Raiding - First 2 days in Nighthold

Lots of enthusiasm for Nighthold! Though the raid is sitting at 20-22, it's quite a nice size. I'll tell you what I find funny though, is people asking me why we are doing heroic and not normal.

The reason it's funny is because I have to keep saying the same thing EVERY new raid. And I've been saying it for... oh... 2 expansions now. We definitely put that into place at the start of Highmaul in WoD.

Q: "Why aren't we clearing normal before heroic so that we can learn the fights?"
A: "Because nobody learns the fights on normal, they just steamroll it. And that really doesn't teach you anything. If we do heroic, everyone has to pay attention to the mechanics and we'll work on it together to get it right.

Q: "Are we not doing normal at all?"
A: "We do normal on Sundays which is the casual raid day."

Q: "Why don't we do normals on Wednesday and heroic on Thursday?"
A: "Because we're going to do normal on Sunday and I don't to do normal on Wednesday and do bosses on Sunday that I've already done on Wednesday."

Q: "Why don't we continue with normal bosses on Sunday after we do it on Wednesday/Thursday?"
A: "Because Sunday is the day that we can let our casual raiders come and see the raid, and we would like them to see the instance from the beginning."

On Wednesday we did Skorpyron and Chromatic Anomaly, and started on Trilliax. That felt like quite a good start!

Skorpyron is a large scorpid. If you ask me, it sounds like the of a Transformer, most likely a Decepticon. Actually, there is already a scorpion Transformer, Scorponok.

For the first attempt I was wondering why the raid was so quiet! THEN I figured out that I was sitting in a discord channel all by myself and had forgotten to join the rest of the raid. /facepalm

It took me a second or two to get then hang of the fight, and times that I thought we should be using healer cooldowns were not really much of an issue. We 2 tanked Skorpyron with Xyn mostly on the boss and HK doing adds. Skorpyron is in the middle of a circular room and around the outside a whole bunch of little scorpions hidden in clouds surround us. We all are supposed to hang out in the middle, but the sides can be aggroed if you go near them.

Skorpyron throws crystals out which land on the ground and you hide behind them when the boss does a knockback ability. If you don't then you get thrown back and land in scorpions and then there are a whole bunch of adds to deal with. The boss also pauses every now and then to do a frontal attack which is easy to get out of if you remember! The first attempt many of us got hit by it because we forgot but that got better over subsequent attempts.

DPS got to have their fun when the boss's exoskeleton became vulnerable and they just wailed on the boss. That was a good time to drink. It took us 3 goes to get it, and each time was a bit better than the last.



Sadly, we didn't take a kill photo! So I took a photo with it with whomever was standing next to me at the time.


Next up was Chromatic Anomaly and I found that fight confusing as hell. Slow phase, normal phase, fast phase...  from my simple perspective I didn't understand the fight except that people got bombs on them and they needed to get out of the group to explode; bursting bubbles coming out as waves from the middle. Oh, and there was a big add that needed interrupting as well. People were everywhere and I was running around trying to keep up with people on one edge and lost people on other edges. Neuro was particularly grumpy!

All I can say is that slow phase is annoying. GCD is sooooo long.

Somehow, we managed to kill it. Yay!


I had to duck off to work in the last half hour of the raid night, so I didn't get any opportunity to learn the next fight Trilliax which was blindingly obvious when I did it the following night.


So I turn up on Thursday to do Trilliax which is actually an amusing encounter with so much movement going on. Trilliax says a whole bunch of funny things! Basically Trilliax is a malfunctioning housekeeping robot (who sounds like he has multiple personality disorder) and goes from being a servant to being a crazy robot!

The master has returned! We must ensure the household is immaculate.
That's not the master, imbecile! Unless he managed to claw his way out from under two tons of solid stone.  Ooo, that would be impressive... considering I still have his hands in a jar.
Please don't say such things! The master is back, and things need to be kept tidy.

It's a big circular room and we have to stay around the edges and keep the middle clean. The boss puts arcane seepage on the ground under players which we have to keep out of so the edges of the room start to get a bit crowded with all the crap everywhere. Then, the boss throws out toxic cake out all over the room which we have to eat and eating it makes us stuffed so we can't eat another slice for a minute and also makes us walk sloooooow.

Then the boss joins two people together with an arcing bond which means you have to stand close to one another or it does tons of damage. Also, people are getting shot every second with mana rupture and it's kinda heavy on healing so a good time to use a cooldown.
How dare you track blood across my floor!
Then, Trilliax jumps into the middle of the room and starts annihilating in front and behind and turns. That thing will one shot you! I died to it first two times and felt like an absolute moron. Also, having that slow debuff from eating is also rather crappy! And that tricky Trilliax turns one way then changes direction part way through the fight! So stick to the side! Good time for one of Cosima's shaman cooldowns or a mobile tranq to top people up. The first time I died because I didn't realise I had to stick to the side, and the second time I displaced into his butt.  So those noob deaths I tried really hard not to do that again!

Can you please die without making such a mess?!

After that phase these robots come out and start cleaning up the mana seepage on the floor. They gain mana when they clean up those pools and we need them to get all the crap off the floor. They blow up once they get full and stop cleaning. Also, they love eating cake! So if we don't eat the toxic cakes they will go over to them first instead of cleaning the crap off the floor and blow up. Fortunately we can do stuff to help keep these robots under control. A sterilize debuff goes out which damages people 8 yards from the players affected but if you have sterilize and stand next to a cleaning robot it will drain its mana so it can clean longer (but the sterilized person takes lots of damage when being next to a cleaning robot).  Succulent feasts get thrown out by the boss so people who eat those can jump on 2 exploding robots and not die.

I'm not sure what I've done, but I'm positive I deserve this beating.

Overall a pretty cool fight and we got it down and first pieces of heroic tier went out (cloaks). Happy people!


After that we had a go at Aluriel which has a TONNE of trash to clear (and dodge her as she pats around the circular courtyard) and is another boss with a lot of phases that we haven't quite mastered yet.

There are frost, fire and arcane phases with lots of things to dodge; in frost we get to bump uglies and remove our frost debuff stacks; in fire everyone is trying to stay one side together but not too close and then fire pools on the ground have these big fire elementals who hurl painful firebolts at us; and the arcane phase is just bloody exploding balls all over the place which I haven't quite figured out yet. Healing is intense at different parts and I haven't quite got my head around the fight yet but when I do I shall do my best to talk about it!

After doing so well this week, we thought we might start raiding Mondays again - however, 4 days of raiding is a bit much for some people (especially if you want to attend normal raids) so Sunday is optional and we have emphasised that to the heroic raiders. There are quite a few non heroic players who would like to see Nighthold so I am looking forward to seeing all of them on Sunday.

Overall good work Frostwolves!

Comments

  1. well done. maybe you should make a macro of the explanation of why you do heroic instead of normal or call them rules. that way when ppl ask you can say rule 1... rule 2... etc etc lol.

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    Replies
    1. Feels so impersonal though! I could make a joke out of it and say "refer to rule 2" or something and have a big list of rules. Oh, and have one rule (maybe Rule 13) that says "Because Navi said so."

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