You can. I did it this morning. They're level 61, which is gray at 70, so you can JUST sneak past them, or if you can't you end up aggroing the one right as you get to the Patchwerk room, in which case you can vanish. It's a huge pain in the ass though, so I stopped bothering after about 5 tries of trying to get Patchwerk to HS me. Unfortunately I dodged all of his HS's, but his melee damage was hitting me for near 6300 with 20% mitigation. So yeah, to get conclusive evidence from him we'd need a raid to clear to him.

Is their fart aura not active when they're not agro?

It only has about a 5-10 yard radius. I'm not saying it's impossible to be hit by it, but if you time it right you can sneak far enough in to where when you finally do aggro one, you can just vanish on the walkway to Patchwerk.

How many glances did you get, and how many crushes did he get?

Edit: BTW, warriors can't vanish. :P Try an invis pot.

Hmm, Patchwerk can't crush can he? Anyway yeah, I don't suggest trying to sneak down there as anything but a rogue and MAYBE a druid(unless you have a soulstone), because I could never get past that last little slime by the doorway without aggroing, due to the way the door frame is. I'd always have to burn vanish going into Patchwerk's room.

Bah! I forgot.

A bit anecdotal but my guild tried to kill the Arch Druid in the Night Elf capital after hearing some wild rumors about the honor bonus for killing PvP bosses. He barely blinked at the tank before killing me and went though half our healers before the tank could get agro due to misses. Everyone was reporting everything resisting, missing and hitting for next to nothing. Adds are level 65 now as well so it would seem the PvP bosses have been upgraded to their level 73 incarnations. Weather skull bosses scale up from their intended level I don’t know but they don’t appear to scale down from their intended level if you try to kill them too early so it can’t really be as simple as your level plus three.

Well, faction leaders can hardly be considered standard bosses, it's entirely possible they have been given an assigned level that is well above 73.

No one has anymore information?

This is how I think skull bosses seem to work, however the actual mechanics might be explained via different coding mechanisms but nonetheless seem to obey the following observations.

From what I can tell the only mechanics that scale with 'skull' bosses are the ability to hit them, the ability for them to hit us and the apparent armour of the boss. By apparent armour this means the armour scales but not using the standard model we use. So instead of a fixed armour value the boss simply has damage mitigation. If you apply an armour reducing ability e.g. sunder armour it reduces the damage mitigation. For example if the boss had 50% mititgation of damage at 60 it will still mitigate 50% at 70, a sunder armour that reduces total armour (for simplicity) by 2000 might actually reduce mitigation by 5% at level 60 but only 2.5% at level 70 due to scaling mechanics.

Things that dont really change are basic damage, skull bosses seem to have % based damage rather than true damage, so if the boss did average 5% total health damage hits on you at 60 it will still do 5% total health damage hits on you at 70. This form of scaling maintains the effective power of the boss without having to redesign it's skills and abilities so they scale with level.

Also other things that dont change are total health, stats etc, as seen with Loatheb who's total health hasn't altered when viewed at level 60 or level 70. What this means is that although in some respects the bosses do scale they will also to a degree become easier at level 70 than they were at level 60. Although if these mechanics do work as they appear some things will make it almost as hard to kill Patchwerk or Loatheb in the time at 70 as they are currently at 60.

In conclusion, yes Naxx will be doable at 70, no it wont be a walk in the park, yes boss encounters will be (slightly) easier but still require full concentration. The biggest change will be to trash and secondary mobs during boss encounters which wont scale and so will be much easier at 70. Fight like Gothik and Noth will therefore be comparitively much easier.

The real question though is how will their abilities be determined? Average player levels in the raid? Highest player levels in the raid? Now that's something I cant work out.

How would this work? I don't know, it seems kind of arkward to me, bosses certainly don't take into account your current max health when hitting you. This would result in a great variety of damage ranges, basically for each player its own.
Also performance wise, first having to calculate the damage range for each hit and then calculating the actual damage after mitigation etc. seems kind of unlikely.

Maybe they have put in 'expected values' when designing a boss (but what if they didn't know about level 70 then?).

I just ran Onyxia last night on beta. In terms of combat mechanics she is most definitely scaling. Casters had resist rates like she was 73, our rogue was glancing, I was taking crushing blows while tanking her on my paladin, and I don't think I resisted a single Flame Breath, nor did I dodge any Wing Buffet's.

She was hitting me for upwards of 900 damage with 12.8k armor. Things went awry when she landed going into phase 3 with our warlock pulling aggro so we weren't able to kill her, but some things I found from phase 3 is that the eruptions are resisted almost every time at 70, so it certainly feels like those are checking as a level 60 spell rather than 73.

The important thing to note here is that Onyxia is a very special encounter though, due to Wing Buffet, so she'll be a bit harder than other things to try to 5 man at 70 simply due to that - the increase in damage for your dps isn't really noticed as much here since they have to be very careful with their aggro, even with BoS. Another thing is that her damage did not scale, but I never expected that. It was a simple combat mechanics scaling, which I expected, and which is the case. Everything from chance to hit, chance to be dodged, chance to be missed, chance to be crit, etc.

So one would assume then that even with the scaling and you take into account the increasing stamina and mana pools at level 70 that Naxx wouldn't be that far fetched to do at lvl 70. If the bosses damage isnt scaling then crushing blows really wouldn't matter due to the damage they are hitting at.

