Legion

The pre-patch has been out for almost a week now and so far it is actually feeling rather good despite all the scaling issues and bugs.

It has been really nice to be able to do some mythic+ again since there is something of a renewed interest for that type of content, primarly due to everyone needing to learn their classes and specs again. It has also given me the opportunity to start poking at Discipline properly which has been a nice change of pace—especially since Holy seems to feel rather similiar to before except I now have on more big cooldown, and that is one really big cooldown potentially one of the strongest healing cooldowns available at the moment. That has been especially nice since unfortunately cooldown wise Holy was very weak during Legion so it is nice to see a bit more utility in that sense being available. I’m still not quite sure how to properly manage getting that cooldown reset though, there have been murmurings of it being doable in 3-4 minutes but I can’t seem to reach that, maybe the circumstances that are being assumed just haven’t been available in raids so far.

Discipline has also been really nice to play, so far only in mythic+ and nothing particularily high, I think the highest key was a Arcway+21. But it has been nice getting a feel for Discipline and I think it plays a bit better now without Plea since the descision what to cast feels a bit more straightforward. Having played my Restoration Druid twink I think also helped a lot with getting started as Discipline, since I had gotten used to the playstyle of being prepared for damage ahead of time instead of simply reacting to it as I can rather easily do most of the time as Holy.

Unfortunately I haven’t yet taken the chance to play my Druid, but that somehow feels a bit less interesting now that I also have Discipline to learn and as such something new and interesting to do with my main. I did however get to tank a couple of dungeons with my Warrior and it went reasonably well though the changes there were felt a lot harder especially when it comes to the global cooldown. Ignore Pain, in other words my primary damage mitigation mechanic, being on the global cooldown was a rather frustating experience. It wasn’t really helped along by Devastator and the talent that gives you rage through Demoralizing Shout now sharing a tier, since I was used to the rage gains of both I felt a lot less survivable than before which is a feat considering Warrior tanks were rather easy to bring down. This unfortunately lead to me not enjoying tanking with the Warrior as much anymore, which is unfortunate since it has been nice to have an Alliance character I could play with from time to time along with being able to tank. Having a feel for both the healing and tanking aspects in dungeons I feel really helps me in becoming a better healer and being able to better predict the damage the tank should be taking, which will of course become even more important if I plan on playing Druid or Discipline more since those are both rather reliant on being able to predict incoming damage. It was only a short test so far though, and I definitely want to try the Warrior a bit more but the initial impression was unfortunately not that good.

The pre-patch also has me really looking forward to Battle for Azeroth now since that’s when the specs will be really fleshed out with the Azerite traits. Also that is probably when I get the chance to start raiding a bit as Discipline once I have some more experience playing the spec, which I’m looking forward to a surprising amount considering I barely played the spec during Legion. I’m even considering deviating from my normal leveling routine and going Discipline for leveling instead of Holy, since that would probably be more useful with the DoTs available though I’m not sure how much that will matter since we’ll be leveling in a group anyway meaning my damage shouldn’t be of consequence.

All-in-all though, the pre-patch was really reinvigorating and has given me and my friends renewed motivation to play the game which was sorely needed and now we can start preparing for the launch of Battle for Azeroth!

There’s actually a surprising amount going on lately, much of which I haven’t written here about. To be fair some of that stuff is fairly recent, like the recent confirmation that the pre-patch is coming next week which is something of a big incoming change that I feel didn’t have a lot of official notice. I mean, it’s already Friday as we learned, which means that the patch is coming in less than a week. That feels like really short notice for something that so significantly changes the game. To be fair, it was somewhat foreshadowed with them saying the PVP season will end soon and with it being four weeks before the expansion launch, it can’t end up being much later.

Pre-patch

So let’s talk about the pre-patch a bit more in detail. I’m excited to see it coming even though I am miffed about some of the changes, since that will be the first feel for many of how Battle for Azeroth will play out. Now I have been poking a tiny bit at the beta myself, but a lot of people don’t have access to that. Of course we will be missing the new artifact along with the azerite armor, but all of the skill changes along with the loss of our artifact weapon are coming with the pre-patch. This will give a good opportunity for people—me included—to familiarize themselves with the class changes in preparation for Battle for Azeroth. I’m also kind of excited since this means I’ll be able to raid with the new talents and so on, and while those aren’t balanced around 110 content it’ll still give some indication how the end-game will feel like.

It’s also a good opportunity for me to maybe start taking some bigger pokes at Discipline, a spec I’ve so far pretty much completely avoided playing. I’m not conviced I’ll hugely enjoy playing Discipline but with the level of raiding I seem to be going to do with Battle for Azeroth it feels it makes sense at least being familiar with my second healing spec even if it’s not my first choice. I just hope that doesn’t end up with me pidgeonholed into playing Discipline the whole time.

