Fyria

I'm going to also take this opportunity to apologise to Mark as well, I realise you've felt that things have been very unfair for you over the past year and a half over this. It might take some time to rebuild these bridges between us all again. Outside of this situation between us I really enjoy spending time with you as a friend and that will be missed. I've had fun playing stuff like Gloomhaven with you and it's a shame we couldn't ever quite find the time to do that again as I feel like we do get on alright outside of WoW.

I really don't understand this, I have absolutely no qualms with you and enjoy doing random WoW content with you, I see no wrongs to absolve? I'm confused? I think I've missed something in the process of this because I never see this side of things and no one talks to me. As far as I can see, I'm still getting important information from Todd in terms of dungeon groups etc, and as far as I can tell it's not otherwise making any difference to anyone. There are no trust issues I have with you guys and enjoy our time spent together doing dungeons and random content online and it saddens me to see people go away. I made it clear early on that I'm on other Discords (at the time of the Distant Worlds thread, I believe it was three?), and it's become more of a necessity with recent events., this is not a new thing and I'm not sure what gave people this impression. My feelings by the end towards the BoT server were purely the issues I had with the way people who were using it were treating me over it, those people are not on other servers? Also Tim, people seemed confused over the issue, I wanted to offer some clarity and say that I'm open to talking about it if people want to talk about it, since I've clearly misunderstood people's stances on this matter (Mark was really the only person this was left unresolved with). I realise that people have somehow let this aid decisions to leave the guild and I was completely unaware until other people (outside of Mark) felt directly involved in this anymore. It's obvious the guild will never recover for the next expansion and all hopes we might be able to run raids again at that point have disappeared, so I'll make it easier for everyone and leave the guild myself. I was hoping that we could find some way to eventually solve this issue and all talk together again, but it's clear that we can't if that's how everyone feels. Again, I'm really sorry to anyone who felt like this was personal to them, it's not, I love you all and Todd can attest how upset I am about losing you all. I miss all of our banter and friendship.

I wrote the post above before you replied, so I didn't see this until after I'd finished. I understand that other people have been affected by this. I don't have a clear understanding of how everybody feels individually but I hope that the post above helps to explain some of the situation - it's intended for anyone a bit confused by this. I'm also more than happy to chat to people, I don't want to fall out with anyone and I'm sorry if people feel like they've been dragged into this or if it seemed like I was pushing them away through this whole thing.

