Will raid tuning improve in ToV and Nighthold?

[ydraw]

When you give people 3 weeks to prep for a raid and several ways to rapidly gear up things are going to be easy. Plenty of raids went into heroic EN with an item level even or close to even of the loot dropped in there. So if and when people out gear content it is going to be simple to do. What is really sad are the guilds with an average item level in the 845 to 860 range still stuck in normal or just starting to do heroic. People aren't going to continue to spend the time and effort in raids when they rewards are less then other sources.

I think this was somewhat intended though. Mythic+ was intended to be an alternate endgame for some. If people are happier playing mythic+ than farming raids then I think Blizzard is fine with that.

Personally I'd much rather farm dungeon content than raid content.

[Alvito]

I think this was somewhat intended though. Mythic+ was intended to be an alternate endgame for some. If people are happier playing mythic+ than farming raids then I think Blizzard is fine with that.

Personally I'd much rather farm dungeon content than raid content.

It is certainly intended to allow people to have multiple ways to gear up or their own route to approach end game content or define what that is for them. The way we can spam mythic + is has a similar effect as them removing weekly lockouts on raids and just letting people spam those for infinite loot. This leaves us in a place where raids wont be tunes well for people that do both because they will out gear the crap out of it. If they raised the bar then that would force all the players to approach the game this way and spam off endless content and no life the game like they were pushing for High Marshall/Warlord in vanilla.

[Amantino]

http://www.wowprogress.com/ 60 guilds, 1200 people. "A lot". I have 1200 dollars in my account. Happy to see that it is "a lot"

Yeah, I geddit..."in previous x-pacs it tok people "longer"" wha..wha..wha... Ask yourself Is your guild one of the 60? So how are you all commenting on "messed up tuning"? Or are now all reporters and critics with a magic book that includes the line "And the game god came from heaven and proclaimed "A raid that is cleared by 60 guilds after two weeks is shit tuning"

Today is day 11 of Emerald Nightmare, 60 guilds are 7/7. At this time in Highmaul, less than 10 guilds had killed Imperator Mar'gok. It took 4 full weeks for 60 guilds to clear Highmaul. 4 days left of second reset and we're already at 60 guilds in current tier. Clearly something is off, considering Highmaul was a decently tuned entry raid imo.

Raid tuning is fine, except Xavius which is a complete joke. M+ grind combined with bullshit RNG loot is whats wrong, and Emerald Nightmare tuning gets the blame.

[Deleted]

If the raid was so easy why have so few raid groups cleared it? I read a lot of messages saying it is easy and Blizzard messed up but most of those people have not cleared the raid themselves yet. How can players say Xavius is easy if they have not personally beaten him?

Hi \o I raid in a 3-day guild with 12h/week. We never extend for extra days. We had a rather bad clear this week of the bosses we had killed previously, after which we downed Cenarius and Xavius on our second raid day, Thursday. Our average ilvl was 868.

Having done the encounter I can say Xavius mythic -is- a joke. We killed him on our 16th pull with a lot of those wipes simply being easy to avoid easy stupid mistakes. I personally like the fight but it kinda did feel like "was that it?" and I do feel it was missing something since it was rather easy to push over compared to Cenarius.

I do believe anyone who has done the encounter would agree that Xavius is a huge let-down after Cenarius; and that's probably why people repeat it even if they haven't done it. They hear the top-players saying it was a joke and thus believe it in addition to having the numbers of people having beaten the encounter.
As I'm typing this there's 60 guilds who have killed Xavius - and 61 that have killed Cenarius. After that is least kills 126 in Il'gynoth. The numbers make it quite clear, Xavius is pretty much a "free kill" if you're able to defeat Cenarius.

I personally think it's alright as it is the first raid. I suspect the following raids will be a lot tougher to beat having some alpha/beta testing experience and somewhat remembering what the fights are like.
Addons being gimped will also contribute to more difficulty on many fights for many people.

[Thelxi]

Things should improve slightly once Blizzard can balance around fully completed artifacts. The way gear works this expansion though there will always be a huge discrepancy between people that are blessed with good legendaries and titanforged gear, and those that get terrible legendaries and regular gear.

[TheWindWalker]

My guild finished Normal in a few hours then couldn't survive heroic Dragons despite three-healing an 11-man run. The raid is plenty difficult for the average raider.

[mistahwilshire]

I side with the cats. Cats have shit figured out.

[kamuimac]

Regardless of the level you raid at, you've probably noticed how easy Emerald Nightmare is compared to what you normally do. They clearly messed up badly. (Imo caused by testing stuff at standardized ilvls not accounting for +30-40 ilvls on weapon as is case on live being a big culprit)

Will they have enough time to fix their tuning targets for Trial of Valor and Nighthold?

the tuning isnt any easier - people have just more and more experience with each tier - with each passing month tha huge gap between mythic mode junkies and average joe is geting wider and wider - just because mythic guilds cleared hc so fast it doesnt mean its easy or easier then hc hfc was - its still content that will be done by 10 % of playerbase while majority will be wiping and progressing in normal modes.

