Thanks for your hard work, patience, and dedication the past few weeks! For those of you who have not gotten AOTC yet, please keep at it!

 

Opening Night:

Earlier bosses are cleaning up nicely in both groups. Opulence is now mostly cake for each group, though we are monitoring performance on basic mechanics and trimming down where necessary.

Depending on the class stacking, we have been getting creative with CC. For example, Opulence with 4 monks makes for a square of Ring of Peaces in order to trap adds:

Conclave

Conclave continues to be a tricky one for both groups. Gronk is not falling when he needs to (before the first Paku wind), so we’re struggling a bit to make up for that. Gronk is our first major DPS check of the tier – and a major mechanics one at the same time.

Too many people in both groups were continuing to get hit by Krag’wa’s wrath. There are also a surprising number of buffed raptors making it around.

Black team got their first look at Rastakhan. He has several new mechanics that make for a steep learning curve, right up through phase 3 of the fight. Too many people are being hit by frogs, and there is too much tank damage being taken from avoidable mechanics

Masters of Mayhem Friday Logs
Freaks and Geeks Saturday Logs

Closing Night

Conclave

I missed the first hour of Red Team’s attempts on Conclave, so I cannot comment on those pulls. However, I gathered that many people were still not bringing Kimbul’s Wrath out of the group, and others were not paying attention to the Krag’wa circle in time to move. When I did join, we got the kill, and it was an incredibly clean job well done – no noticeable overlaps of Kimbul, very few people hit by Krag’wa, and nobody died to raptors. All in all, massive improvements from everyone involved.

Rastakhan

Rastakhan adds several new mechanics to Heroic. For one, there’s a brand new add in both Phase 1 and Phase 3. Two, there’s a soaking mechanic in Phase 1. Three, there are flame totems in Phase 1. Oh, and that plague of toads? They leave puddles behind.

Nothin’ to it.

Black Team spent two nights working strategy for this. In between breaks and wipes, tanks opted to move Rastakhan at specific markers so the flame tongue totems would not be within range to strike after being placed. The tank holding Rastakhan would call out when toads were coming. This would allow plenty of time for the DPS and the other tank to move / follow the adds out of the way of the toads and their deadly puddles. The second soak has a nasty overlap with a tank mechanic for damage, so it’s good for healers to pop a cooldown here (one of ironbark, barrier, spirit link, etc) to help offset.

Moving into phase 2, the tank swap mechanic is much the same as on normal. Fire spreads faster, so it’s more important to stay as spread as possible. Be careful not to AoE the totems controlling players – it may be beneficial for priests here to MC a melee character away from the totem so they don’t die.

Red Team made slight but strong strategic changes to aid in dropping death gates in useful locations in Phase 2. They tanked Rastakhan slightly closer to the throne, allowing ranged DPS to spread more in the direction of the door where we enter the room. This allows ranged DPS to more effectively drop the death doors where the Phase 3 death realm participants can reach them.

Black Team tried to have CC on adds the first night, focusing down one at a time. On night 2 and on Red team, both teams said “to hell with that” and focused on interrupting when possible, cleaving adds as best they could.

Both teams struggled with the Death Realm successfully making it out, but it seems that proper Death Door placement affects this significantly. There may need to be changes to add some stronger DPS to the death realm, much like moving stronger DPS to the left side of the Opulence fight.

There is a lot of mess involved in Part 4 a Rastakhan kill. We’re assured this is normal…

…and both teams are proud to say they downed Rastakhan this week.

Mekkatorque

Masters of Mayhem spent several hours working on Mekkatorque. There is 1 new mechanic: Wormhole Generator (teleports everyone in the raid to a random player’s location), and a big adjustment to a familiar mechanic: only those within the robots can see colors.

To be covered in a later section, but this requires a lot more radio silence than other bosses. It also requires knowing how the fight plays out. For example, the second wormhole generator happens 3 seconds after people get the gigavolt bomb planted on them. This means WAITING to cast movement abilities until AFTER the wormhole goes off.