There is one change that makes me sligthly miffed about the pre-patch coming though, namely the removal of master loot. Now I’m not sure I’m a huge fan of this change in general but it seems to be one we have to live with. But why it specifically bothers me, is that we are still in the process of trying to get the mount from Argus to players who participated or were in the guild during progress and have received some new recruits along with promotions to raider since then. This change now means that some of our raiders who contributed to the boss actually being downed might end up being out of luck and some person we aren’t even sure we want to keep in the guild might end up getting it. This is one of those situations I feel makes it a big mistake for Blizzard to force this change upon guilds.

Druids

Or rather, one specific druid, namely my twink. So a month or so ago by now I ended up boosting a druid for myself to 110 in order to have something to play for our planned split-raids. We are going to be doing split-raids to be able to get everyone the mount in time before the launch of Battle for Azeroth. Now as mentioned above we’ll have to see how that turns out with the loot change, but hopefully it all ends well.

Playing a druid has been an interesting experience so far and has given me a somewhat new found appreciation of why they were so popular for mythic+ during Legion and that reason is rather simple: I’m already surviving abilities without cooldowns that my priest would die to without cooldowns. I mean minor cooldows or trinkets, sure, but priests don’t have very many of those to go around especially if one gets unlucky and Desperate Prayer decides not to reset its cooldown. This really makes me hope they get the balancing around not only throughput but survivability and utility down much better in Battle for Azeroth since it kind of sucks being somewhat excluded from a major part of the game that is my favourite part of the game along with raiding. Mythic+ is probably one of the big things that has made me play and kept me subscribed throughout Legion and seeing first-hand how broken the balance is makes me somewhat frustrated. It might even end up with me making my druid my “mythic+ main” which would be a really sad turn of events. I’m also not sure how viable that strategy is with the changes to the druid talents which I feel makes healing mythic+ as a druid significantly harder, though I have no actual experience of those changes yet.

Guilds

Now there is one final strange thing that actually happened just a few days ago: I ended up being contacted by one of the guilds I applied to way back when. Now this puts me in a rather interesting situation, since I wasn’t really looking to change guilds and I kind of hate doing it. It is with some sadness I counted that this would be my fifth guild change during Legion which feels like a ton. Now two of those were leaving at the time basically dead guilds which is of course justified and a third was due to some rather heavy disagreement with the leadership of some decision being taken—I also wasn’t the only person leaving. So while it is all rather justifiable and it is a game after all where the primary purpose is to enjoy one’s time which does mean being in a group one enjoys playing with and has similar goals, it still feels somewhat wrong for that number to be ending up so high.

At the same time, I had hoped for this outcome since I know some people in the guild and would be very happy to be able to raid with those people again. This is why I made the decision to at least go forward by expressing interest in their offer. Nothing is final yet and they still have some internal discussion to do along with probably a interview with me to do assuming everything goes well, but I’m feeling really good about the direction this all is going in. It’s also something of a win-win scenario for me, since even if they don’t end up taking me in I’m rather happy where I am now and having to think about this potential change of guilds has really solified that feeling for me since I have at times been unsure how well I like the guild and now I feel certain that I enjoy raiding here and will be happy with either outcome—changing guilds or staying put—and that is obviously a rather good position to be in.

Somehow it’s been a while again, but that’s probably because it feels like not a lot has happened though that might not be quite true. I’ve picked up streaming as a fun little thing to do, still expanding on it and not quite sure where exactly I want to go but so far it’s been fun though also frustrating at times since I’m so directionless. This has also led to me being somewhat motivated by statistics, which while they seem decent on the surface since I know many awesome people that want to support me also show that the stream isn’t really interesting people since they don’t stay or follow so I’m left wondering what I can do to improve there. But I guess time and experimentation will bring me somewhere, hopefully.

Streaming is also a really different experience from writing this, since firstly it’s all real time and secondly I have those statistics available. For this blog, I’ve made the decision to not really promote or link it anywhere which naturally restricts the amount of people coming in. I also have no analytics running so I have no idea if people are reading anything I write combined with no comments. That makes it a very “putting something out into the void” experience, which is distinctly different from streaming though is the approach I took when starting the stream—since then I’ve expanded to people actually being able to hear me on stream along with whatever VOIP we happen to be using at the time, usually Discord but Teamspeak at times as well.

