Behind the “Ahead of the Curve” Curve

You almost certainly won’t be able to make it out from the image above, but in the text there, is the wipe text from the previous attempt of Heroic Raszageth.

So there it is, a little bigger. 3.3%.

Oof.

And by this attempt, I figure we would be around pull 105ish. Maybe slightly higher. Fair to say, my guild and I spent a lot of time on Heroic Raszageth. There isn’t a single other WoW final raid boss before now that we’ve required this many pulls on. Heroic Sire Denathrius by point of comparison, Shadowlands Tier 1 final boss, we downed on the 77th attempt. Granted… It was a little bit of a dodgy win. But we got it!

We were really feeling those last pulls for Raszageth. The theory of the guild largely being due to how easy the rest of the raid was up to that point. There were no blocker bosses at all. Not a single one! Generally, there is at least one that takes a bit of effort before getting it down, before you hit the last boss. Here, instead, you go through a raid with fairly trivial difficulty, then bam. Face first into a wall.

The largest issue we had, I think, was the size of the raid team. It was very much on the small side, barely over the minimum of 10 people. Perhaps 12 people on most of our runs.

To make matters worse, the composition within wasn’t ideal either. We were running 4 healers when for this size 2-3 would’ve been better. We were still passing the DPS checks of the first intermission and the storm shields that followed, but it was more touch and go than it really needed to be. We were making it consistently into the second intermission but were not yet executing it well enough with the DPS constraints we had to make it through.

Eventually?

I think we would’ve made it past phase 2. But now having seen the final phase… I dunno! That one could’ve been hairy with those numbers and composition.

Fortunately, though, I didn’t have to find that out the hard way.

You see, the night of that 3.3% wipe, we had essentially all but one player able to make it. We pumped up to a whopping 15 people.

And that 3.3% wipe?

It was the very first pull of the night.

We had a few jitters and made silly mistakes on the next few pulls, dying to stuff we’d otherwise considered ourselves to have mastered much earlier.

The second time we made it into phase 3, Raszageth went down. Huzzah!

So yeah, we were a little bit late on this one. Raszageth took a lot of effort. I suspect we had fewer pulls on the raid as a whole though even despite this fact. Right now? I’m still keen to jump in again for the next round of raiding. Mythic+…? Less certain there. I certainly pushed pretty hard this season. I had fun, but I perhaps also had my fill.

I guess we’ll have to see when it comes. I reckon that’ll be sometime in May!

For now though… Back to the Diablo 4 beta. :D

Inform: (As this post mentions or talks about an Activision Blizzard product, or the company)

While I have chosen to break my self-imposed exile from Activision-Blizzard titles, I still feel it important to acknowledge the troubled status of the company, so you can make your own decision.

Activision Blizzard has become subject to multiple sexual-harassment lawsuits. Of note, in particular, is that it has been alleged that Bobby Kotick (current CEO) has not only been aware of, but also attempted to suppress word of, such incidents — even going so far as to intervene to keep a perpetrator hired with the company.

Even so, support for a long-term boycott was never clear cut, even amongst those affected.