After seeing the note that Firelands raid will launch in it’s current overtuned state is crazy frustrating.
After a single PTR lockout nearly every single ability and health pool was jacked, and then after 2 more PTRs for testing not a single thing was rolled back or reviewed.
Was it too easy? For sure- is the current overtuned version too far? Absolutely.
Spiking the difficulty on a short raid in an attempt to justify extending the phase will backfire, as an overly hard phase and a long phase are the 2 things that players do not want. Making the difficulty more approachable will ensure that core raid groups can: try 25 instead of just optimized 10’s, run their alts, do GDKPs, and generally just stay more involved with the game since right now there’s nothing outside of the raid to do.
Either add a slider, tweak it back, or do something- preferably in advance. When the raid is all there is- a lot hinges on getting it right.
I’ve told this to my raid leader and he said that he wanted to be as challenging as possible so that he can relive the glorious days of Firelands where only a handful of guilds cleared Ragnaros… then again he is also scrambling to find players to fill the prepared raid for the fateful day so good luck to him.
I have three characters at 85 from which two of them are currently 11/13HM and i am not even considering to do Firelands let alone Dragonsoul which i’ve heard that is much worse when SoD is much more fun and chill.
I can struggle and wipe for entire hours on the same nearly impossible boss that makes the raid leader to be angry and stressed or i can have fun and be chill while clearing content and also making new friends.
Brother there are like 3 hard bosses that will require prog before people are just mindlessly clearing every week.
Gear will also help make clearing even easier.
Did you expect 2 week prog only?
This is it- SoD just passed the Cata player base for the first time last week, and dead servers are fun for no one.
Finding 25 people who can raid LK0 style difficulty and who are down for prog over Thanksgiving and the Holidays just won’t be there.
I’m not saying it should be stupid easy, at all. But I am saying that overtuning the difficulty to try to justify a longer phase is the wrong approach.
We are not the same player base that we were 13 years ago- and the raids should reflect that.
agreed, we are much much much better, the original cata #1 guild couldn’t kill hlk0 until 5% buff, that would make them not even in the top 500 in 2024
there is nothing even remotely close to lk0, we killed rag about 5 or 6 times in the time it took us to get hlk 0 to phase 3
I think it will completely kill 25 man raiding for your semi-hardcore and casual base.
There are only 7 bosses, and the time it will take to prog and kill those bosses will be in the months since those guilds only run 1-2 nights a week, which is what should be the baseline for the current age of the player base. People are not going to raid 4+ nights a week to push early prog.
But at the same time, all there is is the raid, and all there is is the 7 bosses- so I want people to have options and time to do other things like alt runs and get loot / have fun / take the holidays off without feeling like they’re letting the raid down.
I think guilds will downgrade to 10m, and we will stagnate over the course of the phase.
The reason for Cata being dead has nothing to do with the raid difficulty.
There is simply nothing to do outside of raid and it took them 6 months to release Firelands.
Cata itself is old and boring whereas SoD is new.
SoD has it’s own issues though and raids being extremely easy there is a big complaint that players have.
Your guild has 6 #1 world rankings over the past 7 tiers … do I really need to state that you do not represent the other 80,000 cataclysm classic players?
i dunno if those stats are correct but I’m the GM and i know how difficult the fights are, outside of baleroc and rag people are going to own this place in the first weeks, these are our wipe stats
Plenty of guilds are recruiting.
I also like I said before:
Raid difficulty is not what is killing Cata, there is nothing to do outside of raid and it took them 6-7 months to release Firelands.
I still standby the statement though- the broader player base did not do PTR, and do not have anywhere near the world first history you have.
I think it’s exactly the problem that perhaps these raids were tuned while watching the retail race to world first and sweaty guilds beast through it the first PTR. But the overcorrection is likely too for to keep the people around who are actually playing and populating the servers.
I totally get what you and your super established guild can do, but that’s just not the reality across the player base
these raids weren’t manually tuned, they were just reverted back to where they were prior to 4.3
the first ptr we had 4.3 firelands (post nerf) and then the next 2 weeks we had 4.2 firelands minus the ragnaros geyser mechanic, its just plainly easier than it was in 4.2 now, but not as easy as it was in 4.3
I think most raids will consider this a 1 boss raid relatively quickly
they reality is wow raids get harder as we go through the expansions. That is why different difficulties were introduced. Are you going to make this argument when mythic is introduced?
If players don’t want to beat the raid to get the gear they can wait till the next phase of H+ dungeons I guess.
I’m not sure why you’re upset about the heroic difficulty being too hard; acquiring the staffs is the same in normal as it is in heroic. If you can’t manage heroic, then perhaps try normal mode. Then if you cant clear normal 25man go do normal 10man.
