Lodekim

Yeah really this isn't rose tinted glasses to say MC was easy.

My first raiding guild, we killed Lucifron with I think 24 people still online cause people had to keep leaving throughout the night, and eventually we just got it. First Magmadar was sub 35 people. First Garr kill every single person in the raid (except the OOC rezzer) died at least twice, most people many more than that by the time he died. First Shazzrah I don't think anyone died, and it was our first time pulling him, things were just built casually then up until Majordomo.

It's unfortunate but there IS no MC in TBC, Gruul sure could be Onyxia, but there's no real "hey new people, learn to raid here" zone.

 

deanx

I remember one shotting lucifron on Archimonde server first time we saw him, and getting gloves of might.

MC up to Ragnaros was pretty easy and rightfully so.

 

Zifna

It's not just a level of difficulty, it's the level of complexity. For example, how much explanation do you need to give for Lucifron, assuming a group of total casuals who have never heard of "Bosskillers"?

-you two tank these two adds here
-tank the big guy here
-dps assist X guy and stay far away from Lucifron if at low health
-you people, remove this debuff off people
-you healers heal these targets
-don't aggro the guys in the next room

That's a pretty managable amount of info. If you're leading a PuG you can reasonably expect the fight to go well with that amount of information.


Let's look at Hydross, on the other hand:
-Okay, what we're gonna do on the pull here is we need a rogue to stealth in and pop evasion in the back, behind where he is right now but not start dpsing the target because that'll make it hard for the tank to pull off you and the tank needs to be ready to get in there very quickly afterward to pull aggro off you before evasion leaves and you die
-After the debuff on you has stacked to X and you've spent Y seconds with that stack the tank needs to pull the mob across the invisible line. What invisible line? Um, it's between the flags. Which flags? Um, you know, those things there that are about as tall as a Tauren. No, the ones in front of him now. I guess you could call them standards if you wanted...
-all you dps after the debuff has stacked to X on you you need to cut dps and move across the invisible line. Every time we do this he'll change immunities so frost mages will need to switch schools etc and we'll have a bunch of adds we need to either focus dps or ae, but aggro will be wiped on the big guy so be careful. Offtanks you need to have a system for who's picking up what and...

Okay, so I'm going a little crosseyed at that wall of text, and I figure I'm about halfway through with what would need to be explained. The thing that matters for a PuG often isn't how difficult the boss is per se but how quickly the strat can be explained.

The first boss should be simple, with only one or two things beyond "keep people alive, don't pull aggro, don't let the mobs loose," and the complexity should scale up slowly from there. Even the endboss of the instance should not require more than 5 minutes of explanation.

This lets casual guilds bring in friends or new players with little experience and not slow the process down drastically. There's not a need to get 25 people with skills and gear and keep them there until you can start doing the content. You can get 10 people with good skills and gear, 10 with decent, and 10 pretty poor players and replace or train the pretty poor ones -as your guild successfully proceeds through content-. That's a BIG thing.

This also lets elite guilds take 4-5 mains, 4-5 alts, and run a weekend PuG for the server. My guild ran an MC PuG for an incredibly long time to gear out alts and get the few best pieces for mains. This had the positive side effect of putting a second side to the "recruitment funnel." Yes, we got recruits from the guilds a bit behind us in progress, but we also helped generate a pool of experienced and geared recruits for newer guilds.

 

Sillia

I completely agree. However, that's not what we're talking about at all. The 'real' first boss in SSC isn't Hydross, it's Lurker. Lurker's just as easy to explain. Get in the water when he begins to spout. Kill/CC/Tank adds. Beware of getting knocked into the water when he twirls.

What about Void Reaver?

2-3 Tanks fight for aggro. He periodically does an aoe move that does 3-4k. He shoots big balls that hurt and silence at random people, but it doesn't track so move/strafe out of the way.

Done.

See? These fights match the exact criteria you put forth, which is why they are the invariably the first T5-content bosses killed.

There are only two things about the introductory bosses to T5 content that may be daunting:

#1. They are not the first bosses in the instance you see. Lucifron is widely regarded as the first boss of Molten Core, but the first boss you actually *see* is Gehennas (who *is* tougher than Lucifron, but not much). It's a perfect parallel here.

#2. They require a reasonable amount of DPS, which is more a gear check than anything (Void Reaver especially).

There really *isn't* a huge complexity difference, or a huge fight difficulty jump here. Lurker and Void Reaver are pretty damn introductory for how hard they are. Hydross is a step up for sure, but isn't ridiculously different. Tidewalker and Karathress are a small step above Hydross. If you use Wowjutsu to track various random servers, this is roughly the progression path people take, because they are going from easiest to hardest.

