There is something about fighting a big dragon that feels... Warcraft-ey, especially when it follows the dragon 'rules' and all of the Dragons of Nightmare follow those rules.
Big breath attack? Check!
Tail Swipe? Check!
You've got yourself a dragon there, son.
A dragon?? I've got 4 of the bloody things!
These dragons are, I assume, English dragons... They politely queue up and wait for their turn to tear the raid to pieces.
And once they have had a go, they just fly to the back of the queue and patiently wait for their next turn.
This is vitally important as, even with only 2 on the ground at a time, there are about a million mechanics to deal with!
I'll be honest, based on our experiences on Heroic, I thought this would be our easiest Mythic kill and we should have gone here first.
I was wrong.
There is just so much going on all the time that you can't lose focus for a second!
When I was leading raids more regularly I used to know every fight inside out, reading up and watching countless guide videos to fully understand every moment of each fight for each role.
I've dialled it back a 'bit' since then...
I've done it on Heroic a few times and watched a guide to show the differences for Mythic. It looked pretty similar to me, same mechanics but more frequently and hit harder blah blah blah.
There is the portal group too but I wasn't expecting to be involved in that... typically I got thrown in there because our DK was getting stuck on the loading screen each time but that was only the first night.
The rest is just like Heroic right?
Stand on the flowers to stop them spawning adds.
Avoid the sleepy clouds of gas.
Interrupt and kill adds.
Dispel the debuff, got to keep those healers busy!
What isn't immediately apparent is how quickly these abilities come at you in Mythic, and how frequently they overlap!
Back in the day, I would have known exactly what was going to hit and when.
Now?
Headless Chicken mode!
I felt like I didn't know what was going to happen at any given moment and just reacted to what was in front of me... constantly for 7+ minutes!
With Mythic in general being quite unforgiving, you can understand why it takes so much concentration to play this way.
Having played Ele Shaman for quite some time now, constantly striving to improve (and had a dps lesson from Preach himself!), I can maximise my dps under pretty much any circumstances so the numbers don't suffer too much.
When I had less skill and practice as a player, the ridiculously in-depth knowledge of the fights must have covered my weaknesses to a certain extent.
Following this train of thought, I have some new-found sympathy for those players who haven't (for whatever reason) put that much effort into improving their play, they don't have that knowledge to cover for them (and I certainly don't expect anyone to go to the lengths I did in learning fights).
It must be incredibly intense to need full concentration on the fight mechanics and your dps rotation, possibly even clicking abilities on your action bar.
I used to just think they were bad players, and maybe they were (hehe), but at least I have a bit more understanding of why they were bad ;-)
Anyway, I digress, back to the dragons!
Despite all of the various abilities making you run around, this fight is surprisingly good for the Elemental Shaman... mainly due to the numerous opportunities to unload with Chain Lightning.
A variety of adds spawn so I quickly learned to save Stormkeeper to coincide with a healthy number of targets and the screen would light up during the 'Shade' spawns.
I think I said at the start of the expansion that the Ele Shaman niche, extended AoE, doesn't occur in current raids... well, here it does and boy do we shine!
Once everyone has learned the fight and you are at that stage of trying to pull the execution together consistently enough in one attempt to get the first kill, it all boils down to one point.
There are gas clouds on the floor, add-sprouting flowers all over the place and purple bombs of corruption dropping all over the raid... when Lethon casts Siphon Spirit and spawns a whole load of adds!
They actually spawn from players so we loosely stacked to group them together, then stunned and slowed them with everything we had to give us maximum uptime.
These adds are the absolute priority in the fight... if they reach the dragons, they heal them for a massive amount!
Enter, the Elemental Shaman!
Lightning blazing everywhere, Earthquakes knocking them to the ground, Earthbind Totems slowing them down, Capacitor Totems... er, capacitating (? incapacitating maybe).
This is our moment!
And once you are through, it is plain sailing to four dead dragons.
Friday, 9 December 2016
Wednesday, 7 December 2016
Plodding Along...
Everything has slowed down now as we await the burst of content that comes with the next patch.
Not that we have finished with the current patch, just all of the non-raiding content.
Aside form raiding, the Shaman just completes his emissary quests and 1 mythic+ dungeon per week for the weekly cache.
I feel like I should be doing more mythic+ dungeons to bring in the AP and finish my artefact weapon but, to be completely honest, I can't be bothered.
I target the World Quests with AP rewards and raiding rewards decent enough AP to keep it ticking over, plus I'm 1/3 on my last trait which is a very disappointing self-heal even at 3/3.
At 1/3, it heals me for roughly 130k HP if I drop below 35% - amazing, right?
