We killed Heroic Maiden of Vigilance without Jondy and myself. I’m so appreciative and impressed with the guild getting a progression kill while we were AFK. So onto the stats.
25 attempts, 14 characters and 916.5 average item level. A big thanks to Wicked for tanking, and Kal (Hydona) for… [Edit: December 2021, for what Kal? what did you do? Where am I going to get a screenshot for this kill from now? Arrrgggg]
We killed Gul’dan with 15 characters and an average iLvl of 896.6. Now, the publish date as always is the time of the kill… but I’m writing this in August, while the guild is doing battle against heroic Kil’Jaeden. I wonder how much of this I will remember. Oh, yey, the email to Jondy for the screenshot has some notes. UGH. The eyes! The eyes!
Gul’dan was killed in 80 attempts. The mechanic that caused the most problems was the empowered eyes. Looking back through the forum, we had a lot of discussion about getting people straight into those throughout the fight. We used potions for the first eye in phase three, heroism for the next two… and by the time we got comfortable with the phase, Gul’dan was dead.
For tanking, Esta did the bulk of tanking Gul’dan and I picked up the Dreadlords in phase two. By the umpteenth attempt, we had our interrupt rotation down pat, and Esta and I were doing a Fel Sythe / Empowered Bonds of Fel dance as a delightful duet. There’s nothing quite like watching Esta get flung across the room, only to roll back, shrugging off the bonds like nothing just happened. Except for when I forgot to taunt, and it was ever so politely and gently pointed out in the guild forums.
Dazzler did a great job (and Tam too on occasion) in managing the stack / spread and movement of the ranged group for the empowered liquid hellfire and empowered bonds of fel dance. Overall we were a little slow in getting the whole group to participate in breaking people out of bonds in a timely fashion… but we did get there in the end.
As usual, Desu was active in the forums with analysis… which may have tired him out enough by the time we got the kill, when contemplating what to do next (Mythic bosses with a sub-20 roster vs. previous tier Mythic bosses) we got this gem:
My suggestion is we perform an 80:20 analysis, go for the low hanging fruit, and leverage our synergies to 10x the value of our time and attention.
A couple of quick mentions, since the boss kill screenshots record the people physically in the photo… Obzen was unwell and retired early, and Silence and Sarky both missed out on the LAST PULL OF THE NIGHT due to a disconnection.
Which leads me into some of the things that sucked about Heroic Gul’dan. The scaling on this fight was appalling. The difference extra characters in the fight was pretty extreme, and throughout our 80 attempts many were made much more difficult to achieve the required DPS by having less total people in the raid. We all understand that it can’t be harder when you invite more friends to join in… but I’m not sure why Blizzard has such a difficult time getting scaling right at smaller raid sizes.
Finally, we had a raid night spoiled by a bugged Elisande that wouldn’t let us progress to Gul’dan. In the scheme of things, it now seems like a small note, but we really weren’t impressed at the time!
Hopefully I’ve done Gul’dan justice, and now I can focus on at least getting up some pretty pictures and stats for all the bosses we’ve killed since!
We killed Trilliax on heroic difficulty on the same night as Chronomatic Anomaly in 7 attempts. Our average iLvl was 884.5, meaning the previous kill yielded an average 0.6 iLvl increase across the raid.
I think from chat in raid and on discord, Trilliax is shaping up to be one of our favourite encounters from Nighthold. I’m not sure if it’s the cake or the robots, but even with the spinning beams of death which we’ve all seen before, the encounter feels novel and unique.
The two major issues were deaths to Annihilation (we even finally saw it change directions in heroic), and Scrubbers blowing up with Cleansing Destruction. Once we sorted those out, we scored a convincing (if messy) kill, on the very last pull of the night.
We one shot Chronomatic Anomaly on heroic difficulty, which makes talking about our strategy and particular struggles moot. We killed the boss with 21 characters and an average iLvl of 883.9. I will say it was pretty fun having timewarp while the passage of time was fast.
Bonus screenshot, with Shakers taking center stage!
We killed Skorpyron on heroic difficulty in the first week of Nighthold opening, with 15 characters and an average iLvl of 879.3. Taking a little longer to kill than a couple of subsequent bosses at 15 attempts, we managed to sneak in the kill while also working our way through normal mode.
We grouped up the Crystalline Scorpids with the Volatile Scorpids and while Esta was keg smashing, exploding kegs and heavy (fire) breathing… we had some AoE in the form of Ret Pally, Fire Mages and Beast master (not survival (never (ever) survival))) hunter ripping them apart. Of course everyone was on the adds, but those specs were the highlights for our composition on our first kill. It’s adorable that even our rogue, Desu, tried to help by flinging a teeny, tiny fan of knives and a poison bomb at the adds.
Aside from dealing with the adds in a timely fashion the key to the fight was dodging Focused Blast, and hiding behind the Chitinous Exoskeleton for Shockwave. We also used heroism on the second Exoskeletal Vulnerability, and prioritised DPS into the boss over adds while vulnerable.
