I completed all of Esmënet's goals the first four resets, which led to an almost immediate WoW burnout. Then came the holidays where I didn't really play much for weeks, which gave me a small dose of motivation. Which was needed to try to complete the the long haul Serwaswathan organized play goals...
Which I didn't really manage. I managed to keep a good attendance up to and including January 15th. Which was the date of the second guild HC Fyrakk kill, having achieved guild curve the week before.
After that raid night, I stopped attending organized raiding on Serwa, as showing up for 2x 2h 15m raids for no item rewards and trying to squeeze out some parses without power infusion and augvoker isn't going to do much. And at around this point, I stopped doing the organized m+ group with the two people I had played with for almost a year, Sea and Rae. Had kept doing saturday afternoon for that, which is an iffy time if you are doing real life stuff at all during the weekend.
But both of those things could have been overcome, if the season content was more fun. The raid was perhaps the easiest tier I've been part of. Curve week 4 and 2500+ rating on hunter same week, would have had in week 3 if I had bothered, will be hard to beat in any other WoW season. Both the dungeons and the raid has this very streamlined feel, with the danger coming from dying to unavoidable damage when you are undergeared for some stuff than anything else. The timers are lenient for doing 20s even with fairly lackluster gear and allows some wipes, especially on fortified. So you don't need to gear much unless you are doing CE and want to do over +25s it would seem.
The whole concept of mostly having old dungeons, and sticking to 8 per season is getting really tedious. Had the first 4 DF dungeons for 5 months. Had Atal and Waycrest for over 2 years as m+ dungeons on top of them being leveling dungeons both in BFA and SL. The cata dungeons were shit even in cata, so Throne of the Tides is being a contender for most tedious and annoying m+ dungeon so far. The fact that the DOTI dungeons brough back the Shadowlands design of constant breaks between pulls made them the least interesting dungeons of the expansion to me as well. Swapping the dungeons around constantly makes having portals a bit moot unless you are farming 20s each week for vault, and then it stops being the goal of the season anyway.
It's a bit meh that it ended up like this. But on the plus side, it cured me of the massive playtime problem that has haunted me since BFA season 4.
Looking at the actual goals of the season, I can make a summary:
Season 3 Goals
Get Ahead of the Curve and 2500+ m+ score on Esmënet (BM Hunter). [Challenge from elsewhere].
Give Serwaswathan (Frost Mage) an honest try in guild raids and m+. By honest mean try to improve, have 75%+ raid attendance the first 3 months and have at least 2 vault options every reset the first three months.
DON'T play Dom or Wutteät (or other tanks) at a level with other people's mains. Especially the mythic raider mains that some of them have turned into!
Esmënet nailed the clear goals in 4 weeks and then I moved on.
Serwaswathan managed the attendance and vault stuff the first 2 months. Then my usual burnout happened and the third month ruined what was fine until then.
I played Dom with other people's mains in week 3, 4 and one time after new year's. I had some nights where I played with other people's alts, but at some point during those alt runs people swap to mains. And if I try to make a group where I dps, people become scarce.
The Alt Switch and Casual Parsing
One of the things that "shocked" me the most when writing this post, was that when I looked up the parses of Esmënet and Serwaswathan, Serwas was best on 7 out of 9 fights on HC. Since I hadn't gotten augvoker buffs nor power infusion on any those parses that I could see, I am not entirely sure how that happened. To be fair, Serwa had better overall iLevel, but still...
While I haven't really been much of a competitor in WoW when it comes to comparing myself with others, for some reason I get REALLY competitive against myself. Some time in SL Esmënet had better score than Wutteät, which led to me playing the game a lot for two weeks to gear and get score to remedy that. And this competitiveness triggered again here. While getting good purple parses on all bosses requires "pollution" from PI and Augvoker for me, I can however see how well I can do on Esmënet with similiar conditions. No external buff pollution, guild raid, same quality enchants and consumables.
I also have an underdog contender going; Navarim the Warlock. I attended the guild last week on it, and will do so again this week (and switch to Serwas for last 3 I am assuming). I have a standing invitation to play with the raid group I played Esmë in, so I might join those once one or both of Serwas and Esmë is kitted out so they can run their competition there. The question is: can Navarim beat either of the two mains on any boss before the raid tier ends? The raid comp of that raid is not static, so there might be pollution from augvoker, but I will check logs if that happened.
The race is one, here is how it starts:
From the point I started writing this post until now, the scoreboard has changed a little. Serwaswathan currently leads on Igira, Council, Larodar, Nymue and Fyrakk. So leading by a single boss.
I don't think Serwa will ever beat Esmë on Smolderon or Tindral. If Navarim is going to win on any bosses, I'm going to guess Nymue.
Poor Navarim had really low iLevel for his first set of parses, I am assuming they will jump quite a bit after tonight's raid.
But what happened to the tanks?
Since I no longer have any "premade" groups going, I don't feel obligated to play them all the time. So they are back to the early BFA ways of mostly doing low dungeons, and more of a "I wanna try this trick I have thought of or watched" rather than fill vault or gear up to push or be able to chill in whatever key level the group is doing.
So the time of the tanks dominating the RIO season in review graphs is over, long live the ranged dps!
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