Blizzard needs to no longer balance Mythic for Method.

[Deleted]

Too many useless pages... the raids when they open should be hard, very hard. Truth is if they made them easier, Method and top 5 world guilds would clear the whole instance in few days. It's not a big deal if they are hard in the beginning since the huge majority of the mythic raiding guilds cant even get to the hard bosses for weeks so it really doesnt affect them at all.

What one could argue is that TOS was on average too hard, and should have been nerfed way earlier, and that i totally agree. I think NH was tuned fine, and guldan after 4 months had almost twice the kills KJ has now. The problem with TOS was that Blizzard should have nerfed mistress about a month earlier than they did, and ava/kj 2 months ago.

Its kinda amazing how Blizzard after 12 years still doesnt learn from its mistakes, take the dungeon COEN, they agreed they should have nerfed it way way sooner, yet they put now SotT which is the same cancer COEN was, much higher by all standards compared to other dungeons, and I bet they wont nerf it soon, thus repeating the same mistake they did it with COEN.

So the problem with raids its not that they are very hard at the beginning, its that sometimes they stay too hard too long, and considering the history Blizzard has, and the fact mythic raiders are about 5% (probably less) of the whole WoW population, I doubt Blizz will actually care too much about it.

[Argorwal]

Too many useless pages... the raids when they open should be hard, very hard. Truth is if they made them easier, Method and top 5 world guilds would clear the whole instance in few days. It's not a big deal if they are hard in the beginning since the huge majority of the mythic raiding guilds cant even get to the hard bosses for weeks so it really doesnt affect them at all.

What one could argue is that TOS was on average too hard, and should have been nerfed way earlier, and that i totally agree. I think NH was tuned fine, and guldan after 4 months had almost twice the kills KJ has now. The problem with TOS was that Blizzard should have nerfed mistress about a month earlier than they did, and ava/kj 2 months ago.

Its kinda amazing how Blizzard after 12 years still doesnt learn from its mistakes, take the dungeon COEN, they agreed they should have nerfed it way way sooner, yet they put now SotT which is the same cancer COEN was, much higher by all standards compared to other dungeons, and I bet they wont nerf it soon, thus repeating the same mistake they did it with COEN.

So the problem with raids its not that they are very hard at the beginning, its that sometimes they stay too hard too long, and considering the history Blizzard has, and the fact mythic raiders are about 5% (probably less) of the whole WoW population, I doubt Blizz will actually care too much about it.

KJ was mechanically officially nerfed after the second kill.

Then it was nerfed again.

Then again.

And now a final time.

Who knows, maybe another round in 2 weeks as well.

I don't know where this "they wait until the end to nerf KJ" comes from because he saw nerfs since the literal second kill.

The discussion should instead be "the skill gap is so wide between top 5 to top 100 that even after 4 sets of mechanical and turning nerfs KJ is still an incredibly hard fight".

This doesn't even count power creep from artifacts and NLC.

[Deleted]

KJ was mechanically officially nerfed after the second kill.

Then it was nerfed again.

Then again.

And now a final time.

Who knows, maybe another round in 2 weeks as well.

I don't know where this "they wait until the end to nerf KJ" comes from because he saw nerfs since the literal second kill.

The discussion should instead be "the skill gap is so wide between top 5 to top 100 that even after 4 sets of mechanical and turning nerfs KJ is still an incredibly hard fight".

This doesn't even count power creep from artifacts and NLC.

Read my post again, its obvious the nerfs to KJ werent enough. If you have twice the kills on guldan in the same time its obvious something was messed up. KJ was WAY WAY overtuned since the beginning, after the nerfs it was still much harder than guldan ever was, hell even now is harder than guldan was after 4 months.

One could argue that EN was a joke, NH too easy, and TOS is how it should be, but no one can argue that TOS was as hard as NH, because its bullshit.

From my point of view (just killed KJ), i think NH was fine, and TOS too hard. I guess people that cleared TOS months ago will argue that TOS was fine, obviously in the end only matter what Blizzard actually wants, there isnt a RIGHT tuning. It all depends on how many people actually you want to see clearing the whole raid before a new one opens.

[Deleted]

+- 50 new Avatar kills this reset (so far)
+- 50 new KJ kills this reset (so far)

Seems to be a bit more compared to last reset, I think we'll see another nerf next week if the patch lands.

