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!

For those who didn’t see: We went 7/8 on Friday!

As stated on Discord the other day, on account of this we’ll be looking at Heroic G’huun at 4pm PST / 7pm EST tonight. We want to get a sense for how the different phases work, so we’ll probably be at this for a couple hours. If we down him, awesome – if not, we’ll have plenty of experience for raid this week!

(I have been so busy I didn’t think to post this until today. Whoops!)

Thursday: Heroic Progression

This week we started our usual schedule: 2 progression days and 1 alt night.

Taloc was a return to messy execution of basic mechanics. Not enough tight grouping, people were too close to the edge on the elevator. The kill was still messy, but we downed him in 2 attempts.

MOTHER is one we can see that we are getting stronger every week. We had a really good first pull that fell apart on the 3rd room crossover. Our second attempt saw deaths due to interrupt problems. Our 3rd attempt also saw a lot of people dying to sanitizing strike, but we persisted, since so many had already made it to the 3rd room. We need to work out our strongest AoE interrupters to cross in the first group to save time on pulls. The timing of crossings is generally getting much better. Raid Lead thoughts: Demon Hunters, moonkins, and other AoE stuns should be high priorities for groups 1 and 2. We accidentally had a warrior with a ST stun in once. Whoops.

Fetid saw one near miss on the second attempt, but in general, DPS are not switching to the adds soon enough. We also had something going on where the tanks and DPS were just taking huge outputs of damage. Maybe it’s a tank positioning issue? Maybe DPS are standing too close? Once we got the damage mitigated reasonably, we were able to kick him down. DPS did reasonably well switching to adds.

Zek’voz was a great fight and the RLs are proud of how we took him down. We had an early mishap with eye beam-donuts crossover causing some deaths, but the next two attempts were great. We’ve got a rotation down for caster adds andthe little bugs aren’t so bad as long as you prepare for them. We’re finding the orb is really hard to track, however. Raid Lead strat comment: We’re going to be spreading out as much as possible in P3 to be able to see the ball dropping. Ideally, people who are closest should be going for it – but we can’t afford to lose our top DPS (who are most likely to be mechanically sound and watching for it) to the debuff. We want some of our bottom numbers to pick it up to start, and our top numbers to pick it up after. Also try not to run too fat past the boss when you have the debuff about to expire. We chased a lot of melee who ran to the wrong far side of the room, costing us precious time on a very close kill.

Thursday Logs

Friday: Heroic Progression

By contrast to some others, Vectis was a walk in the park. We had a decent starting pull of 50% and downed him next try. In the future, we will be triangulating in spots around the boss rather than in an arrow pointing at it, especially if we’re melee heavy. Also, please rearrange and pay attention to debuff locations, and don’t move if you have omega vector stacks. Also, take a look at this graph, select the 3 “omega vector” from the “ability” dropdown at the top. If your name is either very low or nonexistant between all 3, you’re not taking enough debuffs. Hopefully our new strat will make it easier to share the love.

Zul was a stone wall, as anticipated. He is the second DPS check we’ve run into (Fetid being the first) and the second mechanics check we’ve run into (MOTHER being the first), but the first combination of both we’ve hit. We need to be on-point with interrupts. We need to be on-point with Crusher focus. We need to mitigate our aggro on Crawgs (sorry, Jibbles).  We need to clean up the transition between phases 1 and 2 (which fortunately became easier with bloodlust). This is the second boss we’ve benched people on and we will be benching much sooner than later in the future. Unfortunately, too many people is going to make the next 3 bosses incredibly difficult. We’re also going to be rewarding good mechanics more often than not. A person who is interrupting a lot and who is CCing a lot is more likely to remain in the fight than a person who is not, because the person with low DPS but high mechanics is making the raid easier for everyone (and therefore making it easier for everyone else to DPS). A person focused solely on their own numbers wipes the raid.

That said, we made significant progress every pull. We’re proud of how the raid worked together and can smell a kill this week.

As a reminder, getting benched on a boss because of DPS does not count against your attendance for the night and does not bar you from coming to raids in the future. The only thing lost from being benches is the potential for loot from a kill, but if we down a boss without a low DPS the chances are higher that we’ll down it with them the next time.

Congrats to Jibbles and Wendal for hitting Vanguard! Wendal is also a Gladiator, so he’s extra involved in Guild events.

