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  1. #1

    Normal mode boss difficulty and gating issue

    Remember BWL.. remember the second boss Val? Do you remember killing it (effin finally) and then cruising through the next 3 bosses all in the same night? I can't imagine blizzard intends on cock block bosses but every (almost every?) tier it seems to happen. Here we are again with the much more difficult HoF leading to ToES. The first three bosses in ToES are just gimmes after you've killed Amber shaper and Empress. I am encouraging the other three teams in my guild to find an ID of a TOES toon to hop in there when only 1 have them have even killed elegon. I had to put thought to paper and made this image on difficultly of the bosses. It seems that you have 2 really bad tunings (Garalon and Elegon) and then ToES being way too easy overall. Just had to put it out there. Cheers.

    Keep in mind that this is all relative. Meaning at the time, with the gear, and the experience, etc... if you can down all 16 maybe garalon is now just a 2 green bar boss.. but for a team walking into MSV with 463.. this is how I think the bosses stack up.

    Last edited by jfragment; 2012-12-14 at 11:51 PM.
    Being generally horrible but helpful since Molten Core;
    When leading was more about managing bathroom breaks than boss mechanics.
    http://www.ihazlead.com - Raid leading guides, tutorials, and videos.

  2. #2
    I pretty much agree. What I would add is that stoneguard is a big cockblock for a lot of people. Feng falls over and then people struggle with gara again. Spirit kings on normal is a trash pack with epics. No way on earth that gara and spirit kings are equal on difficulty.

  3. #3
    Good point about spirit kings.. we 4 shot it the first week.
    Being generally horrible but helpful since Molten Core;
    When leading was more about managing bathroom breaks than boss mechanics.
    http://www.ihazlead.com - Raid leading guides, tutorials, and videos.

  4. #4
    I think your comparison chart, while very well made, is somewhat misleading. It doesn't have a baseline, for starters, which means that it implies that Amber Shaper (remembering this is all normal mode) is a solid 9 times more difficult than Stone Dogs. I feel that a far more realistic scale would have all of these bosses considerably closer together.

    It's a bit unreasonable to ask that every boss be a gradual ramp-up in difficulty from the previous, isn't it? The gating, overall, seems quite gentle to me, but I know I've got a skewed perspective since I raid a lot more than more casual guilds do.

    We haven't really seen gating for a couple expansions now (outside of the focusing key for Malygos, if I remember right), so this is Blizzard's first foray back into it. Is it too harsh on the more casual playerbase that makes up a significant portion of the game's population now, much larger than it ever was in BC?

  5. #5
    It's a bit unreasonable to ask that every boss be a gradual ramp-up in difficulty from the previous, isn't it?
    I think that's exactly the idea no? I'm not saying be perfect but you can see how (for most guilds ..say bottom 80%) Elegon is essentially the cock block. In week 6 of the raids being out there were less than 50% of the guilds that could kill stoneguard could kill elegon and stoneguard was a reasonably challenging boss for the casuals. I think having ToES where all three of the first bosses were essentially the same difficulty makes it kinda meh.. I think the whole idea is that they get progressively harder as well as each raid be progressively harder as an aggregate as well. I think they really screwed up this last piece with ToES. (thanks for the well made comment.. I did it while hiding from my wife while she tubbed our son. Score.. got out of tub duty for a night!)
    Being generally horrible but helpful since Molten Core;
    When leading was more about managing bathroom breaks than boss mechanics.
    http://www.ihazlead.com - Raid leading guides, tutorials, and videos.

  6. #6
    Quote Originally Posted by jfragment View Post
    Remember BWL.. remember the second boss Val? Do you remember killing it (effin finally) and then cruising through the next 3 bosses all in the same night? I can't imagine blizzard intends on cock block bosses but every (almost every?) tier it seems to happen. Here we are again with the much more difficult HoF leading to ToES. The first three bosses in ToES are just gimmes after you've killed Amber shaper and Empress. I am encouraging the other three teams in my guild to find an ID of a TOES toon to hop in there when only 1 have them have even killed elegon. I had to put thought to paper and made this image on difficultly of the bosses. It seems that you have 2 really bad tunings (Garalon and Elegon) and then ToES being way too easy overall. Just had to put it out there. Cheers.

    Keep in mind that this is all relative. Meaning at the time, with the gear, and the experience, etc... if you can down all 16 maybe garalon is now just a 2 green bar boss.. but for a team walking into MSV with 463.. this is how I think the bosses stack up.

    The only boss that would take longer than others is Amber shaper because it is a vehicle fight and people have to know how to use the vehicle.
    Elegon people fail because they don't do the sparks and pillars correctly.
    Oh and Garalon is a retard check.

