We’ve been progressing on mythic Jaina for 2 weeks now. We’re at 200 pulls and seeing third phase, so we’re actually doing pretty well in comparison to some other guilds. But it is a hard slog, without a doubt.
So it’s probably no surprise when I say that sometimes we get a little silly. Tonight it got reeeaaaaly silly.
Enjoy this clip from my stream, where I completely and utterly lose my shit. š
xo
Another year is coming to a close. Itās always a time for us to look back and reflect on the year, to celebrate our achievements and say goodbye to perhaps some of the sadder moments that have happened.
For this post, Iām going to take a look back at my 2018 bucket list to see how I did. And of course for the next post, Iāll set myself some goals for 2019.
Looking back on 2018
I tend to get to this time of year feeling a bit sad. Sad that I probably didnāt accomplish or achieve nearly as much as I would like to have. But thatās not the best way to think about things, is it? Because when I look back on my bucket list for 2018, I actually succeeded quite well indeed, despite the roller coaster that was my guild in 2018.
Let me touch on that quickly, actually. Those who have followed my blog or twitter this year will know that it has been quite the year of ups and downs when it came to my guild.
The short version is that after the high of getting Cutting Edge with mythic Argus, we made the decision to push harder going in to Battle for Azeroth. Looking back now, we all agree this decision was our downfall. I wrote a lot about this in this post, and then this post. What I didn’t end up writing about is how we came back together again.
What I didn’t end up writing about is how we came back together again.
As I wrote in my last post about all this, I moved servers to a new guild to trial as an elemental shaman. And I have to say, I got damn lucky. The team I trialled with were so lovely and kind, and extremely patient with me while I tried to figure out how to be dps instead of heals. They were extremely kind to me, and I’m so grateful for that. But in the end, as tragic as it sounds, the lure of old friendships called, and I ended my trial to try, yet again, with Realm.
Looking back on this past year, as tumultuous as it has been, there is one common thread throughout – friendship. Oh I know, it sounds so lame. but it’s true. The people in Realm are people I consider to be friends. I am glad to have them in my life. A few weeks back we had an in-game Christmas party that was loads of fun, and really struck home how much I enjoy spending time with these fine folk. It turned out, for me, friendships were far more important that raiding, and I’m completely ok with that.
The 2018 bucket list
At the beginning of 2018, as I do most years, I wrote a bucket list of things I wanted to achieve. You can see this post right here. I didn’t write it at the time, but in the back of my mind I’d had the bucket list from the previous year in mind, and wanted to make things a bit easier on myself. Although looking on it now, I really failed at that! This list wasn’t nearly as easy on myself as it could have been… but it was definitely fun. So let’s see how I did.
Make a list of every pet and mount available in Legion and get any that are missing (That are not RNG dependent).
Well I suppose technically I fail by default because I never made that list! BUT, I’m pretty sure I did get a lot of them. I got Uuna and finished her quest line, and then later go Baa’l when he came out in BfA. I finished the Family Familiar achievement as well as the Family Fighter achievement, getting pets from both of those as well.
I found Lost Mail and felt like Harry Potter as I got the Mailemental pet (and Katy Stampwhistle toy!)
I was also really lucky with mounts, getting the Shackled Ur’zul mount from Mythic Argus! AND I managed to complete the Lord of the Reins achievement! I was very fortunate all around, I feel.
Were I did fail (other than failing to make the list at all, haha!) was not getting the pvp mounts. They were easy gets, but I didn’t do them. There’s still a chance of going back, but to be honest, I can’t see myself doing that any time soon. But overall, I think I’d call this a pretty successful bucket list item complete. š
Finish getting all of the class mounts
DONE! You can read all about it right here. This was an epic undertaking, but one that I’m glad I did in the end (not just because it helped a lot getting Lord of the Reins done!) It gave me a chance to play around on all the classes, to see if any of them really tickled my fancy for an alt. They didn’t… but I’m still glad I had a go at them all again for awhile š
Get more Mage Tower appearances
This was tougher than I expected it to be. My original list of appearances that I wanted to get were:
- Enhancement shaman
- Discipline priest
- Holy paladin
- Frost Mage
- Arcane Mage
- Retribution paladin
- Restoration druid
- Protection paladin (though I honestly donāt see this one happening at all)
- maaaaybe affliction warlock
What I ended up getting….
Shaman – Restoration, elemental and enhancement
(these were no-brainers – I absolutely had to get all of these.)
Mage – Arcane, fire and frost.
Yep, I got all three! I was pretty pleased with myself for that one š
Druid – Balance and feral.
Yeah you heard me, feral. How could I not get disco kitty? It’s easily the best appearance out of all of them. I didn’t, however get the restoration appearance. I’ve never healed as a druid, and that darn scenario is hard.
Priest – Discipline.
This was tough. I’d never played Disc properly before. But I pushed through, because I really loved the appearance.
The Disc priest appearance was the straw that broke the camel’s back, though. It was a tough fight, and by that point I had started to resent the amount of time I was spending trying to finish these, so I stopped. But, I had set myself a goal of getting 8 (maybe 9!) appearances, and in the end, I actually did get 9 appearances. So I’m going to call this one a win, too. š
Stream more
This one was very generic, but I needed it to be (for this year at least).
I managed to get Affiliate status a few weeks after making my bucket list, so that was a nice bonus!
Overall, yes, I technically streamed more. And to that end I can call it a win. But I certainly have a long, long way to go. Will all the raiding dramas this year, I was unable to have a regular raiding/streaming schedule because I kept associating one with the other. It has taken me awhile to separate the two, and branch out to stream other content. I’m still getting my feet with this, but I will get better.
What I have really enjoyed about my streaming, though, is finally settling on an identity. I love my little unicorn self! I’m really enjoying updating my graphics for the year… helps to keep things interesting š It also helps me to focus on the streaming itself, and not necessarily the games that I’m streaming (if that makes sense).
So, that’s my year! Honestly, I can’t complain. I know that I am a very fortunate person. So for all the difficulties and struggles I face, I know there are people who have it so very much harder than me, and I need to remember that.
I’m pleased with what I’ve managed to achieve this year, both in game and out. I hope you all have had a great year, too! Keep an eye out of my 2019 bucket list post, coming very soon….
It’s been 2 lockouts since Realm disbanded. It’s been weird not raiding. I played a whooole lot less. The break was nice in a way, but to be honest one of the main reasons I wasn’t playing as much because there just wasn’t anyone else around. It got very lonely very quickly, and it was seriously bumming me out.
On Thursday (with some help from the lovely Lemon) I changed my status on Wowprogress to “looking for guild” to see what would happen.
I had some decisions already set in stone:
- I was staying Alliance. I just dislike the Horde aesthetic so much that I don’t want to go back to it. Also, almost all of my toons are Alliance, and I just don’t want to have to faction change them all just to raid.
- I was probably going to have to move to Frostmourne in order to find a team. It’s a very Alliance heavy server with a high population, so lots of Alliance raiding guilds. And all the other servers are far too quiet, so if things didn’t work out I’d be stuck on a server with few options.
- I was staying shaman. I’m too attached to my shaman ways.
- No increase to raid time – 3 days max of prog raiding. Ideally, 2, but that’s pretty hard to find.
- No downgrades – I wanted to find a team within 1 boss prog of myself.
- The guild I end up in has to be a good fit people-wise. That’s what made raiding with Realm so amazing – the people. I want to be able to dick around with people and have fun and joke around with each other. And kill bosses.
I got a btag friend request the next morning, and well long story short, I’ve moved servers to Frostmourne and have a trial in a guild. AS ELEMENTAL. Yep, this shaman’s shooting lightning for awhile.
This was a big decision for me. I’ve been a healer for as long as I’ve raided (minus 2 weeks where I tried to be dps back in WoD), so raiding as a full time dps will definitely be a change. But I think it’s going to be a good one. I’ll still always have my healer spec there if I’m ever needed to heal, so that’s not going to go away. There are some changes coming in 8.1 for elemental shamans that I’m hoping will help make the spec a bit better to play… but we can only wait and see.
The thing that really attracted me to this guild was the recruitment person was really lovely, answering all my stupid questions. They also apparently watched some of my streams, which made me feel better because firstly, they know I’m a girl, and secondly, they have seen me play, so they know what they’re in for. They don’t mind me streaming raids, either, which is great. And lastly, something that will either be fantastic, or terrible, their raid times start and finish earlier. I’m a little nervous at the start time being 6:30, as sometimes I haven’t even left work until that time. But if I can get to work earlier and leave earlier, it will be fine. Which means slightly earlier nights, which I think will be good for my tired old self.
I’m obviously terrified. I’m always terrified of putting myself out there, especially knowing people will be watching and scrutinising. I’ve said that they just need to let me know if I’m not cutting it – I’d rather know sooner than dragging it out, because I don’t like letting a team down.Ā But I just have to try my best. It’s all I *can* do. If things don’t work out, at least I gave it a go.
So! Please keep your fingers and toes crossed for me that I can actually pull this elemental thing off, and that these guys are a good fit! š
xo
It’s been hard to start this post. Or any other blog post for that matter, if I’m being completely honest. But this one, I don’t really know how to start. I know the things I have to say, but putting them in order is proving difficult. So how about we make a deal and pretend this is the middle of the blog post and flow on from there. Let’s give it a go.
The past few weeks (or months, really), haven’t been the greatest for me.
The guild crash
Unrelated to the below (but in a way still very connected) my guild fell apart for good. We tried to keep it together but it was too much to try and push through. The gap between strong players and weaker players was becoming bigger and bigger. The in-game workload for officers and the GM was far too much, and the payoff wasn’t there. It was a really tough call, but it was the right decision in the end. So as of last week we stopped raiding mythic, and the guild officially went casual, with a social heroic run planned for every Saturday night so we could all still spend time together.
This week was the first week without raid, and it felt weird. Tonight was the first casual Saturday raid… and we only had a handful of people come along. So I really don’t know how that’s going to go in the future. Suffice it to say that I’m pretty sad at the moment.
For me, I have absolutely no idea what I’m going to do. Raiding has always been a favourite thing for me in game, so to not do it feels weird. But trying to find another raid team… well I dunno how I’m going to go about it. I’ve never had much confidence in my skills as a raider. I do know that I’m not terrible. I do mechanics, I heal while I do them, and I try my damn hardest. It’s the same as when I try to apply for jobs – I know that I can contribute well, but I’m shit at selling myself. Especially with raiding. Logs are a thing, but my numbers always look shit because I hate overhealing, and I make sure I’m focusing on doing mechanics first and foremost.
And this shitty lack of confidence in myself doesn’t help when (now) ex-guildies are getting offers left and right from other teams wanting them to join. I haven’t had anything. Which is petty, I know, but it just reinforces that shitty feeling about myself not being good enough.
I’ve been looking on the forums to see what guilds are after, and I’m not finding any at the level I want to be at who are looking for restoration shamans. (Well, Alliance guilds, anyway). There’s a high chance I’m going to have to go Horde if I want to keep raiding, and that on its own is not at all appealing. I’ll need to give it some more time and thought, and hope something comes along.
Then there’s…
The anxiety
There are a handful of things that I am good at in life, but the thing that I am the very best at is pretending that my anxiety isn’t as bad as it is, and that it doesn’t affect me as strongly as it does. I’m very good at putting on the face that the world needs to see on me, and pretending that everything is fine. I can laugh and joke and make others feel great, and I do it in an attempt to hide the panic that grumbles inside me on a constant basis. I’ve become very good at it. So good at it that people don’t believe I have anxiety at all, and when I bring it up with doctors, they laugh it off thinking I’m just being melodramatic or joking around.
And yet.
I struggle to sleep, laying there as my body tingles with terror, restless and exhausted all at once. If I am lucky to sleep, I wake up in the middle of the night with panic attacks so intense they make me gag. At work, I go to the bathroom for a short moment of solace, squeezing my legs in an attempt to calm the roaring in my ears, to breathe, to focus.Ā It’s exhausting. And over the past few months, it has gotten worse, to the point where it’s crippled me. I’ve not been functioning properly. It’s affecting my health, my relationship, my friendships, my streaming and gaming; everything that is important to me.
I bring this up, because firstly, I wanted to explain my absence (noted or not). I wanted others who may be feeling the same way to know they aren’t alone. And I wanted to be accountable for trying to get better. It has taken awhile to build the courage, but I went to the doctor again this week (a different one) and insisted they help me do something so I can stop feeling like this. I have referrals for a psychologist, and some anti-anxiety meds to help me get out of this funk. I’m not going to let anxiety get the best of me.
What’s next
So then what’s next. Well, I’m starting to feel better, which is why I’ve written this post. And I’m taking steps to keep getting better. I don’t know what the future is going to hold for me and WoW. I know I will continue playing, but I don’t know to what extent. I had a great chat with Neuro after our Battletagged show on Tuesday, and he was telling me about how much more he’s been enjoying WoW since he stepped down from raiding. So maybe there is hope for me outside of raiding.
One of the things I’m saddest about though, with everything that has been going on, is my streaming. It turns out that I really, really enjoy streaming. I’m terrible at it, and I don’t think I’m interesting at all, but I just enjoy playing games with other people. Thor (who I just don’t deserve- he’s so freaking amazing) has been incredibly patient and wise, and we’ve been talking about what I might do. And it became obvious – I just stream something other than WoW. We looked in to what I might stream, and there a whole bunch of games on the Nintendo Switch I’d enjoy playing, and of course Steam and even Discord has a bunch of games now. So I’m looking at getting a capture card and expanding my gaming options.
I’m still ironing out the finer details, but some changes are on their way. I want to get back in to a regular streaming schedule. I will (of course!) still play and stream WoW, especially if I manage to find a new team, but between that, I’m going to try some other games. This also means that I’m going to do a bit of a “re-branding” of myself. Whilst I love my pandaren Shaman, I need to move away from the strictly WoW focus. So keep an eye out for some fun new things in the very near future.
Look, if you’ve made it this far through my post, thank you. Thank you for sticking it out with me when I disappear for lengths at a time. Thank you for reading this post and helping me feel like I’m not alone. You’re amazing, and I’m grateful for you.
xo
Those of you who follow my twitter account will have seen that this past week was quite the rollercoaster. I’m personally still reeling a little bit from everything that happened (though I am overly dramatic, I know).
On Wednesday, Realm as a guild ended. And then on Thursday, it didn’t. Confused? Well, it will make sense. But to explain properly, I need to go backwards.
At the end of Legion
Realm as a guild technically formed at the end of the Tomb of Sargeras raid in Legion, though was made up of people who had been raiding together already for at least a year, some even longer. We went in to Antorus as a new team, determined to get Cutting Edge Argus. Which we achieved. We also managed to be the top ranking Alliance guild on our little server, which we were pretty proud of. We ended Legion as Titanslayers- strong and ready for Battle for Azeroth.
A few weeks before BfA came out we held a guild meeting to start making plans for raiding in the new expansion. We were having troubles trying to figure out our roster as it had suddenly grown to almost 40 players – waaaay too many. We needed to make some decisions about what type of team we wanted to be so that we could build the right team. So we asked everyone what they wanted from BfA; did we want to work on mythics, but bring through lower performing players (effectively being a “friends and family” mythic raiding guild) or did we want to push harder, be tougher about who came to raid and try for faster progression. The agreement from everyone was that we wanted to push harder. We were in a good spot- we had loads of players to choose from, and we all wanted to be better.
Going in to BfA
Going in to BfA everyone (including officers and GM) were dropped to trial rank. Our GM was re-chosen to lead us all, and new Officers were voted in (myself included). We had requirements about what level people needed to be at for raid, and agreed for the first few weeks of Uldir, we’d add in an extra night of raiding to help get us ahead.
Our first week of Uldir was great with us getting Heroic G’huun down, giving us Ahead of the Curve in the first week. We were pretty stoked. The following week mythic opened, and we managed to get TWO mythic bosses down in addition to a heroic re-clear, giving us a bit of time to work on mythic Zek’voz.
And then last week happened. We cleared through heroic relatively quickly, as well as re-killing the first two mythic bosses, giving us days of attempts on Zek’voz. But we struggled. We didn’t get the kill. And worse than that, we felt like we were going backwards. On Monday, we had a really bad night, with many people under-performing and even more people getting extremely frustrated at both performance and lack of progression.
Here’s the thing about mythic raiding. It’sĀ really stressful. There’s a lot of pressure to be performing to a super high standard. If you don’t meet that standard, you make mistakes, and mistakes mean wipes. For some people (like me) I like the pressure. I like the stress of it, I like wiping and failing, because we we do win, when we nail that delicate balance and we all figure out the dance together, the victory is so worth it. I love that feeling of accomplishment when it all just falls in to place and we win as a team. I love the nerd screams. I love our failed kill screenshots. I love it all. But it is really stressful. And you have to feel like you’re getting the payoff for it to be worth it.
Monday
After our rubbish night on Monday, the Officer team had a meeting, and our GM confessed he was done. He’d had enough. For him, as GM and raid lead, the stress and pressure is multitudes higher than for anyone else, and after that night it just got too much. The payoff wasn’t worth it, and he needed to step down. At that time he wasn’t 100% decided on what to do, and our meeting was to try and figure out what we could do. Could someone else take on lead? What would be the consequences of him stepping down? Who would step up? What could we do? I went to bed that night in tears – I could see the writing on the wall, and I was devastated. I could only imagine how our GM was feeling, too š¦
Tuesday
At the end of our meeting, one of our officers (and top dps) decided it was time for him to move on to a higher progressing guild (which he has found, and I’m super happy for him). We had suggested our GM think on his decision a little more and get back to us, but on the Tuesday, we also lost a tank. Then the Wednesday morning, another dps.
I spent a lot of Tuesday talking with the GM and other officers about the whole situation. It’s always a hard decision. I won’t go in to any specifics of our conversations, but a lot of what was making the decision so difficult came down to just how much the GM loved the guild and the people in it, but also just how stressed and worn out he was with it all. Being GM and raid lead has got to be one of the most thankless tasks out there. It’sĀ so much work and effort to keep things running. And even with officers helping with bits and pieces here and there, and with talking to the team and asking them to take issues and concerns out of raid, it doesn’t stop those things from happening. It drives me up the wall, and I only experience it a little. It’s nothing compared to what a GM has to put up with.
