emerald nightmare Archives - Page 2 of 3

Rainbow Tentacles

November 11, 2016 by Belghast

This morning is a getting to a bit of a late start because reasons. Firstly I am off for Veterans day, and I want to take a brief moment to thank those who fought to protect our country. Both of my grandfathers fought in World War II, my wife’s step-dad fought as part of the Chosin Few in Korea, and various sundry other family members have been in the military during peace and war time. If you see anyone out and about, take a moment to thank them for their service. The little things like that, feel all the more important during these last few days because of the sequence of events that has happened from essentially Tuesday onwards. As for me… its been a weird series of days. Firstly I just couldn’t put myself in the mindset of being able to write a blog post, so instead you got an intermission. I genuinely expected to pick up Thursday morning and begin blogging as normal once again. However fate seemed to conspire against me because in the middle of the crushing depression that I was going through Tuesday… my blog disappeared off the face of the internet. It seems my web host had some sort of catastrophic hardware failure, and that since I had yet to migrate to newer harder… partially my own fault… the site went down until it could get moved completely. The positive is that I seem to have lost nothing in the process other than I am sure readers who probably thought I was going dark… given the post that I had left that morning. It feels odd to have taken a somewhat forced break… and then be back just for Friday before taking the weekend off.

As far as my own mental state… I have to say raiding with the guild on Wednesday helped it immensely. For some reason it has become what seems like a new tradition to paint me with the rainbow generator before battles. Here we are waiting on the Xavius fight to begin… and I am glowing with really strange rainbow tentacles as I tend to think of them. I always feel like I am straight out of whimsyshire. On a more serious note though… I could not be more proud of my guild and the raid attached to it. The position I have assumed in the world is vastly different, because I am not leading the guild… and to some extent that still feels odd. Kylana assumed the reins after Rylacus went into Final Fantasy XIV… and I have to say that while Ry and I were essentially the same sort of leader… Kylana is way better than I have ever been at the day to day administrata. That is really the place where he shines, and doing things like making sure everyone gets guild rank promotions on time… without having to be pestered about it a dozen times. As for me… I pretty much live in this position of guild mascot. Folks still ask me to do responsible adult style things, but mostly I try to defer to the judgement of Ky. I am still very much the chief recruiter and tour guide, but it feels okay to not be the king.

As for raiding… there are certain fights where I am taking a much bigger role at least in communicating the mechanics. I’ve started barking orders on Iggy and it seems to go more smoothly when I let folks know what they should be fighting and when… and roughly how much time we have left to burn. As far as Emerald Nightmare in general… other than us tanks completely screwing up Ursoc… we had probably the smoothest night we have ever had and made a really quick work of the entire instance. We had enough time to put in about thirty minutes of attempts on Heroic Nythendra… which is way rougher than the original. I remember rolling into Emerald Nightmare for the first time and feeling amazing when we oneshot her… only to feel frustration again when we struggled with SpiderBirb. Ultimately more than anything I feel happy we have made progress. It feels like we started as a disconnected group of folks that sometimes ran dungeons together… and have exited a highly functional team. I mean I had worked in the past a few times with Art, when I had to fill in tanking during our Warlords raid… but he is a super dependaeble tanking partner. Of course I also love tanking beside Ashgar who fills in when Art has not been able to make it.

As far as other matters go… I am trying my best to focus on the positive things in life for awhile. This is not me burying my head in the sand, but me trying to return to a sense of normality for my own mental health. I am just as confused and frustrated as anyone by the recent turn of events, but I also know that there is very little that is directly in my realm of control. So I am going to focus on the things I do control, and try my best to get happy again. For those of you who are reading this… thanks so much for sticking by me throughout the years. You all mean so much to me.

Dream Cleansed

November 3, 2016 by Belghast

Last night was madness… but in a mostly good way. Firstly it started on a bizarre note because I had not been reading the raid slack during the evening, and had not quite grasped that it was up to me to pull things together. I was busying myself with trying to get shit ready for the raid, and was fishing up some mackerel to make the high end versatility food. During this time folks kept asking me if I was running the show that night, and each time I answered “Sure if Ky doesn’t show up”, never fully grasping that in fact that was what was happening. I remembered Ky saying something about not being there, but for whatever reason I had that linked in my head with the “people attending blizzcon” list, so that when he said he was not in fact at BlizzCon I just sorta deleted that tidbit of information from my brain. As a result what ended up happening was me realizing five minutes before the start time of the raid that I probably should have sent out invites fifteen minutes before hand. There was a last minute flurry of activity, getting people invited and summoned and this also caused me to feel like I really needed to pull faster than normal. Apologies to the healer team for putting up with my shit.

In truth a huge thank you to the entire raid for dealing with my shit. It has been years since I have attempted to lead anything larger than a five player group. Even then I am not entirely certain I am completely qualified to be responsible for the lives of others. The truth is I was a little concerned that we were down both Zea and Kylana who traditionally are locked in an eternal struggle for first and second place on the dps meters. However in the past week it seems like that quite literally everyone has improved their gear a bit, and the result felt like we possibly cleared trash faster than we have ever done. Similarly a lot of the boss fights felt really solid, namely Il’gynoth that felt like our smoothest kill yet with no last minute panic or the feeling of it being an extended wipe race to the finish line. The only negative of the night was that we struggled a bit on Spiderbirb, but I think most of that was simply bad luck. It was about then that our flasks were wearing off so we took a break and came back refocused, and wrecked it on the next pull.

