Mythic is too tight, guilds are dying

[GringoD]

Its nothing new, and they're called "guild killers" for a reason. Thousands of guilds (according to wowprog) drop off at these bosses.

If you, as a GM, dont care at all for improving your guild i have 0 sympathy for its inevitable demise. There are ways to improve beyond just replacing, smart assignments of tricky mechanics, holding your worse players hand throughout the fight, stay in touch with the latest strats, keep giving points of improvement to bad performing players etc. You cant solve bad play with neck lvls in mythic.

That it's nothing new doesn't mean it's good design. They're there every so often, like Gorefiend in HFC, but they don't need to be. It's a testament to the failure of the encounter designers to model a difficulty curve.

I'd say I agree with your second point. A lot of raids collapse because of disinterested or incompetent leadership.

[Tradu]

The tempering of expectations is something I have preached to my raiders for a long time. I feel you. But it's not about getting stuck on boss 7 out of 8 anymore. It's about boss number 4 already feeling like an insurmountable wall.
Guilds like yours and mine yeet the first three bosses, only to burn themselves out on the unnerfed versions of Ashvane and Oppulence. Then on Orgozoa. Then on Court. By the time we arrive at boss 7, people have more than half a thousand wipes under their belt and maybe 4 new items to show for it.
Blizz has forgotten how to properly boil the frog.

So a similar number of wipes over the course of the tier as guilds that fully clear, your wipes are just on earlier bosses because you struggle with them.

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Yeah, the gauntlet was the hard part. Lower skill guilds have a tough time with mechanics that check every single player with fast damage in rapid succession. Everyone is going to fail once a night, the weak players twice. Makes up 20 odd wipes a night. You maybe see P2 once or twice, not enough to practice. Stretch over 5 nights, get a hundred wipes, lose a main tank in between and you basically have our experience on that thing up to the kill.
I imagine lotsa guilds had a similar experience. At the time we were progressing for the kill, the fall-off from the boss before was huge. There were like 5k guilds done with jadefire and 3k with Oppulence, 2,6k with Conclave. Probably not hard for your guys, but a smooth curve looks different.

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Ah sorry, didn't remember you being that guy. You do you, I've got no qualms with that.

I'll complain until hell and high water though until we get our smooth mythic progression back. You can keep your hard earned CE, I just don't want to go from 'babies first tornado evasion' to 'nobody dies, peak damage, picture perfect or out'.

The difficulty curve in EP is better than any recent raid I can think of.

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That it's nothing new doesn't mean it's good design. They're there every so often, like Gorefiend in HFC, but they don't need to be. It's a testament to the failure of the encounter designers to model a difficulty curve.

I'd say I agree with your second point. A lot of raids collapse because of disinterested or incompetent leadership.

Gorefiend rewarded you with 2-3 free kills once you got him down, which is something Blizzard has said they like doing when it comes to difficulty curves(and then didn't do again as far as I can tell)

[Thraps]

I dont see the argument about the grind vs mythic raiding. If your competing at world first level the grind is absolutely required. To progress in mythic and kill all the bosses before the next tier is achievable for most structured guilds without having to go crazy on the grind. The reason why guilds fail to progress is one of many things, bad players, bad leadership, players not researching fights, not using consumables. Basically the reason why guilds crumble at the moment is the players in the guild themselves, not the systems.

The systems are tedious, boring and no one likes them or doing them, but they dont limit your progression in mythic. Not at this stage.

[Zyky]

You're literally making the same argument I'm making. Not only that, I killed mythic queen multiple months ago.

I just don't think top 200 is "needs nerfs to kill the bosses" territory.

My only point is invoking neck requirements for some of the best guilds in the world to claim "the grind is too much" is absurd.

I said the top 200 doesn't need the significant nerfs to kill bosses. The issue is that Blizzard releases raids with feelycraft numbers expecting it to be doable, the raids shouldn't get boosted in difficulty just because their internal team can kill it. The raids should release at a more reasonable difficulty and say fuck off to the world first race. There's several examples of this over the last few years like both bosses in Crucible of Storms, Fetid Devourer, Argus, Kil'jaeden, Fallen Avatar, and Star Auger to name the big ones off hand. Blizzard needs to just destroy this world first race bullshit because it's effecting the raiding community, primarily because they take too long to adjust the overtuned encounters after the .001% of guilds kill these bosses. This is the problem guilds in the top 200 face.

