Raiding - Another wing of BRF done in Mythic

It was good that this week we managed to get enough people to do Mythic BRF compared to last week where we did heroic Hellfire Citadel.

Last week was very memorable for a number of reasons.

1. Kyxyn decided to bring his hunter for a change of pace. Dan was tanking with Peggy and HK was playing his paladin. Xyn just did an enormous amount of crappy pulls with barrage, early pulls, wiping us constantly. I'm sure he was rather abashed about the whole thing, but I was laughing my ass off. I hoped everyone else didn't get frustrated but I had a bad feeling that some people were getting a little distressed.
2. Peggy was tanking with Dan, whom he had on ignore. Who knows why he had Dan on ignore, probably because Dan chatters a lot with Voe during raid time (which we have tried to address but I will make a more concerted effort next week) about non raid things. AWKWARD.
3. Iskar was so horrible that we gave up on it. We actually came back on Monday to do Xhul of all things and it was EASY. Man, I would never have seen that coming. Part of that was because we had mains on for Xhul, whereas we had a bunch of alts for Iskar. And of course Xyn was playing like he'd bought his hunter on Ebay so I don't know if that had anything to do with it.

So this week, it was a relief to be able to do something different.

Things were looking sketchy at 850pm. Hardly anyone was online. But eventually we got people on in dribs and drabs, and I was surprised that Sonuku (Onineko) came along to it. We even had our casual raiders on (Deidrea, Kaeltsez and Mauve) as well as our regular non-mythic raiders, Koda, McTacky and Taxar. Grass and Peggy from Oni came also, and we had Kyxyn, Aimei, myself, Sev, Dan, Lushen, Crooked, Sars, Rey and Cel attending as well.

We started off with Hans and Franz and the big differences were that the stamp would actually kill you, and there was a special smart stamp phase where each section you touched became a stamp. 

The first attempt went as expected. Lots of people dying from the stamps and we also had tanks dying from lack of healing. I may or may not have been DPSing a little instead of throwing heals out...

Sonu was really helpful, explaining the mechanics of the "smart stamp" mechanic that was particular to mythic. For that part, the stamps would come down where people had trod, so it was idea to have two groups, moving in unison, after pausing on each stamp section for about 3 seconds so they could do some DPS and then moving off as the stamp spot lit up in brightness indicating the stamp was to come down. And these stamps did not come up again, so you rapidly ran out of room. I was unsure why we would need two groups as it seemed they would run out of room rather quickly with two groups, but that was because of the body slam that would occur - when we all stack up, we all get body slammed (including tanks) and get a debuff increasing our damage taken. If we split into two groups that would be halved somewhat. Sonu described it like the "snake game on Nokia phones".

We saw that phase a few times. It was difficult because Deidrea wasn't on Discord because of some stalker issues, so he wasn't listening to instructions NOT to move forward and then kept running ahead and activating the plate too early. After some explaining he got the idea. People who were slow to get to the start point was also an issue in some attempts.

After an hour (and we were making good progress, after testing different times to lust etc), Yuuda got on and I begged him to come. We were trying the fight with 18 and any extra DPS would have made a difference. I explained to him the basics of what we were doing and he just said he'd wing it.

And that attempt we did killed it. In fact it was so easy, the smart stamp phase activated, and somehow we DPS'd through it and the phase ended so fast and then he was dead shortly after. Yuuda wondered what all the fuss was about. Clearly we just needed him to join the raid so we could kill it, our little lucky charm.

After that we did Flame Bender Ka'graz and the main thing Kyxyn told us to do was to bring the dogs to melee so they could be cleaved down. Koda had been having FPS issues so she restarted her computer to try to fix it, but I implored her to return because she was worried about causing wipes and dragging the group down. I said we were here to have fun!

The fight seemed relatively straightforward, except Deidrea unfortunately was the target of one dog and didn't bring it in but fortunately the ranged took care of it. That fight went really smoothly and we killed that off quickly.

Yuuda had to leave after that... Nooooo our good luck charm! Fortunately though, Koda was back! Kromog as the last boss of that wing, and the difference in mythic was the Rune of Trembling Earth where these 3 pillars popped up and you had to break in 12 seconds and turn them into rubble (or they would despawn) and then hide behind them to avoid the Call of the Mountain ability which did a ton of damage. Kromog would then smash a random pillar with his frontal cone attack, and he would do that 3 times, destroying all the rubble piles and you had to move quickly to get to the next rubble and hide. There were also some earthquakes on the ground around that phase which were in random changing spots during the 12 seconds of pillar phase which made it a little difficult to hit the pillars (but we did heal through it).

It didn't actually take that many attempts, but we killed it just before 11pm, and everyone was quite pleased!

It was a fun night - even more so because I had a slight feeling of despondence during the first boss thinking we were going to be doing THAT all night, and then again on Kromog thinking that we weren't going to be able to get coordinated enough to do the rubble phase. But we did it, got achievements and I think everyone had a good time. One more wing to go, and I bet Blast Furnace will be anything BUT a blast... and then it's onto Blackhand.