Introduction
I'm writing this message as an outsider of the whole HL PvE scene. I used to play in a HL guild but I don't anymore, having quit before Hellfire Citadel. Even though I quit, I still kept following the World First race as I find it highly entertaining to track which guild kills what first and who performs well.
I am perhaps the only to think this, but after seeing an 18-hour progress get bashed by the worlds best guild(s), I'm very dissapointed by the outcome of what was supposed to be one of the raiding tiers of this "promising" expansion.
I will start by congratulating Экзорсус for their performance and want to make clear that I criticise the tier format, it is not to take away from their performance but to simply analyze, what I feel to be an afwul raid. I also want to congratulate Method, Serenity and From Scratch for this awesome performance, I really hope all those guilds keep on going to give us a (hopefully) long and entertaining second progress.
Now let's get to the three reasons I mentioned in my post: Legendaries, Mythic+ and Class balance.
1) Legendaries.
I feel like Blizzard could have gone two ways with legendary items. Either make them relatively weak so that they don't have a big impact on the dps of the players who get them (let's say: sub 2% dps performance difference) or they could have made it so players who played a lot got the legendaries they wanted no matter what. (for example a Legendary forge where you can destroy one to get another while also including a shitton of mats)
Instead of this, we have legendaries that are obviously extremely strong and others which are arguably useless. If you compare the compositions the first four guilds had in terms of legendaries: Exorsus, Method and From scratch all had ~6 useless legendaries out of 20 raiders and Serenity had ~10. I'm not using this as an excuse whatsoever but let's face it: it had to have somewhat of an impact on the progression. I haven't looked into healer / tank / dps spreading of legendaries but I think it is not absurd to suppose that a guild with 8 dps with a good legendary has a huge disadvantage vs another with 15 dps with good legendaries.
As time passes, this gap is obviously going to close as more and more players get the OP legendary for their class, nevertheless, this feels like one fuckup blizzard could have easily predicted and thus avoided.
2) Mythic+.
I still do not get why blizzard opened Mythic+ at the same time as the Heroic mode. This game mode allowed guilds to get an INSANE amount of gear on their characters resulting in raids having itemlevels way above what should normally be the case. If you look at the itemlevel the top guilds had for this tier compared to heroic mode drops and at what itemlevels guilds had in Highmaul during progression compared to heroic, you clearly see that there is a difference. Having played in HL guild, I can say for sure that a difference of 5 itemlevels has a massive impact on the progression, especially in the hands of some of the most skilled players WoW has.
Having such a high itemlevel has to be a problem because the difference between semi-hardcore (who don't raid during day-hours) and full hardcore guilds has never been bigger. Usually, split runs yield a few points of difference in terms of itemlevel but now this difference is bigger. Because the difference is so big, I think that Blizzard is now stuck and they have to choose between tuning bosses for players who dedicate their entire life to WoW and ones who just log in at night to progress through the content.
I think this participates to the feeling that the Mythic progress was flawed. Now more than ever, players who can play 24/7, level 5 alts, run tens of mythic dungeons for a week and still somehow clean Heroic mode 5 times have an unfair disadvantage on all of the others. Again, this can easily be avoided by blizzard, and solved. All you have to do is release the raids earlier (say after ~1 week of the expansion release) and release Mythic+ at the same time as Mythic raids. This way, players who tryhard can have an alt or 2 and clear Heroic 3 times but they won't have such an insane itemlevel that any content that is tuned for normal players is super easy for them.
3) Class Balance.
In terms of dick moves, I don't remember Blizzard tuning classes in the middle of the Heroic progression and then even reverting some of the changes by the end of the Heroic week. I think the general class tuning has never been worse. Exorsus has been smart to exploit some classes more than others. If you look at their raid comp on Xavius, you can see that they used 1 out of the 6 available tanks, 3 out of the 7 available melees, 3 out of the 6 available ranged and 4 out of the 5 available healers. Except for healers which seemed to be relatively well balanced, I find it amazing that so many classes didn't find their way into the Mythic kills of a raid. I know class stacking has been around forever but I don't remember it being so harsh as it has been this time.
Rebalancing classes in the middle of the heroic clear must have been a nightmare for the officers of the different guilds. If you add to that that some classes got upped right after getting nerfed, I think Blizzard's handling of the situation could have been better, certainly when you know that the time investment into a single char (Mythic+, Split Heroics, etc..) is such that you cannot change your main once the Heroic week has started.
4) Conclusion.
In the end, I feel like this progress was not a real one. I would have been interested in seeing a 2-3 progress at least because that's where real guilds shine and that's where luck starts to make place for pure skill, coordination and innovation. 18-hour races are not fun to anyone. After the disaster that WoD has been in terms of PvE, I hope that this expansion is'nt going to be one more fuck the HC players, they don't pay as much as our dear casuals expansion.
I really hope Blizzard adresses this whole world first problem as I feel that having a world first race is an important part of this game. People might think that what 0.1% of the population does is not important to a game but I strongly disagree with this idea. Think about League of Legends for example, it is the 0.1% that define what is played, what the meta is, why players try to improve, what builds are used, etc...
If you got to this part of my text block, thank you for reading and feel free to comment and debate below.
Sincerely, Zurgasse