1 million AP to make it a 260k heal hasn't exactly got me rushing around to complete it!
The Paladin tank has geared up nicely and is now at the mythic dungeon/normal raid stage... unfortunately, this means he has to use the groupfinder.
I think the groupfinder is a fantastic tool but it's a constant struggle for me to actually apply to join a group, and it's almost a relief if I get turned down.
I know I know, man up and just get on with it... I'm trying
As if reading my thoughts, Preach has just started a series of videos for learner tanks. Apparently, I'm not alone in my fear of the groupfinder and he has been receiving lots of emails asking how to get into tanking.
I was already following Darkmech's advice, who is hilarious by the way, but it's good to have another point of view and I'm always on the lookout for more if you know any?
When my friend got me into WoW it came as no surprise to him how deeply I went into the game, absorbing as much information as I possibly could about all aspects of Warcraft.
Starting with TotalBiscuit (TotalHalibut?)back in the day and Nobbel more recently as I become more interested in the lore, it has always been the personality and opinions that have kept me interested rather than just the content.
And I still consume wow-related content at an incredible rate so am always looking out for new (or new to me) blogs, podcasts and youtubers.
Apologies for rambling a bit today but it is quite representative of my play at the moment, lacking focus and waiting for something to trigger me into action!
Not that we have finished with the current patch, just all of the non-raiding content.
Aside form raiding, the Shaman just completes his emissary quests and 1 mythic+ dungeon per week for the weekly cache.
I feel like I should be doing more mythic+ dungeons to bring in the AP and finish my artefact weapon but, to be completely honest, I can't be bothered.
I target the World Quests with AP rewards and raiding rewards decent enough AP to keep it ticking over, plus I'm 1/3 on my last trait which is a very disappointing self-heal even at 3/3.
At 1/3, it heals me for roughly 130k HP if I drop below 35% - amazing, right?
1 million AP to make it a 260k heal hasn't exactly got me rushing around to complete it!
The Paladin tank has geared up nicely and is now at the mythic dungeon/normal raid stage... unfortunately, this means he has to use the groupfinder.
I think the groupfinder is a fantastic tool but it's a constant struggle for me to actually apply to join a group, and it's almost a relief if I get turned down.
I know I know, man up and just get on with it... I'm trying
As if reading my thoughts, Preach has just started a series of videos for learner tanks. Apparently, I'm not alone in my fear of the groupfinder and he has been receiving lots of emails asking how to get into tanking.
I was already following Darkmech's advice, who is hilarious by the way, but it's good to have another point of view and I'm always on the lookout for more if you know any?
When my friend got me into WoW it came as no surprise to him how deeply I went into the game, absorbing as much information as I possibly could about all aspects of Warcraft.
Starting with TotalBiscuit (TotalHalibut?)back in the day and Nobbel more recently as I become more interested in the lore, it has always been the personality and opinions that have kept me interested rather than just the content.
And I still consume wow-related content at an incredible rate so am always looking out for new (or new to me) blogs, podcasts and youtubers.
Apologies for rambling a bit today but it is quite representative of my play at the moment, lacking focus and waiting for something to trigger me into action!
Wednesday, 30 November 2016
Tanking Trials and Tribulations...
One day it will happen.
One day I will be a good tank.
That day is not today.
A push from the Paladin over the weekend took him to 110 and on to the gearing treadmill. It's an absolute god-send that world quests are open immediately so you can crack on with those while finishing off the zones and doing Suramar at leisure.
As per the latest incarnation of the alt plan, I am not doing any of the class order hall quests until 110, when I can do them pretty much in one go for a more cohesive storyline.
So I picked up where I had left off after opening up Light's Hope Chapel to follow the storyline.
I picked up a dungeon quest for Violet Hold but still had other quests so decided to do those first.
A few quests down the line... I began to wonder why there were so many references to Varian Wrynn and Ashbringer.
Isn't Ashbringer the Ret artefact weapon?
Yes, it is. I was on the Ret artefact quest line!
It's fortunate that Wowhead exists or I would probably not have found out until someone actually handed me the Ashbringer!
Despite the temptation to just carry on with nice, comfortable questing I was left with the dungeon quest in Violet Hold.
No way around it so I queued up.
I wondered if my gear would be good enough but it is a levelling dungeon so I figured I would be fine at any ilvl... how wrong I was!
First portal and my health bar is spiking up and down ridiculously, I'm blowing all cooldowns just to (barely) stay alive. As soon as I ran out of CDs, I was done for.
I ran back in quickly, picked up the mobs and died again.
Two others died before I could get back in again and now we were just on a loop of... Res, run in, die.
Every fear I had was coming true.