- - - Updated - - -

Read my post again, its obvious the nerfs to KJ werent enough. If you have twice the kills on guldan in the same time its obvious something was messed up. KJ was WAY WAY overtuned since the beginning, after the nerfs it was still much harder than guldan ever was, hell even now is harder than guldan was after 4 months.

One could argue that EN was a joke, NH too easy, and TOS is how it should be, but no one can argue that TOS was as hard as NH, because its bullshit.

From my point of view (just killed KJ), i think NH was fine, and TOS too hard. I guess people that cleared TOS months ago will argue that TOS was fine, obviously in the end only matter what Blizzard actually wants, there isnt a RIGHT tuning. It all depends on how many people actually you want to see clearing the whole raid before a new one opens.

KJ -> 98 days -> 285 or 2,9 kills per day (at 89 days it was 2,38 kills per day).
GD -> 98 days -> 565 or 5,7 kills per days (at 89 days it was 4,3 kills per day).

For KJ being brutally tuned, and GD being mediocre tuned, I don't think KJ is doing that bad kill wise.
(Obviously it's going to be less than GD, but I don't think that's a problem tbh, the 1% kill goal will be met soon).

This week KJ kill wise has been the best week thus far, already 50 kills, still 3 full days left.

[Hctaz]

Warlords of Draenor, despite it's numerous issues with daily content, had the best most well tuned raiding content that we've ever had. The difficulty curve inner-raid and inter-raid was perfect, where bosses in HFC like Velhari or Xul which were step ups from Socrethar or Zakuun were off on the sides. Gorefiend himself was on a differently level from the awful balancing jump from Trilliax to Aluriel in Nighthold.

Nowadays, raid balancing feels more slapdash, with difficulty jumps seemingly at random, and causing guilds to hit a wall grind for weeks to clear it, then breeze through bosses that were objectively easier, such as pre-nerf Aluriel being harder than the bosses after her. And while you could skip Aluriel, it made progress through a raid very awkward.

Not only that, there's the issue where instead of what we had in HFC which was in hindsight a damn near-perfectly tuned raid, so much of Legion raiding is meant to make bosses not get easier as you overgear them. Which was done to fight Titanforging, but ended up crushing guilds which relied on farm content and fast re-kills to keep guild morale up during progression. This has made raiding farm content in Legion a slog and this philosophy has culminated with Kil'jaeden to the point where many guilds won't even bother with Kil'jaeden for weeks even after getting their kill.

Simply put, raids should not be balanced around those who raid 16 hours a week. Say what you want about difficulty, but the raid balancing through out Legion both inner raid and inter raid has been the worst, potentially of any expansion so far.

Emerald Nightmare - only Cenarius and Ilgynoth could be considered Mythic bosses
TOV - Odin and Guarm were Mythic, with Helya being Mythic+
NH - After Trilliax the difficulty curve jumps, it does so again on Astronomancer, and many guilds often felt Elisandre to be more frustrating to progress on than Gul'dan which was actually a well designed fight.
ToS - Balancing is fine for the most part, and then you get to Avatar who is a Mythic+ fight, and KJ who is Mythic++

Compare this to HFC where outside of Gorefiend (which was a skill check not a dps or gear check, and wasnt' that difficult) there was a smooth progression from the easy Hellfire Assault to the hard Archimonde, there were no insane jumps where it felt like you were skipping a difficulty level.

In short, Legion has probably been one of the worst expansions for raiders, with Blizzard tuning the hardest content for one guild that raids 12-16 hours and having to overtune that content for Titanforging which should never be able to go higher than current tier mythic gear in ilevel.

The entire problem is the availability (and intensity) of titanforging. This was the reason EN was so easy and the other raids seem so hard in comparison to previous expansions. Method downed Goroth mythic on the first day Mythic opened in item level 931 average item level. There's a problem with the game when you can walk into a raid in better gear than the raid even drops. This is why EN was so easy. They tuned it with the old style of WoW in mind where you took time to gear up to the item level of the raid. They didn't expect Method and other top guilds to vastly surpass the item level that the raid instance was designed with in mind, so EN was a joke of a raid. Tomb was designed with the top guilds farming habits in mind, and that's why Avatar and KJ were so difficult. They purposefully designed those fights to be doable with more than 940 item level even though the raid drops 930. We need to get rid of those cancerous design so that titanforge can go back to being a rare bonus that help you overgear the content rather than a necessity to even clear the fucking place.


