Dear Mimiron, I Hate You

We smashed our way through Flame Leviathan, XT-002, and Kologarn Tuesday night.

After 3 weeks of Tank duty, I asked for a shot to ride the Motorcycles. They were cool, but I think the Tanks suit me better. Maybe I’ll try a Demo next week.

My Raid Leader had discovered a better positioning to use on XT-002. Previously, we had been tanking him at the base the stairs. This time we positioned him in between the two junk piles on the right hand side of the room. With him there, we didn’t have any Adds spawn from those points. We wanted to practice him in this new position for when we do Hard Modes. The plan is to get a clear (kill all the bosses) and then start working on Hard Modes.

We are getting better and cleaner on all our kills. Auryia was a two shot. We had a couple of new people on Freya so it took one attempt for our DPS to learn how to manage the Add pack with the Elemental and the two Flowers that all have to die at the same time.

I had a ‘Real Life’ issue come up and wasn’t in for the Hodir kill. I don’t know how close we are to the 3 minute kill needed for his Hard Mode.

But let’s talk about Mimiron. He’s currently our major roadblock.

We spent a solid night wiping on Mimiron. Not a single mob was looted the whole night. The first night we faced him, we barely got into Phase 1 before we wiped.

For Phase 1, Mimiron’s in a tank, and I have a ton going on. We want to maximize DPS to get through the Phase before we have to endure too many Plasma Blasts, so I need to be really tight in my rotation. I have to be watching for where Mimiron drops the mines to find a good place to run if he winds up a Shock Blast. Reminiscent of Murmur in Shadow Labyrinth, you don’t want to be close to the Mimiron when he fires that off. Then I have to be ready to hit Divine Protection once he starts Plasma Blast. He doesn’t channel the spell; it’s more of an instant DoT. He channels Shock Blast. If I don’t hit DP, we wipe. The second Plasma Blast, I use Hand of Salvation with the Glyph of Salvation. Then I announce on vent that I’m “Out of Tricks”. That’s the cue for our Priest to get ready with Guardian Spirit for the third and final Plasma Blast.

There’s no aggro table in Phase 2 when he’s in a Tie Fighter looking thing. I make sure I’m always facing his back so I don’t have to worry about getting by the Laser Barrage.

In Phase 3, he’s in a helicopter and I’m picking up the Assault Bots. In the early attempts in this phase I would try to throw a Sacred Shield on the Hunter who is Ranged Tanking the Phase, but Once or twice when I did that, I would miss an Asssault Bot spawn and he’d kill a Mage or Healer. I was berating myself during the runback (WITHOUT my Push To Talk Key down). “Let the Healers do their job, you do yours!”

The Asssault Bots are really easy to pick up once you figure out they spawn from a Red Column of Light. The column is there a good 4 or 5 seconds before they spawn. I had to be really careful not to misclick and loot the Magnetic Core. We had a Feral Druid on the duty of looting the core (does that sound familiar?) and bringing the helicopter down.

The second night of attempts, we were pretty consistently getting to Phase 4, although we used so many Battle Rezes we had to change the name of our group.

If I could sum up Phase 4, it would be ‘So many ways to die, so little time’. You fight all 3 vehicles at once. They form together to make V0L-7-R0N (7 is ‘t’ in leet speak, so yeah, it’s VOLTRON!) Each part, bottom, middle and head move independently and have separate aggro tables. The main attack of the bottom section is Shock Blast. You have to get out of melee or you’ll be one shot. That’s pretty easy to avoid, although you still have to find a safe path among the minefield. The middle section still does Laser Barrage. This is a little bit like Lurker’s Spout and will one shot you should you let it hit you. The trick here is that he may have just cast Shock Blast, so I would run out, and then try to run back in. In the process, Voltron tries to reorient himself to the tank, which makes him change where Laser Barrage was going to start and people who had moved out of the path might now be in it.

He can also target the Main Tank with Laser Barrage. I never got this part right, but apparently you have to slowly strafe in a circle away from him, without causing him to reorient. Not an easy task to accomplish by my reckoning.

The other little problem in Phase 4 is the Rocket Attack. It will one shot you. There is a little circle that shows up on the ground to tell you where it’s going to land. There’s only one, little, itsy bitsy problem. The ‘tank’ portion can cover up the circle so you don’t see it coming. I died at least two or three times to ‘surprise’ rockets.

As an added bonus, all 3 pieces have to die within seconds of each other.

After all the mistakes I made and the subsequent wipes I caused, I was really beginning to see the appeal of playing a DPS class, especially a Ranged one.

He feels every bit as frustrating and ‘impossible’ as Gruul or Hydross or Archimonde did when we were learning them. You think ‘Are we ever going to kill this guy?” All that frustration just builds the euphoric high you get when you do finally kill him.

I felt like we were getting close and I have every confidence we’ll kill this bucket of bolts soon enough.