From the desk of Huge & Sparkles LLC:

Hey team! A very impressive first two weeks as we find our footing in Aberrus! Some highlights include

  • Full Normal Vault slots week 1!
  • Earliest ever team heroic kills week 2!
  • One Mystic (Mage/Hunter/Druid) Tier Token dropped!
  • And many more!

Kidding aside, it’s been a fun start and we just wanted to drop some notes about our plans for the next few weeks so you can chart out your gameplay including mid-week homework and other hobbies, etc.

Saturday May 27th

This is the US holiday weekend, so there may be a smaller squad present but we are definitely raiding. This week we will do a full normal clear, 1 through 8. I’m thinking it is probably a decent opportunity to start normal Sarkareth progression with a bit of a smaller team (further comping down if necessary). This means feel free to Pug heroic this week without guilt, if you are so inclined.

Saturday June 3rd

I’ve been dreading this one since Diablo 4 was announced, but we have an overlapping blizzard game launch weekend with a raid night. This may be a decent opportunity to start making use of the Tier lockout we created with the help of FinalFlame’s Alt this past weekend, as generally Tier is going to be the main pieces we’ll need out of Normal long term. We can discuss again after the 27th, but it may be more Sark prog or jumping back into heroic after cleaning up Normal.

Subsequent weekends will proceed as normal, with more and more focus on Heroic Prog as we are able.

Team Preparedness

“What else can I do to help the team come gameday?”

Excellent question, thank you for asking, hypothetical heroic raider! Generally we don’t require any homework, and we provide ample raid night consumables, but certainly the keen will earn some cosmic karma of somesort, and we all benefit from the best prep we can do.

Gearing, Gemming, Enchanting and Stats!

We mentioned this briefly in the last raid, but it is important to know what sort of stat mix you are aiming for – this can cause significant improvement in class playability and output without increasing ilevel.

This should go without saying, but I’ll say it anyway! Make sure you’re staying up to date with Gem slots and Enchants as we’re equipping all the new shinies in this start of the tier.

Gearing this tier looks quite a bit different than anywhere in WoW’s history with the new upgrade system extending to Raiding and Open World content and all the new currencies that entails it can get overwhelming. But it does also represent an opportunity to gear up faster than ever before.

Mythic Keystones

Again, this is in no way required but…. it is extremely beneficial to be doing Mythic Keystone dungeons in this tier. The good news is the 11-14 ish range keys are probably the easiest and most rewarding they’ve ever been offering Hero track gear in the Great Vault as well as the all important Wrym’s Crest fragments that are used to upgrade Champion gear past 4/8 or Hero Gear up to 4/5. They also are important for the initial crafting boost token (Enchanted Wyrm’s Crest).

If you experience key anxiety like myself, not to worry at all; The Keystone events run by Zurro and Zextol on Wednesdays and Saturdays are a great introduction to running keys and always feel free to reach out on the keystone discord channels if you’re looking to run some at other times – a guild group is always going to be better than trying to PUG!

Thanks for reading and let’s keep this momentum going!