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    World of Warcraft: Shadowlands

    Game » consists of 1 releases. Released Nov 23, 2020

    The eighth World of Warcraft expansion set, Shadowlands opens up the world of the afterlife, due to Sylvanas Windrunner defeating the Lich King.

    Raid Log #01 - Sire Denathrius

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    qreedence

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    Edited By qreedence

    Introduction

    I have played a lot of World of Warcraft in my day - probably somewhere north of 10,000 hours. The sunk cost fallacy is real, and I'm probably staying on this boat until the servers explode or something. I do play it very "seasonally", putting in a ton of time when new content arrives, and then slowly winding down and taking a break until the next drop. Shadowlands released in November of 2020, and we're still on the initial patch (9.0) and the initial raid. Which is a good thing, 'cause my guild and I are still not done with the current raid, Castle Nathria.

    The raids are 90% of what are keeping me in this game, and I don't seem to be alone in this given that there's a term for logging in to raid, and then logging off until the next time you raid. When you've played through all the content in a given expansion/patch, raid logging becomes the de facto way of playing for a lot of people, me included.

    There are 4 difficulties of the raids:

    • LFR (Looking For Raid)
    • Normal
    • Heroic
    • Mythic

    The first 3 difficulties are doable with random people, and scale to your raid size. Mythic is designed and scaled for 20 people and is where I find the most fun. Other than the bosses having more health and doing more damage, each increase in difficulty adds new mechanics to contend with. By the time you hit Mythic difficulty, there's usually only seconds between the bosses' different abilities and a lot to take in. Especially considering that on Mythic, bosses are tuned in a way that requires players to be able to output a lot of damage and healing while at the same time dealing with the fight mechanics. All of the above means that mythic raiding is usually only done with guilds, as you need the communication and the consistency of having the same people with you every time.

    With this feature, I want to (mostly for my own sake) break down the bosses my guild and I are currently progressing on, partly to sort through all the information in my head and to perhaps give a small insight into what raiding is like in World of Warcraft.

    Sire Denathrius

    Sire Denathrius is the 10th and final boss of the current raid, Castle Nathria.
    Sire Denathrius is the 10th and final boss of the current raid, Castle Nathria.

    This week we had our first night of progression on this boss. Sire Denathrius, Big Denny, Double Dick Donny, Daddy Denathrius. The community has established that this hot vampire daddy does indeed fuck. If you're surprised by the fact that I said "first night of progression", the reality with mythic raiding is that often times, you spend days, weeks or even months on some bosses. Especially the final boss of a raid tier can be expected to take a while. For some context, currently 1,230 guilds have killed Sire Denathrius on Mythic Difficulty, while roughly 40,000 guilds have killed the first boss of the raid on Normal difficulty (source: WoWProgress). The typical pull count (amount of times the boss has been pulled before successfully being killed) ranges from 150-250 according to progstats.io. We managed to have around 30 pulls on our first night. With us raiding 2 times a week, that should mean we will probably kill this boss around the end of May/beginning of June.

    Denathrius is a 3-phase fight (phase 1 lasting from 100-70% HP, phase 2 from 70-40% HP and phase 3 40-0% HP), and our goal for the first night was to practice phase 1.

    Phase 1

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    Burden of Sin is the main mechanic of phase 1. At the start of the encounter, all players start with 6 stacks of this debuff. It does some negligible damage, but the main component of the debuff is that it interacts with the intermission phase.

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    The dungeon journal entry for this is somewhat lengthy, but the main point is that during the intermission, you need to walk towards towards the center of the room and have 15 seconds to do so. If anyone should fail to make it to the middle of the room in the alotted time, they simply die. The way Burden of Sin interacts with this intermission phase is that each stack of the debuff slows you by 20%. At 6 stacks, that means 120% reduced movement speed, effectively rooting you in place.

    Being rooted in place while having to walk towards the middle of the room obviously does not work. Thankfully, one of Denathrius' other abilities lets you get rid of your Burden of Sin debuff.

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    The part where it says "players in a cone in front of him" is very important. You have to be pretty much in front of the boss to get hit by this ability, and if you succeed in getting hit, you lose 1 stack of your 6-stack debuff. If you get hit by the ability, you also spawn a small enemy called an Echo of Sin, which needs to be killed quickly. If it's not killed in time, it gets re-absorbed back into the person that spawned it and reapplies a stack of Burden of Sin. Denathrius casts this ability a total of 6 times in phase 1, but unfortunately you can't have the whole raid take the hit 6 times in a row due to another ability called Blood Price.

