Yes, I'd have to say it certainly doesn't seem like Sunwell Radience is removed when Felmyst dies as well. I ran with significant avoidance, and suffice to say it was a lot lower than would have been expected. I can't get to wowwebstats to check for sure, but I'm fairly certain that it is still up. Really, if it wasn't, I'm sure people would be using physical immune tanks by now.

Why blizzard hasn't put in a "mass ressurect" spell yet is beyond me. Require 2 rezzers to channel it, takes 20 seconds to cast, revives everyone at 50% health/mana, only works in raid zones, call it a day. Then again, there's 100 other things I'd like to see done just to reduce the 'annoying' factors in WoW. Where are you "Recast/refresh all buffs." spell and "Auto-auto-loot." That's like 5,000 clicks a night I could be saving my poor mouse.

I actually wonder why they haven't thought of using abilities that require multiple people activating them alltogether. Giving an ability which splits the damage between tanks if 3 warriors or tanks in general activate it at the same time could introduce a lot of new game play elements and boss novelties. Mass channeling of spells and other such stuff for the appropriate classes.

If this is not allowed please remove this post but I have to ask....

Has anyone experienced a bug on twins phase 2 where sacrolash will target a person for conflag. Immediately change target back to the tank and conflag both of them?

Had 2 wipes to this crap last night. Warrior is a Tauren if that matters.

Yes I've seen that with conflag, I think it's a pretty common bug/feature. Out of respect to the rules here, I can't say more beyond that.

Brutallus is the next RoS. It will eventually be so trival with better gear.

Has anyone killed the twins with normal (8-9) number of healers? Many of the WWS reports I have seen have 10-12 healers, I cannot believe Blizzard would design a fight that would require this kind of healer stacking...

We got TE to p2 on our last try of the night tonight. Did it a few tries in with new positions. We were using 9 healers, one being my (mostly) pvp geared priest and a respecc'd feral druid with half pvp healing gear. People were dying at around 15% on the first mob, but with a few people having better debuff stack managment and possibly some positioning tweaks, that won't happen. Obviously a little higher HPS couldn't hurt...

I can definitely see where adding another healer would make things easier, and I tend to agree with the sentiment that the enrage timer must be wrongly tuned if you can still get there by stacking healers. Shrug, maybe we're missing something with our positions and we're just bad.

We've spent somewhere between 6 & 8 hours learning so far.

Last night Vodka killed the Twin Eredar in the reverse order and were rewarded with an extra piece of loot and 4 sunmotes. I cannot provide any personal commentary about the significance of the reverse order in terms of the enrage timer, healer stacking, etc, but I do think it is a relevant point in terms of the tuning of the fight and the idea of tuning in general. When the same mechanic was used with the Bug Trio in AQ40 it was generally well received with the caveat that the loot did not necessarily justify the effort. In this fight the reward would be a guaranteed improvement. To me, this seems like an excellent way for Blizzard to offer additional challenges without making an impassable barrier for less capable guilds.

Killing Sacrolash makes it significantly harder. It also penalizes you for using melee, a lot. Check the vodka screenshot, they have no melee. Unless that Grid is really weirdly coloured...

I was just repeating what was read in BB, didn't actually do any research myself to disprove it.

Completely disagree. Once you start getting your phase 1's down to 1 enrage and get phase 2 to the point where you could miss every Deaden and still live, RoS is a lot more forgiving. Your DPS is so high there's not time for someone to screw it up, and even then you could have a bunch of deaths and still come out ok. (not that you ever should, but anyway)

The only thing about RoS that becomes trickier with better gear is that there's a larger risk of your killing yourself in P2 during a Deaden with crits and such, but if you're at that point of progression you should know better.

What is well tuned?

Even after clearing Black Temple and Mount Hyjal every week for several months (9.07-->3.08), there are some bosses which I dread to heal. Why? Because I know they will wipe raid very, very quickly if I or someone else starts to slip up. I consider these bosses very difficult, and well tuned. In BT/HS these were Archimonde, Souls, Illidari Council and Illidan.

We have only killed first 3 bosses of Sunwell 25-man, they are hard and fun. And I dread repeat-kills of every single one of them. That in my book makes them well tuned.

So, what is well tuned? A boss that keeps me on my toes time after time, even after several months and getting every loot imaginable. Maybe it's the bonus you get from being a healer.

Tuning is an interesting thing. For the most part, I would blame our perspective on TBC raiding compared to vanilla wow raiding.

