Nighthold difficulty

[hablix]

Finally got a chance to check out Nighthold Normal. I'm a weekends-only raider, usually a PUG player, and my initial thoughts:

THANK YOU BLIZZARD FOR GETTING NORMAL RAID TUNING RIGHT THIS TIME!

Contrary to what everyone around here says, I think Emerald Nightmare N/H was fine, no comment on Mythic, and I was supremely disappointed with the direction they took with ToV initially. However my initial experience with Nighthold - which was only downing Elisande and Gul'dan so far, mind you - is overwhelmingly positive. The fights are challenging with interesting mechanics without clobberstomping your raid with ridiculous damage output and ridiculous DPS checks. Not to mention the fights themselves were incredibly fun!

No comment on Heroic. I am just beaming with joy that Blizzard finally hit the Normal tuning nail on the head in a follow up raid. Highmaul was great, Blackrock Foundry was a failure (causing me to quit WoD for the rest of the expansion as a direct result); Emerald Nightmare was great, ToV was a failure (initially), but Nighthold is great again.

[Vuagnon]

Should have been made slightly harder imo.

[Jaewalk]

Where are you coming up with these "tuned for 35, 45 and 54 traits? I cleared normal with NH with 28 as a tank, h helya Pre-nerf with 20, I just did the first 6 bosses last night in h nah pug with 35. There is no balance around AP numbers. Simply dps/heal mechanic checks..there are a lot more variables that come into play than AP.

[Jastall]

Where are you coming up with these "tuned for 35, 45 and 54 traits? I cleared normal with NH with 28 as a tank, h helya Pre-nerf with 20, I just did the first 6 bosses last night in h nah pug with 35. There is no balance around AP numbers. Simply dps/heal mechanic checks..there are a lot more variables that come into play than AP.

54 traits is a 15% increase in DPS, which is significant. 35th trait alone is a 5% increase. When it comes to fine-tuning Mythic raids, this must be taken into consideration.

That said, I do agree that people fixate on AP a bit too much. If you aren't in a world-first race guild, it doesn't matter all that much.

[stevenho]

Finally got a chance to check out Nighthold Normal. I'm a weekends-only raider, usually a PUG player, and my initial thoughts:

THANK YOU BLIZZARD FOR GETTING NORMAL RAID TUNING RIGHT THIS TIME!

my initial experience with Nighthold - which was only downing Elisande and Gul'dan so far, mind you - is overwhelmingly positive. The fights are challenging

You cleared the raid in 1 night and call it challenging? Hilarious.

[Sarevokcz]

All of the bosses are pretty easy on normal.... until we got to Botanist.

Last night we wiped on Botanist 12 times before we killed it. The lashers are rough, and there is very little room for error. I would say that fight is a little overtuned for normal, but that is just my opinion so far. All of the other bosses that our guild has seen were very easy.

we just did it on out alts and after the issues we had with main raid, i was expecting something similar, but i had tar trap and binding shot for every single spawn, made it retardedly easy to deal with, even with only like 4 ranged in 22man raid. made me wonder what the heck were our three hunters doing in main raid

but normal is really easy, we had like 3 good dps and were carrying 250k dps alts through most of the normal raid, made me rank pretty high on some bosses, since i could pad on adds alot more.

[Deleted]

You cleared the raid in 1 night and call it challenging? Hilarious.

Basically he's saying:

"Thanks blizzard for making the raid easy enough so I never have to wipe. I quit the game every time a boss takes me more than 10 wipes to kill"

Honestly it's sad to see what has become of the people playing this game

[ping-pong]

That's literally a number, though, you have to define "very skilled". It's entirely subjective.

I do personally like having static stat profiles. Maybe some choices, different talents, legendaries that you can easily choose and swap between. The current high end is quite heavily based on time spent doing relatively trivial content like m+ spamming across 5 characters, split running across several difficulties etc - a huge amount of hours unless you want a serious handicap compared to the top 10, top 100 guilds.