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    Blood Price, aka the ability where he force chokes you and lifts you in the air (players have created an addon that makes your character say some variations on "Harder Daddy UwU" when this occurs). The second part of this dungen journal entry is the scary part about this ability - the healthpools of players are currently at somewhere around 40,000HP. The way this ability works is that it makes everyone deal 3,500 damage to ALL players that currently have the same number of stacks as them. The first Blood Price comes after the first Cleansing Pain. If everybody stood in front of it and took the hit and is currently at 5 stacks of the debuff, everybody would deal 3,500 damage to the 19 other people in the raid. Some quick napkin math reveals that to mean that if the whole raid has the same number of stacks, everybody takes 66,500 damage which is about 150% of someone's entire health pool.

    What the raid needs to do in order to survive is split the group into teams, and have the different teams alternate who stands in front of the frontal cone ability Cleansing Pain. If half the raid is at 5 stacks and the other half of the raid is at 6 stacks, everyone should take about 31,500 damage, which is still really scary. Having the whole raid lose 90% of their HP in a second means that the healers have to work hard to make sure everyone is pretty much at full health before this ability hits.

    These abilities are the main jist of Phase 1 of the encounter, but just to make it a little more hectic and give players a few more plates to spin, there are a few more mechanics to contend with.

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    Night Hunter is the first of these lethal abilities. 3 images of Denathrius appear, and mark 3 random players that they will charge towards. That player will then die. Which is bad, obviously. To prevent a player from dying, there need to be a few other players in the path between the Night Hunter and the marked player, to split some of that damage between them. If enough players are intercepting each Night Hunter, the ability barely does any damage. If too few people, or nobody, do - someone will most likely die. Crucially, you can't intercept 2 Night Hunters at the same time or you instantly die.

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    Ravage is the final ability of this initial phase of the encounter, which now that I've laid out is still a lot to deal with. Basically, at specific intervals Denathrius will command his sword Remornia to cover a third of the room in red goop. The first rule of World of Warcraft raiding is "don't stand in shit". Shit is an all-encompassing term when it comes to raiding. Any harmful ground effect counts as "shit". This particular version of shit is that a third of the room starts to glow, and then "detonates" (instantly killing whoever is inside the area), and then leaves red goop on the floor for the remainder of the fight. Standing in the red goop will quickly drain your health. What this means is that by the time Denathrius casts Ravage for the 3rd time, you need to have gotten him to 70% health to trigger the next phase. Otherwise, the whole boss arena is covered in red goop and the raid will quickly start dying.

    Progress! ...Progress?

    So how did we fare during our first night of exploration of Phase 1 of Double Dick Donny? It's hard to say if we did good or bad, but we did not manage to get him to 70% to trigger the intermission to Phase 2. Our early wipes consisted of dying to Blood Price. People really have to be topped up healthwise, or they just instantly die. Night Hunters proved to be a tricky thing as well, with losing people due to either standing in 2 lines or not enough people splitting the damage.

    We didn't really have time to see if our strategy for removing our Burden of Sin stacks worked out, seeing as we never triggered the intermission before we died to Blood Price or the adds spawned from Cleansing Pain. In other words... it's early going, and we didn't really expect a whole lot from our first night of progression. This encounter is also on the longer side of things, clocking in at above 10 minutes. That means there's a lot of different parts of the fight you need to memorize in order to succeed, and keeping your focus for that entire duration is definitely a challenge.

    Check back next week to see if we have managed to get to the second phase of the fight, that sounds like it's gonna be a whole lot of fun!

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    Congratulations just getting that far, I hear the proceeding fight is a real bastard on mythic. Only got to the council with my own guild when we had to stop raiding due to not enough people showing up.

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    qreedence

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    Congratulations just getting that far, I hear the proceeding fight is a real bastard on mythic. Only got to the council with my own guild when we had to stop raiding due to not enough people showing up.

    Thank you! Yeah, Stone Legion Generals mostly get that reputation because of the inconsistent timers and unpredictability. There's also a lot of things that will wipe the raid if 1 person messes up, which can always feel very frustrating.

    Shame about your guild, but it feels like a LOT of people burned out on this expansion pretty fast unfortunately.

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    Buttbear

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    I took the trauma of 2007-era TBC Lady Vaaszh (the last time I raided seriously) as my guiding emotional light through your engaging read. It's both a good write-up of the bosse's opening mechanics and an empathetic insight into the harrowing madness of Mythic difficulty.

    Goodluck, raider!

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