Four Horsemen Discussion--Why was it hard?

[Roxyfoxy]

I think the answer lies somewhere around this:

Was it hard from a skill perspective? Nope. Not many vanilla fights where

It was hard from the perspective of needing specific people to show up at specific times during a long period of time. Those people needed to have worked on their character for a good while and have a specific amount of gear.

Gear, people and time.

While that is true for most of vanilla, there is a few fights where you cannot really carry bad players.

4 horsemen, kel'thuzad Thaddius and C'thun are fights where the entire raid needs to both know what they are doing, and play your class well. 4 horsemen is the most forgiving fight out of those 4. The others are fights where one mistake can wipe a raid.

But about 4 horsemen.

This is a very unique fight in vanilla, and has enormous amount of coordination for your entire raid group, while the bosses have abilities that are very deadly if not handled correctly, thus making the learning part very hard.

1 missed taunt does not equal a wipe, but 2 can be very deadly. Not because that the tanks cant handle the extra debuffs, but because if you stay too long at one spot you might be too late taunting the next boss, and a few of these can screw up the rotation a lot so at one point a tank will have more debuffs than he can handle.

The reason it took so long to kill was because noone really figured out a rotation that worked well. Since every role has their own kind of rotation.

The guild Death and Taxes was the first guild to kill them, and they released (or it got leaked) their rotation just after the kill. And when the other guilds got their strategy, the boss was killed by several guilds almost imediatly. Causing death and taxes to lose the race for world first Kel'thuzad.
Which was so bugged that the world first was a complete RNG about who got the least gamebreaking bugs on a attempt.


After the rotation strategy got out, 4 horsemen was no longer a difficult fight at all.
The 4piece t3 helps a lot, but is by no means neccesary at all. But you just cant have too much bad luck in a short amount of time.

Many people also failed due to how the warrior taunts work.
Taunt transfers the threat to the taunter.
Mocking blow and challenging shout does not, it just make the mob focus the warrior for the duration, and once it is over it returns its focus on to the top agro target.
This was not really common knowledge, so many warriors failed by using those abilities, thus causing wipes.

[AeneasBK]

Barely anyone had a real clue how to play? Hell on the recent private servers most tanks I spoke to thought taunt worked of hit rating not spell hit. After what, 13 years?

[Cosmic Janitor]

Gearing one main tank was a pita. You usually had 2-3, requiring 8 on that level was just blizzard being dicks

[Storfan]

Barely anyone had a real clue how to play? Hell on the recent private servers most tanks I spoke to thought taunt worked of hit rating not spell hit. After what, 13 years?

No surprises there really. Most players even on private vanilla servers come straight from retail where hit as a stat doesnt even exist anymore, let alone the two versions of old (Spell and physical).

[Projectmars]

For progress runs on 4hm most guilds will use more healers than average meaning there wont be room for any retridins. On average we use about 12-14 healers in Naxx (depending on what Wing and who shows up). For 4hm and Sapphiron we'd use 12-16 healers. Again, there is wiggle room depending on what classes of healers you got, wbuffs and quite frankly how good the individual players are.

Well that doesn't help me a bit then. Ah well, good to know.

[RyanEX]

There too, but we did it on horseman out of desperation, not because it worked pretty good. Lady Blaumeux didn't hit with her sword but casted shadowbolts and warlocks with soullink were quite tanky against casters. We used two warlocks tanking with Searing Pain. The 'taunt' was letting one warlock die and battle rezzing him. There wasn't a combat rezz restriction back than and we had a lot of druids. After the first horseman died the free tanks could switch to Lady Blaumeux.

You're thinking about the Wrath Naxx, which was a watered down version and a joke.

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Yes and no I would say. For it's time absolutely considering they werent killed for months. Across all expansions side-by-side definitely not. Cthun pre-nerf was also to my knowledge completely impossible to kill due to incorrect tuning but I guess that probably doesnt count.

The only reason it was hard was because of the number of tanks required. Going from 2 - 3 geared tanks to 7-8 was a massive leap and a shock when guilds first got to it. So then you had to take the weeks needed to gear the new tanks and hope that your players weren't poached by another guild during the interim.

[Cyanu]

the pinnacle of vanilla difficulty! a logistics and farming nightmare for the sake of beating some simple mechanics...

bonus difficulty for having 'semi-broken' taunt mechanics which rely on spell hit...

