This needs another like 60% nerf if it’s supposed to be pick up possible.
As it stands now the average SOD player has no chance of completing this. Too many mechanics too little loot and too much time to clear to each boss.
I only started playing SOD because I wanted to chill on some easy raids and bosses with friends. Gnomer difficulty is about as hard as any raid should be in classic wow.
Kinda felt like the gnomer difficulty week one was where it should be, but I quickly found myself bored with it. I think ST a nice step up but the second last boss needs some tuning. I think if the whelps and scalebanes coming out each phase only came out half the duration a phase typically lasts it would be a start (versus the entire phase). And then they need to fix the spawns so you don’t have to cheese the boss to kill it. The rest of the fights are fine after the nerfs they did.
Gear will help clear the raid immensely, as you’re dealing with mechanics less and less as you shorten the fight.
The fights are still pretty chill once you understand the mechanics and are no where near on par with mythic raids for example. It might take an extra week or two for people to get there but you’ll be able to pug these, assuming the second last boss is adjusted
but who said it’s supposed to be puggable? Raiding is about guilds coming together to defeat great challenges.
Andy Alert!
Great Challenges is keeping your guild together to complete weekly raids.
SOD ST is Mids
can someone translate that from newspeak to English, please? I’m not sure if I should answer “thank you” or … well… or not.
Thats what retail and cata is for.
We 1 shot the first 6 bosses. Eranikus however…
It’s just too punishing. A mechanic that just straight up says: “You instantly die if you fail this.”
Like, what? Is this Mythic Retail raids? Come on. Were they so creatively bankrupt on a mechanic punishment beyond instant death mechanics?
Yea it’s a huge let down to the casual player base. I always fight against meta/parsing groups, laughing at them for stressing themselves out to save a couple minutes. However, ST? Nah parsing and meta ONLY for this raid. It’s classic, wasn’t UBRS considered a raid? Why are we getting so deep into retail ideology and not balancing between the two. It doesn’t need to be hard, it’s fkn lv 50… why are we making things so complicated?
Actually no. The classic raids were a core group of about 10 players, who brought the future bench warmers of WotLK to fill in the next 25 slots. Then pugged the final 5 slots. This way everyone got to experience and have fun with the game.
If you design a raid encounter around the idea that every player in the raid needs to be BiS and performing at a high level then you miss the point of classic raids. Especially since we spent all of SoD with 10m groups. It should be 10m guilds filling the new slots with their benched roster, and then filling any missing gaps with pugs. But you can’t do that if the difficulty isn’t balanced and the rewards aren’t as common.
One lockout a week for a phase thats gonna last 1.5 months is like why even bother raiding?
It’s fine for it to be “hard”. As long as the mechanics are manageable. This isn’t Era with every boss just being a different flavor of tank and spank.
It’s just one boss that’s a problem, the rest are actually rather enjoyable. Challenging even.
This is normal era or retail mentality. In those modes it’s okay for raids and certain mechanics to be challenging and hard to push because the content is “current” for much longer.
In a seasonal mode, this mindset isn’t alright. You’re literally racing against the clock to clear things before times up. You don’t have months to spend progressing and learning things like you do in era or retail before the next new thing… or it just ends because the season is over.
This is why I hope they do a classic+ just like SoD, but make it a permanent thing where people will have 5-6 months between content releases. That way you can actually take things slow.
counterargument: naxxramas.
There’s only going to be 8 clears as the raid is relevant. After that it might as well not exist, so why not let ad many clear it as they can?
Raids aren’t supposed to be hard especially in SOD. The whole point of the Raid is too meet new people, make friends and get loot. Any random pick up group should be able to clear the Raid in average gear. The Devs are waaaaaay off base with this. Think many are just gonna skip this phase.
The loot in ST is also rather…bad. Like, it is absolutely an upgrade over Gnomer loot. But…barely. In fact, some items are arguably worse.
In a way, it’s also fine for ST to not be a full clear raid. 6/8 is puggable, and its only Eranikus where pugs would just call it and walk away.
SoD is turning into parsing/exploiting simulator. They are hyper focused on targeting the retail Andy’s when they already had a solid player base. Cata and War Within comes out and the player count is dramatically cut, which I’m actually looking forward to for SoD. 90% of the players that exploit/minmax/cry on forums are the people that are jumping ship as soon as these release. I just wish the would stop ruining the experience for the casual players who have been asking for a more in depth version of classic.
They should remove parsing from WoW. Period! Definitely from SOD and the game will be infinitely better.
I assure you that if Naxx or AQ was released for the first time on Thursday, you would be saying the exact same thing unless you’re someone who plays 24/7 or are a PvE hero. You’ve just been doing classic content for five years (some people for more than a decade) so it all seems so trivial and uncomplicated. Eranikus or any ST boss will feel the exact same way in two weeks for even an average player. Gear in classic means everything. Sure, you need to do more mechanics, but even 1 shot abilities will seem trivial in a few kills/handful of attempts with better gear/understanding of new class mechanics (edit).
The difficulty between Naxx/ST would be different - less throughput, more figuring out tactics and coordinating people. But three days into the release, only a handful of guilds would have come together and spent the time to kill KT at the time of this post. Many would be stuck on four houseman. Is it complicated? Not really, especially because you’ve done it 100 times now, but if you were under geared and hadn’t practiced it- you’re going to fail quite a few times, despite whether or not you’ve watched another guild do it 10 times on Twitch.
Again, different kinds of difficulty, but as we’ve seen in P3 so far, throughput of players is becoming increasingly important. You have to succeed at mechanics and press your buttons appropriately at all times. Is this this spirit of Classic? Debatable but all Classic content becomes trivial given time. In this case - a few weeks.
Lastly, people are trying to compare this to a mythic raid boss. If you gave every wow player the best gear possible and asked them to kill a difficult mythic boss, 99%+ would still be unable to do so in a reasonable amount of time. If you gave every SoD player ST gear right now, Eranikus would be an absolute joke.
Naxx took 79 days to clear, and was barely seen by most guilds so they brought it back, easier, in WotLK.
AQ40 took 113 days.
Keep in mind both were released in Vanilla where the time between updates was measured in months, and older content wasn’t really that irrelevant from the previous phase. Compared to SOD where phases are about 8 weeks.
Yeah for sure. I’m just saying that even with 2024 wow player skills/knowledge, there would still be a large learning curve for most of the population. Of course people would clear it in 24-72 hours, but they would be the minority. People would be right here on the forums complaining instead of giving a week or two with newly acquired gear, runes and better understanding of their class. Just because you can hit your abilities and earn a 99 parse while standing still doesn’t mean the average player can do this while constantly dodging mechanics right off the bat - which is what we are seeing. With time, people will get better and it will become trivial.