After a few death loops, and some rather fruity language, one of the dps left which was swiftly followed by everyone else leaving.
First attempt at tanking... disaster.
I checked my ilvl, it was only 747 so I figured (hoped) that the dungeon didn't scale like it does from 100-109 and was tuned for a specific ilvl at 110.
I feel like there should be some ilvl restriction on queueing though if that is the case, just like there is for heroic or lfr.
Regardless, I logged off for the night determined to attack it the next day.
I had no idea how long it would take me to bridge the gap by world quests alone so decided to hit the auction house!
So what piece do I need the most?
Helm... 810ilvl... fine there
Neck... 765ilvl... get the JC to make one
Shoulders... 800ilvl... fine
Chest... 810ilvl... hmmm.
Cloak... 790
Wrists... 795???
Gloves... 810???
Belt... 810???
Legs... 800???
Rings... 750/810
Trinkets... 765/765
How the hell was I only 747ilvl??
It was then that I noticed my weapon slot was blank...
It is supposed to automatically appear with the artefact shield so I can only assume that it bugged out when I started those Ret quests.
I took off the shield and equipped it again... 799ilvl.
The dungeon was a breeze :-s
One day I will be a good tank.
That day is not today.
A push from the Paladin over the weekend took him to 110 and on to the gearing treadmill. It's an absolute god-send that world quests are open immediately so you can crack on with those while finishing off the zones and doing Suramar at leisure.
As per the latest incarnation of the alt plan, I am not doing any of the class order hall quests until 110, when I can do them pretty much in one go for a more cohesive storyline.
So I picked up where I had left off after opening up Light's Hope Chapel to follow the storyline.
I picked up a dungeon quest for Violet Hold but still had other quests so decided to do those first.
A few quests down the line... I began to wonder why there were so many references to Varian Wrynn and Ashbringer.
Isn't Ashbringer the Ret artefact weapon?
Yes, it is. I was on the Ret artefact quest line!
It's fortunate that Wowhead exists or I would probably not have found out until someone actually handed me the Ashbringer!
Despite the temptation to just carry on with nice, comfortable questing I was left with the dungeon quest in Violet Hold.
No way around it so I queued up.
I wondered if my gear would be good enough but it is a levelling dungeon so I figured I would be fine at any ilvl... how wrong I was!
First portal and my health bar is spiking up and down ridiculously, I'm blowing all cooldowns just to (barely) stay alive. As soon as I ran out of CDs, I was done for.
I ran back in quickly, picked up the mobs and died again.
Two others died before I could get back in again and now we were just on a loop of... Res, run in, die.
Every fear I had was coming true.
After a few death loops, and some rather fruity language, one of the dps left which was swiftly followed by everyone else leaving.
First attempt at tanking... disaster.
I checked my ilvl, it was only 747 so I figured (hoped) that the dungeon didn't scale like it does from 100-109 and was tuned for a specific ilvl at 110.
I feel like there should be some ilvl restriction on queueing though if that is the case, just like there is for heroic or lfr.
Regardless, I logged off for the night determined to attack it the next day.
I had no idea how long it would take me to bridge the gap by world quests alone so decided to hit the auction house!
So what piece do I need the most?
Helm... 810ilvl... fine there
Neck... 765ilvl... get the JC to make one
Shoulders... 800ilvl... fine
Chest... 810ilvl... hmmm.
Cloak... 790
Wrists... 795???
Gloves... 810???
Belt... 810???
Legs... 800???
Rings... 750/810
Trinkets... 765/765
How the hell was I only 747ilvl??
It was then that I noticed my weapon slot was blank...
It is supposed to automatically appear with the artefact shield so I can only assume that it bugged out when I started those Ret quests.
I took off the shield and equipped it again... 799ilvl.
The dungeon was a breeze :-s
Friday, 25 November 2016
We're Getting the Band Back Together...
That opportunity for tanking that I mentioned?
Some of my favourite times in WoW were with this group of people back in Dragon Soul and Mogu'shan Vaults. We didn't set the raiding world on fire or anything like that but we had a lot of fun!
Well... we've gathered some of the old crew back together for some fun and games, a bit of relaxed raiding and dungeon-ing. We've even taken up our old setup of co-raid leaders again which I am really looking forward to!
The guild has fallen on hard times recently so I'm hoping this will breathe some life back into it, but I am being extremely careful not to get too drawn into the day-to-day running of the guild... the last thing I want is to repeat the mistakes of the past and burn out on recruiting etc.
We are in the early stages right now and haven't had many turning up to our (two so far) raid nights but I'm hoping that will improve naturally with time as people see events running consistently.
In the mean-time, it's pug pug pug!