That was my entire point. You don't need super duper coordination or skill. You need enough people, some reasonable gear, some dedication to try a few times, and the fortitude to wade through some trash to get to the bosses. That's all it takes to get started.

 

Hate Monkey

So I've been slightly following this thread, and seeing a few topics worthy of continued discussion, but the one that still gets past me is:

What makes the encounter difficult: The gear check? The randomness of the fight? The raid make-up? Or the overall skill of the raid?

And with TBC it has become more and more of a non-issue of gear checks, and more of a player skill check (attentiveness).
There are some HP checks of encounters in TBC, Doomwalker and High Warlord Naj'Entus, and Teron Gorefiend (but not as much).
The amount of luck fights has gone down from Gruul, Magtheridon, Al'ar, Lady Vashj, Kael'Thas, Archimonde, Mother Shahraz, and Illidari Council to just Mother Shahraz and Illidari Council now. And skill checks of Magtheridon, Hydross, Vashj, Kael'Thas have remained the same, just had the luck portion taken away.

Compare those number of fights to what we had in Vanilla WoW going all the way back to MC. We had of luck/bugged fights, Ragnaros, basically all of BWL, Huhuran, Ouru, C'Thun, and a little bit of Viscidus, and when those fights were fixed the luck factors disappeared in nearly all those fights.
Gear checks did not really come about till Twin Emps level, and continued from there till Kel'Thuzad, with the random skill fight thrown in every now in then, C'Thun, Gluth, Heigan, Gothik, 4-Horsemen, and Fearlina.

Now when you compare those fights of Vanilla WoW to TBC there are fewer and fewer gear check fights due to how massively available the resist gears and the HP gears are. There are basically 4-5 real skill check fights in TBC, and those are in the T5 content level passing over 2 raid zones now, soon to be 3. Whereas in Vanilla WoW there were skill checks of fights back in BWL, passing over 3 full raid zones.
But here is where the problem lies: The amount of fights in TBC that require skill is about 1/6 to 1/7 of that in Vanilla WoW.

So you're looking at 10 bosses spanning the T5 raid zones, same as the 10 bosses which spanned the T2 raid zones, but for the 15 Bosses spanning the T3 zone each one required more skill to beat than that of T2, whereas with the 14 T6 bosses there is not much more skill required to beat those bosses in the T5 level.

And the real difficult of the fights in TBC now show up to be the raid's ability to have a maximized DPS uptime, and a high dps raid. Now factoring in those two things, more and more fights are showing up to be a raid stacking to an extent.

So now that our raid game is at the point where we can stack a raid group to just brute force past an encounter, a bit of fun is gone from it, and if you don't agree, the first real raid stacking occurred at 4-Horsemen, and people hated that fight because of that.

Then because I just realized this, the harder the encounter is deemed to be now, it's from how much raid damage is thrown around. Can just look at Gruul, who has little raid damage vs Morogrim who has lots of raid damage.

So now that it's established what makes encounters harder, it boils down to the ability to repeat a kill after the first kill.

In Vanilla WoW each fight really required a different skill than the last, so once you learned some encounters and new tactics, you were able to account for them later. But each fight had something new to it, so you had to adapt, and sometimes that adapting, or learning took a while to understand. And do not confuse a bad strategy to bad skill since one might never work and the other will. And since each fight had something new to it, you always had to change your strategy as the fight went on and you learned more, sometimes up at 5 minutes into the fight you found a bad part of your strategy. Now in TBC once you last 30-60-90 seconds into most fights you've seen all you need to know.

With all that finally out of the way, the way the encounters run now, it should take a max of 2 raid days to learn an unseen properly tuned fight. So if you're a hardcore cutting edge raiding guild going 5-7 days a week, with no set-backs, a new raid zone should be cleared in less than 4 weeks depending upon how many bosses, and what sort of fights are there, assuming easy re-kills of the prior learned bosses. The hardest fights being the straight up DPS checks like Reliquary of Souls is right now.

Now does it seem with the releasing of raid content that Blizzard wants us to be fully geared out in the previous tier before progressing, or being able to move through halfway geared out and progress. Now obviously with all the PTR's and pre-made characters having full sets of the previous tier for testing the next tier, it does seem that way, but does that mean an encounter that is tuned hard for a partially previous tier geared raid is easy for a full previous geared raid?

So if Blizzard wants us to progress at half-way geared of the previous tiered pace, should the fights require a more random element to the fights, but not to random? Longer fights? More intensive fights? All will lead to progressing each night, but still not an easy learning curve, and mere bang your head against the fight till ALL people do it right.

