I think enrage timers are a pretty simple way of tuning an encounter if, and only if, it can be accomplished in an un-intended manner. For sake of argument, you could theoretically do Supremus with 3 tanks and all healers if he didn't have an enrage timer.
I'm certain you can beat Supremus with 2 tanks and 23 healers now actually. If the healers were all priests that religiously kept up shadow word:pain and smited / mind blasted / SW:Deathed in a max dps cycle, it's pretty certain he'd die before enrage.
Your point is valid, generally, of course. Supremus' enerage, however, is a joke.
Without stepping over the TE discussion line, I'd say the fight is probably correctly tuned but people are simply doing it wrong.
I have to agree here. There are so many possible ways to do it (SK and LR videos for example shows a very different approach). I bet most guilds progresssing on this boss have had vivid discussion of the tactics on their forums and guildchat.
Part of the problem grasping the fight is that there are quite many different abilities which you have to react (and everybody has to do so!). But not only that, there are ways A, B and C to do it. Finding the "correct" way needs a lot more thinking than, say, Brutallus.
From the first pull there are only couple of given "facts" but for example the positioning is not obvious at all (when you've seen couple of videos they seem obvious though).
I honestly think that TE are grossly undertuned. No, this isn't some sort of e-peen thing about me saying how easy it was for my guild, because it wasn't. I think that after you pull the boss once its pretty obvious that you aren't just supposed to eat all that damage and it is in some way controllable, or there is at least something you can do to avoid it. The fact that so many guilds (mine included) can kill this boss by just tanking the damage and not really having much of a strat shows that the abilities are undertuned. In general, if you are supposed to find a way to avoid a bosses ability, but you aren't smart enough to figure it out (for example, my guild) then you should not be able to kill said boss. Four horsemen is/was a good example, its pretty obvious after one pull that you are going to need a pretty intricate strat to kill them, you can't just bring 4 tanks and tank them in one spot and win. Watching the SK video and seeing their strat is akin to watching some guild aoe down the four horsemen, if blizzard made the mark only stack up to 5k damage, or something like that. This isn't meant as an insult or a way to talk down the guilds that basically just healed through the damage, because as they've all shown it is doable this way. I just really think that the guilds who should be killing this boss are the guilds who actually found the "gimmick," if you want to call it that, of surviving phase1 with no random gibs. From the videos I've seen so far the only one that has actually done this is Last Resort, and I assume Nihilum uses a very similar strat in the first phase. I think certain parts of the fight need to be tuned up so that if you don't have the right strat, you can't just brute force through it and get a kill. Perhaps a shorter enrage would show guilds that stacking healers isn't the way to go, and that you actually need to find a way to avoid the damage, not just heal through it.
If you do it correctly I'm fairly certain you could kill him using a standard raid with about 8 healers. I'm trying not to actually talk about any specifics here because we aren't supposed to discuss any strategy, but I'm sure you can see this from the Last Resort video.
Well I gues the "gimmick" you are talking about is taking the eredar npc's completely out of the fight with positioning, we didn't set our strat up for that as it kind of seems intended that you have to deal with them rather than them being completely irrelevant. Watching ours and Methods movies then watching VQ or LR movies it's like a completely different fight which is pretty cool I guess, but I do also 100% agree with you that if Blizzard intends for the Eredar npc's to play no part in phase 1 then yes this boss is very undertuned compared to the rest of Sunwell, guilds will see those videos and will kill this boss in a few hours I can garuntee it because there isn't anything hard about it, its just a glorified tank and spank. Delete this post if you feel its giving away to much.
@Hand:
Are you quite sure that the boss is undertuned if using LR tactic? Have you tried it? I can say after wiping 7 hours (best try was 7%) that I certainly didn't feel like that. Still alot harder than Felmyst. Even if it isn't complete gamble there still are things that can quickly wipe your raid.
@Hand:
Are you quite sure that the boss is undertuned if using LR tactic? Have you tried it? I can say after wiping 7 hours (best try was 7%) that I certainly didn't feel like that. Still alot harder than Felmyst. Even if it isn't complete gamble there still are things that can quickly wipe your raid.
