Ahead of the Curve: Antorus! - Part Two

Time to put away the Chain Lightning button for the rest of the raid, the business end is always all about single target damage.

Imonar the Soul Hunter

The new bridge boss! 
Two platforms connected by a long bridge, you attack him for a while then he flies off to the other platform and you negotiate an increasing number of obstacles on the bridge to get to him.
The rather random placement of the obstacles quite often makes them all but impossible to completely avoid so healers have to be on their toes with heals and dispels... the difficulty of this has led to most teams just sending a tank charging down the middle with Hand of Protection and chained dispels!
We haven't tried that tactic yet but I'm looking forward to seeing it in action on Mythic.

The platforms are quite gentle in comparison, some mines to avoid along with a sleep canister which usually results in the whole melee team being asleep each time  :-)

Kin'garoth

Another boss where you get to 'choose your poison', I like that in a fight!


It starts off simply with a few things to dodge here and there then the boss shields himself and starts to initialise 3 Fel Reavers around the room.
Each Fel Reaver is different and they each bring something different to the fight and that's where it gets interesting!

The Fel Reavers are our old friends from Garothi, Annihilator and Decimator, who have found a new buddy in Demolisher.  The Annihilate and Decimate abilities are the same while the Demolish debuffs two players which explode after a few seconds.
The Demolish leaves another debuff on people stopping you from having the same team soak it every time so you need a bit more organisation to deal with it.

There is time to kill two out of the three Fel Reavers before they activate meaning you always have to deal with one set of abilities.
As you know (see Garothi), we've had enough of soaking so always kill the Annihilator.
The Demolisher is a bit of a pain to deal with so we kill that one too.
That just leaves the Decimator which is very simple to deal with, and after a couple of weeks of gearing, we can kill it before he gets chance to even use an ability.

A really fun fight that we've left behind a bit too quickly, looking forward to seeing it on Mythic.

Varimathras

An old school tank and spank, this is as tanky and spanky as it gets!

The whole fight is based around every time you are stood on your own (more than 8 yards away), the dreadlord steps through the shadows to hit you.  This hit does a chunk of damage but also stops all healing on you for 7 seconds.

This sounds tricky but there just aren't many reasons to ever be on your own!  On Normal, there are literally no reasons at all.  At least on Heroic, there is one ability which forces you to move out of the group.

The whole fight consists of switching between two points behind the boss.  You stack up, wait for an ability to cover where you are stood, then move to the other spot. 
Repeat.
Boring as hell.
The Heroic mechanic is called Necrotic Plague and any ICC raiders will remember it well!  After a few seconds the plague jumps to anyone nearby so you need to move out of the group, which at least allows us to see the other mechanic in action (it's pretty cool visually to be fair).

The tanks look after each other, which we thought was going to be quite tricky but with some precise positioning on the pull, they never even have to move!

Such a boring fight, hope it is better on Mythic.

Coven of Shivarra

After the tedium of Varimathras, this council fight feel s incredibly hectic the first few times.

Three sisters each with their own theme.. Fire, Shadow and Frost (Ha! You were expecting Fel, admit it!) but only two are active at any time. 
The third is actually tormenting the mind of a fallen titan!

The usual dodging stuff goes on but there are a couple of interesting mechanics.  Storm of Darkness forces the raid to huddle in safe zones around the room, Frost Orb slows people in a massive area while Chilled Blood is a healing absorb which stuns for the amount left when it expires.

The real fun starts though when one of the sisters torments the fallen titan enough for it to attack us!
There are 4 titans... Norgannon, Aman'thul, Golganeth and Khaz'garoth... and the order is random every time.

Norgannon creates invulnerable soldiers that march across the room from all 4 sides killing anyone they touch!  Luckily, they can be CC'ed to create gaps in the lines.
Khaz'garoth summons 8 adds that channel massive flames into the centre of the room.  This restricts the raid to the outer edges until they have been killed off.
Golganeth was our bane on the first night we tried this boss, summoning adds that constantly cast Chain Lightning at any players grouped together.  This would be easy to deal with in isolation, however alongside the usual dodging mechanics and particularly the Storm of Darkness safe zones, it proved very difficult.
Aman'thul was the bane of our second night trying this boss!  4 adds that only cast one spell, each time they finish the cast it heals them back to full and adds a stack of a dot to the whole raid.  Just have to kill them before the stacks get too high to heal.

Little did we know, between the first and second nights, Blizzard had buffed the HP on these adds through the roof!  Thinking we were being clever, we had cut our raid size down to the bare minimum to help us with the Chain Lightning adds but the scaling was terrible and we found it impossible to kill the Aman'thul adds in time even saving Hero and CDs just for that moment.

We failed to get the kill and even killed Garothi Mythic before we progressed any further on Heroic!
I had some tricks up my sleeve ready for our next attempts but Storm of Darkness was nerfed making it much easier, we still save Hero and CDs for those healer adds though.

Two bosses to go, coming soon...

Mythic Garothi Worldbreaker

I touched on this boss in my last post but I really like the design so thought I would go into a bit more detail.


The fight starts out exactly the same as Heroic with only the two abilities plus the tank swap mechanic.
Decimate is a big AoE effect on random targets, they just move out of the raid to drop it then come back.
Annihilate is... well basically take your pick of the many soaking mechanics in Tomb of Sargeras and it's pretty much the same.
And that's it, nice and easy to get you up and running in the raid.


After a while, the boss goes into overdrive and you have to kill one of the weapons that cause those mechanics to bring him back to the main phase of the fight.

This is where it deviates from Normal/Heroic... In those difficulties, when you destroy one of the weapons it removes it's abilities from the fight.  We had our fill of soaking back in ToS so we elected to kill the Annihilator, just leaving the Decimates.
In another overdrive, the Decimator is killed and you are left with a rather simple run to the finish with literally zero mechanics left in the fight.


Mythic turns this on it's head completely.  As you 'destroy' each weapon, instead of stopping it actually goes haywire!
You have no option but to destroy one so the fight becomes progressively harder with each phase rather than easier.


Destroying the Decimator causes the Decimate ability to stun it's targets, making it impossible for them to get out of the raid in time.  The solution is to stack for the ability then have everyone move out, followed by the targets when the stun lapses.


Killing the Annihilator on the other hand means even more soaking!  More Annihiltes and each one needs to be soaked twice, plus it knocks you away so you have to run back for the second soak.
The double Annihilates are far more difficult than the Decimate stuns so they are left for the final phase as you rush to kill the boss.


What I really like about the design of the fight is how it increases in difficulty without drastically changing any mechanics or even bringing in any new ones.  The subtle changes that are there, the stun and the knockback, increase the movement and add to the frantic feeling of rushing towards the end of the fight.


To cope with the extra movement I tried Icefury... was far from an unqualified success but it did feel good having something to cast on the move.
It's only the first boss so isn't tuned very tightly, it only took us 4 pulls to get the kill and we 1-shot it this week.
I think that's a bit of a shame to be honest as it seems much more interesting than the nominal Patchwerk dps check of Varimathras and I really enjoyed it.

Ahead of the Curve: Antorus! - Part 1

It took us two weeks, and we went the long way around, but Argus fell!


Just thought I would do a quick review of the bosses on Heroic and give my opinions on the raid so far.

Garothi Worldbreaker

Despite his rather ominous title he didn't prove much of a challenge on any difficulty level.  Standard opening boss fare easing us in gently, barely more than a check to see if you are awake until you get to Mythic. 
On Heroic, we 1-shot it from a ninja pull with no tactics discussion which should give you an idea of the tuning.  It only took us 4 attempts to kill it on Mythic!


A couple of mechanics we've seen before but the tanking one seemed the most interesting... it was a re-hash of Iron Reaver's mechanics but with a series of missiles targeting the tank forcing them to keep running to avoid them.
We had some fun with our BM Monk laughing at the Prot Pala's poor attempts at running :-)

Felhounds of Sargeras

These two dogs look amazing!  Apparently, you can get them as mounts too!
One fire and one shadow, they would make great pets for Tolkein's Balrog, their abilities follow suit.  Most of the Fire abilities need you to spread out while the Shadow abilities force you to stack so the difficulty, and the fun, comes when the abilities overlap.

Antoran High Command

aka The Chain Lightning boss!
Three different bosses fought in sequence which have more of an impact when they aren't on the battlefield than when they are...
One of them summons reinforcements to die to my Chain Lightning (or more accurately, the Warriors and Boomkins)
One throws mines all over the field for us to avoid
One calls down a volley from the Paraxis to devastate the battlefield!


Thankfully, as each ones leaves their pod to engage us hand to hand, we can jump in to use their own weapons against them!
If you think back to Amber-Shaper Unsok from Heart of Fear in MoP, the 'vehicle' mechanics were quite tough and killed a lot of pug runs.  Well, Blizzard have made sure that doesn't happen this time!  :-)
You only get two buttons, 1 to spam on the boss and 2 to hit on cooldown to counter the specific boss abilities I mentioned.