So to make progression fast, but not a brick wall once everyone is geared out, should there be more bosses in each raid zone providing 1 tier piece and a random loot like BWL did with the trinkets and Naxx did with the first bosses?

*high complexity with few bosses (BWL) vs moderate/high complexity vs lots of bosses (Naxx)*

 

Furion

The part of this discussion comparing MC and SSC is becoming stupid. You can't compare MC with anything in the game now.
Even from reading the Maulgar tactic new raiders will get a major headache.

And we already have this discussion for the most part in the later pages of Raid Sizes and The Future of WoW Raiding (which isn't even archieved) so it would help to not ignore all the arguments that were exchanged there.

 

Herm

Huh? Explain where the luck portion of Illidari Council comes into play. To me, this is a pure skill check/survivability check. Avoid aoe damage, kick heals/wraths, manage your mana and health, have tanks with quick reactions, and have healers with quick reactions. Where does the luck come from? Everything that occurs in the fight is entirely countered by skill or proper positioning. That, to me, is the definition of a skill check (albeit a rather easy one).

 

Hate Monkey

I hope I didn't compare MC to SSC, I tried to compare Tier level bosses and the number of them together. I see it like this, Maulgar is the Majordomo of TBC. A lot of mobs to be controlled and killed in a proper order. And why can't we make a comparison of control fights to other control fights?

Flamestrike+Envenom. Veras being able to land a melee hit when he goes to envenom. There are a few other combos on that fight which will lead to basically an insta-gib, but you may or may not see them all fight. It's like the other thread about the IC and Quigon bringing some of these things up. You can technically lose a raid member each time Veras goes vanish mode.

 

beathoven

One more thing that comes to my mind when looking back at the progression in TBC versus vanilla WoW and one specific problem and different in TBC(not sure if it was mentioned already in the thread, but haven't read a post about it):

Due to the current attunement chain that Blizzard has in place raiding guilds are now split into 2 big camps:

T5 raiding guilds who are still working on Lady or Kael.
T6 raiding guilds who either have or probably soon will have MH and BT on farm.

For simplicity let's assume that the T5 raiding guilds will keep banging their heads on Lady and/or Kael for the time being until Sunwell comes out (some guilds might kill them, but others will "take their place" so to speak).

The end effect of that will be that the average item level a T5 raider is wearing will hover somehwere around 133 (ilevel of T5) whereas the T6 raiders will at least be at 141 if not higher (exalted rings/trinkets as well as Illidan/Archimonde loot).

Thats a gear difference from an item level point of 8 level already. Add to that that T5 raiders probably won't have access to MH/BT gems and won't have either chest or head pieces this will overall probably add up to 9 or even 10 item levels.

Now Blizzard has a problem with the tuning Sunwell: How hard do they make it? If the attument chain isn't linked to MH or BT attunement they will need to tune Sunwell to roughly itemlevel 133. This will then though mean that all T6 farming guilds will just blow through that instance in a matter of weeks as their gear already is superior to the tuned difficulty of the new instance.

If Blizzard on the other hand choses to link Sunwell attunment to MH or BT attument and tune it for item level 141 they will effecively lock out all T5 or lower raiders. Even if they don't link the attunement to MH or BT, if the encounters are then tuned for item level 141 those T5 raiders will simply bang their heads against nearly impossible encounters for them. And due to the consumables fix that Blizzard did (and thank god they did!) it's not possible anymore to just beat an encounter by overuse of consumables.

So Blizzard effectively steared themselves into a dead end with the current attunement chain from T5 to T6 content and will either make the game boring for T6 raiders or impossible to reach or beat for T5 raiders, thereby locking out a large part of the raiding community. This hasn't happened in vanilla WoW where virtually every raiding guild could just go to any of the 40 man instances and find their level of difficulty.

Maybe, just maybe a solution would be to open up MH and BT 1-2 months before Sunwell comes out so that those T5 raiders could at least begin to gear up a little bit despite not having finished T5 content could then prepare themselves a bit for Sunwell and have a slight chance.

And possibly make the difficulty progression in Sunwell a bit steeper than it was in T5 and T6 content, so that the first 1-3 bosses would be tuned more around item level 133 whereas the later ones would then require 140 or more.

I'm really curious how Blizzard will handle that issue.

