Royal Militia

After some painful raids without a disc priest, Isamoo saved the day by raiding from Singapore and we killed H Twins in 6 attempts. Hooray!

-Mini

Guess I forgot to post that we killed H Durumu last week. This boss has stupid levels of RNG on 10 man… Can we get some more bosses that tie up 5/10 people with random mechanics? Anyways, after an annoyingly large amount of wipes on this boss, we figured out how to not suck so much and killed it.

In other news, Isamoo has been promoted IRL and is now a big internationally-traveling hotshot, which means he can’t raid consistently anymore. So we are now recruiting a disc priest for an IMMEDIATE opening in our group! Let me know if you’re interested.

-Mini

Another fight we killed as soon as we sacrificed Chuba twice in the same attempt. Good job everyone!

-Mini

This boss surpassed H Stone Guard as the boss which has taken us the most attempts. I didn’t think it was bad to start, but for some reason we just couldn’t stop accidentally pulling the boss while buffing. Add that to the RNG late in the fight and  this has really turned into one of my least favorite bosses. I’m glad we finally killed it, and I think it will be pretty repeatable in the future.

-Mini

Two new kills this week! Council turned out to be pretty reasonable once we figured out how to deal with Frostbite and I actually liked Iron Qon. Most of the remaining fights look a lot less fun though =/

-Mini

These kills both happened last week, I’m just late as usual in posting the screenshots. Two fights where having a prot paladin would definitely have made things a lot easier. Oh wait, that’s every fight!

-Mini

Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee flying! This was my favorite boss in a long time, and most of us enjoyed this fight a lot. I think the best part was that it’s a fight that’s almost completely devoid of RNG. It was wonderful to be able to just make a plan and execute it (even if the plan is a little complicated). Too bad all fights can’t be RNG-free.

-Mini

Patch day kill of Jin’rokh. No one was excited about the return of Attenuation balls. Fortunately we have mad orb-dodging skills from Zor’lok and got this boss down.

-Mini

Hi Everyone,

No time for a long post since it’s late, but we cleared all 12 normal modes in one reset. A new record for RM in terms of new bosses/week, and we did it in a reasonable number of hours too… Heroics start tomorrow!

-Mini

We’ve finally completed Tier 14 Heroic Raiding! Seems like it’s been a long time since we leveled up and first poked our noses into Mogu’shan Vaults, and here we are with the last boss down on Heroic. Another disappointment of an end boss, where the main difficulty for us was finding the sweet spot on an infinite plane with no features and no coordinate system. Thanks Blizzard, that was awesome. Just one little dot ANYWHERE would have really been helpful. Here’s our last screenshot from this tier:

I usually take the time at the end of a tier to recap what’s happened since I don’t need to stay up late research strats or writing WeakAuras. We finished Tier 14 at World 473, US 105 (all guilds), and US 53 (for 10 mans). Nothing to brag too loudly about, but better than RM has done in some time, especially considering the significant holiday absences and recruitment. We’ve gone through a pretty significant set of roster changes since we started this tier, with those remaining from our original MoP group being Kerrena, Çhubathingy, Kanaan, Isamoo, Thelmtwo, Joe, and myself (Minimerlinx) with some of us having been together since Vanilla. The newer faces in the raid are Llarold, Pwnaj, Amnaesia, and Kankersore, who have proved their worth by pushing through quite a few new heroics since they joined. I think our raid now is in a better place than it’s been in a long time. Our recruits have all turned out to be strong players and I think we’ll make a very strong push into 5.2 content. We are still looking for a hunter or boomkin, let me know if you’re interested!

Hindsight being 20/20, here’s my take on the bosses of this tier (in the order we killed them):

Stone Guards (10/14/2012) – We wiped more on this boss than any other in the tier. It was a really cool fight, and it was a very satisfying first kill. The most frustrating part of the fight was just trying to watch the active color, energy, and inter-dog distance and make sure the taunts happened at the right time. A very complicated WeakAura handily solved this problem… a foreshadowing of the theme of this tier…

Feng (10/16/2012) – After struggling mightily on Stone Guard for several nights, we accidentally killed this boss within an hour of repeating Stone Guards… Whoops…

Gara’jal (10/25/2012)  - One of my favorite bosses in the tier. In the blue gear we were using, this fight was actually tuned to be challenging and interesting, and we actually needed one more week’s worth of gear to make the berserk check. I liked this one a lot.

Elegon (10/29/2012) – My favorite looking fight in the tier, hands down. Nothing can beat Algalon’s pet dragon in appearance. I also liked the fight mechanically and it was numerically challenging in our still mostly blue gear. My only complaint (and it’s one of my pet peeves) is that damage immunities don’t work for soaking the explosions but 90% damage reduction is okay. Really frustrating when only certain classes are required for encounter mechanics.

Blade Lord Ta’yak (12/02/2012) – Due to the release of HoF/ToES normals and a bunch of ass-hattery from some of our members who decided to quit, delete their accounts, or suddenly never show up for raids again, we had about a month between heroic kills here. A shoutout to BHV for actually giving me a long notice before he quit so I could find a replacement for him. Looking back, we probably should have aimed for Spirit Kings first, since we did not have a consistent group or the gear necessary to hit the Berserk check. The first fight of many which would have been a lot harder without a disc priest to absorb all the bad.

