Let me start off my saying 2 things: The main being that this thread will merely be making an observation compared to last expansions end raid and that RWF has been over for some time now.
So as of this writing we are 11 days to the two month mark since the raid was released and 23 days to the two month mark since the first kill of Fyrakk was registered. Only 64 guilds have downed Mythic Fyrakk and 168 guilds have downed Mythic Tindral. By comparison 764 guilds have downed Mythic Smolderon.
Last Expansion at the 2 month (May 26th) mark since the first kill of the Jailer 160 guilds had cleared Mythic Jailer, 9.2.5 came out 5 days later. Even 13 days (May 13th) before the two month mark of Sepulcher; 118 guilds had made it into the Hall of Fame. Can you see where I’m going with this?
The last Mythic Fyrakk and Mythic Tindral nerfs were Dec 19th and Dec 13th respectively, well after the race to RWF ended and seem to have been mediocre nerfs if this is where we’re at in the Hall of Fame rates. After RWF on Mythic Jailer, heavy Nerfs were rolled out quite quickly.
I understand holidays might have been a factor but the first three Fyrakk kills (which seem to be the only ones that matter in RWF) happened between Nov 26th-29th with the 4th being Dec 3rd. Again the last nerfs to Wing 4 of the raid happened on Dec 19th.
So to recap:
5 days from 9.2.5 of first Jailer kill - Mythic Sepulcher: 160 Guilds made it into the Hall of Fame. May 31st - 9.2.5 comes out.
13 days away from 10.2.5: Only 64 Guilds have made it into the fall of Fame. Jan 16th 10.2.5 comes out.
Why am I posting about this? Because I like to compare present and past events. It’s one of my quirks. I do a lot and I remembered RWF of Sepulcher and the following closing of the Hall of Fame going by a lot faster than Amirdrassil has. There just seems to be huge discrepancies between the lack of nerfs Mythic Amirdrassil’s is receiving and the Nerfs of past Expansion end raids. Again this is all just an observation I’ve made.
Edit: Numbers are not my strong suit (terrible math teachers growing up) so I had to edit some things.
I guess my question out of all this is: Because Dragonflight is moving faster with content releases than past expansions and the fact this is going to be the same for future expansions; When will we see major raid adjustments dished out with these new timelines in place?
I’ve only done Mythic Tindral a little but here is my feedback on it:
Dispels
There is a debuff that goes out and you need to make sure that it is dispelled quickly. The mechanic of multiple debuffs going out and having to stagger the dispels out isn’t fun and I get it is probably designed that way because of mass dispel. I’d suggest at least making it interesting such as different debuffs poison/curse/disease on different targets.
Also the mechanics of the fight encouraging 8 melee. Sure is it required? Technically doable without but still a lot easier due to the hectic nature of mechanical overlaps and trying to communicate “Oh I have a debuff I can’t get x” so having 8 melee just makes it easier to have a consistent flare bombs I would suggest making it 3 flare bomb spawns per set instead of 4.
Fatal Overkill
Multiple overlapping mechanics happen even in the first 30 seconds that can wipe the raid. Raid wiping mechanics is fine but when it is several of them at once it is a bit overkill with the mushroom/dispels/flare bombs it is like mechanic vomit. It reminds me in Sepulcher where a lot of fights had that issue and were later adjusted. More insta-wipe mechanics thrown at once doesn’t necessarily make a fight more fun. Fights like Sludgefist and Rashok are fun with fewer mechanics and tighter tuning where sometimes people die on a pull but it doesn’t punish the raid with a wipe so you can continue prog and then the kill comes when everyone can survive to the end.
Visuals
Every now and then it feels like a boss fights visual design seems to regress heavily. Nymue with its overly green spell effects and Tindral (also Smolderon to an extent) has this issue with multiple mechanics going out that are all the same color. There seems to be a self-imposed idea by design that a Life themed boss must be green or a fire boss must be red.
Life like plants can be a myriad of colors and that it is only green on nymue does not make sense. Why can’t some mechanics be yellow or violet? Fire can be many colors naturally too. Yes, orange is a common fire color but it is not the only one. When fire gets hotter it can change colors to white and then the hottest flames can be blue (I guess the Firelands isn’t that hot). So I don’t understand this design choice to limit colors which makes a fight harder for the wrong reasons. Obscuring visual clarity is never fun and does not make a fight enjoyable.
After reading your post I’m now more curious about your thoughts on Mythic Smolderon versus Mythic Tindral on the level of difficulty. According to Raider.IO statistics almost 800 guilds have downed Smolderon compared to sub 200 on Tindral.
Would you say the difficulty was increased unfairly between the end of Wing 3 and the start of Wing 4?
I’m also curious on your thoughts of when you think it’s ideal to start rolling out nerfs for these harder encounters. Should it be a week after RWF ends? 2 weeks? a month?
