Current & future raid difficulty discussion

[Strife]

Again, you're trying to artificially increase bosses by adjusting values. It adds no difficulty other than the bosses take longer to kill. That's boring and unneccessary.

Making the fight longer does make it more difficult actually, if you get Onyxia out of P2 before deep breath, then you've skipped a huge amount of potential raid damage. If you kill Ragnaros before sons, you've skipped another big part of the fight.

The fight being longer drains healers mana more, requiring more effort on their part min-maxing their consumables. Increasing raid damage also increases the amount of healing needed, maybe then you need to bring a few more healers to keep up with the incoming damage which means less dps which means a longer fight. The boss has a longer duration to cast his abilities therefore making the fight harder. It also makes good DPS more important, to get the boss down before the healers run out of juice.

Full consumables mandatory? You'll run out of money eventually if the boss is hard enough from all the wiping. Casual guilds can't keep up with the grind so they bring less, so their raid is weaker. They are gated from beating the boss because they need longer to get the necessary mats to spend a the night wiping until they get a decent/lucky attempt and down the boss. Walla, you have blizzlike progression.

It might not be the kind of difficulty you imagine where you need skill, game sense etc, but old wow has never required those things in pve. If you want that then retail has way more bosses that require you to actually play well, vanilla is all about preparation and dedication. That was the essence of 'difficulty' in real vanilla.

60 seconds is not a boss fight, it's a named trash mob. I expect that from a feenix guild wearing naxx gear and flasked up, not people wearing nerfed 5 man dungeon gear on a proper server.

My view is just the opposite to yours, 60 second boss fight and 1 night a week of raiding is boring and just too casual. Isn't this supposed to be the more hardcore version of wow, where it takes longer to do everything? Right now the pinnacle of pve on this server is equal to retail LFR mode.

[Azi]

I think that you picked wrong expansion.

[Strife]

Nah I think I just trusted that a wow private server in 2015 could actually offer a blizzlike pace of raid progression. This was advertised as "pre-nerf" but is basically the same as feenix.

2005 blizzlike values in 2015 does not equal the same level of challenge, because we are all better now. The first server to do this is going to be a wake up call to people that have spent last year or more raiding on terrible private servers like feenix who think raiding in vanilla always required this little effort to complete. I am not the only one who hasn't forgotten.

How many people were surprised when grizzly cleared MC so quickly? Many accused them of cheating because on a fresh vanilla server on retail that should not be possible, especially not pre-nerf. With some key scripting absent like meleeing Onyxia in the air, I would not be surprised if there are many other things that have not been properly scripted or reverted to old values. Like we're playing a mix of balance between 1.12, 1.0, mangos bugs and general scripting errors.

If how it is now is really correct, then the balance seriously needs to be looked at, we are after all raiding with 1.12 class mechanics, this isn't a 1.0 client. Multipliers to compensate for 1.12 client and 10 years of xp are necessary for content to be paced as it was on retail and to preserve the life of the server.

[Azi]

If you want to experience blizzlike progression of vanilla content you shall work on erasing people memory not only of (vanilla) WoW itself but also whole gaming experience acquired in the past 10 years. Let me know once you achieve it. And if you think that boosting bosses' stats will change anything then you might end up being miserably disappointed at best.

[Strife]

But changing stats will make a difference, read my first post on this page.

How are you going to kill the boss if your healers ran out of mana, or too many of the melee died from fire because it insta-gibbed them, or if your tank got 2 shot because the boss got lucky and crushed twice in a row and he didn't dodge or parry.

You don't need a memory eraser or a time machine to do any of that.

If you don't want longer/harder fights because it'll just take too long and that will be too boring then idk wtf to say. There's already only 1 night a week's worth of content for a guild that's cleared everything right now, is 2 or even 3 raid nights too hardcore?

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Jumping to what someone said earlier about the lava packs in the second half of MC, I distinctly remember melee dying instantly if they did not wear fire resist gear (150 buffed). So why are they surviving those packs here with no FR, not even pala aura?

