Ultimately I thought this tier was mostly reasonable, shorter than Amirdrassil. Longer than Aberrus, and the bosses get nerfed heavily by gear + increased player power resulting in a non frustrating farm period and smoother progression for lower ranked guilds.
Nobody likes having to hold cds or learn new strategies because of phase timing changes, and this tier had none of that.
I just felt Kyâveza daggers were unfair so far. Thereâs barely any time to dodge them. Granted, strategy of clustering in the middle does kinda contribute to it. Being slightly off-center made it way easier but still felt like it was requiring unreasonable levels of speed.
I also wish tier release dates were known in advance to better plan out how much to raid.
This tier was a huge step up from Amirdrassil, which I liked a lot. But it had Nymue, Smolderon and Tindral, which were just miserable to prog on because of individual responsibility wipes. Not having those makes prog feel much better until later.
I would personally prefer bosses take a max of 2 raid weeks, which is four 3-hour raid nights for my team, but there are so many factors I donât think there is a good metric by which to measure this.
The raid difficulty is just the multiplier by which everything is factored. Every minor shortcoming, every raider absence, every mechanical deficiency or physical limitation is amplified by the raid difficulty.
The harder the raid, the worse the ramifications become as you travel down the skill brackets.
I think whatâs most disappointing from an old timerâs perspective is how much this game has shifted away from âget gear, go kill bosses.â Nowadays, no amount of gear will overcome someoneâs inability to navigate a mechanic and the only solution is to replace them, and thatâs not easy.
Any raid-wide buffs or gear bonuses will need to reach insane levels to get players through some of the worst mechanics.
I think what most players would like is to be able to finish the content before the next tier so that they can feel that sense of accomplishment, the peace of knowing youâve completed the task, with a little room to catch your breath before the next push.
Right now itâs pound your head against the boss and the roster boss until it becomes clear that time has run out and all the fun fizzles out like a wet match and we have to reinvigorate the team and hope players are willing to try again this tier.
I genuinely donât know what the correct answer is, but I donât think it lies anywhere near making each successive raid harder and harder because the rate at which the best players improve versus the worst is what is has created the gulf. In order to challenge the best players the hardest encounters have been pushed so far out of the range of the average mythic raider that they barely identify as mythic bosses anymore. Theyâre something much harder.
When was this ever applicable? Gear itself in the old days was hard to get. (Pre Legion.) Just overwhelming the boss with gear didnât hold up back then either.
People were worse, and bosses were easier, but as a whole? comparable difficulty.
Iâd say this raid has been a step down in difficulty for the majority, especially given the nature of the nerfs and extra ilvl players have access to. It was an extremely hard RWF raid, but then there was 15 ilvl and soon to be 18% damage and healing to get beyond that, on bosses that are nerfed heavily by gear thanks to their lack of percent phases and backloaded difficulty.
Thereâs also the 4 first bosses⌠which frankly exploded.
I think perhaps you misunderstand how this works for raid teams like mine. I am like 7 ilvls above the teams when they first cleared these bosses. We donât get all the mythic raid slots like RFW teams. Weâve had exactly 1 week of 3 mythic raid vault slots this tier.
I have 109 timed +10 dungeons. I have had decent luck on vault, but itâs been hero track rare pieces that are just barely better than the myth track pieces that arenât showing up in my vault.
I have 2 hero track tier pieces because Iâm a healer and my vault has been pretty wretched at times.
I donât think youâre giving enough credence to just how much advantage those RFW teams enjoy with regard to their organization and support.
Just an idea of what I mean, not an actual measurement, but if the raid difficulty is a 10, itâs a 9 for RFW teams but still a 10 for everyone else.
All of their gear prog is jammed into a couple of weeks and they leverage every possible advantage with help from sycophants who will forfeit their tier pieces just for the chub of interacting with their idols.
The two populations arenât orbiting the same center, theyâre galaxies apart and yet one group is constantly paying a tax to support the rich raiders to ensure their lifestyle isnât disrupted while the remainder suffer the consequences of decisions made for a different star system altogether.
Youâre willingly forgoing loot to a never-ending revolving door of dps players probably. So I donât think a healerâs loot situation is really an issue.
That was the part that jumped out at you?
Perhaps thatâs my fault. I was trying to illustrate that the promise of extra ilvl isnât just a matter of âjust loot it, forhead.â
Gear doesnât just manifest over the course of the season by some law of nature. Sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesnât. Iâm not complaining about my ilvl, just pointing out that if Blizzardâs solution is for people to get gear, they need to rethink it.
We are locking out now, so all of my further gearing has to come from vaults and crafted gear. What is not shown is how much crafted gear I have, but even with that I cap at 634.
