Raid design lessons for Blizzard from mythic Azshara

[Marrilaife]

Wtf, EP has anything but class stacking, if a guild needs to class stack then they just need to git gud.

Please educate yourself on the ratio of disc priests and holy paladins in comparison to resto druids and mistweaver monks on mythic Azshara fight.

Also the ratio of brewmaster monks to basically any other tank.

[Tiwack]

I agree it's pretty dumb the boss is inactive and just babbling away for half the fight as well as the console being usable for the LoS-mechanics - Would've been better if they just put that thing on a third pillar and let the boss be a constant threat throughout the fight. I think the mechanics are alright but the way they handled it all led to some pretty weird setups when they could've made things a lot more interesting and engaging for everyone.

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Here's a thought: how about breaking WeakAuras but designing easier bosses that don't need WeakAuras to handle them? The need for WeakAuras comes in the first place only because Blizzard keeps designing mechanics that need complex communication between several raid members to handle them (Mekkatorque, decrees on Azshara). Just don't design mechanics like that and you're fine.

1 subgroup of 2 players communicating to handle a mechanic = fine.

2 or more subgroups of 2 players simultaneously communicating to handle a mechanic = clusterfuck that needs a WeakAura.

1 subgroup of 3 or more players simultaneously communicating to handle a mechanic = clusterfuck that needs a WeakAura.

No need to break it when they could make it obsolete with proper boss mechanic UI/spell visual ques.

[Relapses]

Blizzard is currently in an arms race against addon developers. It is nearly impossible for them to come out with mechanics that aren't trivialized by weak auras, so they respond by stuffing an entire raid's worth of mechanics into one boss. They could break weak auras (and in turn break a ton of addons) but then fights would have to go back to WoTLK/Cata level difficulty or easier.

I doubt Blizzard cares too much about WA nor do I think they have any intention to break it so they can make encounters more difficult. There many different ways they can make an encounter "hard" which are in no way impacted by WAs. I think the biggest challenge they face is simply making an encounter's mechanics interesting enough to set it apart from other bosses while still remaining in the realm of actually being able to be defeated.

[Tr0up141]

I know it's the end boss but it feels shit when every boss beforehand takes less than 100 pulls to kill and then the end boss is a 400+ pull, 8-12 min long behemoth where the true fight is how much patience your raiders have, specially in NA where there's just a weak raiding scene with a small mythic-capable player pool.
Don't see them changing this any time soon though, pretty sure it's been the standard since Tomb.

[Gaidax]

Please educate yourself on the ratio of disc priests and holy paladins in comparison to resto druids and mistweaver monks on mythic Azshara fight.

Also the ratio of brewmaster monks to basically any other tank.

That's hardly a class "stacking", breh. You have 2 healers and 2 tanks? That's what you call stacking? We had frikkin' 5+ Warlocks for Uunat and parts of Uldir - that's a class stacking. Not a bloody 1-2 members of some class.

Sheesh.

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I know it's the end boss but it feels shit when every boss beforehand takes less than 100 pulls to kill and then the end boss is a 400+ pull, 8-12 min long behemoth where the true fight is how much patience your raiders have, specially in NA where there's just a weak raiding scene with a small mythic-capable player pool.
Don't see them changing this any time soon though, pretty sure it's been the standard since Tomb.

"I know it's the end boss"

Yeah... it's the end boss. It should be like that. We already seen the opposite case with Xavius who was a joke and this was a problem.

[Biomega]

That's hardly a class "stacking", breh. You have 2 healers and 2 tanks? That's what you call stacking? We had frikkin' 5+ Warlocks for Uunat and parts of Uldir - that's a class stacking. Not a bloody 1-2 members of some class.

I think what they're referring to is the fact that for an entire role you basically bring 1-2 specs out of 6 and bench everyone else. Which I agree is a poor example of the term "class stacking" but is still a problem outside of terminological quibbles. But I don't think the problem is in the fight design so much as it is in the design of those two specs - both Disc and (Glimmer) HPal are simply absurdly good in raiding. Or the other healing specs aren't good enough, however you want to look at it.

[Aphrel]

Azshara P1 feels like im waisting time. Its so trivial it shouldnt be there, we should start in p2 but also have the p1 add mechanic or something. Thou tbh p2 is sort of a snooze aswell...

It was the same on zaqul, two entirely useless phases where next to nothing happens be4 we finally get to the interesting part of the fight.

If i were to suggest anything to blizz it would be to not have these useless filler phases. This is the case for so many fights.. Where the boss gets 1 more ability per phase and then raids lust in the last phase and just nuke throu it ingoring most mechanics or at worst needs to do them once...
Thats a sucky design imo, id rather have a slightly shorter fight with all mechanics active at once but that you really have to learn. I hate when the go-to tactic is to skip mechanics...

