Raid Tuning Coming July 5

[Stoy]

Raid Tuning Coming July 5

As we previously mentioned, we’re working on a number of hotfixes to the most challenging bosses in Sepulcher of the First Ones.

With the weekly reset in each region (July 5 here), we intend to apply the following hotfixes:

Anduin

• Anduin’s Hope and Anduin’s Doubt health reduced by 20% on Heroic and Normal difficulties.
• Reduced the movement speed of Anduin’s Hope by 15% on Heroic and Normal difficulties.
• Grim Fate reduced from 200% to 150% on Mythic difficulty.

Lords of Dread

• Boss Health reduced by 10% on all difficulties.
• Swarm of Decay and Swarm of Darkness damage reduced by 15% on Heroic difficulty.

Rygelon

• Boss Health reduced by 10% on all difficulties.
• Damage of Dark Eruption reduced by 75% on Heroic difficulty.

The Jailer

• Health reduced by 15% on Heroic and Normal difficulties.
• Health reduced by 10% on Mythic difficulty.
• Azerite Radiation increased from 3%/stack to 7%/stack.
• Domination is now triggered on players with 3 stacks of Tyranny (was 2 stacks).
• Decimator no longer includes knockback on Heroic and Mythic difficulties.
• Surging Azerite damage reduced by 15% on Mythic difficulty.
• Surging Azerite heals Azeroth for 5% per tick (was 4%).
• Rune of Damnation damage reduced by 15% on all difficulties.
• Rune of Domination will be cast 3 times during Phase 2 on Mythic difficulty (was 4 casts).
• Rune of Compulsion absorb reduced by 35% on Heroic difficulty.
• Shattering Blast damage reduced by 20% on all difficulties.
• Chains of Anguish damage reduced by 30% on Mythic difficulty.
• Dominating Will absorb reduced by 15% on Heroic and Mythic difficulties.
• Chain Breaker damage reduced by 20% on Heroic difficulty.

[SinR]

The Nerfening 2: Electric Boogaloo

[Master Guns]

This is genuinely getting hilarious lmao

[Jastall]

It's pretty clear Blizzard has to stop tuning raids so high initially. I know that Mythic isn't supposed to be for the faint of heart but what's the use of the difficulty if 2-3 guilds clear it as intended, maybe 50-100 guilds get to see it as a slightly nerfed version and everyone else basically fights a different final boss?

Even on lower difficulties Anduin was just too hard a fight for its placement as well. How many times has he been nerfed now across the board, 6 or 7? On Normal he was harder than anything up to him on Heroic, was just nuts.

Yes, it'll make for shorter RWF but to be honest even the top guilds don't seem to enjoy weeks of constant split raids and Weakaura crafting that much. Difficulty does not equal enjoyment.

[Trumpcat]

Nerfing the terrible one shot mechanics the raid is littered with leaves them as failure damage for the healers to bear the burden of healing. So from sneezing and wiping the raid it is now down to maybe do the mechanics, just have enough healing.

This happens when a game that's supposed to be an entertaining hobby, is designed for players who do 10 hours of raiding six days per week, along with other min/maxing strategies that the vast majority of players have neither the time, resource nor interest in doing. They ended with a behemoth of challenge that fewer players than ever have managed to beat, not to mention losing subscribers and the chain effect of dying guilds.

I hope the encounter design in Dragonflight is done more competently. And by competent I don't mean a perfection of formulas on an Excel spread sheet, but gameplay that's actually fun and tested as such.

[Chriisto]

The aim here is to make it viable for a fresh level 60 to be able to comfortably solo Mythic Sepulcher of the First Ones by the end of season 3 to accommodate the casual / solo community. I think it's a great idea personally

[Swnem]

Again? Lol

[exochaft]

It's pretty clear Blizzard has to stop tuning raids so high initially. I know that Mythic isn't supposed to be for the faint of heart but what's the use of the difficulty if 2-3 guilds clear it as intended, maybe 50-100 guilds get to see it as a slightly nerfed version and everyone else basically fights a different final boss?

Even on lower difficulties Anduin was just too hard a fight for its placement as well. How many times has he been nerfed now across the board, 6 or 7? On Normal he was harder than anything up to him on Heroic, was just nuts.

Yes, it'll make for shorter RWF but to be honest even the top guilds don't seem to enjoy weeks of constant split raids and Weakaura crafting that much. Difficulty does not equal enjoyment.

Unfortunately, according to Ion's own words, not much is going to change in Dragonflight with respect to how they try to tune/design these raids... at least for now. Doesn't mean it won't be easier than Sepulcher at release, but they're not changing their tuning/design philosophies for raids going forward.

