Hey all,
It’s only been a week since my last post but I have had the itch to write something new on the subject of player awareness and the approach to mythic encounters since our often rather frustrating attempts on Opulence this weekend.
Throughout Weekend Warriors history it has often been said that our Achille’s heel has been player mechanic handling and focus and that generally we find it easier to use brute-force approaches to overcome encounters than we do ones where individual responsibility and perfect mechanic handling are required.
Zerg it if you can..
The issue with this is not just that some bosses can’t be zerged so you end up wiping repeatedly on mechanics that you are not used to handling, but that to allow this “historical” weakness to become a logical excuse, even when 85% of the team is not the same as it was a year ago is sloppy and counter-productive. If the players aren’t the same, why should the same excuse hold? Is it OK to accept that we’re inconsistent at handling personal responsibility and mechanics?
Of course it shouldn’t and it’s not.
What it comes down to is how we approach a fight that starts off as really familiar and old and why we seem to look at it with old eyes rather than new. Parse log eyes rather than progress eyes.
People make mistakes because they try to push an envelope of personal performance that causes mistakes to creep in on try to try consistency and this is never more visible than when you encounter a farm boss that you one shotted last week and find it takes 4 or 5 tries because people slack on an interrupt or killing an add because they want to unload on the boss sooner as they’ve got a good parse lining up and this is after all a farm boss so it’s OK, right?
Wrong.
It’s never OK to ignore non negotiable mechanics to stroke your ePeen, that shit will make you blind. Blind to your actions, your mistakes and to the correct approach to the fights as a part of a team.
This attitude is then carried over into progress tries. We all know the pattern, start well, plateau, regress, finish where we were at the start. Why are our best tries on a second raid day on a boss always the first tries? Because on our first tries we’re trying our best to do the fight as we remember it. We then see we can do this and fuck the next hour up trying to improve our performance by cutting corners or making changes that are aimed purely at improving our numbers and not our execution.
So, when we start a new raid day on a progress boss, always keep in mind that we do best when we keep it simple and keep it repetitive, we do worst when we try to change things we were doing right before in exchange for better logs or DPS rankings.
This post has actually ended up being a bit longer than what I initially intended to write which was an invitation to our current raid team members to read a post I wrote back in 2017 when most of you were not in the guild or team and which still holds true today.
Sometimes there is no need to rewrite what has already been written but a simple bump will suffice.
So bumping this old post which I urge you to read (or read again if you remember it) as it’s the real message that still holds true today.
After all, what goes around comes around.
Thanks for reading!
