Within the past 2-3 days?

Last week we had everyone dead but Leotheras, zoned in, and the pumping stations were all up, but everything else was all down.

Had the hotfix been applied before you zoned in to kill Lurker that week?

I'll check this evening to confirm for sure one way or another, but when we killed Lurker last night and then stayed in the zone for a while, the pumping station trash definitely did not respawn, even past the 2hr mark since it had been killed. And the water remained scalding.

Thats good news, thats what I had assumed would happen.
We killed lurker hours before the hotfix, and even zoned in a while later that same night to see if that trash would despawn, and it never did.

I'll chalk it up to strangeness with patch-week... which is probably what happened. I guess the time of when we killed the bosses, and their trash despawning, matches with the hotfix time. I would've thought it didn't work that way though, shrug.

The other option is those packs require 1 clearing to never despawn again once lurker is dead.

On Tuesday night we cleared Hydross and Lurker and when we went back on Wednesday all the pumping station trash was despawned. I'm assuming that all that trash is tied to Lurker.

Great, thats basically confirmation,
Two questions though.
1. This tuesday?
2. Did you clear the trash before killing lurker?

1. Yes, that was this Tuesday.
2. We did not clear any of the pumping stations after Hydross, Warlocks water walked to the Lurker fight spot and summoned the raid there from Hydross's platform.

Thats great then (so chalk up our experience to hotfix weirdness), but definitely lends toward killing Tidewalker before lurker. The watery graves imo is the only hard part of that fight (I think the final 30% is kinda a joke actually).

Tidewalker really needs to be made more difficult... perhaps the 30% globules should freeze anyone they touch, rather than whoever they target (okay that was really a tangent).

I don't know, I think Morogrim is reasonably well-tuned. I mean he's not "hard" but it's a reasonable fight. Hydross and Karathress should have their loot tables and positions in the zone swapped, if anything.

There are a lot of ways to look at that...
I think Hydross is simply far too difficult for his position in the zone and his loot. Maybe that is why Morogrim appears too easy (because in a relative sense he is much easier).

The fight difficulty in SSC is all over the place, and yet the loot seems inversely related to the difficulty. Your best bet to gear up and learn SSC is to gut the place from the inside out almost.

Perhaps some of this is just perceived by strategy - Fathom lord and lurker to me seem perfect. I don't feel comfortable comenting on Leotheras that much yet. Anyway perhaps that is just a long winded way of me just agreeing with what you just said

I guess people's perspectives are going to be colored by how long it took them to learn the fights. Once you're farming something, the difficulty involved tends to blur somewhat. For us, Hydross took ~15 real attempts (only the last 2 with any pot use), Morogrim took 8 or so (should've been 7, but we had a sweet 5% wipe due to the murlocs chaining that second naga pack by Karathress's room), Lurker took ~12, and Karathress took a grand total of 3, and quite possibly could've been a first-pull kill if our dedicated mind-numbing+kick rogue hadn't fallen asleep as we were pulling. (I wish I were joking -- actually fell asleep and woke up like 10 minutes later thinking we hadn't pulled yet, as we explained to him that he had in fact just wiped us.)

Maybe we have some flaws in our Morogrim strat, but we wiped like 3 times to him this week, and I can't conceive of us wiping to Karathress pretty much ever.

Add the rather extreme rogue-unfriendliness to this. Motivating example; the Sartura-style whirlwind he does not only deals DD - it adds a DoT that ticks for uncomfortable amounts. Nihilum didn't even bring rogues to Leotheras when they were racing for Vashj, just for mention.

Since we seem to be off on a tangent about how well balanced SSC fights are I'll throw in my opinion about Leotheras.

Right now his HP is too high to be done reasonably without having DPS flasked and fully potted. Something like a 20% reduction in HP would probably the best way to make him more doable without having to use a ton of pots. Making him tauntable while he's not whirlwinding would be nice too, we usually have people die more from pulling aggro right after a whirlwind than anything else.

Yes, Leotheras needs an HP nerf, and the inner demon adds need about 8k HP. There is no doubt that he will be nerfed by 2.1.0. Its almost not even worth bitching about because its so clearly out of tune (especially in regards to the consumable fix coming). I know every part of him is doable, but that doesn't make it good.

Shield slam needs to do quadruple damage on the inner demons too. The other mechanics are decent.

I have a random question that doesn't really warrant its own thread and is tangentially related to the order in which to approach bosses in SSC.

This is really only answerable by the first few guilds to get into SSC and make progress there (DnT, Nihilum, Impervious, etc.) -- what exactly was broken about Morogrim and Karathress in their initial implementations that made Leotheras seem like the most doable of the three once Hydross was down? I've always wondered.

Devastate dps!

But, yeah, I agree. This is by far the least enjoyable fight so far for me in SSC. So much trash reclearing and ridiculous tuning. It's also frustrating that I can kill my demon with 15 seconds to spare while other classes are struggling.

Apparently on Morogrim he spawned in water elementals as well with the murlocs making the aoe down quickly before the next pack idea virtually impossible (this info is taken from Nihilum members).

As to Karathress, no idea.

We decided that we would go: Tidewalker -> Fathom-Lord -> Lurker/Or Hydross -> Leotheras -> Lady Vashj when it was apparent that the zone was not complete.

People were getting frustrated with the trash clears etc and a somewhat easier path seems to be working well for us.

- Tidewalker is a duration fight, but not too hard if everyone understands their roles in the fight.
- Fathom-Lord for some reason took us like 3 weeks. I think it was because we kept going for him at the end of the raid night after Tidewalker. We did Tidewalker alone on Sunday and the next night we had a very small clear to Fathom-Lord and he died that night (I dont think we ever got to Fathom-Lord himself before the kill attempt - 3 total tries that night).
- Hydross is just overtuned IMO. We can play perfect, but if we dont have a raid full of pots, you will be demoralized on how far you will be behind on dps. Pot = skill for a killshot unless you sploit his 250%.
- Lurker was one fight that people had a good time getting progression time on and with the new trash fix, the water without fish should make the fight even more enjoyable - save waiting to fish him up.
- Leotheras, I was not in the raid, but it seems the trash clear at the end of a raid night was just painful. They got one attempt in on him and most likely it was half hearted :p

SC should be pretty fun when they tune the zone, like every other raid zone Blizz has put out recently, but when that day comes who knows :p Now it's just something to raid, so we go.

I've suggested a different kill order to my guild, but some people are very concerend that this would be considered 'skipping content' and we would be banned for it. Is this even a remote possibility?

If blizzard doesn't want you to skip a boss, they implement a method to prevent you from doing so. Attempting to bypass that is where you get in trouble.

I agree, but I guess they need me to point to evidence. And no, the fact that this thread exists isn't enough, apparently.

What kind of evidence? It's the same as in old world raids dungeons. You can run past some bosses, but you can't run past others. They will either aggro if you try to pass them or they have a locked door behind them.

The bridge to Lacy Vashj is locked because you are supposed to kill the other 5 bosses first. Those 5 are freely accessible, given that you clear the trash.


No offense, but I find this sentence kind of hard to understand.