All in all, the fight ends up being a little lacklustre.  Do the basics (dodge mines, interrupt one of the adds) and it is incredibly easy to kill, I'm hoping for more on Mythic.

Portal Keeper Hasabel

Another AoE fight??
Indeed, Chain Lightning gets another good runout here as there are even more adds than on High Command.


I really like the thinking behind this fight... There is a main platform where you fight the boss and the adds she summons. 
In addition, there are three 'themed' platforms you can access via portals (Fel, Fire and Shadow)
Each of these portals has a miniboss to kill and, more interestingly, different debuffs you can pick up to help you on the other minibosses.
On Heroic, you use the Fire debuff to light up the Shadow platform and can only damage or heal things that are in the 'light'.


Each debuff has it's own drawbacks and I'm really looking forward to Mythic where you need to use them all, and use them properly.
Alas, on Heroic, the most difficult part of the fight has been keeping our tank alive.  He has a tendency to get knocked off the platform by one of the abilities.

Eonar the Lifebinder

Killed this three times now and still haven't got a clue what's going on!  :-)
In some strange homage to Tower Defence games, trash walks along three rather convoluted paths trying to reach and kill Eonar in the centre.


Some of the trash have abilities, I looked up what they were at some point but they haven't proven to be particularly relevant as yet with everything dying in seconds to the ridiculous mass AoE we bring with 2 Warlocks, 2 Boomkins, 2 Ele Shaman and a Warrior amongst others.


This goes on for a while then you collect the loot.


I have had some fun on this fight though... you get a special ability (which works like the feathers on Elerethe) to help navigate the vast arena and using it with Stormkeeper allows you to fly through the air casting Chain Lightning everywhere!  Great fun :-)


More to come soon...

The Icefury Dilemma...

One of the biggest drawbacks to Elemental Shaman dps is our inability to deal with movement.  This has been mitigated by the amazing Gust of Wind on a fairly short cooldown, which makes it great for quick repositioning but doesn't help with any extended or frequent movement.

Most raids add more of these random movement mechanics as you progress through the instance and through the levels of difficulty. 


For instance, compare Garothi Normal, Heroic and Mythic.  All 3 have essentially the same mechanics but they are tweaked to increase difficulty by way of increasing movement.  Normal and Heroic actually reduce movement as the fight progresses while Mythic starts at the same point but goes the other way!

The natural spread/stack flow of the fight fits quite nicely with Gust of Wind but, as it ramped up on Mythic, it became extremely difficult to maintain dps.  Trying to fit in 15seconds stood still for Ascendance was impossible!

Which is where Icefury comes in...

30 second cooldown which buffs your next 4 Frost Shocks within 15 seconds.
Frost Shock is not used outside of PvP as it does virtually no damage and uses up our precious Maelstrom.  This talent though, makes it hit like the proverbial truck :-)

The issue being that picking Icefury means that you have to forego Ascendance, our biggest cooldown.  To make up the damage of Ascendance, you have to play Icefury near perfectly which is much easier said than done!

Playing perfectly means using Elemental Blast, Icefury, Stormkeeper on cooldown while maintaining Flame Shock, never capping charges of Lava Burst and never capping (or running out of) Maelstrom. 
In an ideal world, I would have the buffed Frost Shocks available every time I need to move but without delaying any of the Icefury casts.

It's a hell of a juggling act!  And, to be honest, I can't always keep it up at the dummies never mind in a real boss fight.
But I got to thinking... If I can't use Ascendance properly anyway, then I won't need perfect Icefury play to match or even beat that dps, right?

Having just got the tier 21 4-set, which both buffs and simplifies the Icefury playstyle, I'm tempted to give it a real go in our next raid.

It could go horribly wrong, I'll keep you posted!

Mythic Fallen Avatar...

There was a lot of confidence in the team when we started Mythic progression in Tomb of Sargeras, we honestly felt like we had a good shot at the Cutting Edge title even on our strict 2 raids/week schedule.

It started quite well, we pushed through the first 5 in reasonable time and still thought we were in with a shot as we approached Mistress Sass'zine.

Talk about a brick wall, ours was 3 bosses thick!

Mistress was the first to really show how little some of our raiders actually took in from Heroic kills with the basic mechanics failed over and over again, before we even got to any of the Mythic mechanics!
Maiden of Vigilance was no better, only serving to highlight an almost complete lack of awareness in the team.  We finally resorted to the RL calling out "ORB!" every 8 seconds through the fight.

Fallen Avatar... was a combination of the two!
Repeated failing of Heroic mechanics and lack of raid awareness to an almost comical extent, it was too much for our RL who lasted about 5 pulls before taking a break for the rest of the tier.

The fight is incredible! 
Without doubt the biggest challenge I have faced while playing WoW... and with our RL on sabbatical, it needed someone to step in.
Can you see where this is going?

Yes, I volunteered my help. 
After managing to avoid any form of responsibility in the guild for two years, I was sucked in by a combination of wanting to help out the RL who I really like, and flattery from the GM.
He talked me into the job just as I was talking myself into it!

The Tomb of Soak-geras meme is typified by this fight...
4 Touch of Sargeras that need to be soaked, preferably solo, once per minute (You've got 4 rogues, right?)
The reason you want to solo those is because you have 12 people (2 teams of 6) soaking 2 beams channelling into the boss.  Soaking this beam gave you a massive reduced healing debuff meaning you couldn't be healed back up from any damage making every mechanic even more dangerous.

Looking back on it now, I think the real difficulty of those mechanics were that they forced you into specific positions. 
The other mechanics in the fight, the ones from Heroic...
Rupture Realities - Get away from the boss
Daggers (5 on mythic!) - Drop them at back/sides
Maiden Shield - Follow Maiden to burn through it or wipe

... also pushed your positioning, forcing you into areas of the room you didn't want to be in.

"Why does it matter?"  I hear you ask.
Unbound Chaos, that's why!

Easy to deal with on heroic, a series of bombs dropped on each player, you just ran and you could avoid every hit.
You don't deal with it any differently on Mythic to be honest but it was the architect of our downfall on the vast majority of our 300+ wipes!

All of those other mechanics forcing your positioning made Unbound Chaos extremely difficult to handle.  It became one of those mechanics that made you hate your fellow raider as they repeatedly ran across your line and killed you.

We tried so many different approaches to make it easier but, in the end, there was nothing we could do about it.  You either had to develop some positional awareness or wipe.
It is so disheartening as a Raid Leader when, after many many wipes, your only recourse is "Git Gud Scrub!"

And it was draining!  Trying to watch so many things all at once whilst still doing your own part (16 people soaking, no room for passengers!) and throw in some dps (very little from me in the end) was exhausting.
Phase 2 was an absolute relief in comparison!

We knew for so long that it would just take a clean run through P1, then keeping concentration in P2 , and the kill would be ours.  When it finally came, there was a moment of almost stunned disbelief that we have done it... then the nerdscreams began!  :)

There might not be any fights as taxing as this in Antorus but it was clear to me that I would struggle to lead Mythic raids while playing my Mage, I'm just not good enough to split my concentration that well.
Playing Shaman though, that I can do!

Back playing Shaman, I missed it so much, and back on the blog!

Good times!

(Now... where is that chain lightning button?)

Still in the Game...

Hello!

I've done too many "I'm back" posts already so I'm not going to bother again, just thought I would drop in to say hi and plaster my thoughts all over the internet from time to time.

Two full progress raids was too much for me in the end so I had to cancel the second team at the start of ToS.  I had hoped there would be enough momentum, along with enthusiasm for the new raid, to keep the team going but it petered out after a few weeks.

Disappointing but, from what I can gather, it was a combination of too many new faces plus a poor attitude from my replacement as Raid Leader.  There is now some talk of them starting up again after Christmas so I hope it goes well.

In the meantime, I pushed on into Tomb of Sargeras with my Shaman's raid team.
Well, I say Shaman... As we moved into Mythic, I began to feel the weaknesses in the Shaman coming through once again.

It started in Nighthold really.
Behind the curve on single target fights even stood still, any fights with movement were especially difficult.  Krosus Mythic was the prime example, my opening burst was interrupted by getting the first orb and I finished comfortably bottom dps on our first kill.

As we progressed through ToS, I could see the same happening to me... Maiden, Avatar, Sisters all high, unpredictable movement which I would definitely struggle with.
Do you know what never struggles with these things in Mythic?  A Mage!

Yes, I rerolled back to Mage (again) and instantly matched my Shaman's dps despite a ~20ilvl deficit :-s

And that was the story through Mythic ToS, it was back to Mythic Magery all over again, until our Raid Leader deciding he needed a break started me back on the road to Shamanism...

The Worst Artefact Trait... Ever!

