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Lies, damned lies... (retrospective)
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Post by
gamerunknown
Well, now that Kin Raiders have killed the final boss of this expansion, I figured I may as well go dig up some interesting stuff about this raiding tier and previous ones (my stats may be a bit off, I hate calculating days between kills, if anyone wants to correct them feel free). To be honest, I thought Madness heroic may have been the fastest end boss to be killed of any tier (from first pull to kill that is). I found out I was mistaken though...
If we count the absolutely last raid released, then Ruby Sanctum's Halion Heroic was the fastest, being killed less than 24 hours from first pull. If we count the boss included in the opening cinematic, Illidan was killed 1 day after Illidari council. Black Temple as a whole took 11 days to complete compared to Dragon Soul heroic's 13 days. Mount Hyjal was actually cleared later, with Archimonde taking 10 days longer to kill after the previous boss. The longest time between pull and clear (as counted by killing the previous boss) in this expansion was
heroic Al'Akir
which lasted a comparable amount of time to
Alone in the Darkness
(may not be directly comparable, since Paragon were competing with guilds on several different bosses, while Alone in the Darkness was Star's sole focus).
I found two uncited sources on mmo-champion about how HLK took Paragon 125 attempts while Madness took Kin Raiders 100 attempts.
M'uru took 5 days after their gate went down, as did Kil'Jaeden. Kael'Thas took over a month, A'lar longer than that. (TK released along with SSC though and Vashj took 17 days herself).
Kel'Thuzad took 5 days after Sapphiron to kill, which in turn took 8 days after Four Horsemen.
C'Thun took absolutely ages, but was killed 1 day post patch. Ouru wasn't actually killed until after C'Thun.
The runner up in terms of attempts was Four Horsemen, taking 56 days from availability. The winner was Ragnaros (v1) at 75 days, with Molten Core also being the longest raid from first boss down to last.
Vanilla and BC featured 84 unique raid bosses (excluding the outdoor ones), WotLK and Cata 65 (including revamped Ony, Nef and Rag, VoA and BH).
This
resource
came particularly in handy for sorting kills. There's a picture somewhere of a druid replacing a blue in a Naxx world first.
Post by
xlanadenx
This might be better off in WoW General. You'd get better responses as I'm certain most of OT regulars don't play the game anymore.
Post by
gamerunknown
Oh, I barely play myself (haven't logged in for more than a week), but this stuff fascinates the hell out of me for some inexplicable reason.
If this is the wrong forum for it, I'd be happy for a mod to move it though.
Post by
yukonjack
While I find the info you provided interesting I dont see where the discussion is, or how your post relates to the title.
Post by
gamerunknown
I was going to draw a conclusion at the end but decided against it: people's perceptions are warped by time. Most of the comments on the mmo-champ thread I saw cited Illidan, Kil'Jaeden and M'uru as among the most epic and tough bosses of all time (with Dragon Soul and this expansion being a let down)...
Their perception was a little warped by the fact that Sunwell's progress was stalled by gating. I'm not denying that M'uru and Kil'Jaeden were incredibly tough bosses - I'd never be able to down them given any raid slot with full BiS gear at level 70, even post nerf. However, if our only filter for how difficult a boss was is the time taken to down it from first pull to last pull of the best guild in the game, M'uru was significantly easier than even A'lar.
Even Lich King (I never managed to down him even on normal mode with 30%) can't be directly compared due to the limited number of attempts on him. The amount of wipes endured may turn out to be similar between Madness of Deathwing and Heroic Lich King.
Edit: Oh, the title refers to
this phrase
. Since I'm the one selecting how to present the data, I can alter it to support my biases. That said, I don't
really
think statistics are inherently flawed or I wouldn't have bothered making the post.
Post by
285998
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
161859
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
gamerunknown
I can't give you a good response to that since I've never seriously raided.
I can
link you to a post
from a Paragon raider though.
My own layman's take on videos comparing the first kills of Ragnaros
V1
and
V2
is that the raiders in V2 are doing more actions per minute and there's slightly less room for individual error. Maybe I'm just impressed by the slick editing though :p. Perhaps it's a case of a few ambivalent people not willing to take on WoW in case the difficulty wasn't high enough, then taking note of how long it took to down the raid's boss and skilled players jumping in? Even in this
playlist
of the server first kills from one of the few guilds to clear Naxx before the release of BC that I found earlier today (guys that I cede have more skill, dedication and experience than I ever will have for pretty much anything), there are players that die early on in Sapphiron and Thaddius, something that one doesn't regularly see in world first kills.
So that said, I think Blizzard are doing a good job at providing progressively more difficult or at least more involved content while simultaneously not penalising players that joined late in the expansion*. There were no gates or limited attempts this expansion, exactly what players were asking for. There are legitimate things to take them to task for though, probably as a result of Activision's influence. One would be recycling boss models, another would be the incremental increase of paid for products that probably shouldn't have such a high price tag. We really don't want end level to be a cash shop grind.
* One of the reasons I didn't raid in BC was because few people wanted to recruit someone with no previous raiding experience, a problem compounded due to attunement - the removal of attunement probably benefited hardcore guilds and casuals alike, since casuals could hop into content already in progress, while hardcore guilds could do alt runs without a lengthy quest chain or completing every previous raid tier.
Edit: In reply to Majin, not sure YJ... There was an uncited post saying Spine took 300 though (at 10 minutes an attempt, that's 7 hours a day for the week it took them). Attempts + length is a much better rubric than first pull to last kill, but we likely wont get accurate data on that so I use first pull (as determined by last boss to die) as a proxy.
Double edit: It's also good that they're creating content that takes dozens if not hundreds of attempts for teams of very skilled players to kill without relying on encounter length like with Absolute Virtue (I've never played FFXI, but I think an encounter can be tuned to perfection and still be defeatable with regular abilities within twenty minutes).
Post by
OverZealous
I think people simply prepare more these days than in Burning Crusade. And also, since the raid lockout system has been slightly altered, people are (at least I believe so - please do correct me if I am wrong) getting more gear these days than they used to, and with the JP/VP-system, it becomes more accessible. Add to that the fact that every content patch now comes with a Legendary (being a significant boost to raid performance - I remember Val'anyr being very useful even into H-ICC), I believe that the gear/raid-system is too different now from how it was back in Vanilla and BC to be comparable.
That, or Blizzard is undertuning encounters; but I don't really believe they are, I recall Paragon calling Heroic LK the hardest encounter in the history of WoW. I doubt that there is a definite answer; but I will agree that it is an interesting thing to discuss.
Post by
gamerunknown
Oh yeah, the existence of legendaries is another factor I didn't account for. I'm not certain that they're occurring literally every raid tier, but Blizzard is releasing fewer raid tiers per expansion so having a similar number of legendaries will feel more significant (Two legendaries across four tiers in WotLK, two across three in Cata).
There were no legendary weapons for the first kill of Rag, which may have had an impact on raid dps and by the time warriors had gotten to Four Horsemen, Sulfuras was probably less of a contribution to dps than those ArP gloves.
That said, Illidan was the fastest boss to be killed yet there were no legendaries from the previous tier.
JP and VP gear contribute to the number of players that get to enter content, but I don't think it has a significant effect on hard mode clears (unless one exploits while trying to get the hunter 2pc lol). Average ilvl going into a tier of content among the world top guilds is going to be BiS from the previous tier unless there's a gearwall boss (apparently Four Horsemen required several warriors in 4/8 T3) which doesn't really occur as often this side of BC. Blood Legion and Kin both had average ilvls of 391 while working on Spine for instance.
I couldn't possibly say Blizz was undertuning content I'll never see. My primary argument was that a fight many people find perfectly tuned (Illidan) occurred in a raid that was cleared faster than the current tier and the end boss was killed quicker after first pull than the current tier (and with Dragon Soul players had the benefit of the instance diary along with beta testing to theorycraft). In both instances we're talking about supremely skilled and dedicated raiders so the initial reaction (cleared in 3 days, must be undertuned) is not justified. I bet more players will see the end boss of this tier in the LFR incarnation, which really shouldn't bother people. When was the last time one avoided getting a game because it had a difficulty level other than legendary/hardcore?
Post by
gamerunknown
Well, I found two cites for the attempts claim.
Paragon used 170 attempts on Heroic Lich King
.
Kin Raiders used 300 attempts on Spine and 108 on Madness.
Edit: At 10 minutes an attempt, Kin spent 50 hours over a week (longer than M'uru and Kil'Jaeden) to kill Spine.
Post by
OverZealous
Well, I found two cites for the attempts claim.
Paragon used 170 attempts on Heroic Lich King
.
Kin Raiders used 300 attempts on Spine and 108 on Madness.
Edit: At 10 minutes an attempt, Kin spent 50 hours over a week (longer than M'uru and Kil'Jaeden) to kill Spine.
And yet people will still claim that Pre-nerf M'uru was much harder. Intriguing.
Post by
Adamsm
Heh, that's because It was; Mu'ru/Entrorpius was supposedly the hardest fight in the BC era....till it got the nerf; now for Transmog runs you can just burn it down and not worry about the old mechanics.
Post by
Ashelia
Thanks for all this info. I always thought that 4 horsemen was the hardest encounter in WoW. I still think so, as Molten Core was the first "raid" and thus the whole system was fresh and new, and you didn't really have the hard core raiding guilds you did when naxx came out.
MC really should be considered an outlier. Yes rag took a long time, but how much of that time was people learning to "raid", rather than people learning that encounter?
4H was not hard, it was just that you needed 8 tanks, which was unbelievably poor encounter design. It was hard because of that, I suppose, but the actual principle wasn't *that* bad. There were also A LOT of hardcore raiding guilds back then, some as hardcore as Paragon and so on are now. The problem was they had to recruit tanks and get them all tier 3 for the bonus, which put artificial limits on progression. You gotta remember you couldn't have paladin/druid/etc tanks back then either, so it was basically let's find a mass amount of warriors with tier 3.
I would say honestly, one of the hardest encounters in terms of tuning, would probably be C'Thun. He was broken and bugged for months and Blizzard did nothing so we just flung ourselves at him.(##RESPBREAK##)2##DELIM##Ashelia##DELIM##
Post by
gamerunknown
Well, I was wary of including C'Thun (not having done him, I wasn't aware of whether he was technically completable in Naxx gear or if the bug really did make it impossible) but he'd win at 86 days of attempts without a kill. His kill was doubly frustrating to US raiders because when the fix went through, EU servers had a cleared raid up to him as far as I'm aware.
Funnily enough he was killed a year after Ragnaros was.
Post by
Ashelia
Well, I was wary of including C'Thun (not having done him, I wasn't aware of whether he was technically completable in Naxx gear or if the bug really did make it impossible) but he'd win at 86 days of attempts without a kill. His kill was doubly frustrating to US raiders because when the fix went through, EU servers had a cleared raid up to him as far as I'm aware.
Funnily enough he was killed a year after Ragnaros was.
He was impossible. And yeah, I think we ended up with world third or something because Nihilium (Ensidia) got it first thanks to EU getting the hotfix quicker then Vodka had it cleared quicker IIRC. Been a loooong time though, I could be wrong.
Post by
gamerunknown
I suppose I never figured out why only Blizzard figured out it was possible and other raiders kept throwing themselves at the encounter :(
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