It's so easy today, despite it's flaws the group-finder is fantastic and the majority of the community seems to have bought into it.
Some groups still demand ridiculous achievements or gear levels but, as a starting group, I like to set the bar quite low.
We are learning to raid as a group again, why not let other people learn alongside us?
In the short term I am just playing whatever role we need most but really I am hoping this will be the opportunity for tanking that I have wanted for so long.
Even if it doesn't pan out that way I am incredibly excited about the prospect of raiding with these people again.
Some of my favourite times in WoW were with this group of people back in Dragon Soul and Mogu'shan Vaults. We didn't set the raiding world on fire or anything like that but we had a lot of fun!
Well... we've gathered some of the old crew back together for some fun and games, a bit of relaxed raiding and dungeon-ing. We've even taken up our old setup of co-raid leaders again which I am really looking forward to!
The guild has fallen on hard times recently so I'm hoping this will breathe some life back into it, but I am being extremely careful not to get too drawn into the day-to-day running of the guild... the last thing I want is to repeat the mistakes of the past and burn out on recruiting etc.
We are in the early stages right now and haven't had many turning up to our (two so far) raid nights but I'm hoping that will improve naturally with time as people see events running consistently.
In the mean-time, it's pug pug pug!
It's so easy today, despite it's flaws the group-finder is fantastic and the majority of the community seems to have bought into it.
Some groups still demand ridiculous achievements or gear levels but, as a starting group, I like to set the bar quite low.
We are learning to raid as a group again, why not let other people learn alongside us?
In the short term I am just playing whatever role we need most but really I am hoping this will be the opportunity for tanking that I have wanted for so long.
Even if it doesn't pan out that way I am incredibly excited about the prospect of raiding with these people again.
Saturday, 19 November 2016
Raar Nom Nom Nom...
In my head, that is the noise the bear makes when it eats Leo DiCaprio* in The Revenant.
Don't give me any of that nonsense about him single-handedly beating the bear, it's just not possible... you need 20 people for that! :-)
Ursoc!
As expected by some people (*cough*), this one took much less time than SpiderBird.
The fight is incredibly similar to Heroic. So similar in fact, that I'm not really sure what the differences are!
There is one rather obvious difference... Ursoc has invited a few of his friends to the party.
An extra bear joins in every now and then, lopes over to us, and we kill it.
Does the new bear actually do anything? No idea. Just an excuse for me to use Chain Lightning.
That is literally the only difference from the Heroic fight, an occasional extra bear that we cleave down in seconds.
That makes the fight sound dull though when it is actually the opposite, it is incredibly intense!
The main mechanic from normal and heroic remains, splitting into two groups and making sure the Focussed Gaze alternates running through each group.
Along with the Miasma pools left behind from Roaring Cacophony (Raar!), that means a rather deceptive amount of movement and you end up using the entire room.
Our biggest problem had nothing to do with movement though, it was that one of our tanks didn't know how, or more accurately when, to taunt.
That sounds bad enough but the reality is even worse... He knew the tactics so knew what he was supposed to be doing, taking one debuff while the other tank took the other debuff.
The problem arose because he couldn't tell when the other tank gained a debuff!
It was somehow hidden on his UI and he had no idea how to make it show up again.
Astounding!
Even with my extremely limited tanking experience, I know it's important to see what debuffs your co-tank has or doesn't have.
How did he even get this far without access to that key information?
Simple answer... he just did what DBM told him to do.
I suppose he's got a point :-)
After a few wipes and various attempts to fix the UI, we resorted to the main tank calling out every time a taunt was needed. DBM mark 2... not ideal but it did the job.
So we had everyone knowing where to run and tanks taunting on cue, now it was time to see if we had the numbers to kill the great bear.
We knew it would be tight, I imagine virtually all progress kills on this boss are tight, so we even had healers pre-potting with dps potions and doing their best to contribute whenever they could.
I said it was quite intense, it's only 5 minutes until enrage and that time just flies by!
We filled the outer circle and had to move into the middle of the room as time was running out.
Another add spawned but we had to ignore it (does it do anything anyway??) and focus the boss.
The 5 minutes were up and Ursoc went crazy!
With each passing second he would 1-shot a player or two but his health was dropping fast and, at 5mins10secs with only 8 people alive, he fell!
The tension had built to such a point, there were old-fashioned nerd-screams on teamspeak when he fell. It was fantastic! :-)
Dragons next!
Should be interesting as we have a healer that can't dispel :-s
*who is not Matt Damon
Don't give me any of that nonsense about him single-handedly beating the bear, it's just not possible... you need 20 people for that! :-)
Ursoc!
As expected by some people (*cough*), this one took much less time than SpiderBird.