I think alot of people went oh noes when they saw the parses from Patchwerk but that can easily be chalked up to two things - Hateful Strike is a spell and the new Armor Mitigation formulas. Now i dont know if thottbot has been updated as of the recent live build but here is what i found for its damage range before armor is taken into effect:

Live

http://www.thottbot.com/?sp=28308

Name Hateful Strike
Effect 1
School Damage (Physical)
Value: 22100-29900

Beta:

http://thottbot.com/beta?sp=28308

Name Hateful Strike
Effect 1
School Damage (Physical)
Value: 19975-27025

Now unfortunately i can't tell how up to date either of these are.

Well I've been lurking over this thread and I just wanted to make a couple comments.

It is obvious that the raid bosses are scaling somehow, nobody is really sure how yet.

First, if raid bosses are taking their targets level into account, wouldn't there be some tricks where one could bring a level 60 + Full Tier3 tank and have everyone else in the raid level 70? You would have level 70 buffs, healing power , dps , etc. If this is the case, I believe blizzard overlooked this.

For instanced mobs, it wouldn't be very hard to calculate the average level of the raid, and use that to make some calculations. This is the system everquest used when they started instanced zones.

But again, one could zone into Naxx with their level 60 alts, then gradually swap people out until they all have their level 70 characters in. This didn't work in everquest because the instances most people did had no raid bosses. They were used for XP. Some instances did have raid bosses, but nobody liked them so they were rarely used.


I cannot really think of a way (from a programmers perspective) to "scale" the mobs, without leaving some sort of loophole or making a bunch of special cases.

Anyway it will be interesting to see what actually happens when the servers go live. I have this strange feeling no matter how they do it, someone will find some type of loophole / xploit.

I got to wondering these things too, but it's not out of the realm of possibility that they overlooked this, considering the boss mechanic has been around far longer than I'm sure they planned to increase the level cap to 70(hell, Outland wasn't an expansion originally, and Emerald Dream/Hyjal were slated to be released).

Sounds like the invisible rats casting the spell are probably 60 or 63 and have no scaling.

Wouldn't it be much simpler to treat it as "max level+3"

I'm not saying that the data suggests this, because the little data we have from characters between 60-70 doesn't seem to indicate that. I just think that it would make more sense as a reusable "boss flag"

I wasn't on the raid, but asking people I know who pay attention to their combat logs, in our raid of level 63-70 players, a 63 rogue reported minimal glancing blows vs. bosses, a 66 mage reported almost no resists, let alone level based resists, and our 69 MT claimed "there is no scaling whatsoever."

This was on a test run in 2.0.5. Cleared 2 wings last night on 2.0.6. Time to buy some green frost resist to speed up sapphiron progress?

We are a more casual guild, so take this for what it's worth:

I am MT for a previously BWL level guild. I had a mix of T1/T2 tanking gear, and buffed was running ~9k armor for about 62% mitigation. Broodlord would MS me for about 6700 on a hard hit.

I am now level 63, with 9250 raid buffed armor with a 55% mitigation rate. I had a Broodlord MS hit for just under 8k, and a subsequent crushing blow kill me this tuesday.

It appears that if broodlords MS hits for aproximately 17,500 damage, the changes in mitigation match the damage input I was seeing.

While we managed to kill broodlord this week, it seems that he may become an insurmountable issue for our guild for a while. If mitigation continues to go down on the way to 70, I can't see the hp increases keeping up.

I want to see if anyone else here has experienced similar problems with hard physical hitting bosses, and if your experiences are matching mine. I also wanted to report, as is already known, that Razorgore is still bugging and lego's/mages continue to spawn after he dies. Also, we had issues with firemaw disobeying all game laws... ignoring taunts, wing buffeting at irregular intervals (confirmed with deadly boss mods, and ctraid), chasing tanks down 6-8 seconds after a taunt had worn off, and stacking the fire buffet debuff much higher than ever before (in the 40's before the tank exploded). Also, I wanted to see if anyones gone past firemaw in BWL since tbc, and see if the bugged events continue.

p.s. Yes, I know, going back to bwl is rediculous. Unfortunately, not my call.

Even though Life Giving gem was nerfed to 1500 health, it still is a nice item. I don't think it is worth going back to BWL to get though. At least going there collected some data on if bosses scale or not.

Unless you still need elementium and nobody wants to sell any to you....!

Some peeps also want to have set bonus like 3-pieces BF to have fun with Envenom and such. But overall, it's true that BWL is not really that useful these days. Even MC for that ever-elusive TF sounds more interesting!

That whole discussion about boss scaling is quite interesting as, being kind of a casual guild, we never got very far in AQ or Naxx (Sartura and Raz respectively). And with the pre-BC downsizing (either wanted or unwanted), we are no longer able to "field" 40 experienced raiders anymore. This caused some drama as some of us really wanted to see the encounters, notwithstanding the fact that loots would no longer be so "ph4t" compared to lvl70 blues. We just wanted to have fun and see game content. And we thought that it would be doable with a limited roster like having only 30 raiders and using some world buffs we had in store (as they quite often scale). Now we need to understand if that will be true or not.

Did Onyxia last night and our observations correlate with what Kody said above. The splashes were highly resistable. Our level 68 tank in 9/9 DN took crushings and did lots of glancing. I at 67 saw glancing spam. Dispite the crushing and glancing keeping the tank up was not a problem and it was a very fast kill. We brought a 60 mage alt along who said one pulse of each arcane missile channel, on average, led to a resist.

It's all anecdotal, and for that I apologise. But it certainly seems like things are scaling. I would not however say Onyxia is harder, the glancing/crushing simply makes her not a total pushover. One place where we disagree in observations is that although our tanks reported taking crushings, the actual damage of the crushings was not abnormally high. There was simply more of them than normal.