So we’ve gotten a lot more progress made on Avatar thanks to extending the raid lock. Honestly I’m not quite sure if it was the right move but I do want to kill Kil’jaeden before Antorus comes out so in that sense I suppose it could be helpful. And in theory at least, we should have the gear to be able to kill both bosses so it should be fine from that perspective. Leaving out the farm bosses does feel sligthly bad though, especiall considering we have only killed Maiden once. Feels like an odd compromise.

The fight itself though seems surprisingly simple at its core with some of the combinations becoming punishing rather than any of the core mechanics being difficult to handle. For example, the beam soaking is easy enough on its own, it can become a pain with the daggers flying around and the AoE from Ubound Chaos. Phase two as well, it’s mostly just managing soaks (like on Kil’jaeden) as well as not standing in the AoE. Sure there’s a quite decent chunk of incoming damage and the damage requirement for DDs isn’t exactly light either but there just isn’t much going on (though there is a decent amount of movement required, which makes finding moments to heal challenging at times). All of that did mean that the first day we practiced Avatar felt like such a chore. It was just unusually boring and uninteresting, though strangely that feeling was gone the second day. It might’ve just been the expectation of going in to do farm bosses and then ending up with progress that affected my mentality so much.

Don’t take all of the above to mean it’s an easy fight though, it’s not. As said, there’s lots of unopportune movement involved both in phase one and two, which means healing can be a pain (since usually having to heal coincides with having to move shortly before or after). Both phases are also very spread out (well, phase two only in the beginning) which while sure, reduces the amount of people I have to look after as a healer also increase the responsibility I have towards each of those individuals. Moving at the wrong time is much more likely to lead to deaths or close calls. I’m also quite curious how we end up managing with mana and cooldowns once we start coming to phase two “for real”, since so far we had full mana and all cooldowns ready while practicing which of course won’t be the case for the actual kill and both phases are rather big mana sponges.

Aside from the healer requirements, it’s all also a rather tight DPS check from what I can see, which will prove to be intersting. We have had a few wipes due to insufficient DPS on the Maiden, though usually something had gone wrong earlier in those tries. It’s interesting actually, Avatar doesn’t punish mistakes as instantly and brutally as Maiden (of Vigilance, that is) but they are still very detrimental. One soaker death? Well if a beam soaker, kind of OK though does mean all the other soakers receive more stacks. Dark Mark soaker? Well, we need to figure out something on the fly quickly or it’s just a wipe when they come, since that’s assigned to individuals that can handle the mechanic alone and we don’t exactly have many extras. Or hope we still have a battle ress, though those go out rather quickly at the moment (it is progress after all).

In the end, I’m actually rather looking forward to see more progress on Avatar. Sure, the boss isn’t actually the most exciting but it is still quite a challenge. And we do have to kill Avatar in order to get to Kil’jaeden, which I’m also looking forward to (though I’m not sure how much I’ll actually end up liking that fight, so far not actually one of my favourites).

So we finally managed to kill the Maiden yesterday! It felt like it was a bit too long time coming, which made finally managing it feel rather nice. At the same time, the kill was also rather anticlimactic because of how the fight works. Since it’s only the two phases rotating the whole time, there’s no real escalation built into the fight, it only requires concentration and clean play the whole time. While yes, having 20 people make close to zero mistakes during a whole encounter is challenging and that’s what led us to having so many wipes as well, it means the encounter is rather monotone. I didn’t realize we were killing the boss until a few seconds before she was down, which is strange because usually one can see the escalation in incoming damage or the like as the encounter goes on, a perfect example being Mistress Sassz’ine or the Desolate Host. Both become much more dangerous as far as incoming damage is concerned and that adds a certain tension.

It is kind of nice with a more I guess relaxing fight in there, though at the same time the almost zero tolerance for failure does introduce tension into the fight. Will be interesting to see how the rekill goes, assuming we don’t extend the ID.

In other news, killing the Maiden meant we got to poke at Avatar a bit. We just practiced phase two, and that fight seems like it will be messy. Theoretically we’ve now played through the whole phase two, though we definitely need to do it better if we actually want to end up downing the boss. Damage looked okay considering we’ll be in execute range in reality but there were a few too many avoidable deaths and failed soaks. Something I’m sure a few more tries will fix. Of phase one I still have no idea though it seems it’ll be something of a pain, since once more tons of movement and trying to keep people healed up in that time. Especially with the different sources of damage that actually require us healers to keep people topped so they don’t get one-shot by mechanics while also dealing with movement. At the same time, I think that promises an interesting fight, so hope to be progressing there next reset again (and not spending the whole reset on rekills).

But in the meantime, some rejoicing that the Maiden is finally dead and we got some progress done!

With patch 7.3 Blizzard released a new dungeon that unlocked a couple weeks ago called Seat of the Triumvirate. I haven’t had the chance to spend too much time in there with it being so new, but have managed a couple of runs in there, one on tyrannical and fortified each. And while neither run went particularily well I have to say Blizzard has created a rather fun dungeon with the exception of a couple mechanics, specifically the third boss and the trash before the second one.

To expand on that, the trash before the second boss in and of itself isn’t so annoying, rather the randomly spawning extra trash is. It hasn’t really caused problems so far because it died really fast but it just feels like an completely unecessary addition that only contributes frustration not challenge, in a similar vein to Quaking activating out of combat. Even on a +16 with fortified the trash was trivial enough to not pose any real extra challenge. Which on one hand I think is good, otherwise the somewhat random nature of it would be even more frustrating, but it also means it serves no real purpose (though to be fair, it perhaps adds a bit of flair).

