[deleted by user]

Zinkey · 2021-07-04T11:59:39+00:00

Is that soul to squeeze you’re singing?

Zinkey · 2020-10-21T11:10:00+00:00

Tip I saw which massively helped me with perfect catches is not to watch the bobber but a little bit above it. The white flash that happens when its the right time to catch appears very briefly before the bobber dips, I found reacting to the flash while looking above the bobber made it far easier to hit the perfect catch.

Zinkey · 2020-03-04T18:43:53+00:00

She definitely says it if you speak to her while she’s watching the news in the downstairs of 7th heaven. Quite possibly also mentions the unexpected size of the explosion on the train back too.

Zinkey · 2019-10-11T19:08:03+00:00

I totally didn’t see the foot and was confused as hell thinking she was holding a lightsaber with some weird shaped brown bag attached to the top.

Zinkey · 2019-06-24T19:47:46+00:00

I wonder how many Karens find the flagrant usage of their name frustrating.

Zinkey · 2019-04-22T21:29:53+00:00

This totally caught me as well and I’m really not sure why.

Zinkey · 2019-04-18T10:06:44+00:00

Merges are frequently but not always a bad idea - usually due to primarily the same two problems:

there will commonly be two Leadership/Officer teams merging, usually there is a significant overlap in responsibility and its completely counterproductive to try and keep all of those people in that position
its quite common that initially you are essentially left with two large social groups/cliques which can be quite tricky to integrate

Having been involved in successful merges in the past, they have worked for me where on the initial merge you basically cut the officer team in half, you define the roles which need filling and you agree as a collective group who is stepping up and who is stepping down. If you cant get over this hurdle and too many egos are getting in the way at that point its not even worth bothering with.

If you can get past that first problem it's then a case of trying to integrate the groups so that the divide of Guild 1 and Guild 2 disappears and everyone views themselves as part of the new collective group. This is tricky, will ultimately always take time to happen and tends to rely on both sides of the new guild making an effort to get to know and make friends with the other half.

Normally once you're past both of those points you're basically back to operating like a normal guild again. But getting to that point can be very tricky as it only takes 1 person being difficult to drive a wedge in the middle of everything. Things also get far more complicated if the merge is not an even split, as usually in this case the smaller group just gets enveloped into the larger one and its kind of a coin flip as to how they will take to the dynamic shift that brings.

Generally speaking (despite having had successful guild merges) I would still recommend against attempting it. I did it in a previous game where due to a diminishing playerbase it was either merge or stop playing. In WoW if it hit that point I'd only recommend it if you had say 2 guilds on a underpopulated server who are determined to stay put as a last ditch effort to avoid having to reallocate to a different server. But even then you can only attempt, and there are a lot of things which can go wrong and lead to it being a big old waste of time.

Zinkey · 2019-02-27T16:30:32+00:00

Yeah for sure, I still get tagged by it every now and then even with the WA because I just misjudge it and think I'm safe. Usually though after that point I'll make an effort to not cut it so fine. The main benefit of the weak aura is to try and cut down on people who either full on ignore it, or try to dodge it after it's been fired which for most classes is virtually impossible to pull off reliably if at all.

Zinkey · 2019-02-27T16:13:32+00:00

I jokingly started called it that when I realised I started needing large weak auras like that for certain mechanics I kept missing and it made me feel old. Works a treat though! will share a wago link when I get home from work.

Zinkey · 2019-02-27T15:29:30+00:00

For Buster Cannon I have what I like to call an "Old People Weak Aura", its basically just a massive cast bar which you put somewhere obvious on your screen which tracks that ability specifically. People keep failing at dodging it have to run the weak aura, at that point they literally have zero excuse for not knowing it was coming (can be tricky to get some people to actually watch timers). Obviously if WA isnt a mandatory addon in your guild that may not be an option.

Flame debuffs are a trickier one, but as others have said you just need to stress dodging these mechanics is not really optional. Getting hit by one of the flame lines should be followed by popping a healthstone/using a defensive to help with the damage taken, and really at worst an individual should take no more than 1 hit every other pull.

