Raid Schedule Tetris

Got close on Lei Shen, 23%! That's only once into the final phase, but it's significantly better than the previous week.

This week there is a high chance I will be out Thursday night. I'm preparing stuff for a weekend trip and I don't know how fast it will all get done Thursday. If it's super fast, then I'll be online, but that's unlikely. :) The raid wanted to do a fresh clear (or start from Tortos), so that's the Thursday plan.

For Monday, we can use my lockout and go straight to Lei Shen and finish him off!

This week did not go as planned, alas! Mostly due to a lot of RL stuff that crushed plans. Yay, life! :)

If all that is better on Thursday, we may extend a lockout and go for the Thunder King. Otherwise we'll probably pick up at Durumu.

Sign ups don't work quite the way I'd like. :) Most of the time, if a sign-up is missing it's a "yes." Usually. So that's what I assume, but as you know it doesn't always work out. Sometimes Auto's internet leaks.

Bluepea signed up, so that's 11. Missing are Mal, Rom and Kul. If all three can come, which is likely for Mal and Kul, but iffy for Rom, then we'll be fine and have an extra tank. Serelyn can fill in for a healer. If 1-2 are still missing at raid time, we can probably PuG a DPS or healer and we're fine on tanks. I know a few so they might be available.

If we have to PuG someone, we'll probably still start at Durumu. If Kul is here and we have a full group, we might be able to use Ardwen's lockout to go to Twins.

Anyway, it's unfortunately hard to tell what we have until actual raid time. Yes, that is frustrating for me. Such is partly the nature of our more laid-back guild.

Lockouts we have:
Fresh (Those of us that killed Lei Shen)
Lei Shen only (Swipe and Bluepea)
Start at Durumu (Rom and Mal)

I'd certainly like to kill Lei Shen again, but I don't think that's the ONLY thing we should do for two days. So the options are a fresh lockout or starting from Durumu. That option is only possible if Rom or Mal is able to show up. Rom is indefinitely "iffy" due to family health concerns. Mal is totally unknown. Very strange that he's dropped off the grid.

Thus, I expect to be starting a new lockout on Thursday and as Aanvil pointed out, I think it's worth our time to hit Heroic Jin'rokh. He's overall fairly simple and shouldn't take long for us to smash. Other Heroic bosses will take more effort, so I'm inclined to clear the rest on Normal for the remainder of the week. Certainly more tier and stuff we can get from the later bosses!

We cleared up to Iron Qon last night with a couple of PuGs. Thursday we'll be off for the 4th, no raid is planned. Next Monday we'll extend the lockout and pick up at Qon. We should be able to kill him and the Twins fast to give us a time buffer for killing Lei Shen again.

So long as enough of us can show, it should be easy!

What Aanvil said. You are free to PuG anything prior to Iron Qon.

Not that you NEED to, cuz you'll just get Lei Shen's shield on Monday, right?

Currently planning a fresh run on Thursday, possibly with Heroic Jin'rokh. We will need to find a PuG or two though. Currently OUT for sure on Thursday are:

Aanvil
Krokuss
Romalus
Serelyn
Swipenrake

Which leaves us just 9 raiders. IF everyone else can come, we're obviously short one. So if you are going to be out tomorrow, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE let me know! Post to the sign-up thread, post here, tweet me or even text me, I don't care! That's why my information is there in the "Emergency Contact" sticky over in the Private General Discussion forum. (That's not a publicly viewable forum, Muta or I have to give specific access to it.)

Words can not describe how much better it is to see a small text saying "sorry I can't make it tonight, [event] happened" instead of just dead space at raid time. It SUCKS SO MUCH sitting there wondering "is this person coming or not?"

So PLEASE update us! Events happening outside of the game are ABSOLUTELY more important, but it won't take more than a minute or two to let me know something happened. Thank you. :)

For the moment, Rom is an indefinite "Out." He's dealing with a lot of RL stuff including helping his wife recover, fixing his flooded house (in Canada) and managing his business, which he had to leave for a month to go to Chile to help his wife. So a bunch of time consuming, but important stuff!

