3 Reasons why this 18-hour race feels flawed

[Zurgasse]

Introduction

I'm writing this message as an outsider of the whole HL PvE scene. I used to play in a HL guild but I don't anymore, having quit before Hellfire Citadel. Even though I quit, I still kept following the World First race as I find it highly entertaining to track which guild kills what first and who performs well.

I am perhaps the only to think this, but after seeing an 18-hour progress get bashed by the worlds best guild(s), I'm very dissapointed by the outcome of what was supposed to be one of the raiding tiers of this "promising" expansion.

I will start by congratulating Экзорсус for their performance and want to make clear that I criticise the tier format, it is not to take away from their performance but to simply analyze, what I feel to be an afwul raid. I also want to congratulate Method, Serenity and From Scratch for this awesome performance, I really hope all those guilds keep on going to give us a (hopefully) long and entertaining second progress.

Now let's get to the three reasons I mentioned in my post: Legendaries, Mythic+ and Class balance.


1) Legendaries.

I feel like Blizzard could have gone two ways with legendary items. Either make them relatively weak so that they don't have a big impact on the dps of the players who get them (let's say: sub 2% dps performance difference) or they could have made it so players who played a lot got the legendaries they wanted no matter what. (for example a Legendary forge where you can destroy one to get another while also including a shitton of mats)

Instead of this, we have legendaries that are obviously extremely strong and others which are arguably useless. If you compare the compositions the first four guilds had in terms of legendaries: Exorsus, Method and From scratch all had ~6 useless legendaries out of 20 raiders and Serenity had ~10. I'm not using this as an excuse whatsoever but let's face it: it had to have somewhat of an impact on the progression. I haven't looked into healer / tank / dps spreading of legendaries but I think it is not absurd to suppose that a guild with 8 dps with a good legendary has a huge disadvantage vs another with 15 dps with good legendaries.

As time passes, this gap is obviously going to close as more and more players get the OP legendary for their class, nevertheless, this feels like one fuckup blizzard could have easily predicted and thus avoided.


2) Mythic+.

I still do not get why blizzard opened Mythic+ at the same time as the Heroic mode. This game mode allowed guilds to get an INSANE amount of gear on their characters resulting in raids having itemlevels way above what should normally be the case. If you look at the itemlevel the top guilds had for this tier compared to heroic mode drops and at what itemlevels guilds had in Highmaul during progression compared to heroic, you clearly see that there is a difference. Having played in HL guild, I can say for sure that a difference of 5 itemlevels has a massive impact on the progression, especially in the hands of some of the most skilled players WoW has.

Having such a high itemlevel has to be a problem because the difference between semi-hardcore (who don't raid during day-hours) and full hardcore guilds has never been bigger. Usually, split runs yield a few points of difference in terms of itemlevel but now this difference is bigger. Because the difference is so big, I think that Blizzard is now stuck and they have to choose between tuning bosses for players who dedicate their entire life to WoW and ones who just log in at night to progress through the content.

I think this participates to the feeling that the Mythic progress was flawed. Now more than ever, players who can play 24/7, level 5 alts, run tens of mythic dungeons for a week and still somehow clean Heroic mode 5 times have an unfair disadvantage on all of the others. Again, this can easily be avoided by blizzard, and solved. All you have to do is release the raids earlier (say after ~1 week of the expansion release) and release Mythic+ at the same time as Mythic raids. This way, players who tryhard can have an alt or 2 and clear Heroic 3 times but they won't have such an insane itemlevel that any content that is tuned for normal players is super easy for them.


3) Class Balance.

In terms of dick moves, I don't remember Blizzard tuning classes in the middle of the Heroic progression and then even reverting some of the changes by the end of the Heroic week. I think the general class tuning has never been worse. Exorsus has been smart to exploit some classes more than others. If you look at their raid comp on Xavius, you can see that they used 1 out of the 6 available tanks, 3 out of the 7 available melees, 3 out of the 6 available ranged and 4 out of the 5 available healers. Except for healers which seemed to be relatively well balanced, I find it amazing that so many classes didn't find their way into the Mythic kills of a raid. I know class stacking has been around forever but I don't remember it being so harsh as it has been this time.

Rebalancing classes in the middle of the heroic clear must have been a nightmare for the officers of the different guilds. If you add to that that some classes got upped right after getting nerfed, I think Blizzard's handling of the situation could have been better, certainly when you know that the time investment into a single char (Mythic+, Split Heroics, etc..) is such that you cannot change your main once the Heroic week has started.


4) Conclusion.

In the end, I feel like this progress was not a real one. I would have been interested in seeing a 2-3 progress at least because that's where real guilds shine and that's where luck starts to make place for pure skill, coordination and innovation. 18-hour races are not fun to anyone. After the disaster that WoD has been in terms of PvE, I hope that this expansion is'nt going to be one more fuck the HC players, they don't pay as much as our dear casuals expansion.

I really hope Blizzard adresses this whole world first problem as I feel that having a world first race is an important part of this game. People might think that what 0.1% of the population does is not important to a game but I strongly disagree with this idea. Think about League of Legends for example, it is the 0.1% that define what is played, what the meta is, why players try to improve, what builds are used, etc...


If you got to this part of my text block, thank you for reading and feel free to comment and debate below.

Sincerely, Zurgasse

[Irian]

I disagree strongly that the world first race is an important part of the game. Maybe a community like MMO-C would have you believe so but the extreme majority of the playerbase likely doesn't know and/or doesn't care about it, I can practically guarantee it.

This isn't a game like League of Legends where you can watch it and see exactly the kind of serious and competitive razor-edge environment it is. Raiding is comprised of co-op PvE encounters and all competition is purely created by the players themselves.

