Sepulcher is the most nerfed raid... ever?

Community WoW Community Council
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I’m sure there is an exhaustive list somewhere compiling every nerf that Sepulcher has seen, but instead of focusing on those nerfs, I want to have a conversation about why they are necessary and what the implications of this many nerfs is.

Lets start with the difficulty chat.
Every raid since Siege of Orgrimmar has had four available difficulties.
LFR: Available to all players, get the storyline, learn the very basic mechanics.
Normal: Clearable by most players, might require a more organized group, but simple enough.
Heroic: More challenging, going to require coordination and communication, clearing heroic is a challenge and not as many players will be able to.
Mythic: The hardest of the hard. Tough mechanics, precision is needed to execute mechanics or the whole group will fail. Very few players will clear the raid on Mythic, it’s the pinnacle of end-game content.

As much as I dislike that there are so many difficulties, I understand that each has their playerbase and need in the game. I’m not going to beat on that dead horse.

So lets talk about Mythic first. Once a new raid releases, the best of the best race through on mythic to achieve the World First Kill of the end boss. As we all know, the race in Sepulcher set new precedents for difficulty, preparation, split running, and time spent to clear. Was it too hard? Depends on who you ask, but if we base the assumption off the number of nerfs since then, yes. It was too hard.

The world first raiders were all 4-piece tier, double legendary, and around 275 ilvl by the time the race ended. That’s the same level most people going into mythic are at right now. The passive gearing nerf didn’t happen this tier. So the bosses had to be nerfed.

And nerfed again

and again.

To the point where, I saw a comment yesterday that Halondrus is now just a moving target dummy.

Halondrus was heralded as one of the best bosses of all time. Is it still? I haven’t done the fight on mythic, but I doubt it based on the number of mechanical changes and nerfs that fight has seen.

So going forward, what do we want to see? What needs to happen? Are the fights too hard to start out to give the RWF people a bigger challenge? Is gearing too easy because of splits and the Great Vault M+ giving mythic level gear?

Here is what I think.
I think that the loot in this raid is underwhelming at best. I think that this raid was overtuned, but that the usual “nerfs” didn’t happen. The ICC type nerfs where damage and health were buffed, optionally, the Artifact power systems continually making the player stronger type nerfs didn’t exist, and I think that because of all these things, we as players have a hard time out-gearing these fights like has happened in the past to nerf the raid.

Echo proved they are the best guild in the world this tier. They have the highest levels of coordination. Expecting other guilds at the world 50, 100, 500, 1000 level to duplicate what Echo did is silly. It’s not going to happen.

So going into Season 4, into dragonflight, what I think we need is 2 things.

#1) Don’t tune the raid for RWF. Tune the raid for the playerbase that you want to be able to clear the raid.
#2) Some sort of passive nerfing system is better than nerfing bosses every week. If there is no “Artifact power” progression making characters stronger, then give a slowly increasing buff to players in the raid without changing the mechanics.

I hope we never see a raid get gutted like Sepulcher was again, and that in the future we can look back and call this an anomaly.

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I don’t raid mythic so I can’t speak to that side of things. I can only talk about heroic and normal (my guild is progressing heroic Jailer now). In general my guild has really enjoyed the boss fights in Sepulcher. The only one we don’t much care for is the first boss, Vigilant Guardian, and mainly because there are times in that fight where we’re just standing around waiting for mobs to spawn.

Halondrus was a popular boss–it’s my favorite boss of the raid and maybe of the entire expansion. And that’s at just normal and heroic difficulties, so without the mythic mechanics. I love the goal-tending mechanic and I love the moving phases, and I love how its extra crazy in the final phase without the mechanics changing dramatically. As a raid leader, I also love that on normal and heroic this is mostly a personal responsibility fight and I don’t have to assign a million things before we can pull.

So let’s talk about Anduin. There’s a lot to like about this fight. I appreciate that the most wipe-prone mechanic (Blasphemy) is in phase 1 so if we’re going to fail it, we fail it quickly. And the intermission phase is a banger for sure.

What I don’t love about the Anduin fight is how technical and nitpicky it is even at normal difficulty. Before we pull, the raid leaders have to divide the raid into groups for Kingsmourne, and we also have to divide the raid into a different set of groups for Hopelessness in phase 3. Each group has to have some crowd control that works on the downstairs mobs, and we want a DK in each group to grip in the adds, and we also have to assign CC for the phase 2 upstairs adds and make sure we have enough kicks available for when half the group goes downstairs in that phase.

We’re a casual guild. We don’t have attendance requirements, which means that every raid night we have a different set of people available, and we have to solve that puzzle anew every time. It doesn’t help either that we need specific classes for the strategy we’re using. If our DKs are out one night, we have to figure out a different way of handling the downstairs adds. If we don’t have the classes that can CC the phase 2 adds, then we need to figure out kick teams instead, which means a third set of groups for one fight.

