So, after bemoaning, somewhat, the state of Hunters in Castle Nathria, a funny thing happened one night later…
The night after I started testing how BM was playing for me in Nathria on one of our farm nights, a night that went as smoothly and as fun a night as you could hope for, things kinda changed.
The following night, on our first mythic raid night of the week, I didn’t attend the raid, choosing instead to attend on the Sunday night with my 2nd raid night that week. So off I logged, choosing to spend some time with my wife, watching telly. It turns out I missed a pretty important raid.
Mythic Shriekwing, normally a boss we kill in a couple of tries at most, turned out to be a killer for us. Wipe after wipe gave rise to frayed tempers, and fairly shortly into the night our raid leader quit not just the raid, but the guild as a whole. This was a big deal, because our Raid Leader was solely responsible for, well, leading our raids.
As it happened, over the next 24 hours (and then further over the following days), a good lot of our raiders decided to leave the guild, and form a new guild, along with our former raid leader. The new guild, Anything is Better, quickly formed and pulled in a number of former Fade players.
This included me.
I stayed on in Fade until the Sunday night raid, as I’d already made the commitment to show up and play that night. The following day however, following a few more departures from the guild, I decided that it was my turn to make the jump and join the players who had left for AIB, most of whom were the players I enjoyed playing alongside in Fade.
Fortunately, Fade had had a rather large recent intake of former members, who had been in another guild together since originally leaving Fade, so even with all of the departures, they were able to carry on more or less as they were, albeit with a bunch of different faces in place. So I’m thankful for that at least.
As for me, I was asked to join AiB and leave the DPS life behind me, in order to become, once again, a sniffer of boss genitalia…
Dual Wielding Tanks
So, to begin with I levelled a Guardian Druid. Mainly because I knew we were needing to get a raid out ASAP for logs (so we had some basis for recruitment), and we only had 1 tank. We also had a surfeit of main spec leather users, and only 1 or maybe 2 main spec plate wearers, so I knew I’d be able to get a Druid levelled and geared via in-guild mythic+ runs pretty damn quickly, and that’s exactly what happened.
I got my Druid levelled, renown ground to 30, and pushed through numerous mythic+ dungeons, and geared to the point where I was able to tank all of Heroic Castle Nathria.
However, I had begun levelling my Prot Paladin, as I’d enjoyed getting back into tanking again, and two things became fairly apparent at this point:
1: Guardian has serious threat issues due to low damage, in comparison to other tanks. Sure this is somewhat mitigated with a lot more gear, but that would take weeks more gearing.
2: Prot Paladin is, for me, a lot more fun to play, and a HELL of a lot better at damage and threat than Guardian. I’m also much more able to survive situations that would see me dead on my Druid. Which isn’t exactly what the current meta would have you believe, proclaiming that Guardian Druids are near-impossible to kill in a raid, and Paladins are paper tanks.
Well, I certainly don’t think I would’ve been able to tank Mythic Shriekwing and Mythic Huntsman Altimor at iLevel 198 on my Guardian Druid, because that’s exactly what I did with my Prot Paladin. I tanked Mythic Shriekwing at item level 198, got a cloak upgrade from it which took me to 199 for Altimor, and then promptly broke the ranking system for parses on Altimor after getting a 100% rank on Shriekwing:
Currently I am the worldwide Number One Alliance Prot Paladin at my item level bracket for Mythic Huntsman Altimor, across all regions and all Covenants!
Very few Prot Paladins are either brave enough or stupid enough to attempt it I guess! 🙂
Since then, I’ve managed to get a few more pieces of gear and am currently sitting at just over 204 iLevel. I could probably do with another few nights of gearing with farm nights in heroic, but given I can only raid twice a week, I’m more needed on our mythic nights, Thursday and Sundays.
As for the guild, how did we manage to get a Mythic raid together so quickly?
Well, our officers had been busy beavering away recruiting new bodies, and managed to happen upon a group of players who were looking to leave their old guild and still play together. None of them had done Mythic at all, having just finished Heroic Nathria recently. So we managed to pull in 8-10 bodies in pretty quick order, giving us just enough players to get a Mythic raid together.
And pretty damned well it went too. We got Heroic Denathrius down for my first time as a tank after 5 pulls, got Mythic Shriekwing down in 3 pulls, then also took Huntsman down in 7 pulls after that.
We’ll be working on Mythic Hungering Destroyer this week, which should be doable after the recent health & damage nerfs. We had one night on him, another night I wasn’t able to attend, which has led me to commit to Mythic progression for the forseeable future over further gearing nights on Heroic farm nights.
It also means my weekly Great Vault will be pretty bare from now on, but at least this week I was able to get rid of my worst slot, a 171 neck for a 213 Huntsman neck. But it does mean that if we’re regularly getting at least 3 Mythic bosses down in a week, I’ll have at least 1 x 226 piece to pick up every week, which should give a nice iLevel boost.
The new guys are settling in well, and very happy that our first mythic night as a guild got them 2 pretty quick first Mythic kills for them. They’re a nice bunch and suit our mentality as a guild well, so it looks like, fingers crossed, that it’s working out! 🙂
We’re also having a lot of fun on raid nights, and regularly putting together mythic+ runs, so gearing for my Paladin shouldn’t hopefully be a great issue.
So all change over the past few weeks – different class, different role as well as a different guild!
Change, it’s the only constant…
