Too Much Gear...

I might be in a small minority here, apart from the elitist Vanilla crew, but I think there is far too much gear in the game right now.


It's everywhere!


And it just flows in with virtually no effort needed on the player's part at all, you can conceivably run the exact same content over and over again for ever-increasing rewards.


Now this isn't such a big deal, is it?
So what if you can gear up infinitely from World Quests or whatever?
It doesn't hurt anyone, does it?


Of course it doesn't, it is completely fine.


The issue is the massive disparity in difficulty across the different gearing paths, particularly Mythic plus.


I have a couple of characters at 120 now who have never entered a dungeon or raid but are sitting in the high 370s on ilvl, which would be even higher if I bothered to do the Darkshore Warfront every time it comes around.


But what do you do next?
Say you have reached the heady heights of 380ilvl by picking up incremental gains on WQs with a couple of pieces from Warfronts plus the higher level rewards of the emissary quests.
Easily achievable without relying on the RNG gods for a lucky warforge or anything.


Where do you go to further progress your character?


1.  Just carry on.
The WQs system hasn't let you down so far so why change?  Well, it slows drastically as you get nearer to 385ilvl.  Only the Emissary rewards offer anything over 370ilvl so you are waiting for those and praying they give you the right slots or waiting for that Darkshore Warfront to roll around again (and hoping it isn't a fecking cloak for the 3rd time in a row! Not bitter... )


2.  Raiding!
Already out-gearing LFR by some distance, it would have to be Normal mode to offer any sort of upgrades.  Preferably Heroic for a nice juicy 400ilvl piece or two.
Probably start on Normal mode though.


3.  Mythic Plus.
The endless content cycle of the same dungeons marginally more difficult each time you run them.


This is where I think the problem lies.
Raiding Normal mode and any kind of M+ that would offer an ilvl upgrade are an order of magnitude more difficult than the gearing up to that point.


How are you supposed to proceed?
You outgear the most natural next step in difficulty and the curve rises incredibly steeply from that point onwards.
In reality, you are looking at +6 or +7 at that gear level to offer a reasonable chance of upgrade but going straight there from Darkshore Warfront would be brutal!


Normal mode raids aren't quite as severe but they are also nowhere near as accessible, obviously requiring a bigger team and greater time commitment.


My Shaman needs +10 dungeons for any kind of upgrade and they are still very difficult but that is at the top end of gearing and you expect it to be difficult, a step between Heroic and Mythic raiding.


I can't work out where the real problem is...
Does the easy WQ gear scale too high? 
Does the difficulty of M+ scale too quickly?


The 'curve' seems wrong to me, to gain experience in M+ it feels like you have to run content you outgear.  Or not necessarily outgear the content, but outgear the rewards from that content.
(I think I said Outgear too many times in that sentence, the word is losing all meaning.)


So do you go from WQs to +7 Shrine of the Storm Hell or do you spend time learning the dungeons with little to no hope of any gear rewards?


The time and effort required for WQs seems massively disproportionate to the rewards, especially when compared with Mythic plus.


How to fix it?
Maybe the lower end of M+ should offer higher rewards and it just scales more slowly, possibly a jump in gear rewards with each affix added?


A narrower gear curve across M+ would definitely help... People would still want +10 at the top end for the max reward and weekly chest but if it started at 385ilvl for +2, I think it would make for much smoother progression from WQs.


Any ideas?

Quick Catch Up...

Hello,


Been a while... again...


Much has changed since I last posted.


We killed Mythic G'Huun, it took far longer than it should have done but we got there in the end.
It was a constant stream of individual errors and poor, blinkered play that dragged it out for us.  Each error is punished to the max and two early in an attempt meant a wipe, as did any error by the orb-runners.


This meant progress was always stop-start.  It didn't flow like it normally does where, once you have mastered a phase, you rarely fail there again so our attempts in P3 were disjointed and rarely consecutive.


This was trotted out as an excuse for failure in P3 but I disagreed.
P3 on Mythic is very similar to P3 on Heroic, there is a little dance that flows nicely and repeats over and over through the phase.
It had been quite a while since we did it on Heroic (and the loot was crap so it wasn't one of those bosses you went back to over and over again) but, to me, it was Raiding 101: Don't Stand in the Fire!


Anyway, the errors in P1 and P2 never really went away and it took me a long time to get through to everyone that P3 was about survival rather than dps but we eventually got there and G'Huun died with a couple of weeks to spare.