While Blizz doesn't officially sponsor and run the RWF, they're tuning the raids around it. Who does that benefit? Well, this past raid, absolutely no one as raiders at all levels of difficulty and progression were upset with it. With how things are done, Blizz is just going to continue to make raiding less and less appealing, there will be little to no upward mobility when it comes to raid difficulty, and you'll long-term likely lose players from the game entirely. There's tons of ways to fix this scenario, but there's no indication that Blizz even wants to. Ultimately, I think we're going to have to see the cross-realm/faction mythic raiding play out through Dragonflight before Blizz finally realizes there are deeper issues and concerns with their raiding model that need to be addressed.

[Ealyssa]

It's pretty clear Blizzard has to stop tuning raids so high initially.

Why tho ? What is so bad with nerf waves ?

It's the way that make the most people happy. Everyone has a fair chance at clearing every bosses on the highest difficulty, then nerf after nerf the guilds who are behind will "catch up" and clear the raid too. Until this last (?) wave where most guild who are still struggling will most likely kill the Jailer before the end of season 3.
It also allow PUGs to try for the heroic mount.

I seriously can't see why people are crying a river about this... Even the RWF of this tier had the most viewers ever (200k+) because of its difficulty (which only impact the RWF guilds on the first few weeks as nobody else would reach last boss no matter what)

[Yem]

Why tho ? What is so bad with nerf waves ?

It's the way that make the most people happy. [...]

I seriously can't see why people are crying a river about this...

Hmmm... the issue is not necessarily the fact that they're making the bosses less hard, but the extent of the changes.
I mean, Jailer is basicaly a joke at this point. It is absolutely ridiculous to push that many huge nerfs at the same time.

I realize this is the last batch (and summer is there, which will be hard on every raiding guild as usual) but it is, in my opinion, a slap in the face for every guild that was currently doing progress on Jailer.
No one wants to invest a few weeks of gametime on a boss, to wake up to something that can be killed in 5pulls. There is not much pleasure there, only the feeling of having wasted time.

I have been playing since Wotlk and it's the first time i disliked a raid. Not because the raid/bosses themselves were bad, but because of the tuning. My guild was stuck on halondrus a few weeks then the nerfs came and we destroyed it in 2 pulls, then the same happened on Anduin, then Rygelon, and now Jailer.

The thing most of us enjoy in the raiding scene is the sense of progression, getting better pull after pull, finding solutions to each issue we face. Yes sometimes we're stuck, and it's fine if some moderate and carefully considered changes help us to the finish line. But this raid was a succession of impassable walls hit by nuclear warheads when you're already 200pulls in and a kill is within reach.
The frustration is real, and i'm rumbling, but hey, maybe it gives you some insight of why some of us feel this way of doing things is not at all the way to make us happy.

Hopping we get back on track for Dragonflight!

[alturic]

You know, I used to try understanding people who complained about mythic being too hard, and while I still really can't understand the desire to "do it" when it's nerfed... I really don't understand Blizzard's mentality with all these nerfs? Why exactly does everyone need to be able to try/do mythic? Is it because they put special features in and they want people to experience them?

[Caprias]

You know, I used to try understanding people who complained about mythic being too hard, and while I still really can't understand the desire to "do it" when it's nerfed... I really don't understand Blizzard's mentality with all these nerfs? Why exactly does everyone need to be able to try/do mythic? Is it because they put special features in and they want people to experience them?

It's not in the slightest about "everyone needing to be able to get into mythic".

Without these nerfs a good deal of CE guilds that had no issue getting CE for the last 8+ tiers (like... cmon, they earned their merit by this point) would not get it this time simply due to brutal miss-tuning.

We are almost 4 months into mythic release and you would need to be in a top 400 guild to have CE by this point, that is ridiculous.

- - - Updated - - -

Unfortunately, according to Ion's own words, not much is going to change in Dragonflight with respect to how they try to tune/design these raids... at least for now. Doesn't mean it won't be easier than Sepulcher at release, but they're not changing their tuning/design philosophies for raids going forward.

This is plain wrong and misinformation, there are literally blue posts from the last few weeks where they're talking about encounter design choices they don't want to make again in Dragonflight, (however to be fair I'm pretty sure we had something similar in Legion soaking+oneshot wipe mechanics boogaloo so I'll take "we learned our lesson" comments from Blizz with a grain of salt).

[pinkz]

sad that blizz made mythic so hard, then scaled N/H down based on a overtuned mythic. many were saying that N/H would harder that previous expacs mythic raids along with LFR being overtuned as well

[Simca]

I don't understand why they keep nerfing the downstairs phase of Anduin. It's the easiest part of the fight and has been since the second round of downstairs nerfs. We're on set like... 4 of downstairs nerfs now, and it's so trivial you don't even need to split the raid in half to handle it - ~30% can do it fine.

