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).