Any enthusiasm I had for the game had completely gone by this point and I stepped down as both Raider and Raid Leader. 
I attempted to step down as Officer too but was convinced to stay on, even though I wouldn't be particularly active in the guild.


I moved my Shaman back to join some old friends who I was raiding with back when I started this blog.  The pace would be slower, more relaxed, and the requirement to do everything outside raiding wouldn't be there either.
I could go back to playing at my own pace, particularly important at this time when I wasn't enjoying the non-raid content.


It's not really working out as well as I had hoped, the grass isn't always greener...
I'm frustrated playing at the lower level, not by people playing poorly or anything, but by the almost complete lack of direction, organisation and planning.


On the plus side (no pun intended), I've really enjoyed doing Mythic+ dungeons with people on a similar level to me. 
I always felt behind the curve in the other guild, with people who are in specialist key-pushing teams essentially 'carrying' me through my weekly.  I didn't like that feeling at all!


Now I am actually learning the dungeons, the routes, the dangerous packs etc. for the first time since our foray into Challenge Modes back in WoD... same guild, same people... coincidence?


Haven't thought about those C-Mode runs in a while, looking back it was so much fun trying to work them out (with Darkmech's help) then execute our pulls perfectly. 
Restarting and practicing over and over, the challenge was perfectly balanced in my opinion and no gear rewards in sight (and all the better for it)!


Is it possible to have the best of both worlds?
The raiding experience of one guild and the dungeon experience of another?
I'm not sure. 
The Mythic guild runs plenty of M+ but they are pretty much a requirement to obtain the appropriate gear for the raids... it's not the lack of runs that is the issue, it is my own place in them. 
The fault lies with me for being behind the necessary experience level to complete these runs without feeling out of place.


I'm now gaining that experience but I needed to go through this process at the start of the expansion.


The thoughts that have been swirling round my mind are beginning to make more sense now I have put them down on 'paper', the path forward is becoming clearer...

Collect All the Things...

Despite all the negativity of my last few posts, there are some things in game I do actually enjoy.


I've never really been a collector... I've dabbled here and there but it's never been the actual collecting or filling a set that has appealed to me.
For example, back in the day I used to play a bit of Magic: The Gathering.
The collecting aspect only served to facilitate the building of decks for me. I wasn't remotely interested in a card to finish off a set and freely traded away anything I didn't need for whatever deck I was trying to build at that time.


So it is surprising that I find myself captivated by the Collections tab!


Much of my spare time, when not doing laps of Dazar'Alor/Boralus, has been spent in old raids picking up tier pieces for one appearance or another. 
Spread across most of my toons, not even collecting them all on my main or anything, just chasing whatever set I think looks pretty cool or different.


Maybe this was sparked by this awesome little thing in Legion but I also find it incredibly relaxing and love the memories that come flooding back.


Recently I was in Throne of Thunder for the first time in god knows how long, it's been so long I forgot how to get to the Isle of Thunder in the first place :)


I had such a good time in that raid - We didn't pull up any trees progress-wise, barely even touched Heroic iirc (no Mythic back then), but it was so much fun!
Dino-madness on Horridon, crazy turtle kicking on Tortos, flying around nests on Ji-Kun... I had a great time.


I don't think I've ever enjoyed raiding as much as I did in ToT, Mythic progression seems so serious in comparison.
I was the go-to guy back then which made a big difference, job needs doing and I'm there.
I was the one kicking the turtles, I was the one flying to nests (solo, was a nice challenge)... and I loved every minute of it.


Running through again at 120 had me constantly smiling as random moments sprang back into my mind - Didn't get the full set either so I'll be heading back again soon :)

Mythic Progression Coming to an End...?

As we continue to push towards G'Huun's end (8% - Getting there slowly) I still can't shake the malaise that has been hanging over my head for the past few months.


G'Huun itself is quite an interesting fight.  Unfortunately, it is dragged down by the crazy composition requirements that have been a feature throughout Uldir.


This time it is Warlocks... well, mostly Warlocks.
The fight has been nerfed so that you don't actually need 4 Warlocks now, although having less than 4 does restrict what classes you can bring to make up the rest of the team.


Anyway... we're closing in on the kill but held back by sloppy play in the earlier phases of the fight that frustrates me no end.
Why is it so difficult to get 'Mythic Raiders' to actually follow mechanics?
It's a constant struggle, like the default state of the raider is to stand still and shoot the boss (or jump and shoot the boss - BM Hunter) while my task is to convince, cajole, threaten them into doing anything else.


