Heroic Ashvane is incredibly overtuned for small raid groups in general. The fact that 3 people are always briny bubbled, combined with the fact that you will have roughly 4x the corals, so 24 if you happen to get 2 coral casts on the first shield break (still 3 per cast of coral spawn on 10-15 by the way) by the end of the third shield phase. This means each raid member would have to take roughly 2 bubbles PER wave cast, assuming you have to take 4 times as long (100% of the shield in first phase, 150% increase in second phase, 300% increase in second phase, this totals 400%), you’re getting 4 times the total wave count, with the same amount of players. This is all ignoring the increased damage you have to do while dealing with these extra mechanics, while possibly 2 dps out of your 6 (assuming a 2/2/6 makeup) totaling up to 33% of your total raid damage is bubbled. How was this not tested?
Ashvane’s tuning is fine in heroic, I’m assuming you’re just not doing anywhere near enough damage to efficiently phase her as to not get a ton of corals. Without logs I have no way of knowing that for sure, but when people complain about Ashvane its generally because their raiders are parsing in the grey for various reasons.
That’s bad tuning, no raid encounter on heroic should assume parses of 60% or greater, no encounter remains like that on heroic. On Mythic it is fine, for the lower difficulties it is not. This is coming from someone who has cleared every single raid since AOTC came out with dps in the 30s and lower on my roster.
The difficulty should go down as you have higher dps, the fight should not be mathematically impossible without high parsed dps.
Ashvane is a gear check. Almost every raid that I can think of has had a gear check. I believe someone did the math showing that your DPS need to be pulling ~25K dps to down her, which is not a high benchmark at all for heroic.
Is that 25k to 2 shield her?
She is so much easier if you can just lust and ignore everything but bubbles on the second shield break.
Not sure, i think that’s three shielding? I haven’t looked into the heroic numbers at all since we’ve been banging our heads against the mythic version for weeks now.
So I’m supposed to care that you willingly have members who will not learn to improve their DPS? Like, log them and talk with them 1 on 1 on how to play better. That is not a derogatory conversation. It does not have to be in a mean manner.
“Lower difficulties”? Excuse me, but heroic – especially when you have players undergeared or when new – is anything but trivial. I still spent a day progging heroic Archimonde, and whatever other applicable heroic bosses, when new. I don’t understand where you’re thinking that because it’s above LFR and Normal, it’s somehow in the same category. It’s not.
If it’s YOUR roster, do YOUR job and help them play better. YOU are the leader of some implication judging by your statement.
It’s called progression for a reason. Either mentor your players, or painfully gear up week by week until you kill it. Either way, it’s working as intended.
We’ve had enrage timers and every other thing in the book, even in LFR, since the dawn of its conception. I don’t understand why you think “high parsed dps” is suddenly an issue?
Ashvane is a DPS check. It’s not the tuning it’s your group.
While I don’t disagree that Ashvane is intended to be a gear check, the OP is not wrong that the mechanics overly favor a far larger raid.
The dps check for heroic is like 25k average, people were doing more than that last tier with less gear and no essences. It’s not overtuned, your group just doesn’t know how to actually push their buttons
Half of the raid wipes on Ashvane could be prevented if players just stopped moving so damned much. Most of the mechanics are meant to scare you into moving right away - don’t. When you think about it, the fight is actually pretty easy-going: everyone stay grouped into ranged and melee groups (something you learned in the Stormwall Blockade), have the groups move when Upsurge pops, then have them move back into position, have briny’d players clump up so you can cleave them, and stagger the bubbles so you don’t kill the raid. Basically, stack until mechanics force you out, then stack again.
My guild raids with 12-14 people on Heroic. Here’s what we found.
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One, Ashvane’s a gear check: you need the gear to heal the damage, you need the gear to deal the damage. That’s it.
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Two, Ashvane’s a DPS check. If you’re anywhere close to Ashvane repeating phase one twice, you’ve probably failed.
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Three, Ashvane is a movement check. Yes, there are mechanics that force you to move, but you have to minimize your movement regardless. If you’ve got the briny bubble, run to the area just in front of the boss while everyone moves out of the way. Get bubbled, get the tank to pull the boss on top of the bubbled players, cleave it all down.
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Four, Ashvane is a mechanics and coordination check. Ignore bubbles when the shell is off, stagger bubbles when shell is on, coordinate beacons to break coral, etc. In addition, don’t blow DPS CDs right away: conventional wisdom says use them on rotation, but Eternal Palace mechanics seem to push players into sitting on their damage cooldowns until crucial moments…like when three of your players are incapacitated on top of the boss.
It’s difficult, but it’s not impossible, and once you beat it, it gets easier and easier.
You would be vastly wrong there with your math, you are not accounting for the increased shield per phase and increased amount of corals and waves you have to soak every carapace phase. For those of you talking about the tuning and a dps check, radiance, the boss before this, can be done with the entire raid group at 9k dps, the next boss cannot, THIS is a tuning issue. Either the bosses preceding it should be on the same scale of berserk timer, or the fight is tuned wrong. DPS checks don’t raise 4 fold for a single boss.
Now to break down the actual fight, with a 14 person group the boss starts off at ~34 million health, that means the first shield has ~13.6 million health. With 9 dps, each DPS is meant to deal roughly 1.5 million damage, corals spawn roughly every 45 seconds, so, at 25k dps, it will take roughly 60 seconds to break the first shield, this will cause 2 sets of corals to spawn, totalling 6, 3 on pull, 3 on first 45 seconds, 0 cause of push. First shield break phase begins, dps goes, boss is brought down to ~55%.
