Blizzard needs to no longer balance Mythic for Method.

[Utigarde]

we would have boring boss fights if they broke dbm

We'd have creative boss fights, instead of having to balance around wipe mechanics, because players know the exact timers and where-to-go's of every mechanic.

[Low Hanging Fruit]

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

Weakauras is the cheese addon in reality.

[KaPe]

We'd have creative boss fights, instead of having to balance around wipe mechanics, because players know the exact timers and where-to-go's of every mechanic.

Did you know that boss abilities don't have to be exact, but based on cooldowns? Just look at Avatar, sometimes there's a huge difference in the order he does his specials during Maiden's shield. Or Mistress deciding to cast Tornadoes after Burden can mean a wipe if you were a bit too fast on the stalkers.

Removing DBM (and breaking WA) wouldn't improve the design at all, other than making it more annoying to measure timers. The complexity would have to be greatly reduced if you couldn't properly prepare for difficult parts of the fight. Instead of requiring to nearly instantly target newly spawned adds/void zones/etc., there'd have to a significant grace period. Everything would have to be quite a bit slower, or you'd have too little time to react.

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.

The problem with current balancing is that it happens too late. With Nighthold, they nerfed Auriel like a week or two before the patch with extra traits, being content with 3/10 difficulty wall. With ToS, they nerfed Mistress and, well, that's it. KJ/Avatar changes were more like "bringing them down to level of Top 100 guilds", instead of actual nerfs. (and recent Dark Marks change was both very late and largely irrelevant)

They do too little hotfixes and count too much on patches with new powerups. This can work if the problem is based on numerical tuning, but not if it's class stacking/instant wipe on mistake issue. You do slightly more damage? Who cares, single error is still instant death at any point of the fight.

[Barnabas]

I don't see the point in comparing a final tier of the last expansion to the not final tier of this expansion. After antorus would be a better time to evaluate and compare.

[Gaidax]

With Nighthold, they nerfed Auriel like a week or two before the patch with extra traits, being content with 3/10 difficulty wall. With ToS, they nerfed Mistress and, well, that's it. KJ/Avatar changes were more like "bringing them down to level of Top 100 guilds", instead of actual nerfs. (and recent Dark Marks change was both very late and largely irrelevant)

Nighthold was completely fine and Aluriel was skippable, we did her after pretty much everything else aside from Star Augur and I think Krosus.

Mistress is also pretty much fine, it was nerfed/changed quite fast actually to prevent specific cheese, but it made it easier for normal guilds. Aside from Avatar and maybe Kiljaeden there are no issues in nerfing pace.

[KaPe]

Nighthold was completely fine and Aluriel was skippable, we did her after pretty much everything else aside from Star Augur and I think Krosus.

Mistress is also pretty much fine, it was nerfed/changed quite fast actually to prevent specific cheese, but it made it easier for normal guilds. Aside from Avatar and maybe Kiljaeden there are no issues in nerfing pace.

The fact that she was skippable doesn't matter. For one reason or another, they nerfed her just before a patch hit. Why at that point? Why not earlier, if skipping her mount much longer runback to other bosses? Why not do it at all, if new traits were supposed to be the intended nerf?

They really need to work on their timing, it makes no sense.

[Gaidax]

The fact that she was skippable doesn't matter. For one reason or another, they nerfed her just before a patch hit. Why at that point? Why not earlier, if skipping her mount much longer runback to other bosses? Why not do it at all, if new traits were supposed to be the intended nerf?

They really need to work on their timing, it makes no sense.

Who cares? She was perfectly killable pretty fast, don't turn her into some sort of Mistress or something, Aluriel was not THAT hard. She was just tough, but she was no Guldan and not even Augur.

I'm looking at wowprogress and seriously, we, 2 evening guild, killed M Aluriel about a month and a week after Mythic Nighthold unlocked and that gave us world 900th-ish spot, meaning a shitton of guilds killed her month in already, that's NOT hard boss by any stretch.

Mistress took us a week longer compared to that and when we killed here we were 436th spot world, HUGE difference in difficulty compared to Aluriel.

Basically Aluriel was not that hard as you think, sure she ain't Tichondrius, which we killed in 17 pulls (literally lol moment when it happened there), but she was not THAT hard at all.

[Marrilaife]

Who cares? She was perfectly killable pretty fast, don't turn her into some sort of Mistress or something, Aluriel was not THAT hard. She was just tough, but she was no Guldan and not even Augur.

Aluriel was a cockblock to guilds who didn't yet get the memo you need at least 5 mainspec healers on a 20 man roster. Because back in HFC 4 healers was already plenty, and people could offspec easily just in case (no artifact / legendary hurdle). My guild went botanist > krosus > aluriel in that order just because we never had the required healers until marks of frost were nerfed.

[Gaidax]

Aluriel was a cockblock to guilds who didn't yet get the memo you need at least 5 mainspec healers on a 20 man roster. Because back in HFC 4 healers was already plenty, and people could offspec easily just in case (no artifact / legendary hurdle). My guild went botanist > krosus > aluriel in that order just because we never had the required healers until marks of frost were nerfed.

We 4-healed it.

[wrynil]

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

You can easily do mythic without timers.. The bosses give a ton of information all on their own, and the rest you just learn to anticipate.

[Jinpachi]

Speak for yourself.

