April 2022 STC Guild Meeting Notes
Welcome Saints to the April 2022 WoW Chapter guild meeting! I trust everyone is starting to enjoy some warmer weather as we begin to depart from the dreariness of winter. Here in Rindy we’ve had seemingly nothing but rain for the past month, but at least I don’t have to shovel rain.
On the WoW front, we took down Lords of Dread, Rygelon, and the Jailer last night, which was amazing to see, especially since many of those in attendance hadn’t seen him before yesterday. Plowing through the final four bosses of a raid with nearly the full raid team is great progress, and I’m very proud of what we all accomplished. It won’t be long before we’re starting to clear these bosses on heroic and nearing AOTC.
Additionally, over the weekend, a handful of Saints put together a PUG for several of our alts to save a lockout with all the non-tier bosses dead on normal. This will enable us to kill only the tier bosses in normal since those items will be relevant for another month or two even as we start to get heroic loot at a more regular clip. Thanks to Hantzu for putting that together and for the Saints who came out to help us get that lockout! Note that having this lockout does not mean we are unable to kill other bosses even after we’ve killed those with tier if there are items that people still need from those bosses, it just gives us the flexibility to save time.
You may have seen that I referenced the normal tier pieces being relevant for another month or two. While the tier bonuses are so powerful for most specs that item level isn’t of concern, there is another exciting development coming up next week that will greatly help the acquisition of tier gear. The Creation Catalyst opens on April 12th, and this system will allow players to convert non-tier armor pieces into tier pieces for the cost of Cosmic Flux. The Creation Catalyst requires you to have completed chapter 4 of the Zereth Mortis campaign quest.
The way it works is that you will be able to transform any armor piece that you collected during season 3 from mythic dungeons (M0 or M+), PVP, or raid into a tier piece at the same item level and with any tertiaries (leech, avoidance, speed, indestructible, or a socket) the item had before conversion. On the PTR, the item level 246 gear purchasable with sandworn relics can also be converted, but it’s unclear whether that will be the case on live servers as well. For example, if you convert an item level 265 shoulder with leech you got from M+ into tier, the result will be an item level 265 tier shoulder with leech. Note that each tier piece has static secondary stats that will be converted when you use the catalyst. If your tier helm has crit/haste, any helm you convert using the catalyst will have crit/haste on it regardless what the secondary stats of the pre-converted piece were.
While the Creation Catalyst will open on April 12th, it requires charges that will accumulate over time in order to use. This means you will have to choose which pieces to convert first even if you otherwise have the items and flux to be able to convert more than one. The rumored rate of charge accumulation will start at one charge per week for the first three weeks, then gradually become more regular until we’re receiving one charge every other day.
One note about the tier sets and Creation Catalyst is that Blizzard did create tier pieces for slots that cannot be obtained in any other way, but those slots do not contribute to your set bonuses. The raid and great vault tier pieces drop for helm, shoulders, chest, hands, and legs, and these are the only pieces that include the power associated with the set bonus. Back, wrist, belt, and feet items all exist to complete the appearance, but they do not offer the set bonuses. If you do want the full appearance but value the set bonuses more, it would be wise to ensure you use the Catalyst to complete your set bonuses first, and then create the appearance only pieces.
I have two final notes about the Creation Catalyst to cover. First, for nearly every spec, achieving your two and four-piece set bonuses will give you a bigger bump in performance than any amount of item level or secondary stat distribution you could be sacrificing in those slots. Until you have your four-piece bonus, you will gain more power by creating a lower item level tier piece with awful stat distributions in a slot you don’t have tier on than to upgrade an item level 239 tier glove to an item level 278 tier glove.
Second, you may want to consider planning out which tier pieces fit best for your legendary slot choices and secondary stats for all the specs you want to play. Depending on what slots you want to put your legendaries on and what your ideal stat distribution would be, you may want to get all five slots with tier bonuses before upgrading the item level of a slot you already have so you can run different gear sets for different purposes. For instance, an ideal setup for me is to run my legendary unity item on my chest for kitty but since I would prefer to run my tanking legendary on legs for bear, that requires me to use the tier chest piece for bear. Again, I would not make this optimization until I have an ideal setup for kitty already, but I play bear in keys enough to justify crafting the tier chest before I worry about upgrading the item level from my normal tier pieces.
The final thing I wanted to say before I hand it off to Meesha for inductions is that we’ve brought back M+ night on Friday evenings again for anyone who wants to join. The event is scheduled to start at 8PM eastern time and we encourage everyone to sign up. We will form a raid group with all interested parties and then form competent groups out of those who sign up. If we get a multiple of 5 with requisite tanks and healers, we will get as many groups as possible going to start. If not, Meesha and I are usually good for at least two runs, sometimes three to swap in people who weren’t able to get into the first wave due to space or role limitations.
Inductions
Blaviken-Lothar
Warfreak-Lothar
Effed-Moonrunner
Grizzlyadam-Malfurion
Raiding Update
Not that much to say after everything there from Dwelk!
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Look back on March
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Crushed it - I'm a raid with two end bosses, the full group has already killed Anduin and the Sunday "learning" group has just cleared the jailer.
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Raid organization is working as intended/did what we said we would do
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Going forward
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Done with non tier normal bosses. There's not much value in killing these
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Reiteration of goal of Sunday- Sundays are to learn the fights and bring knowledge and gear back to The full group. We are balancing a growing group of raiders interested in mythic content with our foundation of a community guild the best way I know how
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Address addons - add-ons have always been a part of the game. In recent years, they have been more and more "required " for boss fights but generally less powerful than they used to be. In vanilla, many could play your character for you! Today, they are primarily for information sharing
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Weak auras - we have a boss where information sharing has become critical. We will continue to work on lords of Dread on normal without the weakaura required, but need all raiders able to communicate. Order of preference is 1) weakaura; 2) microphone; 3) typing
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Method Raid tools- this will become a highly utilized yet optional addon. The main use case will be healer coordination but many other things will apply as well
