Thursday: M.O.T.H.E.R. F-

Taloc took two attempts to down; we lost a priest early because the definition of “loosely stack” middle was…well, taken loosely. After we restarted the fight and settled that, it was relatively smooth sailing.

MOTHER

Much like G’huun last week, I’ll be doing a breakdown of some of the problems on MOTHER.

Some of these stats may be a little misleading (purposefully getting hit by mechanics to die on a wipe call) so it’s important to pay attention to the information as a whole; a person who lives the longest throughout a fight, but has high laser or sanitizing strike damage / hits, probably hit them to wipe easier.

Also, some people weren’t present for all pulls. Sheekey doesn’t need to worry about some stats, while Neko should pay closer attention to overall trends.

Interrupts / Stuns

Depending on comp, we’re going to come up with a stun order for this week. We routinely lost Plutonic and Wendal to melee damage from 15 adds. This means people were using stuns right off the bat without paying attention to other CD uses. We’ll work on this so it doesn’t happen!

Uldir Defensive Beams

A number of people are getting hit by wall beams (usually on the room 2-3 transition), but several more are getting hit because they don’t move quickly enough. The ceiling beams are also deceptive – people will stand in the correct spot, but then move out of safety before the ceiling beams reach the floor (usually because the wall beams have passed, they feel “safe”).

Not all hits resulted in deaths, but it’s an undue amount of damage that the healers have to take care of during an already tricky movement fight. There won’t be a lot of damage going out as long as people are properly following mechanics.

We’ve taken to calling out “STAY!” when the wall beams pass, but we don’t always remember.

Remember also that wall beams move sooner than ceiling beams. Move into a place of safety for wall beams, THEN move into the ceiling beam location if you aren’t at one yet. If you bee-line for the safe spot of both, you’re liable to get hit with a laser or two.

Behold, glorious Quetzie artwork.

If you’re standing at the bisect of green and red, run along green (to the bottom of the picture) and THEN run to the ceiling safety location. Running alone the red (diagonal) will kill you.

Sanitizing Strike

Sanitizing strike should be easy for most ranged people to dodge, unless a tank points it at them. Melee will often have trouble resulting from wind + SS being tough to get around.

SS is also a common way to die when there is a wipe call; if your name is high on the list, check to see if/when you’ve died from the spell. For example, I died to it 3 times – all at 92% or more into the fight. This likely means it was a wipe call, and my actual hits were 2 rather than 5.

Purifying Flame

There are two instances of purifying flame: one caused by swirlies on the ground after MOTHER casts Sanitizing Strike, and one caused by the fire when winds are active. I did NOT track the winds one.

Given our strat, some incidental damage is expected at the start. However, as long as we’re smart, we can avoid most of the incoming flame damage right away.

Behold, more glorious Quetzie artwork.

If we all stack tightly together (red in this image) and move left when flame goes out, we’ll be able to avoid all of the damage from PF. You can move left and move into the wall when called out to do so.

Even with our strat, some people are just getting hit more than expected. Try to dodge PF, even within spirit link. Sitting and taking the damage is just causing unnecessary stress on people.

Healthstone Usage VS Early Deaths

If your name is not on the left, you never used a healthstone. If your name is not on the left (or is very low) AND your name is high on the right, you really need to fix this.

There are a few takeaways I have at a glance.

Neko, Belle, and Telann are a bit SoL on account of being Cleansing Purged a few times. Wendal and Plutonic are dying early to excessive melee add damage through no fault of their own, but are still popping Healthstones to try to survive the onslaught. Hopefully a good stun rotation will prevent those early deaths.

Hoss is the second highest healthstone user, but is in the top 10 earliest deaths. This likely means he needs to position better for mechanics like lasers (see also my doodle above), but Hoss is working extremely hard to stay alive in the event that he does fail a mechanic (mostly, I blame being a fat tauren death knight for those failures). Melee with low movement tend to suffer on this fight, so it’s important to peel away from the boss early to find better positioning for lasers when we call out that they’re coming. On the other hand, Kamahl doesn’t show up on the left at all, and died around the same time as Hoss in fights. If he used healthstones, it’s possible – even probable – that he could have lived significantly longer each fight.

