World of Matticus

The Battle for Azeroth has arrived. With it, we get to explore new lands and face new (or old) villains. I remember the last real mention of Kul Tiras was in the old Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne. It was the Horde side campaign where you played as Rexxar. This was one of the first times where the Horde invaded Theramore and where Daelin Proudmoore ultimately met his demise. Fast forward to World of Warcraft, and Kul Tiras had a few mentions and appearances throughout the game like those early zones in Tiragarde Keep which held Kul Tiran marines. The formal arrival of Kul Tiras into the game answered many questions for me and it was like revisiting the past in a new light. In Warcraft 2, Kul Tiras fleets were the backbone of the Alliance naval forces. So it was always weird to me that when WoW came out, you knew what happened to the Kingdoms of Lordaeron, Stromgard, Alterac, the Kirin Tor, and the rest of the different Alliance factions, but Kul Tiras was nowhere to be found. It was after the events of the first Horde assault on Theramore that we never found out what formally happened to them — Until now.

Levelled to 120 – Twice

Ugh, I think I’m getting too old for this. Reaching 120 on the Priest was just agonizing as Shadow, but I still managed to do it. My server, Proudmoore, went down for about an hour during the evening. I didn’t end up hitting 120 until about 6 AM. After clearing out the first emissary, I took a nice nap before waking up and striking through into heroics and mythic 0’s.

We can’t seem to recruit Rogues for the life of us, so if there’s any free agent Rogues out there, check us out. It’s a great guild with a fantastic, but disciplined atmosphere. I love our pacing and level of organization at all areas. One of the few downsides are the few dad jokes or feeble attempts at assorted puns. Like, c’mon guys, it seems that raid progression is inversely proportional to quality of dad jokes. I’d totally step into that arena and show these guys how it’s done, but I don’t want to jeopardise my raid spot for being too witty, know what I mean?

The past couple of weeks have been fairly calm. Week one was all about rushing characters to 120 — In my case, it was my Priest (main) and my Ret Paladin. Previous expansions, I would have levelled up my Elemental Shaman first. I will say that after the Priest, playing Ret was a relief. I could delete anything without taking forever. I had assorted outs at my disposal in case I unexpectedly over pulled (and those of you who have levelled with me know that happens fairly often).

Tomorrow, my real game begins. The raiding season starts again. After almost a month off of no raids, the time has come to zero in on health bars and ensure I don’t stand in bad. I am so excited. Miss my res cloak though :(.

I also miss my talking knife. She kept me company throughout Legion. What would she say now if she were by my side?

The Gaming Stadium

Speaking of unexpected, an opportunity came my way to help grow the esports scene in Vancouver. I’ve been a Hearthstone Fireside organizer since 2014. One of my constant challenges is finding a venue to run an event out of. The back of hobby and comic book shops, to University lecture rooms, coworking spaces, convention halls, and casino ballrooms have been different places where I could hold Hearthstone.

Then out of the blue, the idea of a dedicated esports community centre came up. Anyone that lives in the Vancouver area know that there’s already enough LAN centers here. Players go in and play with their friends for a few hours on Fortnite or League of Legends, or what have you. The pitch to me was, “not just another LAN center”. Regular, recurring tournaments would be a priority. Recreational weekly leagues would be on the calendar (like a beer league for gamers). We could have a space to watch majors or host viewing parties for HCT or OWL games on a big screen with your friends instead of at home. Vancouver hosted The International last month, and the packed atmosphere was crazy.

I haven’t heard Rogers arena that loud and energetic since 2011 (That’s a Canucks self burn, by the way #Sadface).

Another thing that came up was during my time hosting Hearthstone tournaments, I’d get into conversations with parents who were asking about coaching for their daughter, or their son wanted to learn how to play a specific deck. The best I could do was point them out to a few players and have them observe. But now I’d be in a position where we could run like a bootcamp, a Hearthstone master class, or like a Fortnite 101 and invite local community players to provide a crash course.

Lastly, this one might be a little more selfish on my part than anything. There’s been some unflattering news lately about Riot and but they’re attempting to turn their culture around. There’s an opportunity here to affect and influence players at the local level to be a less toxic, to play nice, and to play fair. It’ll be good to remind players when they’re in here that there’s another person on the other side of that character whether it’s on their team or on the opposition. I can’t change the world overnight, but if I can shape even a fraction of younger players to be less toxic, less misogynistic, and more welcoming, maybe I can do some good here in the long run. It’s too late for me to compete on any kind of world stage. I grew up too early. But maybe one day I can say that we had a hand here in developing players and gave them the right amount of media training and guidance to compete in the HCT or Overwatch League and not get suspended or ejected for behavioural issues. Or maybe it’s a lost cause, I don’t know. Too optimistic and naive? Probably. I have to try.

