Legion Release Date Announced

We are still awaiting news on when any pre-expansion event will start. 

Anyone who pre-purchases will get to play the Demon Hunter earlier than the expansion release date, although the length of time they get is yet to be announced.

See the press release for more details.

Great article in the topic: http://www.wowhead.com/news=250733/what-to-do-before-the-legion-pre-patch

Any chance for us to kill Archimonde on heroic?

There's always a chance!  However, it does rely on a number of things. 

We need to be able to continue raiding regularly with people who are happy to put in the background work and preparation.

We need to be able to progress through heroic on bosses we've not yet done on heroic - which are basically everything after Gorefiend.

We have already planned in the calendar to do a fresh heroic this week, and we're going to be doing normal manno/archi (hopefully) next week.  That leaves 17 Wednesday's before Legion launches.  That's 7 new bosses in 17 weeks - we normally average one every 2-3 weeks, although archi took ... hmmm .. 4-5? 

So in *theory* it's possible .. but it would require a lot of effort from everyone, it would require regular signups from people who know how to stay alive, how to do the tactics, who don't mind spending more time wiping than getting loot and don't mind running progression runs every week which may involve no boss kills, rather than doing a fresh run with 4-6 boss kills.

We would need 12+ people signing up for every single progression raid because any lower and it causes problems for raid composition - for some bosses we'd need around 15.

Of course, as (some of us) know these bosses already from normal or pugged heroic raids, then it may take less time to kill them - but we're also getting close to exams for some, summer holidays and we're already in the pre-expansion slump which will gain momentum.  We're going to struggle more and more to get numbers, and there is the real chance, which can't be helped, that we will have to cancel raids.

As you know, we're already cancelling more Friday raids than we're running.  We've experimented with different days with no greater success.  It is possible that, especially once the pre-expansion event starts, people will not want to raid at all.

I'm happy to continue organising the raids - but I'm not going to go around forcing people to sign up if they don't want to (although I may occasionally offer free cookies!) - and there will come a point where it is less damaging to morale to simply stop putting up raids at all, than putting them up only to cancel them again.

Basically .. we may get to archi heroic, but don't pin your hopes on it.  If you want the achievement and mount, work on the assumption you're unlikely to get it with us.  There are other guilds (one has been mentioned on these forums for months) who offer places for free or for a fee to people, to get their Archimonde kill, and there are also pug groups that do it (although you will need good gear to get into one of those - and they regularly ask that you've got the legendary ring too).

I would also mention, by the way, that ilevel 700, which is the level we set for a fresh heroic run, and what we'd expect for NORMAL Archimonde, isn't good enough for later bosses.  I'd suggest that we'd be wanting around 710+ for later bosses.

We're currently setting a base output for heroic raids, for the first bosses, at 30k - for those later bosses we need a lot higher too - and in order to kill those bosses, we need everyone to contribute, so keep an eye on your gear level and output and, if you're lower than you should be, do a bit of research.

You can see your output for the more recent raids by simply typing your character name into the Warcraft Logs site .. for example Barbarea is shown here:

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/rankings/character/12995389/latest/#boss=0

Note that this is a "per boss" list .. so you need to scroll down to see output for different encounters.  Obviously some will be different to others.  For example, generally my heals are lower, overall, on the first boss than a lot of others, because there's often spike healing, but then not a lot for a while, which reduces the average.

It's also worth noting that the output is the key thing here .. the way flexible raiding works is that we have a fair idea what output every person needs in order to down a boss when it's a 10 man group.  Every single person added to the raid after that point increases the health and damage the boss does, and sometimes changes the mechanics a little too - regardless of how much output they do.  If we have to add an extra healer (who is doing little to no damage to the boss) the boss still increases in difficulty, which means the raid damage output has to compensate for that too. 

Having said that .. just because someone can do mega-dps does not mean they can survive for long - better gear helps them do that - as does knowing the tactics well and knowing how to survive when things get a bit dodgy (which they do, regularly!)