Wednesday – the break-up
A team meeting was held on the Wednesday night (instead of raid) and our GM announced he was stepping down as raid lead, and that the future of the raid team depended on what everyone else wanted to do. People were asked to think on it for a bit, and let us all know what their plans were – did they want to stay and try and fill in the gaps, or did they want to move on to another team. No grudges would be held, we just needed to know so a decision could be made. In the end, too many people said they would be moving on without our GM in the leadership role.
So we came back together for one last team meeting with everyone… and our GM announced there were too many people looking to move on, so this was it…. and I bawled my eyes out (as did he, the poor thing). It was a horrible, emotional moment. I was genuinely heartbroken. I’ve been in guild break-ups before (far too many, actually) and they have always been hard. But this one felt different. This one really cut deep. It really felt like a relationship breaking up. I couldn’t imagine not spending each week with these people, laughing and yelling and struggling with these people. We all had good and bad times together… I didn’t want that to end. And yet here we were.
The fallout was… interesting. Once the meeting was done, people kinda just took a breath, and then decided to go run heroic Uldir together. I was a mess and sat out, but stayed in game because I just didn’t really know what else to do. But no-one gquit or raged or ranted. Everyone was just… sad. Overnight a couple of people faction swapped to join other friends in other guilds, but it wasn’t in anger. It was quiet and kind.
I posted about it on twitter, and had so many beautiful and amazing responses of support back from people. I was genuinely overwhelmed. But still heartbroken. I went to bed that night wondering what on earth I was going to do. How was I going to find a new team? Who on earth would take a shaman to a raid right now? Did I still even want to raid? And even worse… did I still even want to play WoW anymore?
Thursday
I went to work on Thursday exhausted and mentally drained. No-one at work really understood it (one person even kind of scoffed at the situation) which didn’t really help. I felt sad, and tired, but added to that, I was also sick to my stomach. Our GM was feeling almost instant regret about the decision, and it made me feel awful. I felt I had given him bad advice about everything. (My focus was on making sure he was going to be ok with the decision he made, and to not feel guilted in to sticking around if he didn’t want to. You know my mantra – WoW is a game, and games are supposed to be fun. If you’re not having fun, you’re doing it wrong.) Thursday morning SUCKED plain and simple. I had lost my guild, and felt like I had been a bad friend to someone who has been exceptionally kind to me. I was not having a good time.
But then Thursday afternoon happened.
Thursday afternoon, our GM logged in to game, expecting the guild to have emptied, and instead still found it full of people. They didn’t want to go. This was their home, and they wanted to stay. That coupled with our GM’s regret… and well, the guild un-broke-up. Our GM posted in our Discord a really heartwarming message saying the guild would be staying together… and then I cried again as people cheered and left sweet messages and were just everything we didn’t want to leave behind. The thing that makes this guild so special is the people in it. Sure, we all fight and bicker and give each other shit, but that’s what families do.
We went back in to finish off the heroic clear on Thursday night with a renewed sense of togetherness. We also managed to one-shot the last 3 bosses on heroic and the first mythic boss, which just goes to show how much better peoples’ performance is when they’re in a good mood! š
The aftermath
Things seem to be calm, now. The people who had faction changed managed to have them reverted (thanks Blizzard!!!) and came back to the guild as soon as they could. We ran our usual normal run on Saturday night, which went surprisingly well. And tonight’s mythic run, though thwarted by the attendance boss (thanks NRL grand final!), was smooth and successful.
Most people understand why things got they way they did – we pushed too hard. Raiding 4 nights a week was taking it out of people. The constant feeling of pressure was overwhelming for a lot of people, and it was wearing everyone down – not just the GM, but everyone. So we’re taking a step back. We will continue to raid mythic level, with the goal of getting Cutting Edge each tier. But not at the expense of the team.
The whole thing feels like a really sappy daytime romantic comedy in a way. But whatever it was, we’ve come out the other side of it, and I feel like in a way, we’re almost a bit better for it. Those who wanted more have moved to a place they can get that progression, and everyone else back here is on the same page.Ā I’m grateful for this crazy bunch of beautiful people. Here’s to many more raids together as a the silly, dysfunctional WoW-family we are.Ā 
xo
How has it been a month since Battle for Azeroth launched? Holy moly time passes quickly. I suppose a bit part of that is about how completely flat out I’ve been in game. Which leads me in to the topic of this post, and the last Blog Challenge topic (I know I’m late!!) How do you level in Battle for Azeroth?
After raiding, levelling is one of my favourite things to do in game. Seeing new worlds, new NPCs, new secrets and adventures really tickles the explorer in me (and the screenshot nerd!) I love taking my time to follow random paths, hunting down treasures, killing rares, seeing new things and helping out a whole new bunch of people. And this is where we start facing some issues – the time I take to level is not conducive to being raid ready.
Being in a raid team (especially a team that wants to work on mythic bosses) means there are certain expectations. Characters are required to meet a number of requirements in time for going in to raid to make sure we are able to beat dps checks and heal all the damage going out. For our raid team, we expected everyone to have an ilvl of 340 and Azerite neck at 18 before stepping in to Uldir for the first time. (Keep in mind, 340 is the ilvl that drops from mythic 0 dungeons).
I am all for making sure that I’m raid ready. But I’m also not going to sacrifice what I think is important to me about the game. I’m in WoW to have a good time, and new expansions are a really special time for me. So I had to find a happy medium. This is what I did.
1. I levelled alone. Our guild had a few groups of people who were levelling together to help speed up the process. They were also generally in War Mode, which meant they could all help each other stay alive in pvp situations. I didn’t do this for a few reasons, the most important being that I hate feeling beholden to a group. I want to go *my* way, and read all the quest text and stay for all the dialogue and take a million screen shots and visit all the new NPCs in the cities. I want to be able to travel down those random paths and explore every corner of the caves. I also don’t want to hold up a group by doing all those things. I don’t expect anyone else to want to do this (and to be brutally honest, I prefer doing these things on my own).
So solo it was. Levelling solo takes longer, simply because there’s only one of you to kill all the mobs and collect all the things. But I accepted this and knew it would be the case. Which is one of the reasons I took a week of work for the launch. It meant that, even though I would take a lot longer to level up, I’d still have plenty of time to do all the things I needed to make sure I could step in to raid in a strong position.
2. I started in War Mode… but turned it off when I got killed the first time. (For those who don’t know – War Mode turns on world pvp, meaning people can come along and kill you out in the world. It’s not able to be turned on or off no matter what server you’re on, which is pretty awesome!!) The experience gains were too good to ignore, so I tolerated it for awhile. I ended up getting killed in Boralus, though, which made me super mad because that was my home turf! So turned it off shortly after. I managed to make it to about 118 before I turned War Mode off.Ā Regular readers will know that I am terrible pvp, so it’s no surprise I did this.
3. I picked a zone and stayed until I was done… mostly. I started in Drustvar, and stayed until I finished it. The main reason for starting in Drustvar is that it was suggested as a good place to start if you have mining. Which turned out to be true. My mining got maxed out very quickly indeed, which was great.
Another reason I stuck around in the zone was because of how dungeons were baked in to Legion – once you finished a zone, there was a dungeon to help wrap that zone up. It helped make the story feel more complete, and gave a much better context for the dungeons overall. This turned out to be the case for Battle for Azeroth as well, with Waycrest Manor being the dungeon at the end of the zone. Knowing the story that took me there really helps me appreciate the dungeon so much more.
The second zone I went to was Tiragarde Sound. By the time I got here a whole bunch of guildies were already at 120, which started getting me a bit nervous, but I continued on my merry way (though I did miss a couple of side quests in this zone.)
I had about a level and a half left to get to 120, and the pressure was on. Stepping in to Stormsong Valley I made the decision to just do the main storyline so the dungeon would make sense. I dinged before I finished the zone, however kept going so that I could unlock world quests.
Also, all the zones are STUNNING, so of course I wanted to stay as long as I could!!!
Post-levelling
After all that, I think it did alright with my levelling journey. I had a wonderful time levelling, I truly did. I am absolutely adoring the expansion, and being able to take my time with it all, to read all the quests and understand what’s going made the whole experience so much better.
Now, my focus is on raiding. So I’m running dungeons and doing island expeditions and allllll the world quests to get my reputation up and collect azerite for my neck.
I’m honestly having a fabulous time in Battle for Azeroth. I know there are a lot of people out there who are not having the best time, and are unhappy with all the bugs… I’m trying to keep my head down. I don’t want to get weighed down with the negativity. For me, things are great! And the bugs don’t ruin my enjoyment of the game. I’m hoping with a bit of time, peoples’ frustrations will die down.
Last night, the first raid of Battle for Azeroth opened. Uldir is here! It’s a great looking raid. But more on that in a moment.
Before we headed off, I wanted to get a team picture of our starting team for the expansion (and thankfully my GM entertains my annoying screenshot-taking habits!). So we all got together for our first pre-raid pic. š
You might notice that’s a lot of people. Well, you’d be right. One of the biggest challenges that we have as an officer team at the moment is reducing the team numbers down to a more manageable level. Mythic only needs 20, and normal and heroic cap at 30. We have almost 40 people. Thankfully I don’t have a lot to do with really choosing who makes it to mythic and who doesn’t (other than personal observations).
But on to the raid itself!!
Uldir is in Nazmir, on the Horde island of Zandalar. According to Blizz, it was an old Titan facility, where they were experimenting with the void energies that bound the Old Gods. Things did not go well, so they literally shut the door on the place and hoped no-one would notice. Genius!
I tried to get pics of all the bosses, but wasn’t always successful (darn rogues stealthing in front of the bosses!!), but here are some of them.
The overall aesthetic of the place is pretty cool. It has the titan feel that you would want and expect from something that the titans were involved with. It feels massive, but it’s designed in such a way that it doesn’t take a super long time to get from boss A to boss B.
Interestingly, the exit of the Underrot raid is apparently the entrance to this raid, so many of the Underrot aesthics are there, too. Lots of blood and decay. It really looks amazing.
So for our first night, our goal was to at least clear normal with as many people as we could. We managed to do this relatively easily, with the only real challenge being G’huun. That is a chaotic fight that did a bucket load of damage, even on normal. But it was a lot of fun, with some interesting mechanics.
Tonight we go back in to do it all again on heroic. Our goal is to clear out the whole raid on heroic to get Ahead of the Curve by the end of the lock out. IĀ should be do-able… but we’ll see š
Hope those of you stepping in to Uldir this week have a fantastic time. Let me know how you go!
Here’s where you will find the complete collection of screen shots and videos of Realm’s raiding adventures in Battle for Azeroth.
(Check out the gallery to see pics from other expansions)
Stream VoDs can be found at https://www.twitch.tv/cinder_streams/videos/all .
Kill videos can be found over on YouTube.
Battle of Dazar’alor
[9] CUTTING EDGE! Lady Jaina Proudmoore
[8] Stormwall Blockade
[7] High Tinker Mekkatorque
[6] King Rastakhan
[5] Conclave of the Chosen
[4] Opulence
[3] Grong
[2 Jadefire Masters
[1] Champion of the Light
[0] AOTC Heroic Jaina Proudmoore
Uldir [3/8M]
[3] Mythic Zek’voz
[2] Mythic MOTHER
[1] Mythic Taloc
[0] Ahead of the Curve: G’huun (first week!!)
There’s nothing better than getting your guild mates together and taking down some bosses.
Here’s a collection of Realm’s team kill shots and videos for each of the raids in Legion. (Check out the gallery to see pics from other expansions)
Antorus
[11] Mythic Argus the Unmaker – CUTTING EDGE!
[10] Mythic Aggramar
[9] Mythic Coven of Shivarra
- Mythic Coven of Shivarra
[8] Mythic Varimathras
- Mythic Varimathras
[7] Mythic Kin’garoth
- Mythic Kin’Garoth
[6] Mythic Imonar the Soulhunter
- Mythic Imonar the Soulhunter
[5] Mythic Portal Keeper Hasabel
- Mythic Portal Keeper Hasabel
[4] Mythic Eonar the Life-Binder
- Mythic Eonar
[3] Mythic Antoran High Command
- Mythic Antoran High Command
[2] Mythic Felhounds of Sargeras
- Mythic Hounds of Sargeras
[1] Mythic Garothi Worldbreaker
- Mythic Garothi Worldbreaker
Tomb of Sargeras
Here’s a collection of Pit Crew’s team kill shots for each of the raids.
Nighthold
Trial of Valor
I’ve been wanting to do something for my guild for quite some time. Sure, we’ve only been together (in this form) since the end of Tomb of Sargeras (so since around November/December last year? And to be fair, I’ve been raiding with some of them for the whole of Legion.Ā ), but in that time I’ve grown so fond of my guildies. And I wanted to say thank you.
Thing is, the past few months have been a bit rubbish. Well, truth be told, the past year hasn’t been the greatest (work situations are just the worst for making you feel crap!) and raiding with these folks has been one of the few things that has kept me sane (that, and of course, Thor). Raiding with Realm is something I look forward to each week. I love these guys to bits. Even when we yell at each other. Even when we’re apes (ok, maybe especially when we’re apes). When we’re killing bosses together, or playing hide and seek in Dalaran, or fudging our way through mythic+ dungeons & bgs… it’s all just been so much fun. Pulling together and getting our Cutting Edge on mythic Argus the other week really was the icing on the cake of what was already an amazing expansion.
So I’ve been wracking my brains for what to do. And for the longest time I knew precisely what I wanted to do. But… well, I don’t have the talent to do it. (I maaaaaaayy have re-written the lyrics to ‘Part of your World’ fromĀ The Little Mermaid to tell the story of someone who wants to raid with us š But I can’t sing for shit!) So I was back to square one.
Then the other day, when I was doing my WoW screenshots archiving, it occurred to me that I have aĀ lot of screenshots. (Seriously… a LOT). And I had already been asking guildies for pics of themselves for me… so I decided to make a mosaic of all of us (and a whooooole bunch of pics from Antorus) into a wallpaper using our guild logo.
And so with the help of AndreaMosaic I made this…
UPDATED: added some more raider pics to it cos some people were missing in the first one šĀ
The original is big enough that you can zoom in and see all the individual pictures pretty well (not perfect, but well enough!). If you want to have a look, check out the fullsize version of the wallpaper here. Here are some snippets:
I know I’m a giant sap, but I’m an older lady now, and I’m very fond of the people that I chose to spend so much time with each week. I just want them to know how appreciative I am that they put up with my cranky moods and my nagging for screen shots and silly wee wee songs and inappropriate jokes (though, I’m the tamest of them all, I swear it!). I am so thankful for these people who have stood up for me and come to my defence when trolls came to my stream; who have become facebook friends and not run away screaming when they see pics of me; who don’t make fun of my terrible kill videos; who are there for a chat in the middle of the night when I can’t sleep; who are just good fun people to be around (even when I’m not).
So Realm – thank you for being amazing. I am so looking forward to kicking ass with you all in Battle for Azeroth. ā¤
xo
P.S. Here are some closeups of the guildies who sent me selfies ā¤ (All the pics below are in the mosaic)
Well, we have officially “finished” Legion. Last weekend our guildĀ finally killed mythic Argus, giving us the Cutting Edge achievement. It took over 600 pulls and countless frustrations, but we made it. We are now Titanslayers (a title we now use to brush off dozens of wipes during re-clear…)
I’m proud of our team, though. Even though it took us longer to get this than expected, we got through it all with no rage quits. Sure there was bickering and frustrations and nagging and complaining, but we didn’t have to cancel any raids because we didn’t have enough people show up, and we didn’t have massive blow ups or people leaving. We came out the other side of this still a team, and I’m extremely thankful for that.
I put together the kill video for the fight. We had FOUR points of view for this one, which was really awesome! I still have so much to learn when putting these things together, but hopefully this still managed to capture the heart of it all. (The chimp sounds at the start are because we eventually became apes during this progression… š
Now we are just going back and trying to get people the mythic kills they are missing, and getting out as many mounts as we can to people.
I’m proud of our little team. Here’s to new bosses to defeat in Battle for Azeroth!
For the past few weeks/months a few people in guild have been trying to get a group together to work on getting The Chosen achievement. For this achievement, you need to complete the Trial of Valor on mythic difficulty without dying. That is, defeating Odyn, Guarm and Helya on mythic, and still being alive at the end of it to tell the tale.
We decided to try this when we outgeared it a fair bit, to give us a better chance of succeeding. Which brings us to today. Tonight was the 3rd night we had tried to complete (my second night, as I missed the first one). Most of the time people died to silly mechanics like orbs on Helya which, even with loads of gear, can one-shot people if they’re not careful.
Tonight, we lost one person to Guarm (I believe they just got a bit too close to the boss and got one-shot), and we lost another to Helya (got hit by an orb that hurt for a bucket load). 18/20 isn’t too bad, though!
From this achievement, we received the title “… the Chosen” and a transmog set. I’m not the biggest fan of the transmog set, to be honest. But you know me and transmog- got to have them all!
For me, it was more about getting that title. I’ve wanted it since I heard it, and am awfully glad to have gotten it. There will be more runs in the future for alts to get the transmog sets on other armour types… I’ve just got to decide which one I want next! š
Content from cindersays.net.
How is it that a month has passed since I wrote in here? Usually this happens when I’ve spent a lot of time out of the game and have just been busy with work, but that’s not the case this time (although the being busy with work is definitely true!).
Anyways, it’s been awhile, so I thought I’d best do a catch-up post to let you know what I’ve been up to and what I have planned.
Alpha
So first up, probably the biggest reason I’ve been writing less in here is that I have been streaming quite a bit. It initially started to stream our raid nights, which was fun and all. But then this happened:
For reals! This was me at work when I got the email. Followed shortly after by tears.
I’ve been spending a bit of time in the Alpha running around and seeing how things are, reporting bugs and typos in quests and what not. And I’ve been streaming it, which has been quite fun. I don’t have a lot of viewers on raid nights because it’s a silly time in the US, but when I stream on weekends there are more people around, and it’s really enjoyable. I’m not a great streamer; I don’t show my face (because no-one needs to see that!) and I ramble a lot and get distracted, but hopefully it’s a little entertaining to people.
The other weekend I had a great time hanging out in alpha with some lovely friends in chat. We go to experience a terrifying quest line that just freaked me out so badly. It was scary and hilarious. I made a video about it, which was fun! It’s over here on YouTube if you’re interested. (WARNING: contains Alpha spoilers).