Like... a boss can still die in a week if Method grinds on it for 16 hours a day, but when they take that same 16 hours running 7+ heroic split runs and farming Mythic plus, the gap between average player and top guild becomes fucking HUGE. The difference in MoP/WoD was that the top guilds would run so many split farm runs that they'd be fully geared in normal or heroic gear before walking into heroic or mythic. They'd have the tier and the trinkets but they would be the heroic version. If this same system was in place today, they would have walked into Mythic Tomb with an item level average of maybe 920-925 instead of walking in with 931. It's much harder for an average guild to complete the raid when they have to build them with this insane grind in mind. When they have to tune KJ to be killed in 940+ item level when the raid only drops 930 baseline... that's just fucking stupid to me. It blows my fucking mind. Titanforge is SUPPOSED to be a fucking bonus, not a requirement.

[Jastall]

No one said it should be stupid easy. But when it takes 2 full weeks for a top tier guild to clear it and others months later then something is wrong with the overall difficulty. It truly is. Especially on a fight like Kiljaeden where it starts becoming boring due to how long the fight is.

Blizzard has indeed acknowledged that Avatar and KJ were overtuned. At this point all we can do is hope they learned from that and Antorus is more reasonable.

[Deleted]

The entire problem is the availability (and intensity) of titanforging. This was the reason EN was so easy and the other raids seem so hard in comparison to previous expansions. Method downed Goroth mythic on the first day Mythic opened in item level 931 average item level. There's a problem with the game when you can walk into a raid in better gear than the raid even drops. This is why EN was so easy. They tuned it with the old style of WoW in mind where you took time to gear up to the item level of the raid. They didn't expect Method and other top guilds to vastly surpass the item level that the raid instance was designed with in mind, so EN was a joke of a raid. Tomb was designed with the top guilds farming habits in mind, and that's why Avatar and KJ were so difficult. They purposefully designed those fights to be doable with more than 940 item level even though the raid drops 930. We need to get rid of those cancerous design so that titanforge can go back to being a rare bonus that help you overgear the content rather than a necessity to even clear the fucking place.


Like... a boss can still die in a week if Method grinds on it for 16 hours a day, but when they take that same 16 hours running 7+ heroic split runs and farming Mythic plus, the gap between average player and top guild becomes fucking HUGE. The difference in MoP/WoD was that the top guilds would run so many split farm runs that they'd be fully geared in normal or heroic gear before walking into heroic or mythic. They'd have the tier and the trinkets but they would be the heroic version. If this same system was in place today, they would have walked into Mythic Tomb with an item level average of maybe 920-925 instead of walking in with 931. It's much harder for an average guild to complete the raid when they have to build them with this insane grind in mind. When they have to tune KJ to be killed in 940+ item level when the raid only drops 930 baseline... that's just fucking stupid to me. It blows my fucking mind. Titanforge is SUPPOSED to be a fucking bonus, not a requirement.

I dont think they tune raids based on TF equipped people, TF was around even before NH, yet NH had a fine overall tuning. I think they just messed tuning on mistress/ava/KJ, and the problem is that Blizzard always takes too long to fix things. As i wrote earlier, see even the fiasco of COEN (another dungeon they admitted was too hard) and the repeating mistake with SotT now (obviously too hard if you consider it drops same level of gear of any other dungeon).

What upsets me is not that they make mistakes, after all its much easier for them to tune them too hard (which then they can fix it with a nerf) than tune too easy (which they cant fix at all since buffing a boss after someone else has killed it would piss everyone off). What upsets me is that it takes them so long to fix stuff.

[Hctaz]

I dont think they tune raids based on TF equipped people, TF was around even before NH, yet NH had a fine overall tuning. I think they just messed tuning on mistress/ava/KJ, and the problem is that Blizzard always takes too long to fix things. As i wrote earlier, see even the fiasco of COEN (another dungeon they admitted was too hard) and the repeating mistake with SotT now (obviously too hard if you consider it drops same level of gear of any other dungeon).