Note: I'm probably going to use the word Discord in this post to refer explicitly to the BoT Discord server to avoid typing it out in full every time, unless I say otherwise, this is what I mean. Okay, starting with questions over the original situation and where that was left. The original discussion in the Distant Worlds thread ended up with a lot of people posting at once, I felt a bit ganged up on and every time I tried to post to explain something and each time I failed to help the situation. So, Todd ended up suggesting I stop posting in that thread. A couple of other people tried to diffuse the situation in the thread which was helpful but the issue with Mark still remained. Since nothing was being resolved at this point, Todd suggested that he talked to Mark directly to try and get us to work this through properly. After what happened on the forum I really wanted to initially have a direct conversation in which we could figure out the problems we both had at this point without the risk of it ending up in a place like the original thread. For whatever reason, this resulted in Mark posting on the forums again instead. This left me feeling a bit stuck because I didn’t want to start another forum argument. I also found it difficult to see that post at the time as completely genuine given the contrast between that and Mark’s previous interactions with me and because we weren’t talking directly there was no chance or way to work through what was said. Between not being able to find a good way to post in the thread and not having another channel of communication with Mark to talk it out, it was left unresolved. Over time, the issue has come up again with odd comments and digs and these end up reinforcing the idea that it wasn’t a genuine apology in the first place for me. I understand that this is somewhat self-fulfilling, because perhaps Mark felt like he took that step, nothing happened, so he feels like it’s okay to bring up this issue in a way that I still find quite hurtful and I’m not sure how to break this cycle between us now. As far as Discord is concerned, there were some early things where people made me feel a bit uneasy/unwelcome that I largely understand to have not been intentional but at the time that was how they came across, a few people including Tim and Gaz actually helped turn some of that perception around for me, but the outstanding issue with Mark still made it difficult to feel comfortable in that environment. At that point, Mark’s position seemed to be that I was being ridiculous about how I felt about this which made it harder to get past the feeling of not being welcome and made me feel like he was pushing me away from other people. Because of the constant tension between us since, I still associate Discord with the ongoing disagreements we have Because Discord was at the core of the original disagreement with Mark, and we never properly resolved the issues between us, I still continue to feel a bit uncomfortable about being on Discord. I felt like if I just suddenly logged in Mark might make a comment about the fact that I was on there and try to invalidate how I felt about it all and why I felt hurt in the first place. I would be putting myself in a vulnerable situation so it was easier to simply never take that risk. I realise that in that situation Mark may well have not done anything like that but, again, because we never spoke directly it was difficult to figure out how he felt about it all. This then links to why Monday was particularly difficult for me because it felt like I was getting the exact accusations that I was afraid I would get if I ever started using Discord, and all I had effectively done was accidentally log in to it due to using the client for some other servers. So as a result of all this I ended up seeing you as the primary reason why I can't talk to any of my friends on Discord and, therefore, feeling excluded from how a lot of the guild now communicates. This has been really quite upsetting for me as I don’t want to fall out with other people or give the impression that I don’t want to talk to them. So again I ended up feeling a bit trapped between how I felt and what I really wanted. I realise the events of Monday were a bit stressful for us all. In recent dungeons my DPS hasn’t been great. Mark and Gaz suggested that I try switching essences and move away from the rotation that I’ve been enjoying and have been trying to work on and improve. I was a bit reluctant to do this as I have found it difficult to find much information online on how to play any other build/rotation, but I decided to give it a try on Monday to see how it went. It felt a bit clunky and the results didn’t seem to be much better, plus I wasn’t used to the cooldowns and timings yet so was probably getting even worse results. Ultimately I don’t find this build as fun and the internet suggests it isn’t as good, so it’s difficult to know whether to pursue it or not. But I did try it to try to make other people happier with me. So that made it worse when people were then criticising a little bit during and after the run. I’m obviously not deliberately playing badly so getting annoyed with me doesn’t help, even though I can see how it can be frustrating when you’re able to get much better numbers out of the same class. In the heat of things kicking off a bit I ended up missing the bit about WoWAnalyzer. After things calmed down a bit Todd basically came to me and said that he knew I probably missed it, but that Tim was suggesting that I could try using it with the logs from that run. This only came the next morning after I'd made a post asking for spec help, and that actually sounds exactly like the sort of useful tool that might help with that and I'll certainly have a look at it. So I just wanted to apologise to Tim that he got caught up in that moment and to say thanks for trying to help.

I've had a few busy workdays/work evenings, I do have a reply for this to help try and answer some of your questions Mark, but it probably won't come until later today. I've not forgotten about/ignoring this.

It honestly saddens me that it has come to this after the events of last night's TS. We had great fun doing the lower level dungeons at the weekend with you and were in discussion about giving up trying for 15s since we're struggling a bit with them, and seeing whether a few people/alts would be interested in trying to do the 10s achievement at a chilled pace instead. The message was in response to Mark's abrupt comments on TS last night at me over the matter and had nothing to do directly with the above post - this just seemed like the best place to post it. As Mark even points out, the whole situation "festered" because I wanted Mark to have a conversation with me directly (Todd suggested I stop responding to posts on the forum because it wasn't helping when I felt ganged up on with every post). There has been plenty of time for him to do so and to sort out, but he hasn't, so nothing has changed. I never really removed myself from the BoT Discord server, yet never quite felt comfortable clicking into that server whilst I felt pushed away by Mark's attitude, and, he was very accusative of it last night because (and this has been mentioned in a previous comment a long time ago) I'm on a couple of other servers and with lockdown I've found that I've had to use it more (even though I'm not the biggest fan), which means I look active even though I'm not. Practically it doesn't make any difference to me whether I'm not on Discord or never open it, things are still the same, I still only find out the bits and pieces of going on from Todd if it seems important (i.e. dungeon groups etc), and it's never caused a problem - unless Mark ends up provoking me over it - a thing I still do not understand why he does in all honesty because it just brings this all up again. I'm not sure what I should do to try and fix things, I don't want to see other people feel like they're being dragged into this, and I'm sorry if I've upset anyone, I don't want to lose friends unnecessarily over this. I haven't decided what I'm going to do in terms of the guild yet, but was looking to try and see whether anyone wanted to just do a few chilled things sometime instead and I was hoping, like last weekend, if you'd be interested in doing some more fun tanking. with us and whoever wants to bring some alts. I'm sorry to see you go Loz, if we can't figure things out I'm not sure I'll be sticking around much longer either.