There is ONE Wormhole Generator in the last phase. This will include shrunk people AND big people. If you are shrunk, you move first. I cannot stress this enough: If you are large and there are shrunk people, DO NOT MOVE. Even if you think it’s safe, triple-check that there are no little people under your feet before moving.

It’s imperative to dodge the blaster cannon. For the most part this is easily avoidable. Ranged DPS and heals have NO excuse to be hit by it.

Callouts for robots will happen as follows. For example:

Lillith, Coldryder, and Urostek get into robots. Coldryder calls out “Cold is lead. Lillith red, Uro green. Uro, what am I?” This will repeat until everyone has their colors listed.

If there is a tank that needs to get into a robot, they take priority. For example:

Telann, Bellatori, and Corignis are in robots. Corignis calls out “Corig is lead. Telann, red. Telann, blue. Telann, red. Telann, out.” Then, he will call “Bella, red. What am I?” to which Bellatori will respond “Corig, Blue”.

If there is a person with no / crappy /muted mic and a tank, call out the tank but the tank WILL NOT LEAVE UNTIL TOLD. The rotation will be as follows:

Quetzie, Atesies, and Avarkus are in robots. Quetzie calls out “Quetzie has lead. Atesies, red. Atesies, green. Atesies, red. What am I?” Atesies will call out “Quetzie, blue. Quetzie, yellow. Quetzie, green.” Quetzie says “Atesies, out” and proceeds to call Avarkus’s colors while Atesies leaves her robot. Once all of Avarkus’s colors are called, they can exit.

Masters of Mayhem Friday logs
Freaks and Geeks Monday logs

Raid Callouts

For our sanity and yours, we’re cutting back significantly on raid-wide callouts. I may adjust this list over the next few days.

Champion:

• Only calling out add / boss DPS swap. We will not be calling out blind unless the add is right in the middle of everyone.

Grong:

• Calling out add spawn / swap.
• May reactive call-out when people need to move if they are being thrown at if they do not move immediately.
• Individuals will call out when they are using the Apetagonizer Core.
• We will not be calling out the rocket fire spawn

Jadefire:

• Call out which bomb to swap to
• Call out add
• Individuals will call out when they are clearing magma traps
• We will not be calling out magma trap spawn

Opulence:

There should be very little need for callouts in the gauntlet. Learn to pay attention.

• Topaz individuals will discuss stack count with one another
• If a person is going to be BoP / Immunitied OR if they are going to self-sacrifice and die so the raid takes less damage
• Individuals will discuss CC order on the adds

Conclave:

There is no need for anyone to call out if they are silenced by Akunda unless you have been silenced for over fifteen seconds (half the duration). Generally, the healers will get to you. Just sit tight.

• Individuals may call out if there are adds remaining. If there is an add on a tank, it’s imperative to kill that first. Tanks, please call.
• We will not call out hex, leap, etc, unless…
• We may reactive call-out if a person is not bringing Akunda, Kimbul, etc to the back of the Paku circle

Rastakhan:

• The tank taking Rastakhan in P1 will call out when Toads are coming
• We will not be calling out fire circle
• We will not be calling out death’s doors
• We will continue to call out when the groups need to move to get to either death or living realm

Mekkatorque:

• We will not call out when people get the Gigavolt charge
• We will not call out every time Buster Cannon goes off. Only if it’s pointed at a place where a player is hiding with charge or if it’s right down the middle.
• We may reactive call-out when we need big people to stand still so shrunk people can move.
• Individuals should never call out when they are shrunk. (We don’t care. Also we can see that you’re shrunk.) Only call out when you are in a robot and taking lead or answering back (as above).
• Individuals do not need to call out what rock they are going to with Gigavolt. If you see someone else with the debuff nearby, quickly comment “Quetzie will take red, Lillithh you take yellow”
• Reread the comments about about robot callouts in the Mekkatorque fight discussion above.
• Avoid calling out if you need external heals unless you are at <50% health and have none of your own.

Respect your fellow Raiders

You are not in a vacuum when you raid. Your actions or inaction have effects on others and their ability to enjoy the game. Please do not intend to waste 6 hours of people’s time a week because you do not intend to behave like an adult.