This is a challenge to all you people who play other classes than Elemental Shaman...


What is your worst artefact trait?
You know, the one you read and just think... WTF?


I know you all have them, I've seen some of them as my alt plan spreads around the specs, but I think the Elemental Shaman one will take some beating.


Shamanistic Healing -
When your health drops below 35%, Fist of Raden heals you for 222,100 HP.
Can only occur once every 30 seconds.


That's right. 
If I drop below 35%, I get a whopping 6% heal!


I
AM
INVINCIBLE!


The real kicker with this trait is the extra ranks.
You might think that extra ranks buff the heal into something much more substantial... but no, that would make far too much sense.
The extra ranks reduce the cooldown on the effect!
I can now get my life-saving 6% heal, at rank 4/4, once every 24 seconds!


So what do you have?
What trait do you resent putting your hard-earned AP into?


Are there any worse than Shamanistic Healing?

I'm back... again!

Hello!
Yes, I'm back.  Again.
The usual stuff... work mental, blog first to suffer, yada yada yada... but I think I have finally found a plan to fit everything in so time for a catch up.


Mythic Shamaning...
Although the team is virtually unrecognisable from the one that started the expansion, I am still in it... which is a first. 
Could I actually last a whole expansion in the same guild?
Is the guild hopping behind me at last?
Still early enough in the expansion for things to change but I'm hopeful.

The holiday season has crushed our Cutting Edge hopes in Nighthold as we've had to scrabble around for a team on the last couple of raid nights and have further planned absences coming up in the next few weeks.
Progress was difficult enough with the full team available, the management have decided it is not worth pursuing when the team is constantly being filled with different reserves or pugs.
Although disappointed, I think I agree with them on this one.

So progress has ended at... 8/10 Mythic.
The fights in the palace grounds, between Trilliax and Elisande, are excellently designed and all completely different and I have enjoyed progressing all of them.
They had some surprising elements too...
Krosus, billed as the big dps check of the raid, was more about soaking the burning pitch than pure numbers.
Tichondrius, on the other hand, was a much tighter dps check for our group.  This was particularly surprising given our strength at AoE.

Unsurprisingly, the fights we excelled on as Elemental were the big AoE fights.
Top dps on Spellblade, Tichondrius and Skorpyron as our Chain Lightning reigned supreme but way down on High Botanist Tel'arn (and our few attempts on Elisande) as our weaknesses were ruthlessly exposed at every turn.
Although feeling strong was fun, and the challenge on the weaker fights was enjoyable, the bosses that really captured my imagination were the others...
Chronomatic Anomaly is such a fun fight, challenging but has room for error and can be approached in numerous ways.
Krosus is a nice take on the Patchwerk style tank and spank, with possibly the greatest enrage mechanic I've seen.

Star Augur was my favourite fight of all though...
The Grand Conjunctions were an unusual mechanic and often led to hilarious wipes, getting melee players to move away from the boss is possibly the hardest mechanic in all of raiding  :-)

Overall, I'm happy with 8/10.  We did kill some of the bosses post-nerfs which I'm positive changed the fights, particularly Krosus, but it's been an excellent raid.



Heroic Paladining...
The 'other' team has made it's way through Normal and into Heroic, now at 5/10HC and we're currently banging our heads against Botanist.
Progress has been slow and has felt just as difficult as the Mythic progress on my Shaman!
My experience on the fights has meant the mechanics don't offer me a personal challenge, but I haven't done any raid leading for a while and finding solutions to the various problems caused by bosses has been very challenging.


Having a roster of 10-12 people is challenging enough, the fights change drastically when you reach 13-14 including 3 healers, and that is holding us back now we have reached the trickier heroics.
It has been a lot of fun though and we still have some plans to make more progress before Tomb of Sargeras opens.


Another positive from the paladining is that I have been able to try out all 3 specs, even tanking on occasion!  I'm hoping for more tanking opportunities soon.

The slowdown in the Shaman guild has probably come at the right time for me, I was definitely feeling drained from the almost constant push for progress on 4 raid nights.
I'm just not that hardcore, I guess.

The Alt Plan...
Harder than Mythic raiding
Harder than Raid leading
Possibly even harder than getting the melee to move away from the boss!
Resisting the temptation to raid on the alts is the hardest thing in the game :)
It's hard enough to stay away from all the old raids, every time I walk past those empty armour stands it is like a dagger to my heart.

Anyway...
Now up to 8 at 110 with the Hunter as a recent arrival. 
My Rogue has ventured into normal mode with the paladin's team, just dipped his daggers in so far and nothing more.
The Mage is the one I really want to push forwards and I've been messing around with all 3 specs.
Frost is the most powerful at the top end, Fire is still the darling of Mythic+, while Arcane has always got stronger and stronger as an expansion progressed.
Unfortunately, I can't really get into any of the playstyles  :-(
I'm going to try some Mythic+ as Fire (they were boring as Frost) over the weekend to see how much fun it is.

Anyway, that's enough from me. 
How've you been?

Mythic Spellblade Aluriel

Oh... so that's where Mythic went!

Our mythic progress came to a juddering halt after Trilliax as the difficult stepped up massively.

We had a very quick look at Krosus, just six pulls at the end of a raid night, and it was decided that we didn't have the dps to beat the enrage timer... which was probably an accurate assessment looking back.

Out of the remaining bosses it was decided that our best chances lay with Spellblade Aluriel...

To say this boss is a step up from Trilliax would be a huge understatement, it is hard!

Very little changes from the Heroic fight.  Aside from the usual 'everything hurts more', there is an add that spawns to throw in a few extra mechanics.

The add doesn't really do much but it's abilities add some randomness to that fight that you just have to deal with, it has far too much health to realistically kill it.

The biggest impact of the add is that it needs to be tanked, and due to it's bladestorm-type abilities, it has to be tanked away from the boss/melee group.
To prevent any Horridon style shenanigans with 1 tank keeping it miles away from the raid, it also gains a buff if it moves too far away from the boss.

With 1 tank on the add, that only leaves 1 tank to soak the Annihilate ability from the boss which hurts like hell!  Our tanks and healers clearly prepared well for this as I don't remember it ever causing a wipe.

What caused most of the wipes was Mark of Frost.

On Mythic, this needs to be much more controlled. 
By carefully positioning specific raiders, you can determine who the debuff jumps to each time players smash together as it will always jump to the two nearest players who don't already have the debuff. 

The idea is that you have two groups of 4 people that just pass the debuff between themselves and the healers know who is going to need the healing.

We set up two Shaman on one side and two Hunters on the other as designated 'soakers', they would control the passing of the debuff on their side of the arena.

All good... in theory.

In practice, the first set of Marks of Frost and it's Replicate go out on random people and frequently chose our soakers... this meant that each soaker needed a back-up and we had to quickly adjust positioning to adapt.

Once this was under control, the Marks had to be broken at 10 stacks which was way more than we did on Heroic but you couldn't do it any earlier or it would jump to the wrong people because of another debuff.

The timing was pretty tight too as taking 11 or 12 stacks put your health in danger without a cooldown, particularly when you finally smashed into your partner.

Many of the early attempts failed as each person had to experience having the Mark of Frost and learn how to deal with it, timing the smash correctly (which was actually being called out by me anyway) to clear stacks without killing anyone.

Random people straying out of position or accidental smashes would often result in the Mark jumping to somebody who wasn't expecting it, which seemed to result in all out panic. 
This was particularly hilarious if it landed on one of the melee dps, they had no experience of dealing with the debuff and would proceed to do their best impression of a headless chicken, running around aimlessly.

It was a relief as we finally negotiated our way through this phase to the adds spawning... if there is one thing we are good at in our raid team, it is AoE dps!

Those Frost adds melted away (I'll get my coat) in seconds!

We were through the first phase though, the most difficult part of the fight!  Or nearly through it anyway...
The transition to the Fire phase was tricky for those dealing with the Marks of Frost, with a smash coinciding with the first fire abilities from the boss and more than a few decent attempts ended here.

The Frost proved to be by far the most difficult phase and it took relatively few attempts to get used to the Fire and Arcane phases... then we had to do it all again! :-(

The reality of the second go round the phases was that we had wiped so many times learning it the first time round that we were masters of each phase!

It was on only the third time through the full cycle cleanly that we pushed on for the kill... only to fall short at 2%.
A couple of sloppy wipes later and we were there... 4/10 Mythic!

I've enjoyed progressing this fight immensely, working through the phases and solving different issues as they arose.  It is particularly satisfying to get the kill before the patch where the extra power will indirectly nerf the content.

Despite Shaman probably being one of the worst classes for the soaking role, I was delighted to take on the responsibility and be more proactive in the execution of the fight.

In stark contrast to their suitability for the soaking role, Ele Shaman excel in this fight as dps!  The add phases are perfectly spaced to line up with Stormkeeper and Liquid Magma totem (I didn't bother with this) for amazing AoE damage but the real star of the show is Lightning Rod.