Since when is skill subjective? Maybe to people who think "i r ze best, somehow it just doesnt show". By comparing logs, by watching them play, you can easily and objectively say which player is more skilled.
The thing is, whatever you want to compete in at high end... you have to go through huge amount of repetitions. Do you think that Federer just goes out to court and by some miracle in his DNA he is that good? He hit the ball in training millions of times, perfecting every aspect of the game. What you see on the court is a result of his preparations. Likewise, WF racers do 10000 mythics; yes, for gear, but also to practice rotations and reaction times to mechanics and many other things.
I'll tell you a story about a Korean guy on some RTS lan tournament. Days before the tournament he couldn't beat top 2 guys in many games they played. When they came to the tournament, he sat down and spent hours perfecting first 10 seconds of the game (not exaggerating!), resetting after each try. Then he did the same with some other aspects of the game. The others went sightseeing and played just a few warm up games. None of the games were even close, he just ran over everyone, including the 2 guys he couldn't beat just days before.
This is what it takes if you wanna do high end. In anything. Because if you don't, some guy will, and you can't really challenge him without practicing as hard This shouldn't be frustrating to the guy who doesn't want to or can't dedicate that much time. It's normal. I don't play games competitively anymore because my career is elsewhere. I say GJ to racers, and when I kill M bosses I really don't feel like I beat the hardest part of the game. Because, although it was challenging for me, I do realize I did it with quite a few ilvls above what's needed and by copying the strat the top guys came up with and by doing the rotation i read on a guide. It's really a shame I have the same achievements as they do Not all cutting edges are the same.

[hablix]

You cleared the raid in 1 night and call it challenging? Hilarious.

Different definitions. Challenging doesn't have to mean wiping on a boss for 3 hours. In any case I'm saying it's appropriately challenging for the NORMAL difficulty setting, I have no comment on Heroic and I couldn't possibly care less about how hard Mythic raids are. Also I didn't clear the raid in one night, I did the last two bosses only, and it did in fact take several attempts each with a well geared group of decent players. (Well geared in this case means our average ilvl was right around the ilvl of the loot dropped by the bosses in question.)

- - - Updated - - -

Basically he's saying:

"Thanks blizzard for making the raid easy enough so I never have to wipe. I quit the game every time a boss takes me more than 10 wipes to kill"

Honestly it's sad to see what has become of the people playing this game

Pretty much. Hopefully Blizzard gets Mythic right, that way you can have just as much fun wiping your ass off for hours on end in Mythic as I'm having making steady, 0-3 wipe per boss progress with PUG groups in Normal. That way we can both be happy and Blizzard can keep taking both our $15/month.

[Deavane]

The raid is WAY too hard.

As I wrote in another thread, MoPs Flex Mode changed name to the Normal mode we know today.

NH Normal should be equally difficult as SoO Flex and it's not. It's way, way harder.

I only killed 4 bosses Normal the first day, while I expected a full clear and maybe a few HC bosses but no way José.

Compare that to Emerald Nightmare where I cleared 5/7 HC the first day and full Normal on 2 characters. Emerald Nightmare was balanced, this is not.

EN was a pushover.

[Free]

Was flex SOO that easy or just always carried by people in heroic gear?

[WskyDK]

Elisande is pretty fun, but goddamn I can't wait to see her dead.

[hablix]

Was flex SOO that easy or just always carried by people in heroic gear?

Personally I think so far Nighthold Normal matches SoO Flex almost perfectly.

The first 3 bosses of Nighthold are on par with bosses 2-4 of SoO Flex 1st wing. (The first boss of SoO Flex as I recall was easier than anything in Nighthold, following bosses might have taken an attempt or three for first time first-week PUGs.)

Spellblade Aluriel is on par with Dark Shamans - possibly a tad heavier on healing, hard to say because I was DPS then and healer now. Krosus feels about on par with Iron Juggernaut. Those bosses are right where 2nd wing SoO was when it first hit.

Elisande and Gul'dan feel exactly on par with with the final wing of SoO Flex when it launched. Siegecrafter and Garrosh in particular were not easy bosses to PUG the first week they were out. It took me the full week to get those two down, and that was when they were released one wing at a time. They got easily farmable later - with full sets of SoO flex gear, valor upgrades, and people learning the strats.

I haven't done Tichondrius, Botanist or Star Augur yet but I'm pretty damn optimistic they're going to be on par with the likes of Malkorok and Thok the Bloodthirsty, which again weren't gimmes for PUG groups the first week or so - but were reasonably achievable with enough patience.

I really disagree with people saying Nighthold Normal is harder than SoO Flex and therefore is too hard. When taking the progression curve of the raid into consideration I think Nighthold Normal is right where SoO Flex was at when each respective wing launched. People are confusing SoO Flex at launch with SoO flex six months later. I predict that Nighthold Normal will become easily farmable for PUG groups in the weeks to come. I'm saying this as someone who has all along been clamoring for Blizzard to err on the side of making Normal too easy rather than too hard - thankfully I think they got it just right.