Wait a minute though, what does this mean for raiding? Won’t this eat up most of my time? Thankfully, my guild won’t have to worry too much — I specifically negotiated a clause where I could raid from the office uninterrupted in the evenings if it was needed.

Mythic Argus. It’s been a long time since I’ve been at an end boss of an expansion with so much time before the next expansion release. We did reach him a weeks ago and have slowly chipped away to the point where we’re consistently-ish getting into phase 3. Our struggle now appears to be in mastering the movement of Argus slowly around the perimeter of the room — With everyone alive. Raid extensions are now in full swing. We haven’t done a Mythic re-clear since the first time we killed Aggramar and we’ve committed. With the gear options from Mythic+ and titanforging chances from Heroic or Normal, we haven’t had much of a real need to go back and spend that week on re-clears.

Right, I forgot to mention, I passed my trial. I didn’t think I was going to make it.

I find myself in the precarious position of splitting healing time on Argus. There are five healers on the roster but only four can be taken into the encounter. There are essentially two ways to go about approaching progression here rosterwise:

Option A: Shorten the bench significantly. Pack 4 healers and use them as often as possible. Now each healer gets the same amount of practice and experience with opportunity to learn. If all goes well, they’ll be well-versed in the different timings and nuances of Argus. Though depending on the personality of the benched healer, they might not take kindly to that which could result in a departure.

Option B: Rotate and split healers throughout the night. Alternate players during the raid night. Healers now have a varying degree of experience against Argus, and some will have more than others. By diversifying though, no healer is left too far behind in case a player is unable to attend a night which could severely hamper progression.

The longer progression attempts go, the better option B looks. That’s ultimately what we decided to do. I would have been prepared to go with option A and set up camp on the bench just to speed progression attempts along and get the kill quicker. I just want to see Argus dead. Maybe I don’t get in on the first kill or two, but as long as I can secure it later, I’ll be satisfied with it. If this was years ago, I would’ve been disappointed at not being involved in the first guild kill. Now I’m at a point where I’m comfortable getting in on it later.

What happens once Argus is down? I suppose I could relax a bit and come back to Battle for Azeroth later or stick to a lowered raiding schedule. But now I’m getting ahead of myself. We need to crush Argus first.

We’re getting the fight consistently down to about 55% but it wasn’t until yesterday we had a breakthrough and started seeing attempts go into phase 3. A personal raid best of 28%? Seems good! What seems to be killing us the most are the Glaive Storms but just grinding it out and practicing it repeatedly has given most players the experience of seeing and reacting to it. On average, I think most players can survive getting one tick of it (or maybe two ticks if there’s a Spirit Link or a damage reduction ability going off). Still, players do get repeatedly picked off with the Throwing Glaive (the one that homes in on the player), and Phoenix Style often reports these guys as taking 2.5 million damage or more almost always resulting in an instagib.

If we had a consistent and stable roster, we’d be making further progress. Having a turnover of around 2-3 players a week (or at least, that’s what it feels like) means we’re constantly retraining players to get accustomed to the new abilities and our system which is just depressing. At the rate we’re going though, we should be able to knock this encounter out within the next week or two.

Healing comp

Our composition’s a little funky. Right now, we’re running with a Druid, a Monk, a Shaman, a Holy Priest (me), and a Holy Paladin. One of us can sit but lately we’ve been fielding 5 healers during Mythic. Our 6th healer on sisters usually results in an extra Paladin or an extra Priest (who’s Discipline). Pretty handy having that stability in the healing area.

Healing CDs

We don’t have much in defensive cooldowns outside of healing ones which makes me sad. Zero Warriors. One Demon Hunter. One Shadow Priest. So no extra help from outside the healing corps. We’ve nailed down when healing cooldowns ought to be used in the first and second phases, but the third phase is going to be a pain. It’s nice that we don’t have to stack up to maximize healing off the bubble, however we still need to remain somewhat in a line for the Incorporeal Shot to ensure it gets soaked. But we still need to adjust and get used to the Glaive Storm bouncing all over the place.

So close :(.

65+ attempts later, we neutralized the Anomaly. After that, we engaged and Trilliax for a few attempts. Just as we were preparing to buckle down for a long night of pulls, he… uh, fell over. He went down after 6 attempts.

