◊ Vectivus

Preface: There has been a lot of discussion surrounding, in particular, the release of Sunwell, and whether or not its encounters are tuned.

Before this discussion has the opportunity to devolve into stupidity, let me separate what qualifies as 'tuning' and what does not:

Tuning - Is the process by which a given challenge (specifically, raid encounters) is made sufficiently difficult for its target audience.

What tuning is not - Class representation, friendliness to a given talent specialization, etc. In general, if it would be described under the umbrella notion of "balance" (with which everyone and their puppy dog is so eminently familiar), it has no bearing on a discussion of tuning.



Given this, let me start by asking - how do you define when an encounter is adequately tuned?

Brutallus is an easy benchmark for relevant, contemporary discussion. Most everyone who has attempted this fight, successfully or not, has deemed it to be "well tuned" - that is to say, given their gear/experience/talent, they feel that their relative ability to complete this encounter is in line with those factors. It also provides a very clear picture of what is or is not required - no guild in "badge gear" or "welfare epics" can physically defeat Brutallus, which sends a certain message to the intended raiding audience.

On the opposite side, many people claim Brutallus is not tuned to the difficulty they had expected (insert baseless assertion about how an encounter isn't tuned until it takes X many weeks of impossible odds, etc.). I know a fair number of people who sit in this camp.

And, obviously, there is an entire regime of people who will claim Brutallus is overtuned until he falls over death-touched like he did on the PTR. I'm largely content to ignore that group.

I would argue this - given how long the guilds in question have been farming Tier 6 content, Brutallus (and what we've seen of Sunwell in general) walks a razor's edge in terms of tuning. It isn't impossible, but it will test even the most seasoned of players.



To those of you who think that this (or other, for that matter) content is well-tuned - why? What substantiates your belief that any or all of these encounters serve as an appropriate skill/gear/pulse check?

To those of you who disagree - why? There has to be a set point at which player ability + gear + composition = win; if the point that has been set is insufficient, or too extreme, how so?

What content demonstrates adequate tuning? Overtuning? Undertuning?

 

• Snowy

I'll speak to why I think Brutallus is well-tuned -- it requires you to have farmed Illidan for a few months. However, if you tuned it even higher, you'd have to have farmed Illidan until you got every conceivable drop shy of MAYBE one or two pieces -- i.e. having had farmed him for 8-9 months like the top guilds have done. (We had, I believe, 33 Illidan kills)

I think requiring 33 kills of an endboss just to progress in the next raid zone is a bit excessive and I wouldn't purposely force anyone to go down that route. The only reason we had to was, of course, the lack of the zone in the first place.

Paladin: Pyla
Mage: Pylah

 

Holla

Brutallus is near perfect in my opinion.

It really takes all 25 people in the raid mashing their buttons as hard as they can to get him down. I love it. Watching everyone scramble before the raid to get drums made, chain potting, everyone zoned in and really pushing hard. A lot of the fights in BT/Hyjal were just so meh. The boss would fall over and it was just kinda expected, no nerd screams on vent, or spamming /1 with cheers. When we zerged him down the final few % the other night it was nothing short of epic, and it felt really, really good to finally seem that "Brutallus has been defeated" flash up.

That being said, Brutallus might be a little too steep for the target audience. Now I know the kids counting the days down for the new badge vendor will never have a chance at him in his current form, but realistically, even some of the best guilds out there have struggled with him.

I guess struggle isn't the right word, as he died on the first night for some, and many more throughout the week. But I've seen all of one WWS (EJ, WWS is bugged too from what I've hear) beating the enrage timer, with a mere ~10 seconds left. Most other guilds have hit the enrage and zerged him down. Now, I know there's tons of guilds with players that have cleared BT/Hyjal for a while and aren't nearly as geared or as component as most guilds that have gotten Brutallus down. I definitely see them struggling with him a lot.

I really hope they just don't insta nerf him though. Very challenging and fun fight. Looking forward to it next week!

