I still contend that doing Brun -- Molgeim -- Steelbreaker is the "Optimal" order, as riding that rune of power for 45-55 seconds when DPS'ing Steelbreaker would trivialize the DPS requirements. I have no idea why this didn't work out for us though.
We're starting work on this hard mode on 10, and seriously considering that order as well. Do you have logs from the attempts where you tried Brundir -> Molgeim -> Steelbreaker? It seems like the only real dangers to doing it that way are that the Steelbreaker tank has to preemptively move Steelbreaker out of potential Runes of Power for twice as long, so there's more room for error, and the chance that a Rune of Death pops up under the Steelbreaker tank and a Fusion Punch lands before he can get out of it. I'd be interested to see if your unsuccessful attempts at this order failed due to tank death from one of these, or if it was other things going wrong. Rune of Power related deaths are obviously entirely avoidable, but if the tank can't survive a Fusion Punch plus a couple ticks from a Rune of Death, then that might be something you can't work around after all. (Or, would have to work around by switching tanks, and putting a DK or feral on him and popping a 1 min CD for any Runes of Death.)
The only other thing I can see as being potentially bad would be a Static Disruption on the melee killing Molgeim at the same time as a Rune of Death popping up under them, but is there any reason not to tank Molgeim right next to Steelbreaker to prevent that?
On 10 man there's no good reason to kill Runemaster second. Assuming you bring 3 healers and your 2 tanks average a combined 5k dps (which is pretty low end, considering the Overwhelming Power debuff) your 5 dps only need to average 4500 dps each in phase 3. I suppose if your healers are much stronger than your dps you could go in that order, but if that's the case you can drop to 2 healers and kill Stormcaller second anyway and lower the average dps requirement to 3750. If your dps is too weak to reach that point then you really aren't ready for hard modes.
I'd agree. The 10 man is leaps and bounds easier then the 25 man hardmode. I wouldn't bother playing around with Molgeim second, because if you are having DPS issues on Steelbreaker you need to farm more gear and/or get your DPS to step it up a few notches.
It's the whole "more room for error" thing that screwed us over. The rune of death/static disruption combo wasn't really THAT bad, especially since rune of death damage wasn't amplified like other nature damage is. I think it was more an issue of the rune of death causing healers to moving, decreasing raid/tank healing at critical times that cost us. I think it could work, but might require 7 healers on 25 man, just to get through P2 safely.
Actually, the reason we were thinking of doing it with Molgeim second wasn't because of the Rune of Power DPS boost on Steelbreaker, but because it seemed easier for our group for a couple reasons. (Admittedly, the Rune use on Steelbreaker seemed like an added bonus, just not the main reason. I'm pretty confident that we have the DPS with or without the Rune.) We run fairly caster heavy, which leaves us short on interrupts, which in turn means lots of Chain Lightnings (not that they Chain often, but the initial hit still deals damage) and occasional Lightning Whirls still make it out of Brundir doing the fight in easy mode. Stick Static Disruption debuffs floating around, and that seemed like more of a problem than the occasional Rune of Death. Molgeim second just sounded easier with a melee-light bunch.
[edit] Specifically, our tanks are a prot paladin and a feral druid, which both lack short-cooldown interrupts. Some nights our entire non-tank melee crew is a single rogue or DK. I help on interrupts in phase 2, but that's not always possible.
Actually, the reason we were thinking of doing it with Molgeim second wasn't because of the Rune of Power DPS boost on Steelbreaker, but because it seemed easier for our group for a couple reasons. (Admittedly, the Rune use on Steelbreaker seemed like an added bonus, just not the main reason. I'm pretty confident that we have the DPS with or without the Rune.) We run fairly caster heavy, which leaves us short on interrupts, which in turn means lots of Chain Lightnings (not that they Chain often, but the initial hit still deals damage) and occasional Lightning Whirls still make it out of Brundir doing the fight in easy mode. Stick Static Disruption debuffs floating around, and that seemed like more of a problem than the occasional Rune of Death. Molgeim second just sounded easier with a melee-light bunch.
