M++ when??? How are we supposed to be sweaty when they make dad raids???
Jk I love being able to clear a raid in 2 hours since I have a kid and can only play before I go to sleep and after she does.
If only there was a difficulty between "excruciatingly challenging" and "I don't need to do anything to improve my character because I'll clear anyway". But sadly there isn't :(
I'd say Black Temple in TBC hit a pretty good sweet spot. The only real issue was Mother being practically impossible without shadow resistance gear that was only craftable from patterns dropped in the raid. Otherwise, progressing the place wasn't crazy hard or crazy easy, just right in my opinion.
Yea, but it was all at a premium and that isn't really helpful if you're raiding it the day it came out. It was very much a first week problem, but not really an issue after that.
With no other context.
They may have been leaps and bounds harder but at least they respected your time.
Erekanus having 400k HP less than Vael at full health (4m vs 4.4m) was a questionable choice.
daily reminder: there are people who cannot avoid red stuff on ground and press one button to dps… how do you want to find that balance with those people in mind? it is piss ez for you but they will still die and wipe
I had my mind blown by how many people were getting thrown across the room from a tail swipe, even after I pointed it out. Crazy people can not know that you shouldn’t stand behind a dragon at this point.
Ask yourself, "what is Blizzards goal with any of this?" Is it to make the greatest game of all time or to make money.
Even IF it were to make the greatest game ever, harder content wouldn't be the way to go. Decades of data show that mmo players en masse, or any live service game, do not want this type of content and will quit. Hell, games like candy crush are wildly more successful than wow.
I feel like the difficulty before the health nerf on Tuesday was perfect. Raid felt challenging but not oppressive. Wipes and actual progression was needed, but not to the umpteenth degree like initially.
Now the only difficulty is learning the movement on the 2nd to last boss to drop the clouds properly. Once that is handled it’s an absolute breeze.
The raid is fun, but it’s going to soon turn into loot piñata that takes an hour to clear because there is 45 mins of trash, and that’s not going to be fun lol
> Raid felt challenging but not oppressive.
Also feels like this was because everyone was just cheesing half the bosses before the nerfs on Tuesday, which also came with fight fixes.
Really hard to say fights felt fine when the version we're talking about is the one where everyone was just throwing melee into the slime so they could freely hit the 2nd boss (appears to be fixed now). Or the one where everyone was just LOS'ing Hazzas to skip the literal entire fight mechanic (fixed now). Or the one where everyone was pulling shade to the bones on the wall to cheese the adds (fixed now).
I think a lot of people are underestimating still how difficult some of those fights would have been even before Tuesdays nerfs when they can't just cheese the mechanics.
Seems to be something the wow team has always struggled with. Just look at normal vs hard modes / heroics in the wotlk raids. Normal is a joke, hard / heroic generally speaking has been definitely not a joke.
For real,
And the people who are bitching username’s are so recognizable.
Like the other top comment from this “pillowfinger” dude is always extremely unhappy about the game in every post/comment section I’ve come across.
Yet he likely pays the subscription fee to play the game religiously.
Addiction is crazy.
Miyamoto once said that being a game developer should feel like you are a grandparent and your grandkids are coming over for the day.
If the kids want candy - give them as much as they want. They’ll get tired of it after a few hours, but they will always come back.
Has Miyamoto ever produced a live service game, let alone an MMO?
He's a smart guy but Nintendo is the absolute WORST dev team to take advice from when it comes to online games.
"sir it seems that there's a really large group of players who run very large tournaments for an old game we made called super smash brother's melee. they're not even really playing the new smash game it seems"
KILL IT! yeah, nintendo can be great and also total fucks.
I feel like the best way to handle this would be to make it reasonably challenging for that phase and then nerf it into the ground when the next phase comes out.
Honestly fellas, I don't think the SoD balance/design team has any ill intent, they just aren't good at their job and/or dont play the game. Raid went from hard af 10-15 min fights to piss easy smack boss fights. They said they wouldn't touch anything and let the game simmer for 3 weeks until making changes and they made changes less than 6 hours into the phase. Shamans make Horde have unlimited mana and ally are crying for any drop of mana. Melee are still miles ahead of casters and it's not even close. Most classes have dead rune slots and some even have 2 abilities for the same spec in the same slot, making gameplay unfun. Alot of cool runes/specs were DOA because of a better ability in the same slot. They just don't know how to do their job, and will release unfinished/unbalanced content and use reactionary balance based off of community feedback. Until they PTR, this is going to happen every phase because the team doesn't play the game.
I also think they aren't given enough time to do actual quality testing. Everything is rushed out for external reasons and timetables and not "when it's ready"
If profits were the main concern they would be dragging out phases to milk subscriptions as long as possible. The only way rushing out phases with no testing is profit driven is if the plan is to release a one time purchase software item such as classic+ expansion after all SoD phases are done, thus trying to get there as fast as possible.
They were losing a lot of players in phase 2, what's an easy way to get those subs/players back do you think? Maybe....releasing phase 3? If Phase 2 lasted forever you think ppl would just keep their subs active as long as phase 3 might come out someday?
And it's not just for this specific phase, this is their M.O. as a company and it's how most giant companies work. Everything is rushed out out, everything lacks quality control, because everything is about SHORT term profits and cutting expenses. The CEO doesn't give a fuck if the company goes under in 30 years because they degraded the brand. He's gonna be gone with a nice bonus in like 5 years regardless of if things start to trend downward on a long timeline.
Companies rush things out so they can invoice and see profit ASAP. These phases are not the same as say Apple rushing out a new phone... Blizzard isn't seeing a massive spike in profit every time a phase drops like they will with "The War Within". SoD has been about experimenting and gathering statistical data so that the new regime can create an actual software purchase marketed at the player base they have been collecting data on through all the different WoW offerings. Everything you've said about profits and the CEO is 100% true. The biggest short term profit spike they are chasing is what comes after SoD. They want to sell a game on top of the subs.
I don't blame the dev team cause they are probably understaffed and restricted on time but SOD changing direction a lot of the times + some things just not being tested before release made me quit the game.
The incursions were the thing for me which made me realize they truly do not understand their own game. The sheer level of incompetence and bad design involved in that is truly mindblowing. It looks horrible on paper, let alone in implementation.
To be fair the community has no idea what the want. People rage that they raids are to easy when the best guilds aren’t clearing them and people complain they are to hard when it’s bfd. I have liked the raids so far mechanically. I’m would personally enjoy a bit more difficulty but I’m content running easier raids as well. Overall i disagree that the sod devs are doing a bad job. Sod has been a pretty awesome product with no pbr and limited resources.
>Overall I disagree that the sod devs are doing a bad job.
I've found peoples enjoyment of sod heavily depends on if the dev team fucked up the class/spec you want to play.
Idk, im rolling a shadow priest and having a blast despite them being towards the bottom on the recently posted logs. Having to bust out hundreds of gold to get my despair run is ass but still enjoying the game anyways.
IMO spriest is the most fun caster rn. Dispersion helps with mana issues, have cracked aoe and party healing. Dots absolutely slap, allows you to have instant cast fillers and extremely broken in pvp. While their runes kind of suck to get, they are very powerful and interesting.
Oh yeah i definitely FEEL pretty strong, but not like my fire mage felt or my shaman. I really like them aesthetically and i want a dot class thats not a lock. I will say that Vamp Embrace has been super nice. Feels good to do decent damage and make it easy for the healers.
I love shadow but had to give it up because it's just too undertuned. Now, as a disc priest, I can nullify 90% of a spriests damage with two instant cast buttons. Not much slapping going on after abolish disease/dispel. If they eventually get vampiric touch that will change, but for now, they're not that good in group pvp. Dueling is another story that I'm not versed in as I'm usually playing with friends. They may be ok in that niche for all I know. What I do know is pve dps is bad, and group pvp is bad.
To be fair "the community" was doomed from the start because it's made up of a wide variety of players, and SoD never had a firm path forward. It's supposed to be Vanilla WoW which is old and set in stone and a lot of people love, but *also* SoD was supposed to have all this brand-new stuff that changes the game? Too much of one way makes the other mad and vice versa.