EVERY.
SINGLE.
BOSS.


It drives me insane!


The latest one is Blistering Boils.  They explode and the two nearest people get a debuff, pick up two debuffs (either at the same time or one after the other) and you are mind-controlled leaving your team no choice but to kill you.


So you have a little hokey cokey of people with the debuff moving away from new boils and people without the debuff moving towards them... in theory.
What we get is half the team just stood still regardless of the debuff.  It's blind luck whether or not we get through it half the time.


Why don't they get it??
Just do the f*cking mechanics!!


I know, deep in my heart, that the numbers don't really matter. 
It's the mechanics that win you the fight, get you the kill, but people just seem so absorbed by the numbers that they don't see it.
So they push back against any instruction that might lower their dps, or hps (healers tunnel vision worse than most but usually for better reasons) and we fail.
Then there is silence when I ask why nobody moved, why nobody soaked, why nobody actually did the mechanics.


I can't wait for it to be over.


But how over do I want it to be?


I'll be stepping down as Raid Leader, maybe Officer too, but I still enjoy the raiding.
The problem is... I only enjoy the raiding.
I don't enjoy the dungeons, rarely even doing one for the weekly.
I don't enjoy the islands, haven't done them for months.
World Quests... yeah, right.


My characters drop further and further behind.  It's not important at this stage of the tier but a new tier is on the horizon.
Do I want to force myself to complete that content just to keep up?


I'm sorely tempted by a more casual playstyle, forget the Cutting Edge achievements but only play the content I actually enjoy playing.


Decisions to make...

Freedom...

Had a great raid last night!

I haven't become an amazing Warlock overnight so I was still a bit rubbish.

And we didn't kill anything, just banged our heads against Mythrax for a few hours.

Still had a great night!

Because I wasn't Raid Leading.

I had missed the first two nights of progress on Mythrax plus couldn't get my microphone to work, so there was actually no option for me to be RL.  We've already set up my replacement to lead this boss anyway but it still added to my feeling of relaxation as we entered the raid.

For the first couple of pulls, the fight felt incredibly frantic as I tried to work things out and find my position in the arena.  All Ranged have to be spread for the majority of the fight so you need to find your space, then guard it and shoo away anyway who encroaches.

Once I had found a spot, it all settled down.  There are times when everything points your way and you spend more time running than fighting but usually the abilities are spread around the ranged team.
It's a recent nerf to the fight that has made one key ability only affect ranged which makes it more of a pain for me but thank god, because it would have been a nightmare if it affected the melee.  We had visions of Argus all over again.

Anyway, once I had a feel for the fight and my positioning, it calmed down and I could actually work at improving.  This is not something I feel like I have been able to do before now, leading took precedence over my own performance, I was just muddling through each fight trying to watch everyone else.

I realised that this is an aspect of raiding that I had really missed without even thinking about it, the gameplay min-maxing and the awesome sense of achievement as you improve until you eventually nail the fight... then cock it all up on the actual kill so you look like a moron on the kill vid but whatever.
Of course, that sense of achievement was replaced by the team nailing the fight and us getting the kill and, don't get me wrong, I loved that but I want the other feeling.

Am I just selfish?
Maybe I am, I certainly feel quite selfish at the moment.  I'm not a selfish player though, I'll still be offering to do the dirty jobs in the raid that wreck your dps.
Hmmm... that's not helping, still feel selfish.

I don't care, maybe it's just my time to be selfish.

Over Before It Began...

The tanking dream almost actually happened!

It was agreed, I would take over for the next tier of raiding and I had started to prepare... actually levelling a tank class (female blood elf paladin)!

Got to 120, started to gear up and even ran a couple of LFRs.  Tanking G'Huun, even on lfr, at 317ilvl is not recommended by the way.  The other bosses were all fine although Fetid Devourer hurt a bit, but on G'Huun it was impossible to keep me alive despite me rotating mitigation and cooldowns.
(Personally I think the healers could have done more as I wasn't getting much in the way of direct healing but I knew I was undergeared so left them to find a better tank)

Meanwhile, repeat kills on our Mythic team are proving almost as difficult as the first.  We even wiped on Taloc once, ok so our monk had forgotten to switch to tank spec but we still should have been able to kill it.
Some wipes on Mother that aren't easily explained, maybe too many people crossing at exactly the same moment so Spirit Link doesn't get chance to take effect?  Not sure, it's only ever 1 or 2 wipes anyway so not worth bothering too much.