It may have quite niche usage but, by god, is it powerful!
14% of my overall damage came from this talent, over 50 million health, and it propelled me to the top of the meters on the kill!

If I have any gripe it is the RNG nature of Shaman AoE dps, which is exacerbated by the new artefact traits coming tomorrow, but that is a whine for another day.

Today, I am just going to revel in our latest mythic kill.

Bring on Krosus!

Team 2 Struggles...

My relaxed, social raid team has struggled lately. 

We are lucky if we have a full team from the guild and often have to bring in a friend or two from elsewhere.  That's not a problem, we have some good friends coming in and the atmosphere stays relaxed.
My aversion to pugging has held us back a couple of times, sometimes I just don't feel like I have the mental fortitude to cope with the negativity that some (most) pugs bring.

Having so few regular raiders though means we very rarely have more than 10 or 11 in the team and the tuning/scaling seems to be way off the mark.


The early signs came on the second boss, Chronomatic Anomaly.  We handled the mechanics without any problems but hit the enrage timer... on normal!
At the time I just put it down to low dps, the team was at the right gear level for the content and still learning the fight so it made sense.


As we progressed out of the sewers though, we started hitting issues in all areas of the team...
On Spellblade Aluriel, the damage was extraordinary!


Massive raid-wide damage from the Mark of Frost debuffs which were on the entire raid so that damage was constant.  We resorted to building up higher and higher stacks to prevent it spreading too quickly, which then meant more spot healing was required.

Tanks required spam healing through annihilation even with cooldowns up, and still sometimes died anyway.

It was way too much for 2 healers to handle but there is no way you can run with 3 healers in a 10-man group, the dps requirements are just too high.

There were many wipes.

As a last resort, I switched to my Shaman for more healing cooldowns and Val (Team 1 RL), who had been helping us out on his Demon Hunter, switched to his Boomkin main to boost dps.

Even with Val's massive dps, it took almost 3 full rotations through the phases to kill her and we healers were surviving on fumes for half the fight.

Next up we moved to Krosus and I assumed the dps requirements would be the main stumbling block. 
Completely wrong, it was the healing again!

The tanks were taking an incredible amount of damage from the big debuff and it was a constant struggle to keep them alive at high stacks, particularly through Slams and Orb detonations.
Any unnecessary raid damage set the healers behind and often resulted in a death further down the line, to the next unavoidable damage.

Liberal use of tank and external cooldowns saw us through in the end but we still lost a tank from time to time, it just seemed impossible to keep them alive.

It was fun working out the puzzle of how to keep everyone alive and I was really happy that we met the dps requirements as it should set us up for the rest of the raid.

Wrong again.

Tichondrius was like going back to Spellblade again.
To be fair, the first two phases were fine unless people made silly mistakes.  It was when we reached P3 that all our problems started.
P3 seems to be a burn phase by design, a race to kill him before you are overwhelmed by the damage.
With only 2 healers, it was an absolute nightmare!

The damage was intense but manageable until adds started draining all of our mana.  At that point it would very quickly go downhill.
Because there was only two of us, the debuffs would often hit the same healer twice in a row meaning we had to adjust our positioning to stay in range of each other in addition to everything else going on.

Even without the mana drain, the loss of healing for a couple of seconds as we moved away from everyone else then dispelled was putting us behind and struggling to catch up.

It was difficult to handle but we slowly improved and were just about managing to keep the raid alive... far from healthy, but alive.
Then we hit the enrage timer and everyone died.

We were miles off the pace, boss was around 17% I think.

I tried shifting some of the dps to the boss full time, hoping that we could handle the adds ok and less target switching would help overall.
It didn't, and we needed to kill the later adds quickly anyway so it was only an option at the start.

In the end I gave up and switched to my Shaman to boost the dps numbers.  It's a great fight for Ele Shaman with periodic, sustained AoE but it was still an enormous challenge to beat the enrage timer, 3 or 4 more attempts getting to sub-5% before we finally got the kill.

Is it really supposed to be this difficult?
It is on Normal mode, we are following all of the mechanics and pretty much doing everything right, why are we having so much trouble?

There had been some mention of the raid being poorly tuned for smaller teams so this week I put it to the test!  Overcoming my aversion to pugging, I brought in an extra 10 people to take us up to a 20-man team.

We had a couple of big hitters in the pugs but everything ran much more smoothly than normal, the healing in particular was much less stressful with twice as many in the group.

Everything I've experienced backs up what was said about tuning for small groups and it seems particularly egregious when it comes to debuffs:
Frost on Spellblade
Tank debuff on Krosus
All the debuffs on Tichondrius
It has made me hesitant to go to Star Augur so we will probably try Botanist next.

I don't think it should be like this though on Normal mode, it feels just as tightly tuned as Heroic and even harder at times.

Following all of the mechanics, doing reasonable hps/dps, tanks using their cooldowns and mitigation properly... surely that should be enough?

The Alt Plan - Rogue (No Spoliers)

I was impressed with how they captured the Shaman class fantasy during that order hall campaign and they have repeated that success with the Rogue.


A fantastic cast of characters heads up a thrilling story of action, intrigue and suspense, it could be (and maybe is) the plot to a Mission Impossible film... less shooty shooty, more stabby stabby... and more demons.


The pirate rogue is hammed up a bit too much for my liking, and the order hall itself really should have been Ravenholdt Manor (what a missed opportunity that was!) but this doesn't detract from the experience.


The story ties cleverly in with the main Legion storyline too, giving further insight into the events surrounding the failed Broken Shore invasion, and the goblins offer some perfectly pitched light relief to keep it fun.


A couple of minor complaints...
Using this method of hitting cap before running through the whole order hall campaign really shows the follower missions up for the time-gating mechanic they truly are - I wish they could be skipped for alts as they destroy the immersion of the storyline.


Also, the lead up to the finale involves some sneaking around... I was hoping for something similar to the amazing sneak around Gilneas quest in the Fangs of the Father questline but there didn't seem to be anyone there and it made wandering around Suramar City look challenging by comparison.


It was still a fantastic story and an enjoyable romp, highly recommended!


The Specs...
I levelled as Outlaw because it is super easy.  Marked for Death and Roll the Bones make a great combo for levelling and are a lot of fun to play around with.
Moving into dungeons and the RNG of Outlaw becomes increasingly frustrating so I switched to Assassination at 110.


I swear Assassination hasn't really changed in years and it is still a nice relaxing spec to play, as opposed to the button-bashing mayhem of Outlaw.
Pooling energy to make the most of Envenom, avoiding clipping each Envenom... I'm sure I was doing the same back in Cata (once I had learned about poisons anyway, but that's another story).


I didn't really try out Subtlety beyond picking up the Artefact weapons and, as I am trying desperately not to get too attached to Rogue-ing (must not raid, must not raid), I think it will stay on the shelf.


Alt Update:
110:                      6
Artefacts:             15
Campaigns:          4
Armour Stands:    1   (I'm telling you, I'm not doing them...)

It's the little things...

Sometimes you stumble upon something in WoW that serves no purpose whatsoever apart from being cool, I think it's part of what makes this game so great.

There are loads of these little touches all over the game of all sizes and scopes but I found something in the game that captured my imagination and had me hooked for a while.

Armour Stand

I literally ran into one of these in my order hall and couldn't work out what they were.  A quick visit to wowhead told me everything I needed to know.

Each stand would hold parts of the tier if you collected every piece.  How cool is that?

Next I was a little confused as I was sure I must have collected some of the sets over the years but all of my stands were empty.  I read the fine print and everything has to be collected on 10 man normal (where appropriate) and all for the same spec.

I immediately set off to Molten Core to start collecting!

Molten Core and Blackwing Lair

Those two sets took the longest to gather. 
Massive loot tables on each boss and not many dropping each kill mean the odds are against you.

Outland Raids

It was great to run back through Black Temple with Illidan back in the spotlight at the moment but, on the other hand, Battle for Mount Hyjal was just a bore. 
It is actually my favourite set and I was sure I had it in my bank but I had accidentally picked up an Enhancement piece and a Resto piece...typically, it took forever to replace them with Elemental pieces.

WotLK Raids

The ICC set can be purchased from a vendor in Dalaran which irritated me beyond any reasonable level. I almost felt cheated that I didn't get to farm ICC for the pieces which makes me laugh (now).
Ulduar and Naxxramas still have that epic feel as you run through them.  Even when 1-shotting every mob they are a lot of fun.

The Full Set (and me!)

It took a while but I collected all 10 sets!

But, wait!
What's this?

Artefact Weapon skins!

Balance of Power

Hidden Artefact skin - Amani

It's missing!

