The nightmare known as Reborn council

WoW Classic Season of Discovery
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Last night, my guild completed our third group Sunday night SE raid. We reached the Council fight in the Scarlet Enclave and brought 30 players to a raid designed and tuned for 20, thinking the extra numbers would help push through any hurdles. Our comp consisted of 2 tanks, 2 flex tanks, and 5 healers, leaving 20-22 DPS to handle the enrage timer mechanics.

There are a few things I’d like to point out about this fight. With our comp, our average DPS needed to be around 5,600 to meet the 5-minute enrage timer. Definitely doable if everyone had full SE gear.

Even the world-first kill didn’t meet the enrage timer—their kill took 5 minutes and 43 seconds. In order for them to reach the 5-minute enrage timer, each DPS would have needed to achieve a minimum of 7,812 DPS. Looking at the numbers alone, this fight needs to be adjusted.

The Room Design: A New Level of Frustration

Let’s take a moment to talk about the fight environment—because, wow, it’s a disaster. The Council room is absurdly small, making movement highly restrictive, and the camera angles are downright painful.

For those who haven’t seen this fight, imagine Herod’s room in Scarlet Monastery—now picture 20-40 people crammed in there, fighting three bosses. Oh, and you can’t go to the floor because it fills with lava, forcing everyone to stay on the second tier. Then you have falling hammers, tornados, and Herod’s Whirlwind ability all happening at once. Absolute chaos.

And this isn’t an isolated issue—the mini-boss in the courtyard has the same flaw. The space is so cramped that we actually had to switch to a top-down view, making it feel like we were playing StarCraft again.

Final Thoughts

Between the overtuned enrage timer, the unreasonable DPS requirements, and the atrocious fight space, it’s clear that Blizzard needs to revisit the balancing on this encounter. Mechanics should challenge players, not overwhelm them with impossible expectations.

I’m not sure who designed the boss room and courtyard mini-boss, but they need to go back to school for level design. More importantly, how did this pass QA? Sure, we didn’t get to test the raid on PTR, but this content should have been tested in-house at the very least. Who signed off on such a horribly designed space? Every other Council fight in WoW has more room than this disaster.

2 Likes
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Most of the raid needs to be adjusted. My guild went in with 39 last night and we were still getting reeeeaaal close to enrage timers. And this is with full world buffs and full consumes. The mechanics are fine but everything just has way too much health.

I thought Blizzard learned from phase 3 that putting out an untested raid is a bad idea.

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I remember aggrend tweeting something along the lines of he thought it was pretty cool that their new Sunken Temple raid couldn’t be full cleared the first lockout.

Right before they proceeded to do 2 nerfs which reduced eranikus and adds hp by over 50%.

I actually think the devs are happy that this raid is only being cleared by the top 1% guilds for the first lockout.

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He says a lot of things that don’t align with reality. I remember him saying back in phase 3 that he didn’t want dungeons to become “aoe fiesta”…and that’s literally what they became in the very next phase and have remained that way since then.

Regardless, a raid that is so overtuned that even the sweatiest of sweatlords struggle with it, does not fit in a game mode that has become known as “season of dads”.

3 Likes
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Like you said though the worst part is the camera, they need to make the walls invisible or something with the camera so players can zoom out past them.

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Aggrend indicated that the raid is designed to require SC tier to finish…like, they are trying to bring back true classic where you couldn’t easily clear MC in the first week (even though you could but peeps were just super nooby back then about their class)

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My favorite part of council is that missing one singular kick on vishas can lead to a wipe if you dont burn a rally and heal like crazy.

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The first two bosses are super overtuned. This statement doesn’t reflect reality. Unless you want to argue that the intended way to clear this raid is to kill the first boss 8+ weeks in a row and then the second boss 8+ weeks in a row, etc.

They’re not “trying to bring back true classic” (lmao), they simply put out an untested raid with inflated health values on everything.

3 Likes
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it wasn’t a mistake though - vs intentional

why, and if its going to work out the way they hope is a whole other thing.

but he made it clear that everyone will experience a 40…something power spike with tier, and that is why content is tuned the way it is :shrug:

Here is the direct response on difficulty complaints (copied it from bluesky):

The gear in SE is dramatically better than Naxx gear. By the time you get your 8/8 set you’ll do between ~25 and 40% more damage. At full bis you’ll be doing 50%+ more damage. Killing one or two bosses in the first lockout and then 2-3 in the next lockout gets your raid 25+ very strong items.

We have a system in place that, after a time, will allow you to gain a buff that will make it easier (similar to ICC). We don’t want to flip this on just yet, but we are discussing timing for it and will likely make an announcement on that soon.

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The raid is literally untested.

“you need a full 8/8 tier set just to kill the bosses”

so how are you supposed to get that 8/8 tier set if you can’t kill bosses without it?

Think before posting.

1 Like
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read the quote from aggrend I edited into my post. I haven’t expressed any opinion on this so not sure why you are being hostile.

Also, you can eventually get 8/8 tier without ever raiding heh. If you get lucky, you can get a piece of tier every two weeks without raiding.

So you are telling me to think before posting, but perhaps you should research more?

1 Like
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Yeah it’s brutal. You need a lot of kickers. Warlocks need to keep curse of tongues on all the bosses to help too. It does slow it down and it stacks with mind numbing poison.