Conversely, Foxxie is the #1 healthstone user, but is one of the last folks to die in a fight. Partially this is because of healthstone usage. Jibbles, Tusker, and Quetzie are the top 3 survivalists, and also have high healthstone usage.

“But I’m saving healthstones for phase 3!”

Yeah well….fuckin’ don’t. We’re progressing. If more of us live to see room 3, then we can start to worry about saving healthstones for that room. In the meantime we never got a proper rotation in room 3, so it’s a bit of a bust to save the stones for it.

Overall

At the end of the night we were getting into room 3 with some success. We need to time our crossing better to not overlap with wind, and save stampeding roar for the occasion if there are lasers to get to. The entire group crosses at once, so every big cooldown should be used (except healthstones – pop those when you’re out of spirit link!)

Thursday Logs

Friday: Heroic Fetid+

This week we tried something new, and started on Heroic Fetid. Taloc and MOTHER are easy to PUG on heroic now, and we’re starting on them for alt night (since normal heroic and mother were skipped regardless).

We had smooth sailing on Fetid, Zek, and Vectis, as usual. We practiced the Mythic strat on Zek’vos for moving the boss to each marker. It’s going to take some getting used to, but it’s good for us to do it now.

Zul gave us some expected problems. We tried the zerg strat a few times, which failed (not unexpected). We also realized that part of the failure was resulting from Laser Matrix, which is uncontrollable when a person soaking a pool stands too close to a hexer. We abandoned zerg strat because Blizzard is apparently an italian company full of spaghetti code.

We also experimented with changing lust times; initially we’d been lusting after Locus, then remembered that our successful kills had us lusting beforehand. Lusting to kill a crusher before Locus was the smoothest we’ve gotten. At that point, it’s on the tanks to run out stacks, pallies not to BoP the tank in the middle, and healers not to dispell people in the middle of the room (because those fear adds are nasty). We still got him down – our second Zul kill.

Mythrax was sort of a mess. Too many people stacked too tightly at the start of the fight. Not enough interrupts went out. Our DPS was spread too far and too thin, resulting in adds unable to be cleaved down. A second attempt resulted in our second kill. Everyone was alive at the end of it and it was extremely clean. A very good feeling!

G’huun we looked at only very briefly; we have a few people we want to practice orb running in the meantime.

Friday Logs 1
Friday Logs 2

Monday: Alt Night

We went into Heroic Taloc and MOTHER, since we skipped them on friday. After that, we went back to normal and did Fetid+.

For the first time, we one-shot everything AND came in under the two hour mark.

Monday Logs

Guild Repair Money

There’s some concern lately that guild repairs are putting too much of a drain on the bank. Urostek has put some of his own money into the bank a few times, which is not fair to him when we all rely on it so heavily.

A few ideas have been tossed around. One is selling all Mythic BoEs and putting proceeds in the guild bank. Another is selling all heroic or normal BoEs, but letting those who get mythics keep them. Another is selling Mythic BoEs and putting a percentage of sales in the bank. Another is to schedule farm nights after we down MOTHER to try to get BoEs just for the purpose of filling the guild bank. Still other ideas are farming old raids or selling potions / flasks / etc to guildies as a discount and putting that in the bank.

If you have thoughts or opinions on the matter, post in the raiding discussion discord channel. We’re all ears!

Attendance

I’m behind on both the raiding attendance page and the audit sheets. Don’t worry, that’s a penalty on me, not on you!

Thursday: G’huun Practice

Thursday was spent entirely practicing orbs and phase transitions. It wasn’t until about 2 hours in that we started to have some really smooth pulls – early orb transitions, few mistakes on corruption orbs, etc.

Unfortunately, too many people were failing simple mechanics.

Interrupts

We had 25 pulls. There were a few that got screwed super early. But essentially, unless you’re an orb runner, you should be interrupting on every pull that gets past phase 1. Now, I don’t think this counts unsuccessful casts (if two people cast at the same time but one is wasted). There are also some interrupts that aren’t tracked on the above list. That being said, it’s obvious that some people were more successful in their attempts than others.

