vael, chromag.
the 2 big bosses that were hyped up to be the dreaded guild destroyers are being 1 shot off the bat by tons of guilds.
yet… firemaw, the 1 that no one even bat an eye at. is now the one causing problems.
this must go beyond just bad memory. What did blizzard change about firemaw that is making him seemingly more difficult against players who arguably are now better geared / specced / prepared than ever before?
Fire resistance.
Everyone stacked FR back then for ragnaros so they were ready to walk over firemaw. In 2020 most guilds blew through content without FR, but still need it in firemaw.
For this same reason (along with them being on earlier patches, worse talent trees, worse itemization) dps raves like vael were a lot harder
mage class lead on my guild is FR capped with stuff like flarecore legs and he’s pushing top DPS for casters last week. I think he might be onto something
Healers not having to try in mc. Firemaw is a healer fight and spaming heals wont do it. You have to time the shadow breaths. Fr gear prbably a little bit but i am only rocking 90 and do fine.
Nothing.
It’s 100% personal responsibility to survive that fight and requires a modicum of tank co-ordination.
Modern players have better gear, worse skill.
Vanilla players were generally better tanks and enormously better healers because they had to participate in very long fights even in MC. When BWL rolled around, a dps check fight like Vael was incredibly hard but a fight like Firemaw that you could win with minimal dps wasn’t.
We had 3 tanks fully kitted for FR in Vanilla, so there was never a need to rotate them out, and Firemaw ping-ponged between them for Wing Buffets. Threat wasn’t an issue from DPS constantly stepping in and out, either.
My guild ended up making me a bunch of Dark Iron, and we only use two tanks now. Our backups don’t even wear Fire Resistance gear.
In case anyone is struggling: I run in ~6 seconds before Wing Buffet to take it, and then run out; I call for a tank swap preparation, so I don’t get merc’d by Thrash + Shadow Flame + hit (aka bad RNG–he doesn’t always Shadow Flame before Wing Buffet). Usually, I pop Shield Block and have PW:S on me. Recommend about 6400 HP to be the OT, and heavy fire resistance isn’t required.
Thrash will trigger, at minimum, about 3300 damage with no crushing blows between its two hits and Firemaw’s third basic hit, and Shadow Flame hits for ~3800 with no resist. Back to back, it’s easy to die on this if healers aren’t prepared.
Firemaw is the first tauntable boss besides rag, but he doesn’t really count cause the warrior tank just intercepts back in. So, this is the first boss that requires a taunt/tank rotation where threat becomes huge during this. Most guilds are likely finding themselves losing threat during the learning phase because, hey, taunt is resistable and one failed taunt without a backup is a wipe.
we also tended to take WAYYYYYY more healers in vanilla.
My guild used to take 15+ healers to bwl in vanilla. Our first Rag kill took 3 submerges. We killed twin emps at the 15 min enrage.
We overhealed and underdps’d everything.
i don’t know about back in the day, but on kronos people recognized the difficulty of this fight. my guild on kronos 3 (server launch on 3/31/2019) wiped on firemaw 4 times day 1 BWL before calling it a night. came back the next week, one shot him and one shot the rest of the instance. A friend of mine played in a speedclearing EU guild (think maximum sweat levels, there’s a 20 minute BWL clear of theirs on YouTube), and he thought Firemaw was certainly the most annoying and the one where he was most likely to lose buffs.
there are some fine nuances to the fight that can elude people the first few times they do it, mostly judging how many stacks you personally can safely take. If your guild is missing world buffs, it becomes much much harder. your tanks have less health and threat, your melee have to run out earlier, your healers dont have as much mana or crit…
Firemaw didn’t change much. People have to do the proper fight in Classic; there’s no way around that.
What did change is how easy Vael and Chromag are.
Chromag was a great endurance fight, greatly stressing raid mana levels. With how fast Chromag dies now, people don’t OOM, so the major difficulty of the fight is gone.
