I agree that there is loot disparity between raids and keystone dungeons. I am yet to be convinced that this is problematic.
I’m simply saying raid difficulty is not a linear, upward scale. It goes up and down, and in current Normal/Heroic, it is almost a flat line with a few bumps at a few points then hitting a pothole where most if not all difficulty is removed that is Magmorax before going back to the last two.
Ratpally’s stance was difficulty does not incrementally increase one boss after the next, which, is true, boss difficulty spikes up suddenly or dips dramatically one boss to the next regardless of their position in the raid.
Then name me a single raid (post classic) where the difficulty for the later bosses is lower than the difficulty for the earlier bosses. Just one.
Yes there are exceptions. I admitted as such. But to say that “It goes up and down” just because one boss exists in every other raid that is easy doesn’t mean the difficulty goes “up and down”. There are RARELY dramatic dips in difficulty one boss to the next - especially in a linear raid. Just because an exception exists doesn’t make it the rule.
The current one, Aberrus. I would even go so far as to say that Zskarn is the hardest boss in the raid, even harder than Echo/Sarkareth on Heroic. It also is a prime example of having massive spikes and dips in difficulty, for example, Magmorax.
Also, Aberrus is easier than Vault, mechanics-wise, so the first tier being easier than the second tier? Wowee. And it isn’t really a “holdover raid” because those would be something like Trial of Valor, not a full on 9-boss tier raid.
It took Echo/Liquid more pulls on Sarkareth on mythic than all other bosses combined. Zskarn barely made it past 40 pulls for Liquid. Sarkareth took 100+.
For liquid, they killed the first 3 bosses in 6 pulls (total). It took them 18 pulls to kill Magmorax.
Your point isn’t holding up.
So you raid a total of 20.5hr a week 6 +7.5+7? I say is time you take a break
You’re telling me, people who do things in a progression-based game progress and those who do not dont? UNPOSSIBLE!
m+ got 20% of the votes, that isn’t the majority lol. If it was like 80% then yeah, it would be the majority. That poll was worthless too, because people could vote under multiple characters. Also, this forum heavily skews towards pro M+ as well. Most players don’t come to these forums either. 12k votes out of millions of players that play the game. I’d hardly say that poll is representative of anything.
I don’t use RWF as a metric because immediately after, you see Zskarn getting nerfed and different strategies coming out. Note, I’ve also specifically been saying Normal/Heroic.
And from a player’s perspective, not a spectator’s. In Normal and Heroic Magmorax you can do the entire fight spending less than 10 seconds moving and still successfully perform every mechanic the fight has.
Well, the problem with that is, normal and heroic difficulties scale with the amount of people in the raid. Which is why I don’t judge the difficulty of the mechanics by Normal and Heroic standards. A raid group with 30 members has much more room for failure than a 10 man raid group. This simply does not apply to Mythic.
If Zskarn got nerfed and different strategies came out - wouldn’t that make the boss EASIER now for those of us not in RWF groups?
Zakarn is not harder than echo or Sarkareth on any difficulty.
For the most part raids do get harder, but there is usually a mid level boss that is called a “road block” that is a lot harder than the bosses after it(except the last one). Painsmith and Halondrus are a recent example of that.
On this expansion Blizzard been more careful about that and actively said they wanted to avoid that, Magmorax being so easy is more about bad numbers balance on that particular fight, but for the rest of the raid it is true that it gets harder
I had a few months break between season 1 and season 2. I break after KSM/AOTC
I’ve been in more groups that one-shot Echo than one-shot Zskarn. Perhaps it is just confirmation bias because as a DPS, the number of mechanics on Heroic Zskarn: Stay spread for circle dot, switch to adds that spawn far from boss, disarm traps, prepare for knockback while avoiding instakill AoE/Bombs/Traps, have tanks or immunities dealing with bombs during swaps vs Echo: Point purple towards outside wall, stay away with big circle, don’t be in giant big circle, kill adds, stand alone in a portal for big boom.
As for the group size thing… People keep saying 30 people means having more room for error but generally 30 people means more people to screw up a mechanic and wipe the raid. Sarkareth is a fight that is barely even a fight at 2/2/6, 2/3/7 if you want an extra healer to smooth it out even more, because in a fight like Sarkareth, the more people there are = the more people who might not know the mechanic grabbing a bomb or P3 tank cleave and wiping the raid.
Touché
You’ve got me there.
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I cleared the raid on heroic week 1 and Zkarn was just a couple of pull, while echo and Sakareth took us a lot more wipes, the healing, dps and damage is a lot higher on those fights. When you don’t overgear them they are actually deadly.
Even for our second reclear we wiped like 3-4 times on Sakareth while we steamrolled the rest of the raid.
And I’ve pugged all of Heroic twice already, even still, pugs tend to steamroll Echo far easier than Zskarn though I didn’t bother pugging the last three on the first week, was pugging them 2nd week since the legendary was announced to be any difficulty.
If a disorganized pug has an easy time on a boss, I view that as an easy boss even if it has a higher throughput requirement. It’s like saying Rashok is harder than Sarkareth because of the gear check despite having simple mechanics.
When everyone in the group has 4 piece and average +435 ilv it tells us nothing about the difficulty of the raid.
You can survive almost everything with the extra stamina and the dps/healing checks are non existent, is meaningless to compare encounters at that point.
It does though. Mechanically, the raid is easier than Vault. If the ‘difficulty’ is judged upon DPS/HPS checks then obviously it will be made even easier with gear. Mechanic difficulty is what makes a fight difficult beyond initial gearless runs and those gearless runs only last 1~2 weeks for people who do M+ which means the only difficulty left would be the execution of fight mechanics rather than hitting a DPS/HPS wall of just not having enough gear for it.
Unpopular maybe but I’m actually a fan of option A. Lets be completely honest, many people aren’t going to clear peak raiding which is Mythic even with no lockouts.
Is not just mechanics, dps/healing check are a huge part of what makes an encounter hard, like Rasosk is harder than anything before it on mythic and is basically a hps/dps check.
Blizzard didn’t intent for guilds to clear heroic at basically the same ilv the raid drops, is intended to be cleared with a much lower and without tier.
There are casual guilds that progress trough heroic, even now and don’t pug. They experience the raid closer to what it is, compared to a fully stacked pug group full of 435 ilv people.