Streaming
Between streaming all the raids and now the Alpha as well, I’ve been clocking up a decent amount of streaming time. And somehow have managed to get a reasonable number of followers and viewers… enough that this ended up happening the other day:
This basically means I’m able to have subscribers and stuff, which is kinda cool! I don’t actually expect this to go anywhere, but it is kinda fun š I celebrated by setting up a new overlay for my stream and making some new panels to match. I’m trying to get better at streaming, but I know I’ll never be anything interesting. I’m just doing it for the fun š If you want to stop by I’m over at twitch.tv/cinder_streams. (note: I will always say if I’m streaming Alpha so that if you’re not wanting spoilers, you can avoid them).
Podcasting
I KNOW! This was completely random, but we’ve started up Battletagged again. This time it’s going to be a lot more casual, with episodes being recorded when we have something to say (rather than trying to stick to a strict schedule). It’s just me and Neuro at the moment. We talk about it a bit more in our first episode back. We’ve got a new website address – Battletagged.com.au – but everything else should be the same. We’re back up on Stitcher and iTunes. Have a listen! And if there’s anything you’d like us to talk about on the show, let us know. š
Raiding
Raiding has been going ok. We had a rough time with Kin’garoth as well… for awhile we just weren’t really using a strat that worked for us (one of the challenges of there being so many different strats available for a boss!) In the end we got there though, with a strat that seems weird, but it’s what works for us, so that’s good!
After that it was Varimathras which we managed to get down really quickly actually.Ā (I still need to make a kill video for it- oops!!) This week we went back to do a re-clear which took us awhile, but we do have a whole night to work on Coven tonight, which is going to drive us up the wall, but should be do-able either this week or next week.
Work
So real-life stuff. Well, I got a promotion- huzzah! That was nice. But I has also meant that my workload has increased quite substantially. At the moment I don’t mind tooooo much.. it’s been really great the past week actually because part of my work requires us to do public consultation to get feedback on what we’re doing, and then check in again with everyone at the end to make sure we did what people wanted. I’m at that end part now, with checking in, and I’ve been getting some really lovely messages back, saying how impressed they are with our work etc. It makes all the extra hours worth it, you know? (That and I do honestly feel like the work I do has the ability to do some good in a small way, so that’s great too). Anyway, all of this has meant super busy days at work, which some people have noticed because I’ve also been neglecting twitter!
Anyways, that’s where things are at at the moment. I have to finish off my bucket list blog post (which is part way written… but might be December by the time I finish writing it! lol) I also want to do some posts about the alpha and the class changes and things like that… I just keep running out of time to do all the things I want to do. Gah! Why is sleep a thing, eh? Or maybe I could just be younger so I could deal with having less sleep. I hope everyone reading is doing well. I promise to keep trying to write more often!
xo
I mentioned in my 2017 wrap up post that raiding had gone a bit weird for awhile with yet another guild disruption and shifting and all that. I’m not going to dwell on it- the past is in the past. And since Antorus opened, I’ve been trying to keep a positive attitude towards everything, because I just want to have a good bunch of people to play this awesome game with.
So far, things are going really well.
As of tonight, we are 6/11 mythic bosses down. Tonight especially was amazing. We have been working on Mythic Imonar, and were kinda in a slump. People were feeling a bit crap, and were getting tired so making silly mistakes. It wasn’t looking great. But somehow, on the last pull of the night, magic happened. Somehow, everything came together, and not only did we get further than we had gone before, we completely winged it for the whole last section and killed the guy. It was amazing. And even better- I was streaming when we got the kill.
Hey by the way, I stream now hehe I decided with Antorus opening and the new guild happening that I would start streaming. I have a good computer that can handle it, decent internet connection- why the hell not? So I stream our raid nights. I don’t really have many viewers because most of the time it’s stupid o’clock in the US, and Aussies are usually raiding themselves. But I do have some lovely people who come along now and then who I am extremely grateful for. And when people sit mythic fights, they sometimes pop in to watch how we’re going and how we’re doing a fight in case they get called in to do it. So it’s not always too quiet.
So anyway tonight, I somehow managed to have about 5 people in my stream cheering us on while we got the kill. It was really great. š I can understand how people get addicted to the streaming thing. It’s a great feeling having an audience to cheer you on while you do these things. Really helps with the whole buzz.
Anyways, I just wanted to say that I’m really loving my guild. We seem to have a really good bunch of people who can all be really stupid together (like,Ā really bloody stupid) but still get along really well and pull our shit together when it comes to raiding. And we can be cross with each other for awhile without it resulting in people leaving or getting too fed up. It’s hard to stay cross in this team when you’ve people being Pokemon’s and what not (thanks Advo!)
All of our kill shots are up on my raiding gallery (and below for now). And if you happen to want to come along one night while I’m streaming, I’m usually on Wednesday, Thursday and Sunday nights, 8pm-11pm AEDT (so Melbourne time) over at twitch.tv/cinder_streams.
~*~*~*~*~SPOILERS AHEAD!! This post contains images and discussion about bosses in the new Antorus raid. If you do not want to knowĀ anything about this raid, please turn back now.Ā ~*~*~*~*~
Anyone who has been reading my blog for awhile that I love a new raid. There’s always something so exciting about it. There’s a buzz that you can feel in the days leading up to it. I’m no different. Whilst I’m not as tired of Tomb of Sargeras as other people are, I have been looking forward to seeing some new bosses.
So you can imagine my disappointment in missing the first night of the new raid. You’ll have noticed I’ve been quiet here again lately, and that’s because for the past few weeks I’ve been travelling for work. It’s been busy and extremely tiring (I’m not a good flyer, so the anxiety really makes it exhausting!). I was on a flight from Perth back to Melbourne when my guild walked in to Antorus for the first time on Wednesday night. It was an odd feeling. It was the first raid for the new guild (more things I haven’t talked about here…) and I was really looking forward to it. But it is what it is.
I was, however, fortunate enough to step into Antorus on Thursday night, when we started the Heroic run. We managed to clear 8 heroic bosses for the first time on Thursday night, which I was really excited about. I had been terrified for most of the night because, due to being so busy with work, I had only really had a very basic look at each of the fights. But I actually did ok. My healing was trash (also didn’t help that we were overhealing things by a bucketload!!) but I didn’t die to mechanics, so that’s good.
Anyway, we went back in last night for our alt run on normal. Except I took my shaman so she had a chance at some more gear. And more importantly, so she could take some screenshots.
When I say Antorus is epic, I genuinely mean it. This is a level of epic that I think most people haven’t really felt since Ulduar. The raid itself spans from Antorus into space and the twisting nether. It’s incredible. It’s done brilliantly, so it doesn’t feel like you’re running for a long time to get to bosses (ground mounts are allowed for a lot of the raid, which is so helpful!). Instead, you get to use the Vindicaar and the portals you see on Argus to get around.
And the scenary. Holy moly. When you go in there yourself,Ā look up. It’s just… amazing.
The bosses themselves are a lot of fun. I really like all of them. I haven’t had a look at mythic mechanics yet (which I will need to do given we will start mythics next week!) so my thoughts are based on normal and heroic at this stage.
~*~*~*~*~SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS!!!!!!~*~*~*~*~
Yes, I’m going to talk about each of the bosses,Ā INCLUDING ARGUS AND THE PHASES IN THE FIGHT AND WHAT HAPPENS AFTERWARDS. You’ve been warned!!!
Garothi Worldbreaker
This is a great little fight, and I think a nice way to start the raid as a whole. The fight is straight forward, but ramps up in damage over time, which helps speed things up a bit. The way we do it has ranged and melee stacks, which means I always have somewhere to drop my healing rain, which I’m always excited about (this will be even more important when I get my 2 and 4 piece sets from this tier). It’s good fun, though! I like it a lot.
Felhounds
I LOVE how these guys look! And what’s even better- the firey hound drops as a mount from this fight. One of my guildies was extremely lucky and got it on the first night. I’m very jealous. It’s not usually a mount type that I would go for, but I love the glowing colours.
This fight is another one that is quite straight forward, however the difficulty comes in when the abilities overlap in weird ways. For example one mechanic requires you to all stack up together, but then a different mechanic needs you to all spread out. And sometimes, those two mechanics overlap. So it makes for a really interesting fight. I think this one will be quite chaotic in mythic- I can’t wait!
Antoran High Command
This fight actually consists of 3 bosses. Only 1 is active at a time, with the two hanging out in their little pods bombarding us with random abilities. Because the active boss has vacated their pod, one of us can pop in there and use it to our advantage. It’s a great concept. We move around the room and deal with all the abilities. This is another one that ramps up in damage to the raid. It also requires a good amount of dps so you don’t run out of “death-saving” abilities. I like it a lot. I have a feeling this one will be a bit bananas on mythic too, though!
Portal Keeper Hasabel
This is another awesome fight (I’m sensing a theme here…). It’s got some great mechanics- being a portal keeper, Hasabel has a bunch of portals that open up, so the group needs to be split up to help deal with what’s in them. It’s a little like the Dragons of Nightmare fight in that way. Inside the portals there are orbs and things that look like they’re going to play a big part in mythic… we’ll see how that pans out. Again, another great fight with some simple mechanics that are easily botched.
Essence of Eonar
It’s no surprise here that I have lots of pics for this fight…
Eonar is a life-binder, so of course wherever she is, it’s going to be beautiful. This fight is quite different- there’s no one boss. We just need to defend Eonar from the onslaught of demons coming in. Because the room is massive, the team needs to split up. There’s a great ability that you get when you run into the room, that gives you wings. When you use them, you get shot straight up into the air. You can then glide around with your beautiful green wings, or you can use the extra action button again to land somewhere specific. So it makes getting around a lot faster.
I will admit, that even though this is a stunning area for a fight, it’s my least favourite in the raid. There’s SO much running around, so I can’t drop my rain anywhere, and I always seem to get lost. The changes to the fight on mythic have the raid splitting even further, so it will be very interesting indeed. but for now, not my favourite (at least it’s pretty!)
Imonar the Soulhunter
Silly bugger wouldn’t turn around for me to take his picture! So here’s a pic of his butt š
This fight has bombs and sleeping and racing through mazes… it’s chaotic and awesome!! It’s going to be bananas on mythic. It requires some good coordination with the team to make sure that bombs are placed in suitable spots around the room, and to make sure we don’t accidentally put each other to sleep. The fight starts on one side of the room, then he will jump over to the other side. We have to run across a bridge that is full of bombs and rolling balls and lines of death… yep, bananas. But I’m a sucked for punishment, and actually really love this fight.
Kin’garoth
This guy is AWESOME! We smash his face for awhile, then go kill some adds that spawn. Any adds that we don’t kill do a whole bunch of mechanics in addition to the boss mechanics, so it’s really important to get them down. My only issue with this fight is that I find myself out of range of the tanks a lot. I think I need to get them to have markers on their heads so I know where they are. But yeah, another really interesting fight.
Varimathras
This fight is scary. It’s a tank and spank kind of fight, which is probably pretty boring for dps, but there’s a healer mechanic in this which is terrifying. You need to always be near someone, otherwise you get a debuff on you called Misery, which makes you take 200% extra damage, but worse than that, makes you unable to be healed for its duration. Misery lasts for 7 seconds, but I tell you what, it seems so much longer than that. Watching peoples’ health go down and not being able to do anything about is excruciating!! It means people need to be sensible when they’re going to take damage- anything to help reduce the amount of damage taken is going to be really helpful for healers, because otherwise we can’t do anything until the debuff is gone.
This fight has a quick enrage timer on it, and it’s really easy to mess up. I know some people don’t like it, but for me, it’s challenging and really intersting. And bloody terrifying.
Also, it’s nice to see a male character with barely any clothes on for a change!
Coven of Shivarra
I mean, there’s so much ass here…
I’ve only done this fight (and the following two) on normal so far. It’s chaos. I’m not usually a fan of council fights, but this one has some really interesting mechanics that mix things up a bit. There are titan abilities that come in to try and hurt us, and they rotate randomly, so we have to be able to react quickly.Ā There’s also a debuff that needs to be healed off, because if it isn’t the person with it gets stunned. It’s an interesting fight. I’m concerned I’ll dislike it on mythic, but so far, I enjoy it!
Aggramar
So again, I’ve done this fight on normal. It’s damn good fun. This one, to me, feels like a dance, and I really like it. There’s fire and explosions and smashes and thankfully at least a bit of stacking for my healing rain to enjoy. I’m excited to see this fight on heroic tonight!
Argus the Unmaker
Oh Argus. You can’t help but feel sad about how this all came about. But oh boy it’s hard to be sad when you’re surrounded by the freaking AMAZING zone. We’re in space and it’s just incredible. And this fight… this is a damn good final boss for an end of expansion raid.
The fight has 4 phases. The first phase has cones of void that need to be placed properly, and blobs of void that need to be put in the right place as well. There are also orbs of awesome that spawn that give you some buffs, which is a really great.
Phase 2 opens with a giant storm that gets rid of the void zones. We just hang out in the middle avoiding the storm. Then there areĀ junk-rat-style tyres of void doom that make lines of death across the platform that we have to dodge. There are also bombs that get put on people that need to be dealt with… of course they have really similar names so it’s quite confusing!
Phase 3 comes to us with a WHOLE bunch of adds around the room. They start out really pretty as stars, then turn into evil adds of mean that needs to be killed ASAP. There are lines that need to be avoided and casts that need to be interrupted and adds that get specific debuffs on them to make them easier to kill.
Once the adds are all killed, Argus pulls us all in together… and kills us. Dead. RIP
It’s amazing. There’s a bit before the image above where we are pulled together in space, and locked in this big chunk of ice-like stuff… then Argus gets all cranky and smashes us in one hit. What a jerk.
But all is not lost. Eonar is here to save the day!!!
Thanks for the res, Eonar!
I forgot to take a pic of what it looks like when we’re dead! (There will be plenty of time for pics of it in later attempts, though!). While we are dead, we need to avoid running in to some little adds that are out blocking our path, and run to a tree where we can res. That tree stays up for the whole fight, which is really interesting, because it means we can die quite a few times without wiping. Death becomes a resource in a way. And it’s needed, because there are abilities that go out that will just plan and simply kill people.
The last phase is quite chaotic, and is definitely a dps race, because you will eventually run out of rezzes.
But then Argus dies, and the end cinematic begins…
I had watched the end cinematic before I went in to Argus. I knew that it would get spoiled for me before I would have a chance to see it for myself, so I watched it in advance. But watching the cinematic again after having completed the fight was something else. I cried. I really did. It was pretty emotional. Thinking about everything that had happened to lead up to that point… the people who have died (RIP Varian), and all of the battles we have had to face to get to this point, where Sargeras is finally being captured and brought to justice… it’s a lot. It really does reiterate my last post, too, about just how epic this is, and how difficult anything that comes after it will be “disappointing” to a lot of people. This was fucking EPIC. And I’m really going to miss Illidan. What an amazingly deep and interesting character. This was a really nice send-off.
So that’s it! Antorus the Burning Throne. Freaking AMAZING. Here are a couple of more pictures from the raid itself.
Have you had a chance to experience Antorus yet? What did you think? I hope you had a great time š
xo
We did it! After all the dramas we have gone through as a team over the past couple of months; after losing so many players and recruiting and trialling others, we are finally at a point where, not only have we defeated all the mythic bosses we had killed before, but we have now got down a new boss! Mistress Sassz’ine is DOWN!
Mythic Sassypants (Sassz’ine)
This fight is of the most RNG-heavy, mechanics-intensive fights I think I’ve ever done. It is one of those fights that, even after having done it hundreds of times, you still kinda feel like you don’t really know what’s going on. It is absolute CHAOS. And I freaking loved it!
For our team, we went with 5 healers, but as a result, were told that we also needed to dps as much as possible in order to beat the enrage timer. Because of this, and the fact that this fight has SO much movement in it, I swapped my gear and talents around a little to what I would normally do.
For my legendaries I used Uncertain Reminder. Aside from having some really juicy stats on it, it extends the duration of hero by 75%. That extra time of hero, combined with our restoration artifact trait Sense of Urgency, AND the fact that hero is popped at a time when there is bucket loads of damage going out, means that it’s a really useful legendary to have. So this one was a no brainer.
The second legendary I had been thinking a fair bit about. In the end, once it was confirmed that we needed to be pushing out more dps, the decision was easy. I went with Soul of the Farseer. Again, it has some great stats on it. But the reason I went with this legendary was the fact that it let me run Echo of the Elements AND Cloudburst at the same time, meaning I could cast a lot more on the move (extra Riptides and Healing Stream Totems) and be able to cast more Lava Bursts. I was glad I went with it in the end, because towards the end when I wasn’t dpsing so much, I was able to drop out some more instant heals as I was fleeing for my life from some hungry octopus thing.
For talents, I had Torrent, Graceful Spirit (this is a no brainer – being able to cast on the move more often is essential in this fight), Lightning Surge Totem (which I didn’t use at all), Ancestral Guidance (to beef up my Cloudburst Totems), Ancestral Vigor, Cloudburst Totem AND Echo of the Elements, and lastly Wellspring.
Wellspring was a last minute change. Normally on this line I’ll take High Tide, but swapped over to Wellspring because it just felt stronger here. It was great for topping up loads of people after each Hydra shot. And it looks cool. š
My heals overall were pretty crap, but a lot of that is just due to pushing out damage wherever we could, and the sheer amount of movement there is in this fight. The movement also meant that I couldn’t drop healing rain very often at all, and that usually heals for a pretty decent amount.
None the less, we did it. Mythic Mistress Sassypants is sassy no more. Next up… Maiden of Vigilance.
Well, I find myself here once again where the team I’m raiding with has crumbled. We had been losing a few people here and there over the past couple of months for a whole bunch of different reasons. I’m not sure what happened, but this last week something snapped, and we were done. Through a combination of real life issues and people wanting a change, we dropped enough to not have enough people on the team to raid anymore.
It’s not a new story, and it’s not a story that we’ll never hear again. This is what happens. And even though I’ve been here so many times before, it doesn’t get any easier. Before raid on Wednesday we all logged on and had a chat about what everyone’s plans were. There was talk of server transfers to try and rebuild the team on a more populated server (and then further discussion about what the server might be); there were talks of staying put and pushing through it; there were talks of finding other teams, of going our separate ways… and of disbanding entirely. In the end, some people decided to move on, which in turn made other people also decide to move on to other teams rather than waiting for the numbers to come back up again.
