So I’ve actually joined a boosting community recently and have been on a couple of boost runs. It seems like an appropriate way to get some extra gold to cover raiding costs as well as maybe eventually be able to afford the much sought after longboi. Now that latter is more of a long term goal since I don’t know if I will be boosting that often and while the payout is good you do need to boost frequently if you want to make a lot of gold in a short period of time. It also depends on the amount of buyers per run, more buyers of course means more effective use of one’s time.

It has actually been a somewhat strange experience so far even though I’ve only been on a couple of runs. For one, how fun it has actually been considering we are doing content that is trivial enough for us to be able to boost somewhere along half of the raid. I guess actually having to boost all of those people is what makes it fun, since it brings some level of challenge back to the content actually having to think a bit more what we are doing there.

Complete side rant, there was one rather frustrating experience during one of the boost runs in Crucible of Storms. We were taking on a couple of more boostees than in the earlier runs and there was some uncertainty around us being able to actually make it through with so many boostees. Now we had a try and a wipe because of failed kicks on Uu’nat—I play Discipline so I can’t really react to fails that well afterhand, I have to predict them, admittedly I could probably have reacted better and it would have been fine. However, after this a call is made by the co-leader to bring in one more damage dealer and one more healer. Now, in theory this is a fine call since it makes it more likely that we are able to manage the amount of boostees but my issue comes here: the additional damage dealer was not told to interrupt anything which was the whole reason for us just wiping and we were doing more than fine up until that point. The additional healer also just meant that there was less for us to heal per person just making it seem that the healers weren’t pulling their weight. We of course easily kill the boss after that but we would have done that anyway if the kicks had been done properly which they were the second time around. As a consequence, we also didn’t try taking more boostees in on consequent runs—though to be fair I’m not sure if there was enough interest anyway. All of that just annoyed me more than it probably should for some reason, the “lost” gold isn’t that important just the complete misidentification of the issue and the overbearing response as a consequence.

Another somewhat strange and unfortunate part of the experience has been the—I guess—culture some of the players there have. Very much “let’s go boys” and lots of e-peen measuring it feels like giving something of a “boys club” feel at times. Now admittedly I’m seeing this more subtly for the most part and it’s probably something that they are bringing over from other communities they participate in rather than something innate for this community but it still doesn’t make the envirnment feel the most welcoming to me. It also feels really strange since there is so much talk in the Code of Conduct and so on about showing a professional image to the buyers by being on time and keeping the in-game raid chat clean but I guess this same professionalism isn’t expected to be extended towards other bosters.

Now as noted these are initial vibes and I haven’t been on that many boost runs yet and it’s probably very dependant on the leader as well as one’s fellow bosters—in fact the second boost run was much better than the first though that was probably partially due to very low participation in voice chat from almost all boosters present, me included—but it still isn’t really motivating me to more actively look out for additional boosting opportunities. I guess I should probably be fine if I avoid the outwardly obvious incompatible groups.

I still think I want to be doing more boosting than I have been so far, and Uu’nat being down should provide more opportunities as well as more importantly more energy to be able to do boost runs—that has actually a really interesting side effect of this progress that I haven’t though much about, actually just feeling like the breaks from raiding on non-raid nights were really needed.

Speaking of progress, one unexpectedly annoying part of it has been preparing the “foosts” (feasts) for the raids. Now there is a special version of the feasts that instead of the rare fish take the crafting reagnents from Uldir however there is of course a slight problem with this: we aren’t raiding Uldir anymore. There is something of a way around this, in that you can convert the Battle of Dazar’alor crafting material into the Uldir one with several different crafting professions. The problem here becomes when you want to convert 1000+ of the things it takes a lot of time even with the crafting enchantment—I think I spent 10-15 minutes converting mine. Now this doesn’t need to be done that often and it has been a one time thing for me so far but it has still been something of an unexpected and quite frankly unecessary small annoyance with regards to progress. Luckily that shouldn’t be so necessary anymore since from what I hear we will be getting a new feast in the next patch anyway and I don’t have that many of the materials left since we haven’t been clearing Battle of Dazar’alor since we started Crucible progress. But it would just have been nice to either have the transform cast be shorter or have an option to transform several at the same time.

Well that was quick. The most satisfying kill in a while.

So as noted we have been progressing on Uu’nat for a bit. This is still ongoing and I think I’m starting to get a good feel for all phases of the fight, phase three included.

Now my observations on the second boss have changed somewhat. It seems that for melees the fight is mostly rather boring, since two of the primary mechanics of the fight—baiting the Oblivion Tears to the edges of the room so that people don’t run into them; not running into other players while Unstable Resonance is active thus creating an explosion instantly killing players nearby while reaching your relic before the debuff runs out—don’t target melee players unless there are too many of them or too many of the ranged and healers are dead.

