It’s been a pretty successful week of raiding this week!

On Sunday night we got Mythic Cenarius down. Woot!

I have to admit that I was surprised about this. We had previously had about an hour of attempts one night, a week break, then another hour or so one night, then a full night on Sunday. Except we didn’t need the full night on Sunday. In all I think we spent maybe 4.5-5 hours progressing on him? If that? This was one of the fights we were expecting to be on for quite some time, but in the end it took us less time to get him down than Il’gynoth. I think a lot of it comes down to having good gear. Early on you had to go through multiple add phases which made the fight pretty complicated, but because of higher gear we could push through to phase 2 much faster, making the fight as a whole a lot easier to get through.

I was dead for the kill, which was really disappointing. I’d been doing really well healing wise on pretty much all of the pulls, but ended up being dead for the 3rd phase of the fight we got the kill on so came out really crap in the end. And there’s something really unsatisfying about being dead for awhile when the kill happens. But, it’s done, and I’m sure there will be other kills in the future that I’ll be alive for.

That left a bit of time on Thursday evening and all of Sunday evening to work on Xavius. We didn’t need all that time. We had mythic Xavius down after about an hour on Sunday. I am now Cinderstorm the Dreamer! I really like that title. It’ll be really nice for my druid, I think.

Which left us quite a bit of time to do other stuff. We ended up going into Trials of Valor to have a go at Heroic Helya. When Trials of Valor came out we initially ran through all 3 bosses on normal, then did Odyn and Guam on Heroic then stopped. We had been told that Heroic Helya was either equal in difficulty or slightly more difficult than mythic Cenarius, so we decided to finish off Mythic Emerald Nightmare completely before going back to trials. So with EN done, back we went.

Helya is such an interesting fight. It’s messy as all get up, but visually is AWESOME. The waves sometimes make me a bit nauseous, and give me an overwhelming need to pee, but it’s worth it. It’s a great fight with some interesting mechanics that seem straight forward, but easily wipe you if you don’t do them properly. And Helya just looks COOL.

I’ll be honest, this fight is pretty boring for a restoration shaman. For the most part people don’t need healing at all in the first phase, and hardly any during the second phase (unless they’r being silly) so I spent a fair bit of time dpsing where I could, because there wasn’t a lot else to do. Last phase it gets a bit silly. The hardest part for me in the whole fight was my frame rate plummeting to about 3 or 4 fps. Bonkers! And really hard to move out of things well when it’s so stuttery like that. I think I’m going to have to really drop my display settings down for that one just to get through that, because it’s quite ridiculous.

Anyway, we got her down tonight in under an hour. There were some nerfs to the health of the adds in the fight which definitely helped, so if anyone is on the verge of getting this on heroic but just missing out, it’s worth going back in again after these nerfs. We all got full transmog sets from getting the kill which was really nice. I don’t think there’s any other rewards for getting the full heroic clear, which is ok.

We decided that was enough progression for the evening – we didn’t really expect to get all these kills as quickly as we had been so hadn’t even looked at mythic Odyn yet. So between now and Sunday we have some research to do. Instead we did a normal run of Trials of Valor, which ended up giving me the last of the fragments I needed to give to Odyn for the quest he gives us, which gave me another transmog set, this time recoloured for normal. I prefer the normal set, because it matches a helm that I really like, and all pieces together work really well with my hidden Doomhammer appearance.

Although when I was taking this screenshot I realised that the colour of the fur in the chest piece is the same colour as the fur that my panderen has… so it looks like she’s just running around with her boobs out. I might look into finding a tabard… 🙂 I really like the set, though. The shoulders have these awesome coloured runes floating over the top of them – looks really cool.

So overall we’ve had a really great week of raiding. Things are feeling good, to be honest. We’re back to having way too many healers again, so I’ve been dps-ing our heroic and normal runs (which I’m not a fan of!) but that is what it is. I’m contemplating gearing up for elemental given it uses the same stats I use for my restoration set. But that’s a topic for another post. But we’re having a good time in raid – lots of laughing, being stupid and what not. Things are good 🙂