Is Mythic Too Easy For Its Intended Audience?

[ohlins]

Blizzard nowadays emphasizes too much on making the endbosses extremely hard, while the rest of the instance is quite easy.

The endboss should be the most difficult encounter. And looking at how many guilds are stuck on it, it seems to be tuned correctly to give the playerbase enough to have fun with until next raid opens.

[Bigbazz]

To be honest though, if you take away all the pre-raid gearing methods via expensive means then Mythic would have been a lot harder in the general consensus. Our guild (new for me in WOD but they go back to Vanilla launch) hit Normal Imp with people averaging between 630-640, they were extremely slack on entry requirements. Meanwhile there were many guilds doing the same boss while already in the mid 650level or even above 660. Some people even above 660 average pre-raid release.

To put that into perspective, my guild with its slow start was averaging low 660s while killing Mythic Twin Ogron, which was only very recently. While we were on HC Imp we really did struggle more than we wanted, but we also knew we were behind on gear compared to what the top guilds were at when they killed it... With a little more gear we suddenly smashed it to pieces after having felt like the boss was a real struggle, we averaged probably around 655 then.

How hard the fights are really depends on your gear level when you hit them, and most of the top guilds hit them at much higher gear levels than the guilds who failed to make big pre-raid gearing efforts. I am not in a Hardcore or competitive raiding guild, and indeed I came back for WOD not expecting to care too much about top progression raiding.. But the biggest hinderance for our progression has been gear, more than anything... Save for a few hiccups from the ranged dps and their friendly mines on Imp.

Soon enough when people start to gear more you will see even the non-hardcore every day guys completely obliterating 6/7 Mythic just as they did 13/14Hc back in the SOO days. Said it a few times in the thread already, I think Mythic Highmaul is well balanced, not easier and not harder than raids that came before... There are exceptions of course, looking at individual fights.

[AgilityTank]

Which brings the discussion here: is pre-raid BMAH and BOE's having too much of an influence on progression? Where should blizz draw the line? WoWprogress has already had to take a step against the grain to 'even the odds' going into the future.

[Dracodraco]

To put that into perspective, my guild with its slow start was averaging low 660s while killing Mythic Twin Ogron, which was only very recently. While we were on HC Imp we really did struggle more than we wanted, but we also knew we were behind on gear compared to what the top guilds were at when they killed it... With a little more gear we suddenly smashed it to pieces after having felt like the boss was a real struggle, we averaged probably around 655 then.

I just want to point out that initial split raids for most top guilds had a 635-640 average item level, and we cleared full heroic with that. ~655 Would be what a full main raid after the first week of gearing up was like (kargath/twins was usually about 660 average, and that was another reset of heroic gear on top of the first week). So 655 is *far* overgearing it. Like, really, really far.


That said, I don't know if it was easier to buy BOE's/gear this time around; There has always been pre-raid epic world drops, and people who take advantage of them. I think the only real difference is that the crafted gear isn't reliant on boss kills (to get essences), but instead tied to daily cooldowns, making it actually harder to get as it requires many days of prepping to craft a single piece/upgrade. Easier when we've gotten into the tier and everyone has a bunch of barns and garrisons up and running, though.

[Bigbazz]

I just want to point out that initial split raids for most top guilds had a 635-640 average item level, and we cleared full heroic with that. ~655 Would be what a full main raid after the first week of gearing up was like (kargath/twins was usually about 660 average, and that was another reset of heroic gear on top of the first week). So 655 is *far* overgearing it. Like, really, really far.


That said, I don't know if it was easier to buy BOE's/gear this time around; There has always been pre-raid epic world drops, and people who take advantage of them. I think the only real difference is that the crafted gear isn't reliant on boss kills (to get essences), but instead tied to daily cooldowns, making it actually harder to get as it requires many days of prepping to craft a single piece/upgrade. Easier when we've gotten into the tier and everyone has a bunch of barns and garrisons up and running, though.

