Scarlet Enclave is Mathematically Overtuned — Progression Feels Hopeless, Not Heroic

WoW Classic Season of Discovery
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I want to talk about the current state of Season of Discovery’s final raid, Scarlet Enclave, and why, for many players and guilds, the tuning has crossed a line from challenging to demoralizing.

Traditionally in WoW, when a guild talks about progression, it means pushing past tough mechanics through perseverance, coordination, and learning. It’s about mastering the encounter and getting better with each pull. That core philosophy—so integral to WoW since the earliest raids—simply does not apply here. The gear checks and tuning of Scarlet Enclave are so steep that “getting good” is no longer enough. You either do the raw numbers, or you lose. Period.

Balnazzar: The First Wall

Balnazzar has 15.5M HP (effectively 15M with the 5% stop), an 8-minute enrage, air phases that halve your raid’s DPS, and 500K HP adds spawning every 30 seconds that cast AoE fears. To kill him before the enrage, you need ~55K raid DPS.

I reviewed a log of a 20-man guild that killed him in 8:05 with an average parse of around 75. They barely made the enrage. In our own run, we stacked 30 players for ~81K raid DPS and killed him in 4:10. Another top 20-man team did it in 4:09 with ~77K DPS but they were all very high parsers.

A standard 20-man comp (2 tanks, 4 healers, 14 DPS) would require each DPS to push ~3,928 DPS to beat the timer. Our Ret Paladin, for example, parsed 73 with 3,971 DPS. That means you need roughly 70+ parses across the board just to beat the enrage on the first major boss. Over 3/4ths of players cannot kill Balnazzar. I am lucky to be in the 1/4th.

I am not experiencing difficulty with Balnazzar. But in a 20 man context, over 3/4ths of players just can’t do this.

Solistrasza: Healing and DPS Check From Hell

Assuming you down Balnazzar and loot two tier bracers, you’re likely only able to give 2 players a 2-piece bonus, boosting their DPS by ~18%. So instead of 4,000 DPS, they do 4,700. You’ve now increased your entire raid DPS by ~1,400. That’s it.

Meanwhile, Solistrasza throws three whelps with 550K HP each that explode in 30 seconds. If you don’t kill them, you wipe. Add in constant movement, unavoidable AoE like Crimson Flare, Cremation no longer being kickable, and a punishing healing check, and you’re looking at a brick wall.

I looked at logs from one of the lowest-performing successful 20-man Solistrasza kills, and even then they needed 7K–8K HPS just to stay alive. That’s the floor. Crimson Flare damage cannot be resisted or reduced. There’s no fire resist gear or tricks to overcome this—your healers either hit the numbers, or you wipe. No amount of mechanical mastery will save you when 2/3rds of the damage is unavoidable.

I’ve killed Solistrasza. But the unavoidable damage is a steep check for many.

Lillian Voss: The Final Gear Check

Let’s skip ahead. Lillian Voss has 20M HP and a 3-minute enrage. You need a minimum of 111K raid DPS to kill her. That’s double what you needed for Balnazzar.

To hit that number, you need most of your DPS to have 6-piece tier—that’s 84 tier pieces across 14 raiders. If your guild kills 6 bosses weekly (and assuming perfect loot drops and distribution), you’re looking at a minimum of 5 weeks just to gear up. That’s the best case scenario.

Even the current top-performing Balnazzar team in the world is only putting out around 93.6K raid DPS. They would still need to boost DPS by at least 16% to barely meet Lillian’s enrage. And they’re all 99 parsers, literally the top 1%. If they aren’t close—what chance does a solid, but average-performing raid team have? Only the 1% of the 1% have been able to clear this hurdle and their logs aren’t even mostly public.

This Isn’t Progression. It’s a Gear Wall.

The “gear and clear” philosophy sounds good—until you realize the gear required to progress only drops from bosses most teams can’t kill yet. There’s no way to improve each week unless you already cleared most of the raid, which many teams can’t.

