Congratulations to all of our new Vanguards this week:

Tiraffe, Julifton, Rowdyrival, Shaynanigans, Uncletouchhy and Livre!

We’ve also had a number of new AOTC holders this week:

Atesies, Anukhet, Grooverider, Tivie, Grimmbrew, Uncletouchhy, Telanlan, and Auluriya!

For the Vanguards, we’ve updated the monthly donation sheet. If you are a Vanguard or will be one before the 15th, please donate by February 1st. These fund our feasts and flasks!

Tonight we had a pick-up from where we left off last night for G’huun. Congrats to Ministry members new and old: Beastthuntt, Shaynanigans, Nighteld, Livre, Gnardawg, Jynxx, and Harman!

Composition for 1/11 and 1/18

Next week, those who got benched on Friday or missed the Saturday group that lack AOTC will have priority to remain in-group to get AOTC (for example: Uncletouchyy got sat on Friday when we trimmed people, and Yarzza missed Saturday).

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I apparently never announced these promotions on the site or in Discord when they received them in November sometime:

Eviandre
Sylvvannas

Congrats to the following people who’ve received Vanguard promotions in December:

Arianrhod
Haromuk
Jimlahey
Konflic
Vermin
Xazzan
Xuxun

These folks get a special spot on the website as well as access to raider tabs and more gold repairs.

Remember: Attendance is “frozen” right now so you won’t lose Vanguard, but you can still earn it before BfD by attending regularly scheduled raid times!

Congratulations to the newest AOTC members of Ministry of Defense (and Golden Chariots!)

We’d also like to thank our new friends in Golden Chariots for coming out and joining us for it, as well as a few members of I Am Muted from Thrall helping out healers.

Don’t have AOTC yet? We are tentatively putting together a group for Thursday, 4pm PST / 7pm EST to get additional achievements for anyone missing it. If you can’t make it, don’t worry! We’ll have plenty of opportunities coming up with the new raid schedule.

I’ve received two questions in varying forms since the BfD meeting the other day, so I will add them to the post and here for you!

Q: What if I can’t make both progression nights? Can I still raid with you guys?
A: For normal and heroic – of course! We have a number of people who can only make one of the two days, whether because of conflicting raid times or because of IRL conflicts (school, children, etc). We’d never penalize you for having a life outside the game. That said, Mythic is a bit iffier. If we have one healer that can’t attend Thursday, and one that can’t attend Friday, that works out well. But we’d prefer to keep tanks the same both days, for example, and there’s no guarantee that you’d have a spot if you can only attend one day or the other. We will cross that bridge when we reach it.

Q: What’s this about taxes for Vanguards?  Do I have to send goods for giveaways, donate IRL money, or something?
A: No, that would be ridiculous of us, and unfair to everyone who wanted to raid. We mentioned Donations offhand, and I’ll go into it a bit more thoroughly here. We first decided to do this in early October. Our feast and flask makers are having a hard time keeping up with raid demands for providing these materials. To help offset we’re asking for a small donation to the guild to cover expenses. This ranges from a stack of 200 fish, 200 herbs, a bunch of green BoEs (for expulsom for flasks), to vantus runes, and more.

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.

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).

Currently in December we do not need any donations. Officers are still discussing if we need anything for January. We’ll let you know!

Thanks everyone for coming out! We’d like to thank everyone who listened to us and asked good questions about the plans we have for raiding in Battle for Dazar’alor.

Below is the agenda and the meeting minutes!

Raid Pre-Planning Meeting Agenda:

  • Introduction from the Warlords
  • Raid Schedule until BfD Launch
  • Qualifying for and Coming to Raids
  • Vanguard
  • Discord  Lines of Communication
  • Loot
  • BfD Roles
  • Improving your Gear and DPS
  • Other Events
  • Discord Bots
  • Q&A

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We will be having a raider’s interest meeting and meeting to discuss the next raid tier, Battle of Dazar’alor, this Thursday, December 20th at 4pm server (7pm est). It will be held in place of our normal mythic run. Please try to attend if you are looking to continue raiding with us, or are looking to start raiding with us. The meeting will take place in the raiding Discord voice channel.

Thursday: Mythic

I’ve never seen a turnaround quite like this one, and I think I speak for every raid lead when I say how incredibly impressed we are with our team. We killed MOTHER in 3 tries (2, really, because we had an early wipe-call when people died on a crossing), which is a massive upgrade from the 52 previous tries. Normally when we down a boss, we continue to struggle on it for a few weeks. This was a welcome relief.