Now the third boss on the other hand, is something I think tuning will fix. But at the moment the timing between the tentacles spawning (which actually need to be handled since they deal such significant damage to the party otherwise) and the two adds spawning that need to be nuked down is just brutal especially if the party includes even one class with weaker burst damage. So far I think both times when we actually ended up killing the boss the tentacles bugged out and fewer than four spawned, leading to the timing being much more forgiving.

Other than those two specific instances though, the dungeon is actually really good. Now there were a couple of packs that were rather brutal with teeming (especially since we didn’t quite know how to handle them yet), but for the most part the trash was quite good. Hit rather hard but nothing kiting couldn’t solve. And stealthed trash is something that’s a bit fun to see again, can’t really remember the last dungeon that was in (well Hellfire Citadel I guess, but that isn’t a dungeon). Sure it can be frustrating when it pops up at the wrong time, but it didn’t seem to exhibit any one-shot tendencies so far, so as long as that is avoided I think it’s good.

And the bosses, well they are all rather good, mostly relying on just playing the mechanics properly. I do however foresee the first boss becoming a problem at some point since the room gets filled so quickly. The soft enrage on him seems to be rather brutal. That can be alleviated somewhat by clearing more parts of the room though I fear that is too time-intesive with the trash that’s in there. The other exception as said being the third boss, where I think something like 5 seconds more time would make a world of difference.

Overall though, I’m actually looking forward to getting more tries in on the dungeon to learn it better, something I couldn’t say as strongly about Cathedral at the time. Sure I wanted to learn that dungeon as well, but it always felt like the successes and failures there were more down just to failed tuning of damage than any actual fails on the mechanics. So good job Blizzard.

So I haven’t written much about recent raiding efforts and lots has happened (well it’s also been over a year). In that time I’ve ended up changing guilds twice and have progressed through all heroic content while it was current and am currently progressing in mythic Tomb. Specifically, we recently killed Mistress Sassz’ine and are now on Maiden of Vigilance.

Now of the two I would definitely argue Mistress is the more interesting fight, with lots going all almost the whole time. Phase three gets especially intense and getting the kill in the end was quite sweet. She seems to be a somewhat annoying boss for us to rekill however, since people seem to have forgotten how to play phase one and two which presents certain problems considering the fight is still a DPS check.

The Maiden on the other hand is a ball of funny frustration. The fight in itself is quite simple, almost the same as heroic with one small addition: the orbs (from phase two) now randomly spawn on a player of the opposite colour, with a small AoE effect on the ground and delay. Also, a bomb exploding in the raid is an instant wipe. This means that as people are learning the fight, while the wipes can be quite funny at times (the whole raid instantly explodes) it’s also quite frustrating because one keeps dying to the mistakes of others. The fragility of it all led to us having around 50 wipes on Maiden with most of them without seeing phase two. Which somehow gives me the feeling we might be spending a long time on Maiden.

However, it’s been really good to get into some proper progress raiding again and the guild I’m in is quite lovely (silly mistakes aside). Hopefully I and the guild have a long and bright future ahead of us, as I rather hate changing guilds. Now just to make sure we manage to clear Tomb before Antorus arrives, would be good to have the content cleared again before the next comes out. It’s been way too long since last.

Blizzard recently made some pretty big changes to how mythic+ works, both in the way of loot and how the keys themselves handle. The big points being:

• Beating the key quickly no longer rewards more loot, rather higher level keys (15+) have a chance at giving more loot. Completing the key in time also provides one extra piece of loot.
• Keys no longer get depleted, rather downgraded. If you don’t complete the dungeon in time, you get a new random key one level lower. If you don’t complete it at all, you get the same key one level lower.

Now I did not exactly like these changes, to be more precise the change that downgraded keys. In theory, this sounds like a great change: you always have a chance at loot when completing a mythic+ dunegon. For me however, since I’m mostly doing them for the challenge or to get a high key as possible done, it adds a lot of stress to always do a 100% tries for the keys in order to not downgrade them. A depleted key could always be redone and then upgraded once one knew the instance better, not so much when it’s a new random dungeon. It also greatly adds to the frustration of learning the dungeon and affix combo every week, since not getting things right there mean downgraded keys.

The loot change on the other hand has actually worked in my favour since I already tried to do higher level keys and not 3-chesting lower level ones. Though for those who were participating in that, I can understand the frustration.

Now these changes overall were quite odd, in that they seem to punish the people that were actively doing mythic+ content and mostly benefitting the people who weren’t overly interested in it in the first place. Presumably this was an attempt to get more people into doing mythic+, but at the same time the requirements for joining mythic+ groups seem to be more extreme than ever and there seem to be fewer groups up.

Now then, how do the changes feel after a month or so of living with them? Well, still kind of terrible and a downgrade from the old system. I would strongly prefer the option of depleting a key rather than downgrading it, especially since sometimes downgrading is down to one bad pull or an unlucky combo from some mobs. It’s really frustrating at that point to be put, essentially, two dungeons behind from where one was before; especially if one was running a dungeon one was interested in pushing/doing well in at the moment as one then again is at the mercy of luck to get that key again.

The loot change on the other hand, I like but seems to be the more controversial one.

In the end though, the changes aren’t the end of the world. Even the key downgrading at times has proven useful (e.g. Cathedral keystones…) but even at those times it has been somewhat bittersweet as it might have been useful to be able to try it again.