 

Herm

We've never experienced a vanish/insta-gib, and I am unsure if it is avoidable by positioning (I know some guilds tank the rogue near the raid, whereas we pull it well off to the side away from everything). Flamestrike + Envenom is generally easily handled in most situations with proper personal survival and quick healing. On the rare times that envenom ticks for the large amount immediately on top of a flamestrike, causing a death, you simply battle rez the 1 death and move on.

On any given pull, "random or unlucky" deaths are sparse and easily handled with a battle rez, or simply ignoring the death and moving on. The only people who absolutely can not die in the fight are the tanks, and they have enough health to avoid being insta-gibbed or dying from 8k worth of aoe + envenom damage.

To me, a random or luck based encounter is one that has the ability to wipe your entire raid instantly with 1 particular ability or unlucky string of combos, or can kill off your tanks with a single, unavoidable ability. Single deaths that may or may not be avoidable in no way make a fight luck based.

 

• Playered

To be quite honest I hope the first boss requires a raid in full SR so atleast sometime in BT/MH is _REQUIRED_ for most guilds (I doubt getting 200-250 hearts will be easy to AH) before they can even attempt it.

Because to be quiet honest, an ilvl of 8-10 is what? <10 spell damage, <7 int, <10 sta and <6 spell crit rating in this day and age, if it is tuned for gear, I hope its tuned for 151 because then 141 makes no difference, and anything below will struggle.

Atleast this way people will not be able to skip BT/MH like is generally done with TK/SSC, because both instances are great full of good bosses and good loot, and with that amount of SR they can just do Mother and Council regardless and then even get to see Illidan.

 

Dawme

The only thing I hope is, since there will be only 6 bosses in Sunwell, that we don't see 2 supremus, 3 akamas and 1 real boss. This zone is pretty much the latest chance for Blizzard to convince "hardcore" players than there is a future for them besides owning their instances in 3-4 weeks and going afk for 6 months so.... they should better not waste it.

 

Kirth

so your ideal scenario is each boss having a learn time of approximately a month?

 

Zephro

Someone earlier in the thread was asking how many guilds had killed Vashj. According to WoWJutsu, it's around 8%.

That's pretty small for the first boss of the first 25-man instance. 99.95% of guilds are in Karazhan, 31.8% are in SSC, but only 8% have cleared it. That looks like a pretty steep learning curve.

 

XI-

This isn't an issue, this is progression. If you can't handle fights like Vashj and Kael how do you expect to be able to handle a zone that's supposedly harder than BT/Hyjal.

 

Dawme

We should be able to find a good difficulty level between "2 pulls" and "1 month", no ?
If sunwell is really supposed to be the latest BC instance, so the hardest, I hope the first 5 fights are enough hard to last like 3-4 days each one for the best guilds and I also hope there's some mechanic that makes the latest boss requiring some weeks of clearing to be kill.
Anyways, we'll see how it goes but if sunwell is open for christmas, cleared 2 weeks later, and next expansion announced in june or so, Blizzard is gonna loose some subscribers between february and june.

 

• Playered

If they moved onto more raid-wide execution fights rather than "this is what they do, enjoy" type fights, then things should be better regardless of the gear-check they involve.

Using Naxx bosses as an example
#1 - Thaddius (DPS check + idiot filter)
#2 - Gothik (Co-ordination + DPS check)
#3 - Patchwerk (Tank check - Top T5 and some T6 on a non-tauren warrior baseline)
#4 - 4HM (Co-ordination overload)
#5 - Sapph (Requires item drops from the instance, cock-block to hold raids back a couple of weeks)
#6 - Kel'T (not done him personally, but he seemed to do well for his position back then)


Theres very little encounters in TBC that require the whole raid to be on the ball, Mother, EoS, Teron, Illidan - all tend to just pinpoint on a couple of people each time, rather than Thaddius, 4HM etc which needed the whole raid to be doing things together.

 

◊ Praetorian

Pretty much. I mean I take it as a given that Sunwell is going to be set up as something you do after you finish BT/Hyjal. The point you quoted is essentially like asking whether people who are in MC aren't going to hit a brick wall in Naxx. Well, yeah, that's why you do BWL/AQ (even if you don't finish AQ) and then go to Naxx afterwards. A guild that's still working on t5 content when Sunwell comes out can ignore Sunwell until they've made headway into BT and Hyjal.

It's a bit afield from where we started (but I'm also not sure how much original discussion is still to be had about the basis thesis of pacing), but I'm also quite curious to see what Blizzard's TBC-era take on a "last zone of the expansion" challenge is going to be, particularly if it's only going to be ~6 bosses. Is it going to be a zone you walk into and start progressing immediately, or is every boss in Sunwell going to be harder than any boss before it?