Virulent Corruption (oatmeal balls)

There’s also issues with Virulent Corruption. If you don’t run corruption out of the group, you’re going to drop it on top of people. If you bee-line for the nearest wall without paying attention to melee, you’re going to drop it on top of people. If you’re not paying any goddamn attention, you’re going to drop it on top of people. Or you’re going to get hit by orbs. For example:

Notice how 3 of the top 5 people hit are melee. More than likely, their hits are caused by people dropping debuffs right on top of them. It’s also possible that they weren’t paying attention, but we’ll give them some benefit of the doubt. Ignoring ibroke (who DCd early), and plutonic, the bottom 15 are all ranged classes. It’s VERY easy to dodge orbs for ranged classes if you’re standing out of the middle but not on top of the melee. Ranged DPS / healers who have high hit counts are spreading the debuff like wildfire for no reason at all. Melee DPS who ignore their warnings or ranged DPS who tunnel the nearest wall without communicating have hurt the group.

I downloaded a weakaura that will tell me who is “most guilty” of not dodging these things. You can get it here. I will be calling out at certain intervals who is getting hit so they know they need to improve.

Communication

There were also issues of ineffective communication. “I fucked up the orb” doesn’t help us. Did you drop the orb? Are you stuck? Did you not pick it up? Do you need someone from the ground to rescue you? Are you talking to your backup, or the group as a whole? etc. Be specific if something happens with orb running.

Wave of Corruption

In later stages we hit issues with Wave of Corruption. Some of it was simply that we had too many bodies. Others weren’t paying attention. Here is a weakaura to help you track if you’re safe or not. If the circle turns red, you need to move. If you’re a ranged DPS, don’t stand near the boss! Be at MAX range so healers can be between us and melee, and melee have room to spread.

Healthstones

Overall, healthstone usage was pretty good. Many people with high death counts also had high healthstone usage (“hits” in the 3rd column). However, there are some people who didn’t do so well. Keep improving upon this!

Lessons Learned

In general, we learned a lot on Thursday. For one, we had too many bodies on the field. That made dodging orbs incredibly difficult, and made Phase 3 almost impossible with wave of corruption. We needed to trim back. For another, our orb runners got incredibly fast and got their runs down easily over time. We ended up benching people for our next attempt on Friday. If you got benched, here are some things to remember:

• Interrupt often! There’s plenty of casts going off. You should be able to get one cast off every time.
• Careful running out your explosive corruption. In Phase 1, call out to melee to get out of your way, or find a different spot to drop it (ideally the former).
• Use all abilities in your toolkit. If you have speed buffs, use them to get to the wall faster and safer. If you have a defensive, pop it when you have a debuff or sense incoming damage from wave. If you get low, pop a healthstone.
• Be smart about ability cooldowns. If you’re an orb runner, save your movement (disengage, dash, retreat, etc) for orb running. Don’t use them when you know you’ll need them for orbs. It’s more important to call out “I will need heals” or “Watch purple side for orbs” if you know that you’re going to mess up a different mechanic.

Practice these mechanics on Mondays and you’ll be AOTC ready in no time.

Thursday logs

Friday: AOTC, Mythic Taloc, and Heroic farm

G’huun

We trimmed the group from 27 down to 20 and found much smoother sailing. Not only did fewer bodies mean fewer people to avoid in Wave of Corruption, it meant fewer balls to dodge from Virulent Corruption. It meant that those who were average or worse on mechanics did not cause cascades of mechanical failures on everyone else.

As a result, we downed G’huun in two tries.

We had 10 people left alive at the end, and everyone was alive going into the last phase. That’s extremely important for a successful attempt! Our first attempt, we lost 2 healers in the bloodlust phase, which meant 2 healers down for the worst part of the fight. We’d gotten it to 7% and so knew we had a kill on our hands anyway.

Mythic Taloc

Riding the high of our earliest AOTC to date as a guild, we decided to go run after Taloc.

Taloc was basically a cakewalk. He has one new mechanic worth talking about, and a group that can communicate effectively has no problems dealing with it. We merely loosely grouped middle (rather than tightly stacking as in heroic). When it came time to move the damage out, there was plenty of room to spread in all directions and for non-affected party members to find safe zones.

Needless to say, we killed him too – in one go.

This was the guild’s first kill of a Mythic boss while the tier was active. We’re incredibly excited to climb the rankings!