What upsets me is not that they make mistakes, after all its much easier for them to tune them too hard (which then they can fix it with a nerf) than tune too easy (which they cant fix at all since buffing a boss after someone else has killed it would piss everyone off). What upsets me is that it takes them so long to fix stuff.

No, they 100% tuned around TF this time. There's no other explanation for why KJ was tuned so tightly. The guilds literally had to say "Fuck it" and go farm Mythic plus INSTEAD of raiding on week three of the raid tier, and he didn't die until after nerfs PLUS the guilds were already in 941 item level. They even admitted to tuning around the top guilds so that they could have a race. Tuning around top guilds means tuning the raid boss to be killed in higher item level than 930, which means they're tuning bosses with the forged system in mind. And I wouldn't say NH tuning was fine. It was still tuned to be difficult for them (which means they had to tune it around titanforging since, once again, guilds were getting to Gul'dan with 5+ item levels than the base mythic gear even drops) but they also nerfed the bosses much faster and more significantly. Nighthold might have also not been entirely tuned around TF since it was a raid being tested alongside EN in beta. It was tested briefly afterwards, but they obviously wouldn't want to significantly adjust things last minute and end up with a fiasco. I truly believe that Tomb was the first time they built and tuned a raid with TF in mind, and it showed.

But the biggest point is the fact that these bosses were not designed with people in 930-932 item level in mind as they should have. In MoP, forging bonuses were all bonus. I don't know how WoD worked since I skipped that entire expansion, but I know that the valor bonuses were a way to naturally nerf the raid much in the same way that forging was in MoP. I don't know how tightly the raid bosses were tuned in WoD. In MoP, they were tuned with the actual raid gear from the difficulty in mind and then the top players did it in slightly less gear than that. You would not see Method killing KJ in 925 item level like you would have if this were MoP. You didn't even see them kill it with 935. That's fucking absurd.

[ls-]

What upsets me is not that they make mistakes, after all its much easier for them to tune them too hard (which then they can fix it with a nerf) than tune too easy (which they cant fix at all since buffing a boss after someone else has killed it would piss everyone off). What upsets me is that it takes them so long to fix stuff.

TBF, they don't nerf bosses too often because there's enough people among M raiders who want to kill harder (not-yet-nerfed) versions of bosses. You know, even very first public nerf right after Exorsus' kill pissed many people off.

[Jaigar]

My guild raids mythic 2 nights a week, and Mistress is a massive cockblock to us. 12 attempts tonight under 20%, 3 wipes at 5%. Its an awful boss. The overlaps are just horrid and just not fun or interesting in anyway. That fight was just awful.

I'll take gorefiend progression over mistress.. We killed him faster than we did mistress.

[Argorwal]

Also remember relics and legendaries increase your average beyond what your actual gear is.

You can be 930 and not have a single slot be 930.

[Gaidax]

I didn't factor in other guilds as much, for guilds like ours Gorefiend was considerably easier than other's experience.

But I still stand by my point that Legion has had repeated and consistent problems with difficulty jumps.

You are damn joking if you claim that Mythic Gorefiend was easier that M.Iskar or M.Socrethar. It took us considerably more time to kill Gorefiend than either of the followups. In comparing to Gorefiend, Iskar and Socrethar were a joke.

And the best part is that Gorefiend cockblocked the rest of the HFC. The perfect difficulty curve lol.

[Deleted]

They don't balance Mythic for Method.

They do, Ion explicitly said so in dev Q&A

[Free]

fights get nerfed harder when ion's casual guild finally gets them in the horizon

[Anjerith]

In terms of PvE, Legion was rather mixed that is by no means a secret.

No Raid Instance in Legion didn't have some sort of serious design / difficulty flaw.

EM => Xavius a joke of a final boss, not that great ending for a established lore character and threat lingering since Vanilla.
ToV => they undershotted Xavius, then overshotted Helya, for a filler raid the boss was totally overtuned and lacked any rewards besides a transmog if you do the Chosen.

Nighthold => Serious Imbalance between Caster / Melee in terms of Encounter difficulty.

ToS => Massive difficulty jump on Mistress, drops down on Maiden and skyrockets on Avatar / KJ, require(d) a good amount of the "right" classes as well.

You don't feel like Xavius got plenty of limelight corrupting a huge number of the cenarion circle and forcing the players to KILL YSERA?