Obviously, I had to find out what the missing one was.
Oh no... PvP!!!
My order hall is determined for me to do PvP!
I'm still going at the moment so the collection is not quite comlete... but I've just noticed another empty stand which isn't even available until 7.2 so I'm not in any rush now.

I have really enjoyed collecting these sets despite (or maybe because) there being no tangible reward.
Pointless, but utterly cool :)

Now I'm desperately trying to resist the temptation to collect them on all the alts...

Trilliax Disappoints the Master...

Cakebro doesn't change much from Heroic...

The fight is still about eating cake, got to eat the cake, and jumping on exploding robots.

We split the room into 4 quarters and had each group cover a specific area.  Exactly what this was supposed to achieve I have no idea, as the cakes didn't get the memo and still appeared wherever they felt like.

This led to a couple of strange wipes as people stuck to their assigned positions while other areas were overflowing with cake.

We ended up splitting into our groups then having to move all over the room to make sure all the cake was eaten, it seemed rather pointless to me.

Anyway, cake issues aside, there is one major change on Mythic difficulty... the addition of a mini-Cakebro!

In what I hope to be a homage to Austin Powers, Trilliax has his own little mini-me!

Mini-Cakebro builds up energy as the fight goes on and, if it reaches full energy, performs one of the big moves of Trilliax himself depending on which phase it is.

One of them can even cast his own mini version of Annihilation!

There is some passive energy gain but it mainly comes from a buff applied to the add.  Luckily, this buff can be purged and that was my job (Shamans is useful see, bring them to your raids) so I was fully prepared for this fight.

I didn't need to bother.

The fight played out exactly like Heroic.

Mini-me did kill a couple of people the first time we saw him as the tanks weren't ready to pick him up but, after that, he was completely irrelevant.

I did purge him but I'm not even sure it was necessary as he was being cleaved down so fast he could barely build up any energy anyway.  The most one of them managed was around 25%.

It was such an anti-climax, the add barely had any effect on the fight.  Maybe it is different if you have no Shaman in your raid to purge (or Priest to dispel... or Mage to Spellsteal...) but it was far too easy to handle.

6 attempts and we were 3/10 Mythic!

That took us to Krosus which is certainly a step up in difficulty!
We didn't get very far but it was enough to resurrect the 54th trait debate all over again. 

Oh joy.

Chrono- no more!

Full team available so back to Mythic!

Well, it was almost a full team. 

Our Resto Druid was running late so we started without him, figuring we could 19-man Skorpyron. 
It didn't quite go to plan as out main tank had an absolute stinker of a fight and was thrown into the scorpions on multiple occasions.  His play is normally close to flawless so I certainly won't begrudge him one bad pull.
Our druid arrived in time for the next attempt and it was a comfortable kill.

On to Chrono...

Getting so close last time meant we didn't want to change anything tactics-wise but a couple of tweaks were made.
The main difference in the Mythic fight is that two of the adds spawn each time, forcing you to split the raid to deal with them and the main difficulty comes from balancing the groups for each add.

That sounds really simple but, on the 3rd and 4th set, you need one of the adds to die really quickly so you can interrupt the boss.  This means overloading the dps on one side for these adds then having everyone run around the room to help on the other add.

It is extra movement but necessary or we all basically die.

We split the raid evenly for the first two sets of adds but the boss is tanked on top of one so we can cleave.  The group going for the other add then have miles to run to reach the boss again... A Warlock would have been amazingly useful on this fight but, unfortunately, we don't have one.

We are also lacking a Feral Druid so all Shaman were forced to use Wind Rush Totem... I hate giving up my Gust of Wind but it had to be done :-(

The tweaks we made were quite interesting... They put all of the stronger dps into the groups that were moving less and had the boss to cleave.  The ones who are regularly lower on the dps were forced to do all of the extra movement.
The idea clearly being that we would sacrifice less dps to movement...

...and it worked a treat!

We were now way ahead of the enrage timer and only execution would keep us from getting the kill.

There is one mechanic that relies on personal responsibility in this fight, the Time Bomb.  If it goes off in the group it does horrific amounts of damage but you have an absolute age to react and move away from the raid.

If you haven't already guessed... this caused us many problems.

It's one of those random-target mechanics that people seem to struggle with all the time.  It must be because it happens to each person so infrequently that they forget that it can happen... or something like that.
I have some sympathy due to the random nature of the mechanic but, when your character pulses bright white light for the final ten seconds before the explosion, that sympathy doesn't last long.

We resorted to calling out every player with the bomb when they reached that ten second mark so they could move out. 
I really dislike this level of micro-managing in a team that is supposed to be aiming for Cutting Edge achievements but it was necessary.

Maybe people just needed to see it more?  Have it target them a couple more times?

Nah, I'm not having that. 

When it's been pointed out that this mechanic is repeatedly wiping us, one with a response as simple as moving away from the raid, I think everyone should make sure they are prepared for it. I have a TMW set up specifically for that debuff.

Am I being too harsh?

Calling out did the trick and we smoothly ran to the kill.

2/10 Mythic!

Time for some cake!

Farm or Push?

2% wipe on Chronomatic Anomaly on our last raid night.

We lost a vital player who was tasked with a specific job and couldn't scramble to fill it fast enough. 
Another couple of people died and we hit the enrage timer.

It was the last attempt of the night and our best by some distance although the last 4 or 5 attempts had seen some excellent progress.

That was the first of our two raid nights... what do we do on the second night?

After coming so close to the kill, particularly following the progress leading up to the last attempt, we feel like we have the fight won. 
We've twiddled and tweaked the tactics (far too much) until we found something that worked for us (the original tactics) and now we just need to execute it properly and the boss will surely die.

Should we go back to push for the kill?
Or should we clear Heroic again for more gear?
We are going to do both!

Jump in on Mythic, kill Chrono (sorry Chrono), have a quick look at Trilliax, clear Heroic... go to The Winchester, have a nice cold pint and wait for this all to blow over.

Not a chance in hell.

Most likely we will take a few attempts to get the kill on Chrono but mainly I am just hoping we don't get bogged down with it all night.
Trilliax is an unknown quantity. 
It's supposed to be fairly easy (but so was Chrono), it would be great to have a look at him and see what we need to prepare for next week.

How much time that will leave us for Heroic is anyone's guess but I'm thinking Elisande and Gul'dan will be safe this week.
They are the bosses we really need kills on, the ones that hold the best loot, but also the ones we are least likely to 1-shot.

Not me by the way.  I don't need anything from those later bosses, my loot drops from Chrono (trinket) and Trilliax (Tier cloak) so it would probably suit me better to push Mythic.

I can easily see us staying on Mythic for the whole night... take some time to kill Chrono but get there in the end.
Trilliax gives us an early peek at the kill but then strings us along for a while as we try to recreate that early attempt.
No time for Heroic.

I wouldn't even mind if we concentrated fully on Mythic from now on but people need gear from those heroic bosses and we were instructed not to pug.

I'm pretty sure this all stems from us spending too long farming bosses in HFC. 
We could have pushed on much sooner and maybe cleared the instance but we were always farming and farming for minor upgrades. 
In the end we ran out of time as people burned out on the content.

We almost made the same mistake again in Emerald Nightmare but scraped through on the last night and everyone is keen not to put ourselves in that position yet again.

So now it is a delicate balancing act between farm and progress, even in the same night. 

I just hope we can pull it off.


Edit:
The decision was taken out of our hands as two people couldn't make the start time.
We were forced to go Heroic, 1-shot everything up to Gul'dan but had a few wipes on him before we got the clear.
That only left us around 20 mins to have a go at Chrono on mythic and one of our healers DC'ed as we switched.
He didn't make it back before end of raid time.


On the plus side, I got my 4-set and am now 900ilvl :-)

The AP Arms Race... A Solution?

Watcher gave us some information on the latest upcoming method of protecting hardcore raiders from themselves and the AP grind... it appears the answer is to make it even more grindy!

The marginal gains for each trait from 35-54 were still too enticing and had everyone remotely competitive heading to Purgatory, or Maw of Souls, for multiple runs day after day.

Nobody seems particularly happy about this situation but any potential gain needs to be taken if you are determined to beat your competition (apparently).

Obviously listening to the loud, clear message being sent out by their player base, Blizzard's answer is to reduce those marginal gains even further!
Each marginal gain will now be much smaller than the current 0.5% and, for some reason, it will be a random proc.

After years of hardcore raiders proving that they will grind literally anything to gain character power, are Blizzard just trying to test them?  Are they trying to find the Meatloaf point?
I would do anything for more dps... but I won't do that.

My suspicion is that the top guilds will still push for these now miniscule increases in power because, after all, they are still increases in power.
Patch 7.2 and these new traits will release earlier than the Tomb of Sargeras raid, what do you think these guilds will be doing?

This ridiculous arms race leads to the raid being tuned for the max artefact power or we end up with another Xavius, falling on the first night...

