probably best to leave raids as-is. More hardcore guilds are tuning encounters by bringing fewer people to araid which accomplishes nearly the same thing as making the raid more difficult. More casual guilds can still bring a full 40 and not be left behind.
Also, let’s face it, retail provides amazing and demanding raids, it’s something Ion and team do really well, and if players are really interested in raiding they’ll get more out of retail.
The first Locust Swarm, according to the old WoWWiki, casts somewhere around 80-120 seconds, due to whatever reasons, and then every 90 seconds after that.
The fight starts with two guards, each having 200k HP.
Each guard is going to spawn 10 scarabs, with 6k HP each.
Anub has 1.5mil.
To beat the first Locust Swarm, the raid needs to kill two guards, twenty scarabs, and the boss, in about 80 seconds. Assuming you don’t just cleave the adds down and actually single target them, but you quickly AoE the scarabs, that’s 1.9mil health of damage to blow up. That’s 23,750 raid DPS, or ~790 DPS per person, assuming 30 DPS (and not counting Tank contributions).
That’s tight for current gear levels and typical raid compositions, but the thing is Anub isn’t even a hard fight and you just literally need your Tank to GTFO around the edges. Plus you can probably just cleave the adds on top of the boss since their own Cleave attack is pretty paltry.
Fun fact: the WoWWiki assumes a “good” raid will take about 30 seconds to kill a single guard. People currently can zerg down Shaz, a boss with 350k health, in less than 20 seconds. In fact, a 30 second Shaz kill puts you at the 554th fastest time… or rather slow to put it mildly.
Add in more Hit/Crit, much more Spell Power, a lot more weapon damage, and better scaling specs like Fire… Naxx is going to be a loot pinata.
lots of incorrect information here based on my experience (from private servers). maybe it will be a lot easier, who knows, but i have my doubts
locust swarm should come out within the first minute
scarabs spawn rapidly (2x per minute)
and finally your argument of “anub is easy = naxx easy” holds no water. anub is grouped with one of the bosses that most guilds can kill with a bit of leg work. anub, noth, raz, gothik, most guilds won’t have much trouble killing these. its the bosses that come after that test your ability as a group.
When MC first came out we did not have most of the current changes or gear. We DID have most of them when BWL came out. It doesn’t really need a buff, but the ‘strategy hurdle’ not being there will certainly make things easier.
One boss that will certainly be easier, for no reason of the game itself, is Vael… purely because people now use a lot of fury warriors for DPS - which very few did during vanilla bc the ‘warriors=tanks’ myth was widespread - and fury warriors absolutely destroy Vael.
FYI this ^ was the smartest post in that thread
yes vael should be an easy kill. broodlord as well. firemaw is where i think most guilds will stall the first week
I’m talking from experience from my middle of the road guild that walked into Naxx in AQ40 gear on Northdale and cleared three wings in 3 hours of raiding the first night it was released.
We’ve already seen that Private Servers were tuned to be harder than Classic so I’m not quite sure what your argument is.
You can look at any fight from MC and see DPS numbers that were 100% unheard of until Naxx in Vanilla but that’s not enough.
When hard numbers just aren’t enough for people there really isn’t much left to discuss because you’re not being realistic.
You don’t need to lie to convince anyone dude. Just give me some hard numbers that actually prove your point.
exactly my thoughts, firemaw will be the bottleneck.
Also, people that think everyone will still be pug raiding BWL seem to forget the Onyxia cloak requirement. You aren’t going to be able to just spam LFG for anyone lvl 60 and attuned … they need to have a cloak too.
if you’re coming from a private server guild then my argument doesn’t apply to you. ofc you will have no trouble with it. but you do realize that the vast majority of guilds don’t have an experienced leadership team? guilds with even 10 members with full pserver experience represent the top 1%
Imagine my shock when this doesn’t hold water at all because getting timings and mechanics correct was and continues to be pitiful.
https://wowwiki.fandom.com/wiki/Anub%27Rekhan_(original)
https://wow.gamepedia.com/Anub%27Rekhan_(Classic)
Locust Swarm has a variable start timer.
Scarabs erupt out of the dead guards, approximately 10 at a time, and according to both wikis, about 10-15 sec after they die.
The guards start as a pair on the pull and summons one guard per Locust Swarm, not just on a minute timer.
Anub’rekhan is an easy boss. The only “difficult” mechanic is getting your Tank out of Locust Swarm alive. The rest is nuke adds and pre-position your raid so Impale damage is minimized. That’s easy stuff.
