I can say for myself after trying Brutallus out for 2 day's now that he require's insane concentration dps and heal at the same time. The tactics are not that hard and i think he is mostly in line what i've expacted but at some point it's maybe a bit too lucky since every full geared tank is easyly smashed to death within 1-1,5 second(s) it's really challanging but i think he hits a little too hard sometimes especially when the stomp debuff is up. It's healable but with a little amount of luck i would say. So the only solution to kill this encounter is try try try try try try until he's dead an he will fall since he is the same as Patchwerk was back in Naxrammasa and on top of that this instance was made for all those high end guilds out there beating the shit out of BT for quite some time now!
Honestly, people in this thread who haven't actually pulled Brutallus need to stop bitching about how hard the fight is going to be for middle of the pack guilds. It's tightly tuned yes, but not to the point of requiring warglaive sets and leatherworking on every raid member.
On topic though; well tuned is the current incarnation of Felmyst. Well tuned is pre-nerf Archimonde. Well tuned is a fight wherein a group that does not overgear it requires a large amount of class knowledge, environmental awareness, execution, and raid synergy from everyone present to successfully down the boss. Basically, any fight where dead weight will wipe you.
Requiring such a high level of individual player ability on a regular basis will obviously cause guilds whose members are below par to have problems, but given the policy of "hard content now, nerfed content later", who really cares? Let it be opened up to a larger audience at the appropriate time and keep bleeding edge content challenging for at least a couple months. Everyone eventually has a shot at the content in some form, and tuning content extremely tightly for its initial release gives the bored top end guilds something to do between games of dota.
Blizzard has done an excellent job balancing Sunwell content thus far around the line of being challenging for overgeared raids without necessarily making it impossible for slightly undergeared ones, and I hope the trend continues through the latter half of the zone.
I don't think gear check fights are 'well tuned' by their very nature. They tend to be over simplistic in terms of strategy and action. I prefer to think of fights like Archimonde, Kalecgos, and Kael'thas to be well tuned because there are a lot of moving parts and it isn't just a matter of slamming your damage and heal buttons as fast as you can and coordinating cooldowns (they also tend to promote meter grand-standing but that is another matter).
Granted, it takes less time to defeat a non gear-check encounter because the bosses I mentioned can be figured out and familiarized in a matter of hours whereas Brutallus technically takes months of farming gear in order to defeat. Given the choice of those two paradigms, however, I'd definately choose the former over the latter.
Actually, there's a gigantic gap between what top raids actually do execution-wise, and what a theoretical cap would be. The difference is that since complexity and fun aren't equivalent, you end up with needlessly complex encounters.
I was talking only about in terms of currently existing game mechanics. Obviously you can add entirely new game mechanics that we are not good at.
I don't think gear check fights are 'well tuned' by their very nature. They tend to be over simplistic in terms of strategy and action. I prefer to think of fights like Archimonde, Kalecgos, and Kael'thas to be well tuned because there are a lot of moving parts and it isn't just a matter of slamming your damage and heal buttons as fast as you can and coordinating cooldowns (they also tend to promote meter grand-standing but that is another matter).
Granted, it takes less time to defeat a non gear-check encounter because the bosses I mentioned can be figured out and familiarized in a matter of hours whereas Brutallus technically takes months of farming gear in order to defeat. Given the choice of those two paradigms, however, I'd definately choose the former over the latter.
Don't you think it works then that Brutallus is sandwiched between 2 bosses that, while not exactly "non gear-check encounters," definitely favor execution over raw force? We downed Brutallus last night and haven't pulled Felmyst yet, and I like the pacing mechanism that asks superior organization and adaptation as well as solid dps/healing for Kalecgos, more dps/healing with less organization/adaptation for Brutallus, and then from what sounds like another solid test of both in Felmyst.
The fact that these fights, and their relatively solid tuning, have been achieved given the fact that there are 36(?) weeks of possible gear difference between Illidan killing guilds seems pretty amazing to me.
I think people a re overestimating how geared you have to be to kill this guy as DPS (beating the enrage is another thing). We took him down last night with a shadowpreist in FSW/kara/Za gear and a hunter in t5ish stuff.
I think its tuned correctly, but people saying that your entire raid needs 4 months of illidan farming are way off. Approprate use of consumables and cooldowns makes up for alot of missing gear.