Those who are absent, or those who are absent minded, make it hard for us to recruit for what is missing in either group. A person who shows up “sometimes maybe” with no warning, or who shows up but then takes long breaks, or who doesn’t pay attention, will find themselves replaced and put on the sub list. We’ve done it before already this tier, and we will do it again.

Distractions

We’ve noticed a number of people recently that haven’t been giving their raid their full attention. Real life comes first, but if you’re here physically, then you should be here mentally, too. Long breaks, phone texts, typing in chat during fights, drunkenness, etc all take away from 20 other people’s enjoyment of the game. We certainly understand if something comes up unexpectedly (hurt kiddos, surprises at the door), but try to plan around having these 3 hours of the night committed to the group. If you can’t commit to the full 3 hours then we will work with you as best we can.

Absences and Tardiness

Tagging missing people in Discord every week gets irritating. If you know you won’t be here or will be late, you need to tell us ASAP so we can find a replacement for your role. Accidents happen and problems arise unexpectedly, but if you know you have work, school, or family commitments, you need to tell us (though you don’t need to tell us details). We’re not going to be tagging people as much, if at all, on Discord anymore to remind them to get on.

New Warlords

As you’ve likely heard by now, Harmesi and Lineda have been promoted to Warlords. As the remaining Black Team Warlords phase out, Harmesi and Lineda will be taking over the responsibilities for Red Team (there is potentially room for advancement for others as well). Harmesi and Lineda will be taking full responsibility of the team’s decision making from hereon out, with the rest of us providing support and advice where we can. Please cut them some slack in this transitional period.

This is the first step to bringing back alt nights for the teams. The more you support everyone involved, the sooner those will return.

Raid Comp, Trades, and Recruitment

We’ve taken steps this week to adjust raid composition to fill in missing roles, trade people whose time slots will work out better, and put out feelers to fill in gaps where teams are missing roles. We will continue to do so. As a general rule, if you think there’s a gap on either team, we probably noticed it weeks ago and have been working on it this whole time, shut up about it, we know, we’re fixing it. These things take time. We cannot magic heroic-level raiders out of thin air. If you know anyone who can fill in missing roles from either team, or who wants a spot on the raid team, we will work with them to see what can be done.

Sorry I’m a bit late – wasn’t sure about some information to include this week or next. Will include it in the next!

Opening Night

Both groups had easy clears up through Opulence. There are a few mishaps on Grong with tank throws and the people with the orbs dying, but otherwise both groups are getting very comfortable with the first three bosses.

Opulence

Opulence took 6 tries per group to get down. For Red Team, the solution was to put the heaviest-hitting characters on the left side (reducing the number of awful overlap mechanics they needed to face). Going forward this should lead to much faster kills. Black Team had a few missteps but should be able to apply what Red Team learned to the boss to down him faster in the future. Red Team went from an entire night spent on Opulence last monday, to downing him in 6 tries not even a week later.

Masters of Mayhem Thursday logs
Freaks and Geeks Saturday Logs

Closing Night

Conclave of the Chosen

Conclave is a tough fight for both groups. Black Team pulled in a third tank to help reset the stacks on Paku and Kimbul. This allowed the bosses to not cross/overlap and made tank swaps faster and more reliable. Red Team followed suit.

If a melee non-tank taunts off of Paku or Kimbul, the boss continues to gain stacks. This means that taunting at 12, a melee person will get hit with a 13 stack Paku. Then a 14…etc. Taunt-offs with melee DPS need to be exact or the dps will simply be 1- or 2-shot. It’s much safer for us right now to have a tank taunt off, resetting stacks to zero.

Both groups are having a ton of problems with the Krag’wa and Paku overlap. Both groups should have the tanks off to the sides and the majority of DPS way on the edge of the circle. This will hopefully draw Krag’wa to the DPS, who will then run back and forth between the front of the circle and the middle repeatedly, drawing them out. There should be a couple dps towards the back to ensure it’s never a tank that gets jumped on.

