So Wednesday came the patch, and with it a few cool things like the remade leveling experience—though even that seems to be somewhat broken. Like the rest of the game. There were several bugs introduced into Legion dungeons and raids, among them the spy event in Court of Stars sometimes just kind of leading to the mob standing there, not moving. The beams on Hasabel in Antorus are also broken, sometimes the graphic stays on the floor. In addition to that, Antorus seems to suffer from lag and FPS problems in general, which has led to very poor performance in our raid so far. We ended up canceling the raid about halfway through on Wednesday and it took several tries for us to kill Hasabel. The lag problems seem to have slightly improved, the general performance problems remain. Seems like this week will be mostly wasted from a raiding perspective—sadly—though there is another extended maintenance coming on Saturday. Hopefully the situation improves with that and we get at least one proper raid day.

There was also some talk about potentially having an extra raid day on Monday, will have to see what comes of that. On one hand, it would hopefully be a chance to get some more progress done and maybe even kill Kin’garoth finally. At the same time, having Monday “free” and not having to think about raiding and being able to concentrate on mythic+ instead might also be rather nice. But if there’s progress to be done I’m eager to be there.

In better news, it seems I have found a new guild. The guild is Horde which is good as that means I’ll be able to play with a few good friends of mine again—though it pains me to not be a Night Elf anymore. Hopefully that will mean more progressing and less frustration while raiding, just need to make sure I can keep up. That’s always the most stressful thing with joining a new guild for me—trying to prove oneself, both to oneself and to the guild. What it will definitely mean though is me being able to do mythic+ since I now have a few good reliable damage dealers available again and hopefully a few new ones through the guild. It will be really nice to get to do mythic+ again, though there has been a bit more mythic+ activity in recent times, sadly not so much of the interesting variety of actually properly pushing keys and more just upgrading a key or two a few times and then stopping before anything interesting appears.

There is still a small questionmark with all of this however, as I have an application to another guild open still and I’m not quite sure what I’d do if both guilds end up being interested. The guild I’m currently headed to has the nicer raid days but also slightly worse—or rather, slower—progress. Part of that might be in the raid days as the other guild does raid a bit more.

It’s a decision I might not have to make and I’m currently somewhat unsure which way I’m leaning. I do think I might stay with the current option because of the raid times. At the moment three raid days rather than four and something along the lines of 40% less hours just seems to compelling. The progress difference also seems really small with that difference in mind. Though the group impacts how enjoyable the raids are a lot more than the amount of time invested, it’s still a rather big consideration. It’s also rather impossible to figure out ahead of time how well one will end up liking one group or the other, so the times end up weighing a lot more. But I’ll get to that decision when and if it ends up being necessary.

So we did do some more Kin’garoth progress this week, but no extra raid-day. And it went decently I suppose, though slightly disappointed I can’t be talking about killing him. To be fair, I was part of the problem there, for some reason played rather terribly that day even though I don’t believe I directly caused any wipes, just unecessary deaths on my own part. Still we managed to get to 30% which is definite progress and already in the zone where the fight “starts for real”. But there still isn’t much more to the fight, it’s just that there’s more damage coming in and more orbs to dodge. So the fight is a bit more interesting than I thought, but still feels rather simplistic.

There was a slight error in my earlier post however, namely which buff the boss becomes depends on which add is killed last, just that our ordering was that sometime after the 50% mark we got the empowered bombs. Doesn’t really change any of my feelings regarding the fight, since it’s the order we played in that I was evaluating, but important to correct false statements.

Now with regards to searching for a new guild, I’ve added a few people and sent one application in. We’ll see how those leads pan out, they all seem like good guilds so hopefully one of them ends up interested and interesting. I’ll keep up a passive search for new guilds of interest looking for healers, see where that leads as well. At least I’ll be aware of my options. When that doesn’t end up working out I’ll be faced with a hard decision since I might end up considering just taking another pause which I don’t really want to do but going on as is doesn’t really feel motivating either—hopefully I don’t have to think about that, there’s time still.

Also it seems patch 7.3.5 will be releasing this week, which I suppose will mean a new Mythic+ seasons with the change to how Combat Resurrection works. Unfortunate timing in that sense, haven’t really done any mythic+ this season, at least nothing of note. Understandable with looking for a guild and so on and the season will probably be the shortest yet in that case, but still annoys me slightly.

Won’t even be able to take advantage of the leveling changes really, since I’ll probably be mostly interested in leveling one of the new allied races rather than one of the “old” races but those aren’t coming with the patch—probably with the Battle for Azeroth pre-patch for those who have preordered. Maybe I’ll end up leveling something anyway just to try the changes, but nothing really comes to mind at the moment that I don’t already have at a somewhat high level.

With Imonar down last reset and getting through the reclear this week we managed to get a few tries in on Kin’garoth. So far the fight seems rather trivial, with an element of being a movement check. So the fight for the most part remains as is from heroic; with orbs to dodge, adds to kill, a beam to dodge and not standing in the tanks to avoid being one-shot by the tank mechanic.

There is one thing that changes however, after killing the first set of adds, the orbs apply a debuff that increases the damage taken from them. As the orbs will start spawning faster than one can clear them, this will lead to there being an increasing amount of orbs going around the circle which will make moving to the adds and spreading out for their abilities harder. I believe this may end up being our biggest challenge, as movement seems to be a big problem in the guild—Imonar intermissions being the perfect example from earlier. Though I suppose this kind of soft enrage is the primary difficulty in the fight along with the damage requirements it imposes.

Our tries so far were quite promising, though we only got to 45% and the boss gets harder as the fight goes along. In that try as well we had several dead to bombs that were exploded in the wrong place, so there is still a significant amount of learning to do.

Still, I’m hoping we manage to kill the boss this week. Firstly it could prove useful for the guildsearch and secondly it feels like it would be a decent morale booster since some of our progress and farm hasn’t been going quite as well as expected, with some problems even in a heroic reclear. Seems the kill might bring a bit more motivation in, hopefully along with the motivation to stay focused on farm bosses as well so that we keep clearing them quickly. We’ll see at the end of the week, I wonder if we’ll try a extra raidday?

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.