Saturday came as Saturdays do. I had a lovely evening with the wife and settled in by 9pm for some raiding. That's the one thing that both good and bad: Moon Guard is Central time, so everything is just a little bit later for me. That's trash for weekdays with my early-to-bed, early-to-rise routine, but on the weekend it doesn't impact my social life.
I logged in 15 minutes prior to 'go time', and got an invite as soon as I materialized. Good sign. I'd taken a bit of time to familiarize myself with the fights to come. They were doosies, but we'll get to that in a bit. I noted that the team was only slightly leaner than the previous day-- even discounting the couple that had been unceremoniously kicked to the curb. We supplemented the group by picking up a nicely-geared warlock from outside the guild. She had phenomenal dps, awareness, and healthstones. A nice combination for a group lacking at least one of those.
We steeled our nerves and dove back into the Eternal Palace for what would be our hardest challenge to this point: the Queen's Court (aka Naga Council).
This is a fight against 2 bosses without a shared health pool. Like similar fights (AQ comes to mind),. they must be tanked separately or they gain a 99% damage resistance buff. Separate health pools and if gets dropped to 1%, you have 15 seconds to kill the other before it heals itself to full, which is as good as a wipe. Throughout the fight three sparks are summoned with constantly depleting health. When each dies, it deals massive raid-wide damage. If multiple die at the same time, it's a wipe. So prioritization, target switching and timing to allow healers to do their thing is key. There's a mechanic that places crap at your feet that must be carried away from the raid, one boss will periodically create a death zone around himself (run, melee, run!) and at different times the other will create a bubble around himself that will kill any non-tank standing outside it. Whew. Wait? THAT'S NOT EVEN THE BAD PART?
Throughout all of this, Queen Azshara is announcing "decrees" that must be obeyed or you'll get stunned, take massive personal damage, or potentially massive raidwide damage depending on what you screw up. These decrees include: keep moving, stand away from all other players, "form ranks" (stand in these spots on the ground), and "don't use the same ability twice in a row". This last is particularly hell for arcane. These, of course, happen constantly even throughout the bosses' specials. This can lead to hilarious timing events as people who must "stand alone" are required to run to the bubble with everyone else or die.
This took us several goes, but we got it down. Then it was on to a much worse fight.
Boss 6 is Za'qul, one of those big things that scream "elder god pets", being all tentacles and void. I'm still traumatized by this one. It take place on one circular arena in three different phases. Now when I say three phase boss fight, I actually mean to say three different planes of existence: reality, fear, and hysteria. Whenever you aren't in "reality" you gain stacks of "hysteria" which act as a constant damage-over-time. The fear realm is pretty vanilla otherwise. In hysteria though, you gain a massive haste buff, but all players are hostile to you and targetable.
Throughout the fight, a glowing rift will appear along the edge of the combat ring. A few seconds later, a giant tentacle will be periodically summoned that will quickly pass through the middle of the arena dealing huge damage and knockback. To counter this, we placed markers all around the otherwise-indistinguishable area to call out where we were about to get hentai'd. This worked well for those of us not suffering from "scrapper lock".
Three circles will appear around the outside edge. stand on them and you will die. After a couple of seconds, they produce adds start casting a "kill you all" spell and summon other smaller adds every 20 seconds. On higher difficulties, the little adds eventually turn into huge adds, but thankfully we didn't have to deal with that.
Now the fun part. After the first cycle, the summoned caster adds cannot be affected in reality. You must battle them in the fear realm, accessible through a portal a friendly NPC has summoned. Players in one realm cannot affect players in a different realm. Accessing hysteria involves standing on portals the boss summons that allows a limited number through.
If the tank is ever alone, he is instantly and permanently mind controlled. On top of everything else, the boss will put a huge visible shield on himself and casts a thing. It's then a DPS race to crack the shield and damage him down.
I probably left out a number of components, but my god, this was rough. We finally dropped him on the ninth attempt.
All that was left is Queen Azshara herself. We noped out of it as we had already been going 3 hours at that point.
We had originally intended on finishing it Sunday, but too many people-- myself included were just exhausted from it all. We opted to let the lock expire. This week we will be attempting the first three bosses on heroic then switching back to normal for the rest. But still-- holy cats! 7/8 on my first week, with half of those being guild progression kills.
For the non-raiders we're setting up a more regular event calendar… Wednesdays will be Mythic+ runs, Sundays will be "fun stuff"…contests, giveaways, social things. Regular PvP things will be added 'soon' and for the RPers RP nights and in a couple of months, D&D sessions.
…and at some point I still have to decide on my Classic class. ;-)
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