Heroic Sire Denathrius — The Fight Continues
But we’re close. So incredibly close. I realise we’re behind the curve a lot on this one — but with raiding two nights a week, and weeks after weeks of real life incidents taking out various key players (largely tanks!) our attempts at him have been severely hampered.
We just crossed the 50 wipes mark on Heroic Denathrius last night, for some context.
But progress is being made. Quite significantly so.
When we started- getting into Phase 2 was a challenge. We weren’t DPSing hard enough on the boss. Or the adds. Or both. Or missing cleanses. Healing with night hunters. Crossing night hunter beams. You name it- we were doing it inconsistently at best.
I love watching the stages of boss understanding though. It doesn’t happen for every raid member at the same time, but as more of the raid team progresses through the steps, you see that incremental improvement occur.
The Steps of Progression
- Incomplete understanding of mechanics.
- Conscious thought required to execute mechanics.
- Executing Mechanics occurs with minimal thought; focus returns to improving DPS/HPS output or positioning optimisations for Tanks.
- Fight feels fluid, execution by autopilot, mistakes are rare.
The difference in perception of difficulty of a fight depending on where you — and your team — are at can be incredible. And if there is wide enough of a gulf between the step positions of certain players in the team, for too long, that can be… frustrating, to say the least.
For us, that hasn’t been too much of an issue. We definitely have some people ahead and some behind, but never for an extended period and never more than +/- 1 from the majority of the group.
Where I think we’re at now with Heroic Denathrius:
Phase 1: Most of the team in Step 4, the phase is executed swiftly and without trouble and we know exactly how things line up with the DPS we have.
Phase 2: Here we have a little more of a spread. Majority of the raid in Step 3, with a few either side. There are a few regular recipients of battle res in Phase 2 that haven’t quite left Step 2 yet. But! Even across the course of last night (2.5 hrs of raid) this became less and less of a thing, and not only did we start reaching Phase 3 consistently we were doing it with a 40% HP push on Denathrius1.
Phase 3: Where we ended last night, I feel like the balance of the team largely lay between Steps 2 and 3, but we still had a number of people in Step 1, evidenced by being knocked-off the platform over repeated attempts.
I worry about jinxing us — but I’ll still say that I’ll be surprised if we don’t down Denathrius on our next raid night (Sunday).
There were a couple of attempts last night where I thought we were about to do it. Check out this one, for example:
I was on the edge of my seat, just about holding my breath.
I can’t remember whether by the time we’d taken this screenshot we’d already taken the two sets of Orb drops or not, but either way, I do remember we executed that perfectly. And the Orbs during Massacre too, also no problem.
What took us out that attempt is face palm worthy.
Stars aligned such that while we were moving to get out of the second ravage placement, the path a good half the raid team crossed also led to them being aligned to an edge.
Suffice to say; when the knockback inevitably happened — they were sent sailing to both their demise and the demise of the attempt. We lost two healers and a tank in one move, along with some DPS.
But I’m good with this. We learnt we could use the timing to our advantage, with the knockback taking us out of Ravage and into the clear area if we lined it up right. But this was late into our session and the last attempts were not as clean as this one was to this point.
Next time though… NEXT TIME! :D
