Raiding In WoW: Tier 14

Dimli and I raid in World of Warcraft (WoW) Mondays and Wednesdays from 8:30pm to 11pm in a 10 man group from our guild. We have currently downed 11 of 12 bosses in this current tier, the 14th WoW has released so far. Our Wow Progress page shows both good and bad. I am more frustrated by the bad at the moment.

I can't begin to tell you how frustrated I am that Blizzard decided to ramp up the difficulty on this tier? We hit a huge wall pretty early, on the second boss in the raid, Horridon. It was maddening for Dim, who is our main tank and one of the leaders of our raid. It was frustrating for me but it really got to him pretty early on.

We finally killed the damn thing, and moved on to boss 3, Council of Elders. This one took us a little bit, but no where near as long as the stupid Dinosaur with lasers on his back. But then we hit Tortos. The most annoying turtle ever put into any game, ever.

We were on Tortos, with me kicking the shells, for what felt like an eternity. Since we've gotten him down, we have breezed through every other boss we've come across. We've never one shot anything, but a night or a night and a half on each boss hasn't been ridiculous especially considering we are pretty casual about who can make it when. We know life comes first, and raiding/gaming second.

Green Wall Strategy Group of Swift Justice (Velen)

Why on earth does Blizzard feel it necessary to put the hard stuff up front? The number of raiding guilds who started off by killing boss 1 and then never killed boss two is ridiculous. Then add in the true show stopper that is that damned turtle and we have what really can only be considered a mess of progression as far as difficulty.

Towards the beginning we were waiting for the usual nerfs that Blizzard has traditionally done, making encounters easier by debuffing them by 10% every few weeks. Instead, they implemented an item level increase via valor points that didn't seem to really help us a whole lot.

Are we that non-typical of other raiders? So far below the average folks that Blizzard doesn't take our plight into consideration? Or did they just miss the mark in how they ramped up their progression difficulty and tuning of the bosses?

I hate feeling that I just suck that bad - but at least we're killing bosses now, with a good chance of finishing up this tier while it's current content. I am super excited!!

This week we're on the final boss, Lei Shen and I really hope to see a kill!

Can I finish off by saying that I miss Josh "Lore" Allen so much since he want to Blizzard Entertainment as an employee? His PST and Weekly Marmot content is really missed. His personal take on raiding and the game in general just doesn't seem to exist on any of the current WoW community sites. I can't find direct links for his stuff on either of his YouTube channels (devomorph and devolore) but as soon as I find it I will link it!