No, I actually haven't tried, which means I'm probably missing something. It just seems like using our strat vs their strat, the fight is exactly the same, except they don't have to deal with the little shadow demons. With our clumped positioning it looked almost exactly the same, except we did have to deal with the shadow demons, and every single wipe was a direct result of the demons killing us either themselves, or as a side effect of the stun. It seems that if they were just removed from the fight (which from the video, it looks as though they basically are) then phase1 would pretty much be smooth sailing. Although, since we didn't try it, I can't say that I'm sure. Just speculation.
Also I'm not sure if I'm overstepping my bounds talking about the boss, if so delete this post and I apologize.
edit: after numerous discussions with people that tried this strat, I take back everything I said. It's definitely still really hard, I overlooked the fact that the shadow demons annihilate your tanks.
Went to Twins last night with some excellent tacs (not own) and 9 healers (4 paladins, 2 shamans, 2 priests, 1 resto druid) and learnt the meaning of frustration. Even with the best insight in the world, the amount of "random" raid damage is too high for 9 healers if they're not of the right classes.
I love the insight from Gurg that "people play classes, not specs" but was then disgusted to find that our enhancement shaman had vendored all his Tier 5 level resto gear.
Pre-TBC, Loatheb was the fight where 3-4 of our healers respecced to DPS and 2-3 of our warriors respecced from Prot -> Fury. Maybe this fight is tuned around the idea of your "offspecs" respeccing to healing and balanced around those healing requirements.
I bet most guilds progresssing on this boss have had vivid discussion of the tactics on their forums and guildchat.
Our internal Twins thread is definitely the most animated and involved since Kael'thas -- and probably has surpassed even that at this point. Forget phase 2 and any unintended bugs, just devising a strat to get you smoothly through phase 1 every time (and then have everyone execute it flawlessly) has been quite the challenge, and while I don't know how hindsight will judge this boss, I'm quite satisfied at the difficulty here so far.
For what it's worth in regard to tuning, Twins has been the first fight in Sunwell that after a good bit of work on, I've genuinely thought, "this fight is difficult." Kalecgos and Felmyst didn't strike me as being hard, mostly just getting your raid coordinated and on the same page, and Brutallus is mostly just a matter of stacking the numbers in your favor. But now that we've had some time on Twins, it strikes me as the first fight in a long, long time that requires actual progression - where the tactics and the "way to win", so to speak, aren't readily apparent. And that's a good thing, mind you, I've been fairly pleased with Sunwell on the whole and it's definitely nice to be in an actual learning position again.
For what it's worth in regard to tuning, Twins has been the first fight in Sunwell that after a good bit of work on, I've genuinely thought, "this fight is difficult." Kalecgos and Felmyst didn't strike me as being hard, mostly just getting your raid coordinated and on the same page, and Brutallus is mostly just a matter of stacking the numbers in your favor. But now that we've had some time on Twins, it strikes me as the first fight in a long, long time that requires actual progression - where the tactics and the "way to win", so to speak, aren't readily apparent. And that's a good thing, mind you, I've been fairly pleased with Sunwell on the whole and it's definitely nice to be in an actual learning position again.
I've heard rumors that the developers intend on making the Kil'jaeden encounter particularly intimidating and "impossible". Like the first Kel'Thuzad pulls, expect your raid to be destroyed within seconds, and expect to struggle to even get beyond those few seconds. Many raiders were a little disappointed with the length, tedium, and simplicity behind the Illidan encounter, and so Kil'jaeden is meant to blow him out of the water. Whereas the Illidan world firsts were abrupt and easily gained, those who defeat Kil'jaeden will have much reason to pat themselves on the back. He--and I quote--"may be the most challenging encounter we have ever designed".
It appears that the first 3 bosses in Sunwell are there to entice raiders, and the final 3 bosses are there to destroy raiders. Happy gaming, huh? I wouldn't have it any other way.
It's hard to discuss how tuned or untuned a fight is without going into specifics but i'll try anyway, again delete this post if you feel it gives too much away.
It's obvious after a couple of wipes that the hard part of Twins is debuff management and dealing with the shadows, but in my mind after watching a couple of movies it seems like both of those things are completely trivialised or non-existant with certain positoning, which is normally fine but it's just my opinion that if you take out the two hardest parts of this fight then this fight is way way too easy, atleast in phase 1, I just can't see what would be wiping people when you literally don't need to move to manage your debuffs, positioning the bosses in a certain way almost makes the bosses do the actual work for you with regards to that.