There were no hard feelings towards the people who decided to leave for other teams. I totally understand it. Things weren’t perfect, and some people had really good reasons to go, but it still makes me sad. *shrug* It is what it is, and I truly hope everyone is happy wherever they end up.
In the meantime, there are 10-13 of us who have decided to stay and try and rebuild, rather than moving the guild to another server. Our team is 5/9 mythic… past the halfway mark of Tomb of Sargeras… so hopefully we will be able to attract some good players in time to get mythic Kil’Jaeden down. (Shameless plug! Here’s our recruit thread on the forums.)
For now, I’m just feeling sad. I know it’s (hopefully?) not my fault, but it doesn’t stop me from feeling like rubbish. Being in a guild and raid team like this always feels like a second family. We all spend so much time together, and we argue and celebrate wins… so it just feels weird everyone not being together any more. But like I said, it is what it is, and it will probably happen again. In the meantime, I’m holding out hope we find some more awesome players so we can get back to killing internet pixels. š
~*~*~*~*~Spoilers ahead. If you don’t want to see any of the Tomb of Sargeras stuff yet, please turn away now.~*~*~*~*~
This week the Tomb of Sargeras opened. For me, it was a bittersweet time, as my partner Thor had made the decision to stop playing WoW. It would be the first time we weren’t raiding together in years. In addition to that, I was having all sorts of dramas with a new PC (more on that in a later post!) and generally being less prepared than I would have liked. So I went into Tomb, well, flustered.
But in we went, a much stronger team than we were going into Nighthold. And oh, how amazing this raid is. It’s always nice to see some new fights, of course. And for the most part, we powered through normal (with a shut down in the middle of our first night!). On our second night we cleared 6 bosses on heroic, and last night a few of us went in again to get the 7th down.
After we called it for the night last night, I ran around the Tomb to take some screenshots. It’s an amazing mix of beauty and terror. Especially in the real Nightborne areas- things look beautiful, but upon closer inspection, and down right horrific. In one of the pics below you’ll see a statue of a beautiful female night elf holding a large pan. And the light and colouring is so beautiful and serene. But then when you get closer to her, and you look at her face, you see her eyes have been gauged out, and she has an eerie grin that says she’d love to do the same for you… So creepy.
~*~*~*~*~ Post raid spoilers ahead!Ā ~*~*~*~*~Ā
I’ve put the spoiler tag just in case, but there have been loads of pics of this around absolutely everywhere. As many people will know, Argus comes to Azeroth, thanks to some tomfoolery from Illidan (of course). Getting to that point, though, was absolutely incredible. Seeing battles with Kil’jaeden in the background of the Fallen Avatar fight was really great. It was nice to see the other NPCs doing something other than standing there watching us fight.
Once the Avatar is down, we portal up to Kil’jaeden’s ship, and in doing so, we are treated to a mini-cinematic featuring our own toons! It was hands down one of my favourite parts. The Kil’jaeden fight alone was really interesting (ok so I was definitely unprepared for this fight! Kinda winged it!) Afterwards, when Argus was in view around the world, I popped an Inky Black Potion and took pics of it, because it looks so bloody Ā intimidating. It’s amazing seeing the world change like this because of our actions.
The end cinematic for Tomb was bloody brilliant. I had been so busy in the lead up to this that I’d had no spoilers at all, and really no idea of what was to come. So I spent a lot of it just going “OH MY GAWD!!” Here it below if you want to see it. (Goes without saying, massive spoilers!!)
The last thing I wanted to mentioned about Tomb was some random runes I found around the place. The first one I noticed was on a wall as we headed in to the fight with Mistress Sassypants (that’s totally her name, guys). I didn’t want to click on it during raid in case it did something bad, so last night I went back down there to see what happened. Here’s what happened:
Yes, I turned into Gul’dan. Not only that, but I got a new spell bar, with 3 of the spells he used in the fight with him in Nighthold. And boy are they fun to use!! One of the runes even set off a short roleplay scene, but I couldn’t hear anything, I just saw Gul’dan kill a bunch of people.
I looked it up on wowhead, and there’s 5 entries for orcish runes in the database, but no other information. I found 3, so I’m curious about where the other 2 are, and what they are all for. Do they need to be clicked in a certain order for something to happen? I really don’t know. But you know, it’s weird. Even though Gul’dan was a giant dick, running around as his ghost for awhile was, well, kinda sad.
Anyway, those are my adventures in the Tomb of Sargeras so far!
Well, it took us three weeks, lots of tears, frustration, swearing and hysteria, but we did it – Mythic Gul’dan is defeated! We got our Cutting Edge achievement, and new title Vengeance Incarnate. And my partner, Thor, was very lucky and won the mount (it looks AWESOME!!)
I’m even more excited about this because we came into Nighthold as a new guild. As many of you know, we’d had some dramas with the last guild and it disbanded, leaving everyone to go their separate ways. A bunch of us like-minded types ended up forming a new guild – Pit Crew. And we worked our butts off to recruit like mad and build a great team.
Working on Gu’dan himself was an adventure in patience. We had a lot of PC and internet issues (including my computer absolutely packing it in in the middle of a pull last night), some attendance issues of key players, and a general issue with being numpties sometimes. But we got there. And we got there by one-shotting him on our first pull of the evening tonight! We all were laughing and cheering at the end – it was awesome.
Our clicker hunter (he clicks to play… we’re all baffled, but he does it very well!!) caught it all on stream. You can find Tombstone’s stream atĀ http://twitch.tv/whiteronnie
I’ve uploaded a copy of it to my YouTube channel so you can all see it here. The good bits come in at the end around 12 mins where our rogue starts getting excited and says “Fuck yeah bois! … and girl!” I cracked up. šĀ (please excuse my dodgy attempt at making this presentable for youtube! I have no real editing software for fancy intros and stuff, so just did the best I could.)
We need to get as many people in who missed out on the kill tonight in for it next week so they can also get the achievement.
Anyway, we are all so excited to have gotten him down. Now to start getting ready for Tomb of Sargeras!!
I’ve spent a bit of time this weekend attempting the mage tower artifact challenge yet again. I put in about an hour or 2 each time the tower is up in an attempt to get the artifact appearance that I have been wanting since I first saw it on beta.
This weekend I got the closest I’ve ever been to getting it done – up to the very last boss – before I failed miserably. I’m progressing a little more each time. Truth be told, I was sure I’d get it this weekend. I was able to get through the first stage easily each time I tried yesterday, and everything that I had read and watched for Resto shamans indicated that the first phase was the hardest for us. So I felt really good being able to push through that multiple times.
But such is the way when you’re unwell, I had to stop and rest when I was on a roll yesterday. I figured it would be ok, I’d be able to pick things up again today, (Sunday) and get it done. I felt even more confident about it because I had managed to get my 52nd trait last night, which unlocked the final new Concordance trait (woot!). I also managed to pick up a few great pieces during our heroic farm clear last night, including a tier helm that managed to titanforge AND have a socket! This was really great news because the only gem slots I had in my gear were on a couple of legendaries, meaning I was locked in to having one or 2 set legendaries so I could have the 200+stat gem. But now, I can have that in my tier helm, and can swap through whatever legendaries I like. Huzzah!!
Anyway, given all of that, I had another crack at the challenge this afternoon and I *sucked*. Like, terribly. I don’t know what was going on, but I just couldn’t push through that first phase again. So I’m sitting here sulking and feeling sorry for myself. I only gave it half an hour because I just wasn’t doing any better. I’m just marvelling at how one day I can be doing brilliantly, and the next, sucking super hard. Here’s hoping after dinner I pull my shit together, because we’re onto Mythic Gul’dan progression now! SO exciting!!
Anyways, this was just a bit of a ramble really. Just reflecting a bit on how much my performance can change based on how I’m feeling.
Truth be told, I’ve been feeling pretty lost in WoW lately. No, it’s not from lack of things to do, or not enjoying the game (because there isĀ plenty to do, and I still completely love the game!). Once again it’s how I’m performing in raids. And it’s at the point where I’m seriously at a loss as to what to do, and wondering if I should even bother.
I just don’t know what I’m doing wrong anymore. Previously there would be all manner of excuses as to why my performance as a healer sucked – I didn’t have the right legendaries, group composition really makes a difference, I’m not using the right stats, I just need more gear blah blah blah. But whilst I don’t have all of the legendaries that I want to be using on my resto shaman, I do have some very good legendaries that should do just fine. And I have plenty of gear with the right stats on it (not that stats are supposed to matter all that much any more). I’m working my way to my 51st trait, which isn’t as high as others, but it’s still pretty high overall.
I’ve looked at logs and seen what talents people are using. I do know one big problem is that I don’t use Cloudburst Totem as a talent. It’s not that I don’t want to, it’s just that it makes my framerate drop to 3 (and given my UI settings are already set to 3 in raids, I can’t drop it any lower – I have difficulty seeing some abilities as it is). So I can’t use it without it causing some issues. (I’m really hoping I’ll be able to buy a new PC in the near future!!) Might just have to try again.
I look at logs and I suppose a consolation is that Druids just seem to be kicking ass at the moment. And it also doesn’t help (me) that the other healers are just fucking awesome. I guess my problem is that I don’t know if it’s just me doing the wrong thing, or if it’s my class being lacklustre. It just feel like my heals don’t do a lot unless everyone stays low for an extended period of time. But they all get topped up so quickly, so my mastery doesn’t get a chance to kick in. This expansion was supposed to be about bringing back triage healing, but instead it seems the fights are just unforgiving – if people fuck up they get one shot, rather than just getting really low, allowing us to heal them back up again. It’s just back that old ping pong healer bars again, and as a shaman I just feel useless. I’m back to being a walking CD.
And I’m not writing this to get anyone to “fix” things for me or say things to make me feel better, I just need to get it out of my head. I can’t figure out if it’s going to get any better for me. And if it’s not, what does that mean? Do I just stop healing and go hit things instead? Or do I heal on a different class? What? I really am just feeling awfully lost. I found myself going back to this post where I was hypothetically thinking about what class I’d play if I couldn’t play my main and I landed on druid or mage. But what if it’s not the class? What if it’s just that I’m shit? Do I just stop raiding? I keep coming back to moments like this, and Bume is really lovely and helps me out, but I don’t feel like I’m getting any better. Instead I just feel like a burden.
It makes my brain hurt. And in the meantime I just feel reallyĀ blah. So instead I’m bumming around levelling up an Alliance priest because their spells are pretty and it makes me feel better.
About 2 weeks ago I managed to pick up a casual job thanks to an old boss and some awesome friends. Getting back to work has been really great – knowing I’ve got money coming in again to pay bills is a big load off my mind! But it does come with the downside of aĀ lot less game time. Even less than last time because I actually care about this job, so I’m not being cheeky writing blog posts and what not during work hours! But even with less time in game, I’ve still had a really successful couple of weeks.
Mythics
We’re doing pretty well with our progression, getting 1 new mythic boss down per week. Since getting Krosus down a couple of weeks ago, we’ve successfully managed to continue getting him down each week, which gives us 4 mythic bosses on farm. From next week we’re stoping the heroic runs altogether and starting mythic from scratch so that we have more time to spend on progression bosses when we get to them, which is great.
We got Spellblade down the week after Krosus, and then last weekend it was Tichondrius’ turn to go down.
We should have had Botanist down tonight as well, butĀ thanks to Easter and WoW server crashes being the attendance boss from hell, our raid night didn’t end up happening at all. Hopefully we’ll get him down on Wednesday so we can start the long slog on Star Augur.
Team wise we’re doing really well. We’ve got the numbers which is awesome, and we’re all really gelling together quite well. There’s tense time of course, but that’s part and parcel of mythic raiding, I think. It’s just about making sure that at the end of the night we’re all still mates. We’ve got a great little healing team as always, though really need a strong swing healer to fill gaps for us when someone is away. But otherwise, things are going really well.
Riding around
I’ve been pretty lucky with some new mounts lately. Firstly, I finally got my fox mount! I do love it so much, though I think my pandaren shaman is a little too big for him, so I think I’ll use him on my night elf toons instead. š
Then after raid last week I was so lucky!! Thor was flying over Azuna and asked me “what’s an Ephemeral Crystal?” I spun around and asked if he’d seen one. I immediately flew to where he saw one, and off I went. (Thor wasn’t really interested in the mount, and he knew how much I wanted it, so I hunted with his blessing!). It only took me about half an hour to find all 5 crystals needed to get this beautiful mount!
Then of course there was a Mind-Riddler’s Worm, which the WoW secrets discord group had been hunting for since Jeremy Feasel sent out a series of cryptic tweets. It was really fun to watch the whole thing unfold. I had joined the server just to follow along – people are amazing!!! I knew they’d figured it out when my notifications for the server started going bonkers. It was such great work on their part! There’s a great guide on how to get this mount for yourself – shouldn’t take too much time, especially if you have some friends with you to help make the old raids part faster. It’s such a funny looking mount, but I had to get it! I loved that when I got the final piece that rewarded me a mount, there were loads of people just hanging around on them, floating on these strange worm things in solidarity. So much fun.
And then lastly there was of course the unlocking of flying on the Broken Isles. And so now I have a whole other level of exploring to do from up in the air! š
March of the tadpoles
Another micro-holiday came along. This was one I was really looking forward to – March of the tadpoles! Seriously, is there anything more adorable than baby murlocs?!?! No, I didn’t think so. š
So for this micro-holiday, we were able to go see a whole bunch of the more adorable little baby murlocs running around. And best of all, we got to befriend one for the day! Every single baby murloc that was there had a different name, and it’s very own little personality. I had such an awfully hard time choosing which murloc to adopt – I wanted them all! I didn’t want any of them to feel left out! There were some running around really fast like hooligans, having so much fun; there were others there were just hanging out chatting; there was even one little guy that just kept “fainting”! He was hilarious, and I nearly chose him… but then I thought a lot of people would choose him, so I didn’t. I wanted to choose one that no-one else would. (I blame this song that my Mum used to sing to me as a kid for this whole feeling sorry for the “runt” of the litter thing I have!)
In the end I found a little guy hiding in a corner under water. His name was Bloop, and I loved him straight away! He seemed like me – too shy to hang out with everyone else, but still kind wanting to be a part of things… at least from a safe distance.
We went on some adventures together, and in the end he gave me a little present – a Wet Rock. I’ve kept it in my bank for safe keeping. ā¤ It was a wonderful little holiday!
Questing all over the world
The rest of my time has been spent on the Broken Shore and around the Broken Isles in general doing World Quests. I want to do a whole separate post about the Broken Shore world quests, but in the meantime I’ll just say that IĀ love them, and I’ve been having so much fun with them!
As well as the World Quests, I’ve been banging my head against the wall that is the healer’s solo artifact challenge. I’m so determined to get it!!! But no luck so far. In time, in time.
So that’s my big catch up post! What have you been up to?
Tonight was a really great raid night. As usual we started off with our normal heroic clear which went quite well (although completely pathetic heroic Krosus kill with most people dead). We got that all done in an hour, so then it was onto mythic.
We were down one of our strongest healers tonight which made things a little tough, but we did just fine and managed to clear 4 mythic bosses tonight, too! We did a few pulls on mythic Spellblade (which we got down for the first time last week) but we really needed the 5th healer to get us through it so we called an early night. So overall it was a really productive night!
But the best thing of all tonight, was that I got the mythic tier chest from Krosus! Between being extremely lucky with other tier pieces and the transmog pieces being available in mythic Emerald Nightmare, I now have the full shaman mythic tier set appearance! When I first saw this set I was in love, and knew I just had to get it.
And because I have the Balance of Power elemental artifact appearance, I can re-live this awesome wallpaper I won from Skog last year (back when this set was just a dream!)
Tomorrow night we should get Spellblade down, and then it’s on to prog on Tichondrius. Yay!!
A shameless plug – we’re always on the lookout for more dps, especially a dps with a strong healing off spec (except paladin). If you’re interested in joining, check out our recruitment post on the forums for all the people to talk to. š
Thereās nothing better than getting your guild mates together and taking down raid bosses. Hereās a collection of screenshots celebrating our guildās kills through each expansion.
I have been extremely lucky this evening. For some time now, anyone who has listened to any of the podcasts I do will have heard me whinging like a giant sook about not yet having the hidden appearance for the my restoration shaman weapon. I meanĀ really whinge (I’m a big ol’ baby!) But I wanted it. I really, really wanted it. I went so far as running in there on my own on normal today, killing everything very slowly on my own in the hopes of being able to get it. No luck.
Lately I’d been taking to running the dungeon on heroic at least once per day to increase my chances, racking up the bad luck protection. After raid tonight, I went and queued once more for an attempt. And I hit the motherload. Because not only did I manage to get my hidden artifact appearance, but I ALSO got a legendary FROM THE SAME BOSS!!
Hidden appearance AND legendary from the same boss! Talk about extremely lucky!
I was giggling like a maniac. Like, really. I kinda lost it for a bit. I was so, SO excited to get my hidden appearance finally (now I can work on the last tintĀ I need – 200 dungeons using it! *gulp*)
Here we are learning the new appearance:
The only downside is that the appearance doesn’t suit theĀ new transmog that I recently purchased well at all. I’m hoping I’ll have an elemental appearance that will suit it instead! In the meantime, this is what I’ve gone with for my resto set, using the hidden appearance:
I’d like something better, though I don’t have anything in my wardrobe that I like yet – need to get some lucky drops in older raids for what I have in mind.
Then there’s the legendary.Ā 
To be honest, this wasn’t high on my list of “wants”. I was leaning towards the bracers or gloves being my next preferred legendary (not that you get to choose!) But it seemed RNG-sus had something else in mind for me. Something that might just help us with the boss we are currently progressing on. See, for the last couple of weeks our guild has been bashing our heads against mythic Krosus. We’ve hit enrage quite a few times and just missed out on the kill – our dps just isn’t quite up there yet. We’ve been mighty close, but just missing out. Now these legendary boots certainly aren’t going to help with meeting any dps checks, but given that there are great periods of standing still, and I have my healing rain up for almost the entirety of that fight, these boots are going to come inĀ very handy for helping get some extra healing out on a fight that is really rough with only 3 healers.
The legendary works by healing people standing in my healing rain, 10% increased healing from my healing spells. Obviously this requires people to be standing in my healing rain for it to be useful. Thankfully, on Krosus, we do spend a lot of our time stacked up together in the healing rain, so this could really come in handy.