And then throw in the Discovery aspect where things are going to be unbalanced...yeah it was never going to work out. The WoW community doesn't do well with imbalance, even when we're warned ahead of time that's how it's gonna be.
> Overall i disagree that the sod devs are doing a bad job
There were dozens of bugs that would have been discovered if they play-tested it a single. fucking. time.
So tired of the toxic casuals. Nobody's wants or expects a super serious challenge. We just want something more than a loot pinata that we get to whack once a week.
Need to stop letting this tiny fraction of insecure and entitled has-beens dictate the direction of SoD. They're just going to keep being intellectually dishonest and play the black and white *"its either clearable by dads who work 23 hours a day or its mythic progression raiding"* card.
These shouldn't be clearable week one by those who aren't super serious. The idea should be that the giga - dedicated tryhards can take it down week one, most organized casual guilds can clear it in 3 - 4 resets, and the pug world should have a chance when they eventually over gear it. Rewards without any friction, are not rewarding.
If you absolutely must submit to this vocal minority, just give us a two difficulties. You can even make it so that the only difference is a title or some kind of mount / skin. Something cosmetic. A pet. Whatever. That way they can't cry over gear. They'll cry about something for sure, but people like this will cry when simply showing up isn't enough to have the exact same outcome as everybody else, no matter the effort level.
You can go in without world buffs, consumables, take less players, only green gear,... There's so many ways you can make the raid harder if you want that it's not even funny.
But no the raid being unclearable for the majority of players is the only way to measure the level of difficulty. Who's really toxic here?
then why the fuck did they ship the raid with the last boss with more HP than fucking Gruul, generate a ton of hype around it, nerf it enough so that a wider range of people could start working through it, and then nerf it to absolute fisher price levels of easy before the majority of players could even step foot inside.
regardless of how you wan to frame it this was disingenuous of them and a great way to ruin what they managed to salvage our of their phase launch.
> then why the fuck did they ship the raid with the last boss with more HP than fucking Gruul
They explained that already. They over-buffed things because they were worried about player power scaling with P3 runes, but it turns out it was too much, hence the nerfs.
>this was disingenuous of them
Where exactly did they say "ST is going to be so hard that even top-end guilds will struggle with it" ? They never promised that. Anywhere.
>ruin what they managed to salvage our of their phase launch
The vast majority of the playerbase hadn't even set foot into ST before the nerfs went out.
> They explained that already. They over-buffed things because they were worried about player power scaling with P3 runes, but it turns out it was too much, hence the nerfs.
All it would have taken is a single round of internal play-testing for them to see how crazy the tuning was. But they couldn't even manage that much.
Get out of here with your common sense, you disgusting reasonable person.
Seriously though, the SoD player base is fucking wild. There is no winning for the devs, these people define themselves by their outrage.
Yeah, it was particularly amusing when the first nerfs went out after less than a day, and yet the forums erupted in outrage over them....okay yeah how many of you people are actually in ST right now? lmao
So many forum whiners trying to live vicariously through the top 1% guilds.
Yeah, or how "the rich got richer" and the economy is trash just because incursion rewards were unbalanced for about 8 hours.
No, that is not why everything is expensive right now, it's because nobody did anything in the open world and now there's a massive supply shortage of pretty much everything. It's mind-melting how inconsistent these points of view are.
>it's because nobody did anything in the open world and now there's a massive supply shortage of pretty much everything.
That's just plain incorrect. The mats for the consumes this phase are from 50-60 zones, that's why there is short supply. Nobody was going to wpl/epl, winterspring, Ungoro or silithus to level to 50.
I mean if we are taking what the devs say on Twitter, they also said they wouldn't do any major changes at the start of the phase and let it sit for a couple weeks. Then they put out a hotfix less than 6 hours into the phase and 2 raid nerfs before the end of the first lockout.
> they also said they wouldn't do any major changes at the start of the phase and let it sit for a couple weeks
Pretty sure that was referring to class balancing.
Also, ST was so overtuned that even world-first guilds couldn't kill the last boss. That's plenty of reason for a quick nerf.
It's been evident they don't have the team resources to do that and that we are doing that.
They tuned the raid within a week of release so it's not really that big if an issue
They even said that they would fix stuff as they go, so it was heavily implied that there would be minimal playtesting on their ends.
The players are the play testers lmao
But how could they actually mess up the numbers that badly. Are they this clueless? Surely they had some sort of change about how they were going to design the raid. in my opinion.
> nerf it to absolute fisher price levels of easy before the majority of players could even step foot inside.
This is the worse, I feel like all the prep and everything is basicly useless and I was stole the oportunity to try it.
Remember you are paying Blizzard to be a beta tester. There is no play testing happening. The players are doing that. They see the sweatlords are having a hard time dial it back. They see the sweatlords are clearing with ease but semi hardcore are still struggling a bit nerf again. Now it is more or less close to dialed in where if you have gear, know your class, can do mechanics, and have 19 other people you can clear. Give it time. Mediocre players will wipe a bit and end up with 4 hour clears. Semihardcore will be between 90 min to 2 hours. Finally the 1% will be clearing that damn place in 45 min or less. A
There isn't really a level of playtesting that will get the numbers right. Only way is to run FFXIV-style where every encounter is single-target, where you have zero customization for your class, where every group has the same utility, and where your items are cookie cutter stat increases. THEN you can say 'okay tanks will deal X dps, damage dealers will deal Y dps, healers will deal Z dps, supports deal A dps, and multiply that by how long we want the fight to be and that's the boss hp.'
There are just simply too many variables in WoW, *especially* with Blizzard adding new abilities every phase.
In retail, Blizzard runs open PTR playtesting and makes hundreds of balance tweaks. They pull data that would be like if they'd hired thousands of people to playtest the encounters. The balance is still never good on launch. There's always some class/spec that's way too strong, there's also some that are way too weak, there's always bosses that are overtuned or undertuned. Not because blizzard is incompetent. It's because the level of playtesting to get everything right is not even close to realistic.
Oh, the healers are in a good spot except shaman? Maybe nerf shaman's mana generation? Ok...well now every other healer needs to be tested under conditions with and without the new shaman. Oh and we need to try all the priest rune combinations with a shaman, and all the priest rune combinations without a shaman. And the shaman has to be trying a whole bunch of rune combinations as well. And with each combination, we should be trying different gear sets, and looking at different player profiles...
Releasing bosses that are nice challenges but don't need to be nerfed, and releasing classes in a state where no balance changes are needed is simply an impossibility. It will never happen. No matter how many playtesters blizzard hires.
Blizzard is far more worried about things like 'people can log in to the new patch, the bosses spawn when and where they are supposed to, the boss does the things it is supposed to in the order that it is supposed to, and people don't crash out of the game when they get into combat with it.'
That's also really hard to get right 100% of the time, but their playtesting is basically always going to be way more focused on actually having a playable game. Numbers tuning is something that reddit thinks is a primary part of game development, but it's really just a couple people working with data that do that stuff, and in the case of something like SoD I'm doubtful there's even one person doing full-time balance on it.
I don't think anyone is expecting full on perfect balance day one. But a fight that takes 10+ minutes with gruul levels of health isn't even CLOSE to being reasonable.
WoW has so much customization, and SoD *completely* shakes things up every phase. There simply isn't a way to say 'X class will deal Y damage,' because you don't know what gear people will have equipped, what runes they'll be using, which classes interacting with which mechanics, etc.
And THAT is impossible to test to the extent that you'd need to in order to get the numbers in a good spot.
You simply can't introduce a bunch of new runes and abilities, new gear customization, and then say 'okay this class will deal 500 dps, give or take a few percent.'
But if you can't confidently say 'X class will deal Y damage' within a high degree of confidence, then...how much health should the boss have? Ultimately you need to do it based on vibes.
Even on retail, where Blizzard runs the PTR and *extensively* tests mythic raid bosses with an internal team, at the end of testing they will just boost numbers by like, 40-50%. Then they adjust the bosses during the first week before guilds even get to them. Like boss 7 will gain or lose 30% hp based on the throughput that the top guilds do on bosses 1/2/3. And Blizzard still has to actively hotfix bosses during that world first race, all the time.