[Moggie]

Gear up 8 tanks. Have them get poached by other guilds who’d encounter the same thing to them... fun times.

Precision movements, learning how to handle all the abilities, etc was simply awful for the time. I’d much prefer banging my head again cthun [and I loathed AQ40) than the logistical nightmare of 4H. Nothing else in Naxx40 caused as much headaches for the guild before and after the kill. (Well, apart from making sure every raider was attuned) I feel sorry for the healers if locks were used. >.<

Private servers will never come close to what Live was like.

[garicasha]

Ok so 15 wipes? So with modern strats we're not talking 300 pulls here.

But we're probably talking 300 hours of farming per pull.

And heh in that video right at the end Zeliek gets loose and zaps everyone in the safe area. Although one thing I noticed..it seems way fewer people are soaking those meteors than I thought would be needed.

Oh and does anyone have a list of what the fire tanks would wear?

[Storfan]

Ok so 15 wipes? So with modern strats we're not talking 300 pulls here.

But we're probably talking 300 hours of farming per pull.

And heh in that video right at the end Zeliek gets loose and zaps everyone in the safe area. Although one thing I noticed..it seems way fewer people are soaking those meteors than I thought would be needed.

Oh and does anyone have a list of what the fire tanks would wear?

If the melee is wearing their fire res gear properly you'll only need about 4-5 melee soaking each meteor. Tanks will be using less fire ress than melee since the tanks also have to mitigate the physical damage. Honestly, you could even tank it entirely without fire res gear but it's not recommended. I'm using 1-2 fire res rings and 1-2 crafted epic plate fire res pieces so like around 100 fire res and rest is basically T3.

[Chaelexi]

A few details on that...

--It seems like the world-first guilds that were pushing that fight would have been capable of getting the 4-piece bonus.

--The 4-piece bonus only increased spell hit by 5%, couldn't that just be overcome with some random spell hit trinket?

--Were 8 tanks strictly necessary? I've seen forum trolls argue this both ways as I mentioned in the OP. For example, couldn't it be done with 6 tanks, so you'd always have 4 tanking and 2 running across the room?

--Or was it the fact that every other fight required 3-5 warriors and this one suddenly required 6-8?

--Also, what exactly about a missed taunt led to a raid wipe? Warriors had more health than everybody, so couldn't they take an extra stack if needed? Or was it just that the whole timings unraveled if someone missed their turn?

The 6 tank strat worked but it was significantly riskier and had a higher chance of failure. where as the 8 tank strat allowed for tanks to reset debuffs and did not risk a lot of movement on the bosses.

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I actually killed Thaddius as number two in the world and I can tell you that we had a lot of problems figuring them out. Especially Thaddius because that was something entirely new mechanics wise to previous bosses. Getting people to move clock wise or counter clockwise is apparently very hard. I think we killed Loatheb two weeks after or so, mostl due to the gear requirements.

Once Naxxramas was on farm the only bosses we wiped on were KT and 4HM. Most wipes on 4HM was due to the bs mechanics that you couldn’t avoid. It could literally be a wipe if were unlucky during the pull.

Yeah in Deus Vox we actually had people put a sticky notes up with a + sign and a - sign on the left and right side of their monitor and all of the sudden everything worked. Loatheb good times, I can claim my one world first there. Yeah 4H was terrible for that.


And yes C-thun and Ouru were unkillable due to tuning and in fight bugs. Once they were fixed they were killed within hours of the server coming up by multiple guilds. the first couple were within 20 minutes of each other.

[Jastall]

Ok so 15 wipes? So with modern strats we're not talking 300 pulls here.

But we're probably talking 300 hours of farming per pull.

And heh in that video right at the end Zeliek gets loose and zaps everyone in the safe area. Although one thing I noticed..it seems way fewer people are soaking those meteors than I thought would be needed.

Oh and does anyone have a list of what the fire tanks would wear?

Yeah, the big difference is the sheer number of farming required per pull. 15-20 pull seems like nothing today and you can easily reach that on an average difficulty Mythic boss such as Imonar, but when you count the length of the fights, the preparation required, buffs that need to be fetched/applied, the sheer number of consumables used, and the far longer runback to the boss, each pull can take as much as half an hour to setup, whereas on live you run back from the shortcut, eat your food, and are good to go. On Argus the game even has the courtesy of respawning you right at the boss.

