Next Tier Race

[Sirath]

With t17 race closing down with several guilds managing to kill Mythic Blackhand, I really begin to wonder if this race is just simply too fast? I remember back in the old days of Vanilla and TBC, A single boss took weeks to kill. Yes, I know that these bosses were ridiculously over-tuned, and extremely few guilds managed to see the full content prior to a nerf. Blizzard has shifted its stance towards allowing more people to see the content and allowing more and more people to experience the things they make. However, that is the reason LFR, Normal, and Heroic exist.

Wouldn't it possibly better to have the mythic content also be ridiculously over-tuned at the initial release stages? Like having the bosses require an insane amount of buffs/skills/time/luck to kill, or having them be limited number of pulls (Ra-den, Algalon, ICC end bosses) Imagine how intense the race could be? The race for world 1st is something that I do not see ever going away from this game, so why not make things interesting. As by current standards of 5 guilds kills before video releases, we can use that as a standard for when the bosses get a nerf or adjustment. Or simply use time as a factor, every week or two the bosses get easier to handle.

In this manner, it extends the longevity of the current top tier content even further as the day 1 entry would be insanely difficult, but as the content gets closer to the next tier the difficulty progressively gets easier (to a limit) and more people gets to see it as the difficulty becomes normalized. Meanwhile, the race for world 1st becomes an intense, crazy, unpredictable journey.

[PBitt]

For 99.99% of the raiding population, the tier lasts longer then a week. To buff the crap out of encounters for the sake of buffing the crap out of the encounters is just artificial difficulty. They're already at the forefront of progression; there are no youtube guides telling them how to win, and they also will go in with a lower average ilvl then the guilds that follow suit that have had more time to farm. Also, it seems fast to you, but several bosses in the past few years have taken 200-500 attempts for a world first kill. That's a lot of attempts. Factor in theory-crafting and the like in-between pulls, and that's a hell of a commitment as it is.

In the past, as I'm sure you know, they have nerfed the content (sometimes into oblivion) or added a damage boost. While bugs should be fixed and anything unintentionally under or over-tuned should be fixed as well, I don't think mythic content should be buffed or nerfed at all once it's live, especially now that we have 4 difficulties, as you said.

[sdracklryeg]

Terrible idea

Because then the sole factor to a guilds success in the race would be their gear If everything was ridiculously overtuned, because even very mechanically complex fights can be mastered in a short amount of time and players in these guilds can play their classes near perfectly. If they were stuck on a boss they could do nothing but just wait for more gear.

The world first race would actually become very boring If it was extended, guilds would start raiding less and less hours as weeks went on, and It would become completely predictable when bosses would die (After reset when they get more gear). 2-3 weeks for top guilds to clear a raid is perfectly fine. Everything in Sunwell was cleared the week each of Its gates were open, Black Temple was cleared in 2 weeks . Even Naxxramas, Kel'Thuzad only took 5 days to kill, just like Blackhand, the really big roadblock that made Naxx take so long was Four Horseman and the reason for that was 100% gear related.

I just don't get why you think It's a good idea to release overtuned and/or broken bosses. Kael'Thas for example, was unkillable because he was broken,. Kael'Thas stayed alive for many weeks, but the world 1st through 10th all happened in the same week, do you find that type of race more interesting?

In my opinion the world first race would be more interesting If Mythic didn't release a week later, and on Expansion launches, all raids are open from day 1.

[Deleted]

Times change and they will never change back. The top guilds (at least Method) have already mix-maxed everything they can and from Blizzard viewpoint, there isn't really much more you can do to challenge them in a meaningful way without offering literally impossible content. The argument about "four horsemen lasted x number of days blah blah" doesn't stand anymore; if you would bring the Method squad back in time to Naxxramas40 and give them exactly the same tools and gear that raiders had at that time and wipe their memory of anything they know about it...they would still kill it in one weekend. Back then, every single guild raided casually, from today's viewpoint. It didn't take much more than one hardcore- minded leader (Kungen) to gather those world firsts.

Anyhow, there's probably still some tools to try. The limited attempts thing doesn't really work because it would just cause a massive alt-gearing process where the top guilds progress on the boss with a bunch of alt squads and whoever does the most work with gearing alts, wins. But you could for example make an instance/boss that opens daily at 8PM server time and closes at 11 PM server time and that's it.

