Conquering Castle Nathria
Posted by 2021-03-10 in News
The Shadowlands’ first raid, Castle Nathria, has proven to be quite a formidable challenge. Progression Raid has whomped the Heroic level, downing Sire Denathrius and his denizens in fantastic fashion, and has completed all raid achievements. As Progression begins Mythic, and Sunday Raid makes its way through Heroic, Progression Raid Lead Bloodshox shared some of his thoughts on Castle Nathria.
What makes CN different than past raids?
One of the biggest differences is that people in general had much lower gear going into the first tier than the last few expansions which really set the initial difficulty much higher than we were used to. Once we got into M+, PvP, and further in the raid the overall difficulty felt much more familiar to previous raids.
How challenging are you finding CN compared to other early expansion raids?
After the initial gear issue mentioned before, the raid has felt overall about the same as previous expansions if we ignore how easy Emerald Nightmare was. I feel like Castle Nathria has more personal responsibility placed on people than most, where one person not knowing the fight or doing something wrong can seriously hurt the raid or wipe us. I do think that’s a good thing in general though, everyone should have to contribute to the mechanics and not just raw numbers.
What bosses have been most challenging?
Heroic Denathrius was definitely the most challenging for us as a team. Since I became the raid leader for Darkwind in the end of WoD it’s got the 3rd most pulls (27) for any end boss, behind Helya (30) and Kil’Jaeden (29). It’s a difficult fight with strict timings that you just need to do some pulls to feel out. From there it’s just making sure we have both DPS and healing cooldowns in the right places until it works. We kind of mastered each phase one by one until we got to phase 3 enough to take him down. Going into the next phase with everyone alive was crucial to make sure we were able to plan accordingly. We ended up changing our cooldown timings multiple times until we got something that felt right and gave us the edge in phase 3. None of the other fights were much of a challenge but we do struggle with chains on Sludgefist still sometimes. 😛
What’s your favorite encounter and why?
Going into the tier the fight I was most looking forward to was probably Council, since the idea of a dance phase was intriguing. After clearing heroic though it’s definitely Denathrius. It’s a very scripted fight where you can really fine tune how you deal with certain timings and mechanics, which I enjoy. Of all the difficult fights I’ve done in recent expansions where we’re wiping a lot, this one really felt enjoyable the whole time. Denathrius is also just a great character.
What challenges and achievements are you looking forward to in CN and beyond with progression raid?
We actually just finished up our Glory of the Nathria Raider achievements. Working on the raid achievements once we clear heroic for the week has been a fun thing to do since we started doing it in Legion and now that we’ve started attempting Mythic, a nice break before we get “serious.” I’ll be looking forward to hopefully getting a couple mythic bosses down, but it’s important to me that we don’t push too hard and burn ourselves out. I consider any mythic bosses we’re able to down an awesome bonus to finishing a tier. After that I know I personally can’t wait to “defeat” Sylvanas… whatever that entails.