I actually tracked the gear the top guilds and players had while trying to convince my guild we needed to do better (625 was our entry point, we had 625 players in the raid too). Most guilds as I said were 650+ going into normal mode on day one, a lot of players 660 +. This is from my observations of checking out many guilds, hundreds of players among those many guilds. It's not something I just made up.

635-640 is miles off for any high progression guild hitting heroic that I checked.

[Charge me Doctor]

http://www.wowprogress.com/pve/us/thrall

0 guilds finished the raid? I would say that it's difficult enough for intended audience

[Dracodraco]

I actually tracked the gear the top guilds and players had while trying to convince my guild we needed to do better (625 was our entry point, we had 625 players in the raid too). Most guilds as I said were 650+ going into normal mode on day one, a lot of players 660 +. This is from my observations of checking out many guilds, hundreds of players among those many guilds. It's not something I just made up.

635-640 is miles off for any high progression guild hitting heroic that I checked.

650 for their mains, perhaps. Remember, split runs; They would not have enough time nor BoE drops to *buy* to get their alts that high. Here's the log from our two first Imperator normal and heroic kills as a pretty standard guild:



https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/Q3TdcpxN84znZ7CA 637.8 Average (started group with 636.3 on Kargath).
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/tZXwqfjLRndv6rgJ 640.0 Average (started group with 637.7 on Kargath - first 3 bosses died previous evening, so people had time to go and sort their gear from first 3 bosses, thus the much bigger difference).


And our Heroic kills:
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/bTjKkZB19hgCWw3H 644.3 average.
And
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/tDPNrfjQM6VX7bTy 645.8 average.

We started heroics with 640~ avg on both groups, and ended around 645. So yea, 640 would be where "high progression guilds" hit heroics. Not on their main team, of course, but due to split raids.

[Bigbazz]

650 for their mains, perhaps. Remember, split runs; They would not have enough time nor BoE drops to *buy* to get their alts that high. Here's the log from our two first Imperator normal and heroic kills as a pretty standard guild:



https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/Q3TdcpxN84znZ7CA 637.8 Average (started group with 636.3 on Kargath).
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/tZXwqfjLRndv6rgJ 640.0 Average (started group with 637.7 on Kargath - first 3 bosses died previous evening, so people had time to go and sort their gear from first 3 bosses, thus the much bigger difference).


And our Heroic kills:
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/bTjKkZB19hgCWw3H 644.3 average.
And
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/tDPNrfjQM6VX7bTy 645.8 average.

We started heroics with 640~ avg on both groups, and ended around 645. So yea, 640 would be where "high progression guilds" hit heroics. Not on their main team, of course, but due to split raids.

Interesting to look at your logs, you're carrying a shitload of really low dps purely for more loot. What's interesting tho is that you get away with it and kill the boss, all of your highest dps is far below what ours was on our first kill just looking at the face value dps numbers but your kill is only around 30 seconds slower, even while carrying all that baggage. Your healers also performed more healing than ours when comparing Ilvl, though the actual numbers are similar aside from your Monk (we ran 1 Disc, 1 RDruid, 2x RShaman, 1 HPala).

Very notable was both the healing and damage your DK tank did, compared to ours he was much higher whilst also being much lower on Ilvl. It's interesting to look at, your start strategy was as we killed it on Normal, but we changed ours for Heroic. I didn't watch the full replay of your fight though, but it is interesting how you were able to carry so much slack and kill the boss with fairly low dps. I'm not fantastic at reading logs so I can't decipher the exact causes of our issue of our slow progress on that boss, nor a make a good true comparison of the numbers and what they mean.

On the surface it looks like you had roughly the same healing as us, much much much lower dps but also your whole raid was lower geared. But for the record, I never meant to imply that I consider my guild only behind top guilds because of gear, that would be absurd. Mine is your typical non-hardcore hardmode raiding guild, they aim only to clear content before the next content is released, they have generally (as far as I'm aware) pulled it off.