The fight is incredibly similar to Heroic. So similar in fact, that I'm not really sure what the differences are!
There is one rather obvious difference... Ursoc has invited a few of his friends to the party.
An extra bear joins in every now and then, lopes over to us, and we kill it.
Does the new bear actually do anything? No idea. Just an excuse for me to use Chain Lightning.
That is literally the only difference from the Heroic fight, an occasional extra bear that we cleave down in seconds.
That makes the fight sound dull though when it is actually the opposite, it is incredibly intense!
The main mechanic from normal and heroic remains, splitting into two groups and making sure the Focussed Gaze alternates running through each group.
Along with the Miasma pools left behind from Roaring Cacophony (Raar!), that means a rather deceptive amount of movement and you end up using the entire room.
Our biggest problem had nothing to do with movement though, it was that one of our tanks didn't know how, or more accurately when, to taunt.
That sounds bad enough but the reality is even worse... He knew the tactics so knew what he was supposed to be doing, taking one debuff while the other tank took the other debuff.
The problem arose because he couldn't tell when the other tank gained a debuff!
It was somehow hidden on his UI and he had no idea how to make it show up again.
Astounding!
Even with my extremely limited tanking experience, I know it's important to see what debuffs your co-tank has or doesn't have.
How did he even get this far without access to that key information?
Simple answer... he just did what DBM told him to do.
I suppose he's got a point :-)
After a few wipes and various attempts to fix the UI, we resorted to the main tank calling out every time a taunt was needed. DBM mark 2... not ideal but it did the job.
So we had everyone knowing where to run and tanks taunting on cue, now it was time to see if we had the numbers to kill the great bear.
We knew it would be tight, I imagine virtually all progress kills on this boss are tight, so we even had healers pre-potting with dps potions and doing their best to contribute whenever they could.
I said it was quite intense, it's only 5 minutes until enrage and that time just flies by!
We filled the outer circle and had to move into the middle of the room as time was running out.
Another add spawned but we had to ignore it (does it do anything anyway??) and focus the boss.
The 5 minutes were up and Ursoc went crazy!
With each passing second he would 1-shot a player or two but his health was dropping fast and, at 5mins10secs with only 8 people alive, he fell!
The tension had built to such a point, there were old-fashioned nerd-screams on teamspeak when he fell. It was fantastic! :-)
Dragons next!
Should be interesting as we have a healer that can't dispel :-s
*who is not Matt Damon
Thursday, 17 November 2016
Isle of Conquest...
Yes, those pesky followers sent me out to do PvP again!
Another trip to the battlegrounds!
I zoned into Isle of Conquest and immediately started changing my talents to the ones I like for PvP, namely Icefury. Unfortunately, this didn't work as there was a Tauren Paladin pounding me in the face!
What's going on?
Oh sh*t, we're already going!
Battleground mode activated.
RUN AWAY!
Luckily, Paladins are relatively easy to run away from so I survived and did enough to deter him from continuing his chase... or he just got bored and went for someone else.
This bought me enough time to survey the battlefield and work out what the hell was going on.
It didn't take long, we were losing.
My first clue should have been zoning into a part-done battle. Nobody leaves when they are winning, do they?
My second clue was the giant coo-beastie hitting me in the face, there were enemies in our base.
My third clue was that I deduced, from a quick look at the map, that we weren't in their base.
At this point, I just assumed we had lost.
All other visits to Isle of Conquest have followed a very simple pattern...
Horde and Alliance charge past each other to the opposite base, lay siege and throw people over the walls, open the doors, flood in and kill the boss.
My kind of PvP... one that doesn't involve the opposite faction! It's just a PvE race.
So I thought we had already lost, decided to have fun killing some Hordies and went looking for the Paladin.
Two very strange things happened...
1. Someone cut through the moaning in chat and came up with a plan.
2. People listened!
It was a simple plan.
Clear them out of our boss room before they all arrived.
Defend at the gates.
Attack the horde base and we have lost because they are already so far ahead.
And that's what we did!
Any horde that came up to our gates died under the full force of Alliance might (well, 30 of us) as we repelled attack after attack, each time retreating to the safety of the keep.
It took a little while but the horde realised our strategy and decided to group up and attack en masse.
They suffered heavily under the cannon fire on the approach but forced their way to our gates time and time again.
Each time we pushed them back and held within our keep.
I was having fun, killing the horde from the back, and I could see the strategy working but I did begin to wonder how we were actually going to win the battle if we never left our keep.
I had no idea about 'reinforcements'!
It was just a number at the top of the screen. Obviously, I assumed it had some impact on the battle but had no idea what that was.
I know all (both) of you reading this will think I'm an idiot but I told you, I've never done PvP. I had no idea.