The real highlight of the night however is that we finally downed Xavius. Honestly the timing of this could not have been more perfect, because after we had made a few attempts and were regrouping we saw that Zea popped into game. So we ninja invited him… and he opted to bring a friend of his along as well. Then when we went out to summon that friend… Kylana popped online, who we also ninja invited. So when we managed to get the kill we had our entire raid team, which makes it feel all the more awesome as a result. Sure I realize this is “only normal” but screw it I am happy as hell and I will fite you if you poop on this moment! The fight felt like madness from a tanking perspective, but it is amazing how much confidence comes from having downed and encounter the first time. I know without doubt that we will come back next week and wreck him all the harder. At some point I am certain we will start dipping our toes into some of the heroic versions of these fights as well. We essentially have one more Cenarius kill from being able to skip directly to Xavius, so at a minimum we can start working on heroic while still clearing the final boss. It was a good night.

Two More Fall

October 20, 2016 by Belghast

Last night was a pretty great night. For the last several weeks since Emerald Nightmare released, Wednesday nights have been raid night. At this very moment we are just raiding one night a week, and at first that probably held us back a little. However given the last two weeks I think overall gearing was a bigger issue. Last week we went from only being able to take down Nythendra to adding Elerethe Renferal, Ursoc, and the Dragons of Nightmare to the list. Though admittedly both the Ursoc and Dragons kill felt like sheer dumb luck and bursty dps. This week however we largely added to the mix what felt like repeatable versions of those kills. Myself and Art the other tank finally sorted out something resembling a workable taunt rotation on Ursoc, and the fight went from being insanely spikey…. to pretty damned easy. Similarly with Dragons of Nightmare we just straight up did the fight like we knew what was happening this time… and it went down in a single attempt. Elerethe would have been a one shot were it not for both of us tanks getting knocked off the platform. That was not my proudest moment.

However I am in fact super proud that we managed to get things together for Il’gynoth and added our very first kill this week. Overall it felt like our dps increased between the two weeks, and with it a better sense of what needed to die when. Instead of leaving the Horror up for quite a while we had nice gaps to burn it in… and while we cut it a little close for comfort at around the 10 seconds until wipe mark, it was still a victory. From there we decided to take a stab at Cenarius and actually extended past our normal run time because we made decent progress on the fight. It still feels like there are a lot of levers we could and should tweak to make sure that fight is more repeatable, however we got the kill and hopefully will begin work on Xavius next week. I realize this is “just normal” as the chorus of the more serious raiders might say… but screw it I am happy with our progress. I feel like we are even probably going to start mixing in some heroics before too much longer. Especially with the release of Karazhan on the 25th and it adding some additional gearing options for folks. I am hoping to get a team going there pretty quickly, because I am more excited about that place than pretty much any content in any MMO. I loved the original Karazhan and good or bad, ran it quite literally every Sunday afternoon for what felt like two years to help gear folks and their alts, only to later be replaced by Zul’Aman runs. I think more than anything… most of us are simply going to be happy that before long we can complete the balance of power quest step and move on to the next batch of mythics.

Three Bosses Down

October 13, 2016 by Belghast

Last night was an interesting night raid wise. It seems like we reached some critical mass of gear to make the content largely doable. Either that or we simply spent too much time fighting with the harder encounters first. We’ve been able to down the first boss of Emerald Nightmare since our very first hastily thrown together raid on that Friday of the first week it was open. However for the last several weeks we have had a slightly shifting raid composition as folks filtered in and out of the group, including several different tank and healer teams. Last night however felt like things have started to solidify, and it really feels like a fairly solid team. The biggest problem that has been facing us was the shifting from boss to boss trying to find the next one that worked for us. On our first outing we gave Spiderbird a shot, and decided that maybe that fight had too many moving parts. Then for whatever reason… we collectively decided that Il’gynoth was the next best target. After a few weeks of wiping to the eyeball, we decided to shift focus back to Spiderbird at the tail end of last weeks raid and then were shocked we managed to get it easily to the 30% range before shit fell apart. So this week we came back and focused on this boss and after about four or five attempts we managed to push it across with a victory that felt pretty solid. Sure we were down several people at the point of the kill, but we had enough that after a little bit it felt certain we would get it. Granted we were about 45 seconds away from the enrage timer due to the missing dps.

From there we moved on to working on the Ursoc encounter because it seemed largely to be a tank, healer and coordination check. On I believe our second attempt we managed to get the victory after a bunch of shifting bits around to figure out how to handle the charges more effectively. As a tank however I have to say Ursoc is a bit of a heart attack. I was constantly praying that I would have enough rage to hit my next reactive ability to help curb the insane damage that was coming in. The constant tank swaps were a little strange to get used to as well, but Art and I managed to largely figure it out, and with it… another new boss kill. From here we moved to Dragons… and on our second attempt hilarity ensued. Several of us were down… and we THOUGHT we were wiping…. so Kylana started going into the whole spiel about how we could improve on the fight. However the remaining living tank and the dps and heals that were still up just kept on pushing forward. Apparently we were a lot closer to victory than we realized, because in the middle of this speech about the things we need to tighten up… we saw the Dragons of Nightmare killed message pop across our screens. It reminded me so much of the time we killed Sindragosa… with everyone dead. Thalen had fired the last shot and then gotten frozen… and the boss was dead but we all had to rez up and run back to be able to loot the body. Because of this fact I didn’t get a screenshot of that kill, as I was running back at the time. We put in some tries on the Eyeball but ultimately called it since it was getting close to our normal stopping time. However I will absolutely take three new boss kills in one night.