Killing G’huun and Taloc embedded us at #1 Horde on the server and #14 overall on the server. Downing 2 bosses will bring us to #9 overall; downing 3 will bring us to #5 overall. We’re really looking forward to showing everyone what the Ministry of Defense is capable of!

After we killed Taloc, we returned to Heroic. We blasted through the normal bosses as much as we could, dragging through alts or people who might not otherwise qualify based on ilvl. We one-shot everything, and ended before Zul, a bit early – 15 minutes wouldn’t be enough to clear trash and get a look at him, unfortunately.

G’huun Heroic logs
Mythic Taloc logs
Heroic Taloc logs
H Mother – Zekvos logs

Saturday: Guild LFR

Ok, so, nothing to say about LFR. I don’t keep logs or anything. I won’t go over it in detail. But I thought it nice to point out that we were 23/25 slots of MoD people this weekend in the LFR queue. Guild LFR is a lot of fun, you should join!

Monday: Alt Night

Alt night was, as usual now, a total breeze…until we hit Mythrax and G’huun. Mythrax had too many people clumped too close together. There’s no reason for rdps to be standing anywhere but MAX range. Also, be sure to interrupt often! We’re watching. G’huun we had people practice orb running for the first time. In the end, too many people struggled on alts to learn it, so we went with 3 groups to get it done fast. However, we want everyone to be able to do it, because we never know who will be around for Heroic in the future.

Mythic and Heroic: New Schedule

Due to our success in AOTC and Mythic Taloc, we’re starting a new raid schedule.

Thursday: Mythic
Friday: Heroic (starting at Fetid if possible)
Monday: Heroic Taloc & Mother, Normal Fetid+

Mythic is capped at 20 people. As a result, we have to be pretty tight on invites for now. Heroics will continue to simply be “whoever qualifies”.

There are two potential paths we can go from here.

First, we can run 2 groups: a mythic group and a heroic group. We can have Mythics thursday/friday, and Heroics can run whenever the group decides.

Or, we can run two Mythic groups alongside one another.

At the moment, we have 32 Vanguards. Whether we recruit up to 2 full mythic teams, or simply have a heroic team and a mythic team running concurrently, is entirely up to the group.

If we get enough interest in running 2 full mythic teams, we will have to recruit our hearts out, because that means 40+ names (in case some folks can’t make it, we need fills). On a low pop server such as ours, finding 40+ mythic raiders will be a challenge!

But…the Warlords are up to the task of fielding 2 Mythic groups. We’re still running heroic fridays to gear up those struggling in the 360-range that can’t quite get up to 370 yet. The current Thursday Mythic crew will get as much knowledge and gear as possible on all members before splitting between teams, so they can share the wealth of knowledge and make up for any small mistakes made by those who’ve yet seen Mythic mechanics. Eventually, we plan to run Heroic on monday alt nights (regardless of ilvl) and start doing Mythic twice a week. Hopefully this won’t take more than a few weeks to achieve.

At that point it will be very fast to gear up your alts, your friends, and new recruits to Mythic level. We can continue to swap team members around as needed. There won’t be an A / B team situation if we can avoid it.

Of course, this is all up to you guys. Not everyone wants to be a Mythic raider. Not everyone will have the time or ability, which is fine. Mythic takes quite a lot out of you – it’s more of a tedious grind than anything else in the game. On the other hand, Mythic is exciting and there’s a sense of pride that comes with it.

We’ll focus on what the group wants to do and how we can go about those goals on Friday.

Thursday: Heroic Farm, Zul

Heroic is becoming more of a cakewalk on early bosses. We went from struggling on MOTHER and Fetid to 1-shotting both!

We have a new strategy for Vectis (discussed last week) and it worked beautifully. Omega vectors aren’t stacking as poorly (though we could still improve upon it) and everyone can reach the boss. Healers are always within range…etc. It’s also much easier to step away if you’ve got too many stacks.

On Zek, we had a very late wipe on account of add spawns, a problematic orb, and pain donuts. Whoops. let’s just forget that ever happened. That being said, he was otherwise unproblematic.