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. M+ grind combined with bullshit RNG loot is whats wrong, and Emerald Nightmare tuning gets the blame.

which is ok think with mythci + part (rng is bs indeed ) - just because 1000-2000 people on absolute top cleared the mode faster because of it is a price that majority is glad to pay for maving more possibilities in game. thats less then 0,5 % of playerbase that it affects.

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I The way we can spam mythic + is has a similar effect as them removing weekly lockouts on raids and just letting people spam those for infinite loot.

and would it be a that bad thing ? majrity of players wouldnt have time for more then 1-2 clears for week anyway the only part that it woudl affect would be jobless basement dwellers.

same with mythic + spam - are people really that delusional that general playerbase is spaming them ? pls dont joke -_- the only ones spaming them are mythic junkies in organized guild groups . rest is stuck trying to get in and spends hours trying to get in and do just 1 run because they are ocnstantly declined from groups

[antelope591]

Its slightly undertuned, but with mythic+ and titanforged what do you expect? People never went into a raid needing less gear from the actual raid before. If Xavius wasn't undertuned it wouldn't even be a problem really....its nice for more casual guilds to clear content while its still relevant. People are kinda shell shocked after HFC too because that raid was hard as fuck in the grand scheme of things. BRF was no joke either. So you have EN after those 2 raids, its understandable that people are caught off guard. I think Nighthold will tell us a lot more about Blizz's direction going forward. Easier raids and faster content? Or EN was just an unforeseen anomaly? We'll see.

[thebdc]

I can only imagine that Blizz didn't foresee people doing mythic +2 boosts all day long. Without that people would probably not have that high itemlevel and artifact power.

[Deleted]

Mythic Raids should be endgame content for hardcore and highly dedicated players. They are massively eroding that by trying to make it accessible to way too many people.

Ursoc was meant to be your traditional dps race, we beat the enrage by 30 seconds on week 1.
Ilganoth was a complete fuckup.
Xavius was a failure of their internal testing, we're fairly convinced that there must have been more to the fight but their internal testing was too weak.
Mythic+10 dungeons are harder than any Mythic raid encounter.

I really hope there has been an internal investigation as to why it was such a failure, because for us to wait 1 year and get this is totally unacceptable.

[Otimus]

Gearing in general is just was paced at a weird rate for the kind of players that did "everything", especially pre-EN release, it's sort of a problem that'll fix itself, unless they wind up raising the base ilvl WQ's and some other content gives. It was just a bit too easy to get 850 gear in the first week or two of Legion. Even without bothering much with mythics/being decently casual with what you play. (Which brings up all sorts of other problems that has caused, which, again, will be a self correcting problem once more content is out to consume.) Granted, what I'm saying has nothing to do with tuning, and to do with how the gear ilvls are/were handled.

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Mythic Raids should be endgame content for hardcore and highly dedicated players. They are massively eroding that by trying to make it accessible to way too many people.

Ursoc was meant to be your traditional dps race, we beat the enrage by 30 seconds on week 1.
Ilganoth was a complete fuckup.
Xavius was a failure of their internal testing, we're fairly convinced that there must have been more to the fight but their internal testing was too weak.
Mythic+10 dungeons are harder than any Mythic raid encounter.

I really hope there has been an internal investigation as to why it was such a failure, because for us to wait 1 year and get this is totally unacceptable.

Personally, as silly as it seems to say this, I think Blizzard never really entertained the idea of people doing multiple forms of content, and how it'd effect the other. A lot of their decisions seem to implicate as such, as it's sort of easy to invalidate several forms of content or content difficulties if you do alternate things, rather than them working in tandem somehow or another. But it did have the effect of having many alternate gearing paths, which was a bonus! They just really need to watch that ilvl distribution. IMHO, we probably should have been restricted to 840 pre-EN, and crafted gear should have only been able to go that high then too, then the cap should have gone up a to 865 at EN launch, then 880 at mythic launch, then 895 maybe two weeks later, not all shot up all at once in two doses like it was.(850 at launch, 895 EN release), though, I guess you could still let legendaries ignore that.

That's why I think this is mostly going to be a problem that'll fix itself, unless they delay EN for a really long time, or the 3 boss raid drops insanely good loot. EN just had the unfortunate opportunity to be dropped in at a spot when gear inflation was insane to the point where someone who just did WQ's and Heroics could probably of found himself able to ignore ol' basic EN normal, even, if he was diligent pre-release, and possibly of even made Heroic somewhat trivial.

