OK maybe it’s OK on mythic raids, scaling is a non-issue because you will always have 20, and because it’s mythic trying to find the right balance between range and melee is part of the challenge.
But for normal and heroic, with scaling raid sizes and players who mostly play for fun, needing to have a certain raid size, or a certain number of range vs melee, or a specific class or spec should never happen.
My guild just got to Nymue (heroic), but first I look back at my attempts on the mythic Garrosh fight in SOD where you had 4 adds spawn across the map, you could either have everyone CC those adds and swap one by one and hope you all had enough ST damage to kill them fast enough, or take 2 DK’s with slappy hands.
My guild unfortunately did not have enough ST damage, or co-ordination for the ST strategy so we never got passed that boss, we managed all bosses up to that one, gave it a few tries but eventually stopped even trying if we never had at least 1 DK for the night.
That’s not the only boss that has that issue, but that one comes to mind because that was the one my guild got hard stuck on in recent times.
But back to Nymue, and those damn flowers. Tonight after a couple of pulls we very quickly noted that we might not have enough range, we had I think 5 range in an 11 player run and after the flowers came out it looked very suspicious that we ended up with most of the flowers at range needing basically all range to single soak.
Anyone who has done that fight knows, or if you don’t go read up on that fight, the more people who soak each single flower, the faster it goes away, so the strat is to get 3-4 on each flower as soon as it drops, within seconds it’s gone.
We pugged a few players and ended up trying our last few pulls with around 20 players. The issue here is:
- 10 man raids have the same number of flowers as 20 man raids, maybe a little less, but not noticeable.
- The placement of the soaks does not take into account how many ranged or melee you have.
This meaning if you are melee heavy you will end up having to have melee run out to soak, which is just dumb. And if you don’t have enough players in general, during the add phase you will have a lot to soak, with a lot of overlap, and if you don’t soak fast enough you will be in and out of soak circles dodging too many spells which will elongate:
- The time spent on the adds
- The time the soaks are up
- The amount of out-going damage from the adds
- The stacking ticking damage from the boss
What needs to happen here is to have less flowers come out with the less amount of people you have in your group, or have them soak faster with less players and have them fall more within the range of what players you have, no 5 flowers in range for your 3 range to deal with, at least not on heroic and normal.
And these kind of raid boss mechanics from Blizzard need to stop. We should never on normal or heroic be hitting a raid boss that scales poorly and is harder because you have too many or not enough range, or are missing that one spec, especially after the world first mythic clears are done.
To a degree no, but they should at least tune the bosses more in line with what you do have. On this raid boss what they should have done was do a % of flowers per group size on normal, and a slightly higher on heroic, with a split between range and melee.
Two examples for Nymue could be:
Option A:
Flowers spawning for 30% of your group size on normal, with a 30% split out to range. For 10 man that would be 3 flowers total, 1 range, 2 melee. For 20 players it would be 7 flowers spawning, 2 at range, 4 in melee. And for heroic it would be 40% spawn rate, 30% range, for 20 that would be 8 flowers, 2-3 in range and 5-6 in melee.
This would force you to take some range, or at least use your ranged healers to soak. And if you went the other way and took 3 melee and 17 range, at least the range can pretend to be melee, you cannot go the other way.
Or option B:
One giant flower scaling with raid size that spawns randomly twice in each P1 that requires all but the tanks to soak, and one half sized flower after each add dies.
That would force every player to bail and go soak 3 times between both phases and would not matter in one bit what composition you have, and would even favour a ranged heavy comp, because again, ranged can pretend to be melee, not the other way around.