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So you’re saying Blizzard intentionally designed a raid where the intended method of clearing it is using out-of-raid slow acquisition systems to get 1 piece of tier every 5 weeks. An impassible time gate, in a seasonal game mode.

Right.

Ooooorr, they just put out an untested overtuned raid.

Occam’s Razor.

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Yes, they did. Aggrend explained why, and that they do plan to activate a buff to help the casuals clear it if standard gear progression isn’t enough.

So yes, seems like this was given much thought.

I think people are being overly dramatic and emotional over this. My casual guild cleared 4 this week with 29 people, and we did everything blind. Even had confessor affix on beatrix, not knowing you could control it and change it. We screw around A LOT.

If a guild can’t get first couple of bosses down, then they need more bodies, or need to actually learn their class.

The only people who should be miffed are the puggers.

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Council did feel like a massive step up from the previous 5 bosses, though my guild only got a few pulls in before we hit our stop time. The room size really hampers what could be a fun fight, I think.

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100% the room size makes the fight a dreadful experience.

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It can definitely be both. It seems to be that the bosses even the early ones are tuned for players in Naxx level gear, optimized for dps and tanking and have put in a lot of effort on their gear. I think that them not properly testing for this led to things being overtuned, but they are so obviously egregious in tuning BECAUSE of their desire to make it hard.

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  1. Challenge vs. Miscalibration: There’s a big difference between making an encounter hard and making it outright impossible because it was tuned for the wrong group size. A challenging fight pushes you to coordinate, optimize your gear, and execute well. However, if the numbers demand performance beyond what a well-geared team can realistically deliver, then it’s not about difficulty—it’s about improper tuning.

  2. The Council Encounter Example: Take the Council fight for example. In a 20-man raid—comprising 2 tanks, 2 healers, and 16 DPS players—the encounter is designed to require a total of 39 million damage within a 5‑minute enrage timer. That breaks down to roughly 8,125 DPS per DPS player on average. When many capable players struggle to meet this threshold, it indicates that the encounter isn’t just hard—it’s misaligned with the intended 20-man setup.

  3. Why It Matters: When a raid is released with inflated health pools or damage requirements, it’s not simply a matter of “making it hard” through intentional design. Instead, it suggests that the tuning was based on different assumptions even with Naxx-level gear higher raid sizes are needed to clear, leading to an encounter(s) that feels nearly impossible for the target group. In other words, we want a raid that is not looking to punish us; we want something that creates a challenging, yet achievable, experience.

To sum it up: While bosses can be intentionally tough, setting damage requirements so high that even top-tier players are forced to push beyond realistic limits isn’t just about difficulty. It’s a sign that the encounter was improperly tuned for the intended 20-man raid, and a recalibration is necessary to make the fight challenging without being insurmountable.

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perhaps they want you to farm early bosses before defeating this encounter.

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Look, if the design was meant for you to farm early bosses as a precursor to the bigger encounter, then it should never feel like you’re stuck in an endless grind. In many groups—often 30 or 40 players strong—you’re forced to farm through five bosses that drop only about 10 tier pieces and 15 off-armor pieces per run. Let’s break it down:

  1. Raid Drops: If a raid clear involves 5 bosses that drop a total of 10 tier pieces per run, then in a perfect world. (no extra tier drops)
  • In a 30-man raid, each player averages about 10 ÷ 30 ≈ 0.33 tier pieces from the raid drops per week.
  • In a 40-man raid, each player averages about 10 ÷ 40 ≈ 0.25 tier pieces per run.
  1. The Chalice System: In addition to the raid drops, most players only receive 1 chalice fragment per week. Since it takes 6 fragments to complete a chalice—which then rewards you with an additional tier piece—that’s an extra 1 tier piece every 6 weeks, or roughly 0.167 tier piece per week on average.
  2. Combined Tier Piece Gain: Adding these together gives a clearer picture:
  • 30-man raid: 0.33 (raid) + 0.167 (chalice) ≈ 0.50 tier piece per week per player. To gather a complete 4-piece set, each player would need about 4 ÷ 0.5 = 8 weeks under perfect conditions.
  • 40-man raid: 0.25 (raid) + 0.167 (chalice) ≈ 0.417 tier piece per week per player. Thus, it would take roughly 4 ÷ 0.417 ≈ 10 weeks for every player to obtain all 4 pieces.
  1. Why This Matters: If early bosses are intentionally meant to be farmed to gear up for later encounters, the numbers should support a reasonable pace of progression. However, forcing groups—often sized at 30–40 players—to engage in a system where even the best-case scenario requires an 8- to 10-week grind to collect a complete 4-piece set is far from a challenge based on skill and coordination. Instead, it turns the process into an arduous, nearly unfeasible marathon that punishes large groups with prolonged farming.

In summary: While the notion of farming early bosses might be painted as a deliberate design choice, the combined effect of low drop rates (only 10 tier pieces per clear for the whole raid) and a chalice system that only hands out an extra tier piece every 6 weeks means that under optimal conditions, a 30-man raid needs about 8 weeks and a 40-man raid about 10 weeks for every player to get a complete 4-piece T3.5 set. This extended grind isn’t a clever challenge—it’s an indication of mis-tuning that makes it nearly impossible to progress without an unrealistic time commitment.