The problem guilds past top 200 face have the same problem just more extreme because they get hit on different kinds of walls on bosses like not reaching Orgozoa fast enough, hence his movement speed nerf. They also suffer from having too many guilds that are babysitting players be it officers or raiders who are bad.

The 'grind' in of itself causes Blizzard to inflate the difficulty of raid encounters, the same way they tuned anything after Trilliax in Nighthold around having a completed Artifact Weapon. They can't just leave these systems alone and let it be a nerf over time to encounters, which is another huge problem with their design philosophy. And if they wanted to stagger neck progress to prevent players from endlessly grinding the power increases, it's very easy to add a weekly cap as they had done with similar systems in the past like Valor Points upgrades.

[Marrilaife]

Gorefiend rewarded you with 2-3 free kills once you got him down, which is something Blizzard has said they like doing when it comes to difficulty curves(and then didn't do again as far as I can tell)

Desolate host was a free kill after Sisters.
Xavius was a free kill after Cenarius. XD
Varimathras was semi-free kill after Imonar / Kingaroth.
Rastakan felt like a free kill after Conclave (took my guild 12 pulls to down Rastakan first kill).
Yeah, EP doesn't have any "free kills" like that, Orgo was too easy when you could spend 90% of time in p1 and completely ignore p2, then they changed the boss which imo made sense because before the fight was completely broken, akin to 1-phase Ilgynoth, which also got changed.

[Krille]

Desolate host was a free kill after Sisters.
Xavius was a free kill after Cenarius. XD
Varimathras was semi-free kill after Imonar / Kingaroth.
Rastakan felt like a free kill after Conclave (took my guild 12 pulls to down Rastakan first kill).
Yeah, EP doesn't have any "free kills" like that, Orgo was too easy when you could spend 90% of time in p1 and completely ignore p2, then they changed the boss which imo made sense because before the fight was completely broken, akin to 1-phase Ilgynoth, which also got changed.

We had 75 wipes on Orgozoa (pre-nerfs) and 59 on Queens Court (pre-nerfs), Ashvane was 92 (pre-nerfs). I think it's fair to say that Orgozoa + Queens Court were both easier than Ashvane and Zaqul only required 30 more wipes than Ashvane for us.

The worst tier i've done so far (except for Crucible of Storms) is ToS. It had Mistress Sasszine, Fallen Avatar and KJ, they were all more difficult than anything in EP. Mistress Sasszine after they nerfed Blood DK utility is prob the hardest mid-tier boss ever. Fallen Avatar probably the most difficult 2nd to last boss ever and KJ probably the most difficult last boss ever.

But people forget easily.

[M00nty]

We had 75 wipes on Orgozoa (pre-nerfs) and 59 on Queens Court (pre-nerfs), Ashvane was 92 (pre-nerfs). I think it's fair to say that Orgozoa + Queens Court were both easier than Ashvane and Zaqul only required 30 more wipes than Ashvane for us.

That shows how important a 3rd raid day is, if you want to get CE.
We have very similar pull counts for the bosses (around: 110 Ashvane, 86 Orgo, 70 QC, 154 Zaq; all pre nerf, except for the Orgo ramp time) and are still working on p3, so we'll probably won't get CE this tier. (which is ok)

[Krille]

That shows how important a 3rd raid day is, if you want to get CE.
We have very similar pull counts for the bosses (around: 110 Ashvane, 86 Orgo, 70 QC, 154 Zaq; all pre nerf, except for the Orgo ramp time) and are still working on p3, so we'll probably won't get CE this tier. (which is ok)

How is this possible? We killed Azshara over 3 months ago. Even if we raided 2 days we would have killed it months ago.

[asil]

That shows how important a 3rd raid day is, if you want to get CE.
We have very similar pull counts for the bosses (around: 110 Ashvane, 86 Orgo, 70 QC, 154 Zaq; all pre nerf, except for the Orgo ramp time) and are still working on p3, so we'll probably won't get CE this tier. (which is ok)

Lol there's no reason you can't get CE if you're p3 already. If you're struggling with p3 just lust it and 1 shield the first 2 adds. Lust makes p3 pretty much free, and you don't need it at all for p4.

[Marrilaife]

I think it's fair to say that Orgozoa + Queens Court were both easier than Ashvane and Zaqul only required 30 more wipes than Ashvane for us.

