BoD has been a huge struggle even just on heroic with smaller group sizes. Less healing cd’s for the frequency of raidwide mechanics, higher ratios of mechanics vs. the number of players, and impossible strategies for groups running the minimum size or even slightly more than the minimum size.
Ever tried doing heroic Grong with 11 people? You need 3 healers just to cover the cooldowns necessary for the tantrum and if you don’t have enough melee, say good by to your tanks or the unlucky healer who has to babysit the ferocious roar on the unthrown tank due to being able to be targeted by both the ranged missile and melee smash mechanics.
Ever tried two healing Heroic Opulence? Say good bye to your tailwind sapphire 25% damage buff since both sides need an amethyst. And say good bye to the dps who get Hex of Lethargy with your 6 second dispel, hopefully you have a priest who can mass dispel so only one dps dies instead of 2. Ever try to 3 heal Heroic opulence so you can have one tailwinds gem? Have fun wiping to lack of dps gems and rampant adds.
Ever tried 11 manning Conclave while half of your dps are outrunning raptors and you have to somehow manage to coordinate enough healing cd’s for raid wide damage that happens every minute? Damned to raptors who are up too long with 3 healers, damned if to die to winds if you 2 heal due to lack of cd’s.
I think my point has been made, why even have 10 as a minimum group size when the fights are clearly not designed to even be possible unless you severly overgear the content to the point that you can skip mechanics? Might as well just make the raid size a minimum of 20.
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It’s the minimum but not recommended. Sure, they could just increase the min to 15 or 20, but imagine the whining then? Most raids are aimed at a 20 person raid. The closer to that the better. Having 30 on Mythrax/G’huun wasn’t fun - especially with a melee heavy lineup.
It’s not the end of the world to find a healer #3 for Opulence. The raptor hex does not cause damage over time and can be decursed prematurely if absolutely needed. And it only targets two people in a small group setting: three are targeted otherwise. You shouldn’t be running and completely stopping DPS when you’re targeted by a raptor: do damage to one that is not targeting you or focus fire and stun the closest one. Stuns and knockbacks are highly effective against them. And don’t let them cross paths with each other or they gain speed and cc immunity. Scaled down to 10, they should blow up easily.
People wanted Mythic 10 man back, so here ya go.
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Working as intended. Sadly.
opulence is not intended for 10 man but the rest of the fights are actually easier with a 10 man, besides of course the last 3.
I think they dropped the ball a bit on the tuning of smaller raid sizes here. While I’m glad they’re not letting it limit their design space for mechanics, I think it needs a bit more consideration for next time. I believe the intention is supposed to be that flex raid lead towards being easier with more people, but the disparity doesn’t need to be so vast. It’s likely that the bosses need to be hand-tuned for various raid-sizes and not just “health increased by XX% per player”. On fights like Opulence, each player’s contribution is vastly different due to gems, and it ramps up significantly from beginning to end. They clearly didn’t take that fully into consideration when tuning this on the lower sizes.
I remember I solo healed one of the boats on Normal Stormwall Blockade and it was a decent challenge with heroic gear with 12-15 people (I forget how many were in the raid). It would have been VERY challenging if I wasn’t overgearing it. The numbers felt quite high for a normal raid.
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Having a paladin healer stand with the tank is the way we did it. Mostly because paladins are good tank healers, but it worked out since they’re considered melee.
I think the problem is that there are still 4 raptors and you only have 6 dps in a 11 man group if you’re 3 healing so the ranged that get targeted have to move quite a bit without Mythic level coordination whereas in higher group sizes the ratio of raptors to players is so much smaller that they melt and you have more stuns and chances to deal with them before they reach a fixated player.
The problem with dispels on opulence even with a 3rd healer is that one side would still have to manage 4 dispels with a 6 sec cooldown with a debuff that occurs 2 at a time even in an 11 man raid which means then even for just heroic you’re talking about fixing your composition to include shadow priests for an extra mass dispel or only bringing certain healers like other priests in order to compensate for a mechanic. I totally am on board with composition micromanaging for Mythic where you have 20 people, but in an 11 man group running heroic being expected to have multiple raid ready alts to compensate for progression and mechanics is overtuned.
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This sounds like a LTP issue. 1) Hex of Lethargy can be removed by any dwarf, or dark iron dwarf, using their racials. If you’re Horde, this means Maghar, and normal Orcs, and goblin Hunters. Rogues can also cloak it, mages can ice block it, pallies can bubble it. Dispel those classes that can’t do anything to remove it, and if by some odd chance you end up with 2 targeted that cannot remove it, they CAN move 1 time before the hex starts doing serious damage. That SHOULD buy enough time to get your dispel back up if they’re smart.
And having 1 tailwinds gem more than makes up for 1 dps missing. 25% of 6 dps’s damage is more than going to make up for 1 dps no matter what gem they are using.
There ARE to many raptors with smaller groups, but their health pool is non-existant. On my 2 melee, i can kill one by myself in less than 10 seconds with the smaller group comps, (2 3 9) Yours must die even faster. This guy obviously has ramp up time but i can kill all of them myself in 25-30 seconds, depending on group size.
Its true that this raid can get rough for small groups, but I’d rather that be the case and Blizzard continue to create interesting fight mechanics, instead of dialing them back to accommodate 10-man teams.
I guess the option is there if you need it, but not ideal. Maybe try pug’ing some extra’s and invite the ones you like to come back next week.
We’ve definitely had to do that, its just rough. I don’t see how they couldn’t better tune health and ratio of mechanics vs. player count without getting rid of interesting mechanics.