Phase one

Now even as a range and healer, phases one and two are getting to be rather boring. Sure, there is a bit to watch out for with the marks¹ and how the Oblivion Tears have been baited so that you don’t run into other players as well as me having the extra duty in phase one of carrying the void relic² so I need to be positioned well before Unstable Resonance is cast so that other players can get to me easily as well as move around me easily. This is mostly difficult right at the end of phase one, since the room keeps getting smaller in phase one and before the intermission to phase two it tends to have gotten rather small indeed making the last Unstable Resonance somewhat tricky to play. Still, the incoming damage isn’t that great for the most part so you can stay almost completely concentrated on the mechanics and damaging the boss making phase one not overly interesting to play repeatedly—I think this is usually the main cause of some of our fails with Unstable Resonance in phase one, the mechanic still requires a certain amount of attention and people just get so into the flow of the fight that they let themselves get caught in a bad spot or actually just let the debuff run out.

The first intermission is also not overly complex, use the storm relic³ to kill the adds that have accrued during phase one and then use the void relic² and soak the Oblivion Tears—so we have more room to play in phase two—and then drop it on the correct mark by soaking the Unknowable Terror. The room also gets bigger again and doesn’t shrink regularly anymore making phase two somewhat easier to play.

Phase two

Here the fight gets slightly more interesting from a healer perspective, since there are actually some decent bursts of damage coming in when the storm relic³ gets used to clear the adds which at times comes in combination with Gift of N’Zoth: Hysteria which deals a decent amount of damage to the raid as well as healing the adds. This means there are actually a few decent chances to use cooldowns and actually heal people in phase two, which is made somewhat difficult by the necessity to bait and the largeness of the room—there is rarely a moment where I actually have everyone in range allowing me to properly prepare for incoming damage meaning I have to take positioning into account in order to be able to heal people properly. This adds a somewhat interesting layer to the fight from a healer perspective, though it only comes up once for me at least in the fight meaning it isn’t that much of an issue. Positioning in phase two is made even more important by the Unknowable Terror which spawns a large area effect on the floor which will most likely kill any non-tank players—this ability is especially dangerous in combination with the need to bait the Oblivion Tears, since you can’t necessarily just run through the middle which is usually the quickest way out.

Now for the damage dealers there is one extra bit to watch out for in phase two: more frequent adds as well as caster adds. This means that the adds actually need to be cleared during phase two like in the first intermission as well as interrupted—interrupt fails along with Unstable Resonance fails are also the most frequent wipe reason for us. All in all it’s not overly complicated, though the amount of damage on the adds needs to be rather precise since they need to be killed through the effect from the storm relic³ and not directly by the damage dealers which means they need to be brought low together.

Phase three

Now the intermission going into phase three is similar as described above, kill the adds then soak the tears² and drop the relic on the mark—though I still have cooldown on the relic, so this time someone else is the primary soaker. The rest however, is much more hectic than any of the earlier phases. Phase three is played in a room that is sligthly smaller than phase two, so baiting the tears correctly is more important. The beams from phase one also make a return, which means you have to be positioned properly in order to avoid getting two stacks but at the same time also baiting properly so that tears aren’t placed incorrectly—for this, we have set spots for the ranges to bait as a group, so that hopefully the baits land correctly. Now the marks still have to be played like before, but now baits at time come in very close proximity to the marks so you have to be on your toes and not stand incorrectly once you’ve gotten rid of your mark. During all of this the adds spawn like before and have to be interrupted and dealt with like before.

In addition, phase three also has a new mechanic: Insatiable Torment. This ability reduces the healing you receive by 100% making you almost heal immune, with two exceptions: absorbs still work, which is why for the marks we use Rapture and shield the tormented players to allow them to survive since they usually need to split from other players; the tormented players also damage players around them leeching health and this is the other way they can be kept alive.

So phase three all in all is mostly familiar to someone who has played the other phases just with much more tight timings and less tolerance for failure. This does present something of a learning curve since you have to get used to knowing where to go beforehand so you’ll be at the right place at the right time but I think we are slowly starting to get over this hurdle. I think our best try was 12% so far and we have had several phase three tries in the last few raid evenings so hopefully this means we can down the boss sometime this reset still—would actually mean we get a decent world ranking again as well, which would be nice. But I guess we’ll know how that went in a week or so.

Well, that didn’t last long. First kill was today.

So while I was watching a stream today and following the discussion on the Classic beta I remembered something: Blizzard used to provide fansite kits to the community in case you wanted to make a fansite for World of Warcraft. This lead to me wondering if they still do that and unfortunately I could find no sign of these kits on the official website, however I did find a couple of the old kits—namely the original one I had played around with and one for Wrath of the Lich King—from a third party fansite amusingly enough.

