Intro
I’m Juuk, GM of Floor Pov on Zul’jin. We achieved US 209 most recently in Amirdrassil on a 2 Day, 6hr a week schedule. While we achieved CE with plenty of time to spare, I do feel bad for the countless guilds that normally get CE but will not get CE this tier due to the level of difficulty of the last two bosses and the tier being cut short. I think the largest issues I have found in the current iteration of raiding in WoW, lie in tuning, power levels, reclears, and time investment.
Season 4 Announcement + Stats
Today Season 4 was announced to release April 23rd. (3 Weeks away) At this point, roughly 285 guilds have killed Fyrakk in the Americas and 327 guilds in the Americas are currently working on fyrakk. While it is safe to say a portion of those guilds wouldn’t normally achieve CE anyways, a large portion of them normally do and will not this tier.
The nerfs to Fyrakk for the week of 4/2 are largely irrelevant, if you are still having issues with blaze line killing people, cages, or healing up the tree adds in p2, chances are you wont get CE anyways, the difficulty of this boss does not reside in that area. P1 is a slog, its incredibly boring and with the current HP nerfs, we end up holding dps for a large amount of time to phase properly. This is the phase that will likely take you the longest in the current iteration of the boss. P3 if properly planned will only take a handful of attempts.
Progression Burn Out
I would also like to bring up that Tindral and Fyrakk have caused problems for guilds at every level especially with burnout, some guilds have spent well over a month on each boss, my guild spent right at a month for each boss. The burn out all our rostered players felt afterwards was a huge issue when we began reclears, we didn’t have a large power gain from killing fyrakk and the majority of the roster really didn’t want to go back to tindral or fyrakk because of the burn out from prog. Now the guild is facing 3 weeks to get rekills on fyrakk for the players who were not in on the original kill. Now you may think that isn’t an issue however, achieving Cutting Edge without a larger than 20 man roster is nearly impossible, especially in a guild that is semi-casual and the majority of players have lives to live and will miss raid at some point in time. By effectively forcing guilds to have a larger roster, we are also obligated to get players who were not in on the kill, an additional Fyrakk kill, this creates more issues with ending a season early. I am not saying tiers should last a year or even have a set cut off date, but that tier length should be variable and not be rushed. Harder tiers should last longer, or be nerfed earlier to make up for the current state of the game requiring larger rosters and tackling harder bosses more frequently.
Reclears Suck
This trend of ending tiers early and making reclears unenjoyable and hard to do, is in my opinion destroying this part of the WoW community. While I understand that everyone plays the game for different reasons, the Cutting Edge portion of raiding has become increasingly problematic. Reclears feel like a slog, guilds taking 20-30 pulls or more to reclear tindral and fyrakk is not an anomaly this tier in specific. Coupling that with a limited schedule means some guild just flat out have to extend on reclear to rekill those bosses. Bosses are over tuned from the race, and take a long time to get nerfed. The majority of CE guilds are killing Tindral and Fyrakk at 485+ ilvl which means the content doesn’t get passively nerfed anymore. Reclears feel much more like a requirement to keep your guild going than fun. Almost every raider in my own guild and other CE guilds I have spoken to have all relayed the same message. Achieving CE feels more like an arms race against blizzard than it does clearing content. Their nerfs are far too late if they want to end tiers so quickly. I am not sure why they believe they need to release season 4 so quickly as Fated has not been very enjoyable in the past and the raiding player base specifically does not seem very enthused either.
Fated should be fun, not forced Reprogression
Fated especially with the information available seems to be even worse than SL fated. I have had many players say that if fated raids are actually difficult and require reprog that they would rather take a break from the game. I think this is very concerning because no one who has killed mythic raszageth in season 1 wants to take another 100+ pulls to kill fated Raszageth. I would much rather have the season be for fun, let imaginations run wild, try new things, give us even temporary borrowed power for the season, anything but slap a higher ilvl on us and give us the same content we had in the past with the same difficulties. Removing current relevant achievements like Cutting Edge, with short notice just to implement the fated season which might last just as long as the current season, is a horrible decision in my opinion. I don’t mind fated, but it should be treated as a pre patch lasting only a month or so, not a full content length patch.
I know that my takes will likely not be shared with all of the community, however after speaking with my raiders as well as some other guilds I am close with I wanted to share my thoughts as a GM who has gathered his players takes and share with the community.
Added a clarification comment #112