[Dracodraco]

Interesting to look at your logs, you're carrying a shitload of really low dps purely for more loot. What's interesting tho is that you get away with it and kill the boss, all of your highest dps is far below what ours was on our first kill just looking at the face value dps numbers but your kill is only around 30 seconds slower, even while carrying all that baggage. Your healers also performed more healing than ours when comparing Ilvl, though the actual numbers are similar aside from your Monk (we ran 1 Disc, 1 RDruid, 2x RShaman, 1 HPala).

Very notable was both the healing and damage your DK tank did, compared to ours he was much higher whilst also being much lower on Ilvl. It's interesting to look at, your start strategy was as we killed it on Normal, but we changed ours for Heroic. I didn't watch the full replay of your fight though, but it is interesting how you were able to carry so much slack and kill the boss with fairly low dps. I'm not fantastic at reading logs so I can't decipher the exact causes of our issue of our slow progress on that boss, nor a make a good true comparison of the numbers and what they mean.

On the surface it looks like you had roughly the same healing as us, much much much lower dps but also your whole raid was lower geared. But for the record, I never meant to imply that I consider my guild only behind top guilds because of gear, that would be absurd. Mine is your typical non-hardcore hardmode raiding guild, they aim only to clear content before the next content is released, they have generally (as far as I'm aware) pulled it off.

The DK tank is the alt of the Warrior tank. And I can assure you, *everyone* in the top 50 did this split running (and most likely, everyone in the top 100, as we fall juuust about at the bottom of top 100 when not counting all the asians that suddenly got allowed into Wowprogress).

There's also the fact that your highest DPS was probably padding by aoeing adds, while we just let them get cleaved down - if you have a link, I can check your kill and see if I can spot the difference.
With that said, Imperator is a fight that has no actual enrage - as long as your healers can keep up, you can take as long as you want to kill him. Knowing this, low dps is not an issue as long as the damage you take can be healed up by the healers using their mana-neutral healing cycles (which was mostly true for p1/2, and raid CDs made it true for p3). If you killed both mages, that'd also be a difference; our dps was so low that we opted to let one mage stay alive while the raid spread out, and bloodlust P4 to get it over with ASAP. It gains you a shitton of boss damage as you're not struggling to get the last 6-7M off of the mage while the boss is already pounding the tanks, and you don't have to bloodlust to make the reaver/mages go down quicker. Instead everyone's ready to pound the boss with all CDs when he comes down, ending the most intense phase (4, if you were in any kind of doubt) as quickly as possible.

Point being, anyway, that 640 for entering heroics was pretty much standard. 640-645 for killing imp aswell.

[Bigbazz]

The DK tank is the alt of the Warrior tank. And I can assure you, *everyone* in the top 50 did this split running (and most likely, everyone in the top 100, as we fall juuust about at the bottom of top 100 when not counting all the asians that suddenly got allowed into Wowprogress).

There's also the fact that your highest DPS was probably padding by aoeing adds, while we just let them get cleaved down - if you have a link, I can check your kill and see if I can spot the difference.
With that said, Imperator is a fight that has no actual enrage - as long as your healers can keep up, you can take as long as you want to kill him. Knowing this, low dps is not an issue as long as the damage you take can be healed up by the healers using their mana-neutral healing cycles (which was mostly true for p1/2, and raid CDs made it true for p3). If you killed both mages, that'd also be a difference; our dps was so low that we opted to let one mage stay alive while the raid spread out, and bloodlust P4 to get it over with ASAP. It gains you a shitton of boss damage as you're not struggling to get the last 6-7M off of the mage while the boss is already pounding the tanks, and you don't have to bloodlust to make the reaver/mages go down quicker. Instead everyone's ready to pound the boss with all CDs when he comes down, ending the most intense phase (4, if you were in any kind of doubt) as quickly as possible.