If you can't cut it in Mythic, go raid heroic. Only 3% of the WoW population, give or take a %, actually raids Mythic, changing the difficulty wouldn't change that number much, it would just make the top end have less to do, and make a few more heroic raid guilds think they're mythic guilds. Legion has been pretty fantastic for PvE, just not so much for Mythic raiding. Again though, we're such a small percentage of the population why would they ever cater to us? I'm amazed we get the things that we do.

My thoughts exactly.

[KaPe]

We 4-healed it.

Good for you, too bad it has nothing to do with my point. It's not about whether Aluriel was too difficult or not. It's that they nerfed her just before they released the patch which provided instance wide nerf through new traits. I could understand doing that for Cutting Edge bosses, where you want to squeeze the kill before it becomes obsolete, but for mid-boss? If they thought she was overtuned, don't wait so long. If they though she was fine, why nerf her at the very last moment? Very awkward timing, which seems quite common with their Legion tuning.

[Gaidax]

Good for you, too bad it has nothing to do with my point. It's not about whether Aluriel was too difficult or not. It's that they nerfed her just before they released the patch which provided instance wide nerf through new traits. I could understand doing that for Cutting Edge bosses, where you want to squeeze the kill before it becomes obsolete, but for mid-boss? If they thought she was overtuned, don't wait so long. If they though she was fine, why nerf her at the very last moment? Very awkward timing, which seems quite common with their Legion tuning.

She was fine, it could be that your guild just was not good enough. Almost 1k guilds killed her first month and a bit, that's a shitton - almost 3 times more than Mistress first month.

Aluriel was not super hard, end of story. She was harder than Sisters, but completely skippable on the other hand. She's some sort of midway between Sisters and Mistress, which is decently challenging but not "omfg wtf wall" at all.

[Marrilaife]

We 4-healed it.

But if your kill was ranked as world 900 that was probably after first wave of nerfs (she got 2 or 3 btw).

[Gaidax]

The first true cockblock of Nighthold was Augur, which was on a whole other level compared to everything before it, I'd even say that Elisande was easier.

- - - Updated - - -

But if your kill was ranked as world 900 that was probably after first wave of nerfs (she got 2 or 3 btw).

That's my point tho, some dude claims she was some insurmountable challenge until some late late nerf at the end of the tier. That's just false. The very early nerf was all that was "needed" to make her considerably easier and it came fast enough.

[Ahovv]

"Waaaah I want to feel like I did the toughest thing the game has to offer, so make it easier for me." - This thread.

Mythic should continue being tuned around guilds which invest the time and effort to build and maintain a roster with high standards. If maintaining a guild is too much work for you, go run heroic.

[KaPe]

That's my point tho, some dude claims she was some insurmountable challenge until some late late nerf at the end of the tier. That's just false. The very early nerf was all that was "needed" to make her considerably easier and it came fast enough.

... Way to miss the argument to argue with a strawman. "Some dude's" point was that she already had an indirect nerf scheduled with the patch, yet they released another one just before it hit the servers.

What was the point of doing that? It paled compared to new traits, yet was sneaked in at the very last moment. Are there so many balancing teams that they can't coordinate their changes? Did it take so long to approve of these nerfs that they were made obsolete by the patch? I remember seeing this change and being like "what's the point? we already killed her and she'll be trivial next week anyway?"

"Waaaah I want to feel like I did the toughest thing the game has to offer, so make it easier for me." - This thread.

Mythic should continue being tuned around guilds which invest the time and effort to build and maintain a roster with high standards. If maintaining a guild is too much work for you, go run heroic.

That's a garbage sentence that means nothing. "High standards" for Kil'Jaeden were completely different from "high standards" for Gul'dan and for every other boss. KJ was a point where Blizzard went overboard *and* admitted it by telling Antorus will supposedly be easier. No one can tell how this will turn out yet, but when two best guilds in the world say the tuning was shit, there's something wrong.

Also, if you were to track progress by tiers, you'd notice there's a fairly similar number of guilds getting Cutting Edge achiemevents and killing the final boss. There were some outliers, like Blackhand, but KJ puts him to shame. Did hundreds of guilds suddenly because that much worse? Were they never "true" mythic guilds? Did the difficulty of this raid was higher than the previous ones? If you assume the last anwer is false, then Mythic raiders pool will be shrinking tier after tier, so "high standards" will be impossible to maintain outside of Top 10.

[dd614]

we would have boring boss fights if they broke dbm

Not really. They would just have to telegraph things better. Make boss emotes or animation changes a few seconds before an ability happens, etc.

[Gaidax]

Not really. They would just have to telegraph things better. Make boss emotes or animation changes a few seconds before an ability happens, etc.

In some other thread we had a guy breaking down in tears about MoS Helya doing just that with her cone attack, how it is terribly horrible that pretty lights do not appear on the ground before it hits and he has to look at her model.

Point is, what you suggest will be met with equal torrent of tears anyway.

[Sarevokcz]

+- 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 - - -



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.

holy shit, GD being "mediocre tuned,"? Are the standards really so damn high now? Back then, when Rag25 was 200 pull boss, it was ridiculously hard, overtuned, for paragon only etc etc, now easily 250+ pull boss from one of the most praised raids of late, atleast mechanic wise and with very little bugs, is "meh, just mediocre tuned," really? Its like people are getting more retarded every content patch.

Is it really so hard to just admit that KJ tuning was ridiculously off for months and Blizzard completely fucked up? Even now, after all these nerfs, I still find it way harder than original guldan, heck, guldan could have grand conjunction from augur and it would likely still be easier...