It turns out that when the reinforcements drop to zero, you lose!
I didn't know. I'm guessing the horde didn't know either!
They just kept coming! And dying!
Until there were none left...
Another trip to the battlegrounds!
I zoned into Isle of Conquest and immediately started changing my talents to the ones I like for PvP, namely Icefury. Unfortunately, this didn't work as there was a Tauren Paladin pounding me in the face!
What's going on?
Oh sh*t, we're already going!
Battleground mode activated.
RUN AWAY!
Luckily, Paladins are relatively easy to run away from so I survived and did enough to deter him from continuing his chase... or he just got bored and went for someone else.
This bought me enough time to survey the battlefield and work out what the hell was going on.
It didn't take long, we were losing.
My first clue should have been zoning into a part-done battle. Nobody leaves when they are winning, do they?
My second clue was the giant coo-beastie hitting me in the face, there were enemies in our base.
My third clue was that I deduced, from a quick look at the map, that we weren't in their base.
At this point, I just assumed we had lost.
All other visits to Isle of Conquest have followed a very simple pattern...
Horde and Alliance charge past each other to the opposite base, lay siege and throw people over the walls, open the doors, flood in and kill the boss.
My kind of PvP... one that doesn't involve the opposite faction! It's just a PvE race.
So I thought we had already lost, decided to have fun killing some Hordies and went looking for the Paladin.
Two very strange things happened...
1. Someone cut through the moaning in chat and came up with a plan.
2. People listened!
It was a simple plan.
Clear them out of our boss room before they all arrived.
Defend at the gates.
Attack the horde base and we have lost because they are already so far ahead.
And that's what we did!
Any horde that came up to our gates died under the full force of Alliance might (well, 30 of us) as we repelled attack after attack, each time retreating to the safety of the keep.
It took a little while but the horde realised our strategy and decided to group up and attack en masse.
They suffered heavily under the cannon fire on the approach but forced their way to our gates time and time again.
Each time we pushed them back and held within our keep.
I was having fun, killing the horde from the back, and I could see the strategy working but I did begin to wonder how we were actually going to win the battle if we never left our keep.
I had no idea about 'reinforcements'!
It was just a number at the top of the screen. Obviously, I assumed it had some impact on the battle but had no idea what that was.
I know all (both) of you reading this will think I'm an idiot but I told you, I've never done PvP. I had no idea.
It turns out that when the reinforcements drop to zero, you lose!
I didn't know. I'm guessing the horde didn't know either!
They just kept coming! And dying!
Until there were none left...
Tuesday, 15 November 2016
Is it a Spider? Is it a Bird?
No, it's a SpiderBird! And it's dead!
I was amazed when the Raid Leader decided this was our next Mythic boss. It is supposed to be the next easiest after Nythendra but I'm not sure that applies when you struggle each week to kill it on Heroic!
Struggle might be overstating it a little but it is an absolute mess and we've never made it to the end with a full team.
So it came as no surprise to me that it's taken us a while to move from 1/7M to 2/7M.
We have been plagued by other issues along the way which didn't help... main tank holidays and extreme lag issues amongst other things restricted the pure number of attempts we could manage.
Even on our kill night, we had given it up once because 3 or 4 of the team had so much lag they couldn't continue. We jumped into Trial of Valor heroic (reluctantly for some) as we didn't have enough for Mythic without the lag people but it settled down again so we went back to EN.
More time flying than killing bosses!
Anyway, we got back into Emerald Nightmare and stood in front of Elerethe once more.
Following the pattern of incremental difficulty levels, the fight is very similar to Heroic. Aside from the usual extra damage, the small changes to mechanics add a little complexity for those affected but that's about it.
The most interesting change comes from the 'linked' players during Spider form with two sets of two players being connected by a strange web.
Damage is transmitted down the web to the other player so, when the big feeding time damage comes in, you need to coordinate personal defensive cds or you give your healers a heart attack (we missed one and spiked down to sub 10% HP!)
The web itself knocks people back if they run into it so the linked people also need to move together to minimise the chances of running it over someone.
This was honestly the most interesting change from Heroic and, looking back on it, I wish they had extended it to affect more people each time. Ramp up the coordination needed to survive, I think it might have been too much for the healers though.
Progress was extremely slow, needing multiple wipes for us to come to terms with each aspect of the fight.
It often works out this way when you have mechanics that only target a couple of random people... you can look at Fatboss all you want but most people need to actually experience the mechanics once or twice to learn the fight. If only two people are targeted at a time, it takes quite a few attempts for everyone to gain that experience.
Amusingly, this often leads to some frustration from those that mastered it early.