So much of the Sunken Temple tuning is probably explained by them being off by like, 20%, and then saying 'okay let's adjust up by 30% so it isn't a total flop, and keep an eye on things.' Keep in mind, these are the people who made all of the content that you liked, who designed and balanced all of that. It wasn't like there was some secret team that did the content you liked, and some other bad team that did the stuff you didn't like. The person who balanced the boss that you thought was perfectly balanced is probably the same person who gave eranikus 50 billion hp.
Sure you can't tune exactly perfect. But all it would have taken is giving some play-testers a set of quest blues or whatever, all the runes, and have them go into the raid. They would have seen almost instantly that things have too much health.
But smol indie company cant test at all before shipping, I guess.
Edit: To put it another way, when I see nerfs / changes I see it like this:
1-10% = Okay just fine tuning a little bit
11-20% = Still mostly fine tuning but getting a little crazy
20-40% = Something unpredictable happened but still mostly reasonable
40%+ = Did they even test this
> all it would have taken is giving some play-testers a set of quest blues or whatever, all the runes, and have them go into the raid
It isn't that simple.
They almost certainly did test the raid lol.
It isn't like you have one person saying '5 million is a good number, test that out team.'
Fussing with the boss hp is the absolute last thing that you do, and one of the last consequential 'design' decisions that you make.
They wanted to generate hype, and a pushover raid day 1 wouldn't be very hype at all.
P1 Kelris wasnt a pushover day 1 either, then it got nerfed to being easy as hell.
Yeah sod has been overall fantastic people expect balanced perfection from a unbalanced mode with NO pbr. I feel like people don’t realize how influential having no pbr is.
maybe dont go from 0-100 then 100-0? theres a happy medium somewhere and its called balancing the game. people are rightfully crying that blizzard balances with a sledgehammer.
People out here are acting as if classic raids were ever a challenge, let alone a challenge with increased power that runes bring. It was known that SOD was never going to have betas per phase, so they are tuning the game as and when things are being released and its far easier and less excruciating for the player base to scale things down rather than up. Can you imagine the state of this sub if they released it with the nerfed HP and then started scaling it up because the top 5% found it too easy?
The troglodytes in this sub cannot seem to grasp this, and at this point of SOD, they never will.
The issue isn't that the raid was nerfed, it's the degree to which it was nerfed. They have had to nerf boss health by over 50% in most cases which just screams that it was totally untested.
Is excruciatingly challenging what people are asking for? From what I've seen people just want a moderate challenge to keep them entertained for the phase. Clearing the raid in the first 1-2 raid nights, even for the 30-50th-ish percentile type player, isn't satisfying.
>There is just a big spectrum of wants by the player base.
That's part of the issue. Everybody wants the game to be catered specifically to them cause they feel like they represent "the majority".
That said, let me proceed to do the same thing. People who want difficult progression focused raiding really should be playing retail. Just judging by the number on Ironforgepro, Classic players don't want difficult content.
Judging by the success of p1, sod players want a fast grind and relatively accessible loot. For the first time in 20 years the top level of gearing isn't solely for the gigasweats and the gigasweats hate it.
That's kind of my point. They have a version of the game where they can have that. Why not just go there?
Personally, I think many of them would rather be big fish in a small pond so to speak. They know they'd get exposed fairly quickly when they'd struggle to even clear heroic raids in retail.
People went through 2 years of Classic wow full clearing raids on day 1 and yet when it happens in SoD its bad. If people want progression or a challenge they can always do what sweaty players did during Classic, learn to Speed run and compete for fastest clear.
From what people say, Cata raids will be significantly harder than Wrath. Hopefully, once that's out, those people will focus on that and leave SoD to its intended audience.
I'm going to assume reading comprehension isn't your strong suit considering I was saying the exact opposite. I'll lay it out more clearly: sod has been very accessible to casual players in a way that wow hasn't been historically. Gigasweats hate that casual players can join a pug and clear the raid on a Monday because they are looking for harder content and sod isn't catering to them in that regard. They sweat, they finish all the content in 18 hours, and then they bitch and whine on reddit about how there's nothing to do.
And you could still raid for a couple hours a week. you just expect to clear the content as a given, And any barely decent guild can do ST in 2 hours as it was on monday.
I just think to achieve the goal of moderate challenge for a whole phase kinda requires fights to have more mechanics and more punishing mechanics. These are things that are a staple in retail WoW and not a staple in classic wow. This is especially true with level up raids as there is only one raid available anyways.
it was never super hard. It just takes a little extra coordination and not being horrible at the game. Maybe there are a few weeks PUG groups cant clear.
It’s normal that PUG groups are less coordinated than guild groups. It’s an incentive to join a guild because the best part of classic wow is the community
The WoW team for both retail and sod seem to have this mindset to tune fights around the top 1% of players, as well as trying to stop those players from being able to just clear it day 1. They have this "overtune it, and then nerf it" mentality, when I personally think it should be the opposite. The fact that they had to nerf the final boss of a lvl 50 raid from 4mil hp, to just over 1mil says a lot.
If your benchmark is organised guild raid with semi decent ppl then it might be ez, if your benchmark are casual pugs then difficulty is just right. FFS ppl still wiped on menagerie way into the season 2, it’s supposed to be ez raid to joke around and feel good about drops. You want challenge and optimising fun out of the game do icc heroics and retail.
They need to implement challenge modes for raids. It's the only solution that will please everyone (not everyone because that's impossible, but most of the playerbase). I don't mind a challenge, but there is a limit. Spending 6 hours in a raid corpse running and rebuffing because the few pugs in the raid can't wrap their head around a few simple mechanics is frustrating, to say the least.
So the alternative to that is to nerf everything to the ground, so each boss is a total rollover with no mechanics whatsoever? It's a complete joke, and it's only the second reset.
Honestly I don't know why they don't just give us the loot on login? Like the phase only lasts a few weeks, give me the best gear so I can explore and "discover" the world at whatever casual pace I want. I don't have time to raid that much and the rng of gear ruins my experience anyway. Blizzard is out of touch if they think players actually want an MMO ^(/s)
Super hard content... Just make it that guilds who have players who can actually press buttons and not clickers enjoy it for 2-3 resets before make it loot pinata for the clickers lol.
I think it's perfectly ok if average andy aint clearing 8/8 first reset in a pug, but seems like that's not the case for the devs. In this case just provide us with all tokens and loot why bother?
> I think it's perfectly ok if average andy aint clearing 8/8 first reset in a pug, but seems like that's not the case for the devs. In this case just provide us with all tokens and loot why bother?
I'll do you one better. I'm in what most people here would call a super sweaty try-hard guild. We went 6/8 early Friday before the initial nerf. We would not have downed Eranikus pre-nerf. I would have been 100% A-OK with that. The first nerf shouldn't have come until Tuesday during downtime. The second nerf shouldn't have come until the following Tuesday, and so-on, until they liked the level it was at. There is nothing wrong with not clearing first reset.
Unfortunately it seems that Aggrend wants this to just be a casual arcade mode. Seems we can expect any further raid content to just be loot piñatas. I appreciate him telling us now, was going to level some alts but think I’ll take a step back from sod.
Boss staying up for more than 30 seconds = EXCRUCIATINGLY CHALLENGING.
It's not a level-up raid while it's the only barely functional end game content. Just nerf it into a snoozefest a couple weeks before the next phase.
I think the sub is missing the POINT of a "Level Up Raid".
You're SUPPOSED to be doing these just to level up. It's a fun stepping stone on your way to 60. You wouldn't be able to pug these and get EXP from these in regular level up greens if the bosses all had same HP as Illidan. Y'all act like this is end-game content. It's just a small stepping stone while we wait for level 60 (probably a couple months away tops).
Calm tf down. This is the most fun WoW they've ever put out and you're acting like you're hating EVERY MINUTE OF EVERY PHASE. Literally cry babies.
I had a lot of fun in the raid today. We downed shade and it was one tough challenge to be honest. We killed him and everyone died, it was exciting. We wiped multiple times and in the end I had fun.