As a result we got our first look at a new boss on mythic, Zek’vos.

Zek’vos has overlapping add packs and overlapping darkness with deceit. We’re going to need steady coordination for calling out who needs external healing cooldowns / defensives, and making sure people run as far away as possible (not simply dropping to the side).

We also suggest getting comfortable using a microphone for this fight. It’s highly likely that now more than ever, you will need to call out when you need external heals or when you’re using interrupts.

We’re also going to be auditing interrupts much more closely. What’s important is not whether or not you are interrupting, but whether or not you are interrupting out of turn. If someone calls out they they’ve got “next”, and you cut them off, there’s a potential that both your AND their interrupts go wasted, and a cast might go off next time. Also, don’t interrupt early. They only stand around casting and re-casting, so interrupting them late ensures there’s more time for our interrupt rotation to recover. Those with ranged interrupts (like Balance druids) will be saving theirs for the 3rd add, which overlaps with the darkness (pain donuts).

Tanks did a good job moving the boss around, but he needs to be moved much quicker. Consider starting to move him when the add is at 85-90% HP instead of it being at 90-95% hp.

Little adds are going to need to die faster. If you’re running the same talents you ran on MOTHER, chances are you’re doing it wrong. Certain individuals will be told to instead swap to a full AoE build, even if it means they output less boss damage. (In phase 3, you can probably expect them to be the first people to pick up an orb to go down as well, since they won’t be single-target specced for boss or person damage).

Save displacements like typhoon, ring of peace, etc for when the little adds coincide with the darkness.

Thursday Logs

Friday: Heroic clear

Friday was a pretty decent clear. We downed all the way up through G’huun, which is the farthest we’ve gotten on Heroic in one sitting.

We definitely has issues of boss-tunneling. As a baseline comparison, I had a 316/320 ilvl character in on heroics (it’s a balance druid, because I am the height of originality). Through all of our wipes, I did more damage to the Hexers than 3 other DPS, including one ranged. I did more damage to the crusher than 6 DPS including one ranged (though melee DPS are not able to DPS her for as long as others). I out-DPSd 3 ranged DPS on Ichors. I didn’t out-DPS anyone on crawgs.

Guys, that’s bad. Some of you are in the 360, 370 range. A 320 boomkin without an offhand should not be out-DPSing anybody on priority adds, especially not other ranged DPS (melee get a slight pass, especially on Crushers, but still).

A few of us swapped to our mains to down Zul, but as Zex pointed out, we shouldn’t have to. We shouldn’t have to swap to overpowered 380 geared characters just because some of you have no concept of prioritization on targets and are stubborn.

Now, some folks were new to heroics that night, or hadn’t done the fight with us before even on normal. That’s OK! I expect you guys will get more comfortable with looking around for these adds in the future. However, there are some people who have been around the block who don’t have an excuse. I won’t name names, but you know who you are.

TLDR:

Friday Logs

Saturday / Sunday: Timewalking

We took a few hours instead of LFR and then picked up the remainder on Sunday to kill Illidan for the weekly and do something fun and different. It was a long slog and I think it made some of us appreciate how much trash has been cut out of raids (though if you ask me, Blizz took all the raid trash and threw it in dungeons instead), and how blissfully short modern raids are compared to the olden days.

Monday: Alt Night

On account of some internet issues I missed the first hour of alt night.

Every boss was a 1-shot, including G’huun. We had a few new orb runners and they did wonderfully. People listened well to directions given and we have high hopes for our newcomers.

Monday Logs

Thanksgiving Break

On account of the holiday, no raids on Thursday and Friday. Feel free to PUG, watch videos, or take a week off.

We’re going to ignore Oct 30 – November 5 and pretend it never happened.

Thursday: Mythic

It took us a few tries to get Taloc down. We had some problems with lasers or getting knocked off by the bloods. Generally however, Taloc is as easy on Mythic as it is on other difficulties.

MOTHER

We had some very good pulls on MOTHER with very little downtime between them. We also adopted a new strategy of pulling the boss, resetting, and running into the room to stack right next to the wall. This made the initial transition much cleaner. Crossing became easier over time as we settled into the specifics of knowing when to cross, how, and making sure not to move too far after crossing over.

We still had mishaps caused by lag or improper use of defensives, but we’re really getting the “step 1” part down. Arguably, this is the second hardest part of the fight.

After crossing, we need to kill adds. I will say that this week was generally pretty good. We had casts get off on occasion, but on account of smoother crossings we also had smoother add kills.