[edit] Specifically, our tanks are a prot paladin and a feral druid, which both lack short-cooldown interrupts. Some nights our entire non-tank melee crew is a single rogue or DK. I help on interrupts in phase 2, but that's not always possible.
We do 10 man hard mode council killing Stormcaller first every week and the rune of death is never a problem, and quite often the sheild of runes/rune of power make killing Steelbreaker much faster (you can kill him before the 1st tank dies if you get a good rune of power).
# Life Sparks will no longer chain their Shock spell.
actually means? There's been some discussion in the guild what this actually means. Does the shock spell itself not chain anymore (Tooltip fix needs patch) or does it simply not chain-cast the Shock spell anymore? If it was the former this would have some impact in our way to handle the tanking, while the latter would simply make it easier to drop off the spark, not get zapped and possibly die. I can find no mention of this on the forum.
The lightning cast by the sparks is no longer a chain lightning, it only zaps the tank. The change makes it safer to tank them on top of the group, use a pure kiting strategy, or simply have the person with light bomb drop it off without getting chained.
We do 10 man hard mode council killing Stormcaller first every week and the rune of death is never a problem, and quite often the sheild of runes/rune of power make killing Steelbreaker much faster (you can kill him before the 1st tank dies if you get a good rune of power).
This is true, we found it quite the opposite in 25-man though as P2 demands more spreading out than the Rune of Death typically allows.
Reading through this thread, I get the impression not everyone realizes the enormous difference in DPS requirements between heroic and non-heroic.
We have experienced the DPS requirements on XT, Hodir, Freya and Steelbreaker as being completely trivial in the 10-men raids and one group even accidentally one-shot Thorim hardmode on their first run-through. Granted, we are cheesing the place with 25-men gear and ilvl 232 PvP weapons, but I think the mobs have just too few health to make for truly challenging hardmodes.
A 10-men raid will generally have about 30% of the DPS a 25-men raid has. Most bosses in 10-men don't come even close to having 30% of the health. Steelbreaker is an exception here, having exactly 30% of the 25-men edition, but the 200% damage buff on the tank has a major impact on your group's DPS making the DPS requirements extremely low again.
As a posted above said, you need 4500 DPS each to pull it off as opposed to about 5500 on 25-men - That's more than 20% difference. A difference that is not going to be compensated by 2 or 3 extra raid buffs.
And to be clear, it's not just that 10-man is tuned for a tier less of gear either. While 25-man gear obviously helps, 10-man dps requirements are flat out lower across the board -- often not by a little.
As a posted above said, you need 4500 DPS each to pull it off as opposed to about 5500 on 25-men - That's more than 20% difference. A difference that is not going to be compensated by 2 or 3 extra raid buffs.
True. But you really underestimate the gear difference. U10 is supposed to be the 10 man progression path. So it is balanced around the fact that only Naxx10/Maly10/OS10 gear (and those you can buy from that badges) is present. For U10-hard it is the mentioned gear and those you obtained in U10 up to that point.
Being a U25 raider you do excel that balance point significantly. Not only would you start U10 with gear from Naxx25 etc, which is already a full Tier higher than Naxx10 (which are about 13 iLevels), but you also have obtained a good deal of U25 gear which is another Tier higher (though just about 7 iLevels; more if you already have U25-hard gear).
Well, to be fair, tuning any instance under the assumption people have Naxx 10 gear is just a poor design choice. Blizzard knows as well as we do that literally everyone was doing Naxx 25, be it in a pug or in a combined guild effort. If they wanted to make challenging 10-men content they utterly failed at it.
Sure, not all guilds farmed ilvl 226 from Sarth +2/3 and Malygos for 4 months, but it can safely be assumed the playing field was ilvl 213 accross the board with a few 226's here and there.
Ulduar 10 weapons are ilvl 219 and so is the tier8-10 set. The gear gap between 10-men raiders and 25-men raiders is much, much smaller than is widely believed and much smaller than I'd personally want it to be. This is mostly the fault of a severely undertuned Naxxramas and complete lack of content for 6 months. Also, I find it rather silly that some of my guildies are running Uldar 10 for some of their BiS gear because the Ulduar 25 gear is so poorly itemized for many, many items.