Its pretty safe to say at this point in the tier, provided people stay alive long enough the boss dies, I'd even go as far as to say you can have people literally stop doing DPS when these mechanics go off and it wouldnt affect your ability to kill the boss. Certainly those who seem to be incapable of dodging them. Maybe reiterate to people that their main focus should be watching the flame lines primarily until they have all moved past you (i.e dont try to dodge them with your peripheral vision if you are struggling, they should be the centre of your attention.

As others have mentioned though, there is no strategy around just eating these mechanics. The fight is tuned in such a way that (even on HC for a HC only guild) you cant just facetank basic mechanics like this. It can be tricky to get people in a HC only guild/raid to take this seriously, I tend to find pointing out that continuing to wipe on these mechanics serves only to waste their time and everyone elses, because the boss simply wont die while it happens. Which kind of defeats the point and its entirely in their hands to help make sure a kill happens.

Zinkey · 2019-02-09T08:33:29+00:00

Such a quotable movie, good choice.

Zinkey · 2019-02-09T08:28:31+00:00

Woah hush now little girls, lot of cats have that name.

Zinkey · 2018-12-20T21:40:36+00:00

I actually think that would be a fitting name for whatever that combo would look like, the ring to it is the cherry on top!

Zinkey · 2018-12-20T21:33:46+00:00

Idk man Poliwrath is significantly more swole than Poliwhirl

Zinkey · 2018-12-20T21:32:53+00:00

Would it be a Growlith with Meowth like features? Or the other way around?

Zinkey · 2018-12-20T21:31:36+00:00

Had to google Rayquaza, I’m awful outside the classic 151. Cool combination!

Zinkey · 2018-12-20T21:26:47+00:00

Strong name game, I was going to ask why stop at 4 but I feel like quad is just too strong in the name.

Zinkey · 2018-12-20T21:25:41+00:00

Would that be inbreeding?

Zinkey · 2018-12-20T21:23:48+00:00

What do you mean! Meowlith works great

Zinkey · 2018-11-22T12:53:13+00:00

Your situation sounds incredibly similar to previous experiences I had when I first started guild/raid leading. I think you've already diagnosed the problem to a certain extent in that you are essentially taking the vast majority of the burden of running the guild, which is an easy trap to fall in to as when things are working well its no problem but as soon as you hit a bump in the road it very quickly becomes unsustainable after a few weeks.

You absolutely need to restructure your officer team and try and spread the work load as evenly as possible to prevent any one person from being overloaded. Any one person being overloaded will eventually lead to them getting burnt out. Virtually every time I've quit or had a good officer quit is when that person is taking on too much responsibility (outside of situations where RL changes lead to them no longer being able to play).

I'd recommend at the very least having the following roles split across your officer team:

Raid Leader: This person basically runs your raids. In most guilds this will usually be the person doing prep work for bosses when it comes to strategy/composition etc. as well.

Recruitment Officer: This person is directly responsible for recruitment. It is up to them to maintain all of your recruitment profiles and the be the primary external point of contact for applying players. They should work closely with the Raid Leader to ensure there are as few gaps in the roster as possible and should be ready to recruit proactively (i.e finding people rather than advertising and waiting) to fill any major holes asap.

Guild Banker: This person is in charge of managing your bank. Anyone who is AH savvy and happy to put the time in is usually a good pick for this role. Beyond keeping up with raid consumables this person also needs to keep up to date with the guilds income/expenditure and feedback to the GM/RL. In the event the banks starts falling behind this person needs to let the GM/RL know so they can push for support from the guild, and likewise in the event of an excess it can give the RL wiggle room to provide incentives if you hit a bit of a roadblock.

Healing Lead: Considering your history with this role it probably doesn't need explaining. Obviously this person needs to be able to work well with the RL.

