Wouldn’t that depend on your raid groups raid times?
Keep your heads up and keep looking for any and all ways to optimize and you’ll get it.
Anduin is less about raid than it is about personal responsibility as the cause of failings.
Wipe in the first phase? Someone was tunneling their DPS and didn’t move to match circles. Or someone was tunneling their DPS and didn’t move to keep the stars from running through the raid and silencing healers/tanks/DPS.
Wipe when the three fearing adds are up? Someone was tunneling their DPS and broke CC, or someone applied a DoT that breaks CC.
Wipe in the end? Someone didn’t watch their circle. Someone went in wrong.
95% people are just terrible at wow
This is literally incorrect. If I may quote Blizzard:
While it’s impossible to fit every player into a neat, tidy archetype, we recognize that we could be providing a better experience to one broad category of raider: social groups comprised predominantly of friends and family, and smaller guilds that do their best to include as many members in their Raid outings possible.
During the Wrath of the Lich King expansion, the 10-player Normal difficulty served these groups of players pretty well, but the unification of 10-player and 25- player into a single difficulty effectively eliminated that niche. While Raid Finder mode is extremely accessible, it doesn’t provide smaller groups with a tight-knit social experience while progressing through the content. In Patch 5.4, we’re planning to introduce a new mode of raiding that allows us to deliver the sort of experience that we think these players are looking for.
And Ion directly.
•@naquadah007 We’re actually going to convert SoO to the new raid system in 6.0, so current Flex will just be Normal and won’t be going away - Feb 3, 2014, Twitter
The intent was always that heroic raiders stay in heroic raids. How do I know this? Because back in Wrath, heroic raiders kept running normal raids AND heroic raids then complained to Blizzard about having to run so many raids. At that time, each difficulty had their own itemization, and normal gear had some better itemization than their heroic counterparts. So Blizzard normalized the itemization and combined the raid IDs to prevent heroic raiders from feeling obligated to do normal raids.
The current progression should be that hardcore players start in the first normal raid of an expansion (because there is no dungeon gear to get you straight into heroic - which is a point of failure on Blizzard’s part - and the should be able to ignore normal raids after that.
The idea that all raiding except LFR “belongs” to hardcore raiders is, frankly hubris, and has never been Blizzard’s intent. I mean, with Wrath, we had literally “Casual 10s” (10-man Normal), with Heroic 10 being added because guilds were having a hard time coming up with 25 players. 10-N was the friends and family raid difficulty, and it is not a coincidence that friends and family raiding guilds flourished in Wrath.
In Cataclysm, Ghostcrawler decided that casuals needed to “step up” because of a grossly false assumption on the kind of player a casual raider is. The end result was the collapse of the casual raiding community.
As we see from Blizzard’s own words, Normal Flex is absolutely intended for the friends and family guilds. It is spelled out in black and white (or white and dark brown), and it is a philosophy Blizzard has adhered to until Shadowlands.
And now I will add that from the last I brought this up, there have been massive nerfs to mythic SotFO - and significant nerfs to heroic, and marginal nerfs to normal, even though, from all quarters the consensus is that normal SotFO is overtuned for its level of difficulty.
Not all raiding belongs to hardcore raiders. Not all raiding should. What hardcores fail to understand is that when we had the causal raid scene (and LFR does NOT, I repeat, does NOT constitute “casual” raiding) you had massive engagement. Most of you probably wouldn’t remember, but I was there. There was an ecosystem that benefitted everyone. You had the casual raid, where people coming in to the game could experience raiding with their friends. Some of these people would get the itch, and apply to progression teams. Some would stay there, but others, over time, would find the demands of hardcore raiding too time consuming, so what they would do is “retire” back to a casual team, so they could scratch that raiding itch, and ind of luxuriate in the “big fish, little pond” phenomena. These players would then bring best practices to the casual raiders.