Which is where my solution comes in :-)

Lock the artefact weapon for raiding.  Simple.

As an example using Nighthold... the artefact weapon would be locked at 35 traits when you entered the raid. 
Anything you have gained over 35 would still exist but it would be disabled.
Enabling the traits gradually, maybe 1 trait per week after release, would also act as a natural nerf to the content for those lower down the pecking order.

Blizzard could then tune Nighthold based on everyone having 35 traits and there would be no arms race at all.

The grind would be from 35 to the Tomb of Sargeras cap but it would be done over the entire length of the current patch and would happen naturally with raiding Nighthold and just general play.
PvP has been handled in a very similar way in the past, maybe it still is, and that seem to work quite well.

To be honest, I can't see any possible drawbacks with this system. 

Am I missing something glaringly obvious?

There's Only One... Sola!

Finally worked out how to change my name on here to Sola!

Yay me!

This has coincided with the other Sola (sadly) quitting our raid team.

To be honest, he wasn't a particularly good player.  Back in HFC, he seemed to do ok on his Boomkin but was determined to play Warrior in Legion and has struggled.

He was our Warrior tank who didn't know when to taunt on Ursoc and he was switched to dps for further Mythic progress.  Unfortunately, he continued to struggle as we progressed through Emerald Nightmare.

Fast forward to Nighthold and he was at the centre of the whole preparation debate, clearly not having looked at a guide or anything prior to our first run.

I hadn't either but had a couple of advantages over him... I was playing my Shaman so completely comfortable in a new situation, plus I play as Ranged which I think is more forgiving when you are learning fights.


Sola2 struggled again, frequently dying and always bottom of the dps, until he decided to quit raiding.
I suggested he switch back to his Boomkin but that would only solve some of the issues.
A really nice guy, lots of fun to raid with, and he appears to have fallen foul of our recent shift to a more 'hardcore' approach.

Sad times.

At least I get to keep my name.

Trait 54, where are you?

With a massive 1 Mythic kill under our belt, the guild are already looking nervously at the Krosus dps check.

As you can probably tell, I think it's a bit soon to be thinking of Krosus.  Maybe once we switch full time to Mythic it will seem more relevant but we are still farming Heroic at the moment. 
We wouldn't be farming Heroic if there wasn't still plenty of gear for us in there and this was backed up by virtually nothing being disenchanted in our run this week.

I don't think we are far off though... one or maybe two more Heroic clears and we're done.

So... Krosus.
The dps check does look tight.  You need around 10 million raid dps to avoid a swim which, counting the three healers and two tanks as one dps, equates to 625k dps each!

On our Heroic kill this week, we had a grand total of 2 people (Demon Hunter, of course and a Warrior) above that threshold.
The rest of us were some distance behind so I can see why they are concerned, it just feels to me like Krosus is still some distance and a lot of upgrades away.

I still need one more tier piece for my 4-set which is extremely powerful and will give me around 9% more dps just from the bonus, in addition to the extra stats from upgrading the piece itself (hopefully cloak as mine is currently 865ilvl).

Even if I get no other upgrades that should push me close to the threshold even based on what was a poor performance for our kill this week. 
4-set plus better play and I am confident I will be comfortably above the dps requirement.

You have to assume that other people in our raid are in exactly the same position, missing important pieces of gear that will make big differences to their, and our overall, dps.

More Heroic farming plus the kills on Mythic bosses prior to Krosus should give a hefty boost to our raid dps but will it be enough?

Our leadership don't think so. 

Now they are pushing for us all to farm Mythic+ dungeons to reach the 54th artefact trait!
There are guild events all over the calendar, every night of the week, to run Maw of Souls.

How the hell did this happen?

We are a relaxed, 2 night per week, raid guild and try our best to clear Mythic raids but now we need to grind out AP or our progress will stop?

The guild's opinion on this is quite varied...
Some people just don't have the time so can't do it whether they want to or not.
Some point blank refuse to do it, saying it goes against all the reasons they play the game.
Others are blaming Blizzard for making it a 'requirement'.
There are a few happy to do it, they apparently love Maw of Souls (can you tell I am not in this group?)
A couple of people said they would just grin and bear it to get it done.
And then there were a few that have already got the 54th trait so couldn't care less.

I am firmly in the second group.

I have absolutely no interest in repeating mythic dungeons over and over, and I can't bring myself to do it.
I'm at 46/54 now so hopefully should be close enough by the time we get there anyway.

Which group would you be in?
 

Mythic Chain Lightning - Skorpyron

First one down on Mythic!

An AoE-fest on normal and heroic, not much different on Mythic!

Skorpyron gains some colour-shifting abilities which slightly change the fight at times...
Blue... the regular abilities we know from Heroic
Red... sheds Volatile scales which pulse AoE and explode after Shockwave
Green... sheds poisonous scales which stack a dot on the raid

There are also a couple of colourful new scorpion adds to complicate things, the most impactful being the poisonous green one which drops pools of acid around the room.

These extra mechanics basically amount to making positioning much more difficult, not helped by the scales de-spawning at some inopportune times.

Once you get used to the extra care and planning that's needed to find a safe spot for the Shockwave, it is remarkably similar to Normal/Heroic and it doesn't take long before you are pushing for the kill.

The dps requirement is almost non-existent as the incredible amount of AoE flying around absolutely shreds the smaller scorpions with the slightly bigger ones not far behind.

So it took us a few wipes to sort our movement out, then a few more as some silly mistakes were made... maybe a Shaman was a bit too keen with his Chain Lightning (note to self: Lightning, faster than a Death Knight) and died from aggro a couple of times... but we soon had a clean run and got the kill!

With no Warlock or Demon hunter in our team, this boss is an Elemental Shaman's dream. Showing the flexibility of our talent tree, I specced for more AoE damage, picking Liquid Magma Totem and Lightning Rod.

Both choices did incredible damage, LM Totem hitting around 5 million per cast was amazing but Lightning Rod managed a total of 40 million damage over the fight!
It was behind only Chain Lightning on my damage which is insane for a talent!

Those are nothing compared to Static Overload though... what makes Shaman AoE so powerful is the interaction between Chain Lightning and our mastery, Elemental Overload.
Elemental Overload is a percentage chance, based on our Mastery level, to copy your last spell at 75% damage.
Static Overload is an artefact trait that gives a 10% chance for Chain Lightning to trigger Elemental Overload on all targets hit!

1 Chain Lightning cast procs 5 more Chain Lightning casts!

This is in addition to the normal chance to overload so, if you get lucky, 1 cast can produce 11 Chain Lightnings!

It looks amazing!
Some proper Sith lord shenanigans going on here.

The meters were topped by our other Ele Shaman. The winner between us on AoE fights is usually whoever got the most Static Overload procs but not this time, he had me well beaten.

This fight, despite how comfortably we beat it, has forced me to change my style of play! 
I was so handsomely beaten by my Shaman compatriot because I was tab-targeting, this fight was a lesson in frustration for tab-targeting.

The scorpions circling the room which are immune to damage are not immune to being targeted via the tab button, even at times when I was virtually stood on Skorpyron's tail it would choose one of the onlookers rather than the boss (or anything I could actually damage).

I doubt this will be a watershed moment like switching from clicker to keybound but it certainly made the difference on this fight... that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it!

Next up... Chronomatic Anomaly! 
Another Heroic clear first though, fingers crossed for that 4-set!

See ya.

Ahead of the Curve - Gul'dan!

We've chased him across time and space but finally cornered Gul'dan... atop a giant Night Elf er... hold?

I've enjoyed this raid immensely, the aesthetic is fantastic and the fights have been varied and interesting.

There wasn't much challenge for our team on Heroic, we probably carried too much gear from Mythic Emerald Nightmare to hit it at the right level but it was still enjoyable.

And when I say there wasn't much challenge, there was definitely some in the later bosses. 
The first 7 died in a fairly straight-forward manner with only a few wipes to learn the tactics before the kill.
Next came Star Augur Etraeus... and our first real challenge.
It's a fantastic setting for a fight, possibly the best I have ever experienced, like an updated Algalon.

The fight itself is very simple but, rather surprisingly, it turned into an incredibly tight dps check. 
We had been plodding along through the fight until phase 3 and the inventively-named 'Thing Which Should Not Be' - Everybody knew to look away at the right time, and DBM shouts at you anyway, but a couple of people got caught out.
Then a couple more people got caught out on the next add.
Before we knew what was really happening, the boss is casting Big Bang and we're all about to die!
It took another couple of attempts and some tweaking of when to cast Heroism but then it all came together and another boss was down.

Grand Magistrix Elisande was another step up in difficulty and could easily have been the final boss in the raid.
To be honest, I think the Magistrix should have been the last boss.  She has been the major protagonist in the Suramar chain, her dealings with Gul'dan and the Legion more of an undercurrent to the political maneuvering and ongoing battle with Thalyssra.