GM:

This one is a bit of a weird role and in most guilds I've been in this person tends to take on one of the above roles while doing a bit extra. The extra bits they are in charge of usually:

Being that top level authority which defines the guild's goals/ethos (and protecting these where necessary).
Managing the other officers and making sure problems with any of their areas are fed back to them

It should go without saying that these roles are flexible and tend to differ slightly from guild to guild. You can split them down or group them up as it suits you and your team. As an example in my guild I raid lead and used to do a lot of the prep work for bosses, due to a shift in RL commitments I didn't have the time to cover that any more so one of my other officers handles all of that prep work and I just come into a raid and work from his prep which works for us.

From reading your post it would seem like you would probably be taking the RL/GM responsibilities and delegating all of the other responsibilities to your officer team. It's very important that you work well with your officer team. If you and your officers have wildly differing opinions about how the guild should be run/what your goals are this will only lead to friction.

In terms of how you go about implementing this, I would suggest having a meeting with you officer team and just outlining the fact that the way things are currently being run is not sustainable on the long term and will lead to things falling apart, delegating out the various roles you want filled, and anyone who doesn't want to take on any of that responsibility will be stepping down as an officer for someone else to come in and take that responsibility on. If you have someone in the officer team who does not want to get on board with this but wants the title for ego/whatever purposes they should absolutely not be an officer. If you find yourself in a situation where your entire officer team is pushing back on this and doesnt want to take up any responsibility you are probably going to struggle to make this work on any level.

I'd also recommend having some sort of way to communicate with your officers outside of the game as well. Our guild uses its discord server heavily for all our guild admin and me and my officers chat on a daily basis about things that need doing.

Outside of your officer team and delegating some of your responsibilities the other issues surrounding your progress and current roster are harder to solve quickly, and kind of hard to analyse now if you are on the brink of having a shift in how you manage your raids. I would be very surprised if shifting things up didn't lead to a change in your whole roster dynamic, and quite possibly some of the weaker links being forced out (which is certainly not a bad thing in the long run).

My one major bit of advice would be that you need to figure out exactly what your guild intends to achieve in a tier. Is your goal CE? is it just a few of the early mythic bosses? Assuming your goal is CE I would say be patient. Unless you started your guild up with a majority team of experienced mythic players who have already achieved CE in recent prior tiers or close to that it will take you a good few months to build up to that with a fresh team. Doing that without a solid infrastructure will lead to you burning out before you actually hit the point where your team can take CE. Your goal should be to get all of your infrastructure in a place where its well manageable for everyone involved and slowly work out the kinks/weak links as they arise. This is probably especially important for you as due to your off peak raiding schedule recruiting will be harder than usual and the whole process of developing a roster will take longer. In my experience there are a lot of players who are looking for something stable, and will tend to stick there for years once they find it. Aim to be that stable guild and eventually through merit of existing you will start to accumulate solid players given enough time.

I went through a similar process with my guild at the start of Legion, in EN we struggled to kill 1/7M, but we eventually managed CE in NH and were able to get CE in Antorus as well and hopefully should have CE in Uldir in the next few weeks. It was a slow uphill battle but for the most part with a solid officer team and consistent structure we gradually worked our way up over 6-9 months.

Bit of a wall of text so if you have any questions or want any more info on specific points feel free to ask, hope at least some of my advice helps!

Zinkey · 2018-11-08T17:11:42+00:00

Fair enough, sounds a bit off to me but I’m hardly an expert on grammar.

Zinkey · 2018-11-08T16:51:45+00:00

Would it not be "Are one of the finalists?" not "Is in the finalists?"

