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...