Thursday: G’huun Practice

Thursday was spent entirely practicing orbs and phase transitions. It wasn’t until about 2 hours in that we started to have some really smooth pulls – early orb transitions, few mistakes on corruption orbs, etc.

Unfortunately, too many people were failing simple mechanics.

Interrupts

We had 25 pulls. There were a few that got screwed super early. But essentially, unless you’re an orb runner, you should be interrupting on every pull that gets past phase 1. Now, I don’t think this counts unsuccessful casts (if two people cast at the same time but one is wasted). There are also some interrupts that aren’t tracked on the above list. That being said, it’s obvious that some people were more successful in their attempts than others.

Virulent Corruption (oatmeal balls)

There’s also issues with Virulent Corruption. If you don’t run corruption out of the group, you’re going to drop it on top of people. If you bee-line for the nearest wall without paying attention to melee, you’re going to drop it on top of people. If you’re not paying any goddamn attention, you’re going to drop it on top of people. Or you’re going to get hit by orbs. For example:

Notice how 3 of the top 5 people hit are melee. More than likely, their hits are caused by people dropping debuffs right on top of them. It’s also possible that they weren’t paying attention, but we’ll give them some benefit of the doubt. Ignoring ibroke (who DCd early), and plutonic, the bottom 15 are all ranged classes. It’s VERY easy to dodge orbs for ranged classes if you’re standing out of the middle but not on top of the melee. Ranged DPS / healers who have high hit counts are spreading the debuff like wildfire for no reason at all. Melee DPS who ignore their warnings or ranged DPS who tunnel the nearest wall without communicating have hurt the group.

I downloaded a weakaura that will tell me who is “most guilty” of not dodging these things. You can get it here. I will be calling out at certain intervals who is getting hit so they know they need to improve.

Communication

There were also issues of ineffective communication. “I fucked up the orb” doesn’t help us. Did you drop the orb? Are you stuck? Did you not pick it up? Do you need someone from the ground to rescue you? Are you talking to your backup, or the group as a whole? etc. Be specific if something happens with orb running.

Wave of Corruption

In later stages we hit issues with Wave of Corruption. Some of it was simply that we had too many bodies. Others weren’t paying attention. Here is a weakaura to help you track if you’re safe or not. If the circle turns red, you need to move. If you’re a ranged DPS, don’t stand near the boss! Be at MAX range so healers can be between us and melee, and melee have room to spread.

Healthstones

Overall, healthstone usage was pretty good. Many people with high death counts also had high healthstone usage (“hits” in the 3rd column). However, there are some people who didn’t do so well. Keep improving upon this!

Lessons Learned

In general, we learned a lot on Thursday. For one, we had too many bodies on the field. That made dodging orbs incredibly difficult, and made Phase 3 almost impossible with wave of corruption. We needed to trim back. For another, our orb runners got incredibly fast and got their runs down easily over time. We ended up benching people for our next attempt on Friday. If you got benched, here are some things to remember:

  • Interrupt often! There’s plenty of casts going off. You should be able to get one cast off every time.
  • Careful running out your explosive corruption. In Phase 1, call out to melee to get out of your way, or find a different spot to drop it (ideally the former).
  • Use all abilities in your toolkit. If you have speed buffs, use them to get to the wall faster and safer. If you have a defensive, pop it when you have a debuff or sense incoming damage from wave. If you get low, pop a healthstone.
  • Be smart about ability cooldowns. If you’re an orb runner, save your movement (disengage, dash, retreat, etc) for orb running. Don’t use them when you know you’ll need them for orbs. It’s more important to call out “I will need heals” or “Watch purple side for orbs” if you know that you’re going to mess up a different mechanic.

Practice these mechanics on Mondays and you’ll be AOTC ready in no time.

Thursday logs

Friday: AOTC, Mythic Taloc, and Heroic farm

G’huun

We trimmed the group from 27 down to 20 and found much smoother sailing. Not only did fewer bodies mean fewer people to avoid in Wave of Corruption, it meant fewer balls to dodge from Virulent Corruption. It meant that those who were average or worse on mechanics did not cause cascades of mechanical failures on everyone else.

As a result, we downed G’huun in two tries.

