Gear. Preparation. Knowledge. Practice.
Most of the guilds that are doing day 1 clears have players that have been raiding since the 1st month of MC. The strats have been practiced. They come prepared with tons of consumables.
Dont just cancel and delete the game cuz u cant beat vael the 1st day. It’ll take a little while for most casual guilds that arent min/maxing every little bit so that they can squeeze every bit out of the lemon.
Years of experience and knowledge of the fights.
You will get it, the tank positioning and swaps are really the only hitch you will face so long as your tanks hold threat and your healers are sharp on their game.
Thing is a great many people got use to MC. BWL, is in the other hand the raid equal difficulty to Scolomance.
Some is actually really easy, some is a lil challenging.
What are you guys struggling with??
Dude they didn’t, the fastest one was like 40 minutes and some odd seconds, but it’s really not as hard as expected, there were a few things that wiped us like that chromag corner not working like in pservers and rogue class call not being able to be vanished or sprinted out of, aside from that as long as you have 3 hunters for tranq spam you should be good even without flasks.
The guilds clearing bwl 40-60 minutes are mainly from private servers (that typically had to deal with harder hitting mechanics) and are well prepared with gear (rank 14 weapons, rank 13 gear), talents, engineering items, etc. These guild have a lot of synergy and have done world record speed clears on private servers and are very knowledgeable about the raid.
33:38 by APES.
Vael is a very unique fight in the sense that pretty much everyone sits at full rage/mana the entire time. Warriors and melee literally want the fastest weapons they can get, just to spam heroic strike and dump all of this excess rage they get for mountains of dmg. (most melee keep a dagger in their bags just for this.)
Watch a video or two. Yes, its challenging when you aren’t used to a completely different type of strategy. But you can do it!
Hot Tip: Almost everyone underestimated Firemaw, later in BWL. Make sure you have 2 tanks with all their Fire resist in their bags, ready to put on. And again, watch a guide and recommend it to your team.
In the end, I agree with the poster above that don’t worry, it doesn’t have to be ‘all handed to you’ on the first night. Learn the fights with your friends and guildies. Enjoy classic-- that’s why you play!
We made sure our tank had 300 dagger skill, made vael really easy.
???
Step 1 practise. Most of players have been playing private servers for 5+ years and know every raid like the back of their hand.
Step 2 is world buffs and full consumables one everyone. This literally nullifies every HPS and DPS check, even if you are a bad player as long as you don’t die and lose buffs you will pump way harder than needed to clear any boss.
Most of the guilds clearing in under an hour have spent nearly a decade playing on private servers, figuring out and perfecting everything needed for those clears. Everything down to their professions are chosen with world first clears in mind. So yes, while doing BWL in a normal guild of random people playing Classic is still difficult, this is years old farm content for guilds like APES.
My guild killed Nefarion tonight. Got to the drakes last night but ran out of time.
I dunno man. Its not that hard. Vael is an execution fight, so both it, Chromag and maybe Nef aren’t challenges of knowing your rotation, or even having great gear. Its about: Can your raid listen to freaking instructions like adults and not let their anxiety to be top dps or rank high on warcraft logs or whatever push them into doing something stupid…
If they can’t you fail. If they can, you win. Vael is a plenty long enough fight for you to kill it even with everyone dpsing at like 25% of their max capacity. Its the execution in tank swapping and getting people to run out with Adrenaline and not pulling threat and getting the whole raid tail swiped that’s important.
If Vael is bothering you, then Chromag and Nef are probably going to really mess you guys up. Because they are equally execution driven. That being said, once you know the execution, reducing the run time is extremely easy. Youll see, in a few months you guys will have it down to MC times probably too.
That is correct that there are many private server players who are now playing wow classic who have had years of experience, so none of this is surprising.
My guild got through Razorgore and Vael and only didn’t get to Broodlord because of time (we did suppression room but had an accidental boss pull so we stopped until our next raid night). However, we learned the strats for us for the first two bosses and will do better next time.