Or another option would be an epic end-boss fight that lasts for 30-60 minutes with 10+ phases and has almost zero room for error. A ridiculous guild killer that would traumatize all hardcore raiders for life, sure, but hilariously awesome from a "spectator" viewpoint. That would obviously require quite an effort from Blizzard's side to be done properly.

[xcess]

They just need to have challenge mode raid which unlocks after you do mythic. Itll scale down the gear so its as equal as possible then there can be a proper world first race. But yeah making it so hard only a small grp will bother attempting it is not good for Blizz as most ppl will just give up and unsub

[Erlaya]

In my opinion the world first race would be more interesting If Mythic didn't release a week later, and on Expansion launches, all raids are open from day 1.

This is actually one of the biggest changes I would like to see implemented. Progression could be a lot more interesting for the top guilds if they don't get that extra reset of Heroic gear before going into Mythic. Currently the top guilds have everyone (or basically everyone) in full 4pc before they go into Mythic on the second week since a lot of them can do a quick set of Heroic clears on the first day it opens before heading into the new content. By moving Mythic up one week you reduce the amount of time they have. By releasing Mythic first and intending for Mythic guilds to go Mythic > Mythic you also don't have to force Heroic Ilvl gear in the next tier to be better than Mythic gear of the previous tier, this is the other thing I'd like to see changed. Heroic gear from the new tier should be at best equal to the previous tier mythic gear.

[Moshots]

In bc and older tiers Gear wasn't readily available. Its not a big gap between normal/heroic/Mythic gear. So unlike older tiers where you were killing end bosses before people even had full tier. Now you just get full heroic tier and heroic trinkets and your 10% weaker than full mythic gear vs back then when the gap was much more severe. World of Lootcraft now with multiple difficulties is why we will never see bosses taking 4-5 weeks again.

[antelope591]

667 wipes for paragon....do u understand how hard a boss has to be for a boss to take 600+ wipes for a guild like paragon or midwinter? Even in its current state probably 1% of raiding guilds will kill mythic blackhand. Yet people somehow still keep making these types of threads.

[intrinsc]

You're comparing races where classes were massively out of whack, guilds weren't as tight as the top guilds are today, and new players are constantly coming into the game and people are still learning new things about the game. Today's top guilds are grizzled spec ops soldiers that have been in war for 10 years and have tightly tuned raid teams of the best of the best. It's not a comparison that can be made accurately, so I would refrain from even attempting it.

[Dangg]

Bosses seemed ridicilous overtuned, because it took months to gear up, ofc alt runs were unthinkable, you generally had to carry a lot of supbar players and couldn't recruit cross realm until Naxx, server lag made the game unplayable at times and some bosses were staight up bugged.

Yes, let get back to the times that it took Blizz a month to fix a bugged boss instead of a few hours.
Genius idea.

[Deleted]

In this manner, it extends the longevity of the current top tier content even further as the day 1 entry would be insanely difficult, but as the content gets closer to the next tier the difficulty progressively gets easier (to a limit) and more people gets to see it as the difficulty becomes normalized. Meanwhile, the race for world 1st becomes an intense, crazy, unpredictable journey.

Overturning encounters for the sake of extending the time it takes a guild to clear it is a Cheap and nasty way to extend the amount of time it takes to clear content for a minute amount of people, and it satisfy's no-one.

Artificial blocks on content have never been popular, you just have to look at the previous expansion and right back to Vanilla to see that. Your tanks don't have a full set of Fire Res gear, with reagents that drop rarely from mobs in the Raid your working on, good luck killing half the bosses in there skippy. All you tank 8/8 Tier 3 Good luck clearing the 4 horseman. No-one want's to go back to that situation.

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Bosses seemed ridicilous overtuned, because it took months to gear up, ofc alt runs were unthinkable, you generally had to carry a lot of supbar players and couldn't recruit cross realm until Naxx, server lag made the game unplayable at times and some bosses were staight up bugged.

Yes, let get back to the times that it took Blizz a month to fix a bugged boss instead of a few hours.
Genius idea.

C'thun, Keal'thas and Lady Vashj spring to mind here.

