Jigglesworth Sr., Season 4 KSM, and alt M+

The Fated raids were a treat. For simplicity’s sake, we opted to run the raids on normal mode. Many folks in the guild get their gear from M+ and the vault, so this was basically just a nostalgic trip-down-memory-lane of all the raids for this expansion. We knocked everything down each week at a leisurely pace. The mount looks amazing and of course it looks great with the accessory companion pet Jiggles.

Aestalas on Jigglesworth Sr. with his companion pet Jiggles.

Season 4 KSM achieved on first day of of week 3. I know a couple toons that have purple mogs in their closet that will be cleaned and pressed to accessorize with the Restoration Deathwalker mount. Except for Aes and Raz. Aes will be fluctuating between druid-y looking xmogs and mostly-nakedness. Raz will likely always be a mostly-gnaked gnome.

Grape Kool-Aid mount achieved. Purple mogs incoming!

Season 4… Mythic+ and Fated Raids

We’re 2 weeks into the new season and I’m sitting with a M+ score of 1990. Just 10 points away from from KSM and the grape Kool-Aid mount. I only need to time a single 15+ this coming reset and that will take me over the 2000 required for KSM. It would have been possible to already have KSM if I pushed a little harder the first week, but I don’t want to burn myself out. A couple of us have been spamming dungeons fairly regularly, even going so far as to take some alts through a few dungeons (or 4 when it’s the Mythic dungeon weekly).

I love Grimrail Depot and voted for it. Hate me if you must, but it’s sooo fun.

So much cool xmog and I run around like this…

Aes has been dealing with the summer heat with a comfy and VERY breathable xmog. I also decided to use the dark ranger skin and eyes for a bit. I’m probably going to be going back to the eyes that line up with the facial scars that represent the burning of Teldrassil, but for now he’s rocking the edgy look.

Aes’ cool and comfy look in SL season 4

Rygelon, The Jailer, and AOTC, oh my!

Weird headspace, so short post. Just wanted it actually posted before season 4 hits.

Rygie down on the first raid night of the week of July 5th, post-nerf. Even post-nerf, it’s a tight fight with very little room for mistakes. While I thought the mechanics were pretty cool, they were just too over-tuned. We slammed our heads into this brick wall for 3 raid nights and damned if we weren’t aggravated with this fight. EVERYONE was on edge with this fight. We pugged a few folks to help fill a couple holes in our composition for the night we actually downed him. Rygie can go home with his bro Algie from Ulduar and never come back.

Zovie down on the first raid night of the week of July 12th. Again, needed some pugs to fill in for some holes in our line up, but damn if it’s not a good feeling to have him out of the way.

Not sure what the team will be doing for the next couple weeks, or what we will be doing for season 4. Time will tell. In the mean time, a few of us are having fun running M+ and gearing up some baby alts through low-key M+.

Andi & Lords down … Father’s Day alt run!

Been sitting on this one because laziness and extreme frustration/depression with how the country is spiraling and regressing. I’ll just dump a few sentences down as proof that I’m still alive and the guild is still progressing.

We got Andi down during the week of June 7^th (for this post, “week” means WoW’s weekly reset that starts on Tuesday). We were banging our heads against him for a couple of resets. We got to a sub 5% wipe which got our hopes up. With a couple folks out due to health issues, we had to pug a few people to fill the ranks for the night of the kill.

We wound up not progging on the week of June 14^th, due to one of our nights being Father’s Day and the other due to health issues. We did an alt run of the first several bosses on Normal. I brought my Tauren shaman and /moo -ed at everyone throughout the night. Between that and a handful of pugged M+ runs, those are the extent of my cross-faction experiences in 9.2.5.

The week of June 21^st we were able to get Lords down on the first night of prog with the “last pull of the night” magic. It’s a healer boss for sure, so make sure you’re built for big throughput. We were a group of 2/3/6, due to a few DPS still being out.

Rygie isn’t too terribly different from Normal, with the only real difference being the sepia toned world (or downstairs phase as some call it) has an extra mechanic that requires the healers to keep a cooldown or two in reserve. However, it’s tuned so that there isn’t much wiggle room for “oopsies.” We’re able to transition him through both phases, so we’ve seen the entirety of the fight. We just need to get him to transition a couple more times. I’m hopeful we’ll get him down this week (week of June 28^th). I would love to get him down and be able to take a couple swings at Zovall this week too.

Tolerance vs. Toxicity

I finally did it. I snapped in an M+. I finally hit the point where I told someone to F#@% Off. The rest of the group joined me in telling the fool that he was a toxic piece of crap. You cannot berate people in a dungeon because things are not going your way. Especially when you’re just as much to blame for some of the pulls going sideways.

It was a Necrotic Wake +16 (Tyrannical / Inspiring / Quaking / Encrypted). Tank initially seemed pretty chill. Group was Monk tank (toxic POS), Druid heals (me), MM hunter (a guildie of mine), Fury Warrior (funnily enough a random pug that turned out to be a long lost friend of the hunter), and a Boomie druid (random pug).