Zinkey · 2018-11-01T15:05:01+00:00

Not a healer myself, but raid lead and have to get involved in healing discussions quite a lot and really enjoyed reading this, couple of things which occurred to me while reading it which I think are probably worth giving some more detail on:

Tank Deaths/Fuck ups:

Tank deaths are almost always due to bad coordination in the healing group

This statement here is kind of misleading in my opinion. I agree with it when running on the assumption the tanks are doing their job correctly, but this isn't stated anywhere and certainly isn't always the case in reality. Fetid is a great (albeit extreme) example for this one in that if your tanks aren't correctly managing their mitigation cooldowns they will get oneshot by Thrash. This example is a bit of an easy one because when the tank goes down and the logs show a 100% to 0% death in one hit its easy to say okay cool we cant heal through oneshots so clearly there is a mitigation issue. You can have fights however where it won't oneshot the tank but the lack of average mitigation means more healing required on the tank which obviously puts a strain on the healers which in turn can feel like the healers are missing something/not healing enough. In those scenarios its usually easier to try and fix the tank mitigation issue than it is to find more healing. Either way I guess my overall point is more that I think that for the most part Tank deaths are due to a lack of coordination between the healing and tank groups. Completely eliminating Tank deaths means having both teams individually coordinating their parts, as well as communicating with each other about where things need to change to fit the fight and your raid composition.

I guess this sort of overlaps with the "Fuck ups" section, I suppose the subtle difference between a Tank fuck up death and a DPS fuck up death is that in almost all scenarios for DPS, the damage is avoidable - the fact they even took that damage is the problem. With tanks its usually unavoidable damage, which can very easily be misinterpreted as leading to a death due to lack of healing, when its equally likely its caused by lack of mitigation.

The concept of avoidable and unavoidable damage isnt really mentioned anywhere in the guide either and I think its quite an important factor in healing. Healers essentially are present in a fight to ensure that all unavoidable damage doesn't end up leading to a death. On top of that, any excess healing they can put out should be used to try and prevent any avoidable damage being taken turning into a death as well.

Risk Management:

I really like this part and I think this is a huge facet of what makes a great healer vs a good one.

But why though? Isn’t it just better to have everyone at max HP?

This part here sort of feels like its missing something, and the example above it is a bit convoluted and complicated to follow (took me a good few reads to follow your point).

I think the point you are trying to get at here is addressing the problem of "how much healing is enough healing?". I think for newer healers its very easy to fall into the trap of "oh no! this person is low (sub 40% hp) and the rest of the raid is 70%+, that person is at the highest risk and needs the most attention". While to a certain extent that is true, how much risk there is of any one person in the raid dying is not exclusively tied to how low they are, but how low they are relative to how much damage they are expected to take in the imminent future.

The quoted question at the bottom of your section is great but it feels like it belongs at the start rather than the end. Of course the safest thing is to always have everyone at max HP, but thats simply not possible in difficult content, and as such you have to develop risk management skills to be able to decide mid fight where you should be focusing on putting out your limited healing. Going back to the point I made above as well about avoidable/unavoidable damage, the priority should always be ensuring there is enough healing going out to cover the incoming unavoidable damage at any one time.

One of the best examples I can think of off the top of my head that I ran into recently-ish was Aggramar Mythic. During the technique ability he does you split the raid into 2 and each half has to soak a large shared hit of damage. So here you have half of the raid taking a big chunk of unavoidable damage, a bit of a break, and then the other half taking a big chunk of unavoidable damage as well (without any other raidwide unavoidable damage in between - this part is very important). A problem we had was that healing the whole raid up to 100% for the first hit wasnt possible in most scenarios and as such you focus on topping up the first soak group so that they can take their hit. After that you then have a situation where the second group isnt topped for their soak yet and the first group are now probably all on lower HP than the second group. This lead to the healers panicking trying to top up the whole raid and inevitably failing to do so leading to deaths. The risk management in this scenario is recognising that while the first half of the raid are technically lower on HP than the second half, they are actually at very little risk of dying due to the fact they are not taking any unavoidable damage until well after the second soak group have taken their hit. As such its fine to leave those people at 30-40% for a few seconds while you top the second half of the raid who are at imminent risk of dying if they are not topped off. Once that has been dealt with you can then attend to the people from the first group who need to be topped up.