[Fritters154]

I'm like 99% certain that the legendaries were disabled in Mythic EN for the time being. There are certainly other things that would have made the race a bit flawed but Exorsus wasn't the best geared guild in the world and still won.

[hydrium]

In terms of dick moves, I don't remember Blizzard tuning classes in the middle of the Heroic progression and then even reverting some of the changes by the end of the Heroic week. I think the general class tuning has never been worse. Exorsus has been smart to exploit some classes more than others. If you look at their raid comp on Xavius, you can see that they used 1 out of the 6 available tanks, 3 out of the 7 available melees, 3 out of the 6 available ranged and 4 out of the 5 available healers. Except for healers which seemed to be relatively well balanced, I find it amazing that so many classes didn't find their way into the Mythic kills of a raid. I know class stacking has been around forever but I don't remember it being so harsh as it has been this time.

You don't remember Sunwell then. You played Destro lock or you rode a bench until content was on farm, boy I had so much fun spamming shadowbolt.

Edit: Oh, don't forget BM hunters that macro spammed! Even Shaman were stacked. You had exactly 1 Enh for the melee group, exactly 1 Ele for pity and 3 Resto because chain heal was broken as fuck and then you just rotated shaman through one DPS group to spam heroism.

[Pull My Finger]

I disagree strongly that the world first race is an important part of the game. Maybe a community like MMO-C would have you believe so but the extreme majority of the playerbase likely doesn't know and/or doesn't care about it, I can practically guarantee it.

Yeah, agreed. Nobody cares.

[Deleted]

Definitely agree on part 2 & 3 of your analysis, but importantly the combination of the 2. Several classes are so horribly undertuned for Mythic+ that it's a pain in the ass to get into pugs, diminishing your opportunity to join others on the Mythic+ spamfest gear RNG treadmill in order to trivialize raid encounters, where you're not desired as well.

Blizzard has an issue with both of these topics and they need to solve it.

[pmkaboo]

do you even get an achievement for world first?

[Zurgasse]

do you even get an achievement for world first?

No but it is said you have the diggest bick.

[Deleted]

I know class stacking has been around forever but I don't remember it being so harsh as it has been this time.

http://media.mmo-champion.com/images...f_killshot.jpg
It was.

[Kuruption]

Posts like these really make me wonder if people not in the race care more about this stuff than people in the race.

[BigAinCA]

World first means nothing to Blizzard (or me for that matter) as it is not a sanctioned competition so no need to do anything to make it more balanced and fair.

[Vapo]

Should have just not restricted and watered down Mythic+ and Tune the raid accordingly. Seems like they completely miscalculated the amount of AP people would have by the time raid opens and the amount of gear SPLITS would give. Sure they prolly got some nice pieces from M+ including legendaries, but blizz should have tuned the raid up to take these to account instead of tune down to "we did bare minimum of farming HC, mythic and one set of M+" every week.

[Arrowstormen]

Mythic+ is an alternative to raiding, Mythic raiding shouldn't be balanced around people having to do mythic+ dungeons.

And therefore it isn't.

[ryklin]

mythic+ gave kinda shitty gear, it was FAR less impactful than split runs, just go look at the gear on the raiders in these guilds, the ilvl cap on it is so low in these first few weeks (it won't even be able to give heroic level loot for a while now) (of course it can upgrade, but so can everything else available atm)

it's basically just like extra normal mode loot, seriously I highly doubt some extra 850 loot was make or breaking bosses, especially since most the guys in these guilds were 850+ well before normal/heroic raids came out

[Vapo]

mythic+ gave kinda shitty gear, it was FAR less impactful than split runs, just go look at the gear on the raiders in these guilds, the ilvl cap on it is so low in these first few weeks (it won't even be able to give heroic level loot for a while now), it's basically just like extra normal mode loot

Only way M+ gear was useful if it was titanforged, 850 pieces were useful if they were unlucky with Heroic/normal clear and didnt have a crafted item for that slot.

[Octa]

Mythic+ is an alternative to raiding, Mythic raiding shouldn't be balanced around people having to do mythic+ dungeons.

Well I guess it's a good thing that it isn't.

[Arrowstormen]

Well I guess it's a good thing that it isn't.

Yes, yes it is.

[willemh]

I agree that balance is really far off atm. And in a game where dps meters and logs are so prominent, thats really bad.

[Deleted]

Legendaries are super stupid. Our guild got unlucky and we've had little to no Legendaries drop and the ones that did drop weren't ones that increased peoples DPS. I think we have like 8 utility legendaries and 2 DPS ones.

As for Mythic+ I think it rewards too good gear too randomly. Running +2 is still equally as good as +6 because you can randomly get super good gear from +2 and it's a pretty decent chance to get a good piece of gear. So if your aiming for a top spot you feel forced to spam mythic+ dungeons. After you've spammed heroic dungeons before they came out hoping for a legendary that never dropped.

Blizz is awful with class balance for example. In Highmaul Blood DK's were nerf mid progression. In Hellfire citadel after PTR show'd that Frost DK's were super strong. Patch came and there was no nerfs. So all the top guilds funnelled all gear into Frost Dk's. Only for them to be nerfed 3 days later after all the gear had been funnelled into them. The reasoning behind the nerf was that they were doing too much damage. Even though DK's scale really poorly with gear. The nerf brought them to middle of the pack DPS and by the time progression was over they were at the bottom.

[lockedout]

[/B]

You don't remember Sunwell then. You played Destro lock or you rode a bench until content was on farm, boy I had so much fun spamming shadowbolt.

Edit: Oh, don't forget BM hunters that macro spammed! Even Shaman were stacked. You had exactly 1 Enh for the melee group, exactly 1 Ele for pity and 3 Resto because chain heal was broken as fuck and then you just rotated shaman through one DPS group to spam heroism.

Better have LW on that lock