So close, yet so far…

We came a smidgen away from getting our first ever Cutting Edge, for killing N’Zoth on Mythic, but after 200+ pulls it just wasn’t meant to be…

Prior to the delay of Shadowlands, and the subsequent reveal of the pre-patch release date (1 week away as of the time of writing) Fade had been plugging away on Mythic N’Zoth. We had gotten in over 200 pulls on the big lad, but had been losing players to boredom slowly but surely. Players bored of BfA and of the N’Zoth fight itself.

So after losing one body too many, our 2nd tank, the guild called it for the remainder of the expansion. This means we’re finishing off Mythic Nya’lotha at 11/12 bosses down, and no cutting edge to show for our efforts over the past months.

Yes, 9½ months, you read that right. It certainly doesn’t feel that long, but having checked, the raid was released on January 22nd in the EU, meaning by the time pre-patch rolls around, the tier will be 1 week off of a full 10 months old.

It’s definitely felt shorter than that, to me at least, but then again we’ve been raiding solidly the entire time, so that’s probably why it didn’t feel as long as it has been…

For me personally I’m proud of what we managed to achieve, even if it was slower than your average CE guild. Fade has never achieved a Cutting Edge before, and while we didn’t claim this one, we were pretty close.

So long N’Zoth…

This gives me a lot of hope heading into Castle Nathria that perhaps our first CE will be within our grasp. We know we have the bodies capable of doing it, we’ll just need to pick up the pace a bit in order to push for it inside the regular 6-7 month raid tier window.


Going to Hell

Castle Nathria is looking like a fun raid all round. The fights look solid, and are well suited to either Marksman Hunter or Affliction Warlock.

As for me, I’m pretty much (for now) decided on sticking with Hunter, and going Marksmanship in the main. I’d transferred my Forsaken Hunter back to Alliance and made her Void Elf, and will be maining her, rather than my Gnome this time.

My Void Elf is my Legion Hunter, whom I had run all of my Artifact Appearances on, as well as all of my Order Hall stuff, so it’d make sense to go back to her if I want to finish off picking up my old Artifact Appearances, the few that I have left to collect on my Hunter…

However with the delay to Shadowlands release date, to an as-yet unspecified one, we now have no idea when the new raid tier will open, or if it will even be this year!

Blizzard could release the expansion December 1st, and hold off releasing Nathria for a full month to get over the hump of Christmas and New Year. They’ve said in the past that they don’t want to force raiders to be playing to get World Firsts over the holidays, so it’s looking like we’ll have more time than originally planned to get ready for the first tier, or that the release will be pushed back until mid-December…

Either way I’m glad that it has been pushed back. Because by all accounts (#stillnobeta) the game as it exists on Beta is extremely broken, and parts of it aren’t even working currently.

Better to give it a few more weeks to iron out the last lot of problems, and release a much better product. Look at it this way, in 6 months no-one will care if it was released a month or 6 weeks later than planned.

However if it had released in the state that it’s currently sitting in on Beta, then as Miyamoto once said:

A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad

Shigeru Miyamoto

I guess that gives us just that much longer to farm old transmogs and finish off older mythic bosses for their mounts!

See you in the afterlife…!