I think that history might be what also confuses me about what I want from streaming, I know I like playing around with technology and streams and video production and so on are exactly that which makes it enjoyable to me so the whole “putting it out into the void” approach should be appealing in and of itself. I also don’t believe I want to start with streaming as any sort of primary income, since it seems it requires quite a different personality from what I have along with requiring quite a lot of dedication even on days one isn’t really feeling like it. Simultaneosly as stated, I notice myself focusing on and following the metrics and give at least some thought to how I can improve the stream for viewers and hopefully gain some more followers potentially leading to me being able to be partnered on Twitch which would be kind of cool—50 followers being the last milestone I’m missing there. I guess this is where the whole networking thing would come in, getting to know other streamers and getting hosts and so on but that’s also not something I particularily enjoy doing. This has led to me just hoping the random people stopping by due to the viewer count end up liking it and following and that isn’t working very well so far. Maybe it will work better in the future, since viewers tend to bring in more viewers in kind of a positive feedback loop, but for now people don’t stay or follow.

It could also just be down to setup or content of course, I got some reports that apparently the VOIP was really loud at times, so hopefully I can fix that and make it all more even—that should actually be a somewhat easy thing to fix so maybe I need to get on that since I basically know exactly what to do.

I do think I’ll keep streaming though, some of my friends seem to rather enjoy being able to look at what we’re doing even though it’s content they themselves don’t want or can’t participate in at the moment so it is providing a service to them at least. And somehow it feels a bit fun having it running in the background, just from a tech enthusiast point of view as well.

Somehow, it has been a while since I’ve decided to write something which feels slightly strange. It is partially due to not much happening I think, mythic+ was really quiet last week for some reason with barely any runs going on. We did take a poke at a Lower Karazhan +26 but unfortunately decided not to even finish it much less do it in time. That was also Tuesday evening so we did not get a chance to go on and try the +25 at a later date which I find slightly unfortunate—though it would’ve proved rather difficult with Moroes and grievous which is an especially painful combination even without tyrannical.

What has been happening, strangely enough, is some more leveling. I actually have two character’s I’ve been leveling a bit, namely a Highmountain Shaman and a Nightborne Warlock—mostly just so I have the appearances unlocked in case I want to play one of those races.

It has been going decently, getting to Karazhan again was really nice since that’s just such an amazing spurt though it does make normal leveling thereafter that much more difficult. I honestly don’t know how I feel about the classes yet—I probably won’t play the warlock much after leveling because I tend to not like playing as a damage dealer and that is the only choice as warlock but for leveling alone Affliction has been rather nice so far and it goes at a decent pace but then I’m only in Classic zones at the moment which are rather a lot easier than the later zones.

The shaman, on the other hand, feels really slow at the moment both as restoration and elemental. It just feels like the casts take forever and they don’t feel overly impactful. This might be a case of poor gear which is understandable while leveling especially since we’ve used some more unusual methods that don’t provide much relevant gear. But we’re about to start with Legion zones—specifically the invasions—which should provide a rather nice boost of experience and hopefully a bit of gear as well.

Speaking of unusual methods, we did some more experimenting this time around specifically going into Firelands and trying some of the trash there. It wasn’t something I would recommend since the packs there didn’t give overly much experience and were actually rather hard to kill even though we went in there more overleveled than Karazhan—72-73 into Karazhan, 90-91 into Firelands. Though the turtles there did give a rather big chunk of experience, almost 3000 each and they were also much easier to kill than the other packs. Unfortunately, there aren’t overly many of them so the instance limit will be the biggest blocker along with how much one will need to move. But Tol’vir is around those levels anyway and much more lucrative so I would suggest going there until 91 or so and after that just doing treasures and bonus objectives in Draenor—that seems to be the quickest route.

So we actually managed to get some mythic+ “pushing” done with our new alts, we didn’t get spectacularily far yet but still up to a +10. Unfortunately we ended up depleting that one due to one of us having disconnects which made some of the bosses take a long while to kill. Despite that it was quite a lot of fun which probably surprises nobody I think—after all, mythic+ is still enjoyable and getting some of the challenge back in the lower keystone levels due to actually being geared appropriately for them rather than horrendously overgeared unsurprisingly led to those dungeons being fun again. That along with the new perspective of another class.

It has also been interesting to see people playing those new classes and how quickly and well they end up adapting to them classes. I think all of us are adapting somewhat quickly though I still feel I do a terrible job at playing a Death Knight with some real newbie mistakes in Neltharion’s Lair on the last boss for example. This was primarily due to me being somewhat overwhelmed with trying to remember a new set of keybindings while juggling a new-to-me mechanic—gripping mobs—along with proper positioning of the boss. With that triple threat I ended up positioning the boss poorly at times. I also ended up somewhat confused as to what exactly counts as active mitigation for a Death Knight since I had been assuming just having Bone Shield stacks up would be enough but that was not the case. This confusion added a certain incapability to concentrate.