The best recent example is the winds and passing the ball on Iskar... once mastered, everyone finds it incredibly easy but still gets frustrated when the new guy gets it wrong. Makes me laugh :-)
Sorry, back to the fight...
Progress was slow but it was being made on virtually every attempt. We inched our way through the first platform, refining every step, until we had it mastered.
The linked people ran together in specific directions, people dropped the green goo perfectly out of the way, the tornadoes were dropped well away from everything else and the adds killed almost instantly.
Now start again on platform 2 :-(
Well, we had to get there first. I love warlocks!
The tanks and a couple of healers got priority for the feathers with a free for all for the remainder. Mostly, I just left them to others as we had a warlock gateway for half the journey... when he remembered to put it down.
You would think this is the easy part of the fight, just run halfway across then use the portal or fly over with the wings.
That's it.
We had a spate of around 10 consecutive attempts where someone would use the wings' special ability to kill the spiders halfway across the bridge.
I have absolutely no idea why they were doing this.
I have even less idea why they continued to do it for 10+ attempts despite being told not to, under any circumstances, kill spiders on the bridge.
If you haven't done the fight... there are tornadoes on the bridge, they pick up the green goo left behind by a squashed spider and fling it at the raid! It does a ton of damage so you have to constantly dance out of the way, making everything much more difficult.
Once that was sorted, we were back to the incremental progress on platform two. We mastered the bird form then struggled for a while with the spider form again until, in the end (and when our main tank came back from his holidays!), we decided to run with an extra tank for more control.
This change made a massive difference to how smoothly the fight went and I highly recommend it for anyone progressing on this fight. The linked tanks take all the little spiders while the other takes the boss.
Now we had everything working well for two platforms and it was just a case of cutting out silly mistakes and bringing it all together to push on to platform 3.
We had only reached platform 3 once or twice and were a bit hazy about the tactics.
I think they are determined by your dps... if you can burn the boss down quickly, you don't need to deal with the new mechanics on the platform.
We had the dps! Somehow!
I thought the other platforms were a mess, they were nothing!
We somehow gained around 20 spiders while crossing the bridge so one of the tanks decided to wipe them out before they could kill everyone.
This unfortunately place massive amounts of green goo in the path of the tornadoes, there was green stuff flying everywhere!
I could barely cast anything for the final 10% of the fight due to almost constant movement, just had to squeeze in a spell whenever I could.
I think it's fair to say the melee carried us through to the end of the fight, managing to squeeze in enough damage to get the kill before the eggs were broken inevitably and wiped the raid.
Much like our heroic kills, an absolute clusterf*ck! Only 8 survived as the boss fell but we are now 2/7 Mythic! :-)
For an Elemental Shaman, the only chance to shine is to use Stormkeeper on the small spiders but it takes impeccable timing to get it right. You need to use the first cast just as Elerethe ascends for Feeding Time, then run across the room and hope the tanks have gathered the spiders into a nice tight group.
If you time it just right, it comes back up just after you have run across the platform for the second Feeding Time.
Stormkeeper + Chain Lightning = HUGE damage!
If you get a lucky proc of overload, it can virtually 1-shot the spiders.
Unfortunately, on our kill, I got it all wrong :-(
Not just the Stormkeeper but everything!
I missed the window completely on the first platform casting my first SK way too late but then compounded that with other dps mistakes.
Twice (Twice!!!), I popped Ascendance just as I got the tornado debuff and had to run across the room essentially wasting the cooldown each time.
I got the link every time and had to focus on that rather than using CL on the spiders.
My dps was way lower than it could have been by the end of the fight.
Luckily for me, almost everyone else was dead so I still finished 3rd :-)
On to Ursoc!
I was amazed when the Raid Leader decided this was our next Mythic boss. It is supposed to be the next easiest after Nythendra but I'm not sure that applies when you struggle each week to kill it on Heroic!
Struggle might be overstating it a little but it is an absolute mess and we've never made it to the end with a full team.
So it came as no surprise to me that it's taken us a while to move from 1/7M to 2/7M.
We have been plagued by other issues along the way which didn't help... main tank holidays and extreme lag issues amongst other things restricted the pure number of attempts we could manage.
Even on our kill night, we had given it up once because 3 or 4 of the team had so much lag they couldn't continue. We jumped into Trial of Valor heroic (reluctantly for some) as we didn't have enough for Mythic without the lag people but it settled down again so we went back to EN.
More time flying than killing bosses!
Anyway, we got back into Emerald Nightmare and stood in front of Elerethe once more.
Following the pattern of incremental difficulty levels, the fight is very similar to Heroic. Aside from the usual extra damage, the small changes to mechanics add a little complexity for those affected but that's about it.
