The last few weeks of raiding have been mostly filled with progress on Kil’jaeden. And slowly I am getting slightly frustrated and strangely enough, bored, with this boss. The fight requires a decent amount of attention though not quite on the levels of Mistress or Maid however everything just happens over such a long span of time that actually getting to the part we’re progressing on is gettign frustrating.

That all is slightly strange, because at the start when almost nothing was happening as we were progressing phase one, I was actually quite enjoying the boss. Now slowly however, phase one and the intermission are becoming frustrating slogs while waiting for the interesting part to arrive. It kind of reminds me of the healer challenge: the beginning is by no means trivial, but at some point quite easily doable once one knows how it goes, however having to keep redoing it to get to progress gets really frustrating at some point. That’s the thing I’m currently experienceing with Kil’jaeden, frustration at having to keep redoing the “boring” parts and consequently at times making simple mistakes.

A perfect example of this was once getting hit by one of the orbs from the adds in phase one due quite simply forgetting to even think about dodging because I was so ready for the phase to be over.

I realize these things are a part of raiding and a part of what makes these bosses difficult to execute properly, an endurance check in a sense. However being in the middle of progress on such a boss can be frustrating at times.

Seeing past that though, I think I actually enjoy the fight. I’m not overly keen on the knockback orbs spawning in the middle essentially being a timing check for one dispeller in the raid, but in general the knockback mechanic can be quite fun and gives opportunities to make life saving Leaps of Faith which I appreciate. Phase two is also quite interesting, though the healer adds feel slightly frustrating as I feel I can’t properly contribute there. Maybe worth looking into Apotheosis which should give a significant increase in burst heal for those adds, though we seem to be handling the adds rather well for the most part so probably not necessary.

Right now though, I’m just hoping that we actually manage to kill the boss in time, since it seems Antorus is arriving on the 29th and that’s not a whole lot of time for us. Sure, it’s still three weeks that we’re probably extending the ID, but even then it might end up being tight. All of that also assumes I don’t get benched, would naturally very much like to be there for the kill. I’m sure it’ll end up being fine, but it’s a bit of extra pressure that I didn’t need. Especially considering it makes the deadline for getting 75 traits apparent.

On Monday we finally managed to down Avatar after surprisingly few tries. Believe I personally have around 230, which seems to be quite on the low end for that boss. In the end as noted, the boss is quite simple. Sure the DPS and HPS requirements are somewhat tough, and phase one as a healer especially. But in the end, somewhat like Maiden, the kill ended up coming as a surprise. We went down into phase two around 32% and just decided to play it to see how it goes. A few minutes later, the boss was down. It was all surprisingly clean and boring almost. Maybe a place or two where it looked somewhat dangerous.

I also ended up getting some loot which was nice.

And after Avatar, we ended up having some time to poke at Kil’jaeden. Which was surprisingly fun even though we were only wiping in phase one before the first intermission. I find it strange, because on heroic I don’t really find the fight that interesting. Maybe that opinion will change as we get into more phases and get some of the more annoying overlaps, but so far it was rather fun. Could also have been the hype coming in from the Avatar kill as I honestly wasn’t expecting us to kill Avatar that day yet. So now I’m unexpectedly actually looking forward to doing progress again, which wasn’t so strongly the case on Avatar, and that feels great. Especially things like the additional healer adds will be interesting to have to deal with in a fight that already seems kind of hectic with all the flying around.

But until that, it seems we need to clear the raid again, as we’ll be going back to farm. Which I find kind of good as I’m sure there are still several people that need equipment (especially tier pieces) from both Maiden and Avatar. On the other hand, I kind of want to just go do progress on Kil’jaeden. But yes, more gear probably means smoother progress, so that will be nice since it seemed we might have had some damage problems already with getting into phase two quickly enough. But I guess we’ll see how that all goes in a week or two again, not sure how quick our re-clear will be.

Regardless, definitely looking forward to raiding more than I was last week which is a very good thing.

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.