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.

So the last week or so has been rather annoying as I ended up leaving the guild I was in and have been looking for a new one. Sadly, the search has gone rather terribly so far, though I have a few leads still. I’m really hoping one of those pans out, as it would be rather sad to miss out on the early progress in Antorus since that’s usually the most fun time. Unfortunately that’s looking rather likely, since the pool of guilds that are of interest is rapidly shrinking.

And I have no idea what I’ll end up doing if I don’t find a guild, I still want to keep playing the game but if I’m not able to raid at a reasonable level that doesn’t really make much sense any more. But time will tell.

This post is acutally quite late as we already killed him on Wednesday, however I figured it was still worth making. So indeed, Kil’jaeden finally down after some 300+ wipes and now we finally get a small breather before Antorus comes out. Well, kind of, since we are hopefully re-killing Kil’jaeden before Antorus comes out to give the people that didn’t have the chance to be there an opportunity to get the achievement. I will be sorely disappointed if we don’t manage that.

As for the fight itself, well there’s not really much for me to add. Sure, I hadn’t played the second intermission yet at the time of the last post, but that one went over so quickly there’s hardly anything to say about it and phase three was really a mechanics check for one to two players who were responsible for the orbs or looking for safe spots from the obelisks. For the rest, it was just a DPS and HPS race. That’s not to say the phase is trivial, it is however quite a lot simpler than phase two and we really didn’t have a lot of wipes in phase three once we started to consistently get there.

All in all, it’s a fight that seems to mostly test patience due to the length. Sure, there are timing challenges with the orbs especially for slower classes that don’t have means of ignoring the mechanic, but those are somewhat easy to overcome with practice. I am still rather content with the fight, though it’s not exactly my favourite and I do also have to say, as we were more consistenly getting into phase three the fight actually came a lot easier to bear since it started feeling like the fight was progressing rather quickly. This due to there almost always being something happening that needed ones attention, if not now then in a few seconds. That did definitely add some intensity to the fight later on. It is by far not as punishing as something like Maiden, which is probably a good thing as it allows for more training to be done each try.