I think people a re overestimating how geared you have to be to kill this guy as DPS (beating the enrage is another thing). We took him down last night with a shadowpreist in FSW/kara/Za gear and a hunter in t5ish stuff.
I think its tuned correctly, but people saying that your entire raid needs 4 months of illidan farming are way off. Approprate use of consumables and cooldowns makes up for alot of missing gear.
Congratulations on your kill. I do, however, think that your example with the undergeared folks is a bit disingenuous. It is of course doable with some undergeared members, as you say. However, look at what it took for you to pull that off. You dropped to 7 healers. We had to do the same thing last night as some of our key dps was absent. On Sunday we had multiple sub-1% wipes with 8 healers and me (moronically I know) not rotating heroisms into my group to at least give me a 2nd (I have the glaives set). Monday we had some key dps and 1 holy pally absent. That forced us to ask 1 full t6/Arch sword Destruction warlock to go back ot his former main (a full t6 holy pally), we respecced a prot warrior arms (his dps set is not terrible, but he lacks the finishers (rings, trinkets, etc.) to make for a truly strong set, and we brought a recent warlock recruit who is in mostly t6 to be our 5/5 Shadow embrace, affliction person. With that group, we would never have gotten the kill with 8 healers. We used 7 and our healers struggled on some pulls, but pulled through for the kill.
As you see we only had 3 shaman as the lag in Sunwell caused us to drop a resto for a holy pally early as well. I am realy proud of my guild's effort in this encounter and I do think it is well tuned for its intended audience, but honestly it can potentially be unfair to guilds that have had some poor luck with member retention and it shows the real flaw in the model for the awarding of Illidan's legendaries. The Atiesh model is frankly much more preferable. Basically, the margin for error that let us kill last night can be largely laid at the feet of me having a glaive set. For your guild the margin for error was, I suspect, being able to bring in a 4th Bloodlust/Heroism. So while I was exhilerated by our kill, I do think that there are aspects of the tuning that are a bit unfair if you've had bad luck with people quitting the game, or bad luck with drops. I am not sure what can be done about that, but, I find myself siding with Metroelf in this debate that execution checks are a bit more fair and usually more fun.
Congratulations on your kill. I do, however, think that your example with the undergeared folks is a bit disingenuous. It is of course doable with some undergeared members, as you say. However, look at what it took for you to pull that off. You dropped to 7 healers.
We had dropped to 7 Healers on Thursday, at my request (being the officer most involved with Melee DPS) because I felt we wouldnt win without it. Im not trying to claim that we werent geared, many members of our raid are very very geared (some are literally waering Ideal pre-2.4 gear, most others including myself are 1-2 peices away). As for your heroism comment, the 4th heroism was used on the tank groupo so warlocks could go all our earlier in the fight, and the reason we bring so many shamans is beacuse our healing strategy revolves around more armor, not more heals (hint hint to anyone learning the fight still).
We had dropped to 7 Healers on Thursday, at my request (being the officer most involved with Melee DPS) because I felt we wouldnt win without it. Im not trying to claim that we werent geared, many members of our raid are very very geared (some are literally waering Ideal pre-2.4 gear, most others including myself are 1-2 peices away). As for your heroism comment, the 4th heroism was used on the tank groupo so warlocks could go all our earlier in the fight, and the reason we bring so many shamans is beacuse our healing strategy revolves around more armor, not more heals (hint hint to anyone learning the fight still).
Makes sense. I wasn't trying to criticize you either, I was just pointing out that with mostly optimal gear and dropping to 7 healers you can bring in a couple of undergeared folks and still get the kill. With 7 healers and optimal gear on everyone I imagine that's how you get the 25 seconds before enrage #1 worldwide dps kill that Might from Turalyon (sp?) got on Sunday.
Makes sense. I wasn't trying to criticize you either, I was just pointing out that with mostly optimal gear and dropping to 7 healers you can bring in a couple of undergeared folks and still get the kill. With 7 healers and optimal gear on everyone I imagine that's how you get the 25 seconds before enrage #1 worldwide dps kill that Might from Turalyon (sp?) got on Sunday.