Shrug, Iâm at 638 myself. (Could be 639 in all slots.)
You kill bosses, loot drops, and most people are geared out.
And for the few slots missing, 636 items.
I canât see how it can be easier for RWF when theyâre doing it with 10~ less ilvl at least (Some from upgrades, some from crafting, some from repeatedly killing the first 4~ bosses, some from vaults), 1/5th the crests, and without a 10% damage and healing buff. There are mechanics these bosses donât even do anymore because they die so much faster than their original incarnations, and thatâs ignoring nerfs.
Looking at our pulls nothing was much over 200, and the only one over 200 was queen. And the first 4 died in under 2 hours.
Jesus H. Christ on a unicycle.
Itâs like I say something and you just completely ignore it and refute it.
As if I was just forgetting to be lucky.
Thatâs is probably the most frustrating thing about talking to you. You appear to believe that your experience is the default and act like an dbag about it.
Outside of the exceedingly unlucky, most players should be at 636-639 without excessive crafted gear. Assuming, theyâve raided every week, and actually did m+ for rng protection.
Like sure, some people can be unlucky (like you.) But thatâs by far from the norm, and when an entire raid team is taken into consideration, few people will be there.
If Ilvl is lower, itâs willingly (spymasterâs trinket and similar.)
You canât understand how a bunch of professional players could possibly do this in less gear than a bunch of nublets from the interwebs?
I canât envision the size of the pill required to expand your intellect to encompass that fact and incorporate it into your existence.
I think I understand what youâre trying to say, but I also donât think youâre in a position to properly appreciate just how much harder this is for other players who donât possess your skill.
Like, seriously, you are so much better at this game than the average player that I donât think you can truly appreciate the gulf in skill that exists between your team and mine.
We strive to improve each tier but things have been getting harder each tier such that any progress we make is just breaking even.
The thing I struggle with is not the gulf betwee yours and my experiences, itâs that Iâve been raiding in the same guild with the same general core for at least two expansions and this tier has felt like a notable drop in difficulty from amirdrassil. Weâre pretty steady generally, itâs not like weâve improved leaps and bounds for my perspective to be shifted.
Let me ask, do you feel the issue is the raid as a whole? A specific boss or mechanical implementation? The pacing? The gear curve?
Wouldnât just maintaining the same position mean that youâre actually improving because everyone else is also improving (at probably similar rates?)
I suppose if a roster is constantly changing, thereâs less of a benchmark.
Tier finished, replace everyone for higher ranks is something Iâve experienced in the past.
In terms of bosses Iâve experienced so far - no complaints, just an issue me personally sucking at Kyâveza. But probably isolated to me.
I understand and believe you. I think there have been many positive changes made, but this is not the crux of the problem.
A long time ago the game used to about logging in and showing up. It used to be like 5% preparation and 95% raid performance, and even then you could mostly suck and still kill the end bosses.
I donât know what an accurate figure would be now, but raiding have probably shifted to 50% preparation.
I scuffed enough 10s to fill my vault first week, but I am probably an exception on my team, and not the rule.
The simple changes to gilded crest acquisition hit my team in a way that it probably didnât hit your team. Was my team responsible for upsetting mythic raiders last tier by getting myth track gear too easily? Nope. But did we pay for that punishment? Yes, did that one little change make things harder for us in the long run? Yes, and it was only one of many small changes that affected our team and many more.
So it might be reasonable to conclude that the raid is easier, but just being prepared is harder which makes everything harder. It also increases the value of so many of the advantages that RFW players have access to.
They have people making checklists for gear and setting up groups for them to spam dungeons with people lining up to offer their keys so they can target specific items.
Doesnât even feel like the same universe as the one I live in.
So the real issue is m+ exist? (Anything after Legion.) Or maybe really Emerald Nightmare.
Even with gilded changes, wouldnât this tier be easier than DF S1?
You know who complained about emerald nightmare? Players who wanted a two-week circle jerk between them and their top tier friends. So in reality, perhaps a few thousand, maybe as many as 5000 players.
The remaining hundreds of thousands didnât say a word, but because the devs were embarrassed in front of a miniscule fraction of the population of the game they irreversibly set in motion a reckoning on the little men for finishing the content.
The irony is not lost on me.
Idk about that.
If a new tier was tuned the same as emerald nightmare, I believe, I would complain about it.
Over too soon.
But then, you had Helya as the real CE I suppose, so there might not be any if it was intentionally designed that way.
Easier CE for the main raid, and a real CE for the new mini-raid in .5 patch.
All I can say is if every tier was between EN an Aberrus I would be gone and I canât advocate for a game I donât want to play. Things seem to be trending downwards already, weâll see how much further it goes if any.