At the same time, that confusion is the exact reason why we decided to go the route of doing this “pushing” on our alts since it allows us to iron out such mistakes and not make them in the future and as such helps us learn our classes better in the appropriate environment. We already had one instance where our tank in a somewhat high Black Rook Hold key either wasn’t aware of what active mitigation was for Death Knights or just the necessity to keep it up for the Shear on Illysana which felt somewhat awkward later on. This demonstrates rather well that there are some things that Blizzard could be a lot better about signaling—specifically what exactly counts as active mitigation and possibly even more strongly showing those requirements in the Dungeon Journal though it is usually noted in the ability text but maybe a custom icon like there is for interrupts would be good as well?

Beyond that though, it has been a good experience so far and I’m slowly coming to terms with how the Death Knight tank works, how much I can handle and what I survive which is good. There has been one small oddity though: none of us has gotten a legendary so far. With the amount of mythic+ and what not done along with some of us having a weekly chest as well it feels somewhat surprising that the bad-luck-protection hasn’t kicked in yet and given us a legendary. That is of course something of a limiting factor on our ability to progress forward in mythic+ as legendaries—especially at this item level—are a significant boost. Even a bad legendary would be a big upgrade over the gear we are using at the moment. Here’s hoping we start seeing them roll in soon, and hopefully we end up getting some of the decent ones and not the useless ones. But that will be for the coming weeks I think, not sure how much more time we’ll have this week along with not having done so much mythic+ on our mains yet.

So I managed to reach 110 with my Death Knight on Tuesday, which was before the reset meaning I had a nice 960 item waiting for me in my Order Hall today since we also managed to do a quick +15 key for me and the other level 110 in our leveling group. Unfortunately, I got a ring which feels like it would be a somewhat small upgrade compared to one of the major slots like chest or legs but was still nice, I believe the stats are at least decent as well though I do need to poke into Blood Death Knights a bit more in order to confirm that. To be fair, I already have a 950 chest I got from the weekly for doing four mythic dungeons, so maybe a ring wasn’t that unlucky.

Unfortunately, two out of four in our leveling group of four did not manage to get to 110 in time, hopefully, today or tomorrow at the latest so we can get to doing some dungeons. We have been planning to do some lowbie dungeons, potentially starting with running just plain mythic dungeons for gear and then mythic+ afterward. Might end up starting with mythic+ immediately since it’s so easy to get gear at this point, especially with I believe most of us have some of those Argus tokens stacked up somewhere.

Beyond that, there was something of a nice surprise this week—even though I had heard rumblings about it earlier—with the second mythic+ affix being changed from necrotic to volcanic. That will make this week quite a lot more manageable than before even though trash will still remain relatively painful with teeming and tyrannical is generally quite a huge spike in the general difficulty—much bigger than fortified. Still, I think it should be a pretty nice week for getting started with the new characters since fortified doesn’t become a big problem until higher keystones and all of the other affixes are quite manageable.

For now, though I’m just happy to be done with leveling for now because while it was fun doing it in a group the last few levels were a bit annoying since we decided to split up which led to me having to level alone a bit which isn’t the most engaging thing as a tank. Overall the leveling experience was rather educational since we ended up doing some more unorthodox tactics that I was unaware of—namely trash farming in Karazhan and Tol’vir. This was possible thanks to the buff given from out-leveling content intended to make old raids and whatnot still soloable with the stat squish that came in Warlords.

It worked strangely well in those two places, other dungeons and raids not so much. We did try some of the Wrath of the Lich King raids but unfortunately, those were not worth farming as they always presented some sort of problem—examples being the debuff that heals mobs when dealing damage in the Obsidian Sanctum or just how plain hard the trash was in Ruby Sanctum. Naxxramas and Icecrown just didn’t seem worth it on the basis of experience gained. We didn’t really end up trying the Cataclysm raids since we already had Tol’vir available and that worked rather well.

Finally with Warlords we—though I suppose this is more common knowledge—farmed the treasures and bonus objectives of the zones rather than questing. They went rather quickly once everyone was the appropriate level—we tried starting already at 88-89 but we couldn’t loot the treasure and the mobs were already rather dangerous—and were rather easy sailing, would definitely recommend for people planning to level especially in a group since the bonus objectives are so quick to complete. Having a group and being on voice comms also helps quite a lot with the boredom that can creep in while doing such farm focused tasks which is also nice—I’m not sure I would’ve done this whole leveling adventure if I was alone, I probably wouldn’t even have started it.

