SoO lasted a year.
So true. I thought about trying raiding again but my heart just isn’t into the toxicity of wannabe esports types.
4 Likes
A fun casual guild should not need to do this for NORMAL mode. That’s kind of the point. You should not need to have to watch a video of somebody else doing an encounter to be able to do it yourself.
Whatever happened to figuring it out as you go? When they keep designing encounters for the higher end players to challenge them that means the lesser players get left behind and when the lesser players get left behind they say screw it and leave.
But this all goes back to the fact that the games core is fundamentally flawed. And arguably has been from the beginning. Raiding should never have been the primary focus And if they hadn’t gotten early developers from EverQuest who were top tier raiders it’s debatable if that would have been the case. Because in EverQuest even to this day raids are just something there if you want to. They aren’t the focus, they aren’t the carrot on the stick that everyone should try to get to, they are just something there if you want to have some fun with a large amount of people (and EQ raids are like 42 people or something, used to be like 70).
Wow has never had that.
7 Likes
Yeah I think this is the problem. Pass/fail shouldn’t be a part of normal unless it’s the last boss.
4 Likes
Pass fail can exist but it should be a lot more forgiving. So, you know, you can actually learn to avoid them if you decide to do harder difficulties where it’s less forgiving.
The big problem is that they have listened to somebody who said The raids were too easy and ever since have kept trying to outdo themselves each level and in the process they have ruined it for the people who just wanted to go in and have some fun And not treated like a side job or a sports team
10 Likes
Right. I mean, I don’t mind raids being hard but they really need to be a lot more mindful of how they design normal vs. heroic. Mythic can and should be where the crazy stuff is.
1 Like
Blizzard takes from Shadowlands
-We should tune our casual content raids for borrowed power they don’t have access to yet. Peak Borrowed power performance.
9 Likes
I truely believe he was meant to be an end boss of a raid, and the jail or was supposed to be 9.3, but they had to throw it out and didn’t balance accordingly
2 Likes
This kinda sorta maybe makes sense.
They reworked both Halondrus and Anduin the week before the patch went live and they buffed Lihuvim quite a lot because the boss was incredibly undertuned.
Majority of the bosses at least on Mythic are 100% designed/tuned around having 4p and double legendary.
Which arguably is not a good thing, as tier is entirely RNG. Not that I think mythic raiding in general is a good thing, but having it artificially drawn out based on if you get lucky or not is complete BS.
1 Like
My experience with normal has been pretty alright, though my perspective is a bit skewed. My guild is a CE one, and we blasted through normal with no difficultly until Anduin, where we wiped for about 30 mins before killing it.
Dreadlords were a bit iffy with the imposter mechanic, but they died without much difficulty, and then Rylegon fell over dead on the second pull.
We didn’t even bother with the Jailer because his loot is garbage.
Anduin was definitely overtuned a bit, but no idea how he looks after the nerfs.
Tier isn’t essential for normal at all, just being like 245+, and able to concentrate on a few mechanics. There are a lot of potential oneshots, as people above have mentioned already.
What ilvl are the people in your guild?
Last tier normal was about 226-233, In this tier, PUGs are mostly looking for 240-245.
1 Like
It’s not arguable it is a terrible thing due to the circumstances of coming into this patch. Everyone lost 15%+ dps going into 9.2.
Blizzard was so close to learning from their mistake with domination sockets with the creation catalyst but of course they just had to massively timegate it for zero reason.
7 Likes
And the worst part is the systems designer on twitter seems to legit think his ideas are great (also the dude behind corruption) and doesn’t seem to “get” that it’s an awful idea.
Not boding well when the design team is so arrogant they don’t want to accept flaws in their systems.
3 Likes
We outgear normal almost completely. Mostly just trying to get the tier pieces required for the 4 set bonuses. I’m at 264 now and that’s a bit high, so I imagine the average is around 262.
Blizzard not only has overtuned normal, but refuses to listen to the players for whom normal raiding is intended for and neglects hot fixing what are clearly overtuned mechanics (but will jump right on hot fixing mythic, where honestly the whole point of raiding mythic is for the difficulty, and mythic raids should be the last to get nerfs).
