So we’re about two and a half months into TWW Season 1 by this point, and I wanted to make a post discussing the state of Mythic raiding this season because, frankly, it’s in a weird spot. I’ve never felt weirder about a tier. I think there’s plenty of good stuff, plenty of bad stuff, and some straight-up weird stuff about this tier, and I think a lot of these things need to be addressed going into Season 2.
Note that this is exclusively about raiding. I already made a post about the state of M+ very early into the M+ season and I’m planning on cooking up another thread because I think M+ is in an absurdly bad state and needs serious, urgent help.
THE GOOD:
- While I have issues with the way the Severed Strands buff is implemented, I think the idea of a progressive 2.25% nerf to the raid is a good one that’s serving to smooth out deep farm quite nicely. I think the timing of Severed Strands starting to kick in was kinda weird, to the point where I feel like it could’ve kicked in two weeks early and it still wouldn’t have been an issue, but the concept behind it is a good one.
- Nerub-ar Palace has an incredibly wonky difficulty curve (trust me, we’ll get there when we get there), but the first 4 Mythic bosses being extremely easy feels weirdly healthy for alts. I can very easily put together a group in LFG, invite a bunch of experienced Mythic raiders’ (not even CE-level players) semi-geared alts, and we can go in and kill Ulgrax, Bloodbound, Sikran, and Rasha’nan with very little trouble, get two Mythic slots in our Great Vaults, and possibly get a bunch of good Myth track loot, 40 Crests, and very strong items like the Sureki Zealot’s Insignia, Wings of Shattered Sorrow, various Myth track weapons, Rasha’nan’s very good neck, armor in multiple tier slots from the Catalyst or otherwise, etc. The progression curve felt extremely weird from a progression PoV, but being able to fill two Mythic vault slots on a halfway decent character feels genuinely good. Like, I think these bosses being easy feels very healthy for playing alts in raid and I would vastly prefer this to the very frustrating idea of only being able to kill two bosses in Vault of the Incarnates because Terros and Sennarth were massive, massive steps up in difficulty to the point that you never had any reason to do them if you were just going for a chill Mythic run. They dropped crap loot too.
- AFTER THE NERFS, Nexus Princess and Ansurek feel like very reasonable fights. There’s always gonna be a bit of a learning curve on said fights, but I think the ways these nerfs were implemented made these bosses much less frustrating.
- Silken Court and Ansurek dropping 15 Gilded Crests each is extremely good for the game. I have a lot I could say about the current state of the Crest system (and a lot of it isn’t good; Harbinger of the Gilded is an incredibly unreasonable achievement even for HoF raiders to get right now in its current state), but giving even Heroic raiders access to a reliable means of getting 30 Gilded Crests without even stepping foot into M+ is a good thing.
- The Heroic raid as a whole is actually quite reasonably tuned right now. Blizzard identified key problems with fights like Silken Court and Ansurek being extremely punishing over very small mistakes (webs on Court, Frothing Toxins on Ansurek) and addressed those issues very quickly. I’d rather those fights have not had those issues in the first place, but they were addressed within 3-4 weeks if memory serves me which is very fast compared to Heroic Sepulcher bosses being hilariously overtuned for their intended audience for months on end. This raid on Heroic is in a good state IMO.
THE BAD:
- The back half of the raid released in a hideously overtuned state, to the point that even Hall of Fame-level guilds like mine were getting to bosses we had no business being on at that time. There’s the obvious issue of this raid being probably the hardest Race to World First-tuned raid of all time since even a fight like Broodtwister was taking well over a hundred pulls (to say nothing of Nexus Princess being a 300+ pull 6th boss and Ansurek being a top 5 hardest boss ever now), but Severed Strands genuinely wasn’t going to fix any of what made the raid so hard for the first two-dozen guilds or so.
- While the nerfs to Nexus Princess and Ansurek were absolutely enough to make these bosses feel like reasonable challenges for where they are in the raid (Nexus being a 90-140 pull boss, Ansurek being anywhere from a 200-300 pull boss with my guild managing it in 184, 100 of which were pre-nerf), the nerfs to Silken Court and Broodtwister weren’t even close to enough.
- While I personally enjoyed progging it and absolutely love rekilling the boss right now, Silken Court is a fight that, by design, embodies literally everything some people despise about Mythic raiding. Binary “Pass/Fail” mechanics were talked about a great deal in Sepulcher due to how despised they were across all difficulties, and Blizzard said they intended to cut down on those sorts of mechanics only to double down on them on fights like Echo of Neltharion, Smolderon, Tindral, and Fyrakk last tier. Silken Court, while certainly not as hard as Tindral or Fyrakk (albeit much harder than the other two), triples down on what makes progging or reclearing these bosses so frustrating for so many people because the boss’s difficulty is inversely proportional to when you started progging the fight. This boss continues to be a massive outlier in terms of what’s expected of your raid team because there are small mistakes a single person can make on this fight that will wipe your group over and over and over again before even seeing Intermission and it gets immensely frustrating after a while. Lose one of your webs? Sorry, that’s a wipe and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it. Mess up a dispel? Sorry, you don’t have enough time to fix your mistake. A dispel debuff just vanishes into the ether? Sorry, you’re boned. There are nearly a thousand guilds progging Silken Court right now, there are more guilds that have gotten Cutting Edge than have just killed Silken Court because Ansurek is literally easier now, and I’d even go so far as to argue that any guild just starting to pull Silken Court right now will literally never kill that boss in its current state, and a big part of that is that it’s overdesigned to hell.