The fact our first few kills on Court were all past enrage timer (no kidding I was saving bubble taunt the whole fight just to get extra 8 seconds past enrage as we were reliably hitting it) in a world ~150 ranked guild was telling me this boss was awful for guilds with less dps until last recent nerf.

And contrary to Guarm or Krosus this fight requires extra micro management because you have to kill both at the same time. Which is an extra layer on top of "don't die from stupid shit and maximize your dps", which alone is a reasonable requirement to beat a mythic boss. If you end up with extra hp on the caster boss it gets much worse than the other way around, because there are at least 2 abilities that prevent you from hard switching to the caster boss if they happen at a time you need to finish her off.

Orgo was just annoying for roster requirements, having a boss that needs 3 tanks and early on was most commonly 5-healed forced us to use at least 2 people in their offspecs. That's in a tier where last boss is most commonly 3-healed and top guilds even used 2-heal strat, so good luck getting all the spare healers for your rosters. Not kidding, we had applicant healers asking how many healers we have and whether we have another of their class and in the end not joining because of it, even though their current progress / logs seemed like they would be already upgrading their current position.

And I won't argue that Tomb of Sargeras was one of the worst raid tiers invented, it also had a lot of stupid mechanics that were "countered" by class stacking (guardian druids on KJ, rogues on avatar) or even race changing (goblins on KJ). It was also another of those raids released over the summer and as far as I remember, it achieved abysmal cutting edge completion rates. Especially with the last wave of nerfs on KJ hitting around 3 weeks before tier was over and many guilds that could kill it after these nerfs, didn't manage because 3 weeks is often not enough to squeeze 300 pull count into a boss for a typical 2-3 raid a week guild. I've seen tons of guilds crash and disband over avatar or KJ. Probably only around half the guilds that killed mythic Gul'dan with CE, achieved KJ CE.

[Celestraza]

Ah ToS. What a nightmare tier that was. We managed to get our CE on the skin of our teeth after losing some core players around Maiden/Avatar. But we did not manage to get CE for all the subbed players unfortunately....

Really sucks you can't share CE with more than just the 20 players that were there for progress but benched/absent for the kill. Another high risk for 1k-2k guilds thst struggle with time/re-kills.

[Frozenbro]

The tempering of expectations is something I have preached to my raiders for a long time. I feel you. But it's not about getting stuck on boss 7 out of 8 anymore. It's about boss number 4 already feeling like an insurmountable wall.
Guilds like yours and mine yeet the first three bosses, only to burn themselves out on the unnerfed versions of Ashvane and Oppulence. Then on Orgozoa. Then on Court. By the time we arrive at boss 7, people have more than half a thousand wipes under their belt and maybe 4 new items to show for it.
Blizz has forgotten how to properly boil the frog.

It was already said that ashvane was an outlier (ngl if you had issues with her your guild was already on a bad path), but like people said in this thread, bosses are on wheelchairs already, azshara is a meme, if you can't kill her then its on you and your guild, maybe you got lucky in the past and you got a CE, that doesnt mean you need to get every single one, or you got far into progression in a past tier, who knows, believe it or not, people get worse, so you and your guild didnt step up their game and/or they got considerably worse, so yeah, in the end of the day is a git gud matter, "ashvane was an issue" is just the mediocre player scapegoat, cause we didnt have an ashvane in every tier.

[Rozz]

I can't imagine why some people recognize there is a problem and instead of suggesting ways to fix it, focus on tearing down others who are trying to make their experiences more pleasant.

Maybe there are some fundamental flaws if guilds can't find players and good players can't or don't want to commit. Maybe some bosses are more challenging then they are rewarding or fun. Maybe several things are adding up to create the problem and saying 'get good' is about as helpful as saying nothing at all.

[Wilfire]

Top 500 guilds: these raids aren't hard enough! If you're not good enough for mythic, LFR is there for you!
Top 500-2000 guilds: gradually fizzle out with the ever increasing difficulty and time commitment required to raid mythic, choking the supply of new raiders for top 500.
Top 500: *surprised Pikachu meme*.

And they still don't see the problem.

lol

[asil]

Top 500 guilds: these raids aren't hard enough! If you're not good enough for mythic, LFR is there for you!
Top 500-2000 guilds: gradually fizzle out with the ever increasing difficulty and time commitment required to raid mythic, choking the supply of new raiders for top 500.
Top 500: *surprised Pikachu meme*.