Tonight I have been exceptionally lucky and got 1 item I wanted, and 1 item I needed. I am extremely grateful. Here’s hoping I get to post again tomorrow night with a Krosus kill shot!
xo
Nighthold has been out for a couple of weeks now, and guilds everywhere have been poking around killing this and that, edging their way up to kill the worst of the worst – Gul’dan. Exorsus got there first, followed by Serenity, then Method. On Sunday night last week, Pit Crew killed Gul’dan on heroic difficulty, giving us Ahead of the Curve. huzzah!
Ahead of the Curve: Gul’dan is ours!
Then last night we got our first mythic boss down – Skorpyron.We’d been really lucky and managed to recruit some new dps over the weekend, which meant we had a full 20 people on to run mythics, even though some regulars were away. It was great news. (Having said that, we are always on the lookout for more dps! So if you have the same outlook and goals as we do, and you’re looking for a team, have a look at our recruitment post.)
Skorpyron on Mythic is really interesting. He goes through different phases as time passes, and will break off different coloured chunks based on the phase he’s in. Each coloured chunk does something different – green pulses raid wide AoE damage, red only hurts if you’re near it, or if it gets hit by shockwave (but hurts everyone nearby a LOT when it’s hit!!) It’s essentially all about balancing the positioning of the chunks so you can hide behind the right ones. That and there’s green gunk all over the ground which kinda hurts a bit too. Overall it’s not a hugely complicated fight once you make a good plan. (I do feel bad for anyone who is colour blind, though!)
Bye bye Skorpy!
After Skorpyron we headed off to Chronomatic Anomaly, which just hits like a truck on mythic. On normal and heroic you can kinda ham it and not worry too much about things hurting if you stand in them or if you forget to take your bombs out far away. On mythic, there’s no wiggle room. If you don’t take a time bomb out far enough, you can potentially kill players. And if you don’t dodge the blue orbs well enough, that can kill you, too. For healers, healing off that debuff is a giant pain when time is slowed, and pretty drastic if we fail. We got him down around 20% I think? We ended up stopping an hour early because one of our raiders had to log off for awhile and we didn’t have anyone else around to fill in his shoes. So we went and cleared heroic ToV instead for the AP and legendary chance (our tank got one, so it was worth it!) I feel like we would have had the kill, though, if we had have kept going. Oh well, there’s always next week.
Nighthold itself is an absolutely beautiful raid. And it really should be, given who lives there! The elves have a lovely way of making even the most destructive things stunning. A couple of weeks back after a normal clear I went around and spent about half an hour to an hour just running around taking screenshots of the zone. I loved finding little details here and there that helped make the whole place really feel palatial.
Here are some of my favourite pics (click on the thumbnail to see the full pics)
Ok, I might have gotten a bit carried away… It’s just that it’s such a beautiful place! And the gardens are out of this world stunning. I would happily sit in a corner with a book for all eternity in there. Just beautiful.
The bosses themselves are really great. There’s a lot of variety in the types of fights, so it’s quite interesting moving from one to the other. That and I feel like they make sense to the story of the raid.
Have you had a chance to get into Nighthold yet? Which is your favourite fight?
In my last post I mentioned there had been a bunch of guild drama that had happened recently, and I tweeted last week about the guild ending. It’s sure has been a busy time!
I don’t like to talk negatively about other people or anything, so I’m not here to bitch about individuals. But I did want to talk a little about some of the things that lead to the situation, and what’s happening moving forward.
The thing about guilds for people like myself who play a fair bit, is that (regardless of how completely naff it sounds!) they are like the family you choose to hang around with. You spend a lot of time with them – they’re there to run world quests with or pvp with or raid with; they were probably there when you had that sneaky log in on Christmas day to pick up the presents underneath the Winter Veil tree, and they were there when you logged in, hungover, on New Years day. And even if you don’t actively play with all of your guild mates, they are the ones who are there to congratulate you when you ding your achievements you’ve been working so hard on, or when you get that rare mount or legendary – they’re there to beg you for it (but also cheer you on!).
At least, that’s what being in a guild has always meant to me. And judging by recent events, it’s a shared perception held by many.
But what happens if this isn’t what your guild is like? What ifĀ your guild doesn’t cheer each other on? What if they have different priorities to you in game? What if your personalities completely clash?
This is essentially what happened with the previous guild. One of the troubles with having quite a few people in a guild and raid team, is that you’re a little more likely to come across people who have different personalities to you. I think this was one of the bigger issues that I personally had with the old guild. I don’t understand why people just don’t be nice to each other, or just not be dicks to one another. I mean yes, I can be a bitch at the best of times, but I don’t like to bring other people down just for the hell of it. And there was a fair bit of that around, especially towards the end. Maybe it’s the old lady in me, but the way I see it, WoW is my hide-away from the rest of the world. And I as it stands, there’s already too much negativity and hatred out in the real world – it doesn’t need to be in game.
Another big factor (and this was a main factor for many other people) was a different approach to raiding. There was aĀ big divide in the raid team about what the highest priority should be for a fight. One side felt that mechanics first was the way to go, and the other side felt pumping out the best dps etc. was the best approach. It’s probably easy to figure out which side I fell on (all about the mechanics, baby!). It’s a difficult divide to resolve, especially when it’s split so evenly between players.
So between those 2 main factors (and a few other bits and pieces), it was decided that the raid team would end and the guild would cease to be.
This led to the next issue – what about raiding? What about a new guild? What do I do? Pretty quickly a new guild was formed that consisted of the people who all had the same feeling and approach to raiding. One by one people came on board for a new team that was all about focussing on the mechanics of fights, having a good time, and focusing on a more mature approach to the game. Pit Crew was born.
To me, this split has been the best thing for everyone. From what I can tell, everyone in the old guild has already found a new home, which is really great. What this whole experience has showed me, is that it’s just so important to be happy where you are, and happy with the people you are spending time with. I’m sure people who have moved on will be relieved to stop hearing me going on about running away from things instead of standing in them for extra dps, and vice versa. I think this is a good outcome for everyone. And I genuinely hope everyone is a lot happier.
New beginnings – Pit Crew heading in to Nighthold for the first time.
We hit a few things together last Sunday night, but didn’t really do a lot. Our first real raid night was Wednesday, as we headed into the Nighthold to take down Gul’dan.
Here’s hoping for a long and kick ass raiding future for us š
My lovely friend Zeirah and I have turned our weekly blog challenge into a public blog challenge for anyone to participate in. Each week there is a new topic for everyone to write about and share. This weekās topicĀ is 2017 Bucket ListĀ and you can read everyoneās thoughtsĀ aboutĀ thisĀ onĀ our website here.Ā
Oh my gosh how has it been so long since I wrote in my blog? To be fair, the second week of the Christmas holidays was spent pretending the rest of the world didn’t exist. But still, I should have updated before now! Thank goodness I have the blog challenges with Z to keep me in check!
So this week we’re putting together our bucket lists for the year, with the idea of coming back to them at the end of the year to see how we did. Knowing that, in a way, I’ll be held accountable for what I put here has actually made me think about this a little more seriously. It also means (like Z) that I won’t have things like “get the fox mount” etc. because sometimes RNG hates me (I just want my little fox!! :'()
Cutting Edge – all raids*
As anyone who reads my blog will know, raiding is a pretty big part of my WoW time. I love it! So it makes sense that one of my main goals for the year would be related to raiding. The difference this year (compared to others) is that I’mĀ upping things and aiming for full mythic clears on all bosses. The * is there in case 7.2 comes out beginning of December… that would be making things a little tough for me to achieve!
We’ve had a few dramas with the guild over the last few weeks, which I’ll right about in a future blog post. At the moment, this is the goal for everyone involved in my new guild, so here’s hoping things pan out that way. Only set back is that it’s unlikely
Get my class mount*
Shaman class mount!image from Wowhead at http://www.wowhead.com/news=257468/legion-flying-in-7-2-broken-isles-pathfinder-tool-flying-guide-class-mounts-gall
This is another one that comes with a disclaimer that’s really based on time. We don’t know when 7.2 will be coming out, or what it will include (other than we know flyng will be coming with it, as will class mounts). I’m hoping that 7.2 brings the flying and class challenges for the mounts, but not the raid tier until a little while later. With Nighthold only opening tomorrow (SQUEEE!!!!) it would just be too soon to have another new raid tier in the time that I expect to see flying etc.
Complete Family Familiar Achievement
This achievement is a pretty big one – it’s quite time consuming, and sometimes you’re just waiting for a different pet tamer to spawn to be able to work towards it! But it’s absolutely doable, and I really love the pet reward!
Attend all the micro-holidays
I’m SO excited about micro-holidays!! The first one is out this weekend, which I’m really excited about. I think they’re a wonderful addition to the game (and that’s not at all a biased opinion based on the fact that my tweet talking about micro-holidays was featured on the Blizzcon stream!).
Level 3 more toons to 110
As you will have seen from my previous posts, I’ve unlocked all the class halls and gotten artifacts for all of my toons, but at the moment I only have 3 at level 110. Because I’m focusing so much more on raiding this expansion, I don’t have as much spare time as I’ve had in the past to play/level alts. That and I don’t want to rush them – I want to enjoy the order hall experience for each of them. So I think 3 more is realistic. Chances are I’ll get more than 3 done, but just in case I don’t…!
Get the Brawler’s Guild mount
This one should be do-able – I’ve managed to complete Brawler’s Guild for the previous 2 expansions, so I should be ok with this one, too. Some people in guild have already got it, which is awesome! I need some better relics and trinkets for my sets, though, so my dps can be a bit stronger, but that shouldn’t be too tough.
So that’s my list. I’ve tried to choose things that will challenge me, but are doable with having less “outside of raid” time available to me these days.
What’s on your list?
ThursdayĀ night was our last formal raid night for the year. With most people being unavailable for Christmas/New Years/family time it was our last chance to try and get at least one mythic boss down in Trials of Valor.
We’ve been working on Mythic Odyn for a couple of weeks now, but realistically only had about 2 and a half to 3 full nights on him thanks to doing additional mythic EN clears for more gear and skipping a raid night due to attendance boss (thanks Christmas!). We went in on Wednesday night feeling confident we’d get the kill given the nerfs that had been applied to most aspects of the fight.
Maybe that was our problem… maybe we were a little too confident, who knows. Anyway, we did not succeed on Wednesday night. It was a bit of a blow to our confidence, I think. It sounds cocky and stuck up to say, but we really should have been able to get Odyn down before the nerfs. Having the nerfs applied andĀ still not getting him down was not a great feeling.
We didn’t expect to be raiding on Thursday. There were a few people who had already said they couldn’t make it, so we weren’t holding our breath. By some miracle, we ended up having enough people on to try again on Thursday night. It was another solid night of work on this boss. We were getting frustrated – on our first pull we had 1% left to defeat him, but wiped. It felt so close, but it ended up taking the entire night to get him down. In true Ominous fashion, it happened on the last pull of the night. But we got there!
I actually really like this fight, frustrations aside. There are a lot of things that drive me nuts about it. And even though it’s quite a chaotic fight, it’s chaos I can control (unlike Cenarius) so I enjoy it a lot more.
Turns out our enhancement shaman was recording the fight! So if you want to check out how we did, here’s the video:
Healing wise, this fight goes from not a lot to do, to complete burn all you mana and do what you can oh my god we’re all going to die. I’m rolling in crit at the moment and can’t even burn through my mana pool. Even still, I didn’t chain heal my butt off – I was trying to be smart about my chain heals now that I haveĀ 
Ā Focuser of Jonat, the ElderĀ . It can stack up to 5 times, making my chain heal pretty powerful (especially when combined with other talents.) Ā I had been doing pretty well for most of our attempts. Of course the on the kill my heals were lower *sigh* But at least I was alive at the end, so I had that going for me.
I have to say I was disappointed at the end. Most people weren’t thrilled with getting the kill. Some people just seemed down right annoyed, and I found that really disappointing. I understand the frustration, I really do, but isn’t half the fun of raiding the excitement and satisfaction of getting those kills for the first time? I love stupid nerd screams – they have so much joy in them. If you’re not feeling that after a defeating a boss, doesn’t it just start to feel like work? I dunno.
Anyway, mythic Odyn is defeated! I hoping we get at least Guam down before Nighthold comes out. Helya would be nice, too! š
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 anotherĀ 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 meĀ 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… š 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 š
The new raid week started for us last night and we absolutely powered through a full heroic clear in no time at all. Then we went in to mythics and cleared Mythic Nythendra on just the second pull. We headed off to spider bird but only managed to get 1 pull in (which we got below 50% before wiping), but then the servers went down so we called it a night. So overall it was a really great raid night. Except I spent most of it in tears.
I have been looking forward to a new raid tier for ages. I only joined my current guild at the end of Hellfire Citadel – once mythics had all bee cleared. And by that point everyone was so much more geared than I was and knew the fights that restoration shaman mastery was kinda useless (who needs stronger heals on low health players when no-one takes any damage?!) That and I was up against priests and pallies… I didn’t really stand a chance. So even though I didn’t feel good not being top of the heals, I just plodded along and made sure I contributed dps where I could, and did mechanics so I wasn’t a burden. And I waited for Legion and new raids where I’d have a chance to show I could do this.
Except now we’re here in Legion and I’m still shit.
Last night I was constantly at the bottom of the heals. There were times when I was in a brilliant rhythm and doing everything I was supposed to do at the right times, and got to do some of my bigger heals in moments where people were at low health. And I’d get excited, thinking surely this was the moment I’d edge up those healing charts. But no. There I am at the bottom. And sometimes below the warrior tank. What.The.Hell. It’s not just in comparison to other healing classes either – when I look at the logs and look at how I do compared to other resto shamans, I’m doing poorly. It’s devastating to the ego. By the time we got to Xavius last night I was bawling my eyes out.
I love my resto shaman so much, I really do. But I’m finding her tough at the moment. There are a lot of my abilities that rely on people to be close-ish together and to actually stand in the things. Abilities like healing rain, spirit link, earthen shield totem, one of my healing trinkets, and of course my artifact ability, can all really shine when people are stacked up (which is why I can do really well on trash pulls!) but no-one is standing stacked up in raids. It feels stupid dropping these abilities on just tanks, or a handful of melee who run out of it anyway (except for maybe the shield totem). I’ve been trying so hard – I’ve been researching the fights and working on gear stats and trying different rotations. And it just all feels like for nothing. I am just shit.
What to do?
Today I’m not feeling a lot better, but Z was kind enough to listen/read my rants this morning and offer some advice that was confirming some changes I was looking at making. Namely, I’m looking at changing my build. For restoration shamans, it’s always mastery mastery mastery. And for good reason – when people are low for a reasonable amount of time, I can physically see my heals bringing up groups of people all at once – it’s great! But in raids (so far) that doesn’t happen enough. I feel weak. I feel like what I do doesn’t make enough of a difference. I mean even healing tide totem doesn’t feel like it’s doing anything anymore.
The build
I’ve spoken of my love for Ask Mr Robot plenty of times before, and I do love the site and what they do. So of course as Emerald Nightmare was coming up I went on to see what my best pieces would be. What it was showing me was really weird – I couldn’t figure out why it was telling me to not wear mastery gear. Then I saw the optimum build was nothing to do with mastery, and everything to do with Critical Strike.
Instead of
Intellect > Mastery > Critical Strike > Haste > Versatility
Ask Mr Robot was giving me
Intellect > Critical Strike > Versatility > Haste > Mastery > Leech
Quite different. In the end I manually built the stat weights in to be the order I thought they needed to be in and went from there. But now, I’m beginning to think I should try the Mr Robot build. The build is called “Sustained HPS” and I’m guessing the theory behind it is that more crits = more mana regen = more heals I can cast and for longer. The versatility will just make my heals a bit better, too. I’m wondering if, with a crit build, I can do more chain heals. It used to be that that’s where a lot of my healing would come from. Right now it’s all coming from riptide (which is unlikely to change) but maybe I can bring up the AoE heals a bit more. The positives and negatives of this are the same – Ask Mr Robot is based on pure math, which in some ways is great because math doesn’t lie. But in other ways it’s not always great because I’m not a machine – I make mistakes and/or make different spell choices based on situation. But I think it’s worth a shot.
The talents
With that in mind, I’m also going to look at changing my talents around. I had tried the Cloudburst build, but I was not great at it. And a lot of the time the damage didn’t line up with the cloudbursting-ness, so it felt wasted. I absolutely love the Wellspring talent – it looks awesome and it feels satisfying, but it’s mana intensive making, it pretty expensive. And there is a better talent choice if I’m looking at chain healing again.
This is what I’m leaning towards as new talent choices (or see this link if you want the interactive version)
Torrent is lovely with Echo of the Elements (Echo lets me riptide more often, so I think they work well together) And I do love my fart talent (Gust of wind) but I’m thinking of giving Graceful spirit a go for awhile so that I can cast on the move more often.
The tier 60 talent I’m moving to will be Deluge, which just means I need to start chain heal on a riptided target or someone in my healing rain (which means I need to make my vuhdo frames show me who’s in healing rain!)
I’m sticking with the Earthen Shield totem as I’m finding it a lot more useful the more I remember to use it. And it’s good fun to have for trash. Echo is there of course because I failed at Cloudburst and because Bottomless Depths is only good on low health targets, which we’re not really getting at the moment.
The last line has been the one that hurts my head. As I mentioned, I’ve been using Wellspring, and it has been great and is good when people are quite spread out. Ascendance got taken away as a base line ability and put in as a talent here, but I’m just not feeling it. Again, it requires players to be close by to each other, and because everyone is spread out it wouldn’t get used to its full advantage. High Tide is where I’m going to move to, I think – it will heal an additional target AND the falloff with each bounce is reduced, making my chain heals a bit stronger overall. (Chain heal’s heal drops off each time it hits a target).
To make this build work I need to make sure that I’m actually using chain heal more often. Which will probably need to change when Tier 19 set bonuses come in to play. But that’s not for awhile yet, and right now I’m fighting to keep my place on the team (not that anyone is telling me it’s in jeopardy – I just don’t feel like I’m contributing enough to the heal team right now. I’m letting everyone down).
The patience of a great healing team leader
I’m lucky that my heal leader (Bume) is awesome. I cracked it in healer chat last night just saying I was done with it all because I suck. Bume started whispering me asking what was up and I explained, and he’s offered to go through my logs and help see where some improvements can be made. Which is really lovely. The point is, it makes me feel better, and I appreciate the help. Because right now I’m just so lost.