This flow of players too and from difficulty lanes kept the raiding community robust, as there were always new players coming up the to refresh the competition pool, and because there was an “easier mode” with normal, players would stay engaged in WoW far longer - with only those who couldn’t make the time, or just didn’t feel casual raiding was fulfilling enough actually leaving the game. I mean, right now, on my team, I have 3 players who could easily be on progression teams but choose to be with us because they are happy raiding with friends at a more casual pace. I have two hardcores who always start the night with us before moving to their hardcore teams, but when those teams aren’t running, join us, and bring us their best practices, tips and tricks. I have one who has largely left the game but enjoys our company even though he could also be on a heroic team.
Normal raiding doesn’t need to be a roflstomp for the average player, and yes if it is distressingly easy for a heroic raider - well, too bad, so sad this is not your wheelhouse. Normal raids should be accessible to a wide delta in skills, with enough challenge to make folks feel good about the kill - and we know Blizzard can do it, because up until SotFO Blizzard has designed most normal raids for its intended audience. SotFO is a glaring outlier with Anduin basically being everything wrong with Blizzard’s current raid design sensibilities. There are just too many pointless mechanics and too many insta-kill mechanics for a normal raid. Garrosh didn’t have this kind of crazy, and he stands out in my mind as being a particularly challenging end boss.
Right now, if I had my druthers, I would change the following on Anduin in Normal:
- Make Blasphemy an insta-kill only if two like-players collide, but not insta-kill the surviving opposites (but make that a self-heal/healer pick up).
- Slow the rate of Hopebreaker’s increasing damage tick so it isn’t as punishing after the second team goes down (or keep it if Blizzard does 3. and 5.)
- Prevent Blasphemy to overlap Hopebreaker the second time.
- Remove the swirlies below - fine for heroic, it has no place in normal.
- Remove Divine Star or only make it one star in normal
- Scale Army of the Dead better for flex - whether it’s the number of adds or health pool.
- Balance the fight for players who do not have 2 legendaries and a 4 piece set bonus. I honestly don’t care that Blizzard is giving away tier like it’s free Comic Book Day, normal SotFO should be designed for new players coming in. the early bosses should be doable with 239 gear and even the Jailer should be doable with 245-250 gear. It’s absurd that a normal team has to outgear normal to be able to complete the raid.
I know I will never convince hardcores that normal raids do not belong to them, but I will always fight for ensuring that normal raids are tuned for the player base Blizzard has outright stated those raids are intended for.
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You tell me that I’m incorrect then publish a book on all the reasons why what I said is, in fact, correct.
As an example, when you “inform” me that
it is a direct echo of when I said
You originally claimed that normal raids are no longer for casuals, but are just a plow through mode for hardcore players to gear up with. I insisted that Normal is for Normal raiders, even if Heroic or Mythic raiders clear it quickly for gear or experience, and that the progression path isn’t N ->H → M. It’s Normal to Normal to Normal through each tier, or Heroic to Heroic to Heroic, or Mythic to Mythic to Mythic. So again, basically exactly what you said, but much more concise.
You claimed that normal raids aren’t tuned well, they just seem to be because hardcore raiders blast through them quickly. Your mistake here is thinking that blasting through is the correct outcome. It’s not. That isn’t progression.
If it takes a middle of the road Mythic guild months to clear Mythic, and a middle of the road Heroic guild months to clear Heroic, it’s not unreasonable to suggest that a middle of the road Normal guild should take months to clear Normal. Some will take more time, some will take less, just like the other difficulties. The tuning isn’t inherently wrong just because Normal doesn’t fall over for Normal guilds. It is more likely right if it is taking a comparable amount of time as the other difficulties. This is meant to be content that is consumed over the course of the life of the tier, not finished in 2 weeks.
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Normal SFO didn’t feel any worse than Normal SoD and CN when they came out. The reality is that it’s so dumbed down and stripped of mechanics that it will never be a ‘real’ challenge to even AotC raiders. However, this tier is notably harder overall on heroic. Selling full clears and AotC has come with some steep mechanical and performance checks that weren’t present in SoD. I think this is because SFO ended up with more appropriate tuning, whereas Shards of Domination broke quite a few fights in Sanctum. (Guardian is considered the strongest example, but I’d personally say Fatescribe was.)
