Over the weekend, Canna timewalked her way to 110 and earned the Void Elf heritage gear. Yay! I'm a little torn as to whether to continue her to 120 or not. I mean she's 112 now (mostly from mining and herbing) and I still haven't made up my mind. Even with generous catch-up mechanics, leveling the Necklace of Suck is a serious pain. You're given a level 35 Heart of Azeroth once you reach 120 now, so you automatically get access to a major azerite power, but past that is a grind that's painful to do on multiple characters. I've been EXTREMELY diligent with Strev (read: borderline psychotic) and he's heart level 56 a month into 8.2. The thought of doing that on two (or more) characters a day would be ridiculous.
Strev spent the time raiding The Azeroth Inc. Way.
As mentioned previously, my last raiding was w-a-a-a-a-a-y back in Cataclysm with Fidelis, which was in my opinion a pretty laid back guild. Members were supported and encouraged (guilted) into making sure they had flasks, etc. Emphasis was on performing mechanics correctly over raw output. Our raid leaders, Kheth and Sodamodem were very chill. It was a fun time, but honestly, we didn't do so hot on progression.
Fast forward to the now. In Azeroth Inc, the raids are significantly more intense, which is a direct reflection of our raid leader. I honestly didn't know how things were going to go-- I knew the team was still in the "forming" process, with a small clique that had been with the guild a while and a BUNCH of newer players that had joined since 8.1. Many were geared at my level-- some significantly lower and one that was way short of even the LFR requirements. This caused me (and it would turn out a few others) concerns. We were all there to be successful.
All along the way to the first boss, we cleared trash and my damage was all right. Not stellar, but that's just the position my spec is in right now. I should check out fire, but after thousands of hours I'm quite comfortable with arcane. The whole time I'm checking to see how I stack up against the other arcane caster: the raid leader. He's not on the charts. At all. Halfway to the first boss, I found out why.
He was bristling with rage. Not quite "50DKP MINUS", but it was close. He had spent the entire time watching DPS and healing meters, examining gear for enchantments, watching who is doing interrupts on casters, and who wasn't. He's is the first to admit he's a total a-hole, but we all knew why. The goal is to down bosses, not coddle carries when we're doing progression. He gave a fair warning that "if you think you're not cutting it, bow out now-- no harm no foul, but if you keep going you will be called out." No one dropped. From that point forward, he was good to his word, calling out lack of ring or weapon enchants, pointing out a couple of people who were much lower on the DPS charts than would be acceptable. "We can carry through the first one or two, but then you WILL be cut." He explicitly forbid any of the healers from interrupting casters. In short, he put the Fear of God into the group.
It worked. We had DPS unable to interrupt because everyone else was trying to interrupt. We upped our game as best as we could.
We downed boss after boss. The first week they had gone 3/8 on Friday and added boss 4 on Sunday with many attempts. For my own part, I'd watched the videos and gone through the crappy LFR version of the fight whose watered down mechanics left me almost at a disadvantage on one fight. My saving grace is I dance very well and dodge a lot of avoidable damage, but it comes at a cost of DPS uptime. Fights that require repositioning aren't terrible-- that's what blink/shimmer and displacement are for. If I have to keep running? That's a problem. Short version: several fights required a lot of constant movement, but we prevailed.
Boss 1 is a pretty vanilla fight, all things considered. At the beginning everyone is hit with either a poison mark or a frost mark requiring you to constantly move or stay still respectively. I, of course, get the one requiring movement. Standing near someone with the opposite mark causes a burst of raid-wide damage and resets the stacking debuff you constantly get from not doing what you were supposed to be doing. Periodically the boss will target people with crap that must be carried out of the group and will shoot out poison and frost arrows that must be dodged. Failure to dodge means more stacks or raid-wide burst damage depending on which flavor you soak. Pretty straightforward.
Boss 2 is an underwater fight against a giant moray eel. You have to maintain a /range 6 distance from everyone else to prevent extra damage, but being able to swim up/down makes this cake. Otherwise the big gotcha is: you can't be healed unless you have a temporary buff (bioluminescent) from killing one of two puffer fish on the platform. If you have the buff though, swimming over open water makes you a tasty morsel for a giant fish (insta-kill). Bonus: the eel is constantly pulsing knockbacks that push you towards open water. A couple of times you have to swim through jellyfish-infested waters chasing the boss down. Touching a jelly will insta-kill and the new platforms will be more broken up than the previous. Not a hard fight, overall. It was after this fight, the leader made good on his threats and sent to lowest performers packing.
Boss 3 gave me Al-Akir flashbacks from Throne of Four Winds. The boss stands in the middle of a ring in a pool of water and there's a lot of tornado dodging, dispel-able debuffs that do massive raid-wide damage when dispelled (or will pretty much kill the debuffed player if they expire on their own. Positioning is of paramount importance and I can't emphasize how wonderful my shimmer talent (you get 2 blinks) was here. The party constantly ran in a counter-clockwise circle to stay ahead of the tornado spawns. I would blink ahead of the group, which gave me enough time to plant and fire off arcane blasts. Yay! Periodically, you have to run a gauntlet to get to the eye of the storm and beat down an add before 'bad things happen' with knockbacks that can send you into the storm. Again, blink to the rescue, allowing me to return to where I was pre-knockback.
Boss 4 was against Lady Ashvane who has been transformed into a monstrosity by Queen Azshara. Her gimmick is she has a shield that must be popped before you can really damage her and every time the shield comes back it is 150% bigger. She summons corals often throughout the fight that emit bubbles. Bubbles must be soaked for damage and a stacking debuff by different players. If a bubble hits the boss, she regains 10% shield. Every so often six players will be paired up with symbols over their head. After a few seconds a beam will connect you to your partner, destroying any corals (or players) between you.
Boss 5 was a new fight for all of us, against a giant tentacled eyeball ringed with teeth. This wasn't terrible. There's a lot of add prioritization, and a LOT of "move to tiny spots between the crap that is covering the entire floor", and we got it on the third go.
The whole run was a whisker over three hours and we were pumped. We agreed to come back the next day and do what we'd can against the next boss: "The Naga Council". All total I left with a couple of gear sidegrades, but a ton of valuable experience.
I'm now a regular member of the raid team.
Tomorrow I'll cover Saturday's run.
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