We also got better about standing near the wall to melee MOTHER through it. Pets will harmlessly cross through, treants and other summoned abilities can do damage, and of course even casters can safely whack her with a staff! This smidgen of DPS may not seem important now, but you’d be surprised how much it helps later…

After crossing MOTHER into Room 2, dodging mechanics there is pretty easy for us. Then, it becomes a waiting game of knowing when Spirit Link is back off cooldown and making sure we’re ready.

The transition from Room 2 into Room 3 is the most dangerous transition and the hardest to achieve. We need a good setup and we need everyone on the same page.

The yellow line on the left is the wall between rooms 2 and 3. The unhappy face is MOTHER. The silver crescent is Quetzie, marked with the Moon over her head to people know where to stack in Room 1 and now.

During the final Wind phase of room 2, players need to be nearby – but not directly against – the wall of Room 3. Many times,  players are spread incredibly far across the room – even close to the wall of Room 1! They’re never going to make it to the Room 3 wall in time. Instead, during the final Wind phase, drag your character over to Quetzie. Line up with her. She’ll be standing nearby the Room 3 wall, with MOTHER between her and the wall. After the final fire is cast (not before!), the group books it to the wall, throws down all defensives and heals, and crosses as a quick succession – ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR – just like we do in Transition 1.

If all goes well – and so far it only has a small handful of times – we’ll be in Room 3, casting lust, and gunning down the adds, then treating Room 3 just as we did Room 2.

It all came together, however – in the nick of time.

We moved up to #11 on the server and remain #1 Horde.

By the way: Remember what I said earlier about DPSing through the wall? We killed MOTHER when her room was at 94% full. That left us with mere seconds left for a kill.

Or, as expressed by Miatreeleafa on stream seconds before we got her:

Also, congrats to Tusker for hitting a gold parse on the kill:

For those curious: we had 51 wipes on MOTHER, or 45 not counting the “week we don’t speak of”. We really only had 2 nights spent working on her, so that’s not so bad!

Thursday Mythic logs

Friday: G’huun and friends

Because we had a saved lockout from last week, we jumped right into G’huun.

We only had 5 pulls that were what I will call “net garbage” as a result from orb mishaps in phase 1. We had many pulls reach well into phase 2 and 5 into Phase 3, with 3 pulls at 90 and higher. We comped down and swapped some people around due to mechanic failures, and had a few missteps but not many. Our kill was clean, however – once again we had nobody die until Phase 3.

Congrats to our new AOTC title holders: Deathhoss, Eviandrae, Avianne, Nari, Lillithh, and Sylvvannas.

After G’huun, we went to Ripblade’s lockout: he had an opening on Zul and Mythrax.

Zul was a 1-shot, which has never happened before. Everyone was very clean. Interrupts on Hexers, downing Crushers fast, the tanks did a good job at dropping their debuff, and ranged stacked mid. We had a good transition, too. Hopefully we can emulate this in future weeks.

Mythrax was a little less clean (to say the least). We actually had both tanks die, resed one, and he dies again. Fortunately, we had enough DPS and HPS to keep the fight going for a kill.

Friday logs

Monday: Alt Night

Alt night is slowly but surely transitioning into more and more Heroic bosses. We went on Normal first, skipping the first three bosses. In future weeks we’ll be continuing to up this number.

Normal is almost boring at this point, even 2 healing it as we were sometimes. G’huun we needed more healing and had a few problems with orb runners (mostly healing issues and a miscommunication with new runners). But it only took us 3 tries.

Taloc and Mother on Heroic were 1 shots. We did move MOTHER into room 3, which is unusual for us on heroic, but we needed the practice transitioning.

Monday Logs 1
Monday Logs 2

BoE Farm and Guild Bank repairs

On account of having a post-MOTHER lockout, we spent some time Sunday and after alt night on Monday farming BoEs. We’re happy to announce that we got 5 Mythic BoEs and 1 random-drop BoE. This windfall ensures that we will have plenty of money in the guild bank, and thus the repair allocation for Vanguards and Gladiators has been increased. Hopefully we can make this a recurring event as we continue to kill bosses on Mythic, and then will be set for quite a while.

Social Media

As you might be aware, MoD is now on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. We’re holding a contest for anyone who follows us and submit their MoD stories! You may have already read Deiselboy’s account, so it’s time to share yours!

Plus, who wants to miss out on this sort of quality content:

I love endorsements!

Posted by MODaeriepeak on Sunday, November 11, 2018