Maybe Blizzard agreed, at least in part, as the encounter is epic!

More time-bending shenanigans here as parts of the arena itself alter time, killing adds spawns either a 'fast' or slow' bubble, and how mechanics act.

Early on it is just about gaining a speed buff to do the big deeps but, as the fight goes on, it becomes just as important to use the slow bubble to handle various boss abilities.
So clever and so much fun!
Pools need to be soaked but they do damage if you stand in them... pick up a slow buff from the slow bubble and that pool damage ticks more slowly making it easily survivable.
3 debuffs on the raid that will kill everyone if they go off together... 1 person pick up a fast, 1 person a slow, to stagger the detonations.
And various other mechanics could be handled this way.

It is an unforgiving fight though and one particular mechanic killed us many times...

A circle of orbs forms around the outside of the room then contracts on to the boss.
There is no space between these orbs but they follow the same rules as everything else on this fight... hit a fast bubble and move faster, hit a slow bubble and move slower... this creates a small gap around the bubbles due to the speed difference and allows you to escape.

I won't tell you how many times people failed at avoiding these orbs... or the confusion caused by them changing direction in phase 2... but it was definitely the hardest part of the fight for our team.

I think the difficulty came from it not quite being the same each time, particularly in P2 when it was centred on one of the boss's mirror images. 
Soaking a puddle with the slow buff could easily leave you out of position, and slowed, when the orbs came...
I lost count of the number of times Ghost Wolf and Gust of Wind saved me so have some sympathy for the raiders that don't have those tools available.

It took us an entire raid night to bring it all together in one attempt and the kill finally came with a famous 'one last go'! :-)

Grand Magistrix Elisande may have deserved to be the final boss in Nighthold but we've chased Gul'dan long enough and there's no way he was going to play second fiddle to anybody!

Progress seemed much more straight-forward on this fight.  Not necessarily easier, but more inline with various other multi-phase fights where you learn one phase, master it, and move on to the next.

We had extended the lockout this week to focus fully on Gul'dan and, again, it took us the entire night.
I like how they have experimented with time/speed mechanics in a couple of fights and the last incarnation of this came in the form of a speed 'button' I can only assume we stole from Elisande.
It gives you a massive haste buff but the clever part is that you lose this buff if you take any Felfire damage... and Gul'dan throws a LOT of felfire around :-)

In phase 1 we are just handling Gul'dan's minions while he hides behind a shield.  It didn't take us long to push into phase 2.  It was just a warm up, you can't win the fight in P1 but you can certainly lose it.
Gul'dan joins the fight in P2 and his abilities are slowly empowered as the phase continues.
The Eye of Gul'dan seemed to be the most dangerous ability, massive damage which sometimes coincided with the empowered roots knocking people back out of range of the action (and sometimes way way back and out of the fight, much to our amusement)

Then Gul'dan absorbs even more demonic power and we move into P3, his body mutating further and is almost unrecognisable (like the Joker in Arkham Asylum)
He begins to harvest souls to gather even more power so we have to absorb them into ourselves... will we end up like Illidan?
Fire everywhere as it erupts from random people then Gul'dan unleashes his terrible power, destroying anything remotely near him.
Empowered Eyes of Gul'dan cause further torment but we push on, soaking as many souls as we can handle before he finally succumbs to face Illidan's judgement.

Are all the best fights multi-phase encounters?
This one followed the trend as Gul'dan absorbed more and more demonic power before taking his final form.
It was epic!

Ahead of the Curve achieved... on to Mythic!

The Alt Plan - Tanking Shenanigans...

Mythic dungeon week, perfect excuse to do some tanking on my Paladin.

His gear is in a bit of a mess at the moment with a mixture of stats as I switch him from role to role. Crit is king for Holy while haste is the worst stat and, of course, the reverse is true for Prot/Ret.

As my overall plan with this char is to heal our social raid, all the gems and enchants are Crit. I figure that this shouldn't make too much difference to my tanking as I have no intention of pushing into difficult content any time soon.

Eventually I will need two sets of gear but there is no rush for that and it definitely isn't needed to run 4 Mythic dungeons.

So I was expecting a nice easy ride to complete my quest and obtain a Heroic shiny. When I logged on, some guildies were already running Mythics so I waited to join their group. Unfortunately, they had already done a couple of  'normal' mythic dungeons and wanted to step it up to Mythic+ to use their keystones.

Ok... so not quite going to be as easy as I was expecting but it should be fine.

I insisted on starting with the lowest one, to see if my tanking could hold up to the extra damage, which was Black Rook Hold on a gentle +2.

I know BRH fairly well, where the difficult parts are and where you can save a bit of time, so was happy with that side of things.  It was just the overall damage, particularly on those more difficult pulls, that I wanted to check.

The fact that it took them over 10 minutes to get to the instance should have been a warning of what was to follow... Nah, only joking, it wasn't that bad.

There were a few deaths that were definitely avoidable... Spider poison, rolling boulders, barraging hunters... that kind of thing, but I was happy with how the tanking side of things was going.

Then we got to the gauntlet near the end, where you run up the stairs with all the bats flying around. 
This bit may have been my fault but hey ho...

When we killed the two mobs at the bottom of the stairs my spells picked up every bat that was flying nearby... virtually every Prot Pala spell is AoE!

I decided the best course of action would to run, without stopping on the middle platform and getting swamped with bats, all the way into the boss room and kill the mobs in a bat-free environment.

I've seen it done before and figured a Warrior, DK and MM Hunter would have plenty of AoE to kill everything before I ran out of cooldowns.

It turns out there are a couple more of those mobs than I remembered so it was going to be a bit trickier.  I still think we would have been ok but the hunter hit Barrage as we ran up, pulling all of the bats in the entire world.
/sigh
Everyone else was running straight up to the boss room so she got aggro and died almost instantly, leaving us about a million bats to deal with and 1 less dps to do it.

The mobs were massively enraged because (in what was to become a recurring theme of the evening) I was the only one interrupting but, luckily, they were almost dead by the time I finally succumbed to the onslaught and our melee finished them off.

I'm not sure if that is the best approach for the gauntlet but I think we would have been fine with less bats and more dps. 
What is the 'correct' way to do it?

The rest of the dungeon was fine and we got two chests.  Maybe I could have gone faster in parts but I felt constrained by the dps, it was probably all the running from the avoidable deaths that really cost us the extra chest though.

Overall, happy with the tanking side, so we moved on to Maw of Souls +3.

MoS... probably the easiest of the Legion Dungeons, what could possibly go wrong? :-)

It started well, I even did the big pull up to the first boss which was fun!
I'm not sure our healer agreed as people failed to move from the various cleaves and soaked up all her mana, but we got through ok.

The inside of the boat wasn't too bad either but I noticed that our recurring theme had continued and nobody was interrupting the two big mobs just before you go outside.

Knowing the deck was full of mobs casting fears and heals that would need interrupting, I made a point of stopping and telling the rest of the team that we would need more interrupts...

60 seconds later, we have pulled the entirety of the deck as nobody managed to interrupt any of the fears...
the mobs are all at full HP because, of course, nobody managed to interrupt the heals either...
and we wipe.

Paladins are amazing for interrupting with Avenger's Shield and an AoE stun on top of their regular interrupt but I couldn't get everything on my own and we crawled our way down that deck to the next boss, it took forever.

Even on the last boss, it couldn't just be easy...
Our amazing Monk healer was oom before the fight started. 
This time it was definitely my fault!  I jumped down thinking she could drink while Helya did her RP bit but it didn't work that way and she was on fumes from the start.

the fight itself started badly with both melee ignoring the destructor tentacles and just hitting the ones at the side, so much so that the 2nd and 3rd were up together... it was just lucky they were close together and I could tank them both at the same time.

We reached P2 and, knowing the healer had no mana, I was hoping for some help on the interrupts.
The DK died to the very first breath so wasn't going to get much help from him but I didn't get any help from the other dps either... and then they died together to another breath.
Me and the oom Monk limped our way to the end of the fight and 1 chest.

I mentioned again the (lack of) interrupts, the DK moaned that he was dead so couldn't interrupt... fair point I suppose, not something I would be shouting about but accurate.
I linked the total interrupts for the two dungeons we had completed:
Me... 58  (Paladins are OP)
Warr... 14
Hunt... 4
DK...   1

The Warrior is happy with the 14 and the DK was strangely silent while the Hunter responds with... "I don't see them on my screen"
Now I've known this hunter for a long time and heard many comments like this but even I was confused... and I'm hoping she won't mind me having a little fun at her expense here.

The Warrior asks "What don't you see?"
"What I need to interrupt is off my screen" she replies, explaining everything.
"What is off your screen?" the Warrior bravely continues.
"I don't know, I can't see it." Eh? "I just interrupt when I can and hope it hits something"

Yes, you have read that right.