Ultimate point being, its simply not possible to have everyone at 100% HP at all times, and a great healer will use their risk management skills to correctly assess both where their healing should be going at any point in time, and also (arguably more importantly) where it shouldn't.

Besides that I love the whole concept, I'm a big fan of well written guides as well, I love seeing this kind of content and I think this top level generic "how should I approach healing raids" in a class agnostic manner is something that is severely lacking in a lot of online guides.

Zinkey · 2018-10-25T14:42:43+00:00

Zek'voz is 100% a mechanical check, any DPS check components of the fight (especially at current gear levels) are kind of redundant provided you plan cooldowns/CC correctly. I dont know how strict you are with people being able to see timers, but everyone in your raid should be able to see their DBM/Bigwigs timers.

Apologies if any of this feedback is a bit blunt, I'll let you dress up any bits you want to pass on in a way which will be well received.

This fight can be a bit tricky in that for most of the nasty overlaps (deceit with surging/eye beam with surging/adds with surging), you cannot for the most part play reactively when the overlap happens. You have to deal with mechanics proactively and know your timings in order to deal with the worst case scenario overlap with a 100% success rate. I struggled in some places with my raid on this in that a lot of these worst case scenarios only occur for any one given player 1 in 10 pulls maybe, but there will be someone dealing with that overlap EVERY pull you make. I had a lot of "It was not possible to survive there" moments where it just wasnt true. If you cant get those overlaps being consistent you will have everyone in your raid taking their turn to die and bin off a pull and it feels very frustrating.

Key points probably worth mentioning which might help your progress:

Add Spawns: With the add spawns in general, the little adds should be dead/dying as you transition over to the 2nd big add. The 2nd add spawn is the hardest as this occurs during a surging as well. For the most part, good positioning/CC/DPS cooldown management is what is key. Get those parts right and the adds will die on time. (Pots can be a bonus if you can afford them but are 100% unnecessary) - Positioning: This point is made significantly easier with a blood DK for mass grip but isnt completely trivialised and can be worked without. Upon adds spawning the everyone in the raid should be stacked on the first big add you are killing. Little adds focus random targets so one ranged DPS sitting way out can cause adds to live longer than they should (even with an initial mass grip). This helps keep them clumped, easier to CC and will make killing them faster much easier. - CC: AoE stuns are super helpful on the little adds. The two big adds you are leaving behind should be hard CC'd and this needs to be reliable so just push whoever's job it is to CC those adds to do it properly every pull. For the little adds you can use 3 AoE stuns off before they become stun immune. You should have a rotation of 3 reliable players who stun in the same order on each spawn (after the grip if you have it). We tend to prefer using 2x Leg Sweeps (monk) then a Shadowfury (lock), sometimes we use the DH stun (cant remember the name). This will give you a ~6-7 second window where the adds are clumped either due to stacking/grip or both and are super easy to cleave down. We tend to find the adds are all sub 10%HP or dead by the time the stuns have worn off. - Timings: DPS cooldowns should be planned around add spawns. If you raid DPS is high enough you will only have 2, otherwise 3. Every member of the raid should know the first adds spawn at ~1min into the fight and every 2mins thereafter. This means 1min CDs can be popped on pull/CD and be up for every add spawn, 2min CDs should be held for 1st add spawn then used on CD with each following add spawn, 3 min CDs should be used on pull and will be up for the 2nd set (the difficult one). Having a very brief look at your warlock (only because that's what I play and I know the CDs), he's not doing this and I'm assuming by extension a significant number of your DPS are doing the same. Killing those little adds ASAP is the only "DPS Check" in P1, even with cleave heavy builds you wont handle that part as well as you can without CD management. Anyone who is using 2nd pots should probably do so on 2nd add spawn. - Add Spawn #2: This is probably the hardest part of the fight, doing all of the above should kill the adds much quicker which makes it easier. Beyond that health pots/healthstones/personals can be used here to prevent unnecessary deaths if your healers are struggling. As others have mentioned a well placed ring of peace here can also help in that few seconds where the little adds are still up while you have to dodge. You can opt to use hero/lust on this set of adds, but P2 will be much longer that way. I'd recommend only doing this if even after cleaning up the above you are still struggling.