Many guilds were mid-Halondrus progression when Blizzard completely eradicated the fight with a plethora of MASSIVE nerfs–any single of which would’ve still been noticeably impacting to the difficulty. (The HP nerf or the Earthbreaker Missile nerf separately would’ve made the fight wayyyyy easier. The omega overkill Bomb mechanics nerf alone would’ve decimated the difficulty, and it went from a 150-185 pull boss down to a 35-60 pull kill.) Nerfs aren’t always good, and we were about to kill it when they hit. My guild feels robbed of that accomplishment.
This might’ve been true at one point, but they gave the community what they wanted: Tier sets (aka Borrowed Power), and now you had every raider running down through every lower difficulty to acquire their tier for themselves, or to funnel it. I was running LFR, even, to try and get my set. Then us CE raiders wanted to get heroic in all slots for sale runs, though the Creation Catalyst has vastly devalued that now. AotC is still worth selling, however.
But there’s no real relevance to this argument so long as Blizzard keeps designing powerful items on the lower difficulty bosses. A heroic Gavel would still be a substantial upgrade to me, despite using dual 278 weapons, but that would require killing The Jailer, or pulling it from my Vault. So I must return to heroic until I get it, despite not needing anything from virtually any other boss.
This is kind of a naïve view. Most hardcore players straight up retire because it’s the thing they like to do, and it’s a very grating piece of content to put effort into. You make it sound like casual players never put in the same raw number of raiding hours as many other guilds do, and that’s not a broad rule. The overarching difference is the caliber of player. The amount of good players in casual settings are vastly lower than the amount of bad players in hardcore settings. You can put in the time, but if it amounts to nothing because you don’t perform you’re effectively labeled a casual because it’s the tier of content you are capable of doing–rather than the effort you’ve put in. Good players leave bad guilds because they don’t want to be stuck somewhere doing content they’re above. The general barrier is their allotment of time or desire to moving up, but you can still find better guilds in your bracket without investing more of each (presuming you have a better understanding and aptitude to the game).
I, a hardcore raider, can join a casual 2-night guild that progresses AotC, and thus be a casual player. Or I can join a 2-night CE guild and… somehow not be casual.
From all quarters? Consensus? These words don’t mean what you think they mean…
My guild is casual as it gets in terms of raiding. We’re a bunch of mid-tier m+ players who raid just to goof off along with some VERY casual people who only do world content until it’s raid night they jump in with us and raid (like that’s all the group content they do). We clear normal before we move on to heroic and I think we’ve only even gotten aotc as a guild once in the last 5-6 tiers we’ve been raiding and we still beat normal anduin the 3rd or 4th week the raid was out. That’s far from an impressive stat, but our average item level when first beating Anduin was 257 ilvl and only one person, our DH tank, had a tier set bonus. He’s definitely doable with much less than that, like most bosses he’s a mechanics check more than a dps / hps fight. The jailer is an even easier fight than Anduin is imo, which is another mechanics check. The only bosses that I’ve noticed on normal with tight enrage timers are Lihuvum and then there’s a few other lower tier ones with tight soft enrages like pantheon and halandrus. Anduin and Jailer are not these fights.
Okay so this isn’t what happened, I don’t know where this old wives tale started but the problem with TogC was there were very few bosses, and there were 3 tiers of itemization.
10N
10H = 25N
25H
Twin Valk and Anubarak were DPS checks on heroic, they required a decent bit of gear. Because there were only 3 bosses that dropped gear, that meant that there needed to be value put on previous difficulties, and with the lack of bosses meant that some of the BiS trinkets dropped from 25N or 10H.
People weren’t running 3 (because let’s face it, 10N was phased out even at the time after 2 weeks) difficulties for any other reasons, the intent was never for people to “stay in their lanes”, it was to drop the requirement of having to redo multiple difficulties when it was brain dead content because it resulted in burn out. Trust me, if you were on H-Twins or H-Anub you were completing the other difficulties in about 30-45 minutes per difficulty depending on your efficiency.