[Gasparde]

The reason WF guilds (have to) go all out on weak auras IMO is the batshit crazy bad visual information Blizzards provides us with through the standard interface.

Add to that the no-time-to-react and instant-raid-wipe nature of so many mechanics - you really can't afford to coordinate 20 players without WA with such uberly punishing mechanics.

Although it's pretty tough to argue what came first, the WAs that made every non-insta-raid-wipe mechanic trivial or the insta-raid-wipe mechanic that made it so you just couldn't reasonably advance without WAs.

[KaPe]

I think what they're referring to is the fact that for an entire role you basically bring 1-2 specs out of 6 and bench everyone else. Which I agree is a poor example of the term "class stacking" but is still a problem outside of terminological quibbles. But I don't think the problem is in the fight design so much as it is in the design of those two specs - both Disc and (Glimmer) HPal are simply absurdly good in raiding. Or the other healing specs aren't good enough, however you want to look at it.

It's both encounter and class design. Both of these specs bring powerful damage reduction - which you need in order not to die on something like Za'qul... or even Ashvane - and do good dps without really sacrificing anything. "Battle Shaman" is a thing, sure, but they do basically no healing outside of cooldowns, while Disc has no such limitations. Not to mention they offer a nice burst in the form of Schism + Cyclotronic/Fire essence. Both of these specs are getting nerfed, while Monks are getting buffed, but we'll see how that will work.

As for "breaking Weak Auras" - Blizzard can design around it if they want to. Cenarius roots did have no warnings, debuffs or anything other than visual cues and worked fine. It's more like "there's ten other things going on in this fight, making this particular one be undetectable would be so much more annoying, both for players and designers".

[Dracodraco]

That's hardly a class "stacking", breh. You have 2 healers and 2 tanks? That's what you call stacking? We had frikkin' 5+ Warlocks for Uunat and parts of Uldir - that's a class stacking. Not a bloody 1-2 members of some class.

Sheesh.

Not the guy you're responding to, but this is a retarded statement and you should know it. By your own logic, DPS is the only thing we can reasonably "stack", because it's the only role in the raids that's plentiful enough to reach "stacking" numbers. When every boss is a 4 healer boss then you'll never get to "stack" a specific healer when you consider +5 to be your cutoff.

Also, turned out the warlock stacking for Uunat was fucking stupid as evidenced by so many other guilds not doing it (and if you were a part of the early progress guilds on this boss, before it got the first 5% nerf, you'd know that the general consensus was that the heavy-warlock-stack strat WAS a mistake because it worked less well than the suicide strat), the only thing that mattered there was being a caster.

That being said, this is Azshara:
https://i.imgur.com/Ni0z6yZ.png Are you really going to sit there and tell me that when there's almost twice as many brewmasters as *all other tanks combined*, brewmasters are not being stacked? If you don't count #2, there's *four times* as many brewmasters as there are paladins, warriors, druids and vengeance DH's *COMBINED*.

The same goes for healers https://i.imgur.com/TUoGQPL.png - there's twice as many priests and paladins as the third choice (shamans), and then there's three to four times as many of them as the remaining healers combined if you don't include the "runner up".


G'huun literally required 4 warlocks for AGES, and his statistics for DPS aren't as fucking skewed as the tank/healer balance is right now. To get close you'd need the vast majority of raids back then to have used 6-7+ warlocks, and that never happened.

TL;DR -

Stacking 2 paladins 2 discs (maybe replacing a paladin with a shaman and adding a fifth healer of some type for orgozoa/the early bosses) was pretty standard this entire tier. When 75-100% of your healing roster for most of the tier is 2 out of 6 healing specs, surely that's considered stacking. Having 2 discs on every boss in a 4 healer setup would be the same as if we had 6-7 of any DPS on every boss, percentage wise.

[Gaidax]

*snip*

All that wasted effort writing all that... sigh.

It's not a first tier where specific tank has advantage over other tanks and it won't be the last. Same goes for healers and same goes for DPS even. But overall you simply do not have this case of 5+ of single class being mandatory for the encounter which is what "class stacking" is.

[Dracodraco]

All that wasted effort writing all that... sigh.

It's not a first tier where specific tank has advantage over other tanks and it won't be the last. Same goes for healers and same goes for DPS even. But overall you simply do not have this case of 5+ of single class being mandatory for the encounter which is what "class stacking" is.

So what, when 75% of your healing spots are taken up by 2 classes, and 100% of your tank spots are taken up by 1, that doesn't constitute class stacking - but using 5 of the same DPS when there's 14-15 dps spots do?