Im not sure if even Blizzard know what is intended in this fight currently, at the moment I still think phase 1 is way undertuned compared to where it is in the instance/progression if they expect clever positioning to remove the two hardest factors of the fight. It reminds me alot of Archimonde where you could remove Doomfire from the fight by facing him away from the raid.
I'd like to share the view of the poster couple posts above, the Twins encounter is challenging even with some videos floating around with suggested positioning. And that''s why I like it.
LR's strat still deals with the little guys. Go check their WWS, between 2 of their tanks on Sacrolash they take ~150 dark strike hits, tank healing would be a huge adjustment if you tried to swap to their strat(their little hits add up quick, especially when you factor in the debuff and random things like crush->crush->confounding->shadowfury)
It's hard to discuss how tuned or untuned a fight is without going into specifics but i'll try anyway, again delete this post if you feel it gives too much away.
It's obvious after a couple of wipes that the hard part of Twins is debuff management and dealing with the shadows, but in my mind after watching a couple of movies it seems like both of those things are completely trivialised or non-existant with certain positoning, which is normally fine but it's just my opinion that if you take out the two hardest parts of this fight then this fight is way way too easy, atleast in phase 1, I just can't see what would be wiping people when you literally don't need to move to manage your debuffs, positioning the bosses in a certain way almost makes the bosses do the actual work for you with regards to that.
Im not sure if even Blizzard know what is intended in this fight currently, at the moment I still think phase 1 is way undertuned compared to where it is in the instance/progression if they expect clever positioning to remove the two hardest factors of the fight. It reminds me alot of Archimonde where you could remove Doomfire from the fight by facing him away from the raid.
I pretty much thought the same as you until talking to people trying these strats. Exactly like you said, from watching the videos it seems like it would just be trivial, but from all the things that can go wrong and the side effects of said positioning, its a lot harder than you would think. I'd say the fact that theres still only about 15-20 guilds that killed them even after all these videos have been released is a pretty good indicator of the difficulty level.
An example you probably wouldn't think of is since the little guys don't go on the raid, is that they rape the tanks. So they shadowfury and melee your tanks, stack their shadow debuff higher and faster (in combination with the blades), and then he gets the strike that blinds you, tank wanders out of los, while you die to shadow blades and can't be healed. There are a lot of other bad strings of abilities that can do similar things, but it just isn't that apparent from watching the videos. The videos definitely make it look easy mode, but from everything I've heard it definitely isn't.
Yeah I think you might be right, im going to try and see if we can try some of these strats for next reset now that we have time to mess around on stuff and see for myself, maybe it isn't as easy as it looks and it doesn't seem to be as kills aren't exactly flowing in like you said.
Though this question might seem like a bit of a spoiler, I would like to know. Do the twins crush, and do they have the radiance buff also? If so it would seem like paladin tanks would be total junk for tanking them.
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We have had prolly close to 150 wipes on twins now without a kill, and clearly over half of them using the tanks standing on the ledges. I can assure you it's definitely not an easy mode, at least not for us. The raid healing might be a bit easier when considering Dark Strike's spiky damage, but piling up also increases the damage from Shadow Nova and Shadowfury, the latter even stunning big parts of the raid. And the Shadow Images simply rape the tanks if they can't reset their debuffs.
I think the Eredar Twins are tuned quite well considering the top guilds in the world and their progression race, and at least we have not found any gimmick that makes it much easier and there's plenty of ways how to do it. I don't think enrage timer is too strict, it prevents quite nicely stacking absurd numbers of healers (nothing wrong in 11 healers imo). However, if it remains in it's current form, I think it is a bit too hard for average guild currently making progress on the first bosses of the Sunwell, even with complete explanations and movies of tactics.
I actually like the encounter from raid healer point of view, only part I hate is the ressing after the wipes, I'm having soon nightmares of it (I'm the one who gets soulstone always). Also, Lady Sargolash instagibbing the tank is not very fun, we had today tank die from 20500hp literally instantly. Removing crushing blows might actually be a good change.
I hope this post was not against the rules, I doubt the boss can be learned from anything else than actually doing it.
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The twins fight is undertuned in the sense that you can realistically do it in 2/3 of the enrage timer. The fight is fine (and fun!) in the sense that regardless of raid setup, strategy and enrage timer, it is quite difficult to pull off a first kill. The fight is messed up in the sense that it favors massive healer stacking because of the undertuned enrage timer.
