First raid overall difficulty?

[Surfacin9]

It was expected to be nerfed on normal and heroic. Beta lasted so long and class tuning happened so late that very few did raid testing for them to tune bosses properly. Although I do like pre-mythic progression and HC raid taking within a month for a 2-day semi-hc guild to clear, normal is exactly the very casual but organised difficulty, it shouldn't be hard to clear at least 80% of it for a heroic guild. Our (11/12M Nyalotha) with a 30-man group of 175-184 ilvl players did 5/10 normal and we were pretty close to downing Council as well. Shriekwing, Hungering Destroyer and Sun King's Salvation were 1 shots. On Sun King's we actually went in completely unprepared and were simply aoeing the adds like crazy, it was a mess that we 'ran out of mob waves', as in no wave showed up after the first shade phase, dunno if Blizzard put a limit on number of waves or not, but that's what we got. Huntsman and Artificer took several tries, but it didn't feel like it was dps related rather than getting used to mechanics. Blood Council took its time due to figuring out the kill order that was most convenient for us and trying out different ones, but there was always progress. Overall, for the 1st day of mostly tactically unprepared raiding it went quite well, was looking forward to at least being able to do 3-4 bosses on hc, but looking at wowprogress doesn't seem likely.

[TheLucky1]

Why not have heroic and the last boss or two in Normal have teeth. At least let the people get a little bit of progress in.

Thing is we are in the first week, class tuning will still come in and many more legendarys and their upgrades, soulbind additional boni and more conduits will come in in a few weeks.
The vault will also be a more sophisticated/nearly guaranteed weekly upgrade.

I can absolutely understand why blizzard would rather tend to overtune normal/heroic a little bit, war/titanforging are gone but the weekly powergain is still very strong.

[RobertoCarlos]

They are making raiding so complex.

Bosses have way too many abilities now. I thought that was what mythic was for. Heroic should be achieveable with a decent pug

[Argorwal]

Raid nerfed in barely 24 hours.

[Kuruption]

Killed 3 bosses on normal in 2 hours with my guild, everyone said it was a blast.

Unfortunately, I do think Blizz will nerf it.

Ah looks like they did, but the first three (not the first boss) still took us a while, so they'll probably do more.

[munkeyinorbit]

Why not have heroic and the last boss or two in Normal have teeth. At least let the people get a little bit of progress in.

Because those people need to progress else where first. What do you expect to happen to people who are 20 to 30 ilvl behind the loot that drops?

[Ulfric Trumpcloak]

Overtuned for sure. Most bosses also have a ridiculous amount of mechanics.

[Daffan]

They are making raiding so complex.

Bosses have way too many abilities now. I thought that was what mythic was for. Heroic should be achieveable with a decent pug

LOL

Imagine having a take like this for real though

[EpicPhoenix]

So yesterday I spent over 3 hours on the 2nd boss (Huntsman normal), before the nerfs.
The main problem was the healers running out of mana at about 50% of boss fight, so I don't see how it could be completed.
Maybe the dps is too low (it took 4 mins till 50%)? Or need tanks with more hp? Because the spirits came with 80k hp (when tanks were full), and still needed to heal 55k on them (to 135k) and it totally drains all the mana.

[ek0zu]

Calling a raid overtuned is the epitome of a spoiled kid.

Atm Shadowlands is awesome! For me the only thing that it misses is flex mythic raids and you can call it easily the best expansion in years!

[Very Tired]

From my perspective trying to be as unbiased as possible, yeah I thought the raid was a bit overtuned. I'm in a casual guild but even we expect to do better in normal.

For reference when battle of dazar'alor first came out I recall we cleared the first three bosses without wiping once. This raid we barely killed the 2nd boss before our raid ended. So I agree with Blizz that some adjustments were needed to the difficulty.

[Volatilis]

LOL

Imagine having a take like this for real though

Yea heavy forbid people group up with each other outside of guilds???

[Molov]

Your contradicting yourself here. And your wrong. 6 boss kills would put you in the top 5 atm. The top 100 guilds in world are 2% 7 bosses, 2% 6 ,11% 5, 22% 4, 49% 3, 14% 2.

These numbers are insane. The majority of the best players in the world cant get past 3 bosses.

Sorry I believe there's a misunderstanding, in the second paragraph I was talking about normal difficulty. I should've specified.

Numbers have changed now ofc but we see that 1st day done we have around 60 guilds out of 100 (top 100) with 5 confirmed kills. Which is actually quite few I agree. But not necessarily bad, because we can see that bosses are going down, just slower than we were used to and maybe heroic wasn't made to be completely rolled day 1 by a raid in blue/purple gear but offer some challenge before heading to mythic.