So what happens? You kill 5 bosses, hit a wall, and that’s your week. No amount of learning, strategizing, or optimizing matters. It’s not about playing better—it’s about waiting until next reset and praying for good loot.

This Isn’t Fun. It’s Hopeless.

I’d gladly spend four hours wiping, if I believed that improvement would eventually lead to success. That’s the essence of WoW raiding. But right now? There’s no hope. The math simply doesn’t add up. You wipe not because you’re doing it wrong, but because the content is tuned for gear you don’t have and can’t reasonably get for weeks.

Blizzard, please consider retuning Scarlet Enclave. Right now, it’s overtuned to the point of exclusion. Progression feels impossible for anyone outside the top 1%, and that’s not what WoW raiding has ever been about.

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The worse part of this, and the overall tuning of the raid, is how they purposefully nerfed almost every class right before releasing it, just to double down on how borrowed-power all of Naxx was.
Warlock T3 4P inexplicably got nerfed by 65%, right before the release of a raid with such tight DPS checks. Don’t think we can’t see what you’re doing here, Blizz.

Just bring 40 players. Find 15 pugs on each raid night, sure it’s 15 more players diluting your drops, but you get maybe 20 more drops in total! That way you gear very slightly faster! Excellent design!

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Simply remove, or greatly extend, the enrage timers. Let people execute the fight mechanically instead of just being a gear check.

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An 8 minute enrage? Our 20 man killed him in 5 minutes.

lol.

Don’t kill all three. Kill one on top of the boss. Your tactics are horrid.

That sounds legitimately tough in current gear to be fair. Thankfully that is the 7th boss and this raid has massive power creep in terms of gear. So you just gear up.

:thinking:

I raid with three separate groups and the only wall I see right now is Council. Everything else, after the Beatrix nerf, seems like a pretty decent curve and is entirely beatable at different raid sizes and skill levels.

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team doesnt own a calculator, simple as that

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1.) 8 min enrage is the minimum. I am talking about how exclusionary it is. Congrats on your kill.

2.) We kill one on top of the boss. I am just pointing out that the whelps are either a DPS Check OR a healing check and both of those are high. I’ve killed Solistrasza. Many have not.

3.) Anything is possible if you go up to 40 man. But you shouldnt have to go 40 man to clear 20 man content. That is why. This is intended for 20 players and the 20 man math does not check out.

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I’m not saying SE isn’t over-tuned. It definitely is - for the SoD audience. But a lot of this comes down to adaptation and efficiency. With 20, we spent 3 hours wiping first lockout and got her down to 3% by seeing the fight and adapting.

A big problem is that despite this raid being new and “how to” guides being lackluster, players don’t have the patience to think things through.

Even the cries of Fankriss being over-tuned was unwarranted. lol. all you needed to do was macro target spawn, have most classes go single target dps, then go back to boss lol. But people for some odd reason couldn’t even that simple thing out.

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Yes but you had the numbers to adapt.

I am saying if you dont have the numbers there is no point even trying to do it.

There is unavoidable damage on Solistrasza. You must heal it at 7k to 8k hps or die. There are no exceptions to just doing the mechanics better.

You must do 111k or die on Voss. No amount of mechanics is going to magically get you 18% more DPS.

This is not a personal gripe. This is just observations. Most people cannot do this no matter how hard they try unless they bring 1.5x to 2x the recommended raid size and even then, it is a tight tolerance.

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PUGS are already clearing it after 1 week, what are you talking about?

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Not 20 Man.

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The reality is. A group of 20 green parses with a horrid raid comp should be able to clear the whole raid in sub 5 wipes. That’s the balance should be striving for. Think naxx hm0 level difficulty. That needs to be the staple. Anything higher and people will cry. This is way higher and is unkillable without like 20+ wipes per raid.

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I’d be fine with the final boss took 2-3 weeks of prog. I’ve been there before with Ragnaros and C’thun in Dad Guilds.

Not the 3rd or 6th boss.

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You know we’re on the second week right?

