There is something about fighting a big dragon that feels... Warcraft-ey, especially when it follows the dragon 'rules' and all of the Dragons of Nightmare follow those rules.
Big breath attack? Check!
Tail Swipe? Check!
You've got yourself a dragon there, son.
A dragon?? I've got 4 of the bloody things!
These dragons are, I assume, English dragons... They politely queue up and wait for their turn to tear the raid to pieces.
And once they have had a go, they just fly to the back of the queue and patiently wait for their next turn.
This is vitally important as, even with only 2 on the ground at a time, there are about a million mechanics to deal with!
I'll be honest, based on our experiences on Heroic, I thought this would be our easiest Mythic kill and we should have gone here first.
I was wrong.
There is just so much going on all the time that you can't lose focus for a second!
When I was leading raids more regularly I used to know every fight inside out, reading up and watching countless guide videos to fully understand every moment of each fight for each role.
I've dialled it back a 'bit' since then...
I've done it on Heroic a few times and watched a guide to show the differences for Mythic. It looked pretty similar to me, same mechanics but more frequently and hit harder blah blah blah.
There is the portal group too but I wasn't expecting to be involved in that... typically I got thrown in there because our DK was getting stuck on the loading screen each time but that was only the first night.
The rest is just like Heroic right?
Stand on the flowers to stop them spawning adds.
Avoid the sleepy clouds of gas.
Interrupt and kill adds.
Dispel the debuff, got to keep those healers busy!
What isn't immediately apparent is how quickly these abilities come at you in Mythic, and how frequently they overlap!
Back in the day, I would have known exactly what was going to hit and when.
Now?
Headless Chicken mode!
I felt like I didn't know what was going to happen at any given moment and just reacted to what was in front of me... constantly for 7+ minutes!
With Mythic in general being quite unforgiving, you can understand why it takes so much concentration to play this way.
Having played Ele Shaman for quite some time now, constantly striving to improve (and had a dps lesson from Preach himself!), I can maximise my dps under pretty much any circumstances so the numbers don't suffer too much.
When I had less skill and practice as a player, the ridiculously in-depth knowledge of the fights must have covered my weaknesses to a certain extent.
Following this train of thought, I have some new-found sympathy for those players who haven't (for whatever reason) put that much effort into improving their play, they don't have that knowledge to cover for them (and I certainly don't expect anyone to go to the lengths I did in learning fights).
It must be incredibly intense to need full concentration on the fight mechanics and your dps rotation, possibly even clicking abilities on your action bar.
I used to just think they were bad players, and maybe they were (hehe), but at least I have a bit more understanding of why they were bad ;-)
Anyway, I digress, back to the dragons!
Despite all of the various abilities making you run around, this fight is surprisingly good for the Elemental Shaman... mainly due to the numerous opportunities to unload with Chain Lightning.
A variety of adds spawn so I quickly learned to save Stormkeeper to coincide with a healthy number of targets and the screen would light up during the 'Shade' spawns.
I think I said at the start of the expansion that the Ele Shaman niche, extended AoE, doesn't occur in current raids... well, here it does and boy do we shine!
Once everyone has learned the fight and you are at that stage of trying to pull the execution together consistently enough in one attempt to get the first kill, it all boils down to one point.
There are gas clouds on the floor, add-sprouting flowers all over the place and purple bombs of corruption dropping all over the raid... when Lethon casts Siphon Spirit and spawns a whole load of adds!
They actually spawn from players so we loosely stacked to group them together, then stunned and slowed them with everything we had to give us maximum uptime.
These adds are the absolute priority in the fight... if they reach the dragons, they heal them for a massive amount!
Enter, the Elemental Shaman!
Lightning blazing everywhere, Earthquakes knocking them to the ground, Earthbind Totems slowing them down, Capacitor Totems... er, capacitating (? incapacitating maybe).
This is our moment!
And once you are through, it is plain sailing to four dead dragons.
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