We had 10 people left alive at the end, and everyone was alive going into the last phase. That’s extremely important for a successful attempt! Our first attempt, we lost 2 healers in the bloodlust phase, which meant 2 healers down for the worst part of the fight. We’d gotten it to 7% and so knew we had a kill on our hands anyway.

Mythic Taloc

Riding the high of our earliest AOTC to date as a guild, we decided to go run after Taloc.

Taloc was basically a cakewalk. He has one new mechanic worth talking about, and a group that can communicate effectively has no problems dealing with it. We merely loosely grouped middle (rather than tightly stacking as in heroic). When it came time to move the damage out, there was plenty of room to spread in all directions and for non-affected party members to find safe zones.

Needless to say, we killed him too – in one go.

This was the guild’s first kill of a Mythic boss while the tier was active. We’re incredibly excited to climb the rankings!

Killing G’huun and Taloc embedded us at #1 Horde on the server and #14 overall on the server. Downing 2 bosses will bring us to #9 overall; downing 3 will bring us to #5 overall. We’re really looking forward to showing everyone what the Ministry of Defense is capable of!

After we killed Taloc, we returned to Heroic. We blasted through the normal bosses as much as we could, dragging through alts or people who might not otherwise qualify based on ilvl. We one-shot everything, and ended before Zul, a bit early – 15 minutes wouldn’t be enough to clear trash and get a look at him, unfortunately.

G’huun Heroic logs
Mythic Taloc logs
Heroic Taloc logs
H Mother – Zekvos logs

Saturday: Guild LFR

Ok, so, nothing to say about LFR. I don’t keep logs or anything. I won’t go over it in detail. But I thought it nice to point out that we were 23/25 slots of MoD people this weekend in the LFR queue. Guild LFR is a lot of fun, you should join!

Monday: Alt Night

Alt night was, as usual now, a total breeze…until we hit Mythrax and G’huun. Mythrax had too many people clumped too close together. There’s no reason for rdps to be standing anywhere but MAX range. Also, be sure to interrupt often! We’re watching. G’huun we had people practice orb running for the first time. In the end, too many people struggled on alts to learn it, so we went with 3 groups to get it done fast. However, we want everyone to be able to do it, because we never know who will be around for Heroic in the future.

Mythic and Heroic: New Schedule

Due to our success in AOTC and Mythic Taloc, we’re starting a new raid schedule.

Thursday: Mythic
Friday: Heroic (starting at Fetid if possible)
Monday: Heroic Taloc & Mother, Normal Fetid+

Mythic is capped at 20 people. As a result, we have to be pretty tight on invites for now. Heroics will continue to simply be “whoever qualifies”.

There are two potential paths we can go from here.

First, we can run 2 groups: a mythic group and a heroic group. We can have Mythics thursday/friday, and Heroics can run whenever the group decides.

Or, we can run two Mythic groups alongside one another.

At the moment, we have 32 Vanguards. Whether we recruit up to 2 full mythic teams, or simply have a heroic team and a mythic team running concurrently, is entirely up to the group.

If we get enough interest in running 2 full mythic teams, we will have to recruit our hearts out, because that means 40+ names (in case some folks can’t make it, we need fills). On a low pop server such as ours, finding 40+ mythic raiders will be a challenge!

But…the Warlords are up to the task of fielding 2 Mythic groups. We’re still running heroic fridays to gear up those struggling in the 360-range that can’t quite get up to 370 yet. The current Thursday Mythic crew will get as much knowledge and gear as possible on all members before splitting between teams, so they can share the wealth of knowledge and make up for any small mistakes made by those who’ve yet seen Mythic mechanics. Eventually, we plan to run Heroic on monday alt nights (regardless of ilvl) and start doing Mythic twice a week. Hopefully this won’t take more than a few weeks to achieve.

At that point it will be very fast to gear up your alts, your friends, and new recruits to Mythic level. We can continue to swap team members around as needed. There won’t be an A / B team situation if we can avoid it.

Of course, this is all up to you guys. Not everyone wants to be a Mythic raider. Not everyone will have the time or ability, which is fine. Mythic takes quite a lot out of you – it’s more of a tedious grind than anything else in the game. On the other hand, Mythic is exciting and there’s a sense of pride that comes with it.

We’ll focus on what the group wants to do and how we can go about those goals on Friday.