Or maybe it is working as intended? Maybe Blizzard intends for guilds to have 9-10 healers and then have a few of the hybrid classes respec healing? Regardless, we failed miserably on the fight, partly because we only had a total of 9 healers in the guild and only one that could respec to healing (and partly because we just sucked). We ended up with a kill using alts in greens, new recruits and a respeced shadow priest, long after the top guilds, the day before the reset. I think we used twice as many healers as on our first Brutallus kill.
Yes, it all depends on what Blizzard intended. If they intended for people to bring 10-11 healers, it is probably undertuned (or tuned correctly in that it's probably going to take 2-3 nights of learning). Raid damage is more than manageable in both phases with that many healers. They're still easy to down within the enrage timer. If Blizzard did not intend for the fight to have 10-11 healers, I'd argue that the fight is way overtuned as the raid damage is no longer manageable no matter what strategy you wind up using.
We banged our heads against the fight for a week with 8 healers. We finally decided to have myself and an enhancement shaman respec resto and brought in a casual-playing paladin tonight and the fight finally looks doable. Personally, I think needing to bring in more healers than normal (10-11 versus 7-8) is absurd, but if that's what they intended then so be it.
Honestly I'd have trouble calling it undertuned, or overtuned. As far as I've seen, there's no way to entirely remove any of the elements of the fight, and no matter what, it's a healing intensive fight. Even LR's video, they're dealing with demons, just in a different way (I'm not getting into details, especially not with the EJ boards policy)
No matter what you do, the raid damage is going to be high, no matter how you handle it, there's a lot going around. I do think Nihilum's claim of doing it with 8 healers is pushing it a little, though possible, but I suppose I'm not offended by having one heal stacking fight.
The only thing I could say is undertuned is the enrage timer, and that's only if you really want to make the fight into a dps race. We killed them with a lot more deaths than a clean kill should have and killed like at the enrage timer, so arguably it's undertuned that you can lose people and make the dps timer, but with how many near kill's we had, it's really pretty well tuned.
I definitely wouldn't say anything in terms of the raid damage is undertuned, whether you do the fight like the SK-Gaming video or the LR video, it's still a LOT of raid damage, and you still need to put out good damage to kill them. I think it's a remarkably well designed and tuned fight, and I don't think that having the enrage timer not being the biggest challenge isn't necessarily a bad thing when we're already coming off of Brutallus and Felmyst with meaningful enrage timers.
I wont get into the Twins to much. The EJ Board policy clearly states we shouldnt. Im just happy we killed it. As for contributing to this thread. I have to say all bosses in Sunwell so far. Have been perfectly tuned. For there place and point. Blizzard has managed to make bosses who seem impossible on the first days, still be able to get beaten after a few days of practise.
All though i do wonder what Blizzard had in mind specifically when tackling Eredar Twins.
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After LR released their video, we tried their positioning. It simplifies the fight in no way at all imo. You are making one part of the fight easier but others more difficult. It trades raid dmg from one source to raid dmg from another source. We weren't really happy with that at all and tried to reposition a bit but basically it just did not work for us. We went back to what we worked with before and then killed them with 25 alive a long time before enrage.
LR positioning might well be the smartest way to do it, but in no way makes the encounter trivial at all. Sure, it looks like they did not take all that much damage.
In our kill, it seemed raid healing was jokishly easy. The 10 attempts before people just died and we slowly wiped in p2 due to not having enough alive. There's a lot of random stuff that can happen, people can easily get raped if they get a bit unlucky. And you can also just get flame sear targeted the right guys a few times in a row especially on locks who get fortunate with NP.
There's a lot of different stuff you can do to make dealing with certain aspects of the fight easier. But pretty much always you end up making another part of the fight harder. I think the only tuning problem with the encounter is that the raid dmg is too high and the enrage too forgiving. Less raid dmg and a tougher enrage would mean you don't bring 10-11 healers, which is just bullshit imo.
Encounters should be designed around 6-8, maybe 9 healers max. But not 40% of your raid being healers, it just doesn't make sense.
And doing this with 8 healers .... I dunno, I can hardly imagine that, at least outside of using the good old 15 soulstone plan, which blizzard could fucking finally fix. That some guilds used that to kill twins is just a sad joke. This was a problem on Al'ar a year ago and it's not sufficiently dealt with in any way.
04/14/08, 5:22 AM