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667 wipes for paragon....do u understand how hard a boss has to be for a boss to take 600+ wipes for a guild like paragon or midwinter? Even in its current state probably 1% of raiding guilds will kill mythic blackhand. Yet people somehow still keep making these types of threads.

People seem to think content should be Unfair and Frustrating, rather than Challenging and Fun.

[Rixarius]

Bosses have never been more complex and challenging than they are today. If you make bosses mathematically unkillable, how would that make it better for anyone else? It wouldn't. I think that attempt gating for an extra boss is a thing that could work well if applied in the right scenario, but who cares if the top 0.01% of guilds finish the raid in 3 weeks, that's what they want to do. The vast majority of players will be working on this raid all the way until the next raid comes out, and probably not kill Blackhand.

[Sierra85]

I think that attempt gating for an extra boss is a thing that could work well if applied in the right scenario

they tried this in WoTLK and it didn't really work because it made every top guild have an alt team that they would use attempts on, and then use their mains once they had worked a strat.

[Deleted]

Mythic Blakchand is "ridiculously over-tuned" there was no guild that killed him first reset while playing 15 hours a day. I hate to see arguments about vanilla or tbc that it took longer to kill bosses, back in the days class stacking or split runs weren't popular at all almost everyone had 1 main and thats it. Now everyone have 3-4 chars in top 5 guilds.

[Deleted]

Or another option would be an epic end-boss fight that lasts for 30-60 minutes with 10+ phases and has almost zero room for error. A ridiculous guild killer that would traumatize all hardcore raiders for life, sure, but hilariously awesome from a "spectator" viewpoint. That would obviously require quite an effort from Blizzard's side to be done properly.

Now that would be ridiculous and I hope this never happens. What I like about Blackhand is that it's an end boss fight that only lasts like 6-7 minutes, at least in heroic. So you don't run into a situation where you mastered first 80% of the fight, so you focus for 15 minutes just to fail at the end and having to repeat this all over again. Instead you got swift attempts and can throw many of them even if you're not hardcore guild and only raid like 2x 3 hours a week for example.

[Airlick]

Hardcore guilds and players evolved. The game evolved as well. The bosses are still extremely hard, but they are mostly free of bugs, and any bugs there may be left are fixed very fast by Blizzard. The gearing and levelling processes are also a lot easier now than in Vanilla/TBC, so they have tons of alts and are able to figure out the best possible setups for given bosses. Even so, the top guilds spend XX hours a day progressing. Does that make for an easy game? If it was easy, they would all be blowing through the content within a week.

Releasing all raids, or even a single tier, on day 1 of an x-pac is the worst idea imaginable. There are still guilds that are not playing 24/7 during progress and they are able to reach high ranks. If raids were open from day 1, those guilds would have no chance at competing with the ones that do sacrifice their lives for the sake of progress.

[Senka]

Or another option would be an epic end-boss fight that lasts for 30-60 minutes with 10+ phases and has almost zero room for error. A ridiculous guild killer that would traumatize all hardcore raiders for life, sure, but hilariously awesome from a "spectator" viewpoint. That would obviously require quite an effort from Blizzard's side to be done properly.

This reminds me of a FFXI story, though that had more to do with the raiders not knowing what to do because there was literally no way to figure out what to do, so that was more about extremely poor design than total length.

[alexke]

With t17 race closing down with several guilds managing to kill Mythic Blackhand, I really begin to wonder if this race is just simply too fast? I remember back in the old days of Vanilla and TBC, A single boss took weeks to kill. Yes, I know that these bosses were ridiculously over-tuned, and extremely few guilds managed to see the full content prior to a nerf. Blizzard has shifted its stance towards allowing more people to see the content and allowing more and more people to experience the things they make. However, that is the reason LFR, Normal, and Heroic exist.

Wouldn't it possibly better to have the mythic content also be ridiculously over-tuned at the initial release stages? Like having the bosses require an insane amount of buffs/skills/time/luck to kill, or having them be limited number of pulls (Ra-den, Algalon, ICC end bosses) Imagine how intense the race could be? The race for world 1st is something that I do not see ever going away from this game, so why not make things interesting. As by current standards of 5 guilds kills before video releases, we can use that as a standard for when the bosses get a nerf or adjustment. Or simply use time as a factor, every week or two the bosses get easier to handle.