Vael was a fight with a bunch of treacherous tank swaps with how long the fight took. It wasn’t rare to have the first kills in Vanilla occur AFTER the 3 minute debuff wore off. A kill that long would require the first 4 tanks all living until their bomb debuff was applied. That wasn’t easy to make them live, and it wasn’t easy to get that coordination down, as the tank swaps frequently end in collateral damage. When it’s so hard to get a single tank swap right, requiring the raid to get 4 of them to happen seamlessly on the same attempt made wiping very common. In Classic, we haven’t gotten to the 2nd tank bomb, and so the amount of “stars-aligning” that needs to happen to result in a successful kill is significantly lighter.
It’s one of those fights that reward stacking heaps of resistances, which was a very common tactic in vanilla. In fact, the way most downed rag was just stacking FR on everyone to become practically immune to his mechanics. So, against firemaw, the same tactic works: stack a bunch of FR, be totally immune. About 200+ is where you’ll really feel a difference.
Without FR, it’s a fight of personal responsibility where you have to watch your stacks as a DPS. Unfortunately, many DPS get greedy and stay in for way too long, wasting healer mana, or just getting themselves killed.
Because people are using the blue bis gear and dont have the health pools/resists of old. Almost every tank is a dw fury warr instead of deep prot meaning they are losing the mitigation that comes from the deep prot gear - they are all speccing to hold threat for massive world buffed dps classes.
Fights like vael are easier because with a gffpx2 and huge +healing values healers can spam away and dps go ham off the bat. Dps is higher meaning fight length is shorter - where years ago healers spececed for longevity so all the extra mp5/spirit was wasted on vael.
Chrom with correct mechanics is easy - dps take minimal damage and can self heal - healers can focus the tank. Tank can go ham. Chroms mechanics are key.
Nef definatly felt easier than i remembered - but again - thats mainly due to adds getting blown up almost instantly.
BWL was never as hard as you thought - the players of the time and their mindsets made it hard. With Firemaw you are seeing what downsides there are to low health pools and massive dps - unavoidable magical damage.
Do you think you will be able to run AQ40/Naxx without the correct resistances? Most bosses yes - but those few that need it, NEED IT.
I honestly don’t know yet. Huhu is the first real resist check and I get the feeling with popped Coolies you could take her from just under soft enrage to dead before the damage ramps up enough if you can keep world buffs that long with minimal resistances.
Because you need soakers. You also need to be able to resist some of the mechanics from 100-30%. Definatly a fight where NR is needed - not by everyone and not max either. 200+ for the soakers. Tanks back in the day were pushed to use 315 but can get away with max health gear basically.
If we are gearing the same for aq40 as we have for bwl -
this rings true.
I think this is accurate. Not just for tanks, but dps too. Enough FR and you’ll resist stacks. DPS can stay in longer. Tanks take less damage. It just makes the fight overall easier.
You also have to point out that it’s the first technical tank mechanics too, and some classic tanks just haven’t had experience with anything like it. Our first raid day on firemaw our OT was really struggling with the idea of taunting to take the buffet. On day 2 it was worked out, and fairly easy clap.
We first got stopped on Vael.
Later on firemaw because it needs coordination, healers and tanks who stack defense/fr.
Next guaranteed stop will be chromag if we ever get past firemaw.
melee dps should definitely stacks fr. lots of good pieces they can equip. you don’t even need that much if alliance. juju + paladin aura is so much to begin with. if healers or casters want to wear fr they can just do that. most people already have 20-30 equipped from random pieces in their regular set.
i dont know if anyone knows for sure but i heard that 125 resistance makes you resist 1/3 of the stacks. you can breach that without equipping much at all.
UBRS FR buff is 82 - shaman totem another 80. Thats enough and dont have to swap any gear. The issue i have in bwl is sub 4k hp so i dont have alot of longevity - i fix this by using a hp flask.
Pretty simple stuff really.
didnt know shaman totem was that much. we have toyed with the idea of ubrs buff but we just skip it and use juju instead, and melee wear a decent amount of fr. casters healers wear none.