What about onyxia's breath in P1 & 3, I remember my tank wearing fire resist gear there because it did so much damage but here you can just wear your regular gear and the breath is healed through?

There's so many things wrong in mangos by default I can't even begin to explain, like baron mount being 1% drop rate instead of 0.1% like it was before it got changed in TBC/wrath(?), or the epic tailoring robes having like 3x the drop rate over retail. Compare drop rates listed on atlas loot to drop rates listed on a mangos vanilla DB for example.

Can the raid's at least be re-evaluated and looked at to verify how accurate the current version is compared to how it should be?

[Azi]

Feenix tried to increase content difficulty by boosting bosses' hp, yet everything has been cleared in a day (Naxx will be an exception for an obvious reason). Of course they could've went further and increase hp values to even bigger numbers but that seems to be a little artificial to me (to be considered in my eyes, though). However the only "hardcore" thing about increasing dmg would be introducing a RNG factor where tanks would've died to unlucky strikes, not lack of tryhard/skill/dedication/whatever. If you seek for challenging mechanics go play WoD or whatever expansion with toughest PvE.
Loot tables are completely different thing, I'm sure that devs would take a loot into them if only one bothered with providing a credible data, not some vague memories of one.

[Strife]

Feenix boosted boss hp because the classes are broken there:

http://realmplayers.com/RaidStats/Fight ... s&realm=ED

Almost 1k dps with BWL gear, yeah that's totally blizzlike. The bosses would be even easier if they didn't have more hp there. Also I think a lot of people know the quality/authenticity of feenix scripting *cough*. Using more health to compensate for lack of quality is one way to average out the difficulty, my suggestion was to add multiplier's on top of a properly scripted fight, for an increased challenge.

And about the tanks dying to unlucky strikes, that's kinda how vanilla was. You wiped on 4hm because taunt resisted or some shit, not because someone made a mistake. It was never about skill but having the dedication to do more tries on the boss than other guilds until the stars align, which is what separated hardcore guilds from regular ones. It would take a regular guild longer to reach the same amount of attempts as a hardcore one, therefore they'd take several weeks longer to kill the same boss (also more resets for loot to close the stat difference between max consumables every try compared to only some consumables).

Dunno what else I have to say to try and convince some people. This is exactly how the game was. None of this 3 attempts and new final boss is dead. What an anti-climax after that 1x leveling.

[Azi]

Whether you'll convince anyone here or not is completely redundant, it's not up to us how PvE will look like. I still claim that you picked wrong expansion - back then MC/BWL was easily clearable by a bunch of randoms who had barely any clue what they're doing.

[Leekie]

The difference between Blizzlike values and Blizzlike experience clearly grows apart with 10 years old memories about what the game was back then. Now, we have so much knowledge about the game and repeated the encounters so many times that the content feels easy.

I am more of a TBC player but I understand and mostly agree with your point because I have played on so many servers/beta that even if the scripts are really good, it feels easy and I do not find the feels I had on retail.
However, the hard truth is that you cannot tune a content just for 500/6k players because it will backfires on others. Most players are not into competition, wiping 2 weeks straight, etc but they are making the server alive with the economy, dungeons, questing, battlegrounds and if in the end they cant progress, from experience most of them will get frustrated, will not try hard and stop if the content is overpowered and too demanding.

Sadly or not, "casuals" make servers alive, you just cant forget them to please a minority.
Blizzard responded to this problem with multiple modes adapted to different kinds of players but this would require to modify the sacrosanct vanilla and that's not an option.

[Relearn]

Melee was able to attack onyxia when she was in the air btw, had to be right under her, but it happened all the time.

But I agree maybe a 20-30% buff to hp and damage would add some danger to the fight. But even if you do that we will still clear in 1-2 nights. If you think changing any of the hp / damage values would elongate the progression push by more than a night or two for bwl you are wrong. You would have to overtune the fights so much that tanks get randomly gibbed to make bwl last even a reset. Scriptcraft had a blanket 30% hp / damage buff on all raid bosses and we still cleared that in a week for bwl, and two weeks for AQ because some of the fights had bugs in the scripts that required unique and creative strats to overcome.