Friday Logs

Monday: Alt Night

What is there to say about alt night? We had a lot of people gearing up their new characters for the first time. I secured a lockout with Taloc and MOTHER already down, and will likely do so again in the future. We downed all bosses (in spite of some messes) by the end of our 2 hour time limit. Mythrax we had DPS issues on adds. G’huun saw problems with inexperienced orb runners, but that’s OK! We want as many people as possible practicing orbs on this fight.

If you’re interested in coming to alt / normal / boss farm night, make sure to talk to a Warlord! (that goes for Heroic, too!)

Congrats to Qwaylas and Ripblade for hitting Vanguard!

Monday logs

Other thoughts

Downtime

There is still far too much downtime between pulls. Wipe -> “What went wrong?” -> try again. RLs will try to be better about asking pointed questions and members should be prepared with their own, rather than general questions.

Healthstones

There were 14 wipes on Zul. Try to improve your Healthstone usage next week. Yep, I’ll be watching. Which reminds me…

Weakauras

IMO if you’re not using WeakAuras you’re making your life more difficult. I posted a writeup on how to track different kinds of cooldowns or buffs, and even one that pops an ideal time to use a Healstone. Read about weakaura setups and come at me with questions!

DPS Improvement

I’m going to post this again because I’ve received good feedback. If your DPS feels low and you’re not sure how to fix it, check out this handy post! Just check out the real reviews from real, satisfied customers!

Lowered Guild Repairs

A note from Urostek:

As some of you might have heard, Ministry of Defense has spent over 500,000G on guild repairs since the release of Battle for Azeroth. This is unprecedented in this guilds’ history. There has not been an expac release, to my knowledge, that has had such involvement by guild members and playtime and repair usage. However, the current rate of guild repair expenditures is not sustainable. Partly because of changes Blizzard has made (by eliminating the Guild Perk: Cash Flow and by increasing the general costs of repair), guild repair expenses have gone up. A lot. Because of this, the guild repair amounts have been reduced by ~50% the past few days for all levels of membership. Hopefully this change will ensure a situation that maintains the ability of the guild to have repairs at a fair level for all… members / vanguard / gladiators / officers / etc. Hopefully, you all have fun in the guild and have found the people you have met here to be enjoyable, fun, and a pleasure to be associated with! I know I have! I want to thank all of you for making the guild the success it is.

New Vanguard requirement

Because of the insane costs of feasts and cauldrons and the fact that they’re provided for free, we’re going to ask Vanguards (and officers who raid) to donate materials to the guild each month. You can always donate more, but we request a bare minimum. This is a MONTHLY donation, so it shouldn’t stress you too hard, and you shouldn’t need to purchase anything. Each month there will be different things on the list, and we may adjust amounts depending on what we need or how hard it is to come by them (for example we’ll likely lower the flasks next month).

List of donations

You only have to sign up for ONE spot; if you choose to donate extra, you don’t need to sign up for it. Try to spread the signups around as much as you can. Once you’ve mailed your donation, the officer who received it will check off that you completed it (do not touch the pink columns yourself).

Thursday: 8/8 gr8 r8d m8

No, I’m not sorry for the lame meme. Not much to say about Thursday, though. We 1-shot everything except for G’huun!

MOTHER only had 1 death, to the wind flames. Overall, people were much smarter about using their defensives, and our healers were much more able to boost HP losses after a wall crossing. We had a full raid group once again, so this was an even more impressive feat.

Fetid was our fastest kill yet, at 2:19. Not even enough time for a full DPS rotation!

Vectis is still causing issues with Omega Vector. Nobody died, but people are being too stingy about sharing stacks. If you get over 5 stacks early, step out so someone else can take over. Likewise if you’re under 5, step in! Later we’ll comment about having 10 stacks – again, if you’re over that, step out; if you’re under, step closer. People are creating too many problems for healers by avoiding stacks or letting some player soak too many. Tusker had 48 hits from Omega Vector. A number of people only had 6. This is a problem, especially moving forward into heroic.

Zek’vos was another good run. With only 1 DK, we struggled a bit to get adds in, but coordination on the part of the monks and druids made cleaving the caster adds simple.

Zul was one of our strongest kills yet. We had an excellent balance of add cleave and boss damage, and the boss was moved relatively well in phase 3. Things got a little hectic before and after a tank death, but we took Zul down pretty fast after that.