One last factor worth noting, is that even while grouping up the one scorpion that makes the other scorpions go crazy, I (Protection Warrior tank) needed way more external healing than Esta.
Heroic Odyn. Sorted.
We initially tried a three tank strategy for Xavuis, and while it made the first phase mechanically much easier, we weren’t getting through to the second phase without a second Corruption Horror. So back to two tanks, we killed Xavius with 19 characters in 23 attempts with an average iLvl of 860.6.
The first phase was a little tight for damage, but we managed to get our cleave on and get through the Corruption Horror in good time. We tank swapped as efficiently as possible so the Dream tank didn’t get too many stacks of…
[December 2021: hit publish!]
Il’gynoth Heroic was potentially not the easiest choice for a second progression boss (you’ll read later about a boss we one shot (no prizes for guessing which one)). We killed the boss with 20 characters, in 29 attempts with an average iLvl of 848.7.
Once people got used to kiting their adds, and the timing required to have them pass the eye when the raid would likely have time to kill them, the major challenge was burning the Corruptor Tentacles quickly to help minimise the number of Spew Corruption casts to deal with.
Despite the fight revolving around having two opportunities to strike at the heart, DPS was a non-issue, and survival was key. Spreading out for Cursed Blood during the heart phase felt a little cramped to begin with, but quickly felt routine. We used Heroism for the first set of Corruptor Tentacles in the second time in the first phase, since we didn’t need it for the Heart.
We’re looking forward to the day we can kill the heart in one phase.
Welcome to Legion, everyone! After a huge break from raiding we were revelling in a new expansion and a chance to kill some bosses again. We have been blessed to have some new and returning faces in the guild, and it has been a pleasure to see Heroic, Mythic and Mythic+ dungeons being traversed in guild groups.
We stepped into The Emerald Nightmare with 21 raiders, and thanks to the improvements in logging, I can tell you the average item level for the kill was 841.6. Gearing paths are about as diverse as have ever been, with upgrades from world quests, heroics, mythics, craftables and BoEs all contributing to getting ready for raiding.
On the first night of raiding we started out on Heroic Nythendra, and made steady progress as we started to gel, and figure out some things from beta (e.g., tail lash) didn’t carry over to live. We finished the night with a normal kill, and were surprised just how easy it was by comparison.
On our second night we secured a good, clean kill on our second attempt and moved back into normal mode before our night was rudely cut short by a ‘restart’. Fortunately we called the raid, since servers only came back after some of us were already soundly sleeping.
Sunday night saw us have a rollicking good time clearing normal bosses up to Xavius.
Even harder than the screenshot boss, or the attendance boss, is the recruitment boss. With the help of a couple of friends of the guild (thanks Aximish and Canaleth) and even cross realm Mythic (thanks Snowbird (even though despite my super clear labeling you thought it was a Heroic run (but still stuck around more than one attempt))), we ventured in to Mythic for the first time in the expansion.
Our gear level had some pretty dramatic differences. All the way from 729 iLvl with a maxed out legendary ring and fully upgraded… to 709 and virtually nothing upgraded. We have 7 raiders that are maxed out, rings and all, and the average item level was 722.7. There’s a huge discrepancy when it comes to luck with gems. A couple of people are sporting 6 gem sockets, with several people missing out altogether. The average number of gems is 2.55. We were only missing one legendary ring which was a nice surprise and there were even a couple of missing enchants. Oops. We only have half the raid fully upgraded, with a couple of outliers at zero upgrades. It can be difficult when 100% of your gear has come from just the last two weeks of raiding, but most people are steadily working their way through upgrading as they can find the time.
As quick note for guildies, if you have the Ask Mr. Robot addon, and it’s out of date… the gear uploaded to the logs won’t have your upgrades and gems loaded properly. Update those addons ;)
So… fun with spreadsheets over… onto the boss. 11 attempts and several questionable recruits from Premade Groups was all it took to conquer the assault. The notable changes to the encounter on mythic is that there is a new siege vehicle, two new mini bosses, and the requirement to split the raid in half to deal with the spread of the adds and having two artillery vehicles at the same time.
The main challenge of the fight was just to keep up with incoming waves. Once you get a little behind, it snowballs very quickly. Finishing off the felcasters at the right times also made a huge difference to the damage going out into the raid.
We ran 4 healers, and while the mythic raid size of 20 has crippled a lot of small guilds, it tuns out to be super convenient for splitting the raid. We burned Mar’tak at the beginning of the fight, but saved Heroism for the first Transporter. We killed Grand Corruptor U’rogg before Grute. It was pretty important that we didn’t push over any Felcasters during the mini bosses, or the damage got excessive. Aside from just getting used to the fight and our DPS increasing, some much improved target switching made a big difference to how easy the fight felt.
After the mini bosses were down there was a slight reprieve, but as the fight was drawing to a close we got a little behind with the waves, but were able to kill enough siege vehicles to get us through to our first Mythic kill.