Last night was a raid night… and I failed to take any screenshots so you are stuck with an image of me in the order hall. After having cleared Emerald Nightmare a few weeks it was decided that we would instead poke our heads into the Trial of Valor. The goal set out by the raid leader for our group was to attempt to stay current with normal mode progression, so instead of spending several weeks farming Emerald Nightmare it seemed reasonable to just jump straight into the Trial content which has a much higher item level. That was a big part of the decision factor in that the baseline for gear is 850… and literally everyone in the raid last night has 850 or better. All of that said though… there are several of us who still want to keep clearing the Nightmare in the hopes of getting specific items or for no reason other than the try and complete that Balance of Power meta achievement step. So I think in the coming days/weeks we are going to try and sort out a secondary night with a clear purpose of farming the raid. I mean back in the day we used to have a Molten Core night even though we were actively progressing in Blackwing Lair…. and for that matter also had a Zul’Gurub Night. Karazhan is somewhat taking the place of ZG however as far as gear progression goes, but still I want to finish out some quests.
As far as the raid itself, it went fairly well but it is a big of a punch in the gut going from killing eight bosses in a single night to struggling to kill one. All in all it took us around six attempts to work out the mechanics for Odyn and largely sort out how not to have the tanks die during the final phase. The fight reminded me so much of Binding Coil Turn 9 in FFXIV, in that the really rough part was at the very end… but you had to wade through a bunch of mechanics that were more tedious than difficult to get there. This is very much a learn the mechanics fight and less a gear check in the traditional sense of damage output. For some however it is likely a bit of a survival check in that even if you are doing mostly everything as intended you are still going to take the occasional damage that becomes hard to control. We however pushed through and got a kill… and by kill I mean we pushed Odyn to 10% where he once again congratulated us on our performance. What is it about this guy wanting us to beat him up… is this a fetish? In any case a lot of gear dropped, but I got double gold both off him… and off the world boss that I attempted right before the raid. That leaves me with a single roll token for the week that I am going to need to use judiciously and determine what exactly I want to spend it on. Largely nothing from mythic+ is really worth it apart from the occasional trinket.
We put in several attempts on Guarm and that fight feels like a pretty hard gear wall the way that Patchwerk used to be. It has a very short enrage timer, and a oneshot kill mechanic that you need to avoid… while juggling even distribution of the colored debuffs. So there is a lot more going on than there was with Patchwerk, but it is no less of a hard dps race trying to kill him before he enrages and kills us. Last night was largely Art and I figuring out the tanking, and placement… and learning how to avoid the charge attack and get through it without taking much in the way of damage. It also very much felt like the healers were desperately trying to sort out all of the details because there were so many times where I was painfully low and straight up out of cooldowns to mitigate that fact. A little gear, damage output optimization, and some practice and I am absolutely certain that we will get that fight to farm status before long. We also have an alternate path open to us of trying to push through Heroic Emerald Nightmare, but with a brand new raid open that hasn’t seemed that compelling. In truth I hope we get to a point where we can easily clear Trial of Valor and then go back and worth on Heroics all in the same night. Of note however… “ToV” will always be Temple of Veeshan to me and never Trials of Valor.