Mythrax is still suffering a bit from boss-tunneling and lack of interrupts. If you’re not casting any, you’re not coming into Heroics in the future.

G’huun was frustrating. We had a 0%, 36k HP wipe on him. What’s truly frustrating is the number of people – SEVEN – who did not use a healthstone. Imagine 7 people living for an additional, say, 4 seconds. Do you think they could contribute to another 36k damage? Absolutely.

If your name is on the top of that list, but not in the list beneath it, ya done fucked up A-a-ron. It’s a good idea for everyone, regardless of presence on the list, to get yourself something…a weakaura, an addon, I don’t care – that blips that you need to use a healthstone when you go beneath, say, 50% hp. That will get you into the habit of using them routinely.

Thursday Logs

Friday: Heroic Progression

Taloc was the cleanest we’ve had him on heroic. We had very few deaths and everyone moved well together during the elevator phase. However, many people have some low DPS output. Consider whether you should change up your talents or if you’re positioning yourself effectively in the boss fight.

MOTHER was much smoother than last week. We’re starting to get a system down for moving between rooms most effectively and when to start transitioning. People are being smarter with their use of defensives, too. Consider taking extra healing talents, defensive azerite traits, etc, during this boss fight. Staying alive in rooms 1&2 outweighs DPSing!

Since we missed a kill pic last week, enjoy our kill pic this week!

Fetid Devour is a huge DPS check. Our strategy is to only kill 1 of the 2 eggs available at a time. Killing both just wasn’t feasible at this time.  This was also the first time we’ve had to bench underperformers to get through a kill, which should be an eye-opener to a lot of people. However, we managed to get him down within 2 tries after the benches. No kill pic again…whoops.

Zek’voz looks like a VERY doable kill. Instead of clumping and having eyes run out (because people and latency make it unreliable) we spread wide in a crescent for eye beams (cheers to Treeson for the idea!). Then we group back together for adds and other mechanics. We got him down to 10% in 4 pulls and could easily have had a kill if we didn’t bungle add management in the last phase. We raid leads will have to be a bit more aware of Zek’s health and the health of adds so we don’t push phases poorly!

Friday Logs

Raid Changes

Starting October 4th, we’re requiring 355 ilvl for heroics. We may even implement a DPS minimum since frankly, ilvl is easy to acquire given M+ runs, and it’s not a determination of skill. Ideally, you’ll also run with us on normal before heroic, but that’s also not a requirement (yet?).

Speaking of normal, alt runs on Mondays are starting back up. These will be 2 hour runs rather than 3. These will not count against your attendance for Vanguard, but they will count for it, so attending one can only help you. Depending on interest, one of the raid leads might get a lockout so we can skip MOTHER and Taloc and get right into the interesting bosses. Reminder that you’ll see need to follow all the rules & regulations for raiding!

LFR continues to be a success on Saturdays. A lot of people are learning the basic mechanics and we’re all having a good time. Zul trash is easy when you’re this coordinated!

DPS Megapost

If you don’t read this post I might pay Blizzard to delete your characters.

Promotions

Congrats to Neocide, Rwandarousey, and Tusker for making Vanguard!

A reminder from the Guild’s Head Chef, Grimmshock:

Beginning 12:00 pm, 30 September, we will be starting a week long Feast Materials Gathering event. Send materials to Grimmshock. What we are looking for: Redtail Loach, Frenzied Fangtooth, and Midnight Salmon. Will also accept Stringy Loins and Meaty Haunches. I’ll keep a tally of all donations and announce a winner and runner up 7 October. The prizes are a stingray mount and 10k gold. Winners choice.

Thursday: 7/8 again

Taloc, MOTHER, and Fetid were 1-shots. MOTHER had surprisingly few deaths – the majority of which were to Cleansing Purge and not moving into the last room soon enough. We need to work on moving sooner.

Vectis was interesting. We had a wipe on him, due to Omega Vector stacking. With 3 debuffs, 3 groups makes the most sense. However, some people are moving around too much in Phase 2 and then the debuff stacks. Other times, people within groups are not getting the debuff. Those with heavy stacks need to remember to step out and wait for others to catch up on stacks. If you have a stack in Phase 2, don’t move!

For Zek’voz, we had another early wipe due to eye beams. Make sure not to re-enter the group too soon, and please be careful to move out! Eye Beam does NOT put a debuff on you, so if you’re relying on debuffs to tell you when to move, find another method! Eye Beam is a 2-mistake kick from hereon out.