My logic on why to bring 7 healers is as follows:
We arent sure we have the DPS with 8 Healers, and even if we do, the 8th healer was not preventing tank deaths. In our inital strategy (8 healers) we had 3 Holy Pallies, 1 spirit preist and 1 Shaman healing Tank, 1 COH preist healing slash, and 2 Shamans Healing burn, In our winning strategy we cut a Paladin, had 3 Shamans, spirit Preist and 1 Paladin Healing Tank, COH preist healing Slash, and 1 Pally healing Burns.
basically I felt it was pointless to try with 8 healers because when we finally got the healing down with 8 we still wouldnt be winning. It seemed like a much better idea to RNG the tanks living for 6 minutes but know that if you make it that far you are gauranteed a win. We only made it to the enrage timer twice, once with 8 healers (9%) and the time we killed him.
He's right though, you don't need to farm Illidan for 7 months if you happen to have 5 shaman you can bring to a raid. Bloodlust on a short burst fight is just crazy OP. What's preventing us from beating him isn't gear/skill, it's simply not having the right raid composition. If we could swap out our second shadow priest for a ele or enhance shaman, he'd be dead.
Well, that and our instance crashing twice and locking us all out of our accounts for 24 hours.
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.
I think my guild will end falling into this category sadly. We killed Illidan for this first time around mid-December, but recently lost a fully geared (minus warglaives) rogue, a fully geared warlock, and two fully geared resto shaman. These people will not be easy to replace in terms of their gear level, and their departures (for various reasons) will likely set us back a month at minimum, but quite possibly longer if Brutallus stays in his current form. Despite this, I would actually appreciate it if he went un-nerfed for at least a few months. There's something to be said for attempting/ killing the same version of a boss that died for a world first.
I think people a re overestimating how geared you have to be to kill this guy as DPS (beating the enrage is another thing). We took him down last night with a shadowpreist in FSW/kara/Za gear and a hunter in t5ish stuff.
...
I think its tuned correctly, but people saying that your entire raid needs 4 months of illidan farming are way off. Approprate use of consumables and cooldowns makes up for alot of missing gear.
Nobody's overestimating anything. We know exactly how much raid DPS it takes to kill him: 28k+. Most guilds and high-end players know roughly how far their guild is away from that number. Where's the overestimation?
Giving an example of how you brought a DPS class that soft-caps out in DPS very quickly (Shadow Priest) and generally does not do as significant damage as other classes in T6 gear along with 6 Shaman and 7 healers does not make 28k any easier to reach for most guilds.
One could argue that he's tuned fine for the current atmosphere, but people playing him off as "oh, he's really not that bad.. you should try it first" are just being silly. In the world of WWS and heavy theorycrafting, it's pretty easy to sort out what your DPS potential vs. the enrage limit is and see if you can or can't do it. There's no point even zoning in to try him unless you can push out the proper DPS levels.
Nobody's overestimating anything. We know exactly how much raid DPS it takes to kill him: 28k+. Most guilds and high-end players know roughly how far their guild is away from that number. Where's the overestimation?
Giving an example of how you brought a DPS class that soft-caps out in DPS very quickly (Shadow Priest) and generally does not do as significant damage as other classes in T6 gear along with 6 Shaman and 7 healers does not make 28k any easier to reach for most guilds.
One could argue that he's tuned fine for the current atmosphere, but people playing him off as "oh, he's really not that bad.. you should try it first" are just being silly. In the world of WWS and heavy theorycrafting, it's pretty easy to sort out what your DPS potential vs. the enrage limit is and see if you can or can't do it. There's no point even zoning in to try him unless you can push out the proper DPS levels.
While I agree with you about people being able to theorycraft their DPS quite well, I dont think most DPSers are aware of how much they can do on this fight with significant consumable abuse.
For our kill I used: Scroll of Str V, Scroll of Agi V, Haste Pot X3, Elixr of Demonslaying X2, Sharpening Stone. No other fight in the game is as consumable heavy as this one, and as a result theres not real way to know what your raid DPS is going to be until you go ahead and do the fight. When you add in things like Fire elemental totem and other long cooldowns, I think may raids who are probally thinking (or saying in this thread) "Oh we lost to many people to attrition" or "we havent been farming Illidan long enough" have a real shot at beating this guy.