This is a good theory, of course, but it doesn’t always work out in reality. We’re still fine-tuning as best we can, so people have to be ready to move. The Krag’wa circle IS bigger than Darkness, and DPSing during Paku isn’t important. So simply yank your camera over your head and look for the white swirly, then run out of it. It’s very easy – even as a DPS who sits on the outside of Conclave as froggy bait, I can count the number of times I’ve been hit by him on one hand.

Killing Gonk before the first Paku winds seems to be the key to success. Groups may have to trim down excessively just to ensure that Gonk loses health fast enough. That said, Red Team was missing a few key DPS players from their run – hopefully they’ll be back in action this week and make for a smooth kill.

King Rastakhan

Rastakhan seems to have only one difficult phase on heroic – phase 3, where we split into 2 realms. Keeping adds CCd is going to be vital. Otherwise, the other mechanics aren’t too bad. People need to pay attention to the frog path – if you have the absorb debuff on you, move out of the way of the frog! Tanks and healers run the risk of taking damage from from the fire snake totems in phase 1. However, they’re easy to dodge once you get into the rhythm. Practice will make perfect here.

We may change up who we put into the death realm in the future. The faster we get Bwonsamdi down, the better. The living realm is all about soaking and priority killing adds until the death realm people show up again.

Masters of Mayhem Friday logs
Freaks and Geeks Monday logs

Normal

In the spirit of getting off-tanks used to mechanics and teaching some new people how we run the raid, we ran through normal on Saturday morning up through blockade, and finished Blockade and Jaina monday night. Blockade and Jaina were incredibly small groups – 16 people on Blockade and 19 people on Jaina. Small groups with good execution of mechanics are vital for both fights. Every boss was 1-shot except for conclave, blockade, and Jaina, which were all 2-shot.

We’ll likely run this again in the future before we officially bring back alt nights (which we’re in the process of – very soon!)

Champion – Rastakhan (logs gave out at one point)
Blockade and Jaina

Black Temple Timewalking

For those interested in Black Temple Timewalking this week, Tiraffe is setting up a run for people. Check out the pinned post in Raiding Discussion on discord:

Hey guys, Tiraffe here. I’m planning on hosting a Late Night Timewalking Black Temple shortly after red team finishes this Saturday, starting at 8:15pm est. Planning on going until 11:30pm est. Demonhunters come and get your Warglaive of Azzinoth tmog.

If you’re interested, react with something so I can get some kind count of who’s thinking of coming. The more folks we have, the easier the bosses will be. I’ll be posting a quick guide later on how to optimize gear for Timewalking stuff too.

Make sure to find and react to his post so he’ll know you’re interested!

This week, both teams headed into heroic for the first time!

Opening Night

Champion of the Light

Black team had a very good first pull on Champion, but still has problems with “add wrangling”. Too many people are getting hit by Wave of Light,  and Blinding Faith is a continual problem for some people on both teams (though it’s made harder when adds are improperly placed).

Both teams are generally awful at interrupts. It only takes a second to tab to one of the healer minions and interrupt them, but most people aren’t doing it.

Both teams had similar, clean kills; only 3 deaths. 2 of them were tanks and the remainder was someone else dying at the end from boss damage.

Grong

We had a few discoveries this week – for example, adds dying too close to the boss gave him bonus energy, which made tantrum more deadly. We tried a variety of different styles of stacking for large ranged groups – from 1 group to 2 groups, moving when able. That strategy was quickly abandoned as being too complex.

When the tank gets thrown at a player, it’s important to stand still and wait. The tank will be stunned for 1-2 seconds and unable to move, meaning if you abandon them, they’ll get feared. It’s important to stay with the tank during this phase. As soon as a tank gets picked up, a melee DPS needs to stand on the other tank. When the thrown tank lands, they need to walk back together. A potentially helpful weakaura is located here.

In the end, the boss kill is mostly about team comp. We had 4 healers for fewer people on Black team, but we needed an extra healer on Red to make up for the larger team size. As soon as we added an extra healer to Red, they 1-shot the boss, after having 14 previous wipes. Black only took 4 pulls on him to adjust to the heroic changes.

