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Sepulcher of the First Ones Recap by BDGG - Best and Worst Bosses, Loