Fyrakk, did I not see you 3 resets ago?
Aberrus, the raid with the most interesting bosses from the expansion I think. Urge to cast Glacial Spike increasing.
This Fated season I have one goal: testing Mage and Warlock in guild raids, while doing as few m+ keys as possible. And compare them to each other and the Hunter who is also doing keys, but stopping raid early.
I enjoyed playing casters the last two raid tiers, and want to continue doing that in The War Within. But if I can't do say, 5-10 hour WoW weeks as a caster and still do well in raids I doubt I will have the motivation to not mainswitch during a raid tier.
Esmëralda (project Mage)
Main spec: Frost
iLevel: 507
Raid Progress: Vault (8/8 LFR), Aberrus (4/9 HC), Amirdrassil (7/9 HC).
Keys Ran (after 3 resets): 18
Of which had at least one friend/guildie: 8 (~44%)
Replaced Serwaswathan by leveling up last patch - wanted to have a naming convention going and retire some of the old characters. Was originally out of guild raids due to a change in raid days, but was given leeway to attend once a week at most.
Since the character was freshly leveled and had by far the lowest ilevel and shoddy performance first raid, I've done a bunch of keys over the last two resets to "catch up". In this reset's raid I was raid average iLevel and was on the upper half of the guild meter so I can slow down going forward.
So far bought Whispering Incarnate Icon and Vessel of Searing Shadows with bullions, due to simming. Shouldn't have; Whispering crit does nothing at the moment and should have gotten Grieftorch instead of Vessel with how raids and keys have been going with the amount of deaths happening.
Raid progress is mostly slow due to missing both the Vault raids, and the Aberrus and Amirdrassil "progress" nights. Assume both Aberrus and Amirdrassil will be one night HC clears next two resets, as long as enough people are still wanting to do Fated raids... As general interest seems to be going downhill, fast.
Navarim (project Warlock)
Main spec: Demonology
iLevel: 491
Raid Progress: Aberrus (9/9 LFR), Amirdrassil (9/9 LFR)
Keys ran (after 3 resets): 1
Of which had at least one friend/guildie: 1 (100%)
Did not manage to level alt to keep with naming convention, so old warlock it had to be.
Did LFR to pick up Bullions the last two weeks, four m0 this week for the dungeon weekly and 1 m+ with full guild as I was capped on wyrm crests on the Mage.
Spent bullions on Dreambinder and Seal of Diurna's chosen as they were big iLevel upgrades. Got unsure about replacing my current trinkets with the better sim ones after the Mage got hosed there, so focusing on other slots first.
Hoping to attend either guild raids once bringing alts is possible, or bring the character to the community raid thing my Hunter attends. Should prolly be over iLevel 500 before I do either, so will be a couple resets yet.
Parse status
I am going to just compare HC parses here, as normal and lfr parsing doesn't really tell much.
Esmëralda Parses
The Aberrus parse I was undergeared and we only did 4 bosses - one of which wasn't even approved. Primary suspects are Power Infusion and Aug buffs.
Amirdrassil had green logs instead of greys, so improvement. Not starting the raid with scuffed gear helped. Council parse could have been higher (great for Frost mage in general). But the tanks valued not randomly killing dps so much by not moving bear around, preventing cleaving. Which I fully support as a tactic, but it does not help parsing :)
Navarim
Navarim did not do any HC bosses the first 3 resets.
Benchmark Hunter parses
I did not start the massive Esmënet farm from reset day, which led to not having super gear the first raid. Hadn't done the raid on normal or heroic before, so was a lot of adjusting and learning instead of padding for parses.
For Amirdrassil I had a big gear jump. The week had the Dungeon Weekly quest - which awarded bullions instead of the normal random loot chest, which let me buy the Grieftorch trinket. Which had massive value, especially on Smolderon, due to the low geared raiders dropping like flies to passive raid damage and mechanics. Reclearing Amirdrassil is not fun, so this parse will stay the benchmark I think.
Aberrus had a big ilevel jump from Vault, due to buying the Rasz bow for bullions. And upgrading it to max with relentless m+ spamming. Also fairly well known content, no need to learn anything. Unsure why my Zskarn, Magmo and Echo parses were so low, though. This was before Grieftorch, so assume next Aberrus clear with have a parse jump on several bosses.
Status
As of right now, Mage beats Hunter on the Amirdrassil council fight and nothing else. Not a great sell on just showing up to raid with Mage.
Missing week 1 makes a big impact there, but it will be interesting to see how many resets will be needed before parsing better on any other bosses.
Coming as the m+ tank for 6-8 weeks (as dps in the raid, backup tank if need be) still clearly the best option - but switching from paladin to druid to be able to be caster might be the best option for that. But there is way less need in the guild raid for a druid compared to a mage or warlock. But worth thinking about if this does not pan out well.
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