Is that the point? To make people hold a lot of the people going downstairs back so the upstairs phase is easier?

[enigma77]

Good, but too late.

This should have happened 2 months ago.

In Dragonflight Mythic needs to be far easier from the start, fuck the Race to world first, no one cares.

[SinR]

these nerfs to me just reinforce the theory that Anduin was supposed to be final boss of 9.2 and Final 3 were supposed to be 9.2.5 Season 4.

[stoffe]

nice now my guild can maybe finally kill Jailer in hc

[Eazy]

Why tho ? What is so bad with nerf waves ?

It's the way that make the most people happy. Everyone has a fair chance at clearing every bosses on the highest difficulty, then nerf after nerf the guilds who are behind will "catch up" and clear the raid too. Until this last (?) wave where most guild who are still struggling will most likely kill the Jailer before the end of season 3.
It also allow PUGs to try for the heroic mount.

I seriously can't see why people are crying a river about this... Even the RWF of this tier had the most viewers ever (200k+) because of its difficulty (which only impact the RWF guilds on the first few weeks as nobody else would reach last boss no matter what)

I agree.

The guilds who had most skilled players already killed Jailer. No one can stole it from them... while the less fortunate are struggling, they should be able to have their fun also.
It doesn't undermine the achievement from the previous guilds that killed him. They had their time to shine, they had their time of glory. It's now time to let the others have it also, especially knowing that Mythic Jailer was killed by not so many guilds(compared to previous end-bosses in the same time).

[Usernameforforums]

nice now my guild can maybe finally kill Jailer in hc

What you guys having trouble on?

[exochaft]

This is plain wrong and misinformation, there are literally blue posts from the last few weeks where they're talking about encounter design choices they don't want to make again in Dragonflight, (however to be fair I'm pretty sure we had something similar in Legion soaking+oneshot wipe mechanics boogaloo so I'll take "we learned our lesson" comments from Blizz with a grain of salt).

It's not misinformation, as the blue posts and interviews talk about different aspects of the raid design. As an example, the most recent information was about parity mechanics, i.e. one person screws up, it's an instant wipe or it's better to wipe than try to gimp along. Granted these have been an issue since Ion's been in charge (which would include Legion), not necessarily their existence themselves being the issue but the sheer number/severity of them. However, his interviews talking about how they're approaching the difficulty and progression scaling in relation to things like the RWF have been stated as not changing, and there has been no change in stance since.

Furthermore, there's tons of other aspects that they're not talking about or have made statements about that infer or straight-up say they aren't changing. Yes, some aspects are MAY change... as you said (and I agree), Blizz's track record of learning from their mistakes is not stellar. In fact, they like to double-down more often than not.

The one aspect that I like to circle back to is how the raid is balanced around RWF, because that has many issues that trickle down into other issues that end up affecting way more than just mythic raiding. As others have said, it's not necessarily about the difficulty on its own, as that's just one aspect that ties into others... it's the entire process. With how they tune the raids, they have to constantly nerf the raid else hardly anyone will clear the raid and/or will quit... but how they do it probably pisses off more people than it makes happy. For some guilds, they feel like the raid is way overtuned and the nerfs held hostage until the RWF ends. For other guilds, they feel like their progression/efforts is wasted time if they've been working on a boss and a nerf just trivializes a fight. For many, the entire process just feels like a waste of time, whether you like the harder difficult or you struggle with it. This isn't even getting into power/ilvl creep, progression issues, and a slew of other issues that arise because of this. The irony is that Blizz has used other solutions in the past that are the better of both worlds, such as a progressive buff/debuff aura that you can turn off that gives you the option of an easier time or clearing the original difficulty... it's not perfect, but better than what we have.

Yes, Blizz says they're looking at making some changes to raid encounters, but there are some fundamental aspects of their raid/design philosophy that they have already said they're not going to change at this point. While the stated potential changes are a step in the right direction, Blizz still doesn't intend to make large strides at this point. My tin foil hat theory is that they're still mainly looking at this issue from a quantitative point of view versus a qualitative one, so they'd rather turn knobs to see if they reach their projected metrics (kind of like how these raid nerfs get put out) than try to figure out the underlying issues. This is why I think they aren't going to do much more until Dragonflight raids and cross-realm/faction data is available (Season 4 probably won't yield much useful information). I guess I can't blame them on some level, because they're in conservation mode and being risk-averse. However, there needs to be much more risk taking if Blizz wants to go from trying to maintain/retain players to actually increasing the player base long-term.