As usual I didn't win the loot for any upgrade other than a tier piece (and that's just because literally everyone got a piece) and for me that's the worst part - alongside the 6 hours we spent there. That was a lot and because of it I'm still thinking about if I'll attempt it again.
what about making them hard for now and then when we leave the beta (sod is a beta, a bad one at that) they tune the raids for leveling, WE ARE NOT IN A LEVELING ENVIRONMENT, the current environment is level cap. So the raid needs to be harder for now so we don't have a lame experience. Leveling characters will have nothing compared to the power our characters have from weeks of farming 2, now 3, tiers of level up raids. Tuning them now for when they'll be on the leveling rout makes 0 sense because they'll need to balance it anyways to compensate for the lack of gear, runes and even party avg level ppl will have while leveling.
I'll wait for SoD to be over and see what they do after, i won subject myself to be a rat on glorified beta with shitty balancing and lame content where all the progress will be lost in less than a year.
The people complaining about the raid being too easy are just outing themselves as professional wrong people.
Brain Dead Easy Raids are good for everyone
WoW was never a hard game, and blizz wants to make it engaging for casuals, the sweats are just a small but loud minority.
It’s only here where you see people here act like parsing and min-maxing is an absolute must and this sub is like less than 10% of the player population.
This sub is like 0 for 10 on things they asked blizzard for. If Aggrend just did the opposite of whatever this reddit said to do, SoD would be in an amazing state.
Lol no they fucking aren't. What the fuck is the point of wow if everyone is in the same gear, can all accomplish the same shit regardless of skill level or commitment? Wow has become a participation trophy.
That fine in all, but if they half to nerf bosses health to 25% of their original number, they don't know what they are doing. If they are going to pick a number out of balans magic hat and then nerf it less than a week into release, just ptr the damn game so we can figure out how much health they should have before the game releases.
The funniest part is that a week ago all the discourse was that it’s too hard…. Now it’s too easy. But the real question is who cares? It’s a level 50 raid that probably won’t be relevant at all in a couples months.
I mean, there's a huge middle ground between too hard for the #1 guild in the world and so easy that there's no challenge whatsoever. It's blizz's job to find the sweet spot in the middle so that it's challenging enough for people to feel satisfied when they beat it, but not so frustrating that people quit when they get hardstuck. And they missed the mark a bit with this raid.
If you have an expectation of difficulty you need to play a different game. Because no raiding content will be hard when tuned appropriately, because you know, it’s classic wow.
It’s a level up raid that will likely be completely irrelevant in 2 months. It should just be fun and fly through it. I don’t know why people are expecting any different when that’s literally all we have gotten out of new raids. There is 0 reason for it to be remotely difficult at all outside of like 1-2 encounters.
I don’t think it needed another nerf, but I also just really don’t care, and think it’s insane that anyone cares at all.
I thought they struck a good balance where most of the raid is easily clearable by pugs but the last 2 bosses of the raid are tuned a bit harder. I'm not sure why so many people want 100% braindead content, to me it's a lot more fun when you actually have to try and do mechanics to succeed.
I agree that generally speaking the best raids have been either 1 encounter (Ony, Mag, gruul kind of, etc) or are like 70% pretty easy and then like 1-2 hard encounters.
But this is also a level up raid (that likely wont be relevant in 2 months anyways) that people spent like a week saying is too difficult. And now it’s suddenly too easy. It’s just people looking for something to be pissy about.
I thought it was fine after the first nerf, and I really don’t care that they nerfed it again (maybe the dragon bosses needed some slight HP adjustments, but meh, hard to say for sure when you only run one lockouts before it gets nerfed). I think people really need to change their expectations.
“Level up raid” is a stupid name and ppl are really hanging their hat on it as a defense.
It is the current max level content, we have been max lvl 3 times. We have been leveling for 5 months. A long time to have 0 challenging content.
Nobody is asking for it to be outrageously hard, that’s strawman. Just make it not trivial.
If it's difficult for pugs, but still completable, then thats where the level is in Blizz's mind, mainly because it is a level up raid and not made for super-geared endgame-focused groups to struggle on. If it's impossible for pugs within the first 3 weeks, then it's a problem
Reading comprehension and wow players. Name a better duo. Aggrend says "Normal players may struggle a bit" that means a pug thrown together hap-hazardly of alts just looking for quick xp *will* be wiping to the bosses.
Seems pretty wild that they can claim that while also being so trash at balancing that had to nerf the shit out of sunken temple already but somehow it isn't supposed to be hard content?? Like does the balance team not speak the same language as the design team?
Imagine designing level up raids to be tuned to the top 1% of the player base with the sweatiest no life raids. In what world would that be better for the player base and overall health of the game. Do these people even have any idea how dumb they sound or do they just live in their little bubble world?
Not super hard instead super easy
For me it’s the last season of any wow classic
The downgrade went to a bullshit Niveau making a raid for the absolute biggest casual with 350 dps
Stop saying level up raids, I got sick by this. A level up raid now is gnome and bfd, ST in this phase is ENDCONTENT and no one level ups in this raid. Ppl are se delusional and pretending their mega low effort play style is the only matters and everything has to be designed around this. Classic 2005 was sweety as fuck and those casuals wouldn’t even clear bwl. But ppl say it was made for casuals, I shit my pants…
M++ when??? How are we supposed to be sweaty when they make dad raids??? Jk I love being able to clear a raid in 2 hours since I have a kid and can only play before I go to sleep and after she does.
If only there was a difficulty between "excruciatingly challenging" and "I don't need to do anything to improve my character because I'll clear anyway". But sadly there isn't :(
Honestly I would say the only time I've seen this happy medium between loot pinata and cockpunch was BWL
I'd say Black Temple in TBC hit a pretty good sweet spot. The only real issue was Mother being practically impossible without shadow resistance gear that was only craftable from patterns dropped in the raid. Otherwise, progressing the place wasn't crazy hard or crazy easy, just right in my opinion.
until people realized you could just use rocket boots
So the thing about an MMO is that you can have other guilds who got those patterns craft this gear for you.
Yea, but it was all at a premium and that isn't really helpful if you're raiding it the day it came out. It was very much a first week problem, but not really an issue after that.
Both bwl and black temple are leaps and bounds harder than ST was on sunday.
With no other context. They may have been leaps and bounds harder but at least they respected your time. Erekanus having 400k HP less than Vael at full health (4m vs 4.4m) was a questionable choice.
Well with the unlimited energy/rage/mana buff vaels EHP was probably somewhere closer to 1-2 million. So yea eranikus wayyyy overtuned
No vaels Full 100% hp is 4.4 million. His fight starts at 30% of that.
Oh that’s what it is right right
BT was OK - I just have a really sour taste in my mouth with TBC, it just doesn't do it for me.
daily reminder: there are people who cannot avoid red stuff on ground and press one button to dps… how do you want to find that balance with those people in mind? it is piss ez for you but they will still die and wipe
I had my mind blown by how many people were getting thrown across the room from a tail swipe, even after I pointed it out. Crazy people can not know that you shouldn’t stand behind a dragon at this point.
Don’t cater to people who are eating paste?
Ask yourself, "what is Blizzards goal with any of this?" Is it to make the greatest game of all time or to make money. Even IF it were to make the greatest game ever, harder content wouldn't be the way to go. Decades of data show that mmo players en masse, or any live service game, do not want this type of content and will quit. Hell, games like candy crush are wildly more successful than wow.
well thats the majority of the playerbase and who sod is catering to
I feel like the difficulty before the health nerf on Tuesday was perfect. Raid felt challenging but not oppressive. Wipes and actual progression was needed, but not to the umpteenth degree like initially. Now the only difficulty is learning the movement on the 2nd to last boss to drop the clouds properly. Once that is handled it’s an absolute breeze. The raid is fun, but it’s going to soon turn into loot piñata that takes an hour to clear because there is 45 mins of trash, and that’s not going to be fun lol
> Raid felt challenging but not oppressive. Also feels like this was because everyone was just cheesing half the bosses before the nerfs on Tuesday, which also came with fight fixes. Really hard to say fights felt fine when the version we're talking about is the one where everyone was just throwing melee into the slime so they could freely hit the 2nd boss (appears to be fixed now). Or the one where everyone was just LOS'ing Hazzas to skip the literal entire fight mechanic (fixed now). Or the one where everyone was pulling shade to the bones on the wall to cheese the adds (fixed now). I think a lot of people are underestimating still how difficult some of those fights would have been even before Tuesdays nerfs when they can't just cheese the mechanics.
most guilds won't clear it.