In my opinion I think adjustments need to start being made as soon as the race ends given that Dragonflight seems to be moving at a much faster pace than previous expansions.
For mythic Smolderon the fight was nerfed as I begun prog on it and it does have some of the visual issues of Tindral (so much that there is a weak aura to turn off Projected Textures when doing Smolderon). The difficulty of Smolderon drastically dropped when they rolled out nerfs, specifically the reducing 5 flame waves to 4 and the 4 seeking inferno orbs to 3 which prevented some nasty mechanical overlaps, which I suppose I am suggesting they just do the same thing with Tindral like reducing flare bombs from 4 to 3.
I think Tindral from the player data seems like a more overtuned boss compared to previous penultimate bosses. Mythic tuning is weird because I enjoy watching the RWF but it really comes down to 2 guilds in the end which are a fraction of the mythic raiding community (which are also in itself a fraction of the overall community). Whether the race lasts a week or two weeks shouldn’t be a factor in tuning.
I think mechanics should be designed in such a way they don’t need to be changed later and damage/healing should be the tuning knob with things like gearing, aspect crest upgrades and the head enchant acting as a soft nerf over time.
I’m only making observations based on past expansions and I’m questioning if what we have in Dragonflight is going to be the new norm. Obviously Dragonflight is different because it’s moving at a faster pace with more content than some people can handle. It just seems like the entire expansion is a bit overwhelming in terms of, again, the quantity of content and of course its difficulty in some cases.
Bigger challenges are okay out the gate but when it comes time for the expansion to sunset what happens to that content for people who want to revisit it? Countless past raids are still unsoloable because of the difficulty not being tuned properly for a low player count/solo experience.
WoW has always had collectors who will often wait til an expansion is a few years past being current to go back and try to achieve the rewards they want without having to fight people for the drops. However here we are with BFA proving that the raids were not properly tuned afterwards for the low player count/solo experience.
My concerns are about proper tuning to ensure that in the future these raids can be solo’d instead of the mishap we’re having with BFA raids right now.
Let’s not even mention we’re going into The War Within full well knowing at the end of it theirs going to be another squish. Even though they’ve stated “We’ve gotten better”, it’s hard to take that at value when exactly as you put it we’re still having difficulties with the raids from the last major squish.
Also, Mythic Eonar Fight anybody? Some players still can’t even do that boss, simply because of how it was designed
This is true, Stat squishes seem to harm a players ability to solo old raids. If we’re getting another squish in War Within how far does that set players back from being able to solo BFA raids? Shadowlands Raids? and eventually Dragonflight raids? Player power keeps getting pumped up far beyond what should be necessary for no reason and that in turn gives the devs a reason to increase the difficulty of the raid.
The problem as I see it now is we’re going to be facing stat squishes almost every other expansion if this keeps up. We don’t need a 45+ ilvl jump every raid tier, this just creates problems that require the stat squish down the road and it in turn screws up the ability to solo raids in the future.
FFXIV does not have this problem. The ilvls on their gear only go up 5-10 ilvls every new patch and the raids remain challenging through out the entire expansion despite this.
Why does WoW need 30-50+ new ilvls every raid tier?
This is where I don’t quite agree. I actually like that my character can outgear/outpace content as times goes on, especially when the differences between raid tiers make it that much more easier to do legacy solo content. Now does it need to be so vast of differences that we’re doing these stats squish every other expansion… maybe not.
I don’t honestly believe that Vault of the Incarnates should still be just as hard as it was at launch. I like that my character has already outpaced that raid, Not so significantly that I can solo it but significantly enough to make it much easier to do should you wish to do it. I also like that legacy raids are even easier for me to do, heck I was finally able to down Opulence though, now I’m stuck on the Conclave due to the silence mechanic.
Maybe they’ll be open to feedback come Midnight’s Alpha/Beta around any problems encountered with legacy content at which point, Dragonflight will be Legacy, and any issues that may have arisen from the squish can be fixed before launch. That way we don’t have the same problem we had where it was identified everything had gotten harder overnight when they did the Shadowlands squish and they just left it be for years before finally “fixing” it. Looking at you Legion
I can understand that point of view and maybe I was a bit hasty in comparing the MMO’s ilvls. (I’ve been sick so brain fog is prevalent at this time) Although in FFXIV Primals/Raids/Dungeons do become soloable 2 expansions after they’ve been released by certain jobs. This was how WoW used to be and thats the factor I miss the most. I’d love to be soloing BFA raids right now but the squishes that happened kind of messed up that factor.
Though I feel like if they haven’t fixed BFA raids by now and to an extent some Legion encounters, there is no hope they will seek to fix the issues until the gear ilevel is so large that the issues auto correct itself via over powered players. Unfortunately we might be looking at that a few more expansions down the road and not sooner than we hope though I’d love to be proven wrong.