Now I guess I just need to wait for everyone to get to 110 and then we can start doing some dungeons which I’m really looking forward to—get to properly tank a bit again.

Last weekend I actually ended up doing a bit of leveling again, which even though quite a bit slower now with the changes in 7.3.5 was surprisingly fun, just running through dungeons with friends. Didn’t really do any questing except for the odd dungeon quest which tends to be my preferred way of leveling since group content is much more fun than solo.

What was more surprising however, was how big the changes to dungeon leveling actually ended up being, not having tried them myself since the patch. One truly does need to pull quite calmly, at least once we started getting into Burning Crusade/Wrath of the Lich King-content. Part of that however might be how unused I am to playing a Blood Death Knight, not having tanked with a Death Knight since Wrath of the Lich King and back then not as Blood but rather Unholy. It feels strange compared to a Warrior and at times rather frustrating as I’m not quite sure yet how to manage my runes and runic power yet in order to ease the job of the healer as much as possible. I also keep forgetting some of my abilities, which certainly isn’t helping but that’s what leveling is for—learning the class and its abilities—though at times it frustrating not having core abilities in dungeons—for example, I had to do the first few dungeons without being able to interrupt which feels like a bit of a pacing issue. I know that’s primarily an issue with Death Knights due to them starting at a higher level and consequently having a somewhat different pacing to their abilities, but something so core missing at such a level when the dungeons are already expecting interrupts to be available feels a bit iffy.

Despite that, leveling has been fun and I think one of the big contributors to that has been being able to tank a bit more again. Dungeon tanking remains really fun even though I’m not as convinced by raid or mythic+ tanking—mythic+ tanking just feels to focused on managing silly pulls and kiting the mobs which doesn’t feel like tanking as much especially during weeks like this one with necrotic. Managing necrotic stacks does obviously increase the difficulty of tanking but the amount one can do alone feels limited at times though I guess that’s the point—dungeons being a team effort and all.

Still mythic+ at least on the higher levels feels much more gimmicky than standard dungeons.

I am still looking forward to be able to do some mythic+ once we finish leveling though, since getting a better perspective as a tank will probably help my healing as well especially with learning when to expect big incoming damage on the tank and big abilities from trash and what not. I’ve already done much of that learning but still get surprised by new knowledge at times.

It will also be good to get a better feel of the damage patterns and cooldowns of a Death Knight tank since with me not having played one since Wrath of the Lich King I don’t have that good of an idea of what abilities they have available and what they exactly can do to mitigate damage—I know they are extremely durable and probably the best choice for most higher end mythic+ content with exceptions in certain dungeons perhaps but beyond that not much. So that will certainly be a useful learning experience. I guess I really should have all tanks at max level to have a better idea to heal them.

Hm, maybe that’ll end up being my next project? It’s a bit more quiet with the expansion looming anyway even though mythic+ pushing is still really fun, so might be some time over to level. I’m not convinced I’m interested in playing all the tanks however with druids seeming the least interesting primarily due to being stuck in bear form and as such not being able to see the gear and consequently transmogs. The new artifact forms do counteract that a bit but I’m not sure quite enough for me—there’s just something about being able to create one’s own transmog set and the personalisation that comes through that. Monk tank doesn’t seem that appealing mechanics-weise either but I guess I need to actually try it first. I do have monk sitting around somewhere, so wouldn’t even need to level from level one which is nice.

Will have to give it some though, first things first I need to get this Death Knight to max level and next week looks a bit more promising for mythic+ so that might end up taking a while.

So this past week—WoW wise at least—has been rather nice. We managed to reclear in decent if not good time—two days instead of the one day we managed two weeks ago. This was in nice contrast to last week where we actually ended up not clearing, primarily I suppose because people are quickly losing their motivation—also, our raid leader wasn’t present, but one person really shouldn’t make that difference. This might happen next week again, if we raid at all since the sign-ups are rather weak so far.

But beyond that, there has been a lot of decently successful mythic+ going on especially considering it’s a tyrannical week. We managed to play several high-ish keys and even do some improvements on previous keys which feels a bit surprising, though todays tries in Seat of the Triumvirate were unfortunately very unsuccessful. The first two the tank just couldn’t manage the first boss—I suppose I learned my lesson there in being pickier with which tank to pick—and in the third run we unfortunately had one player disconnect at the third boss which killed any chance of completing it. It was rather close and might even have been possible to do in time, which makes it extra unfortunate.

