Hellfire Citadel badly tuned for small groups?

[Moonlily]

Hello,

Anyone else feels like this raid is even more small groups unfriendly than BRF?

We usually just focus on clearing HC content while it's current, with a few Mythic bosses if possible. In Highmaul we started with a 20+ team, since then people have started taking breaks and now we are down to 10-12 people. So far we've only done 6/13 normal and 1/13 heroic.
We got Hellfire Assault down earlier this week after giving up on keeping it a guild run and pugging an extra 5-6 people. After a night of wipes, we increased our numbers and suddenly the fight felt almost trivial. Last night we tried Iron Reaver with 12 people, after 2 hours of no progress (lack of healing cd's for pounding, bombs going off). When I did it with an almost 30 man pug we got it down within 3-4 tries. We decided to move on to Gorefiend normal instead. We killed it just fine the other week with a bigger group, but last night with such a small team we were really struggling.

We've been recruiting for months and can't find anyone to replace the people who left, raiding is becoming a chore, especially when you can get more progress in a random 25 man pug than in your guild run... anyone else feels the same?

[willemh]

Done 6/13 hc and 13/13 normal with a 10-14 people group and it felt fine tbh. Especially on normal the group size is really no excuse to not kill a boss.

I guess your raiders are just below the 'average pug' in skill level, so it feels easier if you invite some extra pugs. Don't get me wrong I'm not bashing you but that's the direction you should be looking in to improve your raids performance. Get better, not more, people or invest in your current players to shape them up a bit.

[Psidum]

First boss on heroic is much much easier with a larger group. Don't know about the rest.

[Deztru]

I've felt exactly opposite. We did an alt raid with ~14 people and the mechanics were a joke compared to 20+

Same rooms, same radiuses on abilities but more bombs, splash damage etc. with more people

[Psidum]

Interesting. Did it first with a full sized pug, 3rd of dps below 20k, easy. Did it again with a group or 12 or so, way better dps yet noticeably harder.

[Ryquis]

Thought Kilrogg got a little dicey because its the difference between losing half your dps for 20 seconds and losing 1/5th your dps for 20 seconds, which doesn't impact your ability to control adds on the outside of death gaze nearly as much. Sure if everyone is a 40k+ monstrosity it'll get done, but people doing normal raiding progression will be what 670 with about 25-35k dps?

Did 7/13 first week and thought that Kilrogg was the only one poorly tuned for small group so long as the composition wasn't just whatever is available.

[Sunnydee]

Mannoroth is the only hc fight so far i've fel is harder with less people. On normal archi is a pain with less people.
It's more than doable but id say those 2 is the ones that stick out depending on amount of people.

[tablespecd]

Some bosses are very badly tuned for smaller groups, for example Archimonde. We gave about 50 attempts with 10 people, who were all at least 8/10 mythic in BRF and 700+ ilvl. We realized that smaller groups have a much harder time on him, especially in the later phases. After looking over kill logs of other groups we couldn't find a single group that had killed him with fewer than 14 people. For example in the last phase there is the same amount of infernal to kill in a 10 man group compared to a 20 man group, which means it's much harder to cc, stun, or taunt one out because a good amount of your raid has been sent down to kill that elemental. With fewer people outside to kill these infernal your raid wipes from them being up to long, this was our main problem with the tuning on Archimonde. There are other fights as well that need to be better tuned for smaller groups. Seems like Blizzard designed these fights for 20 people and didn't spend the time to tune them accordingly for 15 or less groups.

[Army Dreamer]

Hellfire Citadel badly tuned for small groups?

Yep. I love especially how Kilrogg fight is tuned when you need to send 3 men out of 10 into his Death Realm. Hellfire Assault on heroic difficulty is also a total mess. But that's not new. BRF was also tuned badly for small groups on some bosses.

[Tojara]

We did the first week with a smaller raid group and the second week with a larger group. Some of the bosses felt easier with a smaller number (like Tyrant and Fel Lord) while others felt a lot easier with larger groups (Mannororth and Archimonde especially).

The breakpoints really aren't perfect, and I suppose in a way it confirms Blizzards reason for having mythic in the first place. Encounter balance is all over the place depending on the numbers you bring.

Generally I wouldn't say it's one way or the other, like always, it depends on the encounter.

[Deja Thoris]

Did an alt run with 11 people and it felt a lot harder to me.

Just using Kilrogg as an example. Hard to 2 heal because you want to send a healer down. I got mark 2x in a row and ended up with 2 stacks of the DoT which hurts a lot. It was just silly stuff like that adding up to make it feel less forgiving.

[Deleted]

I run with a small group and we found it much harder than we expected, so I did some research, people have said they found the first boss on heroic very easy and others said they wiped for hours, I looked at all the logs of the ones provided and the people who said it was really easy had over 20 people, while the people who found it hard had less than 14. 3 felcasters spawn 1 min in when you have 10 people, when you have 27 people, still 3 spawn, they increase in health obviously but with more people you have more interupts, cds and more people cleaving. I would love for blizzard to test this as they would come to the same conclusion. Or someone to go with 10 people and see how much health the adds have and how much damage each dps needs to do, and compare it to that of 20 people

[Pennoyer]

I'd generally say things favor larger groups, as the leeway you get with dealing with mechanics is much greater due to no scaling on the number of targets for them.

For example, the Xhul'horac always uses Fel Surge on 5 targets, and the DoT on the ability is similar regardless of how your raid size scales. That means a greater DPS or HPS loss due to movement for a small raid than a large raid. This sucks throughout the fight, but it really is bad in the last phase when he's pulsing AOE and you have a solid chance of losing people. With a large raid size, you can pretty much have your Fel Surges jump off the edge if you wanted and you'd still kill him easily, while 5 DPS dying in a smaller raid size would be a wipe. On top of that, adds just die much slower without having a bunch of classes with multidotting/cleaving. Having attempted him with 12 people and with 26 people it's just ridiculously amazing how much easier he is in a larger raid size.

The same principle applies to things like: Artillery, Wake blocking/Pillar soaking on Zakuun, Edict of Condemnation, Gift of the Manari, Iskar laser/chakram, Heartseeker, Mannoroth fear, etc.

Overall, you can fuck up the targeted debuffs, etc. on larger raid sizes and your penalty is only that one or two people die, leaving you with more than enough to power through an encounter. That's not the case with smaller raid sizes, where people have an equal chance to die but their death has a greater impact on the raid (and you have less battle rezzes to boot). It's not like the old 25 v 10 man or Siege of Orgrimmar flex where many more abilities scaled up their number of targets with raid size.

I think it's because Blizzard wanted to encourage raid leaders to bring everyone to their raids, unlike SOO where they'd cut down their raid to get ideal sizes (e.g., Sha of Pride prison break). I feel that this really screwed over the actual target audience of normal and heroic, though... how many casual guilds these days have 25+ raiders to bring along?

[oplawlz]

We're 10-11 manning it with very few problems. You do have to have a raid leader that's able to formulate their own strats though, as the guides seem to mainly be aimed toward larger groups.

[Deleted]

I'm afraid it is intentional that the fights are harder with smaller groups. This was discussed a lot when Flex mode came in MoP and Blizzard told that above all they want to avoid the situation where dropping people from the raid would make an encounter easier. In BRF they had to specifically tune some encounters for small groups because the fights were almost impossible with a 10 man team. We will probably see the same in HFC.

[galaxyquest]

It really sucks for small groups that they need to work harder than those in large groups. Mechanics need to be scaled better in Normal/Heroic, and not weeks after the raid opens.

Archimonde (among other encounters) is an absolute PITA for sub-18/20 groups.

[Wilderness]

Scaling should be better, but I don't think its too bad throughout most of HFC. Assault can be annoying but not terrible. Archimonde though - that is not at all friendly to small raid sizes. Way too hard on smaller groups relative to larger sizes. Some of his abilities absolutely need to scale down to smaller groups and not be the same with 10 or 30 people.

[Deleted]

Kilrogg was where we first ran into trouble as 10 man. It really should be two runes for visions with that amount, not three. We rocked up with 14 people, still three runes and steamrolled him.

[NightZero88]

Pretty much any encounter that has a targeted mechanic will be easier in a big group than a small one. For example on the boss that summons the mines, with a 10 man group he summons 5 mines. With a 30 man group he summons 6. So by tripling the size of your raid you only get 1 extra mine. This is the case for the majority of things. I believe the 2/4/9 is the best group makeup though.

[Bigbazz]

Smaller groups are usually harder, this was especially the case in BRF and to quite an extreme.