I also miss when Raids were easily soloable when behind by 2 expansions. I honestly don’t think it should even take that long, I honestly believe that Shadowlands should be considered legacy content especially given that its not even the new player experience, which is what they used to have be the reasoning as to why the expansion behind the current one was still considered current. It’s just like ZC, straight up abandoned
I too hope that you are proven wrong, though you are correct that historically it doesn’t look like it will occur in that way. Though sadly, Eonar Fight for example, there are fights that no matter how much you outgear it… you are still mandated to do the mechanics just right. Mechanics that were designed around a whole raid team being present. Which will take Blizzard doing something to the fight to make it able to be completed by a solo player.
I’m kind of hoping that an undocumented change for 10.2.5 is that they did already fix the BfA raids/dungeons. I tried to go into them on the PTR, and they were all unavailable.
The problem isn’t so much that the last 2 bosses are hard. It’s that the first 6 are a complete joke because they’re tuned for 10-15 lower ilevel than we had going into mythic with week 1. So not only do they not have numbers checks, you even get a lot of leeway for misplaying mechanics because you’re so much stronger relative to the boss.
So you have 6 bosses that are varying degrees of jokes (all were single digit pull count for my guild across weeks 1 and 2), then you have Smolderon which is a very solid 3rd to last boss at like 100 pulls followed by Tindral at 300-400, and Fyrakk at 150-250.
The last 2 are also not particularly fun to play due to a variety of factors which hurts the raid as a whole quite a lot.
The best difficulty curve we’ve had in a long time was Sepulcher playing at a Horde HoF level, as much as people complain about it because their guilds struggled with Halondrus/Anduin at lower world ranks. You had a very easy first boss followed by 4 bosses in the 20-40 pulls range, then a slight jump at Lihuvim up to around 50, then a spike to 150-200 each for Halondrus and Anduin, a breather on Lords at around 20 pulls again, a step back up to around 100 for Rygelon and then the highest pull count boss of the tier was Jailer at 200-250 or so. It wasn’t just a bunch of completely free bosses followed by 1 boss at the right difficulty level for its position in the raid and then 2 brutal monsters.
More guilds are currently on Smolderon than are on Tindral, because he’s the first hard boss in the raid. Tindral is a bit harder than he should be but not by much. The issues on the last 2 are related to design more so than difficulty.
After RWF, after HoF, around world 500, around world 1k. The tier ends with 1.5-2k guilds having cleared. If more nerfs are needed, do it but that’s a clear sign that the natural, gradual nerfs via gear and things like the head enchant have failed to do their job (which they absolutely will this tier, considering world 100 guilds are progressing Fyrakk with 2-3 ilevels of growth remaining)
Honestly, that’s how soloing should be. You shouldn’t just walk in and 1shot everything, you should have to actually learn fights and execute mechanics properly (not necessarily the same way as when it was current)
tbf. the last 2 bosses are very mechanical, so nerfs from more gear and the head enchant could never be a nerf to it in comparison to nerfs to the mechanical requirement.
While I agree nerfs are needed to the last 2 bosses in general esp. with the likely early arrival of season 4, I would like more slight nerfs over a hefty nerf. This way it doesn’t feel like a cakewalk like Sepulcher felt after the “big nerf” to anduin and rygelon for most guilds (that was a terrible feeling).
What I would like to see is a targeted nerf to tswift before they touch fyrakk so it feels more like a progression (and not like sepulcher where nerfs came for all 3 in a week) and guilds can experience fyrakk in his current state. After a certain threshold of guilds passed, tswift (500 Guilds) start nerfing fyrakk more till a certain threshold is met.
I think we also have to consider the timing here. For many guilds, we’re a full week, if not 2 weeks behind normal progression due to the holidays. US Thanksgiving and Christmas both play a factor in guilds missing progression time and making the tier seem harder on a time basis than other tiers have. Yes, the final 3 bosses are infinitely harder than the previous 6, but it also can just mean that guilds reached smolderon and haven’t been able to put the time in yet.
The unavoidable star damage hit being like 600k is extremely excessive for something that has no engagement or interaction mechanically, its just an invisible way the fight kills you.
The recent WoWhead post that made a good point and brought up a quote from an interview regarding the Sepulcher time period that had a similar issue:
For example, when is it okay to wipe the raid instantly for a mistake? Honestly, the answer should be “almost never” — at least when it’s more like a single person’s twitch reaction mistake of, “you fail if you do this mechanic incorrectly” or whatever. It’s totally reasonable on Mythic to kill the player for doing that; but to say the entire raid is over because someone was one yard out of position is not our aim.
As I mentioned earlier there is an overkill of the amount of wipe mechanics on Tindral that goes against this design goal.