- anasurimbor1000
- Oct 31, 2023
- 4 min read
With no posts for a season, here's a summary instead... :)
Another season of encountering every spec. I don't know any Ret Palas, Shadow Priests or Prot Palas anymore, so the top three most popular PUG specs have been very easy to spot this season.
Esmënet got iLevel 446 August 2nd with a craft, and have since been unable to get shoulders in vault for the last possible iLevel outside of raiding Mythic Echo and Sark. Dominator managed to catch up this reset after hitting upgrades a few vaults in a row and catching up on the Aspect Crest farm. Gearing has been fast and weird this season, I think this will be the fluke season when it comes to handing people gear fast.
I raided again! The easiest raid tier prog I've been a part of. Normal was dropped once we had the shortcut, but did the shortcut after heroic if time, to fish for the very rare drops from the last two bosses.
Something must be iffy with tracking here, because it claims everything was a first kill except heroic Sark. From memory heroic Zskarn had the most actual wipes (pre meganerf), and we had several ~1% wipes on heroic Echo during reclears.
This would prolly have been a shorter prog on Heroic Aberrus, if I had been at work for the first kill. Not that 38 days of raid prog is slow...
This is traditionally the most important RIO graph to me. Like a slow and steady progress is what I am looking for. This one time I went hardcore (for me) at the start of the season on Esmënet, had a steady progress until July (vacation). The regular 2 month burnout happened and played alts or didn't play at all during August, then went through the +20s just to see if I could. Getting into +21s has not been managed except for a single instance, so progress stopped there. Pretty happy with this one this season.
Beast Master Hunter (208 runs) beats Protection Paladin (124 runs) soundly. Estimating I'd say 170 of the BM runs have been PUGS, while the Prot Pala has maybe 30 PUG runs? The rest were just me wanting variation and seeing how easy it was to get KSM this season on everything I was playing. The Demo Lock was the hardest. The Frost Mage I kept playing after KSM, which didn't really happen with the others. I liked the top three specs this season. The Frost Mage especially got a lot more fun once Glacial Spike and the other active buttons got a buff. Frozen Orb/Blizzard play in PUG m+ is a nightmare, so having certain damage means a lot.
Such a meta slave :D
Have done very little static group play this season, which has also meant less friction with other people. People have tried to adjust what to play in the guild so more full guild groups can form, and when I made groups (which was the most static comp I was in) this is not a comp that makes things easy this season. Next season with broken Havoc DHs might be a different matter.
Freehold had 138 runs, Neltharus has 59. Freehold I liked a lot in BFA, and it was insanely popular or outright loathed this season by most other people. Vortex was just generally the easiest key to get into when farming crests for some reason. UR was a free dungeon if people knew mechanics, otherwise a hellhole. Brackenhide was insanely hard week 1, then it was turbonerfed, and it became the most fun one to play, but also quite hard to get into and a lot of keys dies there on fortified due to massive tank pulls. The rest I don't really care about and would rather forget exist.
Other side of the important graph coin. Just shows it different. Constant score progression except during vacation and the burnout phase. Normally the two first weeks would be spread out of 4 weeks or so, so the spike into slow progress annoys me a bit. But better than the rushers who barely got any score after week 2 and made themselves have nothing to play for.
The dungeon amount is hysterically high, but this season ~600 of those keys were me deciding what I felt like doing, so were easy and fast keys for the most part, rather than the 300 prog key seasons of the past.
Raennya was in 54 of the runs, Asphine in 50. Sear and Bod played alts, so that got watered out. Played a bit with several other guildies too, but they also do alts a fair bit, so didn't make the the top 5. Raennya was thus in ~8% of the keys I did, which is the lowest share top 1 has had of my keys in any of these Recaps.
In summary
I played a lot of keys again, and did it like I did for long periods of BFA. Pugging low or baby keys on alts, with a very small share of premade or PUG progress keys. The way gearing and profession worked this patch was perfect for me, and putting lots of gearing back into drops and crafting rather than a weekly lottery did wonders for my motivation to keep doing dungeons.
I'm not so sure about the quality of the dungeon pool or raid though. Freehold I already had hundreds of keys done in, not sure I will remember anything from any of the other content except "Brackenhide had huge pulls with lots of padding"...
But at least none of the endgame content had massively annoying dungeons or raid bosses. I might be tilted over Vortex Pinnacle if I was a Havoc DH, but I just dodged the annoying bullets this time. So that was nice. :)
