We’ve been struggling on this one. Done it so many times and know all the mechanics. Even though we don’t hit everything ‘perfectly’, and mess up on one of the adds (reaches the boss for a couple seconds). It feels too punishing for making any mistake and managing dps on the adds/boss in p2.
While we are talking about the bosses in normal here, I also think Jadefire is undertuned.
NERF INCOMING: Stormwall Blockade
Laminaria health reduced by 10% on Normal and Heroic difficulties.
Energized Storm health reduced by 10% on all non-Mythic difficulties.
Tidal Volley and Jolting Volley damage has been reduced by 10% on all non-Mythic difficulties.
Sea Storm initial damage reduced by 10% on all non-Mythic difficulties.
The interval between spawns of Energized Storms has been increased by 25% on all non-Mythic difficulties.
Storm’s Wail now lasts 13 seconds on Raid Finder and Normal difficulties (was 10 seconds).
Nearly certain it’s overturned, may just scale too much with a lot of people. We were running 20. Every boss prior was a 1 or 2 shot. We had about 13 attempts when we called it. Something ain’t right.
We also had a good 10-12 wipes on it today alone. As well as 6 yesterday. It’s definitely overtuned. Phase 1 goes smoothly and then phase 2 happens. We get a few adds down but one he hits 50% we get overwhelmed and the healers cant keep up.
My team killed it tonight. 15 wipes. A good 5-6 of those were due to dumb things (main tank rolling off the boat, etc.). The team killed Mythic Zek a few weeks back (check my armory and go back one week from when I got the kill; I server transferred halfway through the week and got my lockout rekt inadvertently, so I had to sit out for the team’s first official kill) and really shouldn’t have struggled as much as we did on this boss.
Phase 1 is just two glorified dungeon bosses you have to split your raid between. Not much to say here.
Phase 2 pretty much just boils down to add management and ensuring your melee has as much uptime as possible, whether that looks like leaving them on the boss and having the ranged deal with the adds, or keeping the dock clear of bad so they can swap to the adds safely. A lock gate is helpful but not necessary as long as people are aware of how much time they have to get away from the boss before they drop the add.
We got the kill with a simple “melee stack on skull, ranged stack on X, sidestep the bad spawning attack, if you get wail then clear both stacks and everyone move back” strat, despite the fact that half the raid ignored it and stood wherever they wanted. We had enough DPS that by the time the adds started to pile up, the boss was below 15% and we were able to hard swap to him and burn him down before the wipe cast even started. Regardless of your group’s strat, I suspect that every successful attempt will end with some sort of “ignore adds burn boss” phase.
Overtuned? Maybe a little, but still doable if you put a strat together and people actually follow it (or ignore it and win anyway because your raid’s average item level is above 380 so you can get carried by gear…). Keep in mind that Zul was also a huge step up from the earlier Normal Uldir bosses. It seems Blizzard’s M.O. this time around is end-tier Normal bosses being harder than early Heroic bosses, and end-tier Heroic bosses being harder than early Mythic bosses, at least as far as Uldir was concerned.
So my advice to you is to coordinate with your team, come up with a strategy (or copy Youtube), and learn the boss the old-fashioned way, instead of coming to the forums and complaining. Even if you don’t get the kill, you’ll get more used to how progression works, which will only help you as an individual player when you start pushing into Heroic.
It didn’t seem bad at all on heroic, I think my guild got it down within 8 or so attempts earlier, then also got jaina down on heroic after (which also seemed relatively simple).
Perhaps it may be overtuned a bit just for normal? Not sure.
Few suggestions for you though:
It isn’t a healing intensive fight aside from the boat part (phase 1)… So don’t take too many healers, I’d go with 5 absolute tops. 4 Healing it with a 20-25 person group is also very feasible if your healers are solid… You need every last DPS possible since the last phase is more of a dps check due to needing adds down asap; so it is a very bad fight to stack healers on.
When you kill an add in phase 2, have the person that gets the debuff to clear the pools, and then drop the debuff off at the far part of the platform opposite the boss. Use slows on it and have your ranged DPS + maybe a melee or 2 nuke it down asap. Key emphasis on use slows on the add.
Just prioritize nuking adds and make sure you don’t have too many healers in your raid. If you’re having adds reach the boss, you either aren’t utilizing slows (earthbind totem, etc), your person with the debuff is likely either not dropping the add off far enough away, or people are refusing to swap to the add and are tunneling the boss. If at all possible, you don’t really want to swap melee DPS onto the add, you want them on the boss for as long as possible, so make sure you have ample ranged. (its a really bad fight to have a lot of melee DPS on).
I love the fight but some adjustments would be recommended. We had wipe after wipe on it with different raid compositions. On Brother’s boat a max of four or five pools up at a time would take care of it. On the dock, if the add’s health and walking speed were reduced that would settle things out. The health of the sirens perhaps dropped a bit. Some want the number of swirls reduced, but I think raid placement of pools and a bit more focus is all that is needed.
No need to act like an elitist here…You say I’m complaining when I just mention it feels too punishing and is overtuned for normal. Our raids average ilvl was 383 and we can’t just ‘get carried by gear’. We were doing well, we just couldn’t get the boss down. Sounds like you guys barely got it down after many many wipes. Our strat was nearly the same as yours, maybe we just didn’t execute it as perfectly as you.
edit: OP btw, just logged me in as an alt for some reason.
Dropping the add away from the boss as far as possible and absolutely getting the slows out were 100% our biggest struggle. By biggest struggle I mean we let one add get to the boss for a couple seconds and it seems that’s enough to ruin the flow of the encounter.
Have you done Jaina, is she more difficult or easier on normal mode compared to Blockades?
TIL 15 wipes is “many many wipes” and “figure out a strat instead of complaining” is elitism. It took us close to ten times that many to get Mythic Zek down. Instead of making forum posts about how “overtuned” Mythic Zek is, we kept pulling and adjusting our strat until we had all the overlaps figured out and people stopped panicking during Phase 2, and then we killed the boss.
You don’t know what “barely got it down” looks like. “Barely got it down” looks like our AotC G’huun kill, where it literally ended with a dungeon team left standing out of 25 players and we had to chip down the last 2% on our own before the tank imploded. “Barely got it down” does not look like “two people dead to their own stupidity and the rest of the team ignoring adds and burning the boss”, which was the situation at the end of our Normal Blockade kill.
I use the phrase “carried by gear” to describe my team’s kill because we definitely did not execute our strat properly. Not even close. But we got the kill anyway because we had the DPS we needed to burn down the adds in severely suboptimal conditions. You could do this fight at 370 if people actually do the mechanics right.
I have aotc and probaly a combine 200 attempts on M zek(5%). This fight is still overturned for normal. We can both agree on this. No need to hear your whole uldir progression on a simple question.
Came back just to reply to this guy. “Get good instead of coming to the forums to complain”, when Blizzard literally said on the WarcraftDevs twitter that the fight is overtuned and tuneing changes were missed when it was pushed to live servers
Our average item level was 381. We tried stacking and spreading multiple times. The fight is objectively overtuned for normal difficulty.
Yeah 15 plus wipes and we called it a night . It seems very over tuned. We even had two Stormies spawning at the same time and this made it near impossible to spend any real time on the boss. Bosses health is almost laughable.
It actually seems like if you take a warlock port, the add will always teleport to the middle for some reason, that’s definitely a bug. My guild noticed during our attempts. People who just ran to the back manually didn’t have the add teleport.