The difficulty discrepancy between the second and third bosses is (to quote Khadgar in Hearthstone) astonishing!

Next question now is do we pursue Krosus or focus on Spellblade. We did try a few pulls on Krosus and managed to get him down to an average of 60-70% on our better attempts. This one might end up being a defensive cooldown race and I’m not sure if we have enough just yet. I was trying to map out all the slams. So far, the one that hurts the most is the fifth Slam which happens to coincide with an Orb (and fire elementals, I think).

What a crazy encounter on Mythic. So much burst healing is needed just to get through it. Most guilds seem to be clearing it within 5 minutes. My guild has managed to breach the enraged timer. It does seem like we have the healing chops to keep the group together that long but we’re still losing out on some DPS. We’re short maybe 15% somewhere. Thankfully, it looks like the problem’s been identified.

When we initially started it, we split the raid equally to neutralize the 4 ads on both sides of the boss. What we did not do well was bring the boss in to one side and cleave it. It wasn’t until the end of the night after the raid when someone watched a few kill videos and noticed they had a much larger DPS group on one cleaving into the boss and a skeleton crew on the other to kill the remaining ads at their own pace. We opened with 5 healing but I’m almost certain we can get to a point where we can do it with 4.

This was a thought that occurred to me early on and I wanted to bring it up, but unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a clear line of communication to address this in. Anyway, all indications point that Anomaly’s well within reach for Thursday. The groups will be readjusted with a small interrupt team for one side and the rest of the heavy hitters on the other to maximise as much damage as possible.

At least, I hope.

Talent setup

• Trail of Light
• Angelic Feather
• Afterlife
• Light of the Naaru
• Surge of Light
• Divinity
• Benediction

Normally, I run Piety instead of Surge of Light, but the Time Release debuff needs to be healed off players or else it’ll detonate and those Surge procs happen often enough. I needed something fast and responsive particularly if I’m running from boss to ad.

Let’s get one thing straight. I’m Canadian and our current government in charge is literally called the Liberal Party of Canada. Our biggest “scandal” is the fact that our Prime Minister has decided to not revisit the electoral process (which was one of the platforms he ran on).

I don’t have a problem with political discourse in Warcraft. It happened during the Bush and Obama administrations and it’s only going to continue going forward. I’ve witnessed the odd (yet civil) back and forth about the Iraq War and it never devolved into name calling. But for whatever reason, it’s just more agonizing now when you’re bustling through Dalaran from your class hall to the flight master. It’s all non-stop memes and just seems to be highly magnified. It seems every WoW server is a Trump server based on General and Trade Chat metrics (and I’ve had to disable those channels because it’s just overwhelming).

What gets annoying is when discussion on the guild Discord starts leaning towards the news of the day about how something amazing Trump did or what liberals are pissed off about. I’ve often thought about interjecting and going “Actually…” but I’m still new in the guild, I have no desire to rock the boat, and I’m almost certain any attempt at a reasonable discussion is going to immediately be met with “LOL LIBRUL TEARS”. Now, I don’t for a second believe the entire guild is like that and I think the WoW population is large enough to the point where it can sort of reflect the real national demographic. To me, the game is an escape from reality. It’s a shame though because they’re fun players to be around when focused on Mythic Dungeons and the sort. It’s hard enough finding a guild with the right times, mentality, and progression. Last thing that needs to happen is for guilds to undergo some kind of philosophical or political test.

So for the time being, I stay focused on what I need to do. Raiding shouldn’t be partisan but it does feel demoralizing that I would be thought of as a lesser individual even though I’m healing what I need to (and can) without compromising myself and dying all the time. I’ll just have to treat the more outspoken individuals as the crazy uncles around Thanksgiving.

Anyway, if you’re out there reading this and you’re experiencing something similar, I’m right there with you. I sympathize with you and I’m just a northern neighbour.

Hey team, it’s certainly been a while. I’m back into the grind again. Actually, I managed to sign with a guild shortly after New Year’s. I found the guild on Facebook in one of the Warcraft recruiting groups which just happened to be on my server and their progression was close enough to where I left off. Personally, the name doesn’t do much to inspire me and it reminds me of some vanilla names, but the group seems friendly and focused enough.

It’s called… *whispers* <Ninja Pirate Monkeys>.

Like, how can a monkey be simultaneously a Ninja and a Pirate? It defies all guild naming conventions.