[Beace]

I don't think this "RNG" a lot of people talk about is an issue when it comes to balancing raids. It's not hard for Blizzard to work out an expected average ilvl of a raid team, based on their commitment. You as a player might have had bad luck with warforged gear and legendaries, but that also means someone else in your raiding team had good luck. You'll cancel each other out and the raiding team as a whole can perform by a certain standard that isn't RNG-based. Obviously a few outliers will always exist.

It's obvious Blizzard failed with the tuning of EN. Even if you want to believe that they purposely made the first raid easier, that wouldn't explain why the last boss is so much easier than the ones before him. It's extremely rare that the last boss of a raid instance is not the hardest one, and there's no reason to think Blizzard would ever do that on purpose.

[Amantino]

which is ok think with mythci + part (rng is bs indeed ) - just because 1000-2000 people on absolute top cleared the mode faster because of it is a price that majority is glad to pay for maving more possibilities in game. thats less then 0,5 % of playerbase that it affects.

How is that ok? People doing LFR shouldn't get same ilvl loot as Mythic raid. Rewards should reflect the difficulty, LFR should give garbage gear. Ruining the game for those who actually raid seriously is not acceptable so every casual and their mother can get titanforged gear.

[Echocho]

There's no way to tune fixed difficulty content for our current RNG loot model. It really needs to go.

It will be absolutely impossible to tune the raids when the average item level l from two guilds can differ by 20-30 because of RNG alone.

In the past they could tune the encounters because they knew at exactly what iLvl everyone would be at, now they have no idea.

[Echo of Soul]

It's an interesting dilemma. If you tune ToV heroic for iLvl 865 which is the heroic iLvl in EN those that got lucky and had a lot of titanforging are just gonna burn through it way too fast. If they tune it expecting that everyone will have titanforged up to an average of let's say 875 it will be impossible for some guilds who didn't get lucky with the RNG.

I think the best solution is to normalize all gear from the previous tier so that once you enter the new raid titanforging is disabled and gear returned to their base values. Otherwise tuning is just going to be impossible.

[Beace]

It will be absolutely impossible to tune the raids when the average item level l from two guilds can differ by 20-30 because of RNG alone.

In the past they could tune the encounters because they knew at exactly what iLvl everyone would be at, now they have no idea.

There's no way the average ilvl of two guilds is gonna differ that much, assuming the two guilds have similar goals. If one guild is very casual and the other one is aiming for world firsts and spend 15 hours per day working on their gear, then yeah the difference is obviously gonna be big. But that's not a problem. The raid can be designed around the ilvl of the top guilds, then a few weeks or months later other guilds reach that same content and also have a high ilvl.

[kamuimac]

How is that ok? People doing LFR shouldn't get same ilvl loot as Mythic raid. Rewards should reflect the difficulty, LFR should give garbage gear. Ruining the game for those who actually raid seriously is not acceptable so every casual and their mother can get titanforged gear.

and why so ? so you could finally feel that you acomplished something with your pathetic life by playing computer game ? mythic crybaby at its fullest - everyone needs to feel like shit just so you could feel acomplisment ?

look at FFXIV - people there have no problem that crafted gear is on the same level as this obtainable from raiding - but ah yes maybe thats because the level of toxicity is much lover there due to square weeding out and straight banning people who show this kind of behaviour and comments like yours. + square simply bans all kind of recount clones because they knew that it doesnt bring anything to game beside toxic behaviour.

Infracted - Djriff

[Beace]

To give some perspective, the top guilds right now have an average ilvl around 872. Guilds ranked around 400 have an average ilvl around 867. That's not a huge difference, certainly not as big as some of you make it sound. RNG evens out with more people (i e raids) and time.

Now with those numbers in mind, EN mythic should probably have been designed around ilvl 865 or so. This stuff isn't hard to figure out, and Blizzard should certainly have been able to do it.

It's also worth noting that the guilds that have 870+ average ilvl don't have it because they got lucky. They have it because they worked their ass off gearing up before raids, and then clearing Mythic bosses for a few weeks.

[OrcsRLame]

I'm honestly very torn. By the time NH comes out, players in top guilds will be packing lots of 895 gear, and even some 895 socketed gear. I feel like, based on NH dropping 905+ gear on mythic, 895 socketed gear is probably close to good enough to kill mythic Gul'dan.

Tbh, I think to tune NH properly, they need to increase the ilvl that drops from it by another 10, and increase the health/damage of the bosses to compensate, otherwise we will see an even faster clear than with EN.

On the other hand, Cenarius was tuned fairly well. If he was a smidge harder, and Ursoc was a little more gear intensive than Cenarius, and then Xavius was tuned to be like Margok, (17 minute fight) then we may have had a first raid that lasted more than a week.