I've read that the raid wasn't tested; so all players, even the top 100 guilds, are discovering the bosses too?

[Fallen Angel]

Calling a raid overtuned is the epitome of a spoiled kid.

Atm Shadowlands is awesome! For me the only thing that it misses is flex mythic raids and you can call it easily the best expansion in years!

Or... and hear me out here, the raid was overtuned.

Oh hey, would you look at that... Blizz agrees.

The raid being overtuned as Blizz has obviously agreed it was with the hotfixes has nothing to do with being spoiled. Notice how the current #1 guild in the world didn't bother with more than 3 bosses, and didn't even kill Altimor until today?

A DoT on 3 raid members at a time that ticks for almost half your buffed health pool is super punishing, and that DoT was ticking for more than Mythic is supposed to tick for.

Again, nothing to do with being spoiled children, and everything to do with mechanics being overtuned

[ZazuuPriest]

From my perspective trying to be as unbiased as possible, yeah I thought the raid was a bit overtuned. I'm in a casual guild but even we expect to do better in normal.

For reference when battle of dazar'alor first came out I recall we cleared the first three bosses without wiping once. This raid we barely killed the 2nd boss before our raid ended. So I agree with Blizz that some adjustments were needed to the difficulty.

I mean i dig the difficulty but i think they went a little too far. Tanks suffering a dots that tick for 20% of their health and multiple unforgiving mechanics do not make normal raiding fun. As usually they listened to their vocal minority (this time the elitists instead of the super casuals) and took things a few steps too far

[Argorwal]

From my perspective trying to be as unbiased as possible, yeah I thought the raid was a bit overtuned. I'm in a casual guild but even we expect to do better in normal.

For reference when battle of dazar'alor first came out I recall we cleared the first three bosses without wiping once. This raid we barely killed the 2nd boss before our raid ended. So I agree with Blizz that some adjustments were needed to the difficulty.

The assumption being that the easier tuning i s “correct?”

[ThatJamesGuy01]

Long time lurker first time poster, so hurrah for that. Firstly I personally havent raided properly since WoD, and came back into the raiding scene with Shadowlands. Myself and the GM of the guild we formed both skipped BFA entirely. Our opening raid night we spent the first 3 hours on HC Shriekwing and downed it (pull 18) then had a look at Huntsman and decided that we just didnt have the numbers to pull it off so transitioned over to normal and one shot the first 3 bosses, with decent progression onto the fourth. I feel perhaps the tuning for HC is expecting you to have cleared and mostly geared from Normal before transitioning to HC which is more linear than before rather than just being a difficulty guilds skipped. Personally though had a blast, loved the raid, and really enjoyed it. We are going to aim to full clear normal on our next raid night then push HC next week, planning on just spamming M+ till raid night though.

[Doffen]

Loved the raid. And love the fact we got weeks of progress to come!

[LordVargK]

In parts it seems they "listened" to the people saying that players want how things were in Vanilla. That thought keeps occoring to me...world quests are much more inconvenient and take more time...and especially the recent world boss? Placed in an area that is hostile to my covenant (weird..wasn't I helping the House of the Chosen and the Primus while levelling? ....in Ardenweald folks are friendly enough?) You die (easy...nobody healed me when I tanked the boss)...you cannot res or release and return to combat...and after the fight is over you have a corpse run like Horde to Onyxia or Thorium point to MC.

Yeah...I did all that in Vanilla and I did it because I didn't know better. After years and years of more "convenient" x-pacs...I currently loathe the lv 60 state of SL. Add to that the mind-boggling effort it currently seems to take to even acquire cosmetics and mounts from your covenant? But I try and see the bright side. Makes me log in less and do RL things.

Did you miss the part, where the House of Chosen betrays you and Draka? That's why they're hostile and the covenant sanctum is in the seat of the primus and not in house of chosen. Mob density is reallyannoying though.
But the difficulty of the Worldboss ist not that high. It should not be able without a healer (it's a boss after all) and that has been the same in every expansion. But 1 heal is more than enough to kill the boss, if the mechanics are played correctly (and even if half the raid is dead). The "convenient" expansions you're talking about are the .3 patches where everyone is overgeared. In no expansion you were able to kill the world boss in the first week without gear without a proper group.

[AlmightyGerkin]

Tried normal with PuG (can't raid with guild). Most of us didn't know the mechanics beforehand.

3 wipes on first boss.

Around 12 wipes on the 2nd boss (the one with pets). Decided to call it. I was tanking it, it seemed that healers were going oom half way through the fight

The difficulty seems fine. It will require more gear and practice.

As a healer (Druid) a lot of healer specs except for Shaman do go OOM pretty quickly. Inerva (overtuned in health wise) was close 20% on her with her being at 35%.