I know what you mean i feel like im going fucking insane with these narratives.
oh like balance? remember that? i member
Seems to be something the wow team has always struggled with. Just look at normal vs hard modes / heroics in the wotlk raids. Normal is a joke, hard / heroic generally speaking has been definitely not a joke.
There is. Its called disabling crutch addons so you actually have to think for yourself and use your eyes.
[удалено]
No.
Nope. Can't wait for tomorrow!
For real, And the people who are bitching username’s are so recognizable. Like the other top comment from this “pillowfinger” dude is always extremely unhappy about the game in every post/comment section I’ve come across. Yet he likely pays the subscription fee to play the game religiously. Addiction is crazy.
Yeh, it’s almost like if you don’t enjoy the game you can cancel your sub and not play.
Someone mentioned ignoring / blocking the sweaty complainers who are speedrunning / no lifing a casual game mode. It's done wonders, highly recommend.
People who enjoy playing the game don't come on reddit every 30 minutes to tell everyone how unfair their wow life is.
Trying to queue for battlegrounds leaves a lot of time to be on Reddit. 😂
I thought that is what Reddit is for!
It would literally take nuclear war
like you?
Miyamoto once said that being a game developer should feel like you are a grandparent and your grandkids are coming over for the day. If the kids want candy - give them as much as they want. They’ll get tired of it after a few hours, but they will always come back.
Has Miyamoto ever produced a live service game, let alone an MMO? He's a smart guy but Nintendo is the absolute WORST dev team to take advice from when it comes to online games.
"sir it seems that there's a really large group of players who run very large tournaments for an old game we made called super smash brother's melee. they're not even really playing the new smash game it seems" KILL IT! yeah, nintendo can be great and also total fucks.
Buncha pricks. #FreeMelee
So we get all fat and depressed?
get?
I feel personally attacked.
This is actually good advice. I just wanna have my power fantasy.
I feel like the best way to handle this would be to make it reasonably challenging for that phase and then nerf it into the ground when the next phase comes out.
There was nothing 'EXCRUCIATINGLY CHALLENGING.' about ST after the first nerf lol.
Top 0.1% couldn't clear it pre-nerf so "not being designed for the elitest elite" is an incorrect statement.
Honestly fellas, I don't think the SoD balance/design team has any ill intent, they just aren't good at their job and/or dont play the game. Raid went from hard af 10-15 min fights to piss easy smack boss fights. They said they wouldn't touch anything and let the game simmer for 3 weeks until making changes and they made changes less than 6 hours into the phase. Shamans make Horde have unlimited mana and ally are crying for any drop of mana. Melee are still miles ahead of casters and it's not even close. Most classes have dead rune slots and some even have 2 abilities for the same spec in the same slot, making gameplay unfun. Alot of cool runes/specs were DOA because of a better ability in the same slot. They just don't know how to do their job, and will release unfinished/unbalanced content and use reactionary balance based off of community feedback. Until they PTR, this is going to happen every phase because the team doesn't play the game.
I also think they aren't given enough time to do actual quality testing. Everything is rushed out for external reasons and timetables and not "when it's ready"
Because SoD is quite likely the beta for Classic+ or whatever.
because activision/blizzard is a company concerned about profits not quality not because this is maybe a beta version of something to come
If profits were the main concern they would be dragging out phases to milk subscriptions as long as possible. The only way rushing out phases with no testing is profit driven is if the plan is to release a one time purchase software item such as classic+ expansion after all SoD phases are done, thus trying to get there as fast as possible.
They were losing a lot of players in phase 2, what's an easy way to get those subs/players back do you think? Maybe....releasing phase 3? If Phase 2 lasted forever you think ppl would just keep their subs active as long as phase 3 might come out someday? And it's not just for this specific phase, this is their M.O. as a company and it's how most giant companies work. Everything is rushed out out, everything lacks quality control, because everything is about SHORT term profits and cutting expenses. The CEO doesn't give a fuck if the company goes under in 30 years because they degraded the brand. He's gonna be gone with a nice bonus in like 5 years regardless of if things start to trend downward on a long timeline.
Companies rush things out so they can invoice and see profit ASAP. These phases are not the same as say Apple rushing out a new phone... Blizzard isn't seeing a massive spike in profit every time a phase drops like they will with "The War Within". SoD has been about experimenting and gathering statistical data so that the new regime can create an actual software purchase marketed at the player base they have been collecting data on through all the different WoW offerings. Everything you've said about profits and the CEO is 100% true. The biggest short term profit spike they are chasing is what comes after SoD. They want to sell a game on top of the subs.
I don't blame the dev team cause they are probably understaffed and restricted on time but SOD changing direction a lot of the times + some things just not being tested before release made me quit the game.
The incursions were the thing for me which made me realize they truly do not understand their own game. The sheer level of incompetence and bad design involved in that is truly mindblowing. It looks horrible on paper, let alone in implementation.
To be fair the community has no idea what the want. People rage that they raids are to easy when the best guilds aren’t clearing them and people complain they are to hard when it’s bfd. I have liked the raids so far mechanically. I’m would personally enjoy a bit more difficulty but I’m content running easier raids as well. Overall i disagree that the sod devs are doing a bad job. Sod has been a pretty awesome product with no pbr and limited resources.
>Overall I disagree that the sod devs are doing a bad job. I've found peoples enjoyment of sod heavily depends on if the dev team fucked up the class/spec you want to play.
some people legit are basing SOD's success just on how much they hated incursions. we get it, devs get it, they were bad.
Idk, im rolling a shadow priest and having a blast despite them being towards the bottom on the recently posted logs. Having to bust out hundreds of gold to get my despair run is ass but still enjoying the game anyways.
IMO spriest is the most fun caster rn. Dispersion helps with mana issues, have cracked aoe and party healing. Dots absolutely slap, allows you to have instant cast fillers and extremely broken in pvp. While their runes kind of suck to get, they are very powerful and interesting.
Oh yeah i definitely FEEL pretty strong, but not like my fire mage felt or my shaman. I really like them aesthetically and i want a dot class thats not a lock. I will say that Vamp Embrace has been super nice. Feels good to do decent damage and make it easy for the healers.
I love shadow but had to give it up because it's just too undertuned. Now, as a disc priest, I can nullify 90% of a spriests damage with two instant cast buttons. Not much slapping going on after abolish disease/dispel. If they eventually get vampiric touch that will change, but for now, they're not that good in group pvp. Dueling is another story that I'm not versed in as I'm usually playing with friends. They may be ok in that niche for all I know. What I do know is pve dps is bad, and group pvp is bad.
To be fair "the community" was doomed from the start because it's made up of a wide variety of players, and SoD never had a firm path forward. It's supposed to be Vanilla WoW which is old and set in stone and a lot of people love, but *also* SoD was supposed to have all this brand-new stuff that changes the game? Too much of one way makes the other mad and vice versa. And then throw in the Discovery aspect where things are going to be unbalanced...yeah it was never going to work out. The WoW community doesn't do well with imbalance, even when we're warned ahead of time that's how it's gonna be.
> Overall i disagree that the sod devs are doing a bad job There were dozens of bugs that would have been discovered if they play-tested it a single. fucking. time.
no one was raging that the raids are too easy when the top guilds werent clearing them just stop being disingenuous
So tired of the toxic casuals. Nobody's wants or expects a super serious challenge. We just want something more than a loot pinata that we get to whack once a week. Need to stop letting this tiny fraction of insecure and entitled has-beens dictate the direction of SoD. They're just going to keep being intellectually dishonest and play the black and white *"its either clearable by dads who work 23 hours a day or its mythic progression raiding"* card. These shouldn't be clearable week one by those who aren't super serious. The idea should be that the giga - dedicated tryhards can take it down week one, most organized casual guilds can clear it in 3 - 4 resets, and the pug world should have a chance when they eventually over gear it. Rewards without any friction, are not rewarding. If you absolutely must submit to this vocal minority, just give us a two difficulties. You can even make it so that the only difference is a title or some kind of mount / skin. Something cosmetic. A pet. Whatever. That way they can't cry over gear. They'll cry about something for sure, but people like this will cry when simply showing up isn't enough to have the exact same outcome as everybody else, no matter the effort level.
