It's been a few months since Mists of Pandaria has been released and I haven't updated at all. I know, blasphemy. Work has been sapping the life out of me lately. Same old song and dance and all that.
So, how have things been, you ask? Pretty good. I took four days off of work when MoP first dropped. I leveled with Maralia from my guild. She's a bit less experienced than I am, so some of the leveling took a bit longer than others, but we were still within the first 5 in the guild who hit max level.
Then started the reputation grind. I can't even put into words how draining that's been. I haven't gotten Shado-pan or the August Celestials to exalted yet, but I mainly just wanted to unlock all the valor point gear. Then it was just dungeons, dungeons, dungeons.
The first week of raiding went rather poorly and, to be honest, we haven't fully recovered from that abysmal showing. It seemed like not enough of us took gearing up seriously. Many were still undergeared by the first raid night. This just equated to much fail and we didn't down the Stone Guard on the first night. In fact, it wasn't until the second week of raiding that we finally did.
Raiding was pretty tough for the first few weeks. But as people started to replace their blues with shiny purples, it became easier and easier. LFR has been a decent place to get upgrades as well, and it isn't nearly as painful as it was last tier. Eventually we cleared Mogu'shan Vaults and had a decent progression standing on the server. We had issues beating the enrage timer on Gara'jal for a bit, so that slowed us down. Elegon, like with most guilds, gave us a lot of problems as well. But we managed to clear that raid just as Heart of Fear was going live.
The week it did, we manged to clear Mogu'shan Vaults in one night. Practically one-shot every fight. Always a good sign when you can do that! Imperial Vizier Zor'lok proved to be quite difficult for us. Apparently moving to stay alive is difficult for a lot of people *rolls eyes*. For the first few nights of progression on him, I was the tank for the fight with our paladin tank going holy. We ended up switching this up since her gear in holy was a bit low and, despite my dps gear not being great, I could still pull numbers comparable to the rest of the raid. A night or two with this change and he fell.
On to Blade Lord Ta'yak. Here we hit his enrage timer as well. Very frustrating when stuff like that happens. People had a hard time avoiding tornadoes as well in his last phase. Pretty much the same three people reached each side with no problem every time. Eventually we tried a method where we'd use the side walls in phase 2 that would push you back to get to the other side before he flew over to that one when he hit 10%. Usually we'd do this around 11% or so and leave one dps over there to ensure that he'd get to the required health percentage. It didn't take many attempts using this method until we got him.
Garalon proved to be the most difficult boss for us so far. Kept hitting the enrage timer on this one as well. It becomes pretty obvious what our issue is when we keep hitting enrages. On most bosses in MSV (excluding Elegon), we wiped around 20-30 times before our first kill. We finally managed to kill Garalon last night, after 50+ wipes. To top it off, we killed him as he was enraging. So we all ended up dead, but so was he. I ended up switching to dps spec and gear with a tank trinket equipped just for added health. Our druid healer would pop Heart of the Wild at the beginning of the fight so she could do extra damage (usually 3-4 million). Obviously we couldn't have beaten him without it!
To be honest, I'm a little disappointed with our showing so far this tier. I know I'm not the only one. We have some really good players in this group, and I consider a great many of them my friends. But sometimes it's just depressing when people aren't performing as well as they could be or, even worse, making the same mistakes again and again. I'm not talking about perfection here, we are a pretty casual guild after all. Perhaps I'm a bit more obsessive about things than others. I just wish that more people in the guild would put in as much effort as a few of us do.
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