  7. #7
    i find both shek'zeer and ambershaper harder then garalon tbh

  8. #8
    Quote Originally Posted by jfragment View Post
    I think that's exactly the idea no? I'm not saying be perfect but you can see how (for most guilds ..say bottom 80%) Elegon is essentially the cock block. In week 6 of the raids being out there were less than 50% of the guilds that could kill stoneguard could kill elegon and stoneguard was a reasonably challenging boss for the casuals. I think having ToES where all three of the first bosses were essentially the same difficulty makes it kinda meh.. I think the whole idea is that they get progressively harder as well as each raid be progressively harder as an aggregate as well. I think they really screwed up this last piece with ToES. (thanks for the well made comment.. I did it while hiding from my wife while she tubbed our son. Score.. got out of tub duty for a night!)
    The issue is that the difficulty of a fight is going to be extremely subjective. Many of the very best raiding mechanics that Blizzard's made are ones that rely on the individual to react, and for some guilds, those make for the most challenging fights. Others are difficult because of raid-wide logistics, such as Spiritbinder's totem. Every guild is going to have different issues. For some guilds, Stone Dogs is still one of their most brutal fights because of the combination of tanking logistics and how much rests on the individual, but here you've got it ranked as the easiest fight in the whole tier. For a guild with weaker healers, Tsulong may be uncompromisingly tough.

    That's why I feel that it's impossible to request that 'ramp up' that you want.

  9. #9
    Garalon is just a dps/gear check, once you manage that it isn't too bad. The order of difficulty is pretty accurate, I would argue that Feng really isn't hard, probably one of the easiest fights (maybe spirit kings is easier).

    They really should remove the gating required for ToES, it's only there for RP reasons and it could help those who are hitting walls in HoF. Although I think the gating is kinda cool, I liked in Tier 11 how you can swap between all 3 raids when you hit walls to get more gear. This tier there is no swapping, it's all extremely linear, if you hit any roadblock cause of dps/gear there is nothing you can do. Garaj/Elegon/Garal/Amber/Empress are all gear checks with only going backwards to collect gear. TOES should be open cause it isn't really that hard, and honestly Sha of Fear is a joke once you have the dps for it. It was hard at first cause of the DPS requirements but once you have the dps, you kinda afk for 13 minutes and he is dead.

  10. #10
    I honestly think its hard to make a boss rating chart like this, particularly when you are talking about normal modes.

    What one guild finds hard another guild may find it much easier yet struggle on a different boss. This is due to a number of reasons from raid comp to players skill, but more importantly what areas of skill the group is best at. Some groups have amazing healers which can carry some fights but won't help on hard raid wipe mechanics. Other groups may have exceptional dps where they can zerg their way through some bosses. Other groups may not have chart topping players but are very good at mechanics and can outplay some fights.

    Of course once you get to heroic modes that list completely changes.

  11. #11
    personalty I'd remove one or two bars from sha, the only hard part is meeting the "panda enrage" aka killing your panda before the timer runs out for next teleport and people not dreping on the breath and death blossom thingy ^^

  12. #12
    I think that the normal mode difficulty has been quite successful in both MSV and HoF. ToES I think has been tuned too low. It is also arguable that the second half of HoF could be easier while ToES should be around the difficulty those bosses are right now.

    Quote Originally Posted by Herecius View Post
    I think your comparison chart, while very well made, is somewhat misleading. It doesn't have a baseline, for starters, which means that it implies that Amber Shaper (remembering this is all normal mode) is a solid 9 times more difficult than Stone Dogs.
    I would look at it like I would look at Michelin Stars or any similar way of rating. It's not a mathematically proper system but gets the message across and is a simpler way of emphasizing the differences than saying, for example, that Stone Guard is 1.0 and Vizier is 1.3 or even further breaking the ratings down into different aspects.

  13. #13
    I agree. Keep in mind we raid 2 nights a week and we're not done with Terrace yet as we just got there last week but in my experience we had a rough time with:

    Stone Guard til our tanks got their stuff together (1 whole night of wiping)
    Elegon kicked us in the face for 3 weeks (It was like h spine all over again but might have been a gearing issue since we didn't have more than 1 person doing 100k+ dps until that 3rd week)
    Garalon for a week (his berserk kept getting us at sub 5% for HOURSSSSSSSsssss)

    And that's it.

    Don't get me wrong, we had lots of wipes on Amber Shaper because of missed interrupts (boss and players) as well as Empress from tanks trapping 1 add before the other trap is made or all the little adds die so we can't complete the trap or the 2 things that blow up are blowing up too close together. But since we got past Garalon kinda early in the night and then got the final 3 bosses of the instance + the first boss of Terrace in the same night, I don't think those are nearly as hard as Garalon. In fact our first kill of Garalon he died in mid air from his Berserk crush.