Rom still hopes to come back in a month or two after everything gets set right, but until we hear otherwise from him, I'm assuming he's Out for raids. I don't think we need to recruit to fill his spot at the moment. He does hope to come back and an extra melee DPS isn't that critical of a need anyway. ;) So we'll save the spot for Rom for now, but if he decides that he can't make it back, we'll re-evaluate.

But yes, sign up!

P.S. For the raid tonight, we might be able to get one or both of our PuGs from Thursday. We'll see what's up, since we're likely to be at least one short.

Good News: We had two VERY good attempts on H-Jin'rokh this week, one of which got him to 1%!

Bad News: We ONLY had TWO good attempts. Out of 22. UGH.

There were also mixed opinions on what we should do that night. Whether we should have kept trying Jin or moved on to just kill something. Some people were really tired with Normal and wanted to push Heroics hard, while others were really looking forward to a relaxing night of killing bosses and having fun. BOTH are very valuable to a healthy and happy raid, so the trick is grabbing that balance. I felt that as late as it was, we were just going downhill so it was time for some fun, which is why I had us move on.

Now, the future. I would absolutely like to keep working on Heroic bosses and if everyone would be happy skipping out on farm stuff for that, then that's fine. That's essentially how Normal progression is. We couldn't just skip Megaera when we had a hard time on her. We had to stick it out and kill her. We CAN do that on Heroic bosses though, which is obviously appealing when you still need loot. (Side note, we don't need loot to kill Jin'rokh. We nearly killed him with FOUR deaths. We have more than enough loot, we just need to execute properly.)

My suggestion is that for our next good raid, we spend the first 90 minutes on Heroic Jin'rokh. If we can't down him in that time frame, if we're just not executing right, we should move on. The rest of that Thursday night can be spent clearing the first five bosses. THEN on Monday we can spend an hour or two on Heroic Ji'kun. Why two bosses? Why not spend more time on Jin'rokh? Frankly, I think Ji'kun will be easier for us. I think there are less ways to screw it up, overall. Not so many things that can blow up. Further, the Lightning Storm on Jin requires everyone to do it right, but Ji'kun only needs a small group to fly properly. Numbers might be tighter, but mechanics may be easier. We won't know for sure until we try! :)

Will that be THIS week? Very hard to say. This Thursday we are already missing Ardwen, Kulgarr, Krokuss and Mutagen. That drops us to 9 raiders if everyone else can come. Monday looks better. If everyone else can show up and we find a good PuG, we can go for Heroic Jin'rokh anyway. Or we can do a fast loot clear night. Either way, I hope it will be fun!

K lissen up gud!

We should have eight raiders tonight. Swipe, Loaffy, Luv, Dark, Blue, Skarn, Serelyn, Mal. That leaves us shy one healer and one DPS, which we shouldn't have too much trouble pugging up tonight. Thus we should have a satisfying and enjoyable raid night!

We can do a little Heroic Jin if we want or just smashes all the stuff so we can actually kill the Thunder King on Monday and hopefully get Blue and Mal their kill.

Loaffy, we're on the Dark Animus. We should be able to finish up pretty fast.

Ardwen, well, welcome back! Sounds like we should have 12 people there tonight. Hah!

Query: With the screwy servers messing up our run last night, what do we want to do on Thursday?

a) Extend straight to H Ji-kun
b) Reclear first five on Normal, then H Ji-kun
c) Spend an hour-ish on H Jin'rokh then clear to H Ji-kun

I'm leaning C, but B is fine. A just seems silly to skip 5 bosses that we could kill in 90 minutes.

Aight, given that I think we should smash out H Ji-kun on Monday, clear the next 3 quickly on Normal and give H Iron Qon a try.