As for the rest... really just whining....there are no balance issues in your post that arn't easily fixed by better players in those roles. And Helya was pretty eloquently done --- the aftermath of her death was totally ignored though, but obviously you can't really do a huge game changer like All of her minions going away without affect the gameplay.

[TaurenNinja]

There is actually constant re-balancing of bosses. Only the very best guilds in the world (like within the top 5) see the bosses in their original state before any nerfs.
If you're in a (let's say) top 200 guild, you'll only kill bosses after a couple of nerfs have hit and also (of course) since you've been progressing for much longer, you'll also have better gear, meaning another slight indirect nerf of the bosses.
This is nothing new.
Difficulty jumps are not really a problem, as long as there is a noticeable difference in difficulty between the earlier bosses, the midddle bosses, the later bosses and the endboss. Which is the case pretty much everywhere.

Also, difficulty is a subjective thing... everyone always wants difficulty that's perfect for him/herself. Which cannot really be made. There's always going to be a base level of difficulty (which might be too high for many) that simply has to be there because otherwise the top guilds get bored to death.
The constant nerfs after several weeks/months are enough to make bosses more accessible while still keeping them challenging enough for everyone.
Sometimes, in discussions about difficulty, people also forget that when playing on the hardest setting it's actually work and supposed to be challenging, not just another version of Heroic.

There's really no problem that Mythic is way harder than Heroic, because it's supposed to be the real thing. I always say, a simple test if someone (or a guild) is ready for clearing Mythic within a reasonable timeframe is to ask yourself this question: can you clear Heroic within 1-2 weeks after release without finding it challenging? If the answer is yes, then you're Mythic clear material. Otherwise, you're not.

[Utigarde]

I'd rather they just break DBM and similar addons, so they can properly design fights.

[Kralljin]

You don't feel like Xavius got plenty of limelight corrupting a huge number of the cenarion circle and forcing the players to KILL YSERA?

Lore doesn't really matter here, the Xavius Encounter in EM was a joke on Mythic, most guilds killed him within less than an hour because all you had to do was assign 4x5 groups to a certain mark.

As for the rest... really just whining....there are no balance issues in your post that arn't easily fixed by better players in those roles.

These are flaws within the Encounter design, you can't just "fix" an encounter that heavily favours Immunity CD's by playing better, neither does this have anything to do that a lot of Nighthold bosses just straight out ignored Melees with most mechanics.

And Helya was pretty eloquently done --- the aftermath of her death was totally ignored though, but obviously you can't really do a huge game changer like All of her minions going away without affect the gameplay.

This is a Gameplay discussion, not a lore one.

[Marrilaife]

There's really no problem that Mythic is way harder than Heroic, because it's supposed to be the real thing. I always say, a simple test if someone (or a guild) is ready for clearing Mythic within a reasonable timeframe is to ask yourself this question: can you clear Heroic within 1-2 weeks after release without finding it challenging? If the answer is yes, then you're Mythic clear material. Otherwise, you're not.

That's exactly the problem, many a guild clear heroic within 1-2 weeks tops and then end up being hopelessly stuck in mythic. I know guilds that had no issue clearing heroic in the first reset and then either disbanded on pre-nerf mistress because they lost too many people by being "stuck at her" before nerfs finally came, or killed mistress post nerf and now are stuck on avatar or barely killed him after last round of nerfs. Do they have enough time for KJ? We'll see.

But it's really not fun trying to rush to finish the final boss in the last month, having no period of "farm" before next progress starts, and ok KJ doesn't drop a mount but hell I still don't have mythic Gul'dan mount despite farming this boy every week, we're nearly in Antorus goddamnit. And my guild didn't even exchange that many people since NH, in HFC it took us until pre-patch to hand out all the mounts because of player turn over rate... Which means if there isn't at least 5 months gap between my guild killing Argus the Unmaker and the release of next expansion, I can probably say bye bye to his mount (I have bad luck in /roll). Afaik, in MOP end bosses dropped 2 mounts on 25 man so it was less of a problem to give it to the whole team that contributed to downing the boss in the first place.

[dmerriam005]

I'd rather they just break DBM and similar addons, so they can properly design fights.

we would have boring boss fights if they broke dbm