Let’s see how this goes
So all of the above might be wrong. It might just be shit, and it might make things worse. I won’t do anything for tonight because I won’t have the time to think through the above before raid, but I’ll be making some changes over the weekend to see how it plays out.
Anyway, that’s where things are at the moment. Giant sooky Cinder.
I’ve taken so long to write this because my Dropbox is full and I can’t get screenshots while I’m at work anymore!!
I always feel behind when it comes to new content coming out. It’s the difficulty of time zones. The 7.0 Legion pre-patch ended up going live some time in the wee hours of Wednesday morning for me, which meant that I didn’t get a chance to get in to the game until I got home from work last night – somewhere around 6pm in the end.
I knew going in to this new patch that there would be some big changes, and that things might not work. So I didn’t hold my breath that things would be ok. But things were PERFECT. Every addon that I use was working. The new addon I downloaded was working beautifully. My vuhdo didn’t need anything done to it – it just worked! My Tell Me Whens needed minor tweaks due to spell changes, but they were minimal. I even managed to sort out the graphics issues that I was having on PTR – everything looks stunning. And for me, it just works. I know that I am immensely fortunate, and that many other people haven’t had such a smooth run. I do hope their issues get sorted quickly.
Transmog
So you’d think that I would have been up to all sorts of adventures given everything went so smoothly for me. But no. No, I’ve been in a never-ending transmog purgatory. I knew I had been hoarding a lot of BoE pieces in preparation for the pre-patch, but I didn’t realise it was this much. All I can say is thank goodness for Can I Mog It? It has been a huge time saver! But I still have a very long way to go.
I started working on clearing out my transmog on my old Horde server, where I had my only max level plate wearer. Because everything needs to be soulbound in order to be added to the Appearances, I had to make sure I had a toon available to wear everything. On the Horde server I had all 10 character slots taken up, and every single character had full bags and bank (all toons had at least Embersilk bags for all bag space – some had all hexweave bags). In addition, one of those toons had a maxed out guild bank with all tabs full of BoEs. And then there’s my main Alliance server which has another 4 toons with full bags. Plus all my other random lower level alts who will have bits and pieces I’ve kept over the years. It’s a bloody big job!
So far I have managed to get through most of what’s on my Horde server. My main goal has been to transfer my paladin and mage over to Alliance, which meant I had to get through all of my plate gear before I could move my paladin. I believe I got it all done! So she packed her bags (full of leftover BoEs to sell on my new server) and now she’s a cheeky Draenei again! ā¤
Cinderdawn – my cheeky Draenei paladin
It feels great to have an Alliance paladin again (although I will confess, I did like her as a blood elf, too!).
Once my paladin was moved, I worked on sorting out as much as I could of everything else, mailing between all the toons, learning what I could and returning what I would sell. I made my mage guild master of my bank guild, with the plan to move her and the guild to my Alliance server (just in case I wanted extra space!) In the end, I still had way too many pieces to take in the guild bank (even though it was jam packed full!), so will have to leave some behind. I can’t transfer her yet, though, because I discovered much too late that she needs to be guild master for 7 days before she can be transferred. So I won’t get to do that until Sunday.
I still have my Alliance server to go through and all of my little lowbie alts, but I really can’t be bothered right now. I’m transmogged out for now!
Turtles
So what have I been doing since then? Fishing. Yeah you heard me- FISHING! Most people will know by now that the murlocs that spawn in the waters around your fishing shack have a chance to drop both the Sea Turtle and the Riding Turtle. With the loot changes made in the pre-patch, personal loot options mean that a raid group of 40 can fish together and everyone can loot the murlocs. The loot is personal, so what drops is unique to you, but it means that with everyone fishing together, there are more Carp/Minnow captured to spawn the murlocs, giving you a better chance at the mounts. And of course I had to try.
Chances of getting turtles from fishing greatly increased by hilarious hats!
Each day I’ll spend about an hour or so fishing in these groups. I got lucky and managed to get the Riding Turtle on my second day of trying! Still trying for the Sea Turtle – hopefully I’ll get lucky with that one soon. The beauty of this also means more chances of Nat’s Lucky coins, which can be used for purchasing pets and another Strider mount (if you have the reputation). I grabbed one of the pets, but need to work on the rep for the rest of the goodies.
Cinder’s ADORABLE riding turtle!
Raiding
We actually dove straight into raiding on the Wednesday night. It was a mistake, but only because some people had broken addons which were messing up their UI etc. which made trying to do mythic Mannoroth a bit difficult to do! So we called it until the Sunday night to give people time to fix their UIs etc. Additional nerfs ended up happening prior to that, so come Sunday we just face rolled it, and same again Wednesday just gone. Still not luck rolling the mount, but given I never expected to be going in to mythic Hellfire Citadel at all, I’ve been really lucky.
Ready for the demons
There’s still a lot of work I need to do before I’m ready for the demons – I need to figure out ALL of my alts (haven’t touched any of them!) and finish up sorting out the transmog. And I want to go on a bunch of transmog runs so I can fill up some of the spaces in the Appearance tab. But I think the demons are due soon…
My bank alt sits in the new Stormwind Park
Today Watcher Dev made a post on the forums about removing the cost of changing specs (that is currently on the Legion beta) but instead implementing a cost for changing talents. I’ll post both of his comments below (these can be found on the forums here)
We’ve definitely heard much feedback to this effect, and this is something we’d been discussing quite a bit internally as well over the past couple of weeks. In an upcoming build (hopefully the next one; if not, then the one after), the respec cost is gone, and players can freely switch between all specializations with the normal restrictions of cast-time, needing to be out of combat, and so forth.
Ultimately, the intent behind the respec cost (which isn’t really a new concept, dating back to 2004 class trainers) was to help reinforce a bit of spec identity through declaring a “primary” spec to which you could always return for free, and to serve as a mild gold sink. But in practice, changing specialization is a pretty significant transformation in terms of action bars, optimal gear in some cases, artifacts, and so forth, and already not something that people were taking lightly. I suspect the cost will not be missed.
An area that has appeared to need a bit more friction, however, is actually talent changes. Especially with no reagent cost at all now, it can be all too easy to activate AoE talents before larger packs of enemies in a dungeon, and then switch back to single-target talents before a lieutenant or a boss. Or someone might switch to a passive movement-speed talent when traversing an area, and then back to something functional before entering combat. At that point, we’re often hardly talking about a meaningful choice at all, but rather a nuisance of extra button-presses or UI navigation before you can use your desired talents.
And so, alongside removing the respec cost, that same upcoming build will also restrict the ability to change talents when away from a safe area (defined as an area that provides the Rested state). We currently plan to give Scribes a recipe to craft a consumable Tome that can be dropped in order to allow all nearby players to retalent freely for a time – particularly useful for group play.
and
A couple of clarifications, one of which will probably be a relief and the other likely less so: The Inscription consumable as currently planned would be something that anyone could drop, not a profession-requiring item like a Jeeves. But, in terms of the materials required, we’re thinking of something that’s more aimed at groups, and probably not the sort of thing an individual is likely to carry a stack of and use freely.
This is clearly more restrictive than the way it works in Warlords. Why would we ever add restrictions to something like this? Do we just sit around and amuse ourselves by thinking of things to take away from players? (We don’t.)
Ultimately, for a choice to be meaningful there has to be some associated cost or trade-off in the process. Do you want to eat your cake, or do you want to save it for another time? If you could do both, that wouldn’t be much of a choice.
When it comes to talents, which serve the primary purpose of customization and differentiation, consider two extremes in terms of how they could be handled. Please, take a moment to think through the following scenarios:
First, what if you could switch talents freely, at any time, including while in combat? You’d effectively no longer have a talent system – you’d have a spellbook with another 21 active and passive abilities in it, with keybinds to swap between them as needed. Every player of a given spec would have identical capabilities, with some cumbersome interface management required to swap among them on the fly.
Second, what if you could literally never switch talents, short of making a brand new character? Choosing a talent would be a far, far weightier choice than any decision you currently make in the game (other than choosing your starting class, I suppose). Some favored cookie-cutter specs would emerge, but with 2187 different permutations of talents, there’d be significantly more variety among players. But some niche talents would likely go almost entirely unused (though players who did choose them would be invaluable when those situations arose). And feeling like you’d made a mistake, and were stuck with one or more talents that you didn’t like at all, might completely sour your enjoyment of a character.
Anyway, we are of course doing neither of those things, but there’s a full spectrum of choice that lies in between. We’ve generally moved away from the second scenario and closer to the first over time (years and years back, respecs were so expensive in relative terms that players often waited for class changes to automatically refund their talents rather than spend the gold to move a point around). Other than the combat restrictions, the live game is not terribly far off from the first scenario.
There’s still a fair bit of thought that goes into which talents to select for a raid encounter, where you’re in combat for several minutes in a row and facing a variety of threats, and you may have to weigh whether you want better AoE damage for minions in the first phase, or better single-target burst later in the fight; whether you want a passive movement-speed increase for higher overall uptime, or an on-demand active movement ability in case you get targeted by a specific troublesome ability; and so forth.
But most other content, whether it’s a single quest boss out in the world, or a dungeon that breaks down to a series of sub-1-minute combats, don’t offer nearly that much variety. And so you take the AoE talent for the AoE pack, and the single-target talent for the lone boss, to the point that you might as well just have both of them all the time, which might be powerful, but wouldn’t be a choice.
So where does this leave us?
Of course the world is ending. Of course this is worst change ever. Of course Blizzard are stupid. /end sarcasm
You are not the only person playing the game
I’ve said this many times in the past, and I’ll keep saying it until I’m blue in the face. To be fair, these posts have only been made in the last couple of hours, so a lot of responses are gut reactions, and I can totally understand that.But throwing around “this change personally affects me greatly, so go back to the other way so that I’m not screwed over” is not what this conversation needs, because pretty much everyone can say that.
Which is why I’m here. I want people to take a moment to stop, take a breath and a GREAT big step away from the situation at the moment and think outside of how these changes directly impact you alone. Let’s talk about how these changes impact different types of players and see if we can find a solution that suits everyone.
There are a few points to cover:
- removal of spec change cost
- change of how talents are changed
- possible alternatives
Healers/Tanks rejoice! No more cost to switch specs.
Firstly, the removal of spec change costs. The cost of changing specs has been a concern for me since it was first revealed. (See this post about it!) The TL;DR overview of my thoughts on the cost of changing specs is below, and hopefully point out why this cost was an unbalanced one:
- many (if not most) healers don’t like to level as healers, so have a dps spec they use on a regular basis to level or do dailies with
- locking in, or making it difficult/expensive to change specs means healers/tanks may get sat from raids instead of being able to stay in and changing to a different spec because they can’t afford to change
- small raid teams who are already struggling to find raid numbers may have more difficulty finding even more numbers because aren’t willing to pay to switch specs (so where you could get away with having “swing heals/dps” players, you might need a separate person for each spec)
Many of the arguments I’m seeing on the forums at the moment are from people complaining that spec changes happen less often than talent changes, so why punish people for the thing they do most often? That’s a fair enough call. However what it doesn’t take in to account is the size of the impact on the people are are affected. It may not impact everyone, but those it does impact have some big quality of life reductions. To put it bluntly, this cost to me always felt “unfair” to hybrid classes. So I am glad this cost is removed.
Oh, to change a talent
So the second announcement in the above post, and the topic I feel needs some thought and open discussion, is around the proposed change to how talents are swapped. The proposed change is essentially that if people want to be able to change their talents, they need to be in a a resting area, and they will need a tome crafted by inscriptionists that can be dropped by any player.
There are two key points that this change brings up…
Player disruption
This is the big one. The loudest argument against this change is that it is incredibly disruptive. Players have become used to changing their talents whenever they want to, and putting in this restriction is going to be time consuming, expensive, and overall and very negative experience for players.
The reasoning behind putting in this restriction comes back to that ever present notion of “class/spec identity”. Love it or hate it, this concept is going to be sticking around. And this way of changing talents definitely reiterates that, the notion being that you need to decide if you’re a restoration shaman who likes raining on people all the time or if you want to use your totems for healing boosts (for example). But is it the right thing to do here? Possibly not. Ion’s explanation behind the dev’s thinking is that there is no real “choice” in what you’re doing – you’re just going through the motions and swapping out one spell for another with little impact.
My feelings are that some disruption is necessary. Others have argued in the past that associating a cost with talent changes doesn’t play in to class fantasy or make them think about their choices – they see it as a burden. I can understand this, especially when in the past the new talent system was promoted as something that allowed you to swap in and out of talents as fights needed them.
I think what the developers have in mind for how this fantasy plays out is not necessarily about how this plays as class fantasy, but how this plays as overall game play fantasy. The scenario is this – we as a team walk in to a raid zone together, with the purpose of taking down the “big bads”. As a group we get a battle plan together – who will stand where and do play what role (not just who tanks and who heals, but what a warlock might do to quickly move the entire group etc.) Part of that planning and strategising is sorting out what tools people will need to defeat this boss. And it’s at this point that changing talents would come in to play.
This idea is further reiterated with Ion’s comments:
…in terms of the materials required, we’re thinking of something that’s more aimed at groups, and probably not the sort of thing an individual is likely to carry a stack of and use freely.
The whole idea is based on a group mentality. This is a viable option for organised teams and raid groups, but is less so for pugs (which are still heavily promoted), especially if the mats required to make these tomes come from various profession sources.
So to sum up. my thoughts are:
- a cost for changing talents is understandble
- what the cost is should be given more thought
- a group cost might not be the best approach.
We’ll come back to these points in a sec.
Boost for scribes
This is the point that most people are kind of washing over, because it doesn’t affect a lot of people. But let’s face it, Inscriptionists have gotten a bit of a raw deal so far in Legion. One of their primary purposes – crafting of glyphs – has been removed, so they’ve been a bit useless. Having this tome as a raid-required material is actually a really great idea. It helps them craft a consumable that would be needed over and over again, like potions and flasks or food or enchants and gems. I think this this is a really great improvement to the profession to make it viable long term.
What are our options?
If we take the above in to account, we can try and find a “happy medium” here somewhere. Discussing this with my partner and throwing ideas around, we talked about options and he came up with the idea of the cost still being a crafted tome, but one that is for individuals that has charges on them. This way the items are still useful for inscriptionists to craft; there is a cost involved with changing specs that is meaningful but not burdensome, and; people still have a feeling of freedom when it comes to their personal choices during raids/world content. And even though I’m not a fan of there being a cost applied to changing specs, this tome could also be used to change specs, giving it multiple purposes.
What do you think? What happy medium can you see here that could be suitable for all player types?
I don’t think there is ever going to be a time that I’m not worried about being good enough in this world. When it comes to World of Warcraft, I’m always worried that I’m not a good enough healer, or that I’m not a good enough raider, or that I don’t contribute enough to the community etc. Sometimes it gets to me – last night was one of those nights.
During raid last night I was asked to be the swing healer who would dps unless needed to heal. Which is fine – I enjoy playing elemental, so it was no big deal, other than the fact that I hadn’t dps-ed in HFC for quite a few months, and never at mythic level. So I was a bit terrified. I wasn’t at the bottom of the dps, but I wasn’t doing as well as I would have liked, and as the evening wore on I just found myself feeling worse and worse, which meant I performed worse. Our last fight of the night was Gorefiend which I thankfully got to heal, but I still made a couple of mistakes (nothing wipe-worthy, but silly enough mistakes that I shouldn’t have made). At the end of the raid I was just feeling a pretty blah.
Then I’m dragged in to a different channel in Team Speak that our healing team is in, and I start to panic. I know that I’ve been approved for the team, but like I said, I’m still always worried I’m not good enough and they’ll change their mind (thank you anxiety). I thought this was going to be it. But it wasn’t. Instead, it was our healing team leader wanting to get us all together to say thank you to us for being a great healing team and for doing so well. That he was happy with everyone and felt that our healing team was strong going in to Legion and he wanted to say thanks. It felt really great to get that feedback, you know? Especially after feeling rubbish throughout the night.
I then took the opportunity to say thank you for having been accepted in to the team permanently, even though my heals had been low coming in late to the expansion. And then all 3 of the other healers all at once immediately jumped to my defense and said the most wonderful things about how no, actually I was doing a really great job, and I’d been especially awesome on Archimonde, and sure numbers may play a part in it, but more than that it’s about being able to follow mechanics and use cooldowns etc. when they’re called and I was doing all that really well. And it was just so lovely to hear that from all of them, and that they could see that I had been trying and working my bum off to do things right.
So that’s all this post is – to remind people that even if you’re not feeling great about how you’re doing, chances are someone is out there seeing the wonderful things that you do and they are glad for it. And I also just wanted to say that I am very grateful for my new raid team. I’m excited about raiding in Legion more than ever.
This week, I got an achievement I did not expect to get. This week, I killed Mythic Archimonde.
Because my new guild only had a few kills on Mythic Archimonde, I didn’t expect to be in there for a little while yet. They needed to keep in strong healers to help out any lower level/newer dps players. But on Thursday, they got me in there as there were a few dps missing and one of the healers needed to go boomkin. I was terrified. I had watched the videos a few times, so I knew what abilities to expect etc. But watching videos is very different to actually being in there and doing the fight itself.
Turns out, I didn’t have too much to worry about. In the end I think I actually did alright. My healing wasn’t as strong as the others, but I held my own, and I did all the mechanics properly so I didn’t kill anyone (which is nice!)
It took a few goes – there are some mechanics that can very easily wipe the whole raid. But in the end, Archimonde went down. AND I was still alive at the end!!!! I was quite emotional. I honestly didn’t think that I would get the chance to even attempt Mythic Archimonde, let alone kill him. But here I am. š
It’s been awhile since I posted. I’ll be honest, I’ve been busy and not really having a brilliant time of things so haven’t had a lot of energy to write. That’s not to say that things haven’t been happening, so that’s why I’m here.
Raiding
All dressed up for a Mythic Mannaroth fight
The biggest thing is that I’m now 12/13 mythic bosses down in Hellfire Citadel. Things with the new raid team are going alright. I still feel like I’m not good enough, but I am trying my best and hopefully it’s enough. I’ll probably feel a bit more stable about things when my trial period is over. The existing healer team is very strong, and as a restoration shaman going up against well geared priests and paladins… well it was always going to be a bit rough. I just focus on doing the absolute best that I can, and making sure I do all boss mechanics properly (or admit to failing them when I do!).
