So, here we are again, time for another Blog Post and this time it’s the latest in a long series of posts about Mythic raiding and what I like to call the “Mythic Mindset”.
Heard it all before? perhaps, but then again it’s a good time to remind people what this means for the raid team and how we approach the challenges ahead.
Now, there’s no doubt that nothing will breed more complacency and sloppy play than an extended period farming boss fights that you out-gear and out-perform. What was once a hard fight that people died on and you needed multiple tries to kill becomes a fight you one-shot with nobody dying.
This isn’t unfortunately because we have all become so incredibly good at avoiding damage and handling game mechanics, but rather that the mathematics of our health pools, the damage we put out, damage we take and healing we do adds up to ever larger positive numbers that make it harder and harder for us to die even when we make the same mistakes that used to kill us 3 weeks ago.
So, as we move deeper into the Mythic mode jungle we’re rudely reminded that We are Not Prepared™ and indeed we really need to step up our game.
A lot of us perhaps kid ourselves into thinking that Mythic mode is just a Heroic Mode with bigger numbers, but in truth Mythic raiding isn’t really turbo-driven Heroic raiding, it’s a step up in difficulty from that.
Most of the fights take already annoying abilities that stun, root, kill and maim and add more annoying abilities that cover what’s left of the floor with even more shit to avoid or soak, whilst making those we already knew hurt even more. Then add to this the corruption mechanic that came in with 8.3, our desire to push our own personal envelope of what we can do with more than 39 corruption and you have added complexity in terms of RNG and badly timed slows and extra damage.
So, as we’re individually working our way through our learning curves, what does and doesn’t work for us we’re adding to the wipe count the raid team as a whole. That’s to some extent unavoidable and expected, but that doesn’t mean you can’t and indeed shouldn’t do all YOU can to make sure they’re as few as possible for the sake of everyone’s sanity.
This includes looking at the fights with a fresh perspective, trying to see them as new encounters, not just buffed heroic fights with a few gimmicks. This complacency will kill you and worse still it will kill the rest of us as well.
This includes watching videos, reading strategies and indeed looking around the net for tips on how others of your class and spec are handling these fights. What specs, what talents, what essences, Azerites, corruption levels (and types) and trinkets.
It also includes above all the capacity and willingness for self-critique and being prepared for this to be done to you by others, namely the raid and role leaders.
Some questions to ask yourself:
Have you read Rag’s lovingly created and personalised fight explanations on the forums?
Have you watched at least one of the fight videos also linked there?
Have you checked out class guides and/or competitiveWoW for tips and tricks for the boss for your class/role?
Have you looked at the logs of the top 100 performers on this fight of your class/spec and seen what talents, essences, traits and trinkets most are using?
Are you properly aware of the flow of the fight, it’s timings and mechanics, what they do, what is required of you?
Are you anticipating events and planning where you should be standing and what you should be doing or simply reacting to them?
Are you saving your personal and defensive cool-downs for the right moment, or when that big damage spike comes in is the cupboard bare?
Are you aware of when external cool-downs are needed and are you ready to ask for them, or set up a clear rotation so they can be used without asking?
As an external CD giver, are you waiting to be asked for a CD each time or are you ready to give that CD without being asked each and every time at the same point in the fight once you know that’s when ta specific player is going to need it?
Are you following the chosen strategy and assigned role and target priority, or are you deviating from it and if so WTF! why?
Are you in the correct spec and with the right build and corruption level for this encounter? Do you know what they are, if not why not?
Are you focusing as much on try 15 as you were on try 5, if not, why not, do you think we’ll make it easier if we can all decide when to slack?
I could go on.
If we’re to get very far in our two day per week Mythic schedule without wanting to strangle each other or continue to lose good players who do have a handle on the above to faster progressing guilds, then it’s important people start to get into the Mythic Mindset and realise that with the highest difficulty raiding comes high personal as well as collective responsibility.
Mythic raid team members give up 6 hours per weekend and countless more throughout the week in preparation and training to try and be the best raiders we can be and that means no slacking, no sulking, nothing less than 100% ready to raid, 100% effort every single try, laugh or cry, get up and do it all again but better next time.
When we fail to do this, by coming to the fight without knowing it, using the wrong builds or too high a corruption level that turns each try into a even greater RNG fest than it needs to be just for the chance of a bit more damage for you, we are not just letting ourselves down but those players on the team that are ready for the encounter.
Just because you think you can ‘handle’ high corruption doesn’t mean that it’s always the right choice for the team or the encounter. Most fights have non-negotiable mechanics that need mobility to handle correctly and big corruption circles, severe slows and Thing from Beyond hits will hamper you ability to handle these, not to mention that when you die from a bad case of the RNGs you’ll either wipe us or eat up a combat res that should be saved for others.
Ra-den for example, like Vexiona before it, is not a hard fight mechanically. To make this even easier Rag has prepared an extensive strategy and is using a Weak Aura that tells us all what to do and when and yet tries are all too often effected by players who simply aren’t or can’t be in the right place at the right time because they are out of position to reduce DPS downtime, too slow to react or too SLOWED to react due a bad hand of the RNG lottery and as a consequence vital soaks are missed and Vita is passed to the wrong people.
This would not happen if everyone simply respected the rules of common sense and yet, as so often happens people end up ignoring the mechanics in favour of more output and as a consequence dying or worse still, wiping the raid with their stupidity.
So, if you want to be in the Mythic raid team you need to be ready to prepare, to be accountable, cautious in your approach to the risk/benefits that corruption brings both personally and to the team as a whole and be reliable and focused and kills will happen faster every time and we can move onto the next boss before the doubt sets in.
Not just doubt in ourselves, but the doubt others have about you.
You will have noticed that despite having a workable number of raid team members, we are still recruiting as our aim is to have a larger raid team as we head deeper into the final part of Mythic Ny’alotha than was common in the past where we used to hone the team down to at most 25 regular raiders as we headed into Mythic. This time around however we have deliberately chosen not to repeat this pattern as it only encourages people to get too comfortable in the knowledge there is nobody to replace them even if they play terribly, don’t prepare for encounters or allow their commitment to slide. Indeed, allowing this to happen only increases attrition as other players soon get to understand that with the limited options available to the team that progress isn’t going to get where it otherwise should and this in turn makes others lose heart and leave or quit and these are inevitably not the players that have the above problems.
We can’t continue to turn relatively simple fights like Vexiona into a 100 wipe boss just because we’re not all on the same page knowledge wise or prepared to fix our own personal mistakes even when it becomes obvious that dying repeatedly to the same issue and blaming it on RNG isn’t going to cut it.
So, I’m reminding you all, come prepared, don’t put your personal desire to parse higher over team considerations like survival and non-negotiable mechanics out of respect for those that are not making these selfish mistakes or don’t be surprised if you’re not in on that first kill on this or the subsequent bosses after all because a safer pairs of hands was there instead.
Thanks for reading.