So out of interest and advice for trying to improve my AoE, I elected to try a couple of dungeon runs yesterday swapping out my Hyperthread Wraps and the Lucid major for Focusing Iris major and higher iLvl wrists with actual stats rather than the on-use. There doesn't seem to be a lot of helpful advice online for 8.3 fire mages that don't take this combo, so I'm trying to figure out the best rotation for AoE without it. When taking the wrists/Lucid essence, it favours single target burst as you can basically chain Fire Blast + Pyros for the duration of Combustion (Lucid, Combustion and then wrists on a Fire Blast-Pyro-Fire Blast), it's pretty fun/nukey. However the AoE playstyle as a result seems to basically just be, single target rotation still, but Flamestrike on proc instead of Pyro. Flamestrike doesn't guarantee a crit however, so you can't chain it as efficiently, but I'm still learning the best rotation in this scenario. When you're not bursting, you're effectively back to the classic fire Pyro fishing, Fireball (or Scorch) until crit, then proc the second crit mid-cast with Fire Blast, and Pyro off the back of the Fireball, same as usual. Without wrists/Lucid, I'm basically Pyro fishing the whole time, hitting Combustion when it's off cooldown (but no combo/chain with other abilities), and Focusing Iris beam off cooldown as well. I took Phoenix Flame so if I crit and ran out of Fire Blasts, I could crit off a Phoenix Flame instead and Pyro. Phoenix Flame has the added benefit of a bit of AoE damage. Now I feel that maybe that rotation could be different, maybe there's another talent that would help, but suffice to say, my dps when trying that was pretty poor and I'm obviously doing something very wrong with it. There aren't really any useful guides/information online for a decent no-bracer/lucid burst alternative AoE fire spec. Until I can figure out what, I'm inclined to stick to my original setup/what I'm used to as I /feel/ like I do a lot more dps and can line up bursts when needed - things are on the same CD. Plus it's more interesting to play than fishing for Pyros aaaall fight if I can get some solid firey-chain nuke time out. Having used Phoenix Flames yesterday though, I would be interested to see whether that generally works better for more flexible procs and added AoE. I've also been considering switching my haste enchants/gems to mastery for the added general AoE damage without really detracting too much from the single target nuke. General thoughts? I'm really feeling like I'm not playing/figuring out a non-burst spec very well and want to find some way to improve so that timed 15s can be a thing for groups I'm in.

I've not been on the BoT discord for over a year, so there's no point in me being on the server, since a muted server seems to confuse people and I use the program for other servers, I've left it. Hope that's less confusing for you Mark.

Virtual BoTMeet drinks acquired, it only took two attempts because I didn't have ID on me... To be clear, the BoTMeet is virtual, the drinks are not.

Sounds good to me.

Any idea whether this is likely to happen? Even if there doesn't appear to be enough people interested for a quiz(?*) it would still be nice to meet up online and catch up a bit with people. *Hoping there is though, as it sounds like fun.

Definitely up for this, thanks for organising. 😄

The tool does warn you if that's the case. Also I can see the actual numbers for both of the simmed items under the final gear picks so I can see what they generated. The stars option has higher corruption anyway (50), the alternatives only have a corruption of 35. With the 50 piece I'm at 33 overall which is fine. Edit: Oh, you mean other slot corruption pieces? I only have one other piece of corruption that's usable (i.e. not bracers) and I'm using it.

That said, you may have a point Welsper and I might keep an eye out for how well it's actually stacking in practice as I may be better with the 470s anyway.

I think stars is just a bit too good for fire mages compared to the other options, but I will keep the 470s around in case some combination of gear otherwise permits me to use it somehow. 😕