Zul was 1-shot. Tanks did an EXCELLENT job in phase 3.

Mythrax had a wipe in the beginning of Phase 2. We simply had too many people taking avoidable damage and clumped far too close together. It can be hard with a melee comp, but the boss is very large. Spread as much as you can! And remember, interrupt often. If you’re not on this chart as a DPS, you’re not doing your job.

G’huun was disappointing. We had wipes at 2 and 3 percent. Mostly, people were not paying attention to Gaze. Raid Leads cannot call Gaze for you. You MUST pay attention on your own. Gaze is going to become a 2-mistake kick from hereon out.  Remember also that interrupting is important on G’huun. Again, if you’re not on this chart, you’re not doing your job.

Thursday Logs

Friday: MOTHER is a MFer

G’huun went down about as well as could be expected (minus fumbles with the orb on first pull) on a fresh day.

Taloc was a one-shot, but…there were problems. People continue not to move fast enough out of the group with blood in phase 1. A lot of people are starting to run to the right and then quickly readjusting to run left. That time means they dump blood in the group. I’m not sure why people run right to start. Here is a simple thing to remember: If you get a mechanic on Taloc and you’re not sure what it is, run left to start. If it happens to be Static instead of Blood, that’s ok! Keep running left if you have room. Don’t double back. As long as you run it away from the raid, Static can go in either direction.

MOTHER…whoof. We tried a lot of different ideas with groups here. Ideally, we SHOULD be moving quickly in groups of 4, staggered. (Move 2, pause, 2 more, heal up, repeat.) Unfortunately, people are not paying attention to others’ healthbars and are making this fight much harder than it is, so we’re moving in groups of 3 and 4 with less organization. Always, ALWAYS wait a second behind someone else before running through regardless. When it is your turn to run through, try to be “on deck” as much as you can (barring mechanics like laser walls). I know we like to avoid running through during winds, but unfortunately, winds may end up being one of the cleaner times we get to run through in the future.

DPS is less important than surviving. I will repeat this: DPS is less important than surviving. If you need to run to the far end of the room away from the fire in order to survive winds and dodge mechanics successfully, do it. Getting an extra swing or two on the boss but dying to fire or her frontal because you were trying to minmax won’t be doing anybody any favors. We need you alive for room 3!

Save your movement mechanics and defensives for when you need to cross between rooms. Especially between rooms 2 and 3. You may be in a group that has to book it from the far side of Room 2 to a safe spot in Room 3 with laser ceiling openings. Use movement mechanics to get across as quickly as possible so we don’t wind up with groups stuck behind.

We “killed” MOTHER, but didn’t get a photo with her. Guess that means we’ll do it again this week for a new photo op!

Friday Logs

TLDR Parse Interpretation

I found this chart on Reddit and shared it in the Raiding Discussion channel, but am resharing it here. This is an easy break down of your at a glance parse numbers when reading logs.

(substitute Legendary for Azerite and you get the idea)

If normally your overall is less than Blue and your ilvl is less than Purple, chances are you have things you can improve. Some of it’s gear / stat priority, some of it’s rotation. Check out this guide to see what the best of your class and spec are doing and see what you can do to improve!

Congratulations to the following people for attending 5 raids and receiving Vanguard status for the first time:

Miatreeleafa
Nighteld

Congratulations to the following members for maintaining Vanguard status from Legion:

Bellelina
Corignis
Harmesi
Treeson

These fine folks have earned additional gold repair bills from the guild bank and access to Vanguard – only access tabs. If you’re curious if you’re close to achieving Vanguard status, you can check on the Raid Attendance page!

In addition, we’d like to congratulate Miatreeleafa for being granted Twitch Affiliate status! This grants him the ability to receive subscribers, custom emotes, cheers, and other benefits. As a regular streamer of both our Raids and PvP nights, we’re happy to see him continue to grow! You can follow him and watch the streams at https://www.twitch.tv/nfbprototype.