[jayheals]

Having both healed and DPS'd normal NH in very casual raid groups, my advice for any group struggling the least bit is to drop a healer. The DPS checks actually exist to some extent, you can't have a bunch of DPS doin under 300k, but healing was a complete snooze. Even if a mechanic hit somewhat hard, it always felt like there was plenty of time to recover. This is a generalized statement, but I think it's solid advice. This tier should be the final nail in the coffin for 2/4/9, at least on normal (yes i realize 2/4/9 has been long dead but ppl still do it so idk).

[Akka]

Different definitions. Challenging doesn't have to mean wiping on a boss for 3 hours. In any case I'm saying it's appropriately challenging for the NORMAL difficulty setting

If you're a normal raider and you clear the raid the first week, then no it's not challenging. You're ridiculous.

[Daffan]

Basically he's saying:

"Thanks blizzard for making the raid easy enough so I never have to wipe. I quit the game every time a boss takes me more than 10 wipes to kill"

Honestly it's sad to see what has become of the people playing this game

Then in 2 weeks, since they don't want to go up difficulties they complain there is nothing to do and then go on hiatus till next patch.

[Tradu]

I think people are delusional when it comes to the amount of people they think have more than 35 traits.

That would be an interesting stat to have.

I'm 9/10M and at 39 traits, and I have done the raids in all difficulties all xpac so far and never missed one single emissary.. just avoiding mythic+ like the plague.

Considering I have 30-35 traits in a bunch of my alts' mainspecs just from doing follower missions and then a week of emissaries just before 7.1.5 launched, if people don't have 35 at this point they're not actually playing the game.

[Dawon]

Finally got a chance to check out Nighthold Normal. I'm a weekends-only raider, usually a PUG player, and my initial thoughts:

THANK YOU BLIZZARD FOR GETTING NORMAL RAID TUNING RIGHT THIS TIME!

Contrary to what everyone around here says, I think Emerald Nightmare N/H was fine, no comment on Mythic, and I was supremely disappointed with the direction they took with ToV initially. However my initial experience with Nighthold - which was only downing Elisande and Gul'dan so far, mind you - is overwhelmingly positive. The fights are challenging with interesting mechanics without clobberstomping your raid with ridiculous damage output and ridiculous DPS checks. Not to mention the fights themselves were incredibly fun!

No comment on Heroic. I am just beaming with joy that Blizzard finally hit the Normal tuning nail on the head in a follow up raid. Highmaul was great, Blackrock Foundry was a failure (causing me to quit WoD for the rest of the expansion as a direct result); Emerald Nightmare was great, ToV was a failure (initially), but Nighthold is great again.

No offense dude but it's pretty fukking far from tunes right.. my guild is mostly a HC guild and we went in there and killed 6 bosses in 2hrs, basically no idea of tactics (except for the first 3 which we read up on) and had a grand total of 2 wipes.. i.e. 4 oneshots on bosses we never seen. Granted we're in 870-880 gear but we still had a WAY harder time in normal ToV ffs... NH is retarded... it's LFR-mode in normal now... I bet heroic gonna feel like normal as well... super disappointed, we're gonna sit with this for 6months+ now and I dont see the appeal last at all if it's so easily cleared, even on normal...

[Akakishin]

Finally got a chance to check out Nighthold Normal. I'm a weekends-only raider, usually a PUG player, and my initial thoughts:

THANK YOU BLIZZARD FOR MAKING NORMAL RAID EASY THIS TIME!

Fixed it for you.

[Tradu]

No offense dude but it's pretty fukking far from tunes right.. my guild is mostly a HC guild and we went in there and killed 6 bosses in 2hrs, basically no idea of tactics (except for the first 3 which we read up on) and had a grand total of 2 wipes.. i.e. 4 oneshots on bosses we never seen. Granted we're in 870-880 gear but we still had a WAY harder time in normal ToV ffs... NH is retarded... it's LFR-mode in normal now... I bet heroic gonna feel like normal as well... super disappointed, we're gonna sit with this for 6months+ now and I dont see the appeal last at all if it's so easily cleared, even on normal...

Nah, heroic has actual mechanics, on normal they took all the ones that can wipe you out(like all the add abilities on Spellblade)