    Last night we had a healer dc (our strongest healer in guild) and we 2 healed Wind Lord and Amber Shaper and 1 shot both of them. Wind Lord we can say we solo healed 2nd phase because one of our healers died from a wind bomb and then got battle rezzed into a thrown weapon from the boss.
    Last edited by kenshinag; 2012-12-15 at 12:43 AM.

  14. #14
    It seems to me you had some other major problems on Garalon, because for me it was definitely one of the easier bosses in Heart of Fear instance.

    Did you 2 heal it, or force 3 healers when it's not necessary if executed properly (no extra crushes, handling pheromones without problem). Did you have only melee with cleaving abilities damage the legs? You actually need to tell people with only single target damaging abilities not to damage them, even though it is a boost for their personal dps, it is definitely bad for raid.
    Shaman - Hunter - Monk - Druid - Warlock - DK - another Shaman - one more Shaman

  15. #15
    Quote Originally Posted by Faeglendir View Post
    It seems to me you had some other major problems on Garalon, because for me it was definitely one of the easier bosses in Heart of Fear instance.

    Did you 2 heal it, or force 3 healers when it's not necessary if executed properly (no extra crushes, handling pheromones without problem). Did you have only melee with cleaving abilities damage the legs? You actually need to tell people with only single target damaging abilities not to damage them, even though it is a boost for their personal dps, it is definitely bad for raid.
    Ya we had a lot of trouble with it. We have 3 healers, though 1 of them is a Disc Priest DPSing. All our DPS is focusing legs and killing body only when no legs are up. We stack on the druid on crushes to get stunned in floor heal effects. No extra crushes. Pheromones are passed between 18-22 stacks. Our "tanks" are a Blood DK in DPS gear and a Fury warrior who swaps to Def stance every crush. Swipes he's in berserk stance for extra rage. We can kill it, but I'm sure this is not optimal. And... our logger didn't upload the parse but yes, that's basically how that we do it.

  16. #16
    Quote Originally Posted by kenshinag View Post
    Ya we had a lot of trouble with it. We have 3 healers, though 1 of them is a Disc Priest DPSing. All our DPS is focusing legs and killing body only when no legs are up. We stack on the druid on crushes to get stunned in floor heal effects. No extra crushes. Pheromones are passed between 18-22 stacks. Our "tanks" are a Blood DK in DPS gear and a Fury warrior who swaps to Def stance every crush. Swipes he's in berserk stance for extra rage. We can kill it, but I'm sure this is not optimal. And... our logger didn't upload the parse but yes, that's basically how that we do it.
    There is no reason to have all the dpsers on the legs after you have killed some of them in the pull. Melee dps, depending on the amount, should easily be able to kill the legs as they come while also cleaving on the boss. Tanks can kill the outer front leg on their own if wanted. Ranged can simply stand around the middle and dps the body.

  17. #17
    I can't agree with Amber Shaper being that difficult. The dps and healing requirements are very lenient and the mechanics are not inherently difficult at all, they only seem that way because of unfamiliarity and the fact that random people have to handle them. If you could choose who got transformed then everyone would kill it in a few attempts at most.

  18. #18
    Elegon easier than Garalon? Not for us, but maybe it's just a raid composition advantage. Elegon took like... I want to say 30-40 attempts. Maybe more. Garalon took us about 10 or 12.
    Last edited by TheWindWalker; 2012-12-15 at 08:30 AM. Reason: adjusting for memory degradation
    Soothing Mist:"Healing them for a minor amount every 0.5 sec, until you take any other action."
    Jade Serpent Statue: "The statue will also begin casting Soothing Mist on your target. healing for 50% as much as yours. "
    [What's half of minor?]
    "Statue casts Soothing Mist at a nearby ally for toddler healing."

  19. #19
    Ambershaper is easy on normal when you realize any 3 healers can competently heal through the monstrosity explosions, so you just let them go and spam 1 on the boss and interrupt yourself (even the normal construct explosions aren't horrible).

    Heroic, different story.

  20. #20
    Monstrosity explosion isn't what kills the raid, it's the debuff he puts on player with explosion. Unless you have Disc priest shielding that person, he will most likely die.

    I would agree with chart mostly except for:
    Stone Guards (I would range it at 2 to 4 bars, depending on combo of Jasper and Jade dogs being or not present). It took our guild nearly 20 pulls to get Dogs down (no Jade, worst combo) but steamrolled Garajal after 2 wipes.
    Sha of Fear, the moment people got their cds right for cackles and stopped letting orbs go through, fight is a joke (would say 4 bars)

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