Jadefire Masters

The important thing for this fight seems to be clearing moving away from magma traps and clearing them efficiently. There’s a pretty long windup on the cast, so there’s not much excuse for being hit by them as they spawn. Certain classes can clear them without incident – rogues, hunters, and paladins can all remove multiple traps at once. Other classes can negate fall damage with blinks, jumps, teleports, slow falls, or even a good priest-yank back to safety.

Healers need to be on top of dispells (we had a few pop off for tons of raid-wide damage) but for the most part, we haven’t had issues.

The Xuen tiger add is annoying and we learned to adjust as time went on. During explosive, every DPS would get inside an explosive orb and kill the add while cleaving the orb for maximum efficiency.

The pattern for the monk puzzle will always be Blue, Green, Orange, Green, Blue. This week they’ve made it easier to see, so if we do miss the DPS push threshold, hopefully it won’t be an issue.

Masters of Mayhem Thursday logs
Freaks and Geeks Saturday logs

Closing Night

Face, meet wall. Repeatedly.

Opulence

Both teams suffered the gauntlet here. There are no new mechanics compared to normal, but both teams still struggled with then regardless, which was perplexing to raid leads.

Right-side add always turns clockwise, and you should always be stacked on his butt unless there’s a potential fire-laser mechanic. Even then, the fire-laser mechanic doesn’t do a ton of damage. I’ve said it a number of times and I will say it again: getting fire-laser out of the group is less important than staying alive. There is too much complaining about “fire being under the boss!”. That’s just going to happen because of the fire-spin mechanic coinciding with lasers.

In the future, we may simply ask those with fire laser to make as small a circle – wherever they are – as possible. The tank can then move the add away from this when it’s happening. Or, if it’s happening during a fire-laser-spin, move the miniboss after. The real issue with the fire-laser comes from getting more than 2 instances of it. We’re losing DPS to 1-shot mechanics when we need them alive to kill the miniboss before we get 3 instances of fire-laser on the ground.

Left-side…I’ve never been on. However, both groups had issues with people running the static ability out and dropping it out of the group.

This fight is very important to be fast-reacting with mechanics. If you try to finish a cast, chances are you or someone nearby you will die, much like Blockade.

In the future, Warlords are going to be comping down significantly sooner than we have been. People dying to avoidable 1-shots, especially without using any defensives, are not doing anything but adding HP to the boss and minibosses.

Once in the last room, however, the fight is very simple.

Conclave

Black team managed to reach Conclave, and we’re in for a trick here. Multiple ranged DPS – especially those with the Incandescent Sliver trinket – spread out from the group around the center of the room. This allowed the new Krag’wa mechanic to aim for only one person and thus only make one person have to move at a time.

It is much more imperative that the DPS and Tanks are properly situation in a Paku wind blast. Otherwise, mechanics like Krag’wa or Kimbul will wipe the raid, as they combo into massive damage.

Raptors do significantly more damage and also gain buffs. It’s imperative for mages to spellsteal both these buffs and the haste buff from Paku’s aspect.

Masters of Mayhem Friday logs
Freaks and Geeks Monday logs

Mythic Champion

Jibbles through a quick guild group together on Sunday to down Mythic Champion of the Light before LFR started. The boss went down in <10 pulls and much loot was enjoyed. He intends to run it again so hopefully that gives both groups a leg up on goodies for their runs!

(We also peeked at Grong and had many regrets.)

Mythic Champion combat logs

Thoughts

Warlords are going to trim down groups much earlier than they have been. We’ve been trying to give people chances to make up for mistakes, but some people do not seem to be showing improvement on certain bosses or mechanics. We’ll work with you when we can, but it won’t be able to be done mid-raid. If we’re able we will reach out and provide assistance – maybe helpful WAs or addons, practice runs on normal, etc.

Please don’t whisper warlords graphs and stats during a raid, or if you must, only do so once. We all have the combatlogs, we all have details or recount or skada, and we do pay a lot more attention to those around us than the average raider does. We’re aware of what you’re showing us. If we’re not addressing it, it’s either because we can’t address it at the time, or we’re not sure of the best fix and will need to think about it.