And that's not even considering the darkmoon trinket for plate DPS or the two trinkets Sartharion drops (even without drakes). Those are miles and miles ahead of a all but a few select Ulduar dropped trinkets. Also, given how easy it is for classes like DK's, warriors, paladins and rogue to reach 1850 arena rating in this season it's entirely realistic to assume 10-men raiders are using tier1 PvP weapons.
I mean, sure, we got better gear than we would have had if we pugged Naxx 25 like everyone else and only raided Ulduar 10, but I don't think 7, or even 13 item levels will suddenly make my DPS drop from 5,5k to 4,5k. I was under the impression hardmodes were supposed to be, well, hard. In Ulduar 10, they're not. I'm pretty sure we could all just take out our hateful PvP sets, get it hitcapped somehow and still clear XT Hardmode with ease. One group literally had FOUR minutes left on the timer last reset. The DPS requirements with 5 people DPSing (in a fight that's perfectly doable with 2 healers) are not even 3200 DPS each. I mean, seriously...
10-men Ulduar bosses have not enough health. Simple as.
Before wading into a discussion on whether 10 man hard mode is "too easy"... has there ever been any indication on behalf of Blizzard who the target audience is for 10 man hard modes? We know that they wanted to make the raid content more accessible, and this has resulted both in the 10 and 25 man normal modes; the corollary is that the 25 man hard mode is the "new" elite progression path. So far so good. But how does 10 man hard mode fit into it? Is this stuff _supposed_ to be hard for guilds who have the player skills, organisational talent, and willingness to stack a 10 man group to get maximum buffs, necessary to be at the cutting edge, but just prefer to run 10 man (as some of the recent posters here evidently believe), or is it aimed at giving those guilds missing one or more of these points, but still looking for another challenge after managing normal mode?
I suppose another way of looking at it might be: Is 10 man hard mode appreciably harder than normal mode?
As an aside: I'm not at all convinced XT is a good indicator of how hard the hard modes are in general. That fight has been nerfed substantially and repeatedly since release (increased enrage timer, shorter tantrum duration, less health and damage on hard mode, ...). It's at least conceivable that these nerfs have been overdone for 10 man hard mode.
Last edited by Maranora : 06/11/09 at 11:54 AM.
Reason: Dodgy grammar lead to a significant sentence not saying what I meant. It still godawful grammatically, but I'm at a loss to improve it.
Well, to be fair, tuning any instance under the assumption people have Naxx 10 gear is just a poor design choice. Blizzard knows as well as we do that literally everyone was doing Naxx 25, be it in a pug or in a combined guild effort. If they wanted to make challenging 10-men content they utterly failed at it.
Sure, not all guilds farmed ilvl 226 from Sarth +2/3 and Malygos for 4 months, but it can safely be assumed the playing field was ilvl 213 accross the board with a few 226's here and there.
I disagree with you a bit here. I'm in a strictly 10 man guild. Part of the reason for only doing 10s is that I'm the only one who's stepped up to lead raids and while I have the skills to manage a small number of people, there's no way I could hold together 25 and keep my sanity. The other part, though, is that we're all good friends and quite honestly don't really like strange people, particularly in large numbers. The result of that is that those in the guild who have less time on their hands due to work, school, etc., have had no incentive to PuG 25s, except the occasional VoA or OS. On our first Razorscale kill, 2 or 3 people looted their first Emblems of Valor. I can think of at least two in the guild who just got their Naxx25 completion achievements in the last week or two. I doubt we're the only guild like this.
The result of not having that gear isn't just lower DPS. Some of our primary raiding toons still don't break 20k health with fort, imp, mark, and kings, and just aren't surviving some fights. That's a bigger point that you'd think.
