Every single pug I have done keys with this week have either disbanded before the key finished or overtimed. I didn’t have this issue at all last week on Fortitude! All of them are 18s and lower.
(This is my second week on WW, please forgive if this is a dumb question 
)
Not a dumb question. Tyrannical can be quite hard because mechanics that may have been ignored on similar key fortified will cause a lot of damage in a tyrannical. Boss fights that require coordination, if not executed properly, can cause wipes. Whereas on fortified they may cause big damage spikes.
Also regarding timing dungeons: check the healing done meters. Sanguine can show up there and will really drag out trash mob fights. Even though it’s not a fortified week. I bet in some of those untimed keys, sanguine was healing for millions. Kicking mobs, Ring of Peacing them, typhoon them, etc can help, as well as ensuring folks aren’t taking snares to help prevent mobs from getting caught in sanguine.
Tyrannical 18s have bosses harder than fortified 21s, most people cap out at 20s for vault so if they’re not doing higher keys these are the hardest these bosses will ever be for those players. The threshold where failing avoidable damage gets you killed is usually a bloodbath because it’s many people’s first real experience of it, or they’re just never going to learn / improve past it.
Keys a bit above the threshold are paradoxically easier because the people doing them are aware of what’s coming.
I don’t know how many trash packs I will start moving just as sanguine drops and people stun the mobs. I had one group were it was three different times on the same pack…
Bosses is just learning mechanics. I would say the +18-20 is a mess right now because people are starting to get one shot by mechanics that used to be healed through. Its were people start to deplete keys or learn when to save defensive and what is avoidable damage. Utility plays a big part in this, things like feign death can prevent an etch damage from happening in WM or prevent one of the adds from spawning on Gnarlroot in DHT, add in things like disengage and they can clear half the adds before they spawn.
I think this season most dungeons I’d classify tyrannical as being harder than fortified because of nasty boss mechanics. The exceptions for me being BRH and Throne being dungeons I’d prefer to run on Tyrannical weeks with the bosses being not too bad as well as having some annoying trash in there.
tyrannical is just a defensives check
had a warlock in a 22 who died during the second boss of fall who was screaming at our healer despite having will and dark pact off cooldown
press your buttons and you’ll be fine
Bosses melted during Fort week so now people dunno what to do.
Things that are absolutely NOT true but got the attention you wanted for $400, Alex.
I kinda feel like Fort is harder than Tyrannical this season tbh
I wouldn’t describe it as “hard” exactly. It certainly does present extra difficulty, obviously, but I would say that the more accurate and specific reason behind your observation is that Tyrannical significantly changes the encounters in an impactful way.
It’s probably not creating an insurmountable challenge out of raw difficulty that these players can’t overcome. They’ve probably just picked up little habits here and there when it comes to the boss fights that work w/o Tyrannical, but get them killed on Tyrannical week.
An example of such a habit: they usually mitigate damage to survive a certain mechanic by popping defensive cooldowns A and B, but on Tyrannical, they need to pop defensives A, B, and C to survive it. So, their habit does not work anymore, and they die. I think this is very forgivable.
In addition to the damage buff, the health buff means that there is more time for mistakes like that to occur.
So, yeah, sure, it’s hard. But I think the source of that difficulty isn’t really brute force hardness, it’s just that it changes the encounter in a way that people are not used to, and their routine habits for that specific boss fight may have to be adjusted during Tyrannical.
Back in BFA I haymakered an enemy out of Sanguine. Only for a DK to death grip the mob back in.
Everyone in the group just stopped and asked WHY?! at them.
I feel like this week is easier. But it’s probably because I have more control of the affix.
Last week should have been easy.
The bosses are simpler and everybody’s aoe damage is great.
One other thing to consider when comparing to fortified (beyond what others have posted about tyrannical) is you have more flexibility in what trash you pull and in what way, but you can’t avoid any boss. You can break down trash pulls into fewer mobs (if you were combining packs together) and possibly even CC if really desperate in order to mitigate the difficulty those weeks. But with a tyrannical boss you have no way to make it easier if you’re at a level where it is a challenge for your group.
I’ve noticed this season that the quality of pugs at 18 or lower are absolutely atrocious. The key progression for new pugs this season is basically from a +2 to a +18 key with very little gameplay friction / tension. Thus, they don’t learn mechanics and when they get to ~18s at their gear levels of ~460-465, they start getting one shot.
Perhaps it is a flaw in difficulty design on Blizzard’s part where mechanics are so binary (i.e. pass / fail). This ensures lazy players will ignore mechanics until they fail them. And, instead of improving and learning, those players will just viciously grind out keys where they can just continue ignoring mechanics.
This is why I will never pug anything anymore.
While I semi I agree, it’s also the fact that above 15 keys scale at a ridiculous rate. The difference from a 18 to 20 is roughly an additional 20% from the already scaled damage of a 15. In other words you have incremental increases, or steady improvements in difficulty, below 15 to just you’re dead in about 2 key levels. the damage increase from 18 to 20 is a full multiple higher. That’s an order of magnitude as compared to the sub tens in increase.
On my BrM at 445 I was able to easily tank a 10 and +3 and 449 tanked a 13 and +2’d it. Once I hit 17 I’m pretty sure I’m going to hit a brick wall with that ilvl of every mechanic nearly 1shotting me. So it goes from 1/6’th of my health in damage to 5/6th’s in 4 key levels at an arbitrary number, whereas everything below that stayed relatively similar.
My general sentiment is if they want to do multiples of scaling, fine, just do it above the reward cap for gear chasing. That way you essentially create the warm up phases for the gear in M+ of actually gearing your character and then the challenge begins once you’re done. To those that complain about how this mucks with raid gearing, quite frankly, M+ did that in a long time ago.
If you have a boss in a key at 15 and up that is already:
Boosted in HP by the level of the key
Boosted in Damage by the level of the key
Boosted in HP and damage due to Tyrannical
Healing constantly due to Sanguine
Probably don’t have a HoT based healer to help with all the rot damage
And dealing with players that don’t know Brittle Bark is when you pop potions and cd’s to burn it down then you’re probably going to have a bad time.
But hey I’m no pro and still do lots of dumb things and am still learning myself so yay.
Tyrannical is more likely to brick a key than fortified if people don’t respect the boss mechanics.
On Fortified, people learn really fast how to deal with the trash, or they die but dying on trash is an inconvenience for time but that’s it.
On Tyrannical, people have to learn how to respect the boss mechanics or they will not be able to complete the dungeon because there are no release and run backs on bosses, you die you stay dead without using limited brezzes.
Tyrannical and fortified are terrible for the game because it makes it impossible to balance anything baseline.
They need deleted before TWW. If they’re going to keep affixes they have tons of fixes to make still that they’ve largely ignored since the last big revamp.
If they are dead set on having affixes that bounce back and forth in the +2 slot make it seasonal like affixes.
If they don’t heavily experiment with affixes (and other things like bad luck protection) in season 4 they need to scrap the season 4 concept entirely and stop wasting our time.
Keys upto 20 are free loot. Not sure how so late in the season groups can’t time them. I could carry two bad DDs when healer and tank are somekind of okish
Most people try to ignore and brute force mechanics.
That’s harder during tyrannical weeks.