And they still don't see the problem.

lol

Lol, if they made mythic any easier then there'd be nothing to do for most of the tier for like a large percentage of the raiding community.

There's literally nothing stopping you from getting CE other than yourself. The requirements are fairly lax after the first month and you don't need that much of a time commitment.

I'm ok with them nerfing bosses after the fact - and they do, but if you can't clear mythic right now with as easy as EP is, it's because you simply are not playing well.

It's not time, it's not the difficulty curve, it's that you simply are not playing the game well enough to get CE.

Blizzard was even super generous this tier and made the first 3 bosses completely free, and also loaded those 3 bosses with pretty much the best loot in the instance.

I really don't get what more you guys could possibly want. EP has not been "tight" for months.

[Marrilaife]

Blizzard was even super generous this tier and made the first 3 bosses completely free,

This tier? It's a tradition any raid longer than 7 bosses has 2-3 bosses that become puggable fairly soon once the community gets some ilvls on them.

Sivarra is actually less "free" than Taloc and Champions of the Light, because these were puggable on mythic even before Curve was (i.e. people not good enough to pug curve could pug 1st boss on mythic).

The problem with that is instead of "progressing" through the first 3 bosses even mediocre guilds breeze through them and then hit a "wall" so they feel the difficulty curve is off. At least Ashvane was nerfed 2-3 times by now so it's probably within range of guilds that were previously stuck on pre-nerf version.

The fact court was only nerfed the first time just before xmas, 1 month before end of the raid, and zaqul wasn't at all, is more questionable. Only nerfs were to Ashvane, Orgo and Ashara herself.

It's not about granting CE on a silver platter, more about throwing a bone to guilds that are stuck on some mid-boss, because I don't see the point of telling them "well I guess you aren't good enough, see ya next tier", that's literally telling people to unsub until next patch, so throwing potential money out of the window. Giving them small carrots to keep them subbed and make them feel like they're progressing bit by bit seems like a better option.

[Krille]

This tier? It's a tradition any raid longer than 7 bosses has 2-3 bosses that become puggable fairly soon once the community gets some ilvls on them.

Sivarra is actually less "free" than Taloc and Champions of the Light, because these were puggable on mythic even before Curve was (i.e. people not good enough to pug curve could pug 1st boss on mythic).

The problem with that is instead of "progressing" through the first 3 bosses even mediocre guilds breeze through them and then hit a "wall" so they feel the difficulty curve is off. At least Ashvane was nerfed 2-3 times by now so it's probably within range of guilds that were previously stuck on pre-nerf version.

The fact court was only nerfed the first time just before xmas, 1 month before end of the raid, and zaqul wasn't at all, is more questionable. Only nerfs were to Ashvane, Orgo and Ashara herself.

It's not about granting CE on a silver platter, more about throwing a bone to guilds that are stuck on some mid-boss, because I don't see the point of telling them "well I guess you aren't good enough, see ya next tier", that's literally telling people to unsub until next patch, so throwing potential money out of the window. Giving them small carrots to keep them subbed and make them feel like they're progressing bit by bit seems like a better option.

Who cares if people unsub until next patch? This happens each and every casual, you don't see them trying to chase their tails. Accept that not all content is for you, there is an end and that you can and should unsub until the next patch and try again.

If the curve was smoother it would be too easy, that's just simple facts.

[Relapses]

Who cares if people unsub until next patch? This happens each and every casual, you don't see them trying to chase their tails. Accept that not all content is for you, there is an end and that you can and should unsub until the next patch and try again.

If the curve was smoother it would be too easy, that's just simple facts.

"Just unsub" shouldn't be the answer to any question in WoW. Even though I agree with this the idea behind what you're saying (to an extent), there's obviously something to discuss here otherwise this thread wouldn't have reached 40-pages in under a month. (Even if most of it is circular reasoning with the same few ideas regurgitated ad infinitum.) I believe I said it a few pages back but I'm actually perfectly fine with a raid that's mostly easy except for the last boss. BoD was a pretty good example of this, with really only Stormwall and Jaina being truly difficult bosses to progress on. The difficulty of the bosses from Champs through Stormwall was fairly linear as well. EP, on the other hand, starts the difficulty curve a few rungs higher and then plateaus for the first half of the instance before ratcheting up the difficulty towards the end. There are going to be people who prefer BoD's curve and people who prefer EP's curve and I doubt either are 100% correct. I also doubt Blizzard will ever get difficulty curves in an instance right because there are so many factors that come into play when designing encounters. It's just an unfortunate byproduct of EP's difficulty curve that it has kind of erected a higher-than-average (and certainly higher than BoD's) barrier to entry that has made it difficult for middleground Mythic guilds to establish a foothold.