In this manner, it extends the longevity of the current top tier content even further as the day 1 entry would be insanely difficult, but as the content gets closer to the next tier the difficulty progressively gets easier (to a limit) and more people gets to see it as the difficulty becomes normalized. Meanwhile, the race for world 1st becomes an intense, crazy, unpredictable journey.

1/ Implying it doesn't take a retarded amount of buffs/skills/time... to kill?

2/ Limited number of pulls only promotes multiple lockouts and alts, nothing more.

3/ You'd nerf bosses per week? Really? The idea is to progress it, what helps and nerfs it indirectly is gear.

4/ It doesn't extend longevity, at all. You're going to nerf mechanics? Or are you going to make bosses so retarded hard that top 10 guilds are progressing a boss for 10weeks straight?

- Allso, due note, the reason they're dying "faster", even after a 600+ attempt clusterfuck on a boss, is that you're not wasting 15minutes after a 2minute whipe whilest running back. In Molten Core / Blackwing Lair you had 40man running back from Thorium Point, then running up the chain or jumping in the lava. -

Now you spawn directly in the raid with the appropriate shortcuts ~ how is this a bad thing?

[Deleted]

With t17 race closing down with several guilds managing to kill Mythic Blackhand, I really begin to wonder if this race is just simply too fast? I remember back in the old days of Vanilla and TBC, A single boss took weeks to kill. Yes, I know that these bosses were ridiculously over-tuned, and extremely few guilds managed to see the full content prior to a nerf. Blizzard has shifted its stance towards allowing more people to see the content and allowing more and more people to experience the things they make. However, that is the reason LFR, Normal, and Heroic exist.

Wouldn't it possibly better to have the mythic content also be ridiculously over-tuned at the initial release stages? Like having the bosses require an insane amount of buffs/skills/time/luck to kill, or having them be limited number of pulls (Ra-den, Algalon, ICC end bosses) Imagine how intense the race could be? The race for world 1st is something that I do not see ever going away from this game, so why not make things interesting. As by current standards of 5 guilds kills before video releases, we can use that as a standard for when the bosses get a nerf or adjustment. Or simply use time as a factor, every week or two the bosses get easier to handle.

In this manner, it extends the longevity of the current top tier content even further as the day 1 entry would be insanely difficult, but as the content gets closer to the next tier the difficulty progressively gets easier (to a limit) and more people gets to see it as the difficulty becomes normalized. Meanwhile, the race for world 1st becomes an intense, crazy, unpredictable journey.

Bosses in vanilla and TBC where not overtuned at all. You just had a lot of timesink going on, and you got gear way way slower then nowadays (hello splitraids).

The actuall mythic bosses, are WAY harder then anything in vanilla or TBC.

But you have to look on the selection of tools guilds nowadays have.

- no serverlags, better hardware, better internetconnections overall (this is huge)
- datamining and a lot of information going on over new bosses, mechanics, or how new alitliys work
- things like simcraft make theorycrafting way easier
- warcraftlogs, livelogs, your able to instantly find out every single detail you want to know about a fight you just did
- you now have a lot of raidleads, guild leads and players with almost years of progression experience
- due to several things you are now able push a few hundered pulls on a boss in like 1 or 2 days if your raiding on the bloody edge, the same amount of pulls took you weeks if not months in vanilla.
- easy accessable gear, buffood, flasks, pots .....

You can not even tune this bosses harder, because then they would be unkillable. You can put in a gearcheck encounter, and that is what blackhand was, all guilds needed the extra loot from another mythic 9/10 farm to be able to kill this boss. It took this hardcore guilds a few hundere pulls (i think paragon took like 600 pulls) to down it.

The only option is, like you said, a restricted amount of pulls you can do. But that will end up in top-guild gearing mirror alts and go double the amount of trys they should have, or even tripple.

[Reyzzz]

This thread again...ResidentSleeper

on topic: The bosses weren't hard in early stages of wow. They seemed hard because they were bugged or tightly tuned.

Also, if blizz designs the content around world first race, the 99% of raiders who aren't the part of that, will be on the sidelines.