The guild has a really interesting dynamic – everyone is very passionate about raiding and doing it well, which can lead to heated discussions. There’s also no issue with calling people out if they do something wrong in a fight. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea – and I never thought I’d do well in a team like that – but it actually works well with these guys. None of it is taken personally – if you’re called out for making a mistake in a fight, you’re not being called out on a personal level, just the mistake that you made so that it doesn’t happen again and so that other people don’t make the same mistake. It makes me work harder – it makes me want to be better. And like I said, it’s not personal. Everyone jokes around and seems to have a good relationship with one another. I’m liking the guild and the raiding – I really do hope they keep me!
The only downside at the moment is having to grind out valor. My game time has been shrunk a bit lately because of how busy I have been, and how often we raid. It feels like all my WoW time is going in the valor capping, and it’s awful. One of the better ways of getting valor is with mythic dungeons, which I personally am just not a fan of. But more than that, it just means that what little time I do have in game is spent doing that. I haven’t done mount farming for weeks. I forced myself over the weekend to do what I wanted to do (more on that later) but the niggling in the back of mind that I should be grinding valor was there the whole time which soured things a bit. I’m trying to find a compromise with myself, but haven’t got there yet.
Moving alts & transmog
Silly Cinder…
I did have a realisation the other day that avoided what could have been a bit of a disaster – I’ve been wanting to transfer my paladin and my mage to my new server (hoping I get to stay there!). I feel really naked without my alts with me, so I was wanting to bring over the 2 others I had definitely planned on bringing. Thor suggested I wait until we’re in the team for sure, which is good advice. But then I realised something else. On my old server (where all my other toons are) I have 7 other max level toons as well as a bank toon with a jam packed guild bank, and another level 65ish DK with big bags that are probably about three quarters full. Most of these toons are hoarding huge amounts of transmog gear. Some has been to sell, but a lot is being held in preparation for the new transmog system in Legion.
With the new transmog system, a player needs to be able to equip the gear in order to have it added to the wardrobe. So for example if I wanted to add a plate chest to my wardrobe, a paladin, warrior or death knight would need to be able to equip it (which means they would also need to be at the appropriate level to learn it, too). I only have 1 plate wearer – my paladin. If I had have transferred here now, I wouldn’t have been able to learn all of the plate transmog gear I’veĀ been holding on to! (She has no bag space either… I really am a bad hoarder!) So I saved myself some heartache there. What it does mean, though, is that no toons will be moving until the pre-expansion patch releases that brings out the wardrobe system. Very glad I realised all that before I made the move!!
Making a monk
Cindersong – fierce, but adorable!
Speaking of feeling lost without my alts – I can’t afford to move all my toons over to the new server. It’s a server and faction change, which is over $60 per toon. I have 7 plus the guild bank toon, which means a small fortune to move them all. I’ve made the decision that I’ll definitely be moving across my paladin and my mage (because they were my first toons and I always find myself falling back to them.) I miiiiight move my warlock because she has the green fire and title etc. and I worked really hard for that! But not sure yet.
Anyway, this means that I need my other alts. So I have started levelling a monk. Most of the time I play her while on the bench from raiding (I’m not in for Archimonde fights) but this weekend I decided to spend a decent amount of time levelling her, so that I could feel like I’d had some “me” WoW time. I really love levelling. The world of Azeroth (and beyond) is so amazing. But there is so much content that gets skipped over. (definitely a topic for a future blog post).
Anyway, Cindersong is currently level 64. She’s Windwalker at the moment, but I’ll get her doing Mistweaving again when she’s higher level. For now, she’s having a blast kicking things in the face š (Monks really do have awesome animations!) After my monk, I’ll get back to a Night Elf druid I started levelling awhile ago.
All over the internets
So in addition to the WoW stuff, I’ve also been getting around the interwebs. A couple of weeks ago now I was approached by Dorelei who writes for the Chain Heal website (which is a GREAT site for restoration shamans, btw! Check it out!!). She wanted to do an interview with me for their “Shaman Meet Up” segment. So that was a lot of fun. You can read it here.
Battletagged has been going well – we’ll be doing episode 13 on Tuesday which is all about datamining. Should be a good conversation I think.
Reins of Azeroth is also going well, with episode 14 of that due to be recorded next Tuesday as well. I’ve been spending a load of time on the website for that, including making a huge spread sheet of all the mounts we’ve covered, which hopefully people are finding useful. It is starting to get to a the point where we are going to have covered all of the mounts, so it’s in the back of my mind that we need to figure out what to do after that. Achievements? Toys? Pets? All of the above? Who knows. People seem to like the show, though, so we might just ask what the people want š
In addition to all of that, I’ve going to be a guest on 3 different podcasts in the next month. I am geeking out about all 3. One is Girls Gone WoW which I’ve been on twice already, but EJ and Raven are so lovely, and it was the first podcast I got into so it always has a special place in my heart. The other two podcasts I won’t mention yet because the shows haven’t mentioned me being on there yet! But they are two other podcasts that are right up there on my favourites list, and I am so stoked to have been asked to be on them! I’ll definitely be posting when they are out.
Ok, that’s enough from me! I think we’re all caught up here. š
My poor neglected blog!
I have been so busy lately, and to be honest I’m not completely sure why. Just lots of stuff happening I suppose, and time passing much too quickly.
A little over a week or so ago I transferred servers to trial with a guild for Legion. I am back to being Alliance. AND I’m on a PVE server, so no more ganking! I can’t even tell you how much of a relief it is to be able to run around and do dailies and not worry about some awful person coming along and killing me repeatedly, making it so I can’t get anything done. Talking to Thor about it last night, he was saying that coming back to a PVE server has actually brought back some of his love of the game again, which makes me really happy.
So couple of days after we transferred our new guild got Mythic Archionde down, and were ready to start Mythic farm, which we both would be invited to go along to. It has been a very frantic time reading up on the mythic changes in the fights, and I’ve just generally been shitting myself because, other than the run I did with Navimie the other week, I hadn’t raided since around November last year – well over 4 months ago!
I was also nervous about raiding with a new team. Other than Thor, I didn’t know anyone in the raid, and that always makes me nervous, too. And then add to that the fact that this was farm for the team – they already had their strats worked out, they already know what they are doing. I find it a lot more difficult to go in to situations like that where everything is already sorted. I like learning with a team and figuring things out together.
But, having said all that, things seemed to go ok. Last Sunday night the healing leader got me in the teamspeak and introduced me to the rest of the healing team. Then an hour before our first raid on Wednesday night he spent time with Thor and I going through how they do things and the fights etc. He was very kind and patient, and made me feel a lot more comfortable about everything.
The raid nights themselves were alright. My lack of gear is painful. I’m healing for considerably less than everyone else. What doesn’t help is that everyone is so geared, so they don’t take too much damage, and as a resto shaman it means my mastery doesn’t kick in all that much. But I did the best that I could, and made sure to focus on doing all of the mechanics well (though I did get one-shot by the Barrage on Iron Reaver!)Looking through the logs for the fights afterwards, I was generally very low on the “unnecessary damage taken” meters which I think it good. Hopefully the raid leaders were happy with that!
Over the 2 nights I got 8 mythic bosses down, and was very lucky to get a few pieces of gear (including a new shield and my bis legs – warforged!) Unfortunately I didn’t get to do a couple of bosses that had key pieces of gear that I was after, however as the farm nights get easier I’m sure I’ll be able to eventually get in there and get the goodies.
So overall, it’s been a really interesting time. It’s great fun raiding mythic bosses again! And the guild are lovely – they give each other crap during raids, they’re serious about getting stuff done, but they also have fun and I like that. So hopefully they are happy with me and want to keep me for Legion!
In the meantime, I’ve been drooling over my Alliance garrison, which is just so darn beautiful!
The hunt for a new guild/raid team is still going strong, and I’m not having any luck at all yet (which will be the topic of a future post, I’m sure). However it hasn’t been a complete loss. On Wednesday the ever so delightful Navimie happened to notice my post on the forums about looking for a raid team. She was there looking for numbers for her guild’s mythic runs. Long story short, Navi invited me and Thor to come along to their raid run that night, which we happily accepted!
It was a really fun night, and was a stark reminder of how much I really enjoy raiding. I was so nervous, though.Ā Thor and I figured out that it had been about 4 months since our guild had stopped raiding, so I had the “omg I’m going to fail so bad!” jitters. We ran through on heroic as we didn’t have the numbers for mythic, but that didn’t matter. Navi’s team got to bring along some alts which helped get them some gear which is always helpful. I did a few bosses (including Archimonde!) as elemental, which was terrifying! But I don’t think I was too much of a burden (hopefully!). I was able to heal later on which I was loads more comfortable with. It really confirmed for me that healing is what I love to do, and that’s the role I need to be in for Legion.
I tried to sneak in a few pics of Navi, but they are a very “on the ball” team so I didn’t get much of a chance. Instead, after we were done, Navi came to my garrison for a dance and to get some pics together. And so I was Navispammed!
Thank you to Navi for letting me and Thor tag along to your raid, and for being such a delightful person to know. And for Navispamming me! I feel truly honoured š
Well today I finally made a decision about where I want to be in Legion, and have decided to look for a new guild and raid team. I have loved being in Deadline – the people are amazing. We always have a laugh, we know how to have a good time. It has been awesome. But there are some niggling issues that have lead to me wanting to find a new home.
Firstly, a lot of the players in the team have been paying WoW for a long time, and just aren’t interested in spending loads of time in raids trying to get mythic bosses down or doing achievements etc. I thought that this would be something I’d be ok with, but I’m really not, because what it leads to is people disappearing all the time making it impossible to even consider raiding past getting heroics down. Since I started playing WoW I’ve been in raid teams that have done the hard modes. I love how challenging they are, and I love the buzz of working your ass off on a boss and finally getting it down. Unfortunately this isn’t something the guild shares. And that’s ok – we’re just in different places and wanting different things from the game.
Secondly, I loathe being on a pvp server. Particularly this one. I was talking to my partner about this earlier and we’ve been on other pvp servers and it’s never been as bad as it has been on Barth. It’s brutal – groups of opposing faction just ganking relentlessly making it impossible to do what I want to do is not my idea of fun. It makes for a really miserable experience and I just don’t want that anymore. I want to be able to level in Legion without having the fear of looking over my shoulder or hearing that damn rogue sound, warning me of impending doom. So no pvp server.
Lastly, I am an Alliance girl through and through. I’m glad that I’ve spent time onĀ the Horde side to check out the story, but I don’t like it. I don’t like how cranky and rough everyone is. I can’t remember who it was, but someone wrote in to Girls Gone WoW a few weeks ago and made the great point that if you like the Camelot style of stories, Alliance is for you. And that’s how I feel. I like things to look nice. I like to have seats to sit on, damn it! And I like the NPCs being kind. I want to go back to that.
So! I’m now on the hunt for a guild and raid team that I can call home from Legion onwards. I’m looking a team that is:
- Alliance
- non-pvp server
- doing mythic raids in Legion
- still loving the game!
- ideally Oceanic server
I’ll be wanting to play my restoration shaman (with elemental off spec). And I do believe that my partner, Thor, will be coming along with me too as a frost/unholy DK (he’s crazy amazeballs).
If you know of any teams that would fit the bill, please let me know! Otherwise, please keep your fingers crossed for me that I can find a new home for Legion.
I am still in a bit of shock as I write this.
This eveningĀ I managed to get the “Proven Healer” title for completing 30 waves on endless difficulty in the Proving Grounds. I have been working on this achievement since Mists of Pandaria. This has been about 3 years in the making. And today I finally did it.
I know so many people have done this and found it a piece of cake. Not me. I always had mana issues (in that I had NONE), I had nothing that would keep the tank alive when he was getting wailed on, and it just seemed that the dps would stand in everything in the world and die at the drop of a hat. Today I figured out why. I was always too over geared and the scaling was screwing me over.
Like I said, I’ve been working on this since it was available in Mists. Back then I was trying mostly on my paladin (which should have been a lot easier by default) but could never get it, no matter how hard I tried. I tried for awhile on my shaman as well during Mists but still failed. I tried again in Warlords briefly – still failed. I had looked at guides, I had tried all different stats, gear sets, talents/glyphs etc. Failed every time. I got in the 20s a couple of times but always fell flat. It was a very disheartening feeling, because so many people I knew managed to get the achievement without any troubles at all. Even people who didn’t main a healer. It was demoralising and I felt that I must just be the worst healer. It honestly made me question whether or not I was good enough as a healer to raid at all, and more than once had me on the verge of calling raiding quits.
selfies during the down time between waves š
I was inspired to try again today by this post on reddit from a user who has managed to get endless wave 30 on every single class, on every single spec. Amazing. I figured it had been some time since I’d tried again, so why not? I read through this guy’s advice. The way proving grounds works in Warlords is a bit different to Mists – in Warlords the mobs scale to your gear rather than your gear scaling to the instance. The goal is to get gear as close to about 615 ilvl as possible (some people say you can go as high as 635 – it’s whatever you can get really). In the end I was at 627, which was a bit on the high side, but still worked for me. The other trick is to use your legendary ring (the proc won’t work but the stats should be good) and use 2 great trinkets.
Gear
For most of my gear, I actually ended up using the Shaman set from the Salvage yard. It’s at 610 and suited me just fine. Also, I already had all of it for transmog (except the legs) so that was easy. The rest I either crafted or got from the Auction House. (And of course I transmogged it all, because everyone knows you heal better when you have a new outfit!)
My gear was as follows:
Helm: Streamtalker Coif
Neck: Heirloom – Eternal Horizon Choker (has an on use heal ability, however I didn’t realise this was a shared cooldown with healthstones, which are a stronger self heal, so you may prefer something else here)
Shoulders: Streamtalker Pauldrons
Back: Embroidered Wolfsfur Cloak
Chest: Streamtalker Tunic
Wrists: Streamtalker Armbands
Hands: Streamtalker Gloves
Waist: Streamtalker Belt
Legs: Packrunned Leggaurds of the Fireflash
Boots: Streamtalker Boots
Ring 1: Whispering Blackrock band of the Feverflare
Ring 2: Etheralus, the Eternal Reward (legendary ring)
Trinket 1: Corrupted Egg Shell (from a Timewalking Dungeon. Has an ilvl of 660. Has a mana regen ability)
Trinket 2: Demonic Phylactery (heroic) (Reduces mana cost of all spells)
Weapon: Soultwisting Staff
Talents
I got a bit ahead of myself and started the event before I had changed my talents or eaten any food (silly me!!), so I didn’t get a chance to change my talents. I figured I’d wipeĀ pretty quickly and could change them after so went ahead anyway, but I managed to get this on my first attempt tonight. Here’s what my talents were:
If I were to do it again, I would probably keep most of it, however I’d change the level 100 talent to the Cloudburst Totem, as I was trying to avoid using chain heal as much as possible to save on mana. Elemental Blast is a brilliant talent for this, especially if you have mana shortages. It also helps to buff up some of your other stats for a bit which is nice š
Glyphs
Glyphs weren’t anything special, although the one that I would definitely recommend is Glyph of Healing Wave, which also heals you for 10% of the heal you do on an Ally. Free heals for yourself means you’re spending less mana.
Other stuff
Don’t be a dunce like me and forget to eat – I’m sure it will help! Also, I realised part way through that I (still!!) hadn’t put a Chomp! identifier on my vuhdo bars. I highly recommend doing this as theĀ target with Chomp will take constant damage until they are healed to full. It helps knowing who has that on them as soon as it goes out.
Don’t be afraid to use your cooldowns. People have set times in the fights that they prefer to use them, but I just used them as I needed them. There were times I would have been using a CD when it wasn’t needed if I had have done them at specific times and would have gone to waste. I also threw out my Fire Elemental to help out with DPS to push the wave through quicker.
So I just went for it. I managed to get through the first 10 waves no worries at all. Which I thought was a little weirdĀ but figured it was only the first difficulty so it would get harder and I’d fail soon.Ā When I was at about wave 17 I thought that I might actually be able to do this. Going in to the 20s and I start getting nervous that I’m so close and I could really get it. And so I did. I started crying when I hit wave 30 (relatively easily in the end, mind you!) and it all fell apart at wave 32 because my eyes were all welled up. But it didn’t matter – I had finally done what I had set out to do so many years ago. And I worked my butt off and I did it.
The end!
I know it’s stupid to be emotional about this, but this has really been playing on my and my confidence as a healer. Tell you what, I’m never taking this title off. Ever.
I do find it fascinating how worked up everyone gets about suggested changes to World of Warcraft. There are so many outraged voices making a lot of noise about how “stupid” the devs are and how this is the final straw and they’re quitting WoW.
Just another day in overreaction city.
So what’s all the drama about? Well, it’s this:
@Nemo2342 The 100g is purely a placeholder at the moment. We are still working out what the cost will be!
ā WarcraftDevs (@WarcraftDevs) January 20, 2016
Essentially, on the Legion alpha at the moment, there is a charge being applied for switching specs. I will say upfront – the cost here is mostly irrelevant, which Celestalon has reiterated:
.@WarcraftDevs Discussing 100g specifically, however, is not so interesting, since that’s purely a placeholder.
ā Celestalon (@Celestalon) January 21, 2016
For me, I’d like to discuss whether or not assigning a cost (of some sort) to switching spec is a good change for the game, and what is the real issue Blizzard is trying to combat with this change?
You can skip right to the end for the tldr if you don’t want to read my justification for my opinion.
Disclaimer
As regular readers will know, I play a shaman. I consider my restoration spec my main spec, as this is the one I (usually!) raid with. However, more often than not I am in my dps elemental spec to “survive” being out in the world on a pvp server, to do my dailies, to run old raids/dungeons and to raid with when fights get easier and we need fewer healers. I constantly switch between these two specs. So I do have an initial bias about this topic that I am going to put aside for the moment to try and get to the bottom of what these changes are getting at.
Gold sink vs. stick to one spec
For me, this change points to two possible dilemmas that Blizzard is trying to combat:
- there’s too much gold in the game
- players are not committing to specs.
These are two very different issues, and right now I don’t feel it’s clear which Blizzard is aiming to combat here. But let’s explore these ideas a bit further.
