Raid tier lengths

Hello,

I’d like to bring some light on Sepulcher of the First Ones tier and it’s length.

This tier we finished 11/11M with a kill in the 13th week of the raid landing on world rank 138. Previous tier (SoD) we ended at WR 123 but we we’re able to finish the raid on week 6, first day of that reset. This is a 7-8 week longer tier for us depending on how you look at it which is quite significant.

The raid itself was good but it was far too long for our entire guild which is used to finishing it atleast a month quicker than this.

Speaking to the officers, raiders and other various people I know raiding usually seem to agree on Sanctum of Domination being a good tier length some people argue it’s too short and it was too easy but adding tuning that would make it take 1-2 weeks more for a world 100 guild would’ve been fine.

Looking at the amount of various nerfs across the board on all bosses and not even considering the legenadries being locked I really hope we’ll see lighter tuned raids.

It has been discussed previously but instead of putting out these enormous raids maybe put in a couple of really hard bosses, some midtier bosses and be happy there. Like making two raids out of Sepulcher instead of one super long tier.

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It’s one of those situations where you can’t please everyone, right? So you just have to design it the best you can to be appropriate for the most people. Even if developers hit their target exactly, there will always be people who think it was too hard and too long, while at the same time some that think it was too short and too easy.

Completely agree with the length of this raid tier being far too long (Mythic).

Would say that 6-8 resets of Mythic is a fairly good pace for WR100-150, but this tier had at least 3 100+ pull bosses (Halondrus, Anduin, Jailer. Rygelon could be added for some guilds). Each of these bosses has a taxing effect on Morale and Time.

A typical raid tier would have 1-2 of these bosses but this tier had the most of any tier in recent history which really showed with regards to progress time to complete for guilds this tier where progress was ~1.5x longer than all other tiers this expansion.

As a piece of criticism of this tier specifically, it was very clear that UX testing was not robustly done for many bosses as QoL changes to reduce really bad feelings on bosses were introduced as nerfs. Whilst there is hype about having publicly untested bosses (just want to add that these bosses were all good mechanical encounters but each of them had unnecessary complexity added purely from tuning - even now) if there are issues on these encounters specifically with regards to UX they should be addressed quickly rather than later.

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If we’re talking about raid tier length in terms of boss count at all…

If we get 30 bosses in an expansion I would much rather see five, 6-boss raids, than three, 10-boss raids.

I think this would also cut back the “progression time” that seems to be the major complaint.

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Just looking at the nerfs in this tier and not even considering the passive “nerf” with gaining 2nd legendary I’m having a really hard time agreeing.

Sure you can say for everything it’s agree to disagree and you can’t please everyone but the absolute vast majority will agree on this tier being to punishing with too many long bosses and the tier being just too long overall.

Maybe their target was this long of a tier but the target was bad and it obviously has been reconsidered alot considering how many nerfs there’s been already.

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Something that I feel is overlooked when people discuss raid tier length is how long guilds spent doing heroic/normal splits/tier. While the difficulty compared to # of bosses was definitely higher and could’ve done with one of the bosses being significantly easier(Prob Halondrus early on even if he was one of the best fights imo), it still would’ve been a long tier.

Something does have to give, a tier like this is more likely to cause burnout. A boss doesn’t need to be 200 pulls to be an amazing fight(Look at rygelon) and the loot acquisition was awful. But I do believe they have plans to fix that :slight_smile:

This was probably one of my favorite tiers to progress, just a tad quicker would be awesome. We took 9 weeks when it’s usually 4-6 for reference.

Yeah, we had to commit our raiding hours to play normal and heroic raids which we can usually very very swiftly move away from. At most we’ve like ever only done one normal clear as guild.

The probably worst part was our guild putting together LFR groups to get tier set pieces. This drains alot of actual progress hours from Mythic raiding when we have to go around and do those kind of things.

With it being no heroic week anymore I think it would be good to look over tuning for heroic first week. Usually most guilds struggle to clear heroic first week or have to add another day to do it. Would be nice to see heroic not too hard considering alot of guilds will be wanting to spending as much time as possible in mythic progression.

Seems like the topic has been researched abit on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/CompetitiveWoW/comments/y1qh21/raids_are_getting_harder_and_longer/

Would be cool if we can find a middleground between Sepulcher and Uldir (looking at data from above post).

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This tiers length is perfect. Well done!

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