The bottom line is that while we can fly through the first 7 bosses on reclear, Anduin takes 10 minutes just to set up, and then since we have to adjust our strategy due to slightly different people attending, we typically have to do some re-progression.

For heroic, we’ve decided just to avoid reclearing him. We killed him once and are holding our lockout through AOTC, which we haven’t done in previous raids, and then we’ll clear the whole raid one more time after that and be done with it. Usually we’d try to complete the skip quest, but it seems pointless in Sepulcher because the skip is to Anduin rather than past him, so it doesn’t solve the problem of this very technical, comp-dependent, and coordination-heavy fight being in the middle of the raid.

We also do weekly alt raids at normal difficulty. Typically we kill as many bosses as we can in 2 hours, which is always 1-7, but one week we got done early and had 30 minutes left, so we could have tried Anduin, but nobody wanted to. We’d one-shot every boss before that but the raid did not have confidence that we could kill Anduin in 30 minutes.

I know some people really enjoy the fight but on normal and heroic difficulties I’d rather not have a fight that is so comp-dependent and requires us to do so much setup before pulling–especially as boss #8 of 11. Even the Jailer (on normal/heroic) does not require all the setup that Anduin does. The nerfs have helped but they do not change the fundamental nature of the fight.

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I think there’s a healthier balance between SoD and SOTFO.

A majority of our player power was achieved week 3-4, then the upgrades were underwhelming. In SoD you had gems continuously being upgraded creating fluid and consistent nerfs for the raid over a 5-6 week period, with no bosses really being tuned for all rank 3 gems. This tier our main source of player power was achieved week 3 and most Mythic raiders were finishing 4 set by week 3-4, but the later half of the raid was tuned with it mind.

I’d wager there’s some pressure to get more players “killing” the bosses before Season 4 since it is not that far away as well as making the bosses for season 4 not re-progression. People I speak to who raid Mythic more casually, they find the nerfs to be both necessary but annoying as it makes them feel as if they’re killing bosses that had everything stripped from them. In the future there has to be a better way to handle raid tuning. More progressive nerfs through player power are so well received, so why change it? A better starting point for tuning, perhaps? We don’t need 3 extremely challenging end-tier level bosses in 1 raid, and ideally we don’t spend more time in the first weeks of the raid stuck in normal/heroic farming for tier rather than progressing mythic.

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This raid has been a very rough raid where the design is basically: if one person makes a mistake, you wipe.

Earlier you could continue or atleast not instantly wipe making the instant wipes making you progress slower. This will also kill guilds as personal responsebilities is one of the biggest threats against a guild. You can just look at various websites and see how many guilds has disbanded thus far.

This is like a reversed Emerald Nightmare tier. The nerfs are so many and hard because the design of the tier is awful in that way: you would need to actually change the entire mechanic or the fight. Previous tiers usually a damage taken or hp nerf can be enough but here you have one-shot abilities all over the place.

Just to name a few examples from this tier:
Lihuvim > Missing one person in cascade, entire group of traditionally 4-5~ people dead
Halondrus > One person fail bomb: wipe & everyone dead
Anduin > One person fail marks: wipe & alot of people AoE dead.
Rygelon > One person fails their dark eclipse: wipe & everyone dead

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There are four tiers of raiding. If there were only three tiers, LFR,N & H I’d agree there should be an expectation that all three are broadly completable with sufficient organization, effort and skill. It seems to me that mythic being put on top of the other three it should be the expectation that not everyone who considers themselves a top tier raider should be able to complete it. Sure, give Mythic a nerf after the world first is done but beyond that, with the currently available tiers, I think Mythic should only be completable by the very best of the raiding community and completing it should be the proof of that. It’s not elite if any group with just sufficient organization and effort can complete it. At that level demonstrating skill is the whole point.

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This feels like an oxymoron to me. The point of mythic raiding is organization, effort and skill. If you can be in the right place at the right time and do enough throughput, the boss should die. You can sufficiently over-gear heroic. But mythic is and should be a test of every individual player to do their part, which any group should be able to do with sufficient organization. Most groups just lack the intricacy that it takes.

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WoWhead conveniently made a post outlining every nerf for me, so here is your complete list of nerfs in Sepulcher.

All Nerfs and Changes to Sepulcher of the First Ones Bosses on All Difficulties - Wowhead News

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It’s hard to know exactly who to balance for. Mythic should be a test of a guild/teams ability and provide an adequate challenge for a well prepared and organized team, especially later or end bosses. Should it take them hundreds of wipes against a single boss to achieve victory? Probably not.

I think this is by far the best way to go about making the raid more accessible for guilds as time progresses. The ability to choose to attempt an encounter in it’s “original tuning” while also giving players the ability to go in with a major buff. Obviously some bosses will still need some level of a tuning pass but for the most part this raid wide buff that can be turned off would solve most problems without compromising the fights integrity.