I can in all honesty say I did not really expect to be placing this clipping of a screenshot on my blog. When we cleared Normal Emerald Nightmare… I was pleased as hell. When we turned around and cleared Normal Trial of Valor… I was ecstatic. When we started work on Heroic Emerald Nightmare… I figured that it would give us a challenge right up until the point that Nighthold Normal was released and that we would ultimately switch gears. I mean Nighthold is supposedly slotted for January 17th… which is only 26 days away depending on how you count today. We however started making some significant progress in Heroic Emerald Nightmare… and in truth I didn’t really dare to hope we would manage to get through it yet. We have several friends who are raiding mythics in a much more serious capacity than our guild raid. The awesome thing is… we are apparently the sort of raid that they still enjoy coming along on because of the interaction between all of the members. So in part I chocked our Heroic victories up to the number of “ringer” dps we ended up bringing in as a result. Last night we were extremely short on numbers and missing most of this overpowered dps that we had so often been bringing. I had resigned myself to hopefully repeating our previous progress, and just enjoying the process.
Now is the point where I tell you… that I can not possibly be prouder of my guild. Instead of struggling with the absence of some mythic ringers… we instead continued to perform at an admirable level as we not only defeated… but one shot several of the bosses we have never attempted. We had some early struggles as we essentially got back in the swing of the raid… for me not being able to make the last two Friday nights I felt more than a little rusty. However by the time we reached “Spiderbirb” we were trucking along nicely and managed the first new one shot of the evening. Similarly we seemingly rolled over Ilgynoth… or at least pulled out a victory doing the fight in a single burn phase. From there we worked on Cenarius and once again managed to pull out a victory in a single attempt, which lead us to only having Xavius to work on. This was sitting at 9 pm my time… and I thought to myself that we were in a good position to get a bunch of attempts in… giving us at least 30 minutes before the official end of the raid. I also thought that with it being the holidays… we might be able to extend a bit to get the kill if needed. It turns out we didn’t need all of that time on attempts, because we had a very close first shot and managed to pull out the victory on attempt two giving us still about fifteen minutes to spare before our official ending time. It was a really great night, and I am amped about our prospects going into Nighthold. We will for the first time this expansion be starting new content on exactly the week it comes out, which is a bit of a point of pride for me. I love feeling like we can be casual, but still extremely successful.
By the time the raid was over I realized that I had not actually spent any time with the Luna that evening. So I took her into my office to chill out and get some attention while I opted to play some Destiny. At this point I am 399 light… and have limited my list of needs down to replacing my 394 Ghost Shell, 399 boots, and 399 Heavy Weapon. I had a moment of extreme excitement at one point in the evening when I got an exotic heavy engram… which decoded at 399 instead of the 400 I have been getting from the SRL event. Before long I was joined by my friend Grace and we hung out doing some racing. She was working on one of the quest steps where you had to get ten races where you place in the top three… and I maybe just maybe played a little aggressively with the other drivers. There was at least one time when I happened to ram into the person who was closing in on her then third place slot. Who knew you could tank with a speeder bike? In truth I had seen a few clans doing this over my time racing… where they were essentially clearing the way for their friend to come in and snatch the first place position so I considered it completely fair game. That said she managed to pull out a few come from behind second place victories like the one I decided to screenshot here. The bonus of the entire night was that in both cases we improved our light levels… and simply hanging out and chatting made the whole racing thing go significantly faster.
I have honestly had some extremely good luck during the SRL with crucible weapon drops. Last night was apparently no different as I managed to pick up a really nice version of the NL Shadow 701X. Firstly it has triple tap which is a stat I love for boss encounters… or anything else I am pretty certain to land three precision shots in rapid succession. To crank up the stability is Hand-laid stock… which ultimately reduces the range but I can live with that at 47. Finally hidden hand helps with triple tap in making it slightly easier to get those precision shots… so all in all the weapon has some really nice synergy. The only negative is this is a scout rifle… and I don’t really tend to use a lot of scout rifles. This lives in the Mida Multi-Tool family, and actually has a higher rate of fire… which makes it feel extremely spammy. Now if I could have replaced Hidden Hand with Full Auto… this would have been just about my favorite scout rifle. In any case this is definitely something worth holding onto and other than my Hand of Judgement from Challenge of Elders… I didn’t really have that many legendary scout rifles that I enjoyed using. In any case that still gives me a good roll for Eyasluna, and god rolls for Hopscotch Pilgrim and potentially NL Shadow 701X coming from SRL so far.