Finally, after a few too many wipes—91 to be precise, Imonar is down! The fight ended up being pretty much as predicted, which the biggest difficulty being the intermissions. Phase four also ended up providing one wipe, with one raid member failing to run out of the group and getting instantly dispelled. This led to the whole group sleeping when AoE shots came, killing most healers and damage dealers. Was an unfortunate moment, but soon after that the tries started getting quite a lot better. Both the kill try and the try before were very good, the first time progress became very clear to see. If memory serves those were the also the only times we actually made it into the last phase, which for me confirms my feeling of the boss being rather simple. Luckily it would seem we are slowly starting to get to the somewhat interesting bosses, though that will have to wait until next reset.

Beyond that though, there’s not that many interesting changes that appear with the mythic difficulty, it’s mostly just the same abilities as heroic with more phases and more abilities at the same time. Phase three combines the sleep debuff from heroic with the mines that spawn on players. Phase four is those two with the addition of the ships firing on two random players and some more random AoE. The last phase is again the mines, sleep combined with the tank debuff stacking infinitely. Most of these abilities don’t change the fight much, the biggest problem is simply playing the intermissions cleanly and not losing players there as the last phase is a rather decent DPS check due to the stacking debuff as raid damage keeps increasing with higher stacks.

With that, the question remains if I want to stay in a guild that struggles which such a simple boss, since it seems Argus will end up providing a real challenge at the end of the dungeon which makes it seem unlikely we will down him within a reasonable time frame, if at all before the next expansion. Probably, since there’s so much time still. But still, it’s slightly annoying staying in progress mode for so long since people just decide not to play properly from time to time. The last tries on Imonar showed that people knew how to do the fight, everyone just needed to decide to actually play the mechanics. That is a rather frustrating situation to be in. Will have to see what I end up doing, but the temptation to go asking around is definitely growing. Which frustrates me, since that will mean skipping progress and leaving a guild. Neither of those things I like doing, though there are some alleviating factors I suppose. For, the bosses seeming so simple makes me feel less bad about missing progress on them. Secondly, even being in a guild is no guarantee actually being in the raid for the progress, so it’s something I might end up missing anyway.

Though then again, at the moment there are no guilds that truly appeal to me strongly, there’s one or two I might consider so maybe truly the smart move is to just see if there’s interest on their part or perhaps wait a bit longer. But waiting might mean I end up missing the whole of progress, which would be very unfortunate. Hopefully I still have some time to think with Argus being difficult to kill. Time will tell, in the meantime I’ll have to decide what to do. Will be interesting to see the consequences, regardless of my decision.

I posted about me looking for a guild a while back, and while I technically found a guild it did not quite meet the goals I had set out when looking for a guild with regards to the level of progress. Now, we’ve been at it for a few resets and the progress is somewhere between expected and slightly disappointing (I had been hoping we’d manage to kill Imonar today for example, sadly wasn’t even close. Though there was definite progress). Which all would speak for sending out more applications.

At the same time, I’ve taken something of a liking to the guild I’m in. That combined with most actually interesting prospects requiring a realm and faction change which comes at a somewhat big cost, makes me reconsider.

Then again, I’m not really in the position to do much mythic+ in this guild, as there aren’t many people of the required skill level (it seems at least) to get a group together. Or maybe the interest just isn’t there, but most of the keys I see in the top list for the week are not quite high enough. There are a couple of exeptions, but not enough or not of the correct classes.

This all puts me in a somewhat awkward position where I don’t quite know what to do and in a sense time is running out. Since not doing anything will lead me to just staying in the guild, as the prospects will dry up with time. New opportunities will come I’m sure, maybe something promising might be showing up tomorrow even as I’m hopefully joining a friend of mine for a quick heroic run. Now just staying because of not being able to decide probably isn’t a bad thing either, I do like the guild (or the people in it rather). The worry is more how that will affect my motivation long term, if the progress keeps being not quite what I hoped combined with a lack of mythic+. Might very well lead to boredom which would be rather unfortunate.

Time will tell, maybe I’ll just add a few people on Battle.net and chat a bit, go from there.

Before Christmas we had one last progress raid and we got to poke at Imonar a bit. While we sadly didn’t get that far, there was one thing that slightly surprised me about the fight even though it probably should’ve been obvious from heroic already, namely the intermission. It’s a surprising pain as a healer, as it doesn’t really afford for any time to keep healing since you kind of need to just run through yet the group is taking decent damage from all the explosions going on (we at least opted to trigger several of the mines in order to allow people to get through, with the tanks doing the triggering).

That will be an interesting phase to get to learn and so far seems to be the biggest challenge of the fight, though as noted we didn’t get far, only to the beginning of the third phase. Optimizing movement in general seems to be a theme in this raid, it’s also quite present in Antoran High Command with the mines there, Eonar seems to be nothing but movement and barely any healing, there’s a rather decent amount of movement to be done on the dogs already if one has the fire debuff.

Looking forward at future bosses as well, Kin’garoth continues the theme with a rather spread out raid and both the orbs and beam to dodge. Varimathras has some movement sure, but it seems to be rather trivial and from what I know does not coincide with any damage spikes so shouldn’t really present any problems. The Shivarra seem to be more about positioning than movement specifically. Aggramar might also be interesting in that aspect, as the intermissions already do a decent amount of damage on heroic while also having things one needs to dodge, making it difficult to reliably use cooldowns (as a Priest at least).

I guess the raid might have more promise than I thought, but that might be down to the guild I’m in as well though to be fair, Christmas and New Years probably have something to do with our slow progress, getting only two proper raid days in in the last couple of weeks. Hopefully we keep progressing well and I get to be part of that progress, much less fun to come in on already killed bosses.

The couple first weeks of Antorus progression are now behind me and the raid still feels rather simple. The new mechanics introduced by the mythic difficulty so far have been trivial though to be fair we are not that far into the raid yet with only five bosses down.

There are some bosses I’m still looking forward to though, namely Kin’garoth, Varimathras and Circle of Shivarra. They all had potential on heroic already and will be interesting to see them with more proper damage and healing tuning. Of course, Argus will be interesting as well from what one can gather from the top guilds, but seems it will be a while until we reach that point. Hopefully not too long. At the very least I can end the week somewhat content after how badly last week went, which is already a very good thing. Here’s hoping we keep up the pace next week and one can happily enjoy the holidays.

Week one of Antorus has come and gone and with it the first impressions of the new raid. Only on heroic so far as mythic isn’t out yet, but still.

So far the raid hasn’t offered many real challenges, with probably the most noteworthy fight being the Coven of Shivarra. That boss fight has the potential for some really nasty overlaps on heroic causing problems and almost instant wipes. I’m really looking forward to seeing it on mythic.

Apart from that though, with the exception of Aggramar where people had problems grasping the strategy and priority targets for some reason, most of the fights there were very straightforward. The majority of the fights even being finished in just one try.

There are several fights that show potential for mythic though. Antoran High Command is already slightly stressful on heroic and might be the first problem for some guilds going into mythic. I also think Varimathras, Aggramar and Argus have the potential to become bigger challenges when going into mythic, as the first two at least do already have some significant mechanics on heroic to think about which will likely be even more critical on mythic.

So with that I’m really looking foward to the coming reset, will be interesting to start seeing some of the bosses on mythic difficulty and what the first actual stumbling block ends up being for me. Though first I need to settle on a guild, that matter is still slightly open.