We got a good look at Zul this week. He’s a problem in phase 2. Previously we’ve been sort of skipping the tank mechanic on Normal based on big DPS and general survivability, but it’s obvious that we won’t be able to skip it this time! We had issues of focusing the wrong mobs (or focusing the boss), poor interrupt rotations, issues of stunning the hexers far away, etc. In general we worked to clean up performance and got a 9% pull in.

Raid Lead thoughts: DPS (especially ranged DPS) with low damage on crushers and hexers will be benched. We have a ton of incidental cleave and don’t need to be focusing the crawgs at all, and any ranged DPS tunneling the boss is simply costing us too much. Ranged should almost always be focusing the Crusher when the tank runs her away from the group, because that will ensure that she gets DPS’d down by the time a second Crusher can spawn. We also learned that FoN/Treants work well at taunting crawgs away from DPS or tanks out of the main group when doing mechanics, but generally fail to hold aggro/die too fast in the middle of the AoE shitstorm on top of the boss.

Monday Logs: 1, 2

Friday: Zul and Mythrax

The night was interesting. For one, Zextol was not there to lead, which meant that Quetz and Foxxie were on crackdown “no fun and no bullshit” mode for the night, heh heh. We were determined to get Zul down and make Raid Dad proud! Fox and Telann were on tank duty for the night, which meant that we had 2 raid leads in tank position to nail down the mechanic and hopefully pass the knowledge on in following weeks.

Zul

The Warlords spoke a lot the previous night and before the pull about strategy, dos and don’ts, etc.

Add DPS:

We noticed, looking at the logs, that some high-output DPS were at the bottom of the charts Thursday for priority add (hexer, crusher) damage. Folks were given a general warning, and I’m happy to say that everyone took it to heart and improved! I like to give credit where credit is due and will name Jibbles as an example of an excellent raider – he listened to the leads and went from low damage on priority adds Thursday to literally topping the charts at just utterly destroying Crushers on Friday. This sort of modification has a butterfly effect throughout the raid –  he didn’t die to Crawg damage early on, so he was continuing to pump out big damage the entire fight; tanks were taking less damage, healers were keeping mana for longer, not blowing big defensive CDs early, etc – meaning better chance at a kill in dicey end phases.

Hexer Stunning:

We’re running into some issues with Hexers being stunned (rather than silenced) halfway to the boss, making it hard to cleave down. Please – save your stuns for when Hexers are casting the otherwise uninterruptible Congeal Blood. Otherwise, allow those with silences to interrupt Bloodshard and allow the DKs to drag them in. If you continually stun them halfway to the boss, you’re wasting a lot of cleave damage and drawing the fight out much longer. You’re also wasting a stun that could be used on Congeal Blood, which is a much more important cast to interrupt.

Minions of Zul:

Blood Elves and Priests can both purge these effectively; if you’re not purging, you’re hurting yourselves and the raid. DHs especially benefit from purging, so be sure to be on the lookout for these little guys!

Pool of Darkness:

This is everyone’s job, and requires effective communication throughout each phase. If you’re a melee character and you see an unsoaked pool nearby, stand in it and call out for a ranged person to replace you. Don’t leave until your replacement has arrived! In phase 2, those with immunities (like Paladins) should be at the ready to soak a pool that winds up in blood. Ideally this doesn’t happen because the raid is stacked mid and the blood is along the far edge…but we all know that ideals aren’t reality. Paladin shield, mage ice block, hunter turtle shell, and DH netherwalk are all immunities for this situation.

Tank Swapping:

Ideally, the tanks point Zul away from the raid in the middle in Phase 2. They swap at 2 (or 3?) stacks, and drop the blood right on the edge when the debuff drops, then run back in and take over for the other tank. This allows the DPS plenty of space behind them to run to the edge when affected by the fear, without running across a blood pool.

Dark Revelation

If you have yellow (star) marker, run north. If you have orange (condom/shield/nipple) marker, run south. Star = north star = run it north! This way you’ll always be running to the correct spot.

Otherwise…good job! We’ve been lock-gating to the boss at the start to save pull time, and lusting between 45 and 43% health based on add placement / spawns. After trimming a few underperformers, we started getting him into the 20% range on each pull, until we finally – by the skin of our teeth – pulled out a kill (with 18/22 people dead).