Point being, anyway, that 640 for entering heroics was pretty much standard. 640-645 for killing imp aswell.

If our logs were not private I'd be happy to link them, but it has nothing to do with me. I'm relatively new to the guild and only have access to view them by permission. Infact I prefer logs to be visible publicly and in my previous guild they always were, which I loved for competitive reasons. On the contrary though to avoid competitive reasons my guild chooses not to make them public.

Can't win em all I guess. It's interesting to see that some of our old players (that being from my old now inactive guild) went on to join top 50/100/500 guilds, but I can't personally put my finger on the ball to understand why we struggled so much in my current guild. And we did struggle on Imp HC, it was genuine until the actual night we killed it which was a 2shot complete obliteration, and 1shot obliteration the following week.

Likely as you said, due to overgearing, certainly makes up for those mine popping loving ranged dps!

[Pur1tas]

I think while the raid in generall might be a little to easy for guilds and groups that played together for a long time (or at least 1 tier of raiding), it is perfect for groups that used to be 10m heroic groups to get their setup going for BRF. My guild cleared SoO Heroic before the patch hit and we are having huge trouble in Mythic right now. Only few players from that time are left and while we are trying to recruit players that have experience with Heroic raiding, it is still a long way to go for us to get our setup going and being able to properly raid Mythic. We killed the first two bosses and are currently progressing on brackenspore. We have huge problems with different things, such as interrupting while wave hits, moving as a group, switching targets, blocking spore shooters, etc. Some of these are simply playing the encounter more often, while others are due to communication within the group. So while we still have problems setup wise, we have huge problems with communication leading to unneeded wipes. I think this will become better as we get a more stable setup etc. but the communication and the fact that we have at least 10 players that only joined us this expansion drastically slows us down.

Overall I think Highmaul Mythic is exactly what is is ment to. The top guilds that were playing together for a long time (or even just players that are way better than us) are rushing through it having few problems, while the 10m guilds that started recruiting and/or fused with another guild are having time to set up their groups and get communication going before the first actual raid tier starts.

[theyanger]

What Draco said pretty well covers the ilevel 'issue' for normal/heroic. We had like a top 15 or 20 ilevel in the US going into the first week of raiding. But thanks to wowprogress tracking it, I can tell you straight up our first 3 heroic kills in each run averaged a paltry 640-642 ilevel depending on which split it was. People going in at 650-660 actually have a massive advantage over what top guilds had, it simply wasn't feasible to deck out 90 characters as well as you think.

[rickhunterr]

This post's question is silly beyond words. At the time of it's posting fewer than 19 guilds out of over 10,000 in the US had killed the final boss. And as of today only 30 raid teams out of 10,000 guilds have kill the final boss in the US. This is obviously a trolly question.

[Mikael123]

Too easy? No way. If you clear mythic highmaul and think "wow, that was easy", then you're one of very few wow players.

[Afflictionme]

[QUOTE=Bigbazz;31791043]I actually tracked the gear the top guilds and players had while trying to convince my guild we needed to do better (625 was our entry point, we had 625 players in the raid too). Most guilds as I said were 650+ going into normal mode on day one, a lot of players 660 +. This is from my observations of checking out many guilds, hundreds of players among those many guilds. It's not something I just made up.

635-640 is miles off for any high progression guild hitting heroic that I checked.

nope i was over 20k dps as an affliction lock at 643 and went all the way to heroic imp. yeah heroic imp really requires the ilvl what ya do on all the other fights is not what will be on H imp but yeah class and skill has everything to do with progression not ilvl.

[DeadaliveAoS]

This post's question is silly beyond words. At the time of it's posting fewer than 19 guilds out of over 10,000 in the US had killed the final boss. And as of today only 30 raid teams out of 10,000 guilds have kill the final boss in the US. This is obviously a trolly question.

Exactly. Too easy for who? Most guilds will struggle quite a lot just to kill Brackenspore.