We had at least 1 wipe on every boss. Each due to an oops by any of one or more of us in the group. For the record, I owned every mistake I made (the first one being I forgot to double check my gear before the key was placed and ran with my boomie leggo rather than healing). I’m not perfect and will never claim to be. Various full wipes on trash. Each wipe, the tank got more and more roid-ragey. As we got closer to the end of the dungeon, he seemed to be focusing his anger towards the boomie. My guess is he realized me, the hunter, and warrior were interconnected and would back each other up. So the poor druid (who already confided in us that they were having a rough night) was the object of the tanks rage. When we finally downed the last boss, he unloaded on this poor druid and wove a tapestry of obscenities that, as far as I know, is still hanging in space over the Necrotic Wake (props to you if you can name this reference). And I snapped. So did the hunter. So did the warrior. We let him know in no uncertain terms (and with language that was equally as colorful as his) that his behavior was unacceptable. He was pissed because “the F#@%ing druid got the loot” that he was hoping for. It wasn’t the druid he unloaded on. It was me. I didn’t need the item that dropped. Neither did the other druid. However, because of his outburst, I decided that I wanted to keep it for transmog reasons. I think all four of us immediately /ignore-ed him.

Was my reaction with the loot petty? Probably. Was it justified? Maybe. Would I do it again? Abso-f#@%ing-lutely! You reap what you sew. Keys are weird sometimes. Sometimes you get an amazing composition of people and you just rocket through them. Sometimes you get less-optimal groups and you just have to muscle through it. Sometimes it goes so far south that you need a step ladder to reach the bottom of a whiskey bottle. At no point is toxicity something that should be tolerated (and never should it be rewarded).

Humorous aside, I was checking my raider.io information and notice that the monk in question either server transferred or name changed. Guessing his reputation “tanked.”

We spent some time chatting with this druid and trying to build his spirits back up. Hoping we’ll get to have him hang out with us during one of our raid nights, because he can use a positive experience in WoW.

Wasn’t sure I’d hit KSM this week aka SQUEEEEE!

I’m so ecstatic. I cannot put into words how awesome this feels. I was looking at the finer details of Mythic+ rating and where my scores were sitting for each dungeon (on both Fortified and Tyrannical weeks) and I thought for sure there was no way I’d pull off the achievement this week. Still, I just kept throwing myself at +16 or +17 versions of whatever dungeons had the lowest overall ratings and BOOM! It happened. I have my awesome guild to thank for getting me started on this journey. They gave me a huge head-start by doing our weekly get-a-mythic-item-in-the-vault runs. I hope that we can get more guildies their shiny red mount, because it’s sooooo pretty.

Not askeered of Mythic+

I will always hear “askeered” in Rugrats’ voices

When I re-joined the raid team at the end of Sanctum, the guild carried me through a couple M+ dungeons to boost my gear a bit and get me a shiny in the great vault. In preparation of the new tier, our guild kept running M+ to get folks pretty new shinies. I’m having so much fun with the guild groups. It’s super chill and we don’t have to worry about rando pugs rage-quitting on us. Since I’m wanting that red mount this season, I’ve been dipping my toes in the M+ LFG pool. I’ve been very timid about it and been short-selling what I can run. I’ve been trying to avoid toxicity.

The other day, a guildie asked me if I wanted to heal an +18 NW (Necrotic Wake) and I just went for it. It was a depleted key before we got to the first boss. The tank didn’t know it was a necrotic-affix week, and when made aware, he forgot what necrotic was. FYI necrotic-affix is a stacking anti-heal debuff. At 40 stacks of this debuff, any healing spell cast on you will give you exactly 0 health. The debuff has a short-ish timer. As your stacks start to get up there, you will want to slow the mobs and yeet yourself far away so your stacks fall off and allow the healer to top you up. After 3 total wipes, one of our members leaves the group and that was the end of the NW +18.

The person with the key asks if we want to do the 17 key. We stick around and pull it off. The tank had a couple “oopsies” with stack management at the beginning, but got into his groove pretty quickly. We timed it with only a couple of deaths. The whole group was incredibly chill. I know there’s a lot of toxicity in the LFG, but this group gave me a big confidence boost to stop short-selling myself. I should be doing 15’s on the regular, but I still have many well below that. As of the writing of this post, I still have 1 dungeon that is sitting at a single digit key. I will have to fix next week when bolstering is the affix. I’m sitting at a M+ score of 2237. I’m soooooooooo close, I can taste it.

Progressing Heroic SotFO

We have a lockout saved for Normal with only tier bosses and the Jailer up, if we ever want to quickly run alts through. I believe everyone has their 4 piece at this point and has seen at least 1 kill of the Jailer. We’ve dipped our toes into the heroic pool the past couple weeks. We’re now 5/11 on heroic, we’ve downed Guardian, Dausegne, Pantheon, Lihuvim, and Skolex. I am super proud of our team. Our composition can vary quite a bit from raid night to raid night. Hell, even from the first hour of raid night to the second hour. Regardless of what our composition is, we have fun and give it our all.

That’s no moon, it’s a soul forge (Star Wars pun required today).

Helloooooooooo Meh-ffort

Yeah, I said I wasn’t gonna do it, but it was nagging at me.