Let’s talk about the guild for a moment because this is the first time in maybe 10 years where I can be just a player. After about a solid month of retooling, we’re currently 1/10 Mythic in Nighthold! That’s not bad for a two-night, six hour guild (with optional raid nights during the week or weekend depending on who’s around). Then again, Mythic Skorpyron feels a tad easier than Heroic Gul’dan. The loot system’s handled using EP/GP which is new for me. Only loot system’s I’ve experienced before was loot council and DKP (way back in Burning Crusade) so this was an interesting change of pace for me. The nature of World Quest drops, Mythic Dungeons, and Titanforged puts less of an emphasis on raid gear because of the multiple avenues of gear sources. This has the added effect of allowing me to be much more selective on rewards that drop because I might not need an item if I have something close to it from a Mythic Dungeon, for example. Obviously, we can’t forget the lucky tactical usage of seals for extra rolls.

The healing corps at present consists of two Resto Druids, a Holy Priest (me), and a Paladin. I’m tempted to reinvest into Discipline because there’s times where I don’t seem to make a dent compared to the throughput capability of Resto Druids (but my AP’s only at 46 right now).

Every guild seems to have that one kryptonite class. You know, the one class where they can’t seem to recruit anyone for it or if that class does join, they leave within a week or two? In this case, that class seems to be Mages. I haven’t had anyone make food in ages. So yes, we’re recruiting.

One thing I’d like to see of is more structure. I do wish Angry Assignments were used more often for different bosses. Hell, I’d use it just for myself to write down notes for my own use but I can’t seem to edit it because I’m not a rank that has the permissions.

Nighthold Thoughts

How about some thoughts on Nighthold now that it’s been out for about 4 weeks? It’s nice to be in a non-dark, well-lit instance especially one that takes place in a part of a city. As for the overall difficulty of the instance, it seems to be just right. I haven’t progressed too far into Mythic yet so it’s difficult to say for certain how the rest of it is.

Skorpyron: Not that memorable. Your basic introductory boss. The mythic version is much more engaging with the coloured spikes and varied consequences of hiding behind different ones. A little dull for me to heal.

Chromatic Anomaly: Interesting change of pace especially with the slow time and fast time built in. Throws off my timing especially during slow time. Otherwise, straight forward and tolerable healing-wise.

Trilliax: It’s the beam phase. Go too fast one way and Trilliax can change directions and before you know it, a quarter of the rate is lightsaber’d in half with no chance of recovery. Thankfully, encounter itself seems to be forgiving. I like jumping on the Roombas before they detonate. Fun!

Aluriel: Fun to heal! Frost phase is the most tense for me just due to the number of things that can go wrong. Sometimes a person who just got a bomb collides with someone who had the bomb for much longer so the timing’s off. Ideally, I wish players with equal timings would run into each other instead.

Krosus: Also fun to heal. Nice sense of urgency applied with the gradual reduction in raid platform. Aside from the occasional player getting sniped from his beams, there’s a nice amount of damage that just gets thrown around with the slams.

Tichondrius: Challenging encounter. This isn’t one I look forward to at all. Always worried about missing the purple pool buffs because it seems to spawn on the green fire. Collisions can be scary especially if players just run in to detonate them before the raid is at a sustainable health level.

High Botanist Tel’arn: Fun to heal! Multi-phase fight means you need to keep track of different abilities that are occurring at different times. Slow buildup that crescendos into a chaos filled final phase.

Star Augur Etraeus: Actually, I really like the special effects and the background of the encounter with the different backdrops and skies. Visually stunning. I appreciate it more during moments where I can safely take a moment to look up. Though, those moments aren’t often

Grand Magistrix Elisande: More dependant on your DPS nailing the blue and red elementals at the right time to ensure that you have the necessary slows and buffs for the rings.

Gul’dan: One of the better end bosses I’ve experienced. Lots of awareness needed with the eyes. Placement matters so you don’t get thrown off the ledge. Reminds me of the ol’ Lich King encounter. The final phase and the dealing with the souls is one of the more tense parts of a fight I had to heal through. First phase is a little annoying though.

During one of the Elisande kills, I found myself with the Ephemeral Paradox trinket.  It seems to only work on the following healing spells:

• Holy Priest: Heal
• Discipline Priest: Shadow Mend
• Holy Paladin: Holy Light
• Resto Druid: Healing Touch
• Resto Shaman: Healing Wave
• Mistweaver Monk: Effuse

Yeah, casting Heal for that mana return takes just way too much time. You have to make a calculated risk on whether that extra second on Heal is worth it. In a raid group with Resto Druids, by the time the heal lands, the Rejuvs will already have done their jobs. Any player with lower health (like 25% health) generally needs healing right now and Heal isn’t fast enough nor strong enough to get that wounded player back to a healthy level. In my opinion, for a regen trinket, it seems pretty weak. I just need to get lucky on a high Titanforged Amalgam’s Seventh Spine drop.