Only raiding two nights a week and having some people on vacation recently, we're only up to Mimiron right now. That said, everything to that point in the instance on normal mode is almost absurdly easy at this point, so we've given a couple hard modes a shot, specifically XT and Thorim--in the first case, we're getting the 205 second achievement every time without even trying, and in the second, not engaging hard mode means the hallway group has to twiddle their thumbs for ~45-60 seconds after killing the second mini-boss. In both cases, our DPS was fine as long as everyone was alive, but people would just splat. Some of that blame surely rests on myself and the other healer(s), but our lives would be way easier if our raid was just more survivable, which the ilvl 200 gear is lacking.
Somewhat long-winded, but the main point is this: for the (presumed) target audience of people doing almost strictly 10 mans, 10 man hard modes are providing a challenge, and do require some degree of gearing up from the normal mode encounters before they're really doable, at least from a survivability standpoint. If people are completing the 10 man hard modes in 25 man gear but still unable to complete 25 man hard modes, I don't really see how that's relevant.
I think Blizzard either intimated or came out and said that the 10-man Sarth/3D wasn't supposed to be the hardest thing in Tier 7 content. Something like "maybe 25 was undertuned, maybe 10 was overtuned". Regardless of how clearly they stated it, they made it "correct" in their paradigm this time. It's clear to anyone that's spent time in both 10 and 25-man Ulduar that it's not just gear that trivializes the 10 man stuff. The gap in difficulty is a highly visible, designed-in gap.
It's not just XT hard mode -- although that example is particuarly obvious -- and it might not be every single variant of every encounter but it's there.
Yogg-Saron - The Yogg-Saron encounter has received the following changes: Death Ray no longer hits players who are under the effect of Malady of the Mind, Guardians of Yogg-Saron no longer use Dominate Mind, the spawn rate of Guardians of Yogg-Saron is more forgiving, and these Guardians will no longer spawn if a player that is protected by Hodir’s Flash Freeze hits an Ominous Cloud.
In the opening sequence of Ulduar you can now see Liquid Pyrite from farther away.
The Flame Leviathan encounter has received the following changes: the bonus health Flame Leviathan receives per tower has been reduced, the ejection height from Flame Leviathan has been reduced, the snare effect of the Tower of Frost has been removed, and the cannons on Demolishers and Siege Enginers should now break Flash Frozen vehicles in 1 shot.
The XT-002 Deconstructor encounter has received the following changes: the health of the heart has been slightly reduced in heroic difficulty and the rate at which Gravity Lapse and Searing Light are cast has been reduced.
I'm surprised they come out so straight forward and nerf fights that were balanced and a challenge. I thought their philosophy with hardmodes were that it was not something that everyone was going to be able to do? A challenge to keep you busy until the next tier of content. Does this mean that it's a philosophy change on part of Blizzard, is 3.2 closer than we think or are they just lowering the requirements for hardmodes in general? I wish they'd be a bit more vocal about this so we knew where they were going with it.
Edit: Actually I thought he meant Gravity Bomb and Light Bomb, what he says about Gravity Lapse and Searing Light makes no sense. Both are fixed to their parent entity, so I'm assuming he means the frequency of those parent(Gravity/Light Bomb) entities spawning has been decreased.
Last edited by Whitemane : 06/11/09 at 11:01 PM.
Reason: Re-read the XT-002 changes and got confused!
Since the very beginning, Blizzard has said that they WOULD be changing the hard modes to bring them in line with the intended difficulty level just as soon as they had gathered enough data on them to make appropriate changes. The fact that they're starting the serious nerfs with the first two available hard modes supports that fact: it's almost certain that more hard mode attempts have been made on Flame Leviathan and XT-002 than any of the other Ulduar hard modes.
This is the same pattern they followed with the normal-mode encounters. Yogg-Saron is only now getting nerfed, while Ignis and Razorscale were nerfed almost immediately after the patch.
Given that they've heavily nerfed early hardmodes, and generally done very little with later ones, and nerfed late easymode bosses, I suspect they're trying to make Hardmode Ulduar effectively a second raid, where the progression goes:
Normal early bosses -> normal late bosses -> hard mode early bosses -> hard mode late bosses
Originally when Ulduar came out, some of the hardest hardmodes (FL/XT) were at the beginning of the instance. Personally, I think this is a good idea: even a fairly mediocre guild can do FL/XT now, so there's more of a curve in progression rather than a brick wall at starting hardmodes.