 

Crazytrucker

-remove

 

WiPe|Domin

I aggre, Brutallus seems like a perfect encounter that requires almost perfect execution. Our WWS shows 6 min kill, yet we killed him with 4-5 sec before enrage and thats with one shadow priest dying 2 times and one other shadow priest dropping dps to help heal for some short time. We didnt have single warglaive in raid.

Felmyst is very well tuned aswell. Requirement of dps are only slightly less than Brutallus and enrage timer allows you to dps him for ~1 min after it hits depending if he is in air or not. This encounter involves high dps, high hps, FAST reaction on the encapsulate, fast reaction on mass dispells, running away with the beam and finaly a Heigan style dance Aoe part of the skellies is trivalised when using a Prot Pala so its not worth discussing.

 

stirno

I would agree with everyone saying Brutallus is tuned very very well. Its been a long time since I've seen a truly fun raid encounter that required everyone in the raid to go all out.

We killed Brutallus 15s before the enrage and it was amazing. As a healer It was insane -- and I want more fights like that.

Wow Web Stats

 

Efreet

"Tuned" seems heavily arbitrary depending on who's talking about. I am no more than an educated observer on the matter (with little personal experience) so you can ignore me if you like, but I feel, as many who aren't so inexperienced that content tuning is relative to it's next release. That is to say if content dies in one week and then the next instance is released 9 months later it is severly undertuned. But if it lasts 3 months before it goes down and the next instance is released 6 months later it is decently tuned. The only "overtuning" I could imagine is most of an instance lasting for 80-90% of the development period, since 2-3 weeks of farming content is understandable. Any more farming than that is generally boring as hell unless every boss in the instance is extremely random (say, Original Gruul type random). Yes I realize this allows for bosses to be utterly impossible for most of the time if Blizzard cannot reproduce an encounter like Four Horsemen (which granted they probably won't, at least not for another 100-200 encounters until they get lucky or if they hire more innovative designers), but provided development time is shortened down to 3-4 months I don't think the burnout resulting from this will equal the 8 months of dead content burnout.

This gating mechanic is not very useful either unless one of the future bosses takes longer than a week to kill or if WotLK is released 1 month after Kil'Jaeden is killed for the first time (assuming 1 month per gate).

Undertuning certainly attracts more of the population and probably improves the overall growth of the game from a pure economic standpoint, so I don't think it's in Blizzard's interest to tune content well, though it may be in their interest to develop quicker.

 

• Praanz

No content is adequatelly tuned.

To elaborate.

Why? Maby abit rough said but because WoW attracts such a wide audience an encounter can never be adequatelly tuned. The wide range of skill on the playerbase makes it almost impossible to suit everyones need.

But, for the time beeing, probably all encounters are well tuned. The players on the bleeding edge are the ones in SW25 right now and they need/want/love with a mix of hate when the going gets tough.

In the end we will probably see nerfs in SW25 but who cares? As long as I (or You) got to be part of the hardest "Version 1.0" of an instance I'm all happy - and I'm equally happy when the rest of the community gets to try it out in their casual way months later.

This what we have now - Version 1.0 with little known - is where WoW is at its best. Everyone will find their adequatelly tuned versions in the future but everyone needs to wait for their turn.


The point I'm trying to make is - Blizzards philosophy is crystal clear: Start out hardcore-hard and end up casually-squishy. Redefinition of whats well tuned will happen along the way. Content will be adjusted to be meet the demand of the entire raid community. Everyone needs to wait for their turn and enjoy it while it lasts.

 

Efreet

What is hardcore-hard compared to casually squishy in terms of say Black Temple? What encounter aside from Shahraz is so much easier than it was to begin with? How, for that matter, can an encounter be construed as difficult if 200 guilds kill it in a few days when previously the bleeding edge was considered the top 40-50 guilds in the world? WTB Zalgradis PvP video though.

