The Raid Observer: Day 2 (or Day -5) Update!

Updates Today

Well, not much to report really, mostly just a bit of news on the overall attack of the normal modes by guilds everywhere and a bit of news on what's (not) happening with the elite race so far. 

The progress sites continue to be a bit wonky, which I realise will continue until the guild scans and whatnot are complete. Kruf explained this to me last night and while I tried to look (textually speaking) like I had a clue what he was talking about, he started talking in techno-speak and maths-ness and I kind of got lost at "crawling" and "scan." Anyways, let's hope they catch up with us soon. I reckon next week the elite race will be more accurate anyway.

 

The Big Race

So the unwashed masses of raiders assaulted the Dragon Soul like a baby tasting ice cream for the first time. We saw a dramatic spike from about 2000 guilds killing Morchok on the first US-server only day, to around 13000 guilds on the second day. No big surprise there. Any guild that likes to raid--from the most casual to the hardcore--will be looking at checking out the new raid instance (not including the elites, that tend to have a different philosophy about what they do the first week of a patch, incidentally, but more on that below) and see what they can defeat.

Morchok, I'd say, proved to be a not-too-challenging foe (others might say "cake walk"). As one raid leader of a semi-hard core guild told me this morning, "We killed it on first try without anyone dying I think." Is Morchok too easy? Is he an early Christmas present? I suppose that's going to depend on the group facing him, but suffice to say, the more "hard core" guilds were making their way through the content without any significant wipefests so far. While the numbers drop down gradually as you look at the numbers for the remaining 7 encounters, but steady normal progress is being made at a fairly rapid pace, even for the more casual guilds out there. Yesterday I noted a guild on my own server that had cleared all the 10-man normal modes in a few hours--and this is not a hard core guild. Will it be a similar story when we get to the heroic modes? We'll have to see!

 

The Littler Elite Race

Anyway, what are these guys up to? I mean come on, Paragon didn't even kill a single boss in DS? Did they get lost and go back to Firelands on accident? These long dark nights are making our northern friends a bit confused. Method barely even got through some of the bosses and then stopped? They are ranked world 5414? Are they... what? Ensidia, vodka, Envy, For the Horde, Inner Sanctum, are all half way too... did they just fail at the 5th boss? Ok so Карфаген did a bit better, but DW has scared them off? Stars didn't even show up for the race yet and I can't seem to find any evidence of In extremis! :)

Ok, so Premonition did kill all 8 on normal but they didn't even get the realm first! What's up with our little elites? Well, there are strategies to all of this. See, for the elite guilds, Week 1 is all about that practice lap and the squirrel-like storing up of those resources that one will need for the heroic race ahead. They'll all tend to have a slightly different approach, but their mindset is about optimising in anticipation of the actual race which begins during Week 2. They may hold off on clearing all the normal bosses if killing the respawning trash helps them or if they want to do some other resource building/optimising activity before the week is up. And never mind the new introduction of our Raid Finder! This has created an interesting, new element that is being seriously considered by some of our elite guilds.

Keep in mind, when I say elite, I usually mean the guilds in the top 50 or so. I hesitate to give a specific numerical range because the notion of "elite" is really more about mindset and goals, which can be shared by much more than those guilds in the top 50 alone.

Anyway, more to come!