8.3 Visions of N’zoth TL;DR Guide

8.3 releases on January 14th, and with it comes a bunch of game-changing mechanics, zones, and scenarios. Although 8.3 took a while to get here, it brings a huge amount of content. It can be a bit much to process all at once, so this guide will give a TL;DR of all the new stuff coming in Visions of N’zoth, along with general tips along the way for raiders who want to maximize their efficiency when the new raid becomes available.

Patch/Raid Release Schedule

January 14 – Visions of N’zoth Goes Live
January 21 – Normal and Heroic Difficulties
January 28 – Mythic Ny’alotha, Raid Finder Wing 1 (Vision of Destiny)
February 11 – Raid Finder Wing 2 (Halls of Devotion)
February 25 – Raid Finder Wing 3 (Gift of Flesh)
March 10 – Raid Finder Wing 4 (The Waking Dream)

New Legendary Cloak – Ashjra’kamas

When you’re going through the 8.3 questline, you will eventually get a 470 ilvl legendary cloak, Ashjra’kamas. This cloak will most definitely be an upgrade of whatever you have on, and it gives two major bonuses; corruption resistance and reduced sanity drain. The corruption resistance helps you negate the negative effects on corruption gear (more on that later), and the sanity drain reduction helps in Horrific and Lesser Visions of N’zoth. To upgrade the cloak, you have to complete certain sections in Horrific Visions based on how much your cloak has leveled up. When you start off with your cloak, you’ll want to always make sure you kill the “major” boss in the Horrific Vision in every run. If you don’t kill the major boss, even if you defeated bosses in side zones, you will NOT get the items to upgrade your cloak. When your cloak reaches rank 6, it gains an active effect that allows you to remove all corruption debuffs on you currently and for the next 6 seconds. Rank 12 gives a mainstat proc.

More information on the legendary cloak can be found in Wowhead’s legendary cloak guide.

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Weekly Raid Roundup (5/29 - 8/12)

Finally beating the past couple of weeks of procrastination, Tiraffe and Fokola put together a weekly raid roundup for both teams to review. The roundup contains 3 sections; 2 for each raid team and a section for improving an individual’s dps and some other small things to note.

Thursday/Friday Raid Roundup

Sivara (H/M)

Good: Comfortably meeting dps/hps requirement on Heroic.

Bad: Folks still dying to Overflow mechanic. This is happening for 2 reasons:

  1. Not enough people stacking on the Overflow target. 3 or more is recommended for heroic. We should have enough healers/ranged to cover this without having to have the rest of the melee move.
  2. Heavy Defensives/Immunities not being used when there’s mechanic overlap and/or 2 or less people are soaking. This is a direct result of not enough people stacking, since the teams lack a lot of immunity classes.

For Mythic, people need to dodge the overwhelming barrage to avoid getting unnecessary stacks and need to make sure they pop Unstable Mixture at 3 or 4 stacks. Overall damage could be higher. Azerite defensive traits should also be used instead of mobility to increase survivability.

Note: Outside of the start of the fight and whenever Inversion occurs, people should be better on stacking with their respective marks instead of being a continent away. Since Overflow happens more often than Inversion, it should be better to stack until it’s time to spread instead of the other way around. There’s also something about having more than 4-5 stacks at once, but it probably won’t kill by itself on heroic. Everyone that died last week was either soaking by themselves without a heavy defensive or stacked with just 1 other person and still died due to not using a defensive. Continue reading

Fokola's Mechagon Hardmode Guide

Hello super friends, Pasta Fagioli here. After experiencing Mechagon Hardmode myself with Tiraffe, Corig, Jibbles, and Demonestra, I decided to make my own guide to give tips and tricks in case other people want to do Mechagon Hardmode. The guide will cover a lot of ground to help you perform this task; composition positives and negatives, buffs you can get around the island, and certain boss mechanics that cause problems in Hardmode.

PLEASE NOTE: A majority of the bosses in this run are a HUGE dps check, whether it be the first 3 or King Mechagon. The more dps you have, encounters will be much easier. I’d recommend a minimum of 430+ item level for the dungeon, depending on your composition and what utility each class you bring can do.

Hardmode Rewards

Mechagon Hardmode gives 3 rewards in total:

  • An achievement “Keep DPS’ing and Nobody Explodes” to all members of the party.
  • One member gets a 430 azerite helm.
  • One member gets the “Aerial Unit R-21/X.”
  • If nobody dies at all during a single lockout of Mechagon Hardmode, everyone gets the Hertz Locker achievement which rewards Vision of Perfection Rank 4.

Most groups will probably run this over several weeks

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