I’m hoping we can carry this momentum forward tomorrow and keep pushing keys, though next week I feel is rather less appealing than this one even with tyrannical gone since we’ll have: teeming, quaking and fortified. Teeming and fortified will make the trash annoying to deal with, especially in places like Maw of Souls or Halls of Valor which have bad trash to begin with and quaking can make some bosses much harder to play since it will keep breaking the Prydaz shield which is necessary to survive some big hits—examples being Lady Hatecoil in Eye of Azshara as well as General Xakal in the Arcway. Both of those bosses have big AoE hits that Prydaz can help with dealing, but unfortunately the quaking damage is more than the Prydaz shield meaning one will probably not have the shield up when the hit comes. Especially since quaking hits more often than Prydaz refreshes.

Which means it unfortunately looks like there might not be a significant amount of pushing going on until three resets from now, when we get fortified again along with bolstering and skittish. Sure, those both make trash take longer but they’re a lot better than what we have in between. I’m still looking forward to doing more mythic+ though. I’d also like to play some more Magicka—there’s been a distinct lack of that with Easter and what not, will have to see about remedying that as soon as possible maybe even tonight still depending on who’s online.

In the recent Q&A, there was some talk of Blizzard considering removing the option for (Guild) Master Loot in current content raids with the release of Battle for Azeroth. And I’m still somewhat undecided on the matter though leaning towards it being a negative change.

On one hand, I can kind of see and agree with the argument being made—Master Loot was primarily used to allow people to complete their tier sets—but on the other hand Master Loot was used for more than just that. It also enables the guild to distribute gear according to need, based on for example secondary stats or usefulness of certain procs, these things being especially important for trinkets, rings and necklaces the moment.

Additionally, even with sets being gone, there will still be the Azerite bonuses on armor that will probably mean that different pieces are better for certain classes. To be fair, the Azerite pieces specifically will be a smaller problem since they can’t titanforge, but especially early on in the raid it might be still frustrating to see pieces that are an item level upgrade go to classes that might not choose to wear them due to the bonuses.

I also to a degree fail to see the benefit this change is supposed to bring. One might argue that on average it will be more fair, since everyone has an equal chance for loot but at the same time maybe that loot isn’t an upgrade and one still can’t give it away due to item level and that is simply frustrating as it’s the same as the boss having simply dropped gold. Maybe it reduces the administrative burden of leading raids a bit and the time required for loot, and even then I feel more time has generally gone to trading loot acquired through personal loot than has been neede for Master Loot.

So the whole situation at the moment just kind of feels like either an unecessary simplification or trying to reduce split runs which is only a concern for a very small number of guilds and then directly harms others.

I am hoping time proves me wrong on this one and it won’t be the end of the world even if not, but it still just feels kind of bad at the moment.

They say time flies when you’re having fun and the last few weeks have gone by rather quickly. As mentioned briefly, Argus is down. Now this is a few weeks ago and I have my kill by now as well along with my trial being over in the guild apparently. That was a bit of a surprise, since I just kind of ended up being promoted without any feedback or discussion or the like but nice nonetheless.

The Argus fight in itself was fairly trivial at this point though I did do a few silly mistakes. There’s only really one difficult part in the last phase if one gets the wrong debuff, aside from that it seems to be basically: stay with the group unless you have bomb/debuff in which case out of the group. Sure there is a bit more nuance than that and Argus isn’t an easy boss, but it still felt fairly straightforward—which gives me much better understanding for some of the people in the guild who are kind of done with the boss since I’m guessing they were rather tired of wiping on other people’s mistakes. Though that is something that happens with every difficult boss and we actually managed the kill with relatively few wipes, 225 or so.

Now I’m just curious to see how they continue with the setups, since I believe only three healers need anything from Argus if they decide to keep taking four healers along or go with three from now on for farm as well.

When it comes to downing bosses, there has obviously been some other “progress” for me as well since the last boss I mentioned progressing on was Kin’garoth. So far the Coven of Shivarra still stands for me, but Kin’garoth, Varimathras and Aggramar have been downed—along with Argus as mentioned. The Kin’garoth fight was about as straightforward as it felt in progress, it’s still error prone with the bombs but other than that straightforward.

Varimathras is almost the same as heroic, just that one has an escort when one goes out with the Necrotic Embrace and there’s a need for keeping proper distances due to this. Also there’s an add that needs to be focused quickly. The fight remains a pure mechanics check, similar to the Maiden in Tomb of Sargeras.

Aggramar, well, just felt like more damage. Sure the big cleave needs to be soaked as two camps as it applies a debuff increasing the damage taken from it, and there spawn some more adds. But the intermissions remain the only difficult phase healerwise and beyond that it’s just add control. Which is fragile yes, and takes time to learn but doesn’t apply to me as a healer much. Though I did get to help a bit with kicking the adds back, which was fun.

