I’ve been raiding with the same core group of players for about two years, but faces and guilds have changed with time. A group of us decided to re-assemble and form a non-guild weekly static group. We’re a mix of hardcore, casual, returning, and new players.
Last week, we got a late start and took a long time to kill Vale Guardian, mostly due to a new tank learning the role. After the kill, we one-shot Gorseval with an exciting last-second squad-wipe-double-kill and had a relatively easy time with Sabetha–which was surprising since it was a first kill for at least one person. Then we coasted through Cairn, Mursaat Overseer, and Samarog.
So, our team goals for last night were to full-clear wing 1 then pick up three easy kills in wing 4 and finish on Deimos as our stretch goal. I’ve been playing the role of alacrity renegade, and my personal goals were to improve my energy management and to identify places where different legends will be more useful than the default build.
How did we do? We definitely had some good & bad 🙂
- Vale Guardian: Much better this week. We did no-greens, and it went pretty well. Took us two attempts.
- Gorseval: We did a little better, but only by a tiny, little bit. We didn’t get the 0-second wipe, but I’m told we were only faster by 0.2s. Still, no complaints for the one-shot.
- Sabetha: This is where we hit a wall this week. We had our least experienced team member learning flak kiting, and there was definitely some learning! I’ve made all the mistakes he made, though. I think he was feeling bad, but this is how you learn–you gotta get the reps and make the mistakes. We had her down to 9% on our best pull. Even though we didn’t get the kill, I feel good about our improvement as a team.
- Cairn: We had a rather disgusting first pull followed by an okay second pull & kill. Poor management of shared agony was the cause of the wipe. Everybody knows how to manage it, and I think it’s just a matter of gelling as a team.
- Mursaat Overseer: I goofed on this one. I had Claim and messed up positioning. We recovered with a heads-up Protect, but then I made a similar mistake a second later. Our DPS was good enough, though, and we pulled off the one-shot with 8 defeated players. Not pretty, but we got it done!
- Samarog: I can’t think of anything notable about Samarog. We had some unfortunate spears that caused us to wipe once before getting the kill. Overall, pretty smooth, though, with no big areas for improvement.
As for my personal goals, I was feeling much better about my energy management. I was being more strategic about toggling my upkeep services to ensure Orders From Above could be used off-cooldown and did a better job of anticipating CC phases to unload with Surge of the Mists, Darkrazor’s Daring, Scorchrazor, and even an occasional Jade Winds. I noticed also that I was having a tendency to stand outside melee range and not hit with my auto-attacks! I think I’m going to pick up a Diviner’s shortbow this week and use that as my default since I’d rather focus on alacrity uptime and energy management than positioning for melee damage.