Boss regenerates new shield, 13.6 * 1.5 = 20.4 million shield now, begin second shield phase. Since the shield is now 20.4, each dps is now meant to do 2.26 million damage. To not get more than 6 corals, each dps now has to do 2.266 million damage within 85-90 seconds, this raises the dps that every dps has to do to 25k. 25k is not hard dps to do, until 22% of your dps is briny bubbled, causing up to 8 seconds of downtown, you now have to make up that 16 seconds of dps, your average dps has to rise above 25k. Again, lets assume you make that break, you have some people rise to 30k to make up for the fact that your dps is stunned for so long and carry the lower people, bubble breaks, begin vulnerability phase at 55%. Pew pew goes on, all corals are destroyed, boss is around 20% now due to not having heroism after first break.
Third shield phase begins, the bosses shield is now at 30.6 million (13.6 * 1.5 = 20.4, 20.4 * 1.5 - 30.6). Each dps is now responsible for 3.4 million dps. Taking into account your “25k is fine” it now takes 135 seconds to get into third vulnerability phase. That is 4 sets of corals, with the waves going 3/3 6/6 9/9 12/12 for total number of bubbles to make it into the last vulnerability phase. It is not mathematically possible for 14 people to soak 60 bubbles within 2 minutes. And again, we aren’t even accounting for 22% of your dps being stunned for up to 8 seconds every 45 seconds at this point. And ignoring the standard berserk timer.
And with 9 25k dps, you are not going to 2 phase it because at 34 million health, each dps needs 151 seconds of pure dps time (not counting breaking corals), each vulnerability phase is 70 seconds at most.
The fight is badly tuned, the berserk timers on the fight prior are not even close to the amount required to kill Ashvane with a smaller group.
You’re not on my raid team, nor do you design encounters, no you shouldn’t. When fights are DESIGNED, and able to be killed with 30-50% dps percentile in mind though for the past 10 years, Blizzard SHOULD care. Every boss in THIS raid leading up to it, have nowhere NEAR the same dps requirements, it should be reflective in the entire raid what the intended DPS requirements are, Ashvane is CLEARLY an outlier as Oorgozoa has an 8 minute berserk timer. This is absolutely heroic scaling being bad for smaller groups.
I agree, the enrage timer SHOULD be the limiting factor, however, you will never make it to enrage with a 14 person group, too many corals will spawn. You keep providing reasons of why it’s tuned badly (spawning more corals than the number of players can support), and not why it’s “hard”.
Lastly, those calling me a bad raid leader etc, it’s okay, I’ve led the same group of people for 13 years, we’ve killed every boss on heroic for AOTC, even with our lackluster dps. Yes some of our dps is not good, and we make the fights significantly harder by bringing them along, but this is nothing but the purest case of a fight being scaled bad for the number of players in the group, since it becomes a point of impossibility, not difficulty with a certain number of players in the group unless they are all pulling dps far BEYOND what the content was designed for.
Edit: Didn’t read a post while I was doing all my math responding to the person above me.
With 14 people, boss has ~34 million health, that means if you NEED to 2 phase it as you say (which is true, you can’t possibly 3 phase it with 14 people), each dps needs to do sustained, during burst phases, 31.5k dps, not accounting for moving for corals. 31.5k sustained dps for heroic fourth boss, after the boss before it can be killed with 9k dps by the same team, does not make sense, it means the fight is poorly tuned. Even at 430 item level, sustained 31.5k dps is a lot to ask, if the entire raid was 445 that’s another story, but considering this boss drops 430 gear, it is designed for the entire raid to be 415 -430.
Bfffffffffffffffwahahahahahahahahahaha mother of god this is heroic man not LFR. Doing a whole HALF of your potential output is not a big ask.
Also
My guild got our first mythic kills on Sivara, blackwater behemoth, and radiance in a single 4 hour raid night. Not one of them took more than 8 pulls to kill. On MYTHIC. Those 3 are so easy it’s insulting. And you think the rest of the raid should be on that level?
Especially on a fight that is pretty much patchwerk. The boss has literally half as much health on heroic compared to mythic. Honestly idk why you still wouldn’t do the mythic strat of 3 tanking on heroic especially since you don’t even have to suicide the tank soaking since the stacks drop off during shield break.
I by no means play super well and even I do like 80% of my sim on M Ashvane since the fight is so low movement. If they are going to tune ANY version of Ashvane it would probably be the Mythic since 69% of mythic guilds are stuck on her (2915 at 3/9 and only 919 at 4/9).
Source: https://www.wowprogress.com/
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/ZHLYdxmK2NDv9CgJ/#fight=16
This is my guild. We’re not especially awesome: we have to work on our DPS output, but we’re working on that. Count how many people are in that group.
Fourteen - just like yours, OP. And one dead Ashmane.
Stop overthinking it. Stop making excuses, stop saying it can’t be done. It can be done, but you are the one who has to make the changes. Ashmane is a stupid AI, and you’re not. Make everyone watch the guides. Make everyone watch Preach critique the elemental shaman on the Mythic version. Get the logs, run them through wow analyzer, make sure everyone knows what their shortcomings are so they can improve because the goal is getting better, right?
Raid encounters were made to be beaten, but you have to work for them.
Well since I have to repeat myself.
The raid should have a linear scale of difficulty, a 4-fold rise from one boss to the next is bad, yes, and if you think that’s intentional, name one other example in wow history that wasn’t eventually nerfed where the fight is mathematically impossible without 4x the dps that was able to kill the boss prior before berserk.
You know what, post your logs.
Even at 430 item level, sustained 31.5k dps is a lot to ask, if the entire raid was 445 that’s another story
At 430 most specs are easily capable of 40k sustained, at 445 it’s closer to around 50k. Asking for people around 420-430 to do 30k isn’t asking a lot
God, now I feel awful.
And since I have to repeat myself
The previous 3 bosses are way, way, way, WAY too easy.