Given that they've heavily nerfed early hardmodes, and generally done very little with later ones, and nerfed late easymode bosses, I suspect they're trying to make Hardmode Ulduar effectively a second raid, where the progression goes:
Normal early bosses -> normal late bosses -> hard mode early bosses -> hard mode late bosses
Originally when Ulduar came out, some of the hardest hardmodes (FL/XT) were at the beginning of the instance. Personally, I think this is a good idea: even a fairly mediocre guild can do FL/XT now, so there's more of a curve in progression rather than a brick wall at starting hardmodes.
Also, XT/FL are incredibly problematic for guilds on a logistical level- you can't go and clear a bunch of farm content then go work on one of the hardmodes since they're gateway bosses. Bringing them down a notch definitely doesn't seem like a bad idea.
I fully understand the FL and XT hardmode changes. As a poster above said, since they're gateway bosses it's hard to justify spending 2 nights of wiping on them with the whole instance up behind them. It's much smarter from a logistical point of view to clear everything except one watcher, spend 2 nights on that watcher's hardmode and then proceed to clear the rest of the instance.
Also, regarding FL, having done the 2-tower version and having spent some time on 3 towers, I can see a 4-tower kill requiring perfect execution to complete. That would be alright for a later boss that's also not a vehicle fight, but for a vehicle encounter that also functions as a gateway I always thought it to be a bit too demanding. Good change in my opinion.
The Yogg-Saron change is a giant kick in the nuts for phase 1 and I don't believe that was needed.
The spawn rate is already quite managable as it is as long as you don't make mistakes. In fact, anyone that has killed Yogg will probably be spawning two or even three extra adds during phase 1 to make it quicker. The removal of the Dominate Mind is just the nail in the coffin. Sure, MC'd paladins putting Hand of Protection on guardians was really annoying, priests AoE fearing people into clouds was frustrating and so was getting your tank MC'd with an add at 10% next to Sara, but that was usually just a result of having too many adds up in the first place.
What you can do now is just spawn 8 guardians from the get-go, pile them up in the middle and AoE them and keep your tank up with a shieldwall or some outside cooldown (or both). Voila, phase 1 complete in 30 seconds.
I'm not sure I agree that early hard modes should be easier in line with standard difficulty progression through the instance, as far as hard-modes go the fact that they're gateway bosses doesn't apply, the hard-modes for those bosses can be skipped in favour of normal mode if a guild is having troubles with them. In these terms the only hard-mode I think should be easier, possibly, is Iron Council, as thats technically a gateway to Alagalon, on the other hand, it should possibly be harder for that very reason, it's a hard-mode gateway. I'm thinking of old school Kael'Thas here.
Also, can anyone confirm when these changes came into effect? (On European servers) My guild downed XT-002 hardmode yesterday evening, the 11th, after having some teething problems with the sparks, and I'm trying to work out if its going to be easier next reset.
{...} In these terms the only hard-mode I think should be easier, possibly, is Iron Council, as thats technically a gateway to Alagalon, on the other hand, it should possibly be harder for that very reason, it's a hard-mode gateway. I'm thinking of old school Kael'Thas here. {...}
You already have the option to get the Archivum Data Disk through killing Runemaster Molgeim last, which isn't very difficult compared to to the full hard mode of the encounter. I'd actually go so far as to say that as long as you have one mage that can swap to a spec with Improved Blizzard for it, Runemaster Molgeim last is potentially easier than Stormcaller Brundir last.
buff /bʌf/ Pronunciation[buhf]
–verb (used with object)
- to reduce or deaden the force of
I assume the nerfs are a response to the fact that they look at what percentage of people are getting bosses down on the timeline they expect. Clearly they want more people to finish off Yogg and begin working on the easier hard modes at this point.
06/10/09, 11:59 AM
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