The next 3 though are erratic to say the least, some weeks they take 1-2 attempts and some weeks it takes 10 or more! 
Except Fetid Devourer that is, which always takes 10+ but that's for another post.

With me falling out of love with the Warlock and the frustration of wiping to silly mistakes on bosses we have already killed multiple times, I've not been enjoying the raids very much.
Leading has been a real drag too, people know what to do on these fights but it is still a constant struggle to get them to do the right thing, to think about more than themselves in any given situation (Again Fetid, will have to do a Fetid post)

Our progress boss in now Zul but we barely get any time on him each week.  It's not a difficult boss for most of the raid but a few people have specific tasks that need some practice to get right, or at least get the timing down.
For the rest of us, it is pure Patchwerk!  Stand still and hit the boss as hard as you can to the exclusion of pretty much everything else, letting some rogues cheese you through the phase so you don't actually have to deal with any mechanics.
I hate it!
If Blizzard released the fight this way by design there would be uproar, yet we reduce it to this to make it easier.  And the more rogues you have, the easier it becomes.

Anyway, again a rant for another day.

We only have 3 rogues (some guilds gather as many as 6 or 7!) and 1 of them is an alt who, by his own admission, is completely shit at it.
'Only' having 3 rogues (2.5 really) means the dps check for our cheese strat is incredibly tight.

My Warlock is the lowest geared char in the raid, poorly itemised gear too as I stopped doing all of the extra-curricular activities needed to keep him up to date quite some time ago.
Give me some mechanics to deal with and I back myself to bridge the gap to higher-geared players but in a straight stand-up dps check? 
I was bottom of the pack quite consistently.
And in a bid to meet this tight dps check, I'm now riding the bench.
Sad times.

At first I wasn't really bothered.  I wasn't enjoying the raids anyway and I knew my dps was the lowest so it made sense.
The more I thought about it, the more bothered I was though.
It was actually poor execution of those few specific tasks that had slowed our progress, not my fractionally lower dps.
At the end of the day though, I just didn't like that I had let myself get into a position where I was the one being benched.

What to do about it?
Well, after a rant in our officer channel about identifying the real issues in a fight and cheese strats in general, I started thinking about what I wanted from the game these days.
Not normally one for introspection, it took me a while to sort through my thoughts...

I still want the challenge and thrill of Mythic raiding.
I also want to be relaxed and enjoy it.
I want to enjoy the extra stuff outside raids.

The answer was obvious and I should have known it from the start... Elemental Shaman!
Why did I ever doubt it?

Is It My Year?

Tap Tap.  Is this thing still on?

After my brief dalliance with the Arcane as Mage, I thought I had returned to my Shaman for good.  But no, this time I went even further and completely betrayed my Shamanistic roots by switching to Warlock for the new expansion!
Even worse... an Orc Warlock!

After such a betrayal, how could I come to post on this Shaman blog?
It just wouldn't be right.

That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it, let's move on :)

So why post now?
Well... I'M BACK!!
Yes, the Shaman is now a troll but he's back ready to take over in 8.1

Dismayed by the constantly poor position of the Shaman and the proposed changes for BfA, I was determined to play something which would be decent no matter what was thrown at it so chose the Warlock.

Demonology was the spec that really interested me so that's how I prepared and levelled, typically it was brokenly poor when the raids opened up (and before) so not really viable.

Affliction was the go-to spec for pretty much every situation so I reluctantly switched over.
The thing with Affliction is that it's all about those DoTs, and keeping those DoTs up takes a fair amount of concentration with all the other stuff going on.

This did not fit very well with me being raid leader...
Learning a new spec/class is one thing
Learning to raid with that spec is another
Learning to raid with that spec in new fights is another
Learning to raid with that spec while raid leading new fights is a whole other thing altogether!

I couldn't do it.

After every raid, I felt disappointed with my performance as both a Warlock and a Raid Leader.
I'm just not good enough to do that, I thought doing it from the start of the expansion might give me the time to become comfortable enough on the Warlock to allow it but it didn't.
I even had to ask for a night off raid-leading on one Heroic clear so I could do some half-decent dps and show the newer people in the guild that I could actually play the game.

It's a shame as I really thought I could do good things with the Warlock but don't really feel like I had the opportunity.
It was similar to the Mage, and a similar reason for switching back.  To be a decent RL, I need to be playing my Shaman!