In vanilla WoW, it was MC first (which, by the way, Ragnaros in his original incarnation was not killable), and after months, BWL came out. BWL was clearly a step up in difficulty, especially considering how it went from "tank and spank, watch out for this one ability, killshot" to a significant challenge for the first time. Vael probably being the best example of this increase in difficulty (and to this day, one of my favorite bosses). The bosses got harder generally speaking (lets not talk about flamegor). I'm going to skip almost all of AQ40 firstly because to explain the range of the difficulty of the instance would make me go on for too long and secondly because there's really only two bosses to mention that are of significant fun/difficulty, C'Thun and Twin Emperors. The Twin Emperors, who was perhaps the first time the first true DPS race. We all remember Patchwerk as the gear check, but Twin Emps was, in my opinion, the first true DPS check. And then there was C'Thun, a completely new concept on a boss fight for WoW.

Then we enter Naxxramas, which has been mentioned plenty. Vanilla WoW's difficulty scaled because the complexity of the bosses increased, in a way that blizzard realized they could throw more at raiders and they would, without much difficulty, overcome the complexity of the fight, at least eventually, KT probably being the best example, the massive amount of abilities and things happening in that fight, and it was still killed in relatively short time.

Now in TBC, we had a sort of different problem with tuning, and well, complexity. They kinda went in opposite directions. I think that the encounters actually went down in complexity in 2.0 raiding, all the way up till Vashj and Kael (who Kael I'll return to in a moment), but inversely, they all became overtuned fights. However, we had so many different versions of the bosses, sometimes its hard to keep track. And worse yet, even in 2.1, the bosses didn't seem to follow any sort of smooth difficulty progression, with the only notible exceptions being end bosses. And we see this disjointed difficulty progression in the casual guilds; they jump from Gruul to VR, then to Lurker, get 5/6 SSC, then kill 2-3 bosses in hyjal, and 3 bosses in BT, while (the option does exist) skipping Magtheridon, Vashj, and Kael.

For the first time in TBC, and perhaps since Naxxramas, we are seeing steady increases in difficulty progression in an instance. It would appear that the first 3 bosses of SWP are evenly tuned in their own way, or even checks of their own, Kalecgos = execution check, Brutallus = gear check, Felmyst = player (idiot) check. Pass all these, increase difficulty, meet the Twin Eredars, who are a mixture of all 3 kinds of checks.

If you ask me, Twin Eredars are fine, excluding a few bugs which will soon be fixed I'm sure. In facing the M'uru/Entropius encounter, its the first time in TBC that I've felt undergeared in a way for the fight, where we as a guild might need to take a week or 2 and farm up some gear to really face the 2nd to last encounter of TBC. (definitely not going to say anything more about the M'uru encounter per EJ policy)

You could definitely make an argument that because there might be a chance we are not geared enough for M'uru that this could be an overtuned boss, however, instead this could be just fine. This is an increase in difficulty (once again, difficulty progression moving along), and as it is the 2nd to last encounter, I'm not complaining just yet.

And of course, this is all a build up for the big daddy of them all, KJ, which I doubt we'll be disappointed with as far as any tuning.

Edit: I wanted to talk about Kael. I think Kael is one of the best fights in TBC, its original version's tuning was perfect, it was difficult, it took time to learn, and it brought in a new interaction with a boss fight (using the weapons). However, as perfectly tuned as it was, it was out of place, it was a T5 end boss encounter that was far more difficult than, arguably, all of BT as far as a learning curve is concerned, yet is a full tier below it. Not to mention (as it has been many times before in this thread), it was a block to a lot of raiding content. I honestly think the Kael encounter should have been the Illidan fight of pre-2.4, that would have been worthy of an "end of TBC" raiding encounter, however, it was just in the wrong place.

I have no TK-Kael, BT, Hyjal, or Sunwell boss experience, but from my own raiding experience, reading about the fights I haven't been to, hearing about them from friends, and watching videos, I think any individual boss encounter is tuned just fine. Blizzard isn't really playing any heavy tricks with the bosses. The boss has certain attacks, some special properties, and then after you get him to a certain percentage/after a certain amount of time, he will change phases and do something else, and the process repeats.

The main issue with these encounters is the order you find them in, and the relative difficulties between any two bosses. While the two individual encounters might be tuned fine, if you have an A-difficulty boss right after a D-difficulty boss, this might lead you to believe the bosses aren't tuned.

The most obvious example I have would be SSC. A guild I was in would basically raid with 10 serious players and 15 laidback casual players. Even with this, we could bark orders around, and after a few wipes, down any boss in SSC until Vashj. With Vashj, you need a much higher presence than 10 serious people, both gear wise and coordination wise. Here's my basic view of the requirements for the SSC bosses:
Hydross - Gear check on tanks, very minimal coordination
Lurker - Light coordination check
Morogrim - Gear check on tank/healers, light coorindation
FLK - Average coordination check(even then mostly on pull)
Leo - Gear check on tanks, light DPS gear check, light coordination
Vashj - Raid wide heavy gear check, heavy coordination
In other words, Vashj basically pops up out of nowhere. There's no fight in SSC that demands anywhere near the DPS and healing that Vashj does, nor is there a fight that demands anywhere near the amount of coordination required. You jump around from light to maybe medium gear/coordination checks to a heavy check in both.

