As we are approaching closer to the launch of Season 4 on the week of August 2, we wanted to provide the Fated Raid schedule in advance so that raid groups can start their preparations and planning.
Fated Raids will be on the following weekly rotation:
August 2 – Fated Castle Nathria
August 9 – Fated Sanctum of Domination
August 16 – Fated Sepulcher of the First Ones
August 23 – Fated Castle Nathria
August 30 – Fated Sanctum of Domination
September 6 – Fated Sepulcher of the First Ones
And so on until the rotation is removed and all raids are Fated later in the season.
While a raid is Fated, it will only be available in Fated difficulty, but the other two raids will still be available that week in their non-Fated difficulty.
So… hows the testing for the raid affix? and will gear keep the special effects from previous zones, also will Legendary gear and crafted gear go up in ilvl to help people do season 4 content…? Also any Vault changes?? thats alot of random gear to be getting…
Ok so this is good news. I was worried we weren’t going to get a mad scramble unrestrained access at the end, just like mage tower was at legion end.
So while my original guess was 4 fated cycles, there could be a chance of blizz hyper compressing prepatch duration (2 weeks total and no recoup time before event). And maybe even pushing raid/season starts of df into January.
Tl;dr from my guess of 12 weeks into maybe like 15-16.
And so on until the rotation is removed and all raids are Fated later in the season.
So eventually there will be no easy version of Sylvanas and Jailer mythic (easy version = we outgear it). This will make a lot of people angry because im seeing a lot of pugs farmng transmog sets from M CN and also farming the mounts from mythic Sylvanas and Jailer.
Give us a way to enter the old “legacy” difficulty when that happen please.
this implies there is only 1 difficulty? is that true and where does that difficulty line up heroic? mythic?
or is there fated versions of each normal/heroic/mythic?
They have to since they have an entire tier’s worth of ilvl unused for SL cause of the obvious dropped content. Too much work to crunch df numbers down vs this.
Proof: we had 15 ranks of conduits datamined before launch. Rank 13 being 304 and rank 15 is 330 (aka enhanced conduit ilvl).
I like this new fated thing, and I think you should even upgrade this to have M+ but for specific raid bosses (like maybe a rotation of 8-10 raid bosses at different “key” levels, where you only need 10 players to do the fight (i.e. heroic version of the fight)).
Just a heads up: there will likely be a lot lower participation in S4. This is not a reflection of the fated affix in raid being bad, because it isn’t. It’s a reflection of people not liking Shadowlands / having quit. Note: not trying to be a doomer or Blizzard hater, I just don’t want Blizzard to look at decreased raid attendance as a show that Fated is a bad idea, because it isn’t.
I definitely think raid participation is going to be at an all time low in S4. Running already mechanically-complex fights with extra difficulty isn’t something that appeals to many. It should be a toggle at the very least, especially for the current raid Sepulchur.
Fun. I’m curious as to what the difficulty would be like because imagine not being able to progress on the same raid week to week and having to constantly refresh and relearn stuff.
My point is that the all-time-low participation is NOT because of this.
As an example: 5.5 million logs were had for heroic CN.
There are 1.7 million logs for heroic SotFO.
SoD is right in between (i forgot the exact value).
You can blame the mechanically difficulty on SotFO if you want, but that doesn’t explain SoD, since SoD was easier than CN.
My point is that a large portion of the drop-off is because people just aren’t playing right now, and that they shouldn’t take that to mean that the Fated Affixes are bad. It’s just that this expansion hasn’t done very well.
Thanks for the schedule. One question that I may have missed being covered is:
I assume raid skips acquired when these raids were current will still apply? For example, will a skip to Mythic Sludgefist after the first boss of CN be usable in the fated raids if we acquired it in the regular mythic mode?