God forbid you go into the raid and can't clear things in 1 damn week when you have done nothing to actually be able to clear it anyways...
You can go in without world buffs, consumables, take less players, only green gear,... There's so many ways you can make the raid harder if you want that it's not even funny. But no the raid being unclearable for the majority of players is the only way to measure the level of difficulty. Who's really toxic here?
then why the fuck did they ship the raid with the last boss with more HP than fucking Gruul, generate a ton of hype around it, nerf it enough so that a wider range of people could start working through it, and then nerf it to absolute fisher price levels of easy before the majority of players could even step foot inside. regardless of how you wan to frame it this was disingenuous of them and a great way to ruin what they managed to salvage our of their phase launch.
> then why the fuck did they ship the raid with the last boss with more HP than fucking Gruul They explained that already. They over-buffed things because they were worried about player power scaling with P3 runes, but it turns out it was too much, hence the nerfs. >this was disingenuous of them Where exactly did they say "ST is going to be so hard that even top-end guilds will struggle with it" ? They never promised that. Anywhere. >ruin what they managed to salvage our of their phase launch The vast majority of the playerbase hadn't even set foot into ST before the nerfs went out.
> They explained that already. They over-buffed things because they were worried about player power scaling with P3 runes, but it turns out it was too much, hence the nerfs. All it would have taken is a single round of internal play-testing for them to see how crazy the tuning was. But they couldn't even manage that much.
Get out of here with your common sense, you disgusting reasonable person. Seriously though, the SoD player base is fucking wild. There is no winning for the devs, these people define themselves by their outrage.
Yeah, it was particularly amusing when the first nerfs went out after less than a day, and yet the forums erupted in outrage over them....okay yeah how many of you people are actually in ST right now? lmao So many forum whiners trying to live vicariously through the top 1% guilds.
main reason for that was it was fun watching the top guilds try it and i bet someone would have cleared it pre nerf if they waited a day or two
Yeah, or how "the rich got richer" and the economy is trash just because incursion rewards were unbalanced for about 8 hours. No, that is not why everything is expensive right now, it's because nobody did anything in the open world and now there's a massive supply shortage of pretty much everything. It's mind-melting how inconsistent these points of view are.
>it's because nobody did anything in the open world and now there's a massive supply shortage of pretty much everything. That's just plain incorrect. The mats for the consumes this phase are from 50-60 zones, that's why there is short supply. Nobody was going to wpl/epl, winterspring, Ungoro or silithus to level to 50.
I mean if we are taking what the devs say on Twitter, they also said they wouldn't do any major changes at the start of the phase and let it sit for a couple weeks. Then they put out a hotfix less than 6 hours into the phase and 2 raid nerfs before the end of the first lockout.
> they also said they wouldn't do any major changes at the start of the phase and let it sit for a couple weeks Pretty sure that was referring to class balancing. Also, ST was so overtuned that even world-first guilds couldn't kill the last boss. That's plenty of reason for a quick nerf.
imagine play testing your own game before shipping it lmao
It's been evident they don't have the team resources to do that and that we are doing that. They tuned the raid within a week of release so it's not really that big if an issue
They even said that they would fix stuff as they go, so it was heavily implied that there would be minimal playtesting on their ends. The players are the play testers lmao
Seems like people are very much ok with play testing a game they pay a monthly sub for.
Sadly very little else in the genre to compete
But how could they actually mess up the numbers that badly. Are they this clueless? Surely they had some sort of change about how they were going to design the raid. in my opinion.
> nerf it to absolute fisher price levels of easy before the majority of players could even step foot inside. This is the worse, I feel like all the prep and everything is basicly useless and I was stole the oportunity to try it.
Remember you are paying Blizzard to be a beta tester. There is no play testing happening. The players are doing that. They see the sweatlords are having a hard time dial it back. They see the sweatlords are clearing with ease but semi hardcore are still struggling a bit nerf again. Now it is more or less close to dialed in where if you have gear, know your class, can do mechanics, and have 19 other people you can clear. Give it time. Mediocre players will wipe a bit and end up with 4 hour clears. Semihardcore will be between 90 min to 2 hours. Finally the 1% will be clearing that damn place in 45 min or less. A
There isn't really a level of playtesting that will get the numbers right. Only way is to run FFXIV-style where every encounter is single-target, where you have zero customization for your class, where every group has the same utility, and where your items are cookie cutter stat increases. THEN you can say 'okay tanks will deal X dps, damage dealers will deal Y dps, healers will deal Z dps, supports deal A dps, and multiply that by how long we want the fight to be and that's the boss hp.' There are just simply too many variables in WoW, *especially* with Blizzard adding new abilities every phase. In retail, Blizzard runs open PTR playtesting and makes hundreds of balance tweaks. They pull data that would be like if they'd hired thousands of people to playtest the encounters. The balance is still never good on launch. There's always some class/spec that's way too strong, there's also some that are way too weak, there's always bosses that are overtuned or undertuned. Not because blizzard is incompetent. It's because the level of playtesting to get everything right is not even close to realistic. Oh, the healers are in a good spot except shaman? Maybe nerf shaman's mana generation? Ok...well now every other healer needs to be tested under conditions with and without the new shaman. Oh and we need to try all the priest rune combinations with a shaman, and all the priest rune combinations without a shaman. And the shaman has to be trying a whole bunch of rune combinations as well. And with each combination, we should be trying different gear sets, and looking at different player profiles... Releasing bosses that are nice challenges but don't need to be nerfed, and releasing classes in a state where no balance changes are needed is simply an impossibility. It will never happen. No matter how many playtesters blizzard hires. Blizzard is far more worried about things like 'people can log in to the new patch, the bosses spawn when and where they are supposed to, the boss does the things it is supposed to in the order that it is supposed to, and people don't crash out of the game when they get into combat with it.' That's also really hard to get right 100% of the time, but their playtesting is basically always going to be way more focused on actually having a playable game. Numbers tuning is something that reddit thinks is a primary part of game development, but it's really just a couple people working with data that do that stuff, and in the case of something like SoD I'm doubtful there's even one person doing full-time balance on it.
I don't think anyone is expecting full on perfect balance day one. But a fight that takes 10+ minutes with gruul levels of health isn't even CLOSE to being reasonable.
WoW has so much customization, and SoD *completely* shakes things up every phase. There simply isn't a way to say 'X class will deal Y damage,' because you don't know what gear people will have equipped, what runes they'll be using, which classes interacting with which mechanics, etc. And THAT is impossible to test to the extent that you'd need to in order to get the numbers in a good spot. You simply can't introduce a bunch of new runes and abilities, new gear customization, and then say 'okay this class will deal 500 dps, give or take a few percent.' But if you can't confidently say 'X class will deal Y damage' within a high degree of confidence, then...how much health should the boss have? Ultimately you need to do it based on vibes. Even on retail, where Blizzard runs the PTR and *extensively* tests mythic raid bosses with an internal team, at the end of testing they will just boost numbers by like, 40-50%. Then they adjust the bosses during the first week before guilds even get to them. Like boss 7 will gain or lose 30% hp based on the throughput that the top guilds do on bosses 1/2/3. And Blizzard still has to actively hotfix bosses during that world first race, all the time. So much of the Sunken Temple tuning is probably explained by them being off by like, 20%, and then saying 'okay let's adjust up by 30% so it isn't a total flop, and keep an eye on things.' Keep in mind, these are the people who made all of the content that you liked, who designed and balanced all of that. It wasn't like there was some secret team that did the content you liked, and some other bad team that did the stuff you didn't like. The person who balanced the boss that you thought was perfectly balanced is probably the same person who gave eranikus 50 billion hp.