Now I have been considering changing the design of the blog for a while and although I do like more simple and elegant designs there was something charming about the idea of using one of these old fansite kits as the basis of that redesign especially since the blog has mostly World of Warcraft content so the theme still feels appropriate.

I decided to base the redesign on the Wrath of the Lich King fansite kit, since that one had more of a template for a website—the original one was extremely bare bones, only a header image with some links in the left column and content in the right column. With the Wrath kit however, it ended up being more of a case of bringing the code into the modern era where responsive design is a given as well as some other slight modifications to the details.

For example, I decided to keep the fonts I already had on the site since they do give a slightly cleaner look to the whole thing as well as not using the original header image—it was weirdly cropped and relied on some borders in the styling to complete the look. Instead I launched the game and took an updated screenshot of the map and used that instead. The new image is also bigger which makes it look better when the site scales up. Another small change was actually separating the two side iron borders so that they are two separate images, since they would have otherwise been at a fixed width from each other. I also cleaned up some small noise left at the outer edges, probably as a result from some background image that had been captured with the bars. I also slightly modified the gradient on the post title in post listings, it was an image but is now made through CSS. This allows me to use a bigger font on the post titles if I want to since it means that the gradient will scale with the size instead of being a fixed size. I did end up scaling the post titles in listings up slightly, since the original size was actually smaller than what I normally use for the size of the content. It would have felt a bit strange to have the titles be smaller than the content even if they are well separated through the red background.

The article pages stayed mostly the same from a content perspective, of course the scaffolding changed but the content font and such is the same as earlier. It still feels significantly different of course and I am rather happy with how it turned out.

The final change was getting rid of the footer since with the content being so clearly delineated in comparison to the old design where the header and footer clearly marked the boundaries of the content. This made the footer feel less necessary than before. And honestly, another reason was that I wasn’t quite sure how I would separate the footer from the content since while there was a horizontal border in the fansite kit similar to the vertical ones on the sides, it was sligthly bulkier and it did not feel like it properly fit in there since there were no joining pieces for the different borders. Maybe it would have looked fine but I personally was not happy with the result—though I am still considering, having nothing at the end of posts feels a bit empty.

All in all I am very happy with how the site came out and finally getting to do something a bit different. The earlier clean look was very nice but also in some way a bit boring and while I know it is possible to get it to feel a bit more interesting I do not know how to do that personally—and since this blog is a one woman show, me not knowing how to improve something kind of prevents that from being an option. Still, it was interesting to see with how little effort is was possible to convert an admittedly simple outdated template into something that reasonably well follows modern web standards and practices.

I might get back to tinkering with it tomorrow or at some other point, for now I just wanted to get it all out there. Now for some well deserved rest after a hard day’s work on this as well as some nice Uu’nat progress—should probably write a new post on that if I remember, we’ve seen phase three several times and have had some quite good tries as well though nothing close to a kill.

So the new raid has been out for a while new and we’ve been poking at it for almost all of our raid time since it came out with the exception of one half-clear of Dazar’alor. So far we have managed to kill the first of two bosses and happily actually killed the boss before significant nerfs. Unfortunately those nerfs also came to the second boss so won’t be able to say the same thing there. Still, the nerfs seem quite justified considering the silly setups we’ve seen for some of those early kills.

Still it has been really nice to have a new raid to progress and the bosses are also quite fun on mythic if rather boring and undertuned on heroic which rather surprised me. We actually had a decent amount of wipes on the first boss on heroic due to casts going through at the wrong time but ended up killing the second boss on our first try as if almost all of the mechanics were simply irrelevant—it was a really strange feeling.

On mythic however, it’s the other way around really. The first boss is deceptively simple: play the kicks and dispels correctly and that’s most of what you have to do in order to kill the boss. After that, it mostly comes down to correct timing of cooldowns for the healers and no individual failing too much. Getting all of this clean still took a fair amount of tries for us but once you learn the important parts and don’t stress too much amount the irrelevant bits the boss is rather straightforward to play. I did really like the boss though as it managed to give me several mechanics as a healer that were relevant which is somewhat rare.

The second boss on the other hand seems to have more things that are relevant for the whole raid. You have concerns about correct positioning both for baiting the Void Tears as well as not exploding each other wenn you get the marks and making it in time to your relic. In addition you more phase dependant effects you need to look out for in your positioning.

Uu'nat also has a decent amount of somewhat bursty incoming damage that you need to plan for as a healer, which makes the fight more enjoyable for me though cooldown usage being at times boss health dependent does make timing those cooldowns harder. The boss is fun so far though, even if we are only not so consistently poking at phase two. I’m interested to see how it feels to play phase three.