[Krille]

"Just unsub" shouldn't be the answer to any question in WoW. Even though I agree with this the idea behind what you're saying (to an extent), there's obviously something to discuss here otherwise this thread wouldn't have reached 40-pages in under a month. (Even if most of it is circular reasoning with the same few ideas regurgitated ad infinitum.) I believe I said it a few pages back but I'm actually perfectly fine with a raid that's mostly easy except for the last boss. BoD was a pretty good example of this, with really only Stormwall and Jaina being truly difficult bosses to progress on. The difficulty of the bosses from Champs through Stormwall was fairly linear as well. EP, on the other hand, starts the difficulty curve a few rungs higher and then plateaus for the first half of the instance before ratcheting up the difficulty towards the end. There are going to be people who prefer BoD's curve and people who prefer EP's curve and I doubt either are 100% correct. I also doubt Blizzard will ever get difficulty curves in an instance right because there are so many factors that come into play when designing encounters. It's just an unfortunate byproduct of EP's difficulty curve that it has kind of erected a higher-than-average (and certainly higher than BoD's) barrier to entry that has made it difficult for middleground Mythic guilds to establish a foothold.

The only thing that bothers me is that people that say stuff like "I just want to log on, go into raid and thats it" but at the same time want to get Cutting Edge. If you're in a guild that clears all mythic content at a decent pace, making it easier will kill the game for them too.

So when the argument is that you need the "sub 1000 ranked guilds to feed the top 1000 guilds with players", I find myself not agreeing to any of that logic. This idea that a lot of sub 1000 players constantly stream into the top 1000 is just a thought the OP had. My personal anecdotal experience is that most of the players in top 500 switch guilds inbetween them. Guilds die, new guilds are created but the players remain the same.

EP just had 5 semi-difficult bosses instead of only having 2 difficult end bosses. Azshara isnt difficult, it wasnt before all these nerfs (unless you're a world first guild) and its a joke now. We have more problems with Zaqul on reclears because there's more personal responsibility. Azshara is legit only slightly difficult in P3, the rest of the fight is a joke.

I just want to play the game without having to wait 3-4 months for content, might as well quit if that keeps being the case. And i think a lot of other mythic raiders feel the same. Make it easier and the game becomes a joke all-in-all. The hardest difficulty is nothing compared to some other games hardmodes.

[asil]

This tier? It's a tradition any raid longer than 7 bosses has 2-3 bosses that become puggable fairly soon once the community gets some ilvls on them.

Sivarra is actually less "free" than Taloc and Champions of the Light, because these were puggable on mythic even before Curve was (i.e. people not good enough to pug curve could pug 1st boss on mythic).

The problem with that is instead of "progressing" through the first 3 bosses even mediocre guilds breeze through them and then hit a "wall" so they feel the difficulty curve is off. At least Ashvane was nerfed 2-3 times by now so it's probably within range of guilds that were previously stuck on pre-nerf version.

The fact court was only nerfed the first time just before xmas, 1 month before end of the raid, and zaqul wasn't at all, is more questionable. Only nerfs were to Ashvane, Orgo and Ashara herself.

It's not about granting CE on a silver platter, more about throwing a bone to guilds that are stuck on some mid-boss, because I don't see the point of telling them "well I guess you aren't good enough, see ya next tier", that's literally telling people to unsub until next patch, so throwing potential money out of the window. Giving them small carrots to keep them subbed and make them feel like they're progressing bit by bit seems like a better option.

Court and za'qul are already super easy bosses.They should have nerfed queen's court a bit faster probably, but za'qul is a push over of a fight. Even queen's court was easier than ashvane/orgo.

Sivara, I think, was more of a return to the goroth/gorothi worldbreaker model of a first boss. she was actually just much harder than the next 2 bosses.

She's a bit of a barrier to super low end guilds I think. I'm honestly amazed she hasn't been nerfed.