The gold sink
It’s Rho’s fault I’m writing this, because he got me thinking with this post that he wrote about how this change could be considered a gold sink, and what that meant. This part really struck a point:
Read Rho’s whole post at http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1so7d6e
It’s very easy, as someone who’s greatest gold accomplishment was getting to 500k on all her toons just this week, to feel upset about the argument that there’s just “too much gold in the game” and that “players are too rich”. I, for one, don’t see it because I’m not “rich”. But that’s because I only see how much I have. Don’t get me wrong, I’m well aware that there are plenty of people out there who are rolling around in gold like Scrooge McDuck. I see it on the Black Market Auction House all the time, when items hit gold cap within minutes of being released, or players going out and buying whatever mounts they want, or not being affected by price hikes in enchants/gems etc. But I, like everyone else, don’t see the overall numbers and can’t fathom how much of a problem it is for the game. So I have to trust Blizzard on this one.
I don’t like gold sinks. I understand their purpose, but I don’t like it. I feel like there are too many rewards/items associated with the gold-making mini-game. And let’s face it – making gold in WoW is a whole other game in and of itself. If gold-making isn’t something you like to do, there is an awful lot of content in the game that you can miss out on – there are loads of cosmetic items in game that simply cost a bucket load of gold, and if you don’t have that gold, you’re going to have a hard time getting them.
The point is that Blizzard needs to find ways to get players to let go of some of their gold, and perhaps tying it to something many players do often is one way of going about it. But is assigning a gold cost to switching specs a fair gold sink?
Not all classes are created equally
My biggest concern with the proposal to charge to change specs is that it’s not an activity that is spread evenly across the specs. Hybrid classes are definitely getting the raw end of the deal here, as they are more likely to change their specs often (as I have explained for myself above). This isn’t an uncommon activity for hybrids at all, and in some cases it is expected of us to switch our specs based on the needs of the group we are raiding with.
DPS will definitely change their specs as well, but this is not as often as hybrids.
So for this argument, I say that no, this approach is not equally balanced across all classes.
New players
I think my biggest concern with specifically a gold sink being attached to a spec change is how that will impact new players. I’m talking about the shiny, brand new players who will come in to the game because of the movie. They come in to it with nothing – no gold, and also little to no knowledge of the classes/specs available in the game. Because of this they may end up switching specs to “try them out”, which they won’t be able to do if it costs a small fortune. There is the possibility of the cost scaling by level, or the cost only being implemented at a certain level to help alleviate this, but I think saving up for flying feels more satisfying for new players rather than paying to change their spec.
As a slight side note, if it was decided that the cost would be something other than gold, it’s important that this is available to non-max level players. So I don’t feel that it could be attained with valor, conquest etc.
Cost per healer
There is an argument for hybrids in that they could charge for their services. Much the same way mages would charge for others to use their teleports, healers and tanks could take a similar approach and sell their services (and their faster queue times!) on a cost recovery basis. Or at a profit if they so desire. Likely? I’m not sure. I do think this would depend on the cost of switching specs in the end. It could get out of hand, though, but it is an option if the gold cost ends up being a bit high.
So is it about the gold?
Personally, I don’t think this is about a gold sink. There are too many limitations for new players if it is. And honestly, there’s just something yucky about putting a gold cost against game functionality, and I don’t think Blizzard would do that. But I do understand that gold sinks need to exist – there should definitely be some more thought and discussion given to this.
Which leads me to believe it’s not about the gold at all.
All about that spec
I feel that class fantasy and sticking to one spec is what this change is about. “But why would Blizzard want players to stick to one spec?” I hear you say! I asked the same thing of my lovely twitter followers and they said the following:
I think Marie really nails it on the head here with her comment about identifying with one spec. Artifact weapons really emphasise this. Players will need to choose which weapon they are going to focus their energies and time on. And whilst we can get artifacts for the other specs, it will be very time consuming and not quite as strong as your primary artifact.
It’s about the fantasy
It’s pretty clear that class fantasy is high on the priority list for Blizzard in Legion. It was the focus of the first blog posts that came out after Blizzcon, and is reiterated time and time again when talking about class changes. It is really hammered home with Artifacts – each spec has its own specially crafted quest chain to obtain the artifact. It’s allllll about the class fantasy.
It could be argued that if class fantasy is so important, why are there multiple stats available on gear? That allows us to use that gear for multiple specs. So why limit access to the other specs? I suppose the answer here is that they don’t want to take the option to change specs away (if they wanted to do that they would completely lock down classes so that you could only ever play the 1 spec), but by introducing the cost element they want to limit how often it happens.
Having a cost associated with changing spec can reiterate class fantasy. By changing spec you’re changing in to a different mindset, and to emphasise that, it should be acknowledged that this is happening. Having a cast time to switch specs helps with this, as does wiping our resources and having a spell effect like we already do. But perhaps there can be more to it. Adding some sort of cost to this is another step that could make players pause for a moment to actually think about what they’re doing before they do this. Or it might just annoy them.
But class fantasy can’t be ignored. It’s important, it’s a focus for Blizzard and we need to adapt to this.
Why am I being punished all the time?!
So this is where my bias is going to come back in. Like I said above, I switch specs all the time. I don’t want it to cost me *insert price here* every time I do it. It feels like a kick in the gut. It’s already going to be incredibly time consuming for me to get 2 artifact weapons – it’s further punishment to make me pay to change specs. Artifact weapons already limit a player’s ability to play multiple specs – why does there need to be a cost added to it, too?
Another personal gripe is the impact it would have overall on our raid team. As many of you know, I’m already cross about mythic raiding being limited to 20 players (read this and this). Our team is small and rarely has over 15 players. As such, we don’t get to do mythic raiding not because we’re not good enough, but because we just can’t get the numbers. Because of our small team, we also have to do things large teams don’t – we don’t have “benched players” in our team. Everyone who shows up raids because we need the numbers. That means that if a fight requires an additional healer, one of our hybrids switches spec. If we need more dps, generally I’ll switch to ele to fill the gap. We are not the only teams to do this. So who would pay for that? The player who is just trying to help out their team? Or the guild who is already forking out for guild repairs/pots/food and not getting income from leveling members? Again, big kick in the gut for some of us.
Side note – healers can now dps
This, for me, is one of the big things I’d like the opportunity to test in the Legion alpha/beta. A lot of the arguments made about the cost of changing specs could be redundant if healer and tank dps is viable in all aspects of the game. Hybrids won’t need to change spec, so the cost (whatever it may be) doesn’t matter.
It’s a very big ask to get this balance right. I will be honest though, if I can charge through ICC on my ele shaman in no time flat, but it takes half an hour to do on my healer, I don’t care that my healer can dps, I’ll be switching to ele for it. And I don’t think I’m alone in that mindset.
This is a really big topic that I have loads of opinions on, so I’ll save it for another post. But it is worth having in the back of the mind while we discuss this.
Get to the bloody point, Cinder! What is your solution?!
Ok ok this has gone long enough, and you’ve done really well to get here if you have (thank you!)
Based on what we’ve gone through above, here’s what I think:
The ability to switch specs should not be used as a gold sink, as it punishes some players more than others (hybrids will generally switch more often than pure dps classes). Given that artifact weapons will already make it difficult for players to maintain more than one spec, adding another layer of difficulty (by charging) feels like a kick in the gut for those players.
Having said that, I do feel that class fantasy is important, and that some form of acknowledgment when changing a spec could have an impact on a player and make them more “aware” of the fantasy of their class. I feel like this could be achieved by using a Tome of the Clear mind for 50 silver. This is a minimal cost that new players could afford, that can also help players get in to the mindsetĀ and appreciate the class fantasy.
I think the most important part of this change is that players need to feel like they still have the choice to change their spec if they want to.
So that’s what I think. What do you think?
Seems like everyone is talking about the fact that players can now purchase Crystallized Fel with valor. Wowhead have done a write about up about this which you can read here: http://www.wowhead.com/news=250679/crystallized-fel-now-available-for-valor-points
Crystallized Fel are used to upgrade the Legendary Ring +3 items levels each time (up to a total ilvl of 795 for your ring). And interestingly, you are able to purchase multiple of these, allowing you to make significant upgrades to your ring each week. i.e. if you earn maximum valor each week, you will be able to purchase 7 upgrades every 2 weeks (the wowhead article shows you the maths!)
Initially, I was excited about this. I raided as healer so I always upgraded the healing ring, which meant that my dps ring has been neglected. This way, I now have the option of upgrading that ring, too. Excellent news for dual spec players! And I get get multiple rings
But then I got to thinking about it. Why are Blizzard doing this? What’s the motivation? And what are the consequences going to be?
Nerf?
My first thought has been whether or not this is a ānerfā of sorts by giving players stronger gear. Maybe some groups are still struggling to get the Heroic Archimonde kill for the moose, and these upgrades are an attempt to help people in that situation. (Especially given you can upgrade multiple times a week).
Itās an interesting thought. Itās not uncommon for there to be nerfs made to the raid content, especially towards the end of the expansion. This option will give a bit more of a nerf without having to change the difficulty of the fights themselves which isnāt so āinsultingā. Iām just curious about whether or not this is needed? Are teams still struggling with Heroic Archimonde? (Genuine question ā Iām not trying to be a smart ass.) I suppose outside of the moose, there are teams still raiding just for fun who may have hit a brick wall in their progression, so these upgrades may be that extra little push they need.
Get more people in to end game content
My next thought was perhaps this was a way to get people more involved in end game content. As wowhead points out, you can make 4875 valor per week by running all of the end game content ā Hellfire raids (LFR included), Heroic dungeons, Mythic dungeons and completing the weekly bonus quest. Maybe this is a way to get more people involved in those activities.
But is an upgrade to your legendary ring enough of a motivation to run all of that content? Probably not. People who werenāt motivated by valor upgrades to gear are unlikely to be moved to upgrade their rings. I personally havenāt given 2 hoots about actively farming valor and upgrading my gear. And whilst upgrading my Legendary Ring would be nice, itās not a priority for me. I’d much rather run the end game content for my alts who still need to get their rings and who need gear. Running all of that content (where no gear is an upgrade for me) just for +3 on one item honestly doesn’t appeal to me.
What does this mean for guild runs?
Crystallized Fel only drop from Archimonde on a Normal or higher difficulty level raid. i.e. anything but LFR. Which means that until now, an organised raid team has been required to get the Fel. In addition, we were limited to 1 per week. With the new system you can get at least 3 Fel per week without having to step foot in to a normal+ raid. If you and your raid team were at the point of just farming HFC for ring upgrades, will this system replace that and cause the team to stop raiding?
Or has the collapsing of guild teams contributed to this decision? There are a lot of guilds not raiding at the moment because of end of expasion burn out. At least this way, if your guild team has fallen apart/taken a break you can still get better gear without them, which is nice.Ā It makes me sad, though, if this is the case.
Why?
I canāt help but still come away from this asking āwhyā itās been done. Iām not saying itās a good or bad move, Iām just curious about the motivation behind it. I know of some people who will be very happy at being able to get some better gear without having to focus on difficult raid content, and I am really happy for them! I also know some people who will be disappointed with the decision and see it as a bit of an insult to those who raid harder content for better gear.
Either way, the option is there. Will you be farming valor for ring upgrades? And why do you think Blizzard did this?
This week I was a guest on the Girls Gone WoW podcast with the ever lovely ladies, Raven and EJ. As usual, I had a brilliant time. You can check out the episode on their website hereĀ (or iTunes, Stitcher etc). The episode was about all things Beta. We talked about our experiences with Betas, how to be a good Beta tester etc. It’s a great show and I highly suggest giving it a listen, especially if you are in a Beta right now.
The main purpose of a Beta is to test, test, test. During the episode we talked about how to give feedback and I gave a (thoroughly entertaining!) analogy of how to give good feedback (it’s all about the detail!) (and it wasn’t that entertaining, but hopefully made sense!)
Since the episode, though, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about what I would like to see tested in the Beta, and what I would test the crap out of if I were one of the chosen ones for beta testing. Here’s my list:
Can I really level as a healer? Or is it still going to be very slow?
Blizzard have talked about how healers and tanks will be able to put out a lot more damage than what they have been able to previously.
This, to me, it’s pretty clear that Blizzard expect healers and tanks to level in their respective classes rather than levelling as dps and switching to their support role for raiding. Some people will be really happy about this – they are healers or tanks through and through and don’t like having to figure out a dps rotation just to level. For me, I prefer levelling as elemental. I am a shaman, and whilst my primary purpose is to heal those who face the demons of the world, I recognise that I sometimes need to do that myself. I have command of the elements as a shaman, so it makes sense that I am able to use those to heal or to zap my enemies and generally kick some ass as elemental. But that doesn’t seem to be the intent in Legion, and it looks like I may need to level as restoration.
So an important aspect for me in Legion is how viable it is to level has a healer. Is the dps output strong enough that it doesn’t take 5 minutes to kill a mob?
I will say, I think it’s very important that this is tested by healers or tanks, rather than those who usually play dps specs, asĀ dps will instantly feel weak. The tanks and the healers who are used to mobs taking a long time to die need to be the ones to see if we are feeling stronger, so they’d be better placed to determine whether it’s any faster now. I expect dps as a healer to be slower and lower and that’s totally fine – just how much slower will it be?
Getting more than 1 artifact weapon – when can you do it, and how viable is it to maintain 2 artifacts?
And a whole bunch of other related questions…
(I understand these are probably difficult questions to answer in beta – I’m hoping some can be, though!)
This follows on from my previous point. Like I said, I much prefer levelling as elemental, but I would need my artifact weapon to be raid ready for healing.
This comment was made during one of the Darkmoon Faire interviews at Blizzcon:
Ok, yes we can have 2 artifacts, but they will never be equal. I can absolutely deal with that. It’s the same situation with my legendary ring at the moment – my healer ring has been upgraded every time it could have been; my dps ring hasn’t been upgraded at all. It doesn’t need to be because I level and do dailies only as ele, whereas my healer ring, well that’s where I save lives! I need that to be as strong as possible.
My real question is, if I were to level as elemental with the elemental artifact weapon, would I have enough time to get the resotration artifact weapon and level it up to be raid ready in time for the first raid that opens?
Am I able to get my elemental artifactĀ and my restoration artifact immediately after? (i.e. essentially have both artifacts while I’m levelling?) Or do I have to wait until I’m 110, or some other point in time in the levelling process?
If I can get them at pretty much the same time, am I able to choose which artifact gets the upgrades, or will it default to what spec I am in at the time?
Again, loads of questions and some that are probably tricky to answer, but they do dictate how I’m going to level and play the game overall.
What is groupĀ composition like now with all of the class changes that have happened?
In particular, how melee heavy is group make up?
I’m coming at this from a raid leader’s point of view and wondering how much I need to worry about there being too many melee players in a team now. Does it really matter or have things kind of balanced themselves out?
I’m also curious about how the healer changes will affect group composition, too. With holy paladins moving closer to melee range, mistweaver monks coming out and holy priests being somewhere in between, how does that change how the groups are made up? Or does it not make much of a difference?
That one is difficult to test without raid testing having started. Though I am also curious about how the healer changes are playing out in the dungeons that can be tested right now, so there may be some information available.
So these are my initial thoughts so far about what I’d like to see tested out. This is in addition to the usual “How have professions changes?” and “oh god how do I play my class again??!” questions.
If you are a Beta tester and any of the above are things you’d be keen to test out, I’d love to hear your feedback! If you’re not a tester, what are you wanting to see tested?
Last night was a good night of raiding. We had made our way through all of Heroic Hellfire Citadel on Wednesday night so that we would have all of Sunday evening to work on getting Heroic Archimonde down for the first time. Turns out we only needed 2 pulls. We were very fortunate to have an extra hunter come along (who is totally kick ass!) so that definitely helped. I think also having smacked our head on the fight so many times previously on normal (and thankfully getting it down before all of the nerds!) as well as a couple of heroic attempts helped. Anyway, I’m really proud of the team. š
Nighty night Archimonde! (I’m the Pandaren, third from the left)
After we killed Archimonde, we went back and did the first 6 bosses on Heroic. To make things faster we 2 healed almost everything, which was a challenge but also a lot of fun. I actually did pretty well on Iron Reaver and I managed to rank 450 on that fight (which I know isn’t that great at all, but for me it was awesome!) So overall we had a pretty good night.
Now we’re just waiting to see what happens about the Moose mount, whether that’s something that will be awarded to players who have already killed Heroic Archimonde, or if it is only on fresh kills. And also whether or not the quest drops for all in the raid, or only once per kill. I have a feeling I know what the situation will be, but I don’t say it then it won’t come true, so maybe I can avoid the inevitable out of sheer stubbornness! š
Last night, Archimonde met his fate. (In other words, we kicked his butt!)
Our poor little guild had not been having the best time with Archimonde. Our small numbers meant the fight was unnecessarily difficult for us to execute, leading to many frustrated evenings. Mechanics were followed relatively well, it just came down to not having enough people available to deal with all the mechanics being thrown at us. The healer/dps ratio was always a problem as well. But last night, with a bit of switching around and some new people, we got him down.Ā Read More
Podcast goodness
Earlier this week I was a guest on the Girls Gone WoW podcast!
It was a really fun time, even if I did get up just after 4am in the morning after a late raid night and then no sleep (ācos I was so nervous and excited!). Despite all that, I somehow managed to be a bit coherent, which worked out well. Didnāt make too much of a fool of myself! We talked all things raid leading – what to do if youāve just started in this type of role, tips to help you do it well. And of course there were a lot of laughs, lots of emails from listeners and other fun stuff.
If you would like to have a listen, check it out here –Ā http://girlsgonewow.net/?p=1082Ā The show is also on iTunes and Stitcher if those are your preferences.
Hope you enjoy! š
Iron Qon
Soo…. we downed another 2 bosses tonight. Iron Qon took us a little bit, but only because our dps was a little low so if we lost one person we’d hit beserk. When we did get the kill we had already hitĀ berserkĀ and our DK tank was last man standing with like 0.5% health when he got him. It was pretty amazing.Ā
And then on Twin Consorts… we one shot it. First time we’ve been in that fight – first time even one of our tanks had seen the fight at all! – and we one shot it. SO awesome.Ā
So we took on the final boss for the first time tonight… didn’t do too badly. Didn’t get him down (that would have been a small miracle). But we did alright.Ā
Quite a successful weekend, though – 4 new bosses down in total. A decent effort.Ā