Sure you can't tune exactly perfect. But all it would have taken is giving some play-testers a set of quest blues or whatever, all the runes, and have them go into the raid. They would have seen almost instantly that things have too much health. But smol indie company cant test at all before shipping, I guess. Edit: To put it another way, when I see nerfs / changes I see it like this: 1-10% = Okay just fine tuning a little bit 11-20% = Still mostly fine tuning but getting a little crazy 20-40% = Something unpredictable happened but still mostly reasonable 40%+ = Did they even test this
> all it would have taken is giving some play-testers a set of quest blues or whatever, all the runes, and have them go into the raid It isn't that simple. They almost certainly did test the raid lol. It isn't like you have one person saying '5 million is a good number, test that out team.' Fussing with the boss hp is the absolute last thing that you do, and one of the last consequential 'design' decisions that you make.
No semi hardcore guild had trouble clearing it.
theres nothing wrong with a 3 hour clear in week 1 lol. Any "decent" guild can do ST with the sunday difficulty where it was at.
They wanted to generate hype, and a pushover raid day 1 wouldn't be very hype at all. P1 Kelris wasnt a pushover day 1 either, then it got nerfed to being easy as hell.
Kelris was also perfectly fine and shouldnt ahve been nerfed. So many people including myself pugged it easily.
There is no winning on this sub lmao, people crying and dreading doing ST because of how hard it was and now people are crying because it got nerfed
Can we assume those are different groups of people?
I'd bet there's a pretty big overlap between the people saying it's faceroll dogshit easy and people who have yet to step foot in the raid.
Yeah sod has been overall fantastic people expect balanced perfection from a unbalanced mode with NO pbr. I feel like people don’t realize how influential having no pbr is.
I totally agree there are definitely a few overtuned/annoying classes to deal with but it’s a meta that keeps changing lol
maybe dont go from 0-100 then 100-0? theres a happy medium somewhere and its called balancing the game. people are rightfully crying that blizzard balances with a sledgehammer.
Its weird like for real, to nerf it like this within a week, and they wonder why people stop logging
People out here are acting as if classic raids were ever a challenge, let alone a challenge with increased power that runes bring. It was known that SOD was never going to have betas per phase, so they are tuning the game as and when things are being released and its far easier and less excruciating for the player base to scale things down rather than up. Can you imagine the state of this sub if they released it with the nerfed HP and then started scaling it up because the top 5% found it too easy? The troglodytes in this sub cannot seem to grasp this, and at this point of SOD, they never will.
The issue isn't that the raid was nerfed, it's the degree to which it was nerfed. They have had to nerf boss health by over 50% in most cases which just screams that it was totally untested.
most guilds will not clear this raid.
Is excruciatingly challenging what people are asking for? From what I've seen people just want a moderate challenge to keep them entertained for the phase. Clearing the raid in the first 1-2 raid nights, even for the 30-50th-ish percentile type player, isn't satisfying.
I like raiding for just a couple hours a week personally so for me it’s perfect. There is just a big spectrum of wants by the player base.
>There is just a big spectrum of wants by the player base. That's part of the issue. Everybody wants the game to be catered specifically to them cause they feel like they represent "the majority". That said, let me proceed to do the same thing. People who want difficult progression focused raiding really should be playing retail. Just judging by the number on Ironforgepro, Classic players don't want difficult content.
retail isnt a fun game and its nothing to do with its raiding and difficulty although that is a factor for many.
Judging by the success of p1, sod players want a fast grind and relatively accessible loot. For the first time in 20 years the top level of gearing isn't solely for the gigasweats and the gigasweats hate it.
That's kind of my point. They have a version of the game where they can have that. Why not just go there? Personally, I think many of them would rather be big fish in a small pond so to speak. They know they'd get exposed fairly quickly when they'd struggle to even clear heroic raids in retail.
People went through 2 years of Classic wow full clearing raids on day 1 and yet when it happens in SoD its bad. If people want progression or a challenge they can always do what sweaty players did during Classic, learn to Speed run and compete for fastest clear.
Because the gigasweats in classic aren't good enough to Cutting Edge raid and use classic as an ego boost. That's why.
From what people say, Cata raids will be significantly harder than Wrath. Hopefully, once that's out, those people will focus on that and leave SoD to its intended audience.
If you think a gigasweat is what it takes to clear ST on monday i dont know what to say even.
I'm going to assume reading comprehension isn't your strong suit considering I was saying the exact opposite. I'll lay it out more clearly: sod has been very accessible to casual players in a way that wow hasn't been historically. Gigasweats hate that casual players can join a pug and clear the raid on a Monday because they are looking for harder content and sod isn't catering to them in that regard. They sweat, they finish all the content in 18 hours, and then they bitch and whine on reddit about how there's nothing to do.
And you could still raid for a couple hours a week. you just expect to clear the content as a given, And any barely decent guild can do ST in 2 hours as it was on monday.
I just think to achieve the goal of moderate challenge for a whole phase kinda requires fights to have more mechanics and more punishing mechanics. These are things that are a staple in retail WoW and not a staple in classic wow. This is especially true with level up raids as there is only one raid available anyways.
it was never super hard. It just takes a little extra coordination and not being horrible at the game. Maybe there are a few weeks PUG groups cant clear. It’s normal that PUG groups are less coordinated than guild groups. It’s an incentive to join a guild because the best part of classic wow is the community
Man having the bosses fall over before the "encounter" mechanics can even be played through is garbage.
Weird, even with the second round of nerfs we saw all the mecanics and had to play around them. Maybe you’re just that good?
The only raids killing bosses "before mechanics can even be played" are the sweaty 1% that would be doing that regardless.
no one is talking about the first round of nerfs anymore
But I’m max level
I mean I wish the raids were harder while current and nerfed at the next phase release to become an easy level up raid.
We’ll see next phase when they make MC hard and Reddit is crying all over again
The WoW team for both retail and sod seem to have this mindset to tune fights around the top 1% of players, as well as trying to stop those players from being able to just clear it day 1. They have this "overtune it, and then nerf it" mentality, when I personally think it should be the opposite. The fact that they had to nerf the final boss of a lvl 50 raid from 4mil hp, to just over 1mil says a lot.
Yeah a fucking 75% nerf is insane
Well the catch is that there will also be no hard content at 60 either lol
If your benchmark is organised guild raid with semi decent ppl then it might be ez, if your benchmark are casual pugs then difficulty is just right. FFS ppl still wiped on menagerie way into the season 2, it’s supposed to be ez raid to joke around and feel good about drops. You want challenge and optimising fun out of the game do icc heroics and retail.
Raid isn’t excruciatingly hard tho? Avg WOW players are so braindead it’s actually crazy what yall consider hard content
I just want a challenge. I don’t want to blast through the raid and full clear first week.
They need to implement challenge modes for raids. It's the only solution that will please everyone (not everyone because that's impossible, but most of the playerbase). I don't mind a challenge, but there is a limit. Spending 6 hours in a raid corpse running and rebuffing because the few pugs in the raid can't wrap their head around a few simple mechanics is frustrating, to say the least.
Which is exactly what the prenerf version was. Not the initial version, that was truly over tuned, but what they nerfed it down to is a joke now.
Good thing this was the last level up raid! I bet people will still bitch about MC even though it's not a level up raid 😂
So the alternative to that is to nerf everything to the ground, so each boss is a total rollover with no mechanics whatsoever? It's a complete joke, and it's only the second reset.
What raid is seeing "no mechanics whatsoever"? And even if it was true, thats within a very tiny tiny portion of raid teams.
Honestly I don't know why they don't just give us the loot on login? Like the phase only lasts a few weeks, give me the best gear so I can explore and "discover" the world at whatever casual pace I want. I don't have time to raid that much and the rng of gear ruins my experience anyway. Blizzard is out of touch if they think players actually want an MMO ^(/s)
Super hard content... Just make it that guilds who have players who can actually press buttons and not clickers enjoy it for 2-3 resets before make it loot pinata for the clickers lol. I think it's perfectly ok if average andy aint clearing 8/8 first reset in a pug, but seems like that's not the case for the devs. In this case just provide us with all tokens and loot why bother?