Aside from raids, I have also gotten into doing some mythic+ a bit more regularily again which has been really nice. It feels good to be pushing for higher keys again and being challenged—though this week hasn’t gone quite according to plan with more depletions than I’d have thought. But no matter, it has been too much fun anyway to care too much about that. I think I’m slowly managing to get rid of the stress to perform I have been feeling at times which has prevented me from enjoying aspects of the game I tend to enjoy the most.

With that said, I’m actually hoping I manage to play the key I have still, though time is quickly running out and finding decent people for a key this late might be a challenge. But should still be manageable, if not then not the end of the world either.

Overall, good times at the moment. I’m really looking forward to actually participating in progress when Battle for Azeroth comes out, hopefully there will be many opportunities for that.

The first week of raiding with the new guild has come and gone, though there wasn’t all that much raiding in it for me. I participated in the farm up to and including Kin’garoth, meaning one new official kill for me. After that however, I got to sit out. Not necessarily surprising since they would have been new bosses for me and presumably they wanted to finish the farm quickly in order to get back to progressing on Argus—but nonetheless slightly disappointing. In good news they seemed to like my play so the decision wasn’t motivated by bad performance. I was out for the rest of the week as well which was to be expected with Argus progress going on and us running only three healers. Which meant that for the rest of the reset I was mostly following the progress through either streams, Teamspeak or both. And now it seems that will continue for this reset since we have extended the ID. I’m hoping they kill the boss soon since it sounds like some people in the raid are getting very frustrated with the progress.

In other news I suppose, slowly getting back into doing some mythic+ with one guildie, so far no more of a steady group than that and not many intersting keys but it has been fun. I think I might just end up reorienting my expectations regarding mythic+ since lately I’m feeling my desire to play higher keys is preventing me from actually enjoying the keys I am doing as much as I should. This I think goes for raiding as well, I’ve taken on an undue amount of stress from a desire to perform and participate that has led to great frustration with not being able to and that is frankly unecessary. So I’ll keep working towards my goals but try to readjust my attitude regarding the present since I think I’ve done the old mistake of comparing myself to others to much and becoming disappointed with what I have even though it is pretty great and when I am doing stuff I’m enjoying it greatly. So now just to look forward to some more mythic+ hopefully in the near future again and enjoy the sounds of raiding if not the experience of raiding.

Speaking of things that are great, I came to a surprising conclusion lately: I am actually really enjoying being Horde. I had rather expected to miss being a Night Elf a lot but aside from the few moments where I really want to Shadowmeld I’m actually really enjoying playing a Blood Elf. Maybe it’s just the variation after all these years, but it has been oddly enjoyable. I’m still learning proper use of the Blood Elf racial for mythic+ though that is slightly difficult running which such uncoordinated groups. Since it has a long cooldown using it at the right moment is rather critical, but when it gets followed up by a stun or another player using a silence the effect that it has is somewhat diminished. But that will come with time I’m sure, though I’m not so sure how much more time there is since there was some indication in a recent Q&A about the racial potentially being a bit too powerful which could mean changes. That’s for the future though, for now I’m enjoying where I am and actually looking forward to getting started with Battle for Azeroth when the time comes, I think I’ve found a good place to do that if they’ll have me.

Today, I transfered. New server, new faction, new guild. I have a lot of things to get used to. Haven’t really had the time to do anything with the guild yet—the next raid is on Sunday but I have no idea if they’ll be taking me. Not too many sign-ups so far, but I have no idea about peoples’ roles. In addition to that, I need to start reading up on some bosses as they are a bit farther in progress than the previous guild—which was the whole point: finding a guild who does progress at a more reasonable pace. But it does mean there is a whole lot of learning that needs to be one in a short amount of time.

The biggest thing to get used to though will definitely be the new faction: Horde. I have at times been Horde before, my first character was an Orc even. But I’ve always felt most at home with the Night Elves, which are Alliance. I did opt to stay an elf—this time of the Blood variety—which should hopefully lessen the blow, even though the two races are quite distinct. Unfortunately the Allied Races aren’t available yet, as the Nightborn might have made a good compromise though even that wouldn’t have allowed me to keep Shadowmeld, which is easily one of my favourite racial abilities. Shadowmeld is just so damnably useful, it can be used in mythic+ for trash to sneak a ressurect, to reset a boss when one is the last person alive or just to drop out of combat in the world when the “combat bug” rears its head again. At the same time—for pure performance in progress and utility in mythic+—the Blood Elven racial Arcane Torrent is probably more useful in more situations. But I care more about aesthetics and feel than pure performance, and in those categories there’s nothing that competes with Night Elves for me—Nightborne would just be crude imitations as the feel of the races are extremely different.

