for two platforms and it was just a case of cutting out silly mistakes and bringing it all together to push on to platform 3.
We had only reached platform 3 once or twice and were a bit hazy about the tactics.
I think they are determined by your dps... if you can burn the boss down quickly, you don't need to deal with the new mechanics on the platform.
We had the dps! Somehow!
I thought the other platforms were a mess, they were nothing!
We somehow gained around 20 spiders while crossing the bridge so one of the tanks decided to wipe them out before they could kill everyone.
This unfortunately place massive amounts of green goo in the path of the tornadoes, there was green stuff flying everywhere!
I could barely cast anything for the final 10% of the fight due to almost constant movement, just had to squeeze in a spell whenever I could.
I think it's fair to say the melee carried us through to the end of the fight, managing to squeeze in enough damage to get the kill before the eggs were broken inevitably and wiped the raid.
Much like our heroic kills, an absolute clusterf*ck! Only 8 survived as the boss fell but we are now 2/7 Mythic! :-)
For an Elemental Shaman, the only chance to shine is to use Stormkeeper on the small spiders but it takes impeccable timing to get it right. You need to use the first cast just as Elerethe ascends for Feeding Time, then run across the room and hope the tanks have gathered the spiders into a nice tight group.
If you time it just right, it comes back up just after you have run across the platform for the second Feeding Time.
Stormkeeper + Chain Lightning = HUGE damage!
If you get a lucky proc of overload, it can virtually 1-shot the spiders.
Unfortunately, on our kill, I got it all wrong :-(
Not just the Stormkeeper but everything!
I missed the window completely on the first platform casting my first SK way too late but then compounded that with other dps mistakes.
Twice (Twice!!!), I popped Ascendance just as I got the tornado debuff and had to run across the room essentially wasting the cooldown each time.
I got the link every time and had to focus on that rather than using CL on the spiders.
My dps was way lower than it could have been by the end of the fight.
Luckily for me, almost everyone else was dead so I still finished 3rd :-)
On to Ursoc!
No comments:
Post a Comment