If Patchwerk is "average", than my server of 14,000 players had about 100-120 players in average or above average guilds. The guilds that farmed Maraudon for NR gear and Scarlet Monastery for Shadow pots need to understand that running DM for Loatheb buffs is not "average" behavior.

At what point should a guild look at doing Magtheridon? Right now my casual raiding guild is working on Aran/Prince we are going to start working on Maulgar monday or so. I don't see us having too much issue with him. I assume we could get Gruul down after a few nights of attempts. So is Magtheridon going to be feasible once we are consistantly downing Prince/Gruul everyweek? or can we start a bit sooner>?

Brilliance, I honestly cannot believe I read that... do you even think before typing this crap? Is it ego? or just stupidity, because something isn't clicking upstairs son.

Most casual guilds put in a lot of effort. Almost every guild on our server puts in quite a bit more raid time than we do, and yet they are behind us in progress. Surely, those lower life forms must be punished for their impudence. Surely there are not other mitigating factors; surely they don't deserve anything. They just want to get free loots!

Nezralix made a valid point... 27 out of the 30 encounters will be tuned for a tiny handful of guilds. How in any possible way is that appropriate?

I believe there is some confusion over 'casual players' and 'casual raiders', or 'average players' and 'average raiders'.

An average player may of done Nef, Fankriss.
An average raider has most likely gone abit further and ventured into Naxx.

Do you mind? I'm trying to enjoy the extremely productive casual vs. hardcore argument for the thousandth time.

But theoretically speaking, I have the same question more or less. =P

Along the same lines, which fight should we go after now that Gruul is beatable - Magtheridon or Hydross the Unstable?

Like others have said in this thread, Gruul post-hotfix is significantly easier then Magtheridon is now. Gruul takes almost no coordination now, and doesn't require much dps. Magtheridon actually had some challenge in killing the adds before, now the only real challenge is getting 20 people to learn to click boxes in rotations. Still, getting 20 people to click can be a real challenge in itself for most guilds. If your guild is coordinated you could probably work on him now and see progress, but don't expect a kill if you can't farm nightbane with ease by this point.

As for his damage, I don't remember what he hit me for before. I seem to recall it being around 2kish. He was hitting me last night for 5.2-6k. A paladin reported 5k cleve pre-hotfix and 13k post (healing gear both times). Seems like a hell of a lot more then the 40% some people are reporting.

Magtheridon and Hydross are both doable by a guild that has killed Gruul for the first time this week. Both have different requirements, to wit:

- Hydross requires you have a lot of good tanks that are properly geared. This involves a mix of frost resist and nature resist gear, and not stuff from maradon either. You can use bear tanks (again though, with some frost/nature resist) to tank the adds Hydross spawns periodically. You need very high DPS. You need some warlocks for banish. The trash in SSC is very painful and respawns rapidly.

- Magtheridon has less of a gear check and more of a skill check. You will have to create groups of people that have very specific jobs every few minutes (clicking cubes), healers that need to heal these clickers, all the while the ground is earthquaking below you. Missing the cube clicks will wipe the raid. Once you click a cube you start taking 800 dmg/sec plus you get a debuff that won't let you click it again for 3 minutes (hence the group rotations). Its kind of like C'thun stomach on crack.

I would suggest you should start gearing up a few tanks in frost/nature gear (not really sure what the best source is? Naxx resist gear or outland frost stuff? Green nature resist?) while working on Magtheridon, once you have a couple tanks geared up try out Hydros.


fwiw SSC will definitely get nerfed when patch 2.1.0 comes out, most likely along the lines of trash respawns/amount, and then the bosses themselves a few weeks/months later. The formula has been the same since WoW launched as proven this week with Gruuls hotfixes.

/wave

So, sidestepping pointless comparisons to bygone raiding content and arguments over who should get to kill what bosses, I thought I'd come back to the topic.

Last night the hotfix was applied while we were making attempts, and before the RnD post had been made. One attempt, he was hitting me for around 2k, the very next run abruptly shot up to 6-7k hits and cleaves. We actually thought it was bugged ala Netherspite at first, then came back after we saw the post. The only other observed difference was that the channelers went down more quickly-- they still appeared to hit/cast/getstrongerondeath the same as before. Mag's other spells also seemed to stay the same. Overall noticeably easier, but nowhere near the scale of the gigantic nerf on Gruul-- still relatively challenging (lrn2click, etc).

Following the raid progression chart, Mag = Gruul/Kara, whereas SSL/TK are above it, thus you should most likely do Mag right after Gruul, just make sure you read up abit on it first so people know whats going to happen :P

I personally made our guild wait on Mag till he got nerfed, because spamming flasks on Gruul, and then Hydross was more than enough without adding Mag there too when I knew he would be nerfed later.
So tonight after Gruul goes down we're going to play with Mag instead of going to SSL thanks to this now.


I have to give a different story about Hydross though, we've not found him nearly as easy as other guilds seem to be saying he is. We've used full flasks twice, tried 2~3 different tactics (that are known to work) and had a pretty damned optimal setup on the last time we flasked. Still not dead yet and its due to a shortfall of DPS only.
We are an 'above average raiding guild' with a fair mix of pretty 'hardcore' players, we dont have slackers in the raid and the general management of the tactic/raid setup was always pretty good.
Im unable to work out exactly what we are doing which is simply 'wrong' and preventing us a kill, whereas with other bosses thats normally pretty easy to work out.

Hmmm, I've not read anyone really saying Hydross is easy? I mean DnT is saying he is balanced fine which I can understand where they are coming from based on what they have said but never was what they said was Hydross is easy. Really the fight comes down to how can you best optimize your guild DPS (examples should all the DPS be on adds or would it be better if we left some DPS on Hydross all the time, should you banish adds or should you AOE them)