 

Miriam

I'd say it's quite possible to design an instance with tuning that pleases pretty much everyone. It involves, roughly:
- 6 or more bosses with tuning curve similar to BT
- highly complex end boss, very long fight but definately doable with learning and proper execution
- 3 or 4 optional bosses, maximal gear check with gimmicks and fight mechanics to the point of being ridiculous. Loot with maximal e-peen factor (mounts, funny trinkets, pets and such) but nothing necessary for killing the final boss or being prepared for the next instance.

So while "normal" guilds are following the usual progress curve within a few months, the hardcore guilds can bang their heads on the optional bosses if they feel like it.

AQ was sort of in that direction, but ever since Blizzard has been able to release 6 new bosses per year, it doesn't necessarily seem realistic anymore.

 

Furizaa

When I compare your 15 seconds left, the stats and the gear, Brutallus will become a real asshole to all the guilds that killed Illidan recently or got a handfull of new members still in T5 or worse. So with this bad timing your guild is doomed to farm old content until you get your raiddps to 18k or the encounter is nerved. Not very well tuned in my opinion.

 

Zaran

Really simple sentence has always summed it up for me. *while keeping in mind no guilds farming Illidan for say a month should by any means have an easy time with the boss*

Something that pushes every member of your raid to use everything at there disposal and push themselves to do that much better.


From a US top 10 Brutallus kill member here, he is very very well tuned if the intention is to keep out guilds that haven't been farming Illidan for at least a couple of months or are not willing / too stupid to use everything at there disposal.

 

Ghando

This is a silly assertion. If Brutallus was tuned to be killable by a guild that beat Illidan very recently, he would be a joke to the many guilds who've been farming BT for months. Those guilds have been awaiting new content for a long time (the better part of a year) whereas a guild killing Illidan today has been immersed in fresh content the entire time. Guilds who've just killed Illidan will have to farm BT, Kalecgos and the trash leading up to him for a while before they can take a reasonable crack at Brutallus, and that's totally fine. This way he's a satisfying kill for every single guild who beats him, whether it's now or in a couple months.

I'm a Shaman.

 

Nolanhadhoof

The role of gear checks have been discussed on the WoW forums ad nauseum so I'm going to stay clear of that and instead talk about another aspect of the difficulty of encounters and consequentially tunning; fight complexity.

First off, I've yet too see a fight that is so complex that it is, prima facie, over tuned (like Vectivus noted, this is with respect to the target audience). When I first saw the Kael fight I was admittedly overwhelmed but it's now just one more trivial farm encounter. There is no fight in the game that cannot reasonably be learned and this is substantiated by the great number of people completing all the encounters.

Now we have new encounters with new mechanics. Giving a boss patches of fire, curses, and fears doesn't cut it anymore as seasoned raiders are so familiar with these that they are rarely going to be tripped by these. From the first three Sunwell bosses (the extent of my Sunwell experience) we get a few interesting new mechanics all of which are easily learned. So what is a reasonable learning curve of new mechanics? I don't have a clear answer as some people have no problem wiping often to learn something and other simply don't need more than a few wipes to catch on. I'll throw out thirty as the arbitrary number of wipes to learn an encounter that is tuned. What do you fellow readers think of that number? What would make a fight too complex? No fight currently in the game should take that many wipes so by that measure I'm concluding that in terms of fight complexity everything is tuned or under tuned.

Blizzard could make fights that require incredible situational awareness or add puzzles to fights as a true test of intelligence. Such fights could be so difficult that the average Illidan guild, say mine, couldn't do them but that's obviously not what they want. On the other hand end game raiders want a challenge. So we're again with a dichotomy where not everyone can be pleased. But which is best?

 

Giske

First three bosses in Sunwell are tuned perfectly or close to perfect. I hope they arent changed in any way.

Edit: To elaborate, its awesome that theres finally bosses hard as nails that require both gear and skills to down and not one or the other.

 

Zaran

This exactly is what is so great about Sunwell raiding so far. Ever since I've had most of my tier 6 gear I have yet to feel challanged in any aspect of PvE, Sunwell is doing an amazing job of pushing players to not just gear zerg encounters.