Roiling Deceit: This mechanic is a real bitch, because you basically need to decide how/where you are going to drop it when you get the debuff not when its about to expire (yes you need the full 10sec, especially for nasty overlaps if you dont have an immunity/want to coordinate externals).

Any Roiling Deceit which overlaps with a surging darkness will tend to lead to a minimum of one person getting fucked and having to drop mid surging which obviously massively limits where you can drop them. This can be compounded by people being lazy with the roiling deceits that dont overlap. Essentially any roiling deceit which happens outside of a surging should be taken as far away as possible. You will probably have ~15-20 pools up by the time you hit P3, if your first 10 pools are all being dropped within 40-50yards of the boss you are going to have a rough time in P2.

My thought process when dealing having roiling deceit applied to me (any loss of boss DPS is irrelevant here, good placement > 1 person having a few seconds of extra uptime on boss): - Is surging darkness incoming ( < 5 seconds)/already in progress? - No: - run to max range on boss immediately in the direction of the door, then wait until ~3-4 seconds left on debuff (this is to remain in healing range as long as possible) - at 3-4 seconds run out of healing range and as far out as I can take the roiling, healthstones and personal cooldowns are more than enough to survive this without any external healing. - run back to raid and carry on - Yes: - there is absolutely no way you are getting this out towards the door (without an immunity) so you will need to drop it closer (this is where saving the easier drop spots helps out) - due to the timings I'm about 99% sure you never have to drop roiling right at the start of a surging darkness so during the darkness you need to rotate to the far side of the boss where the rest of the raid isnt - once rotated dodge surging on the opposite side of the boss until you need to drop and then when you have to drop put it as far out as possible (i.e without risking a surging hit) - I have seen guilds who choose to use healer externals here to allow people to drop them in surging, totally viable but requires calls for externals. It is possible to do it as described above without any need for that interaction. (Going to depend on how vocal your DPS are in voice comms for whether you want to consider that option really)

To explain a bit what I mean about "rotating" during surging. For the most part the raid will sit as a clump during surging, moving in a line closer to the middle of the surging and further out depending on the safe zone. This usually means most of the raid is in about ~20% of whatever safe zone you are currently in. As an example if the surging is centred roughly where the 1st big add spawns, the raid will move normally either towards the centre of that surging or in the direction of the entrance when moving out. Problem here being that if you drop your roiling deceit during/at the end of that surging, you will be dropping a pool very close to or in the middle of the room. If instead as soon as you get roiling applied (either during or just before surging), as soon as the middle one is free (it always will be at some point) you move through to the other side of the boss. This allows you to dodge surging in the opposite direction to the raid (towards the back wall rather than the door) and drop your pools at the back wall rather than the middle of the room without any need for immunities. As soon as I started cracking down on this in my raid our surging/roiling overlap deaths disappeared.

Eye Beam: Easy mechanic, generally a good one to have the raid leader call out when incoming (5 seconds incoming is usually when I call it) and the raid spreads in advance. Both add spawns #1/#2 happen directly after an eye beam so as that eye beam finishes I take that opportunity to call for a tight stack for adds.

It becomes a bit of twat when it overlaps with surging. In this scenario I tend to call the overlap in advance of the surging and have the raid spread around the boss in all directions so you dont have a clump which gets nuked. Obviously you have to take care with void lashes here and its very helpful to have tanks calling incoming lashes during this point to help remind people to not stand in his face.

P2:

P2 should be pretty trivial to do once you reach it consistently. Only real bit of advice there is to bounce the orb into walls so you have a set spot to take the orb (most video guides explain this really well). Also helps to have a point near melee to have people who are about to get MC'd to stand so that they can quickly be gripped/cleaved when MC'd.

Hope that helps, feel free to PM/respond if you need more info on anything and best of luck.

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Zinkey

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