THE BROODTWISTER PROBLEM:
And on the topic of hideously overdesigned bosses… Broodtwister Ovi’nax is nearly everything wrong with modern-day WoW raiding packaged into a single boss. It somehow makes nearly every single encounter design mistake imaginable, and while the boss has received countless nerfs and damage numbers are now so high that you don’t even have to play the third slice of the room much anymore there’s no outgearing most of what kills you on this fight. This boss is so egregious in terms of how badly-designed it is that I believe it deserves a list of its own just to highlight why this boss has been killing guilds en-masse this entire tier.
- The boss aggressively throws tons of mobs at you which makes it run abysmally. Like, half the issues that happen on this boss are performance-related. Many people I play with have their games grind to a halt as soon as any Parasites are hatched. If it’s some easy meme fight that throws tons of adds at you it’s not a huge deal, but Broodtwister is actually difficult and has mechanics that severely punish you for not being in the right place at the right time, or for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I’ve genuinely just seen people die to Discharge because their PCs grind to a halt and they’re running at single-digit frames per second and getting killed by multiple swirls landing on them.
- The egg break mechanic is overdesigned. Eight random people will have eight seconds to figure out where they need to go, and if even a single one of them misses an egg it’s a wipe and you can do literally nothing about it on Mythic. This heavily incentivizes the use of WeakAuras to figure out the mechanic (and they certainly don’t play the game for you, because if they did there wouldn’t have been over 2000 guilds stuck on this boss at one point) which people despise. Bosses where you have to progress the fight as the rate your 20th best player learns it are often not very enjoyable, and that boss immediately following up an easy boss like Rasha’nan makes it a thousand times worse.
- Too much add control is required for the fifth or sixth boss in the raid. I played a DK on this boss alone because we needed the mob control, and we ran a 3-tank comp that included two additional DKs, because every single time you have extremely dangerous, high-priority mobs that can be affected by traditional CC the answer is, without fail, “bring Death Knights to grip them.” We saw it with Soulrender, we saw it with Anduin, we saw it with Aggramar, we saw it with Xhul’horac and Mannoroth, and we’ll probably continue to see it for the rest of time, and it’s dumb every single time. For a guild like mine, getting the DKs we needed for the fight wasn’t an issue; for most CE-level guilds, getting the DKs will be annoying, but not unbearable. But for any guild on that boss now (which is a very large number of them), asking people to reroll for the fifth boss in an eight-boss raid or asking guilds to recruit DKs when they’re in such high demand for this fight is a bit of an ask.
- The boss still heavily incentivizes you to 3-tank it. If you have to 3-tank a boss it’s a failure by design. The World First guilds did it for much of prog, and we continue to do it even though we’ve had Broodtwister on farm for a long time now.
- Basically, Mythic Broodtwister in its current state feels designed specifically to kill the concept of a mid-level Mythic guild. It requires more than two tanks, it requires a specific comp, it’s brutally punishing if you fail a mechanic, it’s unplayable if you aren’t using a WeakAura of some sort, and on top of all this it runs like trash unless you have an extremely high-end PC. As it stands right now, there are 2152 guilds on RIO that are 4/8M, either because they fell apart on Broodtwister or because they’ve just been stuck on the boss forever. That number is higher than the number of 1/8M, 2/8M, and 3/8M guilds combined, and comparable to the number of 5/8M, 6/8M, 7/8M, and Cutting Edge guilds combined (that being 2243 as of the time of this post, and some of those 5/8M guilds definitely killed Nexus Princess first). That number of guilds being on one boss that’s literally halfway into the raid, and that number being above 1500 for more than a month and a half, and that boss having been heavily nerfed from its release state and still putting up those numbers, is an enormous problem. Any guild getting to that boss now has literally zero reason to even attempt to pull Broodtwister, because they will not kill it. Rasha’nan is their final boss. It is genuinely not worth progressing Broodtwister currently. That isn’t an “oh, that’s just the way Mythic raiding works” issue: that is a five-alarm fire, “all hands on deck, this boss needs to get gutted yesterday” level problem. That should not happen after just four bosses in an eight-boss raid.
Overall, though, I find this season kinda weird from a raiding perspective. I think it’s in a much, much better state than a tier like Sepulcher was, but there are a lot of issues still. But at least it’s better than the absolutely rancid state of M+ right now. That mode actually needs Jesus.
). But we’re breaking the shield comfortably with some people holding CDs so they can send 40 stack spymasters on the platforms. We’re currently P2, though alot of this week was getting all the gateway WAs and interrupt/marker assignments done with a handful of pulls getting the 2nd platform (thanks blizz).