Nightmare Operations - Operations Nightmares

It's been a while since I've written about my PvE endgame progress. Two months ago I noted that we finally killed Brontes on hardmode and predicted that we should be able to get the Council too before 2.7 released. I was right. In fact, as soon as we got the Council down once, we were able to repeat that kill pretty consistently in the weeks afterwards, while Brontes is still giving us trouble on our farming runs. I just don't know what it is about that fight.

We also went back to give Scum NiM another go and actually got the first boss down. We also had some decent tries on Titan 6 that night but messed up too many times to really get anywhere. I still can't believe how hard those 2.2 nightmare modes are, even now! Just... mad props to the people who cleared this when it was current content.

Ever since the release of nightmare mode for Dread Fortress, we've been working on that. We got Nefra down on our first night - she's comparatively easy, as you just need two people to learn a new trick for nightmare mode and everyone else can basically continue playing as if it was hardmode. Since then, we've been working on Draxus.

Oh that Draxus.

He's one of the trickier bosses on any difficulty really, due to the consecutive add waves requiring different people to do different things, but on nightmare all this basically gets tuned up to eleven. The most glaring example is that using an interrupt locks you out of interrupting anything again for the duration of that wave, so you have to set up whole rotations including tanks and healers. It's pretty nuts.

We've been making some progress, but it's slow. I hope that we don't end up with another Dread Guard situation. (We spent over two months trying and failing to kill these on NiM, until the release of Oricon "saved" us by giving us something else to run. I still haven't got that kill.) Especially since it looks like the next new operation is still going to be more than a few months away.

Then again, we might actually benefit from what they are doing with Nightmare Power this time around, as they've announced that the buff will already be removed in 2.8. While fights like Draxus are very much about execution, having less health to burn through and taking less damage would still work to provide a bit of a buffer to make unforgiving mechanics a bit more forgiving, maybe allowing the raid to recover from a mistake that would previously have been a wipe. We'll see.

All I can say is once again that I'm quite in awe of the people who clear this content with ease. I listen to people like Mae from TOROCast and her slightly exasperated complaining about how these new nightmare modes are way too easy because it took her guild only two days to clear them (or however many days it was, a small number in any case) and my mind just boggles.

I believe that all the people in my ops group are good players - they know how to gear, how to play, how to execute tactics... but we all make mistakes. And that seems normal to me, whoever doesn't make the occasional mistake? Miss an interrupt, taunt the wrong thing, stand in the wrong place at the wrong time? Well, on fights like Draxus NiM, every one of those mistakes will wipe the group, even if it was just one person getting one small thing wrong. I guess true NiM raiders don't make mistakes, or at least it must be extremely rare.