Because Warcraft Logs updated and subsequently broke down for me, we’ve got short logs and a shorter Roundup this week

Thursday: 7/8, what a breeze

You can tell that the group is becoming more accustomed to working together as a unit. Taloc went down with few issues – people are getting better about moving when they have debuffs on them. Elevator is still a bit sloppy – in the future, we will likely mark a tank and expect people to stay behind the tanks, rather than expecting someone to stack behind a melee DPS. MOTHER we wiped a few times. There were rough calls on when to go through (sometimes overlapping with wind), but practice over time made this easier. Remember to use your judgement: if you get a call to move through, and wind starts up, hold off until the wind dies down. Everyone did an excellent job stacking up on their markers, though, making dodging fire much easier. Fetid was another instakill this week – I have a feeling he’s going to be a favorite on normal because of the simplicity.

After Fetid came Vectis. Vectis was problematic. We had multiple people getting multiple stacks of the omega vector debuff at once and dying. Raid Leads will work out a new strategy, but remember not to remain stationary within your group. Move around a little to encourage the debuff to bounce between different players, rather than ping-ponging between the same 2-3 people. Zek’voz was a pretty simple fight and was looking to be a 1-shot, but unfortunately we got too intent on the kill and completely ignored a mind-controlled bear tank, thus wiping the raid with his easily interrupted casts. Remember, interrupts are king and we need to focus MCed players. We also had a player confused 2 similar mechanics that need to be run away. Remember: eye beams sideways, Roiling Deceit back or sideways. Focus down those who are mind controlled or they’ll wipe us! For Zul, we employed the same strategy as last week. Tanks still need to clean up the final phase and Rupturing Blood, but the DPS was much better about managing add cleave and boss health.

Mythrax was another toughie. We downed him in 2 pulls, but people are not interrupting, and fewer are focusing on finishing up adds, favoring boss tunnel-vision. These sorts of mistakes lead to wipes.

Thursday Partial Logs

Friday: Ghuun, Heroic Progression

G’huun is becoming interesting. We wiped at 1% on the first pull, in spite of being down a warlock for portals. Interrupts were good, but could have been better. We made better use of Bloodlust by waiting longer to use it – after the collapsing ceiling and tanks got re-situated gave us a few extra seconds. We’re going to start paying VERY close attention to interrupts / interrupt attempts on G’huun starting this week. Be aware of that.

Heroic Taloc is still messy. Too many people are not reacting quickly to static or blood drops. You should be moving the second a timer goes off. Don’t wait to finish casting. Customize your setup to more easily see these warnings if you must. We’re going to be saving Bloodlust for phase 3, since phase 1 is pretty simple. The elevator strategy we’ll be employing from hereon out is as outlined above – tanks marked, party behind the tanks. Everyone should be CCing the bloods and ranged-killing them asap, while the melee focuses on killing the add stuck to the tanks. We’ll continue to move clockwise, lasers permitting.

MOTHER is getting very close. This week we got unlucky with our healer comp – druid HoTs make for difficult spot-healing on tanks soloing MOTHER on the crossover. Ideally, we’d have a monk or paladin who can keep the tank well-protected during that last crossover, before reaching the safety of other healers. If we don’t, we may be changing the strategy of the last 2 groups.

Friday Logs

Thoughts

Next week we’re going to be auditing interrupt and Healthstone usage. If you don’t use either, you’re likely to be sat from Heroic attempts in the future until you improve in normal. These are very simple things that can make the difference between a 1% wipe (or which we suffered 2 on different bosses last week) and a kill. Those who delay on mechanics like like the Taloc or G’huun puddles will also be similarly benched from Heroic attempts. These show a lack of awareness to your surroundings and will hold back a raid as large as ours.

We were very pleased to have gone 7/8 in 1 night. The sooner we breeze through 8/8 in one go, the sooner we will set up an alt / farm night on normal, to focus on pushing heroic progression for our main raid days. This is good for everybody!

This is also the first week we hit max capacity for raid size at 30 people. “First come, first serve” is likely going to start coming into effect here, and we’ll have to start consider split raiding.

Last Saturday was an LFR run. We had 10 people come, and it was a good time. I got lucky and was made leader of the LFR, so was able to use Raid Warnings to talk to the group. You could see where most PUGs followed directions and minimized the wipe chances we had (some ignored it, as they tend to). If you don’t want to LFR during the week, come on Saturday for a guaranteed easy and relaxing run.

Congrats to the guild for getting their first heroic kill on Taloc last night! Remember, if you want to raid with Ministry of Defense, there is actually work you have to do like reading the guilds’ raiding rules, properly confirming you have done so with a Warlord and preparing by watching the appropriate boss fight videos. All the information you need is here:

https://www.ministryofdefense.net/raiding/