 

Nurru

Along the same lines it'll be interesting to see if Hyjal has a similar attunement requirement based on Tier 6 end bosses or if it'll be an open instance with some sort of gear check at the beginning. But as we've discussed, gear checks don't work particularly well anymore.

< Aislinana> Why would it be my job to sleep with vontre? Don't I have standards?

 

Jayde

As many people have been referencing the WoWJutsu numbers, I figured that visualizing them might be a good idea. Here are two graphs, one showing the overall progression % over the entire scale, and one showing only T5+ content.

Edit: Added the graph discussed on the next page. The third graph also contains the differencial between the previous boss in purple.





I think it's hard to argue that the pacing/progression curve is exactly "smooth" at the moment. There seem to be a lot of flaws in the current way the progression structure is right now, and certainly seems as if it could be a bit better than the scene is representing at the moment.

 

Lumi

Hydross looks like a bigger block than Kael on that chart. Maybe those dedicated trolls should start making "Nerf Hydross" threads.

 

Goggles

Hydross and Lurker are definitely the wrong way round on there. I was surprised that the drop off to Vashj and Kael'thas was as small as it is.

Not actually a member of Refusion on Burning Blade.

 

songster

Thanks - lovely illustration there! I suspect Solarian is a bit of an oddity there as a lot of guilds were waiting for the 2.2 changes before trying. She'll probably move up after the retune.

Three take-home messages:

1) The major "hump" is still getting into SSC in the first place. This cannot be due to attunements any longer. Nor is it due to a lack of people wanting to raid 25-man content - look how many are going for Maulgar and Gruul.

2) After a bump following the "easy three" of VR, Lurker and Magtheridon, there is a smooth-ish fall through SSC/TK bosses, with Vashj and Kael as the final two (allowing for Solarian being an odd one out). Kael is, as expected, the biggest speedbump here.

3) Any guild that can kill Kael rips through the next 6-8 bosses extremely fast. The curve flattens right off as soon as you get past him, with almost no noticeable bumps whatsoever (though a graph showing just the numbers from Vashj onwards would be helpful).


Now, of course these numbers should be taken with more than a grain of salt. As I've said in other threads, Wowjutsu massively overstates the number of raiding guilds in KZ and early T5, due to the effect of cross-guild raids, PuGs etc. This gives (as near as I can make out) something like a 2 to 3 fold overestimation of the number of groups raiding T4 and T5 content. Since these graphs are normalised to keep the number entering Kara. at 100%, this will have the effect of exaggerating point (1), point (2) or both.

However, what is also worth pointing out is that at this point in pre-TBC raiding, around a year (at most) before the next expansion, something like 25% of the entire playbase had killed Ragnaros. That's a figure from Tigole, if I remember rightly. Thus, to even keep pace with pre-TBC raiding (for which Naxx in particular was derided as overly exclusive), Vashj should have now be at well over 25% (since this is the percentage of raiders rather than percentage of the playbase. Currently she's at under 8%.

Even if you don't believe the "25% of the playbase" figure, we *do* know from a variety of sources that at the time the expansion hit, around 50% of raid groups had killed Nefarian. So, when WoTLK hits, then the Wowjutsu figure for Kael should be around 50%. He's currently at less than 5%.

The pacing is wrong not just at the top end, but right along the whole raiding spectrum. As discussed above, some of this is down to the dog-eat-dog raiding climate created by the frontloaded content. Let us all hope this is something Blizzard avoid in WoTLK.

 

snape

I don't know about you, but thinking back to Nefarian is an eery parallel to our Kael experience. Both fights took us roughly a month to learn, and around us the Nefarian fight as well as the Kael fight caused a competing guild to implode.

While Nefarian is definitely the easier of the 2 fights, the increase in player skill leads me to think that they were both equally "challenging" in the sense that my past self and those around me was/were less skillful than we are now.

 

Deris

That 10 man -> 25 man drop off is abysmal :/

Why don't they just patch in a bigger Gruul's Lair, make HKM and Gruul the last 2 bosses, with 4-5 "easier" bosses in the zone - maybe even have HKM's adds show up as induvidual bosses - but more buff. This way you learn what each boss does, and how it works - then when you get to HKM, you are all prepared with the "necessary tools" to handle HKM. Throw in 1 optional harder boss ala Ouro (a female Gronn maybe who is almost T5 level vs Gruul's T4 tuning), keep the trash low like it already is, and you have the recipe for success right here. Then tune Gruul down a bit more, and make that curve almost equal.

I'd expect SOME drop going from 10 -> 25 man, but not the levels that are displayed here.