Spirit Kings (12/04/2012)  - Once we killed Blade Lord, this one fell over pretty easily when we had an ex-raider’s poorly geared alt in the group. The obvious problem with this boss was the random order, making about 80% of the pulls instant wipes due to the RNG of the order. Once they fixed that, this was actually one of the easier fights in the tier. Should have done it prior to Blade Lord for sure.

Wind Lord Mel’jarak – (12/9/2012) – I personally liked this boss a lot because of the flexibility in strategy. There are lots of ways to approach it, any of which can land a kill. Actually feels like this is a lot easier than normal mode because you have a lot less wind bombs to deal with. I’m not sure how groups without a priest could have possibly done this, since mass dispel is ultra-overpowered here.

Will of the Emperor – (12/13/2012) – An average fight with not much innovation over normal mode. The main complaint here is that this fight favors classes with short-duration immunities or damage reductions quite strongly. Putting rogues on the Rage sparks one-at-a-time was the clutch change in strategy which ended up getting us a kill on this. Too bad that Ring of Frost trivialized the fight on 25man.

Garalon – (12/17/2012) – Definitely one of my less favorite fights. The fact that there’s almost no cooldown on transitioning the Pheromones caused unbelievable annoyance, even if it wasn’t directly responsible for many wipes. Our main trouble here was the berserk check since we had no rogue for most of the attempts until Pwnaj joined us for the kill.

Holidays, Lag, and Recruitment Problems – (12/18/2012 – 1/20/2013) – At this time, our group was sitting on exactly 10 raiders, when suddenly our boomkin ninja-transferred to another server to become a casual-pvp’er. Didn’t answer forum posts, texts or phone calls… So with the various absences due to holiday travel and being down to 9 raiders, we were basically marking time and just barely killing the farm bosses each week with friends and pugs filling in. Fortunately, once the holidays ended and we got some decent recruits, we got back on track. Then, when we were finally making some progress on Protectors and Vizier, about half our raid was struck with the terrible lag spikes which afflicted people across the country due to AT&T and CogentCo. Out of the whole tier, these two bosses are probably the worst to have random 10 sec lag spikes. Once we all decided that the problem wasn’t going away any time soon and got Smoothping, we finally resumed real raiding again.

Imperial Vizier Zor’lok – (1/20/2013) – My least favorite boss of the tier. Dodging those dumb balls  really wasn’t fun, because it was often the case that your position didn’t match up with where the server thought you were, so the way to not die became to run through the balls in front of you, but not too close or they’d kill you. I hope we don’t see another super-frogger boss again, ever.

Protectors of the Endless – (1/22/2013) – A close contender for least favorite boss of the tier. The fight is actually pretty cool when you read about it, but the unforgiving kick rotation coupled with mechanics which disable people from the kick rotation coupled with having to stand in a tiny 3 yard circle with no buff to indicate if you’re actually standing in it quickly degraded it to a nightmare. This fight really seemed like it was designed for 25 man without much thought for the realities of doing it with only 10 people. Fortunately, we had lots of people with kicks and we were able to coordinate back-up plans for all the possible ways the kick rotation could fail. Yet another fight where disc priests shine.

Amber Shaper Un’sok – (1/28/2013) – Neck and neck with Vizier for least favorite boss. I hate vehicle bosses. The only saving grace for this fight was that it has some room for creativity in the strategy, which I like a lot. Actually, this fight would have been awesome if it didn’t involve vehicles. It’s just really frustrating when you don’t get to pick who’s in the construct, so your progression is a lot of “I don’t see any cast bars in the vehicle?!!?!” x 10 because there’s no way to get in a construct prior to the fight. This fight actually would have been really cool if you just got to pick who was the construct so they could learn it once.

Lei Shi – (1/29/2013) – Doing this fight so late is my biggest mistake of this tier. This fight was a complete cakewalk and we should have done it before Zor’lok. My bad everyone.

Grand Empress – (2/4/2013) – Another fight I wish we had done sooner. I read awful things about it but 4-healing it really wasn’t so bad. We actually spent the fewest attempts on this boss out of all the bosses in the tier. Really very disappointing for an end-boss since it was almost the same as normal and the new mechanics were both ignorable. +1 for disc priests being overpowered.

Tsulong – (2/10/2013) – I actually think this fight is one of the coolest fights that’s been created in a long time. Using healer throughput to contribute to a DPS check is cool. The obvious problem with this fight is the RNG of having a sunbeam spawn literally on top of a Dark of Night, resulting in an instant wipe. Fortunately, the boss is resettable. The fight had a reasonably tight Berserk check which I’m sure would have been a much bigger challenge if we had done the fight with less gear. Probably the only fight in the tier where a disc priest isn’t the uncontested best healer.

Sha of Fear  - (2/19/2013) – Less disappointing than Will or Empress, but still a let-down for the final boss of the tier. We wiped far more times in Phase 1 than Phase 2, and there was almost nothing new about Phase 1 other than Dread Spray being numerically more challenging and requiring stupid addons. Not a big fan of Phase 1. Phase 2 was fun with one glaring exception… NO REFERENCE POINT. With the positioning of the ball-throwers being critically important, we wiped a lot of times just to find the sweet spot.

Phew, glad I made it through all of those bosses.  Looking forward to a solid push into 5.2!

-Mini