Gonna have to give you a hard "nice logic m8" on that one. Yea, you're not gonna see brewmasters stacked on any encounter because we don't 5-tank shit. But when they make up 50% of the population out of 6 specs, you fucking bet they're being "stacked". Same goes for the healers. You can even see it if you bother looking at trends; Discs are actually less common than holy when you look at ALL mythic parses, but come Court/Zaq/Azshara, they fucking leapfrog ahead.


You're quite simply misinterpreting class "stacking" with class "requirements". You stack something because it's a better option than everything else available. G'huun wasn't that. It was a hard requirement. Cabal was a class-stack fight (where you stacked disc priests as well).

[KaPe]

All that wasted effort writing all that... sigh.

It's not a first tier where specific tank has advantage over other tanks and it won't be the last. Same goes for healers and same goes for DPS even. But overall you simply do not have this case of 5+ of single class being mandatory for the encounter which is what "class stacking" is.

By your logic, healer and tank stacking is impossible, since you never use 5+ tanks and I can't remember final boss that required 5 healers. (and it would be 4 healed anyway) I hope you realize that this reasoning makes no sense. Blizzard is nerfing Brewmaster, Holy Paladins and Disc Priests for a reason - and that reason is the fact that they are too powerful.

Same with double Blood DK on encounters that favoured Mass Grip. Hopefully we won't see such fights again, but by your definition, that wasn't stacking either.

[Gaidax]

I think you both do not quite understand what class stacking is. Class stacking is when a good quarter + of your raid is of specific class. 2 monks in raid is no biggie, neither is 2 priests.

[KaPe]

I think you both do not quite understand what class stacking is. Class stacking is when a good quarter + of your raid is of specific class. 2 monks in raid is no biggie, neither is 2 priests.

I think you do not quite understand what the proportions are. When 100% of certain role is used by a single spec, that's stacking. It's physically impossible to have more than that. With healers, it's only slightly better, but it's pretty much the same thing. These two roles are much less interchangeable than dps'ers. Even with Zul needing 4+ rogues, you still had 10+ dps spots left. With healers/tanks, the "lesser" specs are benched.

You also do not quite "understand" (we both know you do, you're just being obstinate) that tank monk is quite a bit different from healer monk, with the latter being pretty much the worst healer right now. Just because 2 Brewmasters is the optimal tanking team doesn't suddenly make Mistweavers fine. Which is nicely proven by 8.3 changes, so Blizzard does agree.

[Biomega]

To be honest, whole Dragon Soul was shit raiding dungeon, there were only 2 fights that were cool. On the topic, there are always some fights that are cool and some that are not.

That's true, but there's a big difference between "Random Unheard-Of Raid Mook #13" and an end boss that's an iconic story character we've been talking about for over a decade. Screwing THAT up is far, far, far more relevant.

[Trend]

I think you do not quite understand what the proportions are. When 100% of certain role is used by a single spec, that's stacking. It's physically impossible to have more than that. With healers, it's only slightly better, but it's pretty much the same thing. These two roles are much less interchangeable than dps'ers. Even with Zul needing 4+ rogues, you still had 10+ dps spots left. With healers/tanks, the "lesser" specs are benched.

I'm on this forum (and others) a lot and this is the first time I've ever heard "stacking" being used in reference to 2/2 tanks being a certain class. In the past, when I've ever seen the term "stacking" used, it has referred to 4+ of a spec being used for a fight due to the nearly required trivialization of a mechanic, or the inverse agony on not doing that stacking.

I don't think anyone is disputing that having such an over-representation of a class in a given role (i.e., BrM) is lame. It's just not properly termed "stacking" until the broader community decides to use that term differently than it has in the past. Hell, maybe eventually we'll even refer to restro druids in mythic+ as "stacking" since we humans love to use words stupidly.

[asil]

I think you both do not quite understand what class stacking is. Class stacking is when a good quarter + of your raid is of specific class. 2 monks in raid is no biggie, neither is 2 priests.

I don't know if I'd call it "class stacking" but tank balance has been in shambles for a long time. It's almost invariably double brewmaster monk, every tier for top tier prog.

In legion we had guardians being insane. There was a point where like 99/100 KJ kills had 2 guardians or some absurd shit and the same was true for gul'dan if I recall.

[KaPe]

People in here saying "class-stacking" when referring to 2 of said class. LMFAO

You physically cannot stack more tanks than two. You can call it whatever you like, but the fact remain the same - both tank and healer balance has been atrocious in Palace.

[Arcanines]

Thats not what most people define as class-stacking though, that would be 5 or more of the same class.

But I get your point, I do.

Good thing you dont know anything about the game.... Like I have no idea why people that barely play the game talk. When they are so fucking clueless. if 50%+ of tanks are monks, you're saying they arent stacked. Depsite being over 50% of all classes for X role

5 dps is generally 33% of the dps roster.

So 1 tank being monk pretty much always is 50% thus its stacked. So you're unable to do math, and unable to play the game. GL