After saying this, would I say the fight is tuned? Absolutely, just not for where it is. If you threw Kael and Vashj to somewhere in Black Temple(ignore the lore problems here obviously), I doubt there'd be as many complaints for it as the difficulty wouldn't suddenly jump so much. Maybe it would have been better for some of the bosses to be a much bigger gear or coordination check instead of just jumping up so high for both. That would have been much better zone tuning.

That being said, I kind of like the newer additions to raiding, and like the new ideas around tuning. ZA chest timed run is one of my favorites. The fights alone are tuned to a T5 difficulty, but you get the added bonus of 1-4 extra chests for doing it fast, with borderline BT level loot. The very same zone, the very same bosses give you two different tiers of challenge. They kind of extended this to the Eredar Twins, which if you do it the hard way, you get more loot.

best question...


IS M'URU TUNED? ))))

he is do able but with ZERO mistakes... so is it tuned or is it over tuned?

so what purpose did blizzard have to make such an encounter :P
playing on limit? i like that fight cause it is the ONE challenging fight in world of warcraft.

so is he tuned or not? we will see...

Well, all professions have a perk of some sort (or at least, most of them try to - but I'm not sure how skinning would ever provide a dps boost). Imagine for a second that patterns were plentiful in sunwell, then maybe players would go tailoring or engineering. If you agree with the general ideology that all professions provide some sort of dps perk, ignoring for a second that some will be better than others, then really the incentive to go leatherworking/enchanting would be lessened.

Would you not agree that something is wrong when the whole point of a profession is getting that perk (ie: sunfire robes), but then the pattern seldom never drops ? I believe blizzard made a mistake there -- the patterns should have a far higher drop rate, because, without them, it invalidates many professions.

This is quite a simplistic view on things. In fact, I do think that the 5/6 SSC prepares you for Lady Vasjh very well, IF you actually did it, say, half a year ago. Let me explain that a bit:

Hydross was, other than a resistance fight a very tight DPS check. You have to use the perspective here that people are supposed to down Hydross after getting attuned to SSC. That requires Nightbane and Gruul and as such not much more than a few KZ clears, a few heroics and a Gruul kill. People are supposed to engage him with 5-6 epics and the rest filled out with dungeon blues and the occasional crafted epic. Controlling and zerging down adds within a reasonable amount of time like that is an element that returns very heavily in the Vasjh fight. Add the fact that the boss just continues to do his thing, including debuffing players and throwing around raid-wide damage it looks, in fact, a lot like Vasjh P2. Arena epics and t5/6-quality badge equipment completely negating the DPS-check part of the fight is not a mistake in the design of the encounter.

Move on to Lurker. I mostly agree with you here, that it's just a basic tank & spank with a single, yet funny, twist. I do like to point out that splitting up the raid into different groups to deal with the adds is another of those elements you will see again when facing Lady Vasjh.

Morogrim. Again little more than a tank & spank with some twists. For starters, this fight is the first one where you can meet the pain of parry mechanics and had to time shieldblocks properly not to get crush-gibbed at the wrong time. The earthquake being classed as physical damage and eating shieldblocks might have been an oversight, but it added an interesting burst-factor to the fight; something that returns a fair few more times on encounters much later in the game. Using a S2/3/badge geared druid as a tank for this removes this danger from the fight. Also, for my guild at the time, Morogrim taught many players in my guild to use their own damned consumable the hard way. The tomb mechanics forces people to watch their healthbars and the murlocks force people to not rely on healers - both very important in future fights. Again, using t5/6 badge gear and arena gear with their inherent high health removes this from the fight as well.

Leo kinda adds what the three fights before taught you. For starters, it was a VERY, VERY tight DPS check when he still had 3.5 million health as opposed to his 2.5 now. I personally loved the implications of the whirlwind, aggro resets and inner demons, because it basically was a moron-check. You can very quickly determine who your slow/poor players are on this fight and beating it consistantly meant your raid was ready for Vasjh. It had some interesting healer coordination in it with regards to the positions during whirlwind and the fact that if you got unlucky 3-4 healers could get Inner Demons. Healer coordination, once again, is a big one on Vasjh.

Lastly there is Karathress. What karathress did, in all his simplicity, was three things. First, you had to split up your raid again and each part had to perform a different task. Second, the early stage of the encounter sports massive raid-wide damage and thirdly, you had to target and burst down a single target (the spitfire totem). All these elements return when you fight Vasjh.