Thankfully, the 8.1 changes are looking good for Elemental.  As long as the damage balancing is done properly (hahahaha), we should be fine.

That is the really sad part of this... my Shaman is only a few ilvls behind my Warlock now as I prepare for the change but even if I played it perfectly, I would still do more damage playing the Warlock as poorly as I do.

Ah well, I feel like the Warlock ship has sailed now.  It's Shaman time once more, which at least allows me to feel good about my play (and a bit better about my raid leading).

Or is it Shaman time?
The latest rumblings around the guild are that our main tank wants to switch back to his hunter!
Maybe it's time for me to step up!
I've boosted a paladin, sent her to Zuldazar and set her spec to Prot.
Ok, she's still 110 and I have no xp but...

Is it finally my year?

Progress vs Rotation...

The big debate raging among the officers now is how to handle our roster of 25 raiders.


Our old system had a 'core' 20 raiders with 3 or 4 'support' raiders coming in to cover when someone had a night off... this fell down because our core were ultra-reliable and all turned up to every raid for weeks on end, meaning the support never actually got a chance to raid and eventually got bored and left.


When someone did finally need a night off, we were scrabbling around for someone to fill in and even pugging sometimes to avoid cancelling the raid... far from ideal for Mythic progress.


Our GM has recruited a few extra people now so we always have enough people but he hates benching anyone and we have to go through the rather torturous process of picking those benched people each time.


To make it 'fair', our GM decided we needed a rotation system to make sure the same people didn't keep getting benched over and over again.  That would be the same as our old core+support system, just without telling the support that that's what they were.


With this in mind, I figured we could have everyone open for rotation on our farm night then pick the best 20 available for whatever boss we were progressing on at the time for our progress night.


For example, we are currently progressing on Antoran High Command which is mostly an AoE-fest so...  I wanted to bench our lowest AoE dps - 2 BM hunters, 1 Rogue and 1 Frost Mage who are consistently lowest on our Heroic kills - They would get plenty of opportunities for the kill in future but it's a small attempt at min-maxing to get our first kill.


The first fly in the ointment was one of our BM hunters who is extremely resistant to being benched... one of the main reasons she applied to join our guild was our old core raider policy so I have some sympathy for her but ROTATION!
She went on holiday, taking full advantage of our expanded roster, before we implemented the rotation plan anyway but the GM is concerned she will leave.
It turns out she isn't the only fly and a few other people have now spoken up about their dislike for the bench.


One of our officers suggested just not rotating those people that are going to complain but I couldn't see that working particularly well for any length of time.
Another officer suggested complete rotation with making sure all roles are covered being our only consideration, the fairest of fair systems.


The GM was not happy with any of these suggestions... so I came up with a plan to cover ALL of them!
My plan was to have everyone rotate, has to be that way really, as a starting point.  But, beyond that, I set up a new 'core' of raiders that would only be benched on our farm nights with everyone else being benched on our progress nights.
Over a 5 raid period, all of our players would be benched once but we still had our top players available for progress every time.  I won't go into any more detail but it was a solid plan that covered all eventualities.


Submitted it to our GM, we went through some what-if scenarios, and he was happy!
We tentatively (and secretly) put it in place before our progress raid on Monday, benched some people, and went to raid.


Despite our best efforts (4 wipes at <5%), we failed to kill AHC and I should have predicted what happened next...
Wednesday farm night rolls around and our GM wants to push for the AHC kill so refuses to bench any of the new 'core' players.  This throws the whole rota into an absolute mess as we can't fit everyone in now and still keep the core for progress nights.


Personally, I don't really care what system we use but we probably should have a system of some kind in place if only so that people know where they stand... or, more importantly, I know what's going on if they ever ask me!


I thought my initial solution gave us the right balance of rotation and progression.


What do you think?
Any different or better ideas?

Ahead of the Curve - Antorus - Part Three

The raid naturally splits into these three areas and I think this is where the skip mechanism brings you once you've collected your 4 McGuffins.
It's a natural split in difficulty too, Coven shenanigans aside, although the curve is quite gentle over all of the first 9 bosses.

Aggramar

Our plate users were drooling over his sword, Taeshalach, which can actually drop for transmog purposes.  It does look bloody cool!

The fight itself is a lesson in avoiding fire which gets progressively more difficult as the fight continues.  In the final phase, I find myself tending towards the headless chicken routine and still haven't mastered Icefury so my dps is close to non-existent.

