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!