Watch our successful Zul kill from Bloodlust onwards on Miatreeleafa’s youtube channel:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQGnRGQQH6g&t=6420

This kill tied us up at 6/8 for the #1 Horde spot on the server.

Mythrax:

Facing Mythrax felt a lot like facing Fetid after MOTHER. It was a vacation! The strategy between normal and heroic didn’t change much. One noticable change to our strategy is to stack DPS and Heals on top of one add, and leave 1 tank, heal, and 1 DPS with many interrupts on the other add. this meant the add swarms would be close together for cleaving and not having to chase them across the room.

We had a few decent pulls, but got overwhelmed and died shortly after the add phases got heated. We then changed our strategy slightly: rather than blowing all our 2-3 minute DPS cooldowns at the start of the fight, we used them during the first add spawn phase. This allowed us to decimate the large adds quickly, and the cooldowns were back for the second add phase (and lust). This is similar to our approach to Kin’Garoth in Antorus: use cooldowns on adds. Literally the moment we changed to this strategy, we got the kill.

For those keeping track…we’re now the #1 Horde raiding guild on Aerie Peak.

Friday Logs

Sunday: Bonus G’huun Practice Night

On account of having a G’huun lockout, we wanted to practice and get a feel for him. Mostly, we spent the night working on getting orbs in incredibly fast. Basically, we should have the first 3 orbs in by the time the first troublesome worm add spawns. We’re focusing more heavily on our solo orb runners and getting them to be fast and efficient with their dunks. A few folks are still struggling, but we saw great improvement both in solo runners and in the teams of 2. We had 2 fights where we got all 6 orbs in.

I’m providing the logs as a courtesy, but I don’t expect folks to look at them too hard for DPS. Be aware if you ran into oatmeal balls. Watch the replay for positioning errors. Make sure you got any kind of Dark Bargain stack. Etc.

G’huun logs: 1, 2 (please ignore the dungeons, as I forgot to turn off WCL. Whoops.)

Monday: Alt Night

I got us another no-taloc no-mother lockout (as evidenced by the above log for G’huun). It worked out well, as once again we killed G’huun at juuuuust under the 2 hour mark. Ideally we’ll be able to do a full clear in 2 hours soon enough, but this works well.

We had 1 wipe on Mythrax because people were not interrupting adds and were not focusing down the big adds. DPS was spread too thin. Once we fixed that issue, he went down easy.

I give props to Harm for tanking his first raid with us and doing a great job alongside Rip. We also welcomed a few newcomers this tier, and had several people on alts (and of course, someone asking if I have an alt. HAH. Meme.) or on different specs than normal. Corig proved he can heal or DPS and the rest of us are total scrubs in comparison.

Orb running went relatively well, with some newcomers soloing successfully their first time with us and getting their first look at the strats for doing so (Widrick on DPS, Nari, and Tusker were all first-time solo runners with us). Others were quick on their feet to react and save stuck orb runners, which is just what we’ve been looking for.

Monday Logs

Going Forward

G’huun

This week, Deathhoss was kind enough to save a G’huun lockout, so we’ll be starting on him Thursday. After we down him (I have faith in us!) we can go back into regular heroic, or look at Mythic Taloc.

Mythic

Soon we’ll start looking at Mythic in general (how pumped are you guys to do Mythic raiding?!), but the warlords have to figure out where that leaves heroic in the mix. Zul through G’huun drops a ton of good loot for a lot of specs, which is why we tend to skip taloc and mother on alt nights. Whether we look for a similar heroic lockout without Taloc and MOTHER, or whether we simply clear as far as we can, is uncertain. We don’t want to stop doing Heroic entirely, as there are still many good rewards, and that would presently leave a large gap between “alt geared” and “mythic geared” players. We will also be coming up with ilvl requirements for it. In the meantime, consider pugging bosses on Heroic that you’ve missed during the week, and keep running M+.

Continued Benching

We’re still benching some people for low DPS, or letting them squeak by. If you’ve been benched more than once, please feel free to reach out to us. We’ll try help you get your damage on track, but make sure to check out this post first.

Promotions

Congratulations to Lillithh and Choochoobear for making Vanguard for the first time; congrats to Kamahl and Pickpocket for re-earning their Vanguard status. Check ’em all out on the Raid Team page!