When venturing through SSC (approx. july 07 - november 07), I always had the feeling it was well-tuned and I never felt at a loss at Vasjh. The same is true for Tempest Keep and Kael'Thas.

What we have now, obviously, is 8 encounters that you can just completely outgear by using 10-loss-a-week arena gear in combination with crafted t5/6 loot and "22-badges-per-run" Karazhan acquired badge loot. Then after 3/4 and 5/6 you run into encounters that require all kinds of skills that your raid was never taught because you just waltzed through the bosses with gear a tier-and-a-half above what you're supposed to have there.

I can understand what you're saying here, however, I think things are designed this way for a reason. Almost every great action adventure-type video game ever made has followed the formula of levels with escalating difficulty, culminating in a difficult and epic boss fight. WoW is no different. The final bosses of each instance should be significantly tougher. If my guild had worked through SSC for months, just to fight a Vashj that is only slightly harder than Leo, then that sense of accomplishment is somewhat diminished. I want my final boss fights to be epic. I want to try, and to struggle, and to wipe over and over before I kill the final boss of a dungeon.

Fortunately, I feel like Blizzard has done an excellent job of making the final bosses of each TBC dungeon very difficult (wasn't around for Vanilla WoW raiding, so can't speak for those instances), while at the same time providing means to allow guilds to spend more time actually working on the boss, and less time on other things.

Vashj - No trash, easy access to repair vendor for those exalted with CE.
Kael - Reduced trash compared to other bosses, short "corpse" run also allows easy access to repair vendor.
Archimonde - No trash, teleport directly to the boss, easy access to repair vendor.
Illidan - No trash, teleport directly to the boss, easy access to repair & reagent vendors.

As far as "gear checks" go, I don't feel like any final boss is particular is a gear check. From what I can tell, a raid capable of killing all the bosses beforehand is capable of killing the final boss, gearwise at least (FR tanks for Illidan being the only exception). The only one which I might say otherwise is Kael, however, the weapons that drop during the encounter have such high stats, that they almost act as an "equalizer" for everybody's gear.

Are final bosses that much harder than the previous ones? Absolutely. But should that change? Not at all.

Yeah, you definitely not around for any boss kills in Vanilla WoW.
Ragnaros - Long walk to the MC portal, and then a decently long walk to Rag's room, all while Rag was on a 2hr timer.
Nefarian - Nearly identical long walk from the graveyard as MC (it was the same graveyard afterall), and then an atrociously long walk to Nefarian's room, god so help you if you didn't kill the whelps and forgot about it.
Any boss in AQ40 after Prophet - It was nice that the zone was so big and all, but seriously, the walks back were not fun, and you begged for a summon if you were unlucky enough not to have a mount. The walks to twin emperors, Ouro, and C'Thun were legendary in their length, and only got fixed seemingly too late.

Naxxramas for Sapphiron and KT was a significant improvement, but the end wing bosses were a LONG run back.

Eh, it's a min/max'ed fight. M'uru will get easier as your raid gears up. I think we'd have a kill now if we magically had 2 more months of Sunwell farming under our belts, for example. I also don't think M'uru is too class-sensitive in terms of stacking or forbidding any one class -- it encourages a balanced, synergistic raid -- though yeah, you're going to drop some healers going from Twins to M'uru, but people bring more healers for Twins than really for any other fight in the game so that's not too much of a surprise.

This is true now, but it was far from the truth in the initial version of these fights. I think the bosses fit in well as the instance progressed, leading up to Vashj, with Lurker as the Viscidus of SSC. To remake your list, the bosses were:

Hydross - Resist + regular gear check for tanks, massive healer check on tanks, minimal coordination, massive DPS and threat check.
Lurker - Decent coordination check. You faced either 2k water ticks or getting dazed/eaten by fish. The dps check on adds was not easy too, to stop him coming up enraged due to adds still alive.
Morogrim - Tank/healer check, and the first time most guilds thought of a prot paladin (although many just used AoE taunt rotations + Earth Elementals). The most basic of the fights in SSC. This one I agree always stuck out as being easier.
FLK - Very heavy raid and tank healer check, and more of an execution check for "/tar spitfire".
Leo - Leo v1 was harder than Vashj v2. The simple fact that the dps required to kill him was so large, PLUS you had threat wipes every few seconds, made it a huge tank/threat/dps/moron check.
Vashj - While it was a raid wide gear check, better coordination lead to less healing needed, more effective dps, etc. So more of an execution fight in my opinion.

In short, I think the scaling or the difference in boss difficulty was pretty much spot on. However in the 2.1 patch, it changed the difficulty of some bosses more than others. I'm certainly not complaining about the 2.1 patch, but one of its side effects was the steep ramp up from the regular SSC bosses to Vashj.