You can definitely class stack to counter the gear check, but that option isn't available for everyone. That's been the truth all along though. Look at Gurtogg which was the 'healer gear check' fight of BT. But if you had priests/shaman up the wazoo, it was trivial. Guilds rolling with primarily paladin healers?
Yes, I'm bitter.
Luckily Blizzard's April fools day forum changes provides endless entertainment...
This content is 'tuned' for now, to be hard for all of you that have been farming Illidan for 6+ months.
I'm sure as the second half of the instance is opened up, we'll see the first have 'tuned' for guilds that have only been killing Illidan for 1-2 months.
You cant expect hes going to stay in a state where he pushes max/min 6+ month Illidan farming guilds to their extreme for very long.
I personally think Brutallus is tuned fairly well for the guilds he is intended to. It's been out 1 week and already 60+ guilds killed him and more and more will do it the next few days.
We killed him with 7 healers (2 Shamans, 3 Paladins, 1 Druid, 1 Spirit Priest), 1 Glaive Rogue and 1 Protection Warrior doing dps while we were trying how it works with druid tank. I am fairly confident that this reset we can bring him down safely before enrage timer.
Who we are is but a stepping stone to what we can become.
I am sure it seems unfair for a guild that recently killed illidan that is getting murdered by brutallis.
That said, everyone has/had to do a lot of work for the raid to be ready for Brutallis but the people working towards this goal today have a faster and more varied route to get where they need to be.
Guilds gearing up now can get to the requisite raid gear level in far less time with the following changes...
3 tokens per kill.
T6 equivalent badge rewards.
Vendor epic gems.
Kalecgos/sunwell trash loot.
MT heroic trinkets.
Overall I would say Blizzard did a fairly admirable job in giving everybody a chance.
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.
What I have to ask is, when does is become OK to re-tune the encounter? Should encounters which do require such coordination, expertise, and gearing, be re-tuned once there is a new challenge? I don't see the changes to former bosses so much as a nerf but admission that the job was done. In other words, Blizzard provided the challenge to allow players to prove themselves capable.
What is well tuned to me? Making an encounter require the full cooperation and exertion by all those present. I however think tuning should not require specific classes; this is not the same as not requiring specific builds in classes present; but that it should require smart play.
While the guild my main is in is very "casual" I would never hope to see any encounter tuned for the majority of people who show up. Why? Because for the most too many of these people don't take it serious enough. They accept defeat too easily. As such content is tuned when it removes the ability of the lazy to participate.
Now, when it comes down to farm status I have to ask, if something isn't changed by Blizzard to be more accessible can it still be considered "tuned"?
I suggested in a previous thread here that one way Blizzard could nerf the content is to slowly reduce numbers and/or provide a lore mechanism behind weakening of bosses as they get killed more. Did someone not say that their guild was rumoring that the Sunwell Blessing would be removed when the 1st gate opened? Or at least, some gate? If one were to get that massive avoidance advantage on the fight, would dropping to 7 healers not become standard? Could some guilds not cope with 6? Adding one DPSer adds around 7% if their DPS is the same as the rest and they provide more synergy than the healer they're switching for. Certainly that's enough to make up for a month of farming Illidan.
And then who knows what potential things they could do to tweak the zone as the next few gates open? This lore-based nerfing allows them to legitimately offer hard content for the top 1% while maintaining its difficulty for the next 10%, and further nerfs to allow any organized group to have a shot. Of course, they still don't put out content to challenge the very top 1% of 1%, but if those guilds really expect a challenge that others could solve as well they're deluding themselves.
The only two issues with Brutallus as he stands now are the exact same as we saw in Naxx, although not quite as severe:
Class stacking is overpowered (Only this time it's shamans instead of mages)
Buffs are overpowered (Only this time it's a profession instead of pricy elixirs and world buffs)
Hopefully Blizzard will bring him down a notch once Kil'Jaeden falls though, so more casual guilds will have a chance to see the final zone this time around. He's a fun fight for those of us that meet the requirements for gear and dedication.
The simpliest way to nerf him is to lower his armor.
Lowering his armor would affect different raid compositions differently and perhaps even encourage some raid-stacking for certain classes. The simplest way to nerf him is actually to boost raid equipment levels across the board, either through trash/Kalecgos loot or through adjustments to BT loot.
I don't personally think any changes are needed and certainly not at this time.
04/01/08, 8:47 AM