Beyond that, I am also leaving someone rather dear behind in my old guild and while we still will be able to chat not having our mains on the same faction will be a blow—he does have alts on Horde but it’s just not the same, especially after playing in the same guild for so long. The virtual closeness can be surprisingly important, especially since he physical closeness isn’t there due to distance.

In good news, I’m not alone on Horde. Two good friends of mine had already transferred over, their guild searches having led them to Horde guilds as well. Hopefully that makes the transition a bit easier, being able to play more with them again.

Good if strange times ahead, we’ll see where this year leads me. The beginning of last year started me on this path and it was the best decision I’ve made in a while, both personally and in the gaming space. Hopefully it continues being as awesome as it has been so far even if the rough times have been very rough.

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.

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.

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.

So I haven’t written much about recent raiding efforts and lots has happened (well it’s also been over a year). In that time I’ve ended up changing guilds twice and have progressed through all heroic content while it was current and am currently progressing in mythic Tomb. Specifically, we recently killed Mistress Sassz’ine and are now on Maiden of Vigilance.

Now of the two I would definitely argue Mistress is the more interesting fight, with lots going all almost the whole time. Phase three gets especially intense and getting the kill in the end was quite sweet. She seems to be a somewhat annoying boss for us to rekill however, since people seem to have forgotten how to play phase one and two which presents certain problems considering the fight is still a DPS check.

The Maiden on the other hand is a ball of funny frustration. The fight in itself is quite simple, almost the same as heroic with one small addition: the orbs (from phase two) now randomly spawn on a player of the opposite colour, with a small AoE effect on the ground and delay. Also, a bomb exploding in the raid is an instant wipe. This means that as people are learning the fight, while the wipes can be quite funny at times (the whole raid instantly explodes) it’s also quite frustrating because one keeps dying to the mistakes of others. The fragility of it all led to us having around 50 wipes on Maiden with most of them without seeing phase two. Which somehow gives me the feeling we might be spending a long time on Maiden.

However, it’s been really good to get into some proper progress raiding again and the guild I’m in is quite lovely (silly mistakes aside). Hopefully I and the guild have a long and bright future ahead of us, as I rather hate changing guilds. Now just to make sure we manage to clear Tomb before Antorus arrives, would be good to have the content cleared again before the next comes out. It’s been way too long since last.

Blizzard recently made some pretty big changes to how mythic+ works, both in the way of loot and how the keys themselves handle. The big points being:

• Beating the key quickly no longer rewards more loot, rather higher level keys (15+) have a chance at giving more loot. Completing the key in time also provides one extra piece of loot.
• Keys no longer get depleted, rather downgraded. If you don’t complete the dungeon in time, you get a new random key one level lower. If you don’t complete it at all, you get the same key one level lower.

Now I did not exactly like these changes, to be more precise the change that downgraded keys. In theory, this sounds like a great change: you always have a chance at loot when completing a mythic+ dunegon. For me however, since I’m mostly doing them for the challenge or to get a high key as possible done, it adds a lot of stress to always do a 100% tries for the keys in order to not downgrade them. A depleted key could always be redone and then upgraded once one knew the instance better, not so much when it’s a new random dungeon. It also greatly adds to the frustration of learning the dungeon and affix combo every week, since not getting things right there mean downgraded keys.

The loot change on the other hand has actually worked in my favour since I already tried to do higher level keys and not 3-chesting lower level ones. Though for those who were participating in that, I can understand the frustration.

Now these changes overall were quite odd, in that they seem to punish the people that were actively doing mythic+ content and mostly benefitting the people who weren’t overly interested in it in the first place. Presumably this was an attempt to get more people into doing mythic+, but at the same time the requirements for joining mythic+ groups seem to be more extreme than ever and there seem to be fewer groups up.

Now then, how do the changes feel after a month or so of living with them? Well, still kind of terrible and a downgrade from the old system. I would strongly prefer the option of depleting a key rather than downgrading it, especially since sometimes downgrading is down to one bad pull or an unlucky combo from some mobs. It’s really frustrating at that point to be put, essentially, two dungeons behind from where one was before; especially if one was running a dungeon one was interested in pushing/doing well in at the moment as one then again is at the mercy of luck to get that key again.

The loot change on the other hand, I like but seems to be the more controversial one.

In the end though, the changes aren’t the end of the world. Even the key downgrading at times has proven useful (e.g. Cathedral keystones…) but even at those times it has been somewhat bittersweet as it might have been useful to be able to try it again.