I agree, current Normal tuning is not designed for anyone. It’s not for the reasons that you’ve mentioned before, because Normal can be absolutely obliterated with gear, and that gear is widely accessible from M+ keystones.
Keys are designed in conjunction with raids, if doing anything higher than LFR it is designed with the idea that you will be gaining most of your gear from the keystone system, so they have to keep a remote semblance of engagement for Normal raids.
If I pull up your roster from RIO, 75% of you are under 250. You’re massively undergeared, 3 of you are missing double legendaries, and less than half of you have 4p despite it being free from the creation catalyst, not to mention that 2 of your players logged out in tank or healer trinkets despite being DPS players.
But it is doable at that gear, people were clearing heroic day 1 with gear from normal and a few piece of heroic gear. You’re conflating Blizzard giving you multiple strong gear outlets, you opting not to take them, and then blaming them for being as undergeared as you are. A brand new player will have 4p day one at this point, they’ll get it from a M0 world tour, they will have unity because they have it on their mains.
You only think you need to outgear it because the majority of the playerbase gears through keys, and fills in slots when they’re already 260+ with normal drops when 80% of the raid is trading gear.
And I totally agree with this statement. Blizzard massively broke the social contract they made when they wouldn’t hyper incentivize people for a resource like time in over prioritizing lower difficulties. The majority of guilds are 2-3 weeks behind where they were respectively last tier according to WCL statistics. When most guilds are 2 days a week and with the refusal to do things like release the catalyst earlier, they conflated guilds not progressing because they weren’t spending the time on higher difficulties with the difficulty of the raid itself.
Yes,he is overtuned a bit. I think the only adjustment that needs to be made however is the HP of the adds below. Just not enough time to get them all down even with well geared people. He’s the painsmith of the raid. The wall you gotta get past. Mechanic heavy fight. Many raids have that one boss, and he is it.
The adjustment list for the fight, across all the difficulties, is massively long lol.
our guild one shots every boss on heroic to anduin. then we just spend all night dying. this boss is just like sylvanis. be perfect or die.
That is kinda the point. SotFO is a raid that is actually 2 raids combined into 1 (hence why there was a 1 week delay on the final 3 bosses from a gameplay perspective). With the first 8 bosses being raid 1 and the last 3 being raid 2. It would be if you went to the Terrace of the Endless Springs after killing Shek’zeer while still being within Heart of Fear. I use this example instead of say EN & ToV or BoD & CoS as HoF and ToES are narratively linked via the Sha of Fear. Much like how Vil Guardian to Anduin and the final 3 bosses are narratively linked. And just like Shek’zeer, Anduin is tuned to be an end of raid boss. While Zovaal would be the Sha of Fear in this scenario.
Lords of Dread and Rygelon are not as mechanically complex as Anduin is (at least on anything other than mythic).
Don’t run the stars through an add and win is a far cry from “be perfect”.
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Wait are you talking about normal, heroic, or mythic?
Will say normal too mee is incredibly chill heroic does step up a bit annd haven’t done it on mythic.
The only fight that seems ridiculous to me in the raid so far is rygelon.
Am starting too run heroic jailer annd trying too find people for mythic annd heroic jailer also seems kinda chill to me.
Sheesh and folks wonder why people have stopped playing. It just isntfunand the wall is not worth the time.
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I have tried with 3 different groups, we killed all bosses last night except anduin. Spent an hour on him. Groups i have been in cant kill anduin.
He is overtuned on normal, if i wanted a heroic level challenge i would take on anduin on heroic. This fight is tuned like a heroic encounter.
Phase two add phase is very unforgiving if the adds dont stay cc’d and will wipe the raid in a few casts.
So keep the adds cc’d? What am I missing here?
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every cc works. you can fear them with a paladin. when’s the last time you used turn Evil? was it this decade?