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? possibly (even though we have a lot of new raiders since I last did it so maybe not), 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, despite multiple deaths and then one 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 back 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, as we saw from Nighthold and Tomb of Sargeras, Mythic raiding isn’t really turbo-driven Heroic raiding, it’s a step up in difficulty from that.
Make no mistake, this stuff is hard. 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, whilst making those we already knew hurt even more.
There are lots of wipes ahead, make no mistake. That’s cool and expected, but you can and indeed should do all YOU can to make sure they’re as few as possible for the sake of everyone’s sanity, especially yours.
This includes looking at the fights with a fresh perspective, trying to see them as new encounters, not just buffed old boring and easy 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 legendaries 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 me and the role leaders.
Some questions to ask yourself:
- Are you properly aware of the flow of the fight?
- Are you anticipating events and planning where you should be 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 the tank 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 what WTF! why?
- Are you in the correct spec and with the right build and talents? 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, then it’s important people start to get into the Mythic Mindset™ and realise that with great raiding comes great personal and collective responsibility.
You and everyone else give up 6-7 hours per weekend to try and be the best raiders we can be and that means no slacking, no sulking, nothing less than 100% every single try, laugh or cry, get up and do it all again but better next time.
If this weekend has reminded us of anything, it’s that we start strong, get complacent, get discouraged, start maybe changing things ourselves without asking the raid leader if we should in the mistaken thought that we can alone make the difference by being heroes and instead doing even worse, before trying to pick things up way too late and perhaps then doing what in all truth we should have done on try one rather than thirteen and killing the bloody farm boss.
Similarly, AHC is not a hard fight. Much of it is simply respecting the rules that applied in heroic before we started to be able to sit in damage and ignore mechanics because we out-gear the fight. Yet, as so often happens people end up ignoring the mechanics in favour of more output and as a consequence dying or worse still, killing others with their stupidity.
So, if you want to be in the Mythic raid team you need to be ready to believe, prepare, be accountable, reliable and focused and it will happen faster every time and we can move onto the next boss before the doubt sets in.
You will have noticed that we have a larger raid team as we head deeper into the Mythic modes 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 I have deliberately chosen to not 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 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 slack or quit as well.
Finishing ToS Mythic at 7/9 having to beg and scrape from non raiders to make up 19 or 20 showed me that this time, with a long wait ahead of us before any new content is due we must instead stock up and prepare to make a faster push early on with a strong, varied and flexible team before attrition puts us into ‘beggars can’t be choosers ‘ territory so soon again.
This will necessarily require greater understanding that it’s not going to be possible for all of us to be in on the first kill of each fight and to adopt instead a more team focused approach where we accept that as we don’t all play multiple alts, sometimes we’re going to pick classes and players whose skillsets are more suited to an encounter rather than those players we would ’normally’ field.
I honestly believe that this time anything less than Cutting Edge and repeated full clears of Mythic Antorus is selling the guild’s raiders short, so we’re going to do what we can to make that a reality.
So, donning my coach voice: we’re in the big leagues now, this is what we trained for, let’s all give it our best shot and work as part of a team to get the victories we all deserve!
Thanks for reading.
