Tags
mists, mists of Pandaria, mop, protectors, protectors of the endless, raid, terrace, terrace of endless spring, toes, WoW
[edit from 2024: this post will get some serious traffic when classic MoP launches, you’re welcome to the future, check out my mop disc stuff]
So my raiding team has had the first fight in Terrace of Endless Spring (TOES, as we call it) on farm for 3 weeks now. The council fight, Protectors of the Endless, features a unique mechanic called “elite” mode. Basically, if you kill the bosses in a harder order, you get better loot. How much better?
ARE MY BOOTS NOT AWESOME
Normal is 496. Elite starting level is 503. Heroic is 509. Two upgrades on an elite item and it is BETTER THAN HEROIC QUALITY. This is an amazing opportunity for guilds who are behind the gear curve, like our team was. We started the tier quite slowly and with a lot of hiccups. We weren’t showing enough discretion in who we brought, and tried to just let everyone have a try, with the more experienced and geared raiders doing a separate Heart of Fear run. Once we realized that we had more progression in Heart of Fear than in Mogu’shan Vaults, we knew we had to switch things around. We now have training raids for the newer members, and a dedicated progression group…which means we are flying through content, downing at least one new boss every progression night.
But, like I said, we had a slow start, so we’re playing catch-up with gear. And one trick we’ve used is leapfrogging ahead into TOES.
Yes, our server has a lot of raid teams.
We downed Garalon last night, but WoWProgress is being stupid and won’t update. Anyways…
As you can see, we downed protectors before we even killed the second boss in Heart of Fear. It’s actually a very simple trick and something I suggest considering if your team is struggling on DPS checks or with gear. Terrace basically won’t let you in if you haven’t cleared HoF yet. The stupidly simple solution is just….clear Heart of Fear.
The thing is, only one member needs to do that. It’s just like switching to heroic modes. As long as the person who has gotten the requisite kill is the first one to enter the raid, the rest of the team will also be able to enter.
For us, we had the fortunate situation of one member in our group being an alt from a hardcore raiding team. They are already on heroic modes and had someone who had to miss a day, so they were happy to bring our rogue (and his ranked DPS – yes, he ranked 113 in the world on our Garalon kill!) along for a HoF farm. Same with our (nearly as DPS-tastic) warrior. So both of them now have a clear of HoF under their belts and we can all progress in Terrace simultaneously with progression through HoF.
Now, I will advise one caveat about this idea – gauge your guild. Some teams might feel offended by a member jumping ship for a week to get a “carry” (although in our DPS’ case, they definitely held their own) to a clear. It might make members feel as if the raid leader has lost confidence in their own ability. Take careful stock of your team and your members before you consider something like this, and decide if it is going to hurt team morale. It is a sort of a gimmicky short-cut, afterall. For many teams, the value of defeating the boss together is more important than advancing in progression – hell, I’d say the same likely will apply to our team for next tier. We just are trying to recover from that initial hold-up at the start of the expansion.
Plus, our raid lead definitely framed it as something to be proud of – we’re basically the only team on our server outside of the top 15 getting kills in TOES. That’s kinda cool, especially for a group that hasn’t started heroic modes yet.
And DO try elite mode. Our first pull, I freaked out, panicking into mumble, “Hey, I think this order isn’t the one the guides suggest…!”
Our raid lead just mumbled “You must be confused321pull!”
After a dozen or so pulls, we downed them (as seen in the video above) – and my eyes immediately widen when I see the loot.
“We did it on ELITE?!” I was stunned. I felt tricked, but also really awesome about the deceit. I felt proud of us – we had not only downed the encounter, but done it far tougher than intended, all unknowingly!
“Did you know this was on ELITE?!” I demanded.
Our raid leader merely chuckled, replying, “Of course.”
“Why?!”
“Because,” he calmly stated, “I knew we could do it.”
Pfffffft. He was right, though – we totally could.
a little bit of everything all of the time 
Lol, neat trick to get into Terrace and grats on the Elite bracers! Unfortunately, we’re gonna have to get into TOES the hard way and clear HoF ourselves. ><
Well, like I said, there is a big feeling of solidarity and progression for earning your way there legitimately!
Since I see you posting about raiding on a regular basis, I think you’re the right person to ask: how much time does a casual gamer have to devote to raiding these days? Can you get some progress done with one or two casual raid nights a week?
For sure. Raiding these days isn’t like the horror stories you hear from vanilla and BC. For one thing, the raid sizes are smaller. Wrangling 40 people is a lot more time consuming than working with 10. The game is a lot easier to play, as far as tedium management. My boyfriend used to raid in vanilla and BC and he tells me how “fun” it was as a paladin – rebuffing everyone every 5 minutes. Sitting outside of the fight to rez whoever died so they could run back in. Replenishing mana for other people. These days, Blizzard has cut out a lot of the mundane, minute details and given users better UI tools, better ability functionality, better quality of life changes, which cuts down on the headache and time management needed for raids in earlier expansions. Some people also argue that the game was harder, while others argue that players have just gotten better and are better trained to basic mechanics (don’t stand in fire, duh) – either way, the end result is that bosses are downed a lot faster. There is also a lot more public knowledge, with guides and videos helping raiders learn fights.
It will depend on your team and everyone’s ability (and patience), but all sorts of raiding is possible. For example, my guild raids 2x a week, for 3-4 hours each night (we’ll keep going after 3 hours sometimes if nobody wants to stop :P). We had a slow start and we’re still over halfway through the normal content. We also run a training run where our progression raiders come on our alts and we take brand new and very rusty raiders. The progression for that is quite a slower, but we use rotations to ensure that everyone gets a chance to see the content and experience raiding at a level higher than LFR.
I’d advise raiding at least two nights per week (and you’d be hard pressed to find a guild offering once weekly runs) just because it’s important to go through and kill the bosses you already have learned how to defeat and get valor points and gear off them (this is called farming). This gearing process makes it easier to kill the later bosses. So, most teams devote one day to farming what they already have downed to gear people up, and then at least one day to tackling a new boss.
But yeah, it’s definitely possible to raid on a casual schedule, especially if you find a team of like-minded and competent team mates. The team I ran with at the very start of Cataclysm pretty much ONLY did casual raiding. They’d log in, raid for 3 hours, vendor some trash and then log over to team fortress until the next raid. Myself and one other guys were the only ones who played the game more extensively than that, and we still downed every boss on normal. A more casual team probably won’t get a bunch of heroic-mode kills, but you’ll still have a bunch of fun and get to experience a really exciting new aspect of the game.
Sorry. I guess I should have just said “Yes! :D”
That sounds great 🙂 I have some raiding experience from BC and Wrath, and I really enjoyed the raids back then (speaking as a Shaman). My guild was also really laid-back, but sadly we fell apart somewhere halfway through Ulduar. It’s good to know that the game is still very casual-friendly, and I’m looking forward to giving it a try once I hit 90 🙂
Nice! MoP is a great place to try again. LFR is great for learning the basics of a fight, while elder tokens give you 3 extra chances at loot a week – what’s not to love about that? 😛
Grats on the elite kill!
And BTW your guild name is amazing!
Haha, thanks. My GM and his best pal are fans of the TV show. All the ranks are named after stuff from the anime. I haven’t watched it, but I kinda like the name regardless – SOS Brigade conjures up images of us flailing around frantically as we kill stuffs.