There are a couple of really interesting aspects to the fight though...

Taeshalach's Technique is reminiscent of the 'dance' you had to perform for Will of the Emperor back in Mogu'shan Vaults. 
Do you remember that?
It was a series of telegraphed moves you had to avoid for a damage buff.  I remember finding it quite tricky at the time, definitely on the first few attempts at least.
This incarnation is only for the tanks to deal with and doesn't have much depth to it, seems like a missed opportunity to me.

CC all the things!
There are a couple of transitions in the fight where the boss is immune to damage and some adds spawn.  A couple of big adds to keep the tanks busy and a few smaller adds for the rest of us.
These smaller adds just move slowly towards the boss - If they reach him, they explode for raidwide damage and leaves a debuff for more damage from any more explosions.

On Normal, you just kill these adds off before they reach the boss.  It's pretty easy, they don't have much health.
On Heroic, it gets much more interesting!  You can still kill the smaller adds but after a few seconds they just reform and continue their journey to the boss.
You need to CC all of the adds and release them one at a time to reach the boss as the debuff from the previous one runs out.  It's a level of individual responsibility and coordination that isn't needed on any of the other fight.
Having a DK grip each add in at the right time makes it a lot easier but it is still a step up in challenge, particularly with all of the fire-dodging going on.

Argus the Unmaker

Wow, this fight is spectacular!
I'm going to do my best to avoid spoilers here because I really feel like this is a fight you should experience rather than read about in a blog.

I barely know where to begin anyway, so much going on...
Multiple phases
Big buffs to make you OP
Big bombs to blow up the raid
Even a bloody Cone of Death!!!

Visually stunning, it is a superb way to end a raid (and possibly expansion)
Normal mode seems well tuned but I think Heroic is lacking a bit of bite, although reports suggest that is more than made up for in Mythic.

Those 'epic' moments are few and far between when you have been playing the game for a long time but this fight really brought them back, hope you enjoy it as much as I did!

Summary

If, as expected, this is the last raid of the expansion, then I can't complain.  The bosses are fun for the most part and although the setting does get a bit 'same-y' after a while, it looks incredible and Eonar/Argus offer a touch of variety.

On Heroic, the bosses were not quite challenging enough for our group but that is probably more down to gear than anything else.  I've been keeping an eye on the progress of some old friends (who didn't raid Mythic ToS) and it seems nicely tuned for them.

We're now pushing on for Cutting Edge after a break for the holidays, I'll keep you posted!

Alt Shenanigans - Arms Warrior??

11 of the 12 classes at 110 now, only Monk to go.

I had some lofty goals of running tem all through invasions each week, gearing them up with Relinquished tokens and eventually collecting all of the class mounts.  It seemed like a better idea than running around Dalaran on my main, looking at the groupfinder (but not applying for any groups).

That didn't last long to be honest, felt like too much of a chore.  It did get me playing all of them though, and sometimes one would grip my attention for a while so I would do some World Quests and LFR on it.

Since abandoning the invasion plan, I just jump on whatever alt I feel like to just go do stuff!
Recently, I've been enjoying the Arms Warrior of all things.
It has the simplest of simple rotations, on par with BM Hunter and Havoc Demon Hunter as the easiest specs to play, but there is a certain satisfaction to be gained from hitting something really hard with a big sword!  :-)

I originally levelled the Warrior because they kept destroying me in PvP... I can't remember why I was doing PvP now but I was doing some random BGs and always struggled when I came up against a Warrior. 
I didn't do any PvP on the Warrior, I stopped doing it on the Shaman and forgot all about it, so he sat around for the last few months without even leaving his order hall until the invasion plan started.

Still not doing any PvP on the Warrior but I'm now playing it on the side, it's up to er... 2nd or 3rd alt, which is high indeed for a class I've pretty much avoided for all of my WoW life.  It has even edged out the Mage, only my pipedreams of one day being a Paladin tank are keeping it from going higher (Timewalking last week, content for making you feel good about your tanking ability :-) ).

A couple of runs through LFR and a few WQs, I'm now considering doing some real content with him!  Maybe run some Mythic plus this week, I doubt I will reach the 975ilvl that pugs want for a normal Antorus run though.  The old guild is gathering to raid once more so maybe some opportunities there.

It's exciting being at this stage with a new class, so much content ahead of me and no rush to clear it... I'm going to have to name-change first though, can't take him seriously at the moment xD

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?