Edit: And there are only 8 bosses the entire raid.

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And from the second week it will take 3 weeks for a 99 parse guild to be even ABLE clear the 7th boss, and approximately 6-8 weeks for everyone else to be able to gear themselves to even have a chance at attempting those bosses.

My complaint is that week 2 makes no sense. I have no idea if I am just wiping to wipe or actually making progress because the gear checks are so high and if SE is just a 2 boss raid or a 8 boss raid.

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We’re on week 2 of a brand new raid with few hand holding guides out there. Do you think it’s reasonable to even think that any guild should even think of almost clearing the raid?

If your answer is yes, then well ok - you just want to steam roll content.

But you’re right, sometimes it’s hard to tell if you’re doing the right thing. You could have the right idea, but just aren’t executing it right. Reality is that in order to play something new, players need to have some appetite for failure. SoD and Classic players don’t have any.

I’ll give you a very straight forward example. Fankriss pre-nerf with all this crying of how overtuned his spawns were when in reality he was already very doable. Everyone knew you had to kill the spawns first. But for whatever reason guilds decided they wanted every player to run an aoe build and not single target dps - probably by virtue of seeing lots of bugs. All it really took is to have someone take a moment and think why the spawns aren’t killed fast enough. Are we over run by the little crapper bugs? No? Then ignore the crapper bugs and focus spawns with single target dps.

But no, players took too the forums and cried about being over tuned instead.

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Elkwood. I don’t want to steamroll content.

Stop strawmanning.

There is literally a guild of 99 parsers, every last single one of their DPS parses 99 and Lillian Voss cannot be killed by them for another 3-5 weeks because they are 16% DPS behind the enrage and it will take that long to boost their raid DPS by 18% by getting them 2P Tier. There is no mechanics to improve on. There is no getting better at the game. They are the top 1% of players.

It is literally IMPOSSIBLE for them outside of grabbing 10 more raiders. But what is the point of tuning it to 20 man?

If it was mathematically possible but the mechanics were difficult, I wouldn’t mind wiping 200 times with the hope that I can be a hero on 20 man.

But there is no hope. All you can do is log off and wait until your raid has 2P to do it or bring 10-20 more people.

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I like how there’s still people that ignore that the complaint is about tuning, not mechanics, and continue to insist “ur just bad people don’t know mechanics ur just bad”

it’s not the mechanics

it’s the tuning

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Elkwood is a troll just ignore him.

We had 24 in our guild, that are now down to 22, as people cannot set aside 4 hours for the raid. Pretty sure we got another 1 on the fence. People are gonna leave SoD before they get the gear needed to clear this.

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I love someone finally putting numbers to the issue. It is quite annoying to talk about this with so many people saying that “this is fine” while either running with 35 people, or being the top 5% who actually can clear SE in its current state (former being most likely)
Our guild has several atiesh users, and there’s no way we are clearing the raid as 25 at the current tuning.
Even dbm calls this a 40 man addon, which is funny.
But inviting more people makes less loot per person, which makes progression take longer without almost any options to remedy that.
Yes, next reset many people will get their first tier piece, and a select few will get a 2 piece, but i doubt that is going to make that much of a difference, when we overall need to improve group dps by 20-30% to make it to the enrage timer.
Are blizzard just waiting for the first completion of the ashbringer quest to start tuning the raid down?
And even then with 40 people it still takes several hours to full clear the raid thanks to the sheer amount of adds in the instance.
Our guild got to 2/8, with around 25, where beastmaster and solistraza being doable if we do everything perfectly. I dont think it is reasonable to ask some guildies to commit 6 hours to a raid, and then even more hours getting the bis items for their class and minmaxing the rotation to parse as hard as possible.
I would like to clear a raid with my guild before we start losing people to various reasons, be that personal reasons, or just being done with SOD.

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You are correct. The 10 to 20 man was a guild killer. Now we have to magically find 10 more players.

I’m all for difficulty, but this is just inflated numbers with a short enrage timer disguised as difficulty.

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