This week in World of Warcraft, pretty much nothing of substance has happened. Like I said in my previous post, we're at the stage of the patch cycle where most people have completed their seasonal in-game goals and are waiting for the next content patch. There's still no release date, but that might be Blizzard trying not to take away too much hype from Burning Crusade Classic, which has started its pre-patch period and is going live on June 1. Personally, I played enough of the Burning Crusade back when it was current and have no real desire or intention to play that again. It was kind of the same deal with WoW Classic, I have so many fond memories of that time, but I don't really care to play through that again.

There have been trickles of news about the coming patch, but I think I'll wait until closer to release before putting down my thoughts on it. In the meantime, my current WoW routine is that I log in two nights a week to raid for 3 hours with my guild.

Last week I had hopes that we'd be able to get to Phase 2 of the Sire Denathrius encounter, and I'm pleased to say that we did so in our first night for the week.

Phase 2 is kind of cool. After the intermission phase between Phases 1 and 2 (named March of the Penitent) there's a change in boss arena and you are pulled down to the floor below. The boss has 4 "horsemen" that need to be dealt with, 2 at a time. So the raid of 20 people splits up into two groups, and each of the adds has their own set of mechanics to deal with.

The add I've been dealing with has a sort of bullet hell-like projectiles that she spews out at regular intervals that you just need to dodge. Not that bad. But Phase 2 is kind of an intricate dance of positioning. Go to this position, deal with this add, get dragged to the middle by the boss and take a warlock's demonic gateway to get to another platform to outrange one of the boss' deadly attacks, deal with the new set of 2 horsemen adds that spawn and... that's as far as we've gotten. We're 89 attempts (about 9 hours) in so far, so I think our progress is on track with what is to be expected.

Looking at this graph taken from progstats.io, our expected pull count should be between 150-250 and expected progression time to be 18-32 hours. Stuff like this is one thing I love about the hardcore WoW community. There's tons of sites for different types of information, and the community takes it all so seriously. I love it. I think the reason is that raiding in WoW is to me one of the most satisfying types of PvE combat. There's all the different boss mechanics to keep in mind all the while pulling off your regular damage rotation which to me is just inherently satisfying. From an outsider's perspective, I'm sure it looks like a mess. The fact that most people don't use the default UI doesn't help for watchability of WoW content to an outsider either - how is someone who isn't familiar with the game to glean any sort of information when every video looks different? Well. Maybe what's going on on the screen isn't that important.

I thought a fun thing to do with these weekly boss progress check-ins would be to upload a video of our best attempt so far. Here's us on a good attempt at our current progress.

Phase 1 is going by relatively easily at this point. We're getting comfortable with the movements and the mechanics, and that's usually when the banter starts. You can hear the shift in tone in our Discord as soon as we get close to Phase 2 and once we enter it, that it's time to put your focus pants on. Progress next week is probably not going to be much further along, we're going to be shifting around our strategy a bit during the horseman type adds, so we will probably need a good few attempts to get comfortable with that.