And consumables are a topic in and of themselves. As an example, for our Mythic raids in Legion all I had to gather was a bunch of flasks in case whoever is usually dropping Cauldrons didn't have the time to farm. Apart from that I buy the food that's best for my spec instead of using feast, get a Vantus rune from the gbank on prog bosses, and use an unlimited charge augment rune (or before that, run LFR a bit). In vanilla, I'd have to get almost literally a dozen different potions, flasks, and elixirs of various flavors and effect, from damage to resistance, and that's without the bevy of world buffs that I (mostly) didn't look for as a tank but were available as well. You could spend hours prepping for raid. And I didn't even do Naxx as I quit raiding after BWL.

Logistics is what really sets vanilla apart from all other expansions raid wise, even TBC. It doesn't help that on top of the absurd logistical requirements, FHM also happened to have (gasp!) mechanics as well even if you're prepped. One void zone in the wrong place and it can be gg right there.

[Kanariya]

Also have to factor in raiders went in blind to these boss encounters. Wowhead didn't even open until Naxx's launch day, so it wasn't data-mined out the ass like everything is today. Blizzard didn't have the noob friendly Dungeon Journal in to tell you each boss ability and their mechanics and tips on what to do for roles. While Naxx was on the PTR, it wasn't tested much and people didn't get very far into it. There weren't Youtube strat vids filled with PTR footage of top guilds showing you exactly what to do like there is today.

When top guilds did end up getting to the Four Horsemen, they didn't know they were actually going to need eight tanks to do it, and they didn't know they were going to need 4P-T3 for all of them. I don't have the exact quote, but I do remember reading from one of the guilds saying they were in disbelief that Blizzard would deliberately design the encounter to require eight tanks, and they tried to brute force it with far less before giving in and accepting it.

[garicasha]

Anyone know how many weeks after server launch the first kills go out on?

[Gavll]

Mostly soaking meteor and people being positioned wrong. Taunt resists can mean tanks take extra marks and everything gets fucked up. So coordination and reacting to fuckups was important.

Also cheap people skimping consumables like fire pots.

I hope they do the standard PServer thing of greatly reduced respec costs because then getting geared tanks won't that much of a big deal since all your furies would have full T2/AQ40 and any new tank could be boosted to get gear in week or 2. You can also use the ZG fishing boss trinket for 10% hit.

[Storfan]

Mostly soaking meteor and people being positioned wrong. Taunt resists can mean tanks take extra marks and everything gets fucked up. So coordination and reacting to fuckups was important.

Also cheap people skimping consumables like fire pots.

I hope they do the standard PServer thing of greatly reduced respec costs because then getting geared tanks won't that much of a big deal since all your furies would have full T2/AQ40 and any new tank could be boosted to get gear in week or 2. You can also use the ZG fishing boss trinket for 10% hit.

We only respecced our furies to prot the first 2-3 4hm Kills.

EDIT: The guild even paid for the respecs I believe.

[Hottage]

Simple:

• Need to adequately gear up four/eight(?) competently skilled tanks.
• Available loot pool when bosses only dropped two or three items (which were not guaranteed to be suitable for a tank).
• Constant risk of getting them poached by other competing guilds (some guilds went as far as bribing prospective tanks).
• Keeping the 36+ guild members happy and motivated to be grinding completed content during the gear up.

Talking from classic experience, not private servers.

[QuiksLE]

Needing 8 well geared warrior tanks. Think about it. Has any other fight required 20% of the raid to be well geared tanks that were all the same class?

Dark shamans 10 HC needed 3 tanks- 30% of your raid had to be tanks(not the same class though)

[Hottage]

Dark shamans 10 HC needed 3 tanks- 30% of your raid had to be tanks(not the same class though)

Except that 10HC raids also dropped 2-3 items of loot per boss, so geared up was considerably easier.

Dual spec and hybrid gear (no more defense or stamina stacking needed) also made having tank geared DPS on stand by for these sorts of fights far more viable.

[Darkynhalvos]

Old video of the guild by my buddy, Inudemon.

I absolutely LOVE seeing old videos like this. Thanks for the link.