I called for more interrupting and our Hunter decided to start blindly casting Counter Shot on cooldown in the hope that it would interrupt something.
/facepalm

I needed a break after that but when I returned the group wanted to do a +4, we had a choice between Halls of Valor and Eye of Azshara.
I picked EoA as I know that one better and didn't fancy the drinking hall part of HoV, it was my first experience of tanking an affix (Sanguine this time) so wanted it to be as smooth as possible.

The first boss took an absolute age to die but it was all going pretty well so far... I worked out what Sanguine looked like on the first pack so just had to keep an eye out for that and kite the mobs a little.

Moving down the hill, we come across one of the witches.  We are killing her but pick up some stray wildlife and the witch ends up in a Sanguine puddle left behind by a dead turtle.
Typically, both of my interrupts are on cooldown so the witch stays in the pool casting away and healing back up to full.  I decided to wait for a few seconds to see if anyone would do anything about it... it just stayed in the pool at full HP.
Oh well, interrupt and move on.

After poking a bit of fun at my team-mates, obviously the next fail would be mine :-)

There are a few blobs around the pool of the second boss.  I have seen other tanks pull them, I just assumed it was so they didn't accidentally get pulled during the boss fight, but didn't know what they did.

It turns out they slow movement speed and, with enough stacks, you can't move at all!
Ploughing into them regardless, I ended up rooted as they all died and Sanguine pools on the floor...
Never mind, I hear you say, you are a Paladin so can just use Blessing of Freedom or Blessing of Protection to remove the root/debuff and get out of the pool.

And yes, that is exactly what most Paladins would do.

This Paladin is really a Shaman and didn't think of it until about an hour later... so just died in the pool. 
Numpty.
At this point, I realised I could have used Cleanse on the poison from the spiders in the first dungeon. 
Double numpty.

2nd boss died easily and we were clearing the trash on the 3rd when the DK decided he had had enough of trash and pulled the boss.
Tanking the boss and all of the surrounding trash was great fun!
Our Monk, as usual, did an amazing job to keep us all alive through the mess of boss abilities, trash hydra abilities and random seagulls.

We moved on!
Clearing the small packs of crabs before the tunnel, the DK asks why I am pulling extra.

I'm busy tanking so just carry on but he asks again as we pull more inside the tunnel, and the Hunter joins in asking (and this one really made me laugh)...
"Don't you know this is a timed run?"

I can't tank and type at the same time, which is probably for the best, so this went on for a couple of minutes until the Warrior and Monk explained the concept of the mob counter... reinforced by the fact that, despite all my 'unnecessary' extra pulls, we finished on 99% and had to go hunting for a crab.

And people wonder why I don't tank...

The State of the Shaman...Nerfs Incoming?

The great class (re)balancing of 7.1.5 has left the Shaman in a fantastic place!

Three massive buffs have improved our single target dps immensely and we have lost none of the Cleave/AoE.

The Lava Burst buff, while much enjoyed, is a straight buff to our dps and doesn't alter our gameplay much on it's own.

The biggest, and most welcome (by me anyway), change was to make Elemental Blast the best option for raiding. 
It is a fantastic looking spell, one of the best in the game, and is on a medium-length cooldown which slightly increases the complexity of the rotation.
It was pretty lacklustre beforehand but now hits quite hard and gives a hefty buff to one of our secondary stats.

In a fit of unparalleled generosity towards us Shaman, Elemental Blast also benefits from our Mastery!
This is epic!
Not only do we see two casts flying towards the target, we can also benefit twice from the resulting buff!

The final 'major' buff was to Icefury.
Another interesting buff, which also came with a buff to Frost Shock damage making this talent viable (or even best) for raiding.
A medium cooldown of 30 seconds for a hard-hitting spell which massively buffs the next 4 Frost Shocks cast within 15 seconds... sounds like a mouthful even on paper!

Where Elemental Blast added a little complexity to our simple rotation, Icefury completely transforms it!
The fact that we use them both together makes the rotation absolutely mental!

Having to keep Elemental Blast, Icefury, Stormkeeper and Lava Burst constantly on cooldown and making sure none of the buffs are wasted, while managing Maelstrom and Flame Shock is one hell of a juggling act!

A juggling act I haven't quite mastered just yet but I'm having a lot of fun trying! :-)
When I gather my tier 4-set I will also need to ensure my Elemental Focus procs are used effectively which will add even further complexity and the true min-maxxers will even optimise Power of the Maelstrom procs... I fear this may be beyond my plate-spinning skill level though.

Aside from the increase in pure damage, the buffs (and talent reshuffle) have also opened up more variety in the talent builds.
At the start of the expansion, I was extolling the virtues of the talent tree and the options it gave us. 
It may have taken a few months but that has now been fully realised with almost every level giving us (close enough to) equally powerful yet diverse choices to make, some which radically alter our gameplay.

All these choices to make mean we can adjust our build very effectively for whatever fight we are facing...
Skorpyron's AoE-fest?  Lightning Rod and Liquid Magma Totem.
Trilliax's high-movement?  Icefury for more instant casts.
Krosus' short dps race?  Ascendance times out really well.
High Botanist's cleave? Maybe Elemental Fusion gets a run-out
The list goes on...
Icefury even covers one of our notoriously weakest areas, low-HP adds and target-switching, with up to 4 booming Frost Shocks ready to unload on them.

It suddenly feels like we don't have any weaknesses!
But it is more than that... we actually feel powerful in every situation!
Running round Trilliax as his laser beam keeps us moving and I am the only caster able to maintain my dps! 
One of the worst situations for the WoD Shaman is now a strength!

It feels like I can turn every situation into a strength... which is why I think the nerfs will come at some point. 
Being powerful in some, or even most, areas is fine as long as there are weaknesses as a counterpoint but they just don't exist right now.

This doesn't quite translate to the top level where we still sit mid-table on some fights whilst excelling on others.
I am not sure what makes the difference to those raiders.
Perhaps other classes have a level of min-maxxing that is available above what a Shaman possesses, and only the top echelon of players are capable of accessing that level?
I don't know but it might be enough to protect us from the nerf bat.

Either way, I am just going to enjoy it while it lasts!  :-)

The Race!

Is anyone else delighted to see Gul'dan hold on into the second week?

Star Augur Etraeus has seen off most of the US contingent and Grand Magistrix Elisande held the mighty Method at bay for a long time but, at the time of writing, three EU guilds are bashing their heads against the final boss in Nighthold, Gul'dan.

Even though it wouldn't bode well for my own chances of killing him further down the line, I want the race in every tier to last at least into the second week and maybe even the third (if the difficulty curve is quite smooth, not in this case).
It feels so anticlimactic when they die in the first week, particularly if it is a lore-laden character like Gul'dan.
Keep fighting Gul'dan!

Raiding as an e-sport...

There has also been a lot of debate about how to market and broadcast the world first race and, as usual, I'm late to the party but have some thoughts on the subject...

Who would even watch it?

Up to this point, these guilds have put in well over 100 hours of raiding each and killed 9 bosses with wipes numbering in the thousands!
How do you make that worth watching?

The first thought that springs to mind is... Golf!
At first glance, you may not see many similarities between mythic raiding and golf but stick with me on this one.

Golf suffers from some very similar issues when it comes to broadcasting:
1. There are long periods of inactivity or standard play between each moment of greatness.
2. You have no real idea when those moments of greatness are going to come.
3. A complete tournament encompasses many hours of playing across multiple days.

Golf gets round these issues by a system of mass simultaneous broadcasting of every golfer and every shot they play, while only showing one at any time to the audience.

This must be a nightmare for the producer but they do a fantastic job of showing as many 'live' shots as possible while slotting in some recordings of recent shots they missed.

This works by focussing on the leaders of the tournament, or some superstar, for almost all of their shots while jumping around the course to other players in the downtime in between.

It flows incredibly well on screen as the coverage continues almost non-stop.  When there is an inevitable lull in the action, it is filled in a variety of ways... scoreboard and recap, golfer interviews, previews of upcoming holes and replays of great play earlier in the day amongst other things.

This is the model I would use as a base.

There would clearly need to be some tweaks though, to both the coverage style and the approach of the competitors.
The privacy walls between guilds would come tumbling down for a start but this may make the race both tighter and faster as tactics are copied and iterated upon much more quickly.

The sheer scale of an event which runs pretty much continuously (if you can get into the raid instance hehe) for a week or more, across so many timezones, could make it virtually impossible to cast but a major problem would be having no idea when it would actually end! 
Xavius died in a die while we are now on day 9/10 for Gul'dan.

It would clearly be a massive undertaking demanding incredible resources which makes it highly unlikely to be done by any third party.  If it's going to be done, Blizzard will probably have to do it themselves.

Before they consider allocating so many resources though, they would still have to answer the question...
Who would even watch it?