We have Vanilla veterans and players who have never raided BWL. We have a few who have been on private servers but not many. We are a mid-tier guild that focuses more on friendships than being the fastest guild out there and only taking the “best” and we are fine with it.
I played through content when it was originally progression 15 years ago.
The person who said that if your guild can’t kill Vael on night 1 you will never do AQ40 or Naxx is wrong. My Vanilla guild got to CThun in AQ40 (when it was considered broken) and got quite far through Naxx 40. Do you know what happened with that guild the first night we tried BWL? We failed on Razorgore so bad that we went back and farmed MC for a few more weeks for gear. We then wiped on Vael for 2-3 weeks while we learned the fight.
There is something to be said for actually progressing through this raid in terms of strengthening the social relationship etc of your raid team. I’d rather not have content on farm on night one personally, although of course some guilds do for the reasons mentioned before and that’s fine.
They practiced on private servers for years.
That’s not what it says in the post by Kaivax. 42 minutes as the fastest time, with the guilds starting at 23:00 and killing the last boss at 23:42. (It could be misread as them starting at the time of the first kill, but that’s incorrect.) 42 MINUTES!
MC was also being cleared in half an hour. MC speed is dependant on how well you handle the trash.
BWL bosses have mechanics and threat management is a thing.
What we have now, that we didn’t then, is Warcraft Logs.
If you post your log to WCL, it should be pretty easy to zero in on your problems.
Here’s a random guild that wiped a few times on Vael:
https://classic.warcraftlogs.com/reports/CfBbG2gaDk7tAHWp#fight=17
When fighting a dragon you stay away from his front and rear, it looks like they knew that, but still didn’t do it right. At 18s he turns toward the melee, BBQs them and tail swipes the ranged, including healers. By the time they get back in position too many are dead.
That could be because the OT briefly pulled aggro, he never took a melee hit though, so impossible to say for sure. Threat exists, and it does not look like the MT was prioritizing it, in that case everybody else has to be careful to stay below him because anyone else pulling aggro = death.
Healers also have to coordinate more in vanilla than retail because half the spells don’t have passives that jump to whoever is hurt. That may be a non-issue if the low tuning obscures it, but it comes to the forefront otherwise. Does not look like these healers had that down.
I’d think they have had a full and consistent roster since launch, play a lot, have the gear and probably have plenty of private server experience.
Apes had a bugged UBRS portal and zoned in like 7 minutes late, and only missed the world first by a few seconds. They had the fastest actual clear time by a wide margin.
Here’s what guilds like Apes, Progress, and Storm do:
Keep in mind literally ALL of these top guilds played for 5+ years on Nost, Elysium, Light’s Hope, and Kronos rerolling fresh every single time
Everyone flasks. EVERYONE. It doesn’t matter that they’re crazy money, you flask.
Everyone has one raid viable alt for maximum efficiency/comp.
Everyone is an engineer with sappers so trash just explodes. You end up with 40 sappers on a pull at 500+ damage each.
Look at their raid comps - literally 15-18 warriors 7-9 rogues. The DPS is unreal. There is no “Fun” there is no “friends” it’s just this is the best way to achieve the goal of fast, downed content.
Alt raids - they split their R1 into two groups after the initial clears to ensure their top performers get gear funneled to them. For example, everyone in the guild has to have an alt. Those alts carry the main raiders so that 20 of them run the raid with 20 alts. The 20 alts get left overs while their main gets fed gear. Which, works for all 40 of the raiders in the end.
Everyone has a level 20 lock strategically placed somewhere on azeroth to summon people to important locations. Songflowers, BRD entrances, DM:N, etc;
This combined with them doing the content over and over is how you end up with these guilds clearing so fast. They know the mechanics by heart, they are ready to go with no issues. There is no sense of fun or adventure and discovery. They get their fun by saying, Hey…we’ve done all that already. Let’s push the speed/execution instead.
@OP, this is what to keep in mind. Just because other people find it easy, does not mean you shouldn’t progress on the fight. Vael is a wake-up call for raid groups that have not practiced it over and over again.
Run over logs, check logs of guilds that have downed him. See what they are doing, and if you can learn anything from them. You’ll get it!