Raiding in a small guild raid group and we complete heroic raids (or equivalent) and have been doing so for years.
We have been stuck on Zul for a very long time and Ion needs to pull his head out of his backside and not let this happen again with the new raid. The difficulty increase on heroic and mythic plus is flat out garbage. They wonder why people are leaving the game and subs are dropping. Maybe because they can’t balance anything properly. Bliz, if you can’t scale the raid properly, then change it so that it’s tuned to specific size only… or do your jobs. This raid season has been huge disappointment and slap in the face for small raid groups.
I second this, Heroic uldir is very punishing for small groups (we run 10 or 11 person groups) . Now I am in a small f+f guild and I am not going to claim we are the best players. but we have been active since vanilla and generally can clear heroic content when we have enough folks around but some of the encounters in Uldir are just poorly designed for small groups. A few of our members her pugged their AOTC commented on how much more difficult the encounters were in a 10 man than in larger pugs.
We are also stuck on Zul right now, I can’t even imagine how we are going to do G’hunn and we are fortunate enough to have a Warlock among our regular group.
If are have only 10 You’ll have to have solo runners across the board or you’ll wipe all night no matter your skill level.
Blizzard’s bull of “bring the player and not the toon” is full of it. Yes I know you need healers and tanks. But if you have mechanics then every class should be able to handle those mechanics as easily as another. Be it different tanks, healers or DPS.
This of course is not the case.
So drop the bull and just say, “This Boss you will need X. Anything else will be a wipe fest. Enjoy!”
While I agree that scaling is often pretty bad, especially for 10 mans, I think it highlights the reason that mythic exists at fixed 20 man rather than flex or 10 AND 25.
You can never do perfect scaling for mechanics unless you make everything boring. Simple soak mechanics, X players must do something mechanics, add spawns, etc… impossible to scale in a way that effects all group sizes equally. Same with raid comp. Swapping between 2/2/6 and 2/3/5 is a HUGE change in dps and healer rations. 2/4/24 vs. 2/5/23 is not much of a change.
That said, yeah I think they should be more conscientious of the fact that certain heroic fights end up being very difficult with 10 players every single tier and do a better job of balancing them to start with or rolling out a hotfix more quickly. The encounters are designed for mythic 20 mans, but that doesn’t mean heroic needs to suffer.
With Zul, if you don’t have blood elves or priests to mass dispell, then the fight literally becomes a nightmare for small raids. This is 100% reflected in warcraft logs with the number of 10 mans completing the fight. It gets worse at Ghunn. Running the sides is almost impossible with a 10 man because of ramping damage and the runners not being scaled. This could be fixed by reducing spawn rate of terrors. For zul this could be fixed by reducing number of minions who fear. Reduce the numbers not just health. The cost of purges is directly related to the number of minions. For Ghunn the difficulty is directly related to the rate/number of terrors that spawn.
The idea that it can’t or it’s difficult to scale in HC is a load of hot steaming garbage.
This is 100% a failing on blizzards part. If they can’t scale the fights properly, then they should just remove scaling, set it to 20 man across everything and tell smaller guilds or guild without specific classes to kick rocks.
Reducing spawn rate of G’Huun minions: How do you test the proper spawn rate to balance? Do you test every raid size from 10 through to 30? It might not be balanced if it was a linear increase/decrease.
Reduce number of Zul fear adds: Is this actually needed because more adds make it harder? Or because you’re more likely to have a priest in a big raid? If you do reduce it, where are the breakpoints? There will always be granularity there.
All this stuff could be improved, but it’ll never be perfect, and isn’t worth the time
I don’t think most people would agree that sacrificing flex over this is worth it either.
It’s probably best that some of these obvious problems do get addressed or at least thought through. Normal Heroic is where a lot of raiders currently sit, and with many mythic guilds bleeding having a fair challenge on the middle end of the spectrum should be a priority.
I’m not expecting 100% balance, but it wouldn’t break heroic zul by having only 1 dispel add spawn per side. It’s an arbitrary mechanic that’s only made difficult by not having 2 priests or being alliance.
G’huun can be adjusted by generally reducing the damage better on the channel, since with more players no more than a tick or two goes through prior to an interupt, or simply change being uptop near the cysts to create LOS and add a mechanic that if there’s no one in LOS of the tentacles downstairs they pulse raidwide damage and instantly wipe the group. The fight is mostly P2 timings and dealing with P3, so why make P1 more difficult for smaller sized raids?
Two very simple changes that don’t realistically raise or lower the difficulty of the fights overall. Sure, the Zul change saves you a little bit of mana on a fight on heroic that’s explicitly designed to be rushed anyway and healer mana to not be a concern.
Also i agree balance is tough, but these other people defending the scaling and balance… are refusing to accept the fact that the scaling issues right now are not difficult to implement.
Bliz is dropping the ball right now, when what they really need is a home run. To bad they can’t be motivated to save themselves