 

Furizaa

When this "gear check" is meant to prevent guilds that cleared BT to progress in Sunwell than I can't just understand the idea behind this. Guilds should be able to progress in an zone when the others have been cleared - regardles of how many guilds had to farm something for a year.

For the majority of guilds that cleared BT this boss is well tuned and hard - for the others that cleared BT aswell... a content blocker.

 

Tunch

Yeah, but what the hell is your rush? If you're one of the guilds who still needs some Illidan farming until your gear is up to par for Brutallus ... just enjoy the ride. This is your last raid content for another way too large block of time. Kill Kalecgos, work on Brutallus one day a week for a challenge, and continue to farm gear. If you hadn't been farming BT for 6-8 months you aren't going to be getting any world firsts anyway.

 

• Shifft

A guild that clears BT tomorrow and progressed at a reasonable pace will have a gear level about equal to T5 (some Karazhan/T4 pieces left, some T6 pieces). There's no reasonable way to tune Sunwell around that without it being completely trivial for the hundreds of guilds that have been clearing BT forever. Adding an extra tier 6 token of each slot per week will help new guilds catch up a bit quicker.

 

◊ Quigon

At least it no longer requires 6 elixirs and a pre-2.1 flask to meet the tuning benchmark.

 

Faustryn

I initially thought along the lines of what Vectivus stated in regards to the tuning of an encounter, but I think Nolanhadhoof hit upon a another good point - the intellect of the target players experiencing the event (and I'm not talking about the stat either). It's one thing to design an encounter to meet a certain corporal criteria, such as a dps check, but it's another to have an encounter test the wits of the player. The chess event in Karazhan is an excellent example. Imagine an encounter that was indifferent to the gear of the raid, but relied solely on their smarts.

I realize, however, that the chess event was situated as more of an "award encounter" for the raid making it that deep into the instance. I also realize that World of Warcraft is more right-brained than left, but I think Blizzard did something special with that event, and I'd like to see more things like that incorporated into future content. Nothing mind-numbingly frustrating (Ricochet Robot, anyone?), but a pleasant mind-game, so to speak.

 

Ghando

BT is tuned for a T5 raid, meaning you don't need to have a raid geared out in T6 to beat Illidan or any other encounter. Sunwell is tuned for a T6 raid, meaning you don't need Sunwell gear to beat the intense gear check that is Brutallus but you DO need T6 gear. This is called "progression." And you sidestep my other point, which is that if Brutallus was tuned such that a guild who recently killed Illidan could kill him, top-end raiders would crush him in their first couple attempts. Top-end guilds want real challenges that push them to their limits. Brutallus does this. I hope he never gets nerfed.

I'm a Shaman.

 

Anedris

The difference however is that to gear up for Illidan you have thirteen t6 encounters you can farm. To gear up for Brutallus you have one t7 encounter. A better analogy would be if Supremus and Anetheron required full t5 gear on everyone in the raid to beat.

I don't have a problem with Sunwell's tuning, however. We have until Wrath to beat the place - there's no hurry.

 

Kumar

The process of tuning shouldn't involve making an encounter difficutly for its target audience, it should be making the encounter negotiable or challenging for its target audience.

While the encounter might be fun at this moment for the top raiding guilds who have cleared T6 and have members in T6 gear, a few months down the line they will have moved on and people who freshly hit/clear T6 will be looking at getting their hands wet in Sunwell before the release of the expansion. There is no reason at that time for Brutallus to remain a content blocker for them.

I am perfectly fine with hard and challenging encounters when the new raids are released, because the people hitting them are going to be the top guilds, going for the kill and the challenge. I do feel over time that content has to be opened to a wider audience.

 

Anedris

And the difference between "difficult" and "challenging" is...?

Clearly, the target audience for Brutallus is those guilds who have been farming Illidan for 3+ months. He is both challenging and negotiable for such guilds. I suspect that, just as you suggest, he will be nerfed about 3 months from now (and that's a good thing).