Feels off to be writing again. But, it’s like riding a bike.

The first three months of any guild’s inception are usually the toughest. If they can stick around and be cohesive for that long, then the guild’s odds of making it through for the rest of the expansion are usually in their favour.

Unfortunately, I am disappointed to say that Integrity stopped just two weeks shy of that benchmark.

Losing 1-2 players a week due to attrition is manageable. Losing 3-4 every so often is like losing 20% of your team and that’s usually much more difficult to recover from. Though the GM tried his best, he lacked the drive to keep going and had already burned out — Not necessarily due to the game, but due to the players.

The Post Mortem

If there’s a case study to be had here, the underlying lessons here would be to set and manage player expectations.

It definitely seemed that most players had their own idea of what direction the guild should go and how things should be handled. To a GM, that can be overwhelming to parse out what’s relevant and what isn’t. Here’s two of the most common opinions that I heard about:

• “We should be raiding Mythic on Tuesdays and not Heroics.”Mythic requires 20 players, period. If 20 isn’t an option, then Mythics isn’t an option. Second, players can still benefit from trinkets from select bosses. In the weeks leading up until now, it was only a 90 minute investment from first pull to finalizing loot distribution from Xavius (out of a 9 hour raid week). Granted, we disenchanted perhaps 3 out of 4 items that dropped but that didn’t mean there weren’t legitimate upgrades. Once one player was done with Heroic and no longer needed anything else, they seemed to possess a “Screw ’em, I got my loot” mentality which is dangerous and does not align with a guild first philosophy.Answer: My solution here would be to take a close look at what bosses players needed and target them exclusively. Ursoc and Illy trinkets were still in high demand. Going after Nythendra, Ursoc, and Illy and then backing out and switching to Mythics right away would have been an adequate compromise between those hellbent on progression and those who still needed upgrades. We did this too late though. Even then, when we did, it wasn’t enough. I would have banked Heroics for later in the week as an option if we didn’t have enough for Mythics.
• “That player sucks, kick them.”Vendettas appear to be a real thing in a virtual game. Personally, my belief is that a player needs to worry about their own performance first and foremost before examining someone else. If a player’s performance is lacking, it’s up to the leadership to try to address it. But at the same time, the raid is subject to the reality and logistics of Mythic raiding — If you have exactly 20 players, and one of them isn’t firing on all cylinders, dropping one of them means you’re not going to be able to do Mythic at full strength unless you want to pursue it short handed. It’s almost always better to try to address and identify player performance problems because the cost of finding a new player, training them up, and gearing them to the appropriate level can be just as costly.Answer: Removal from a guild should only be used for the most egregious of offences. However, I am of the opinion that if a player is having an off night, telling them to take a seat for maybe 2 or 3 pulls to get their stuff together is not a bad idea. Consistency is a huge part of the game. If you give the ball to Steph Curry, you expect him to make those 3 pointers on a night to night basis. If the same player is the first to die on every pull when they normally don’t, that’s a problem. Steps should be silently taken to continue recruiting but the guild can’t advance without fresh players coming into the organization. We didn’t do a good enough job of recognizing  and addressing that. This lead to player frustration because of the perception that we didn’t see or want to do anything about it. The reality is that we did see it, but we were handcuffed due to the logistics and restrictions of Mythics. In most cases, it seems that of the three important attributes of a player, they only possess two of them: Attendance, game awareness, and high DPS.

Next Move

I’m officially a free agent. I’m heading out of town over the Thanksgiving weekend and will be back early December. I hear Chicago’s nice this time of year (and I’m really stoked to watch Hamilton). Once I’m back home, I can get back to guild hunting and pounding pavement. Faction changing is off the table so I’d rather stay Alliance. Weekday evenings strongly preferred. Realistically, I’m at the point in my raiding career where I’m okay with not having to be a starter. I find myself caring less and less about being one of the first to secure a progression kill. Obviously if I can help contribute, I’d be delighted to do that. I’m just as comfortable coming in later on a farm night or to help provide healing relief for a healer that needs to take a night. As long as I still get to participate and see the kill at all, right?

Anyone have a lead for an 878 Alliance Holy Priest?