Instructor will cause more problems with guilds that lack suitably competent Priests than anything outside of the end-wing bosses, and even then those aren’t particularly bad like Maexxna.
Naxxramas is not hard.
Why? The fight isn’t particularly hard and people will learn rather quick the various ways to LoS cheese the entire thing.
With how much Onyxia is getting steamrolled, these will be fairly freely available.
I’m also looking at numbers from guilds ranked 500-1000 to get a baseline of where your ‘average’ guild is in terms of overall dps.
I’ve been saying the same things since Classic was months from release
I know a lot of people thought Classic was going to be this big “shock” to players in terms of difficultly and how unforgiving it is but this isn’t Vanilla and you can’t negate 15 years of knowledge.
At the core, Classic is a better MMO and better RPG but in terms of difficulty we were our own worst enemies 15 years ago.
All of this, but I will caveat that compared to Patch 1.1 vs what we have, Frost Mages and Fury Warriors are higher than they could have been then, but still vastly higher than anything people pulled back then. 6% Hit and 10% Crit for a Mage is hard to pass up thanks to the 1.11 Frost rework, likewise with Warriors actually having Bloodthirst to hit.
The rest is spot on. The only “shock” is that people can’t believe how badly they and their guilds performed 15 yrs ago so instead it must be everything else that’s the problem
A large portion of players are pugging Ony … so they wont have a guild to hand them an ony cloak the day they need one. You’re gonna have a few thousand people all wanting an ony cloak at the same time, and having to get it from the AH.
Prices are going to soar through the roof to the point it’s going to create a financial barrier. It may not last very long, but its certainly going to be a problem for anyone thinking of pugging through BWL in the first month its released.
It will also be very different for each server. While big servers may have had dozens of Ony kills already within the first 2 weeks… Small/medium servers took about a month before the first groups could down Ony.
Maybe for the first week or so. Guilds are stockpiling them and there are a LOT of scales available.
Given we have probably another 1-2 months before BWL releases, and Shadowflame is truly only a raid-wide problem at Nef, partial clears and half-pug groups with alts are going to be pretty common.
Naxx can be pugged to some degree though. Will it be a full clear? Absolutely not. Probably not even a wing clear. But trash and a couple bosses are viable if the PuG has decent coordination.
I still feel like the average guilds will have at least a few wipes on Vael, simply because of how finicky the aggro is, and how trigger-happy DPS has become.
Will this cause any significant bottlenecks? Probably not. The best guilds/private server junkies will still clear in one shot, while the lesser guilds will probably need an attempt or two.
This is coming from a guy who witnessed Vael destroy two of his guilds.
Enough with the changes already.
Everything they changed has completely f’d the game so far. Spell batching double attacks and double crits. Layering exploits for rare mats and gear. Giant servers that make lopsided servers atrocious to play on for the smaller faction.
Seriously, retailers you’ve already damaged the game enough, go away.
Lead off with a Druid, aggro problems disappear. Infinite rage means Maul/Swipe spam for the highest TPS in the game, especially if you pop MCP. At the DPS levels we’re at, it’ll probably be only one Tank death due to Burning Adrenaline before a lot of guilds destroy the boss, so the “OTs” just need to edge to the front and fight for 2nd.
It isn’t like healing is very hard when you have infinite mana and can spam assigned groups.
i mean you can do split raids and get double loot if too easy
it’s pretty good incentive
Yeah, the goalpost moving by the “Classic is hard” group is hilarious. First it was “Ragnaros will take weeks or even months to go down! You private server kids have no idea how hard it will be!”
Now it’s “Ohhh you just wait till you get into BWL kids, you’re going to encounter VAEL and his 900k HP!” with the wipe mechanic not killing the tank until 55~ seconds into the fight.
After average guilds kill Vael on their first try with no difficulty, we’re going to move on to the claims that C’thun will wipe out those average guilds. Here’s a video of the kind of player that was killing C’thun before Naxxramas was even out:
Then we’ll get into Naxxramas and half the bosses will die to those average guilds before they even use a mechanic that has the possibility to cause a wipe. By this time, hopefully people will have realized that Vanilla WoW was not a difficult game but I’m sure there will be a slew of new and exciting excuses explaining why Naxx is being smashed by average guilds.
Onyxia has already been killed by a 7 player group.
Honestly, thanks to Onyxia’s obnoxious threat mechanics, this is a bigger accomplishment to me than someone annihilating Gluth before Decimate, or Faerlina without bothering with silencing her volley or getting rid of her enrage.