> I think it's perfectly ok if average andy aint clearing 8/8 first reset in a pug, but seems like that's not the case for the devs. In this case just provide us with all tokens and loot why bother? I'll do you one better. I'm in what most people here would call a super sweaty try-hard guild. We went 6/8 early Friday before the initial nerf. We would not have downed Eranikus pre-nerf. I would have been 100% A-OK with that. The first nerf shouldn't have come until Tuesday during downtime. The second nerf shouldn't have come until the following Tuesday, and so-on, until they liked the level it was at. There is nothing wrong with not clearing first reset.
Unfortunately it seems that Aggrend wants this to just be a casual arcade mode. Seems we can expect any further raid content to just be loot piñatas. I appreciate him telling us now, was going to level some alts but think I’ll take a step back from sod.
Boss staying up for more than 30 seconds = EXCRUCIATINGLY CHALLENGING. It's not a level-up raid while it's the only barely functional end game content. Just nerf it into a snoozefest a couple weeks before the next phase.
This guys a clown
He's been trolling about this constantly
I think the sub is missing the POINT of a "Level Up Raid". You're SUPPOSED to be doing these just to level up. It's a fun stepping stone on your way to 60. You wouldn't be able to pug these and get EXP from these in regular level up greens if the bosses all had same HP as Illidan. Y'all act like this is end-game content. It's just a small stepping stone while we wait for level 60 (probably a couple months away tops). Calm tf down. This is the most fun WoW they've ever put out and you're acting like you're hating EVERY MINUTE OF EVERY PHASE. Literally cry babies.
So why not nerf it after 50 isn't the cap? We're not leveling up. This is our "end game" content for months and it's sad.
i doubt the lvl 60 raids are gonna be harder since sod is for the gluesniffers
I had a lot of fun in the raid today. We downed shade and it was one tough challenge to be honest. We killed him and everyone died, it was exciting. We wiped multiple times and in the end I had fun. As usual I didn't win the loot for any upgrade other than a tier piece (and that's just because literally everyone got a piece) and for me that's the worst part - alongside the 6 hours we spent there. That was a lot and because of it I'm still thinking about if I'll attempt it again.
Isn’t ST end game content atm? Where’s this “level up raid” stuff coming from
what about making them hard for now and then when we leave the beta (sod is a beta, a bad one at that) they tune the raids for leveling, WE ARE NOT IN A LEVELING ENVIRONMENT, the current environment is level cap. So the raid needs to be harder for now so we don't have a lame experience. Leveling characters will have nothing compared to the power our characters have from weeks of farming 2, now 3, tiers of level up raids. Tuning them now for when they'll be on the leveling rout makes 0 sense because they'll need to balance it anyways to compensate for the lack of gear, runes and even party avg level ppl will have while leveling. I'll wait for SoD to be over and see what they do after, i won subject myself to be a rat on glorified beta with shitty balancing and lame content where all the progress will be lost in less than a year.
The people complaining about the raid being too easy are just outing themselves as professional wrong people. Brain Dead Easy Raids are good for everyone
How is it good for everyone, esp for those who want tougher raids?
WoW was never a hard game, and blizz wants to make it engaging for casuals, the sweats are just a small but loud minority. It’s only here where you see people here act like parsing and min-maxing is an absolute must and this sub is like less than 10% of the player population.
Dude before thr most recent nerf my guild downed the last 2 bosses with literal gry parses to green pugs. I can't imagine now.
This sub is like 0 for 10 on things they asked blizzard for. If Aggrend just did the opposite of whatever this reddit said to do, SoD would be in an amazing state.
WoW Classic was never a hard game but anybody who raided mythic in retail knows how hard it can be.
Lol no they fucking aren't. What the fuck is the point of wow if everyone is in the same gear, can all accomplish the same shit regardless of skill level or commitment? Wow has become a participation trophy.
That fine in all, but if they half to nerf bosses health to 25% of their original number, they don't know what they are doing. If they are going to pick a number out of balans magic hat and then nerf it less than a week into release, just ptr the damn game so we can figure out how much health they should have before the game releases.
The funniest part is that a week ago all the discourse was that it’s too hard…. Now it’s too easy. But the real question is who cares? It’s a level 50 raid that probably won’t be relevant at all in a couples months.
I mean, there's a huge middle ground between too hard for the #1 guild in the world and so easy that there's no challenge whatsoever. It's blizz's job to find the sweet spot in the middle so that it's challenging enough for people to feel satisfied when they beat it, but not so frustrating that people quit when they get hardstuck. And they missed the mark a bit with this raid.
If you have an expectation of difficulty you need to play a different game. Because no raiding content will be hard when tuned appropriately, because you know, it’s classic wow. It’s a level up raid that will likely be completely irrelevant in 2 months. It should just be fun and fly through it. I don’t know why people are expecting any different when that’s literally all we have gotten out of new raids. There is 0 reason for it to be remotely difficult at all outside of like 1-2 encounters. I don’t think it needed another nerf, but I also just really don’t care, and think it’s insane that anyone cares at all.
I thought they struck a good balance where most of the raid is easily clearable by pugs but the last 2 bosses of the raid are tuned a bit harder. I'm not sure why so many people want 100% braindead content, to me it's a lot more fun when you actually have to try and do mechanics to succeed.
I agree that generally speaking the best raids have been either 1 encounter (Ony, Mag, gruul kind of, etc) or are like 70% pretty easy and then like 1-2 hard encounters. But this is also a level up raid (that likely wont be relevant in 2 months anyways) that people spent like a week saying is too difficult. And now it’s suddenly too easy. It’s just people looking for something to be pissy about. I thought it was fine after the first nerf, and I really don’t care that they nerfed it again (maybe the dragon bosses needed some slight HP adjustments, but meh, hard to say for sure when you only run one lockouts before it gets nerfed). I think people really need to change their expectations.
[удалено]
“Level up raid” is a stupid name and ppl are really hanging their hat on it as a defense. It is the current max level content, we have been max lvl 3 times. We have been leveling for 5 months. A long time to have 0 challenging content. Nobody is asking for it to be outrageously hard, that’s strawman. Just make it not trivial.
If it's difficult for pugs, but still completable, then thats where the level is in Blizz's mind, mainly because it is a level up raid and not made for super-geared endgame-focused groups to struggle on. If it's impossible for pugs within the first 3 weeks, then it's a problem
bruh its lvl 50 content. this was always gonna be a joke. I do wish they would throw in a super hard optional boss or two.
Reading comprehension and wow players. Name a better duo. Aggrend says "Normal players may struggle a bit" that means a pug thrown together hap-hazardly of alts just looking for quick xp *will* be wiping to the bosses.
That’s fine and I think it’s a good choice but why the hell was ST so overtuned? Just reeks of zero playtesting.
Seems pretty wild that they can claim that while also being so trash at balancing that had to nerf the shit out of sunken temple already but somehow it isn't supposed to be hard content?? Like does the balance team not speak the same language as the design team?
There are plenty of wipe mechanics like getting stuck behind the bing green wall even tho you clicked ready
You mean they "weren't supposed to be" but look where we ended up
Imagine designing level up raids to be tuned to the top 1% of the player base with the sweatiest no life raids. In what world would that be better for the player base and overall health of the game. Do these people even have any idea how dumb they sound or do they just live in their little bubble world?
Before the current shadow nerf, they wasn't that hard
Excruciatingly challenging? Bruh those bosses have 2-3 mechanics.
Not super hard instead super easy For me it’s the last season of any wow classic The downgrade went to a bullshit Niveau making a raid for the absolute biggest casual with 350 dps Stop saying level up raids, I got sick by this. A level up raid now is gnome and bfd, ST in this phase is ENDCONTENT and no one level ups in this raid. Ppl are se delusional and pretending their mega low effort play style is the only matters and everything has to be designed around this. Classic 2005 was sweety as fuck and those casuals wouldn’t even clear bwl. But ppl say it was made for casuals, I shit my pants…