The most interesting change comes from the 'linked' players during Spider form with two sets of two players being connected by a strange web.
Damage is transmitted down the web to the other player so, when the big feeding time damage comes in, you need to coordinate personal defensive cds or you give your healers a heart attack (we missed one and spiked down to sub 10% HP!)
The web itself knocks people back if they run into it so the linked people also need to move together to minimise the chances of running it over someone.
This was honestly the most interesting change from Heroic and, looking back on it, I wish they had extended it to affect more people each time. Ramp up the coordination needed to survive, I think it might have been too much for the healers though.
Progress was extremely slow, needing multiple wipes for us to come to terms with each aspect of the fight.
It often works out this way when you have mechanics that only target a couple of random people... you can look at Fatboss all you want but most people need to actually experience the mechanics once or twice to learn the fight. If only two people are targeted at a time, it takes quite a few attempts for everyone to gain that experience.
Amusingly, this often leads to some frustration from those that mastered it early.
The best recent example is the winds and passing the ball on Iskar... once mastered, everyone finds it incredibly easy but still gets frustrated when the new guy gets it wrong. Makes me laugh :-)
Sorry, back to the fight...
Progress was slow but it was being made on virtually every attempt. We inched our way through the first platform, refining every step, until we had it mastered.
The linked people ran together in specific directions, people dropped the green goo perfectly out of the way, the tornadoes were dropped well away from everything else and the adds killed almost instantly.
Now start again on platform 2 :-(
Well, we had to get there first. I love warlocks!
The tanks and a couple of healers got priority for the feathers with a free for all for the remainder. Mostly, I just left them to others as we had a warlock gateway for half the journey... when he remembered to put it down.
You would think this is the easy part of the fight, just run halfway across then use the portal or fly over with the wings.
That's it.
We had a spate of around 10 consecutive attempts where someone would use the wings' special ability to kill the spiders halfway across the bridge.
I have absolutely no idea why they were doing this.
I have even less idea why they continued to do it for 10+ attempts despite being told not to, under any circumstances, kill spiders on the bridge.
If you haven't done the fight... there are tornadoes on the bridge, they pick up the green goo left behind by a squashed spider and fling it at the raid! It does a ton of damage so you have to constantly dance out of the way, making everything much more difficult.
Once that was sorted, we were back to the incremental progress on platform two. We mastered the bird form then struggled for a while with the spider form again until, in the end (and when our main tank came back from his holidays!), we decided to run with an extra tank for more control.
This change made a massive difference to how smoothly the fight went and I highly recommend it for anyone progressing on this fight. The linked tanks take all the little spiders while the other takes the boss.
Now we had everything working well for two platforms and it was just a case of cutting out silly mistakes and bringing it all together to push on to platform 3.
We had only reached platform 3 once or twice and were a bit hazy about the tactics.
I think they are determined by your dps... if you can burn the boss down quickly, you don't need to deal with the new mechanics on the platform.
We had the dps! Somehow!
I thought the other platforms were a mess, they were nothing!
We somehow gained around 20 spiders while crossing the bridge so one of the tanks decided to wipe them out before they could kill everyone.
This unfortunately place massive amounts of green goo in the path of the tornadoes, there was green stuff flying everywhere!
I could barely cast anything for the final 10% of the fight due to almost constant movement, just had to squeeze in a spell whenever I could.
I think it's fair to say the melee carried us through to the end of the fight, managing to squeeze in enough damage to get the kill before the eggs were broken inevitably and wiped the raid.
Much like our heroic kills, an absolute clusterf*ck! Only 8 survived as the boss fell but we are now 2/7 Mythic! :-)
For an Elemental Shaman, the only chance to shine is to use Stormkeeper on the small spiders but it takes impeccable timing to get it right. You need to use the first cast just as Elerethe ascends for Feeding Time, then run across the room and hope the tanks have gathered the spiders into a nice tight group.
If you time it just right, it comes back up just after you have run across the platform for the second Feeding Time.
Stormkeeper + Chain Lightning = HUGE damage!
If you get a lucky proc of overload, it can virtually 1-shot the spiders.
Unfortunately, on our kill, I got it all wrong :-(
Not just the Stormkeeper but everything!
I missed the window completely on the first platform casting my first SK way too late but then compounded that with other dps mistakes.
Twice (Twice!!!), I popped Ascendance just as I got the tornado debuff and had to run across the room essentially wasting the cooldown each time.
I got the link every time and had to focus on that rather than using CL on the spiders.
My dps was way lower than it could have been by the end of the fight.
Luckily for me, almost everyone else was dead so I still finished 3rd :-)
On to Ursoc!
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