I recently spoke to someone who asked why pugs are able to at least clear the first four if not more bosses. My first question back was raid size - because I have hand’s on proof that a 10-man team can breeze through normal, whereas the same teams at 15+ struggled on the first boss (not my guild, but a friend-guild). This tells me that Blizzard hasn’t even tuned the scaling of normal raids. The second question I asked was what the average ilv of the pug was, and they were close to 250+ and I think this is what a lot of players fail to take into account when they come swanning in with their opinions about what a normal team “should be” doing.
The raid is supposedly tuned for 239 gear, per Blizzard and the guides. But I think that the encounters of the first five bosses are really tuned to an average ilvl of 245-250 to get the fights to align with the “intended difficulty.” So basically Blizzard designed normal raids to be accessible for friends and family raiders once friends and family raiders are geared with … gear that comes out of normal raids. Which is patently absurd. Unlike heroic raiders, who can farm normal for their tier pieces to bootstrap themselves for heroic encounters (which is what most of these pugs are for - basically gentle carries with the quid pro quo of the pug getting normal ilvl gear and the host getting access to tier) normal raiders have limited options to get to 245-250 without raiding like a hardcore raider, which means endless farming for the gold required to boost legendaries, running M+8 and above for 252 gear or M+2 and up for a chance at 252 gear in the vault or spending thousands of gold on the crafted 252. And that is not the point of what normal raids are for. This isn’t a matryoshka doll dynamic, with each difficulty being a smaller duplicate. Each raid tier should have its own “mission statement” and Blizzard needs to design each raid “lane” to that mission:
LFR: Always intended for players who do not/cannot raid regularly but want to see the story - so the mechanics need to be light and airy for a bunch of random strangers with no boss/guide to lead them.
Normal: Always intended for regular players to get together with their friends to enjoy raiding together and to have fun in cooperative instanced content.
Heroic: Always intended for the players who are looking to push their skills, with greater risk, greater rewards. So higher demands, higher caps.
Mythic: Always intended for the 1% power gamer, with the highest levels of challenge.
The whole point of normal raids is that regular players shouldn’t have to do the things that heroic and mythic players must do to be competitive. A friends and family raider should be able to walk into SotFO in, frankly, SOD normal gear and get the first two-three bosses down with little difficulty (and no one shot mechanics unless you are literally just standing in damage) and heroic SoD should get you past the first four-five. And that’s not happening. What is happening?
- Vigilant Guardian is despawning the third shield, pushing friends and family raiders into transitioning to phase 2 in a mad dash to beat a timer that shouldn’t be there.
- The boss health is too high in P2 for the intended ilvl, which demands an overly-steep DPS check on the first boss out of the gate.
- I believe antimatter’s visual effect is inconsistent, sometimes appearing extremely small and one-shots players. antimatter should never 1-shot in normal - 90% health, sure - there should be a penalty, but P3 is where the pass/fail mechanic should end up for friends and family raiding.
- Dasuegne - the cleave fan is too wide or too fast (pick your poison) for a difficulty intended for players who have mobility challenges. In normal, either the tanks should be able to direct the cleave, or the fan should be narrower.
- The cleave happening with multiple halos is too much insta-kill going on at the same time for normal (fine for heroic). So either the insta-kill for multiple halos has to adjust or the cleave fan mechanic needs to happen less frequently on normal because navigating the multiple halos is the major mechanics that’s going to consume most of the “thinking” of a friends and family team.
- The pillars that spawn the halos are insanely difficult to see, meaning that normal players only get a split second to react. In normal difficulty, the pillars that spawn should either always be in the same sequence or the visual should be blatant.
- The halos proc far too quickly in normal. It needs to be slightly slower or the debut needs to drop off slightly faster in normal.
In general though, the raid is tuned for a higher stamina and a higher throughput than friends and family raiders are going to have access to and this barrier to entry is absurd given that the purpose of normal raids is to give regular players an opportunity to enjoy raiding with their friends REGARDLESS OF SKILL AND ABILITY. There should never be a cascade failure because a team member ended up standing in bad a second too long because of a high ping, or another player having trouble weaving through four halos because of a mobility issue. Heroic should be where the “meta” lives, normal should be where the regular folk just go and enjoy a productive raid night.
I know Blizzard can do this because Legion had decently tuned normal raids out of the gate.
13 Likes
Id think its for people who dont want 85 mechanix vomited up on them simultaneously, but still want some ‘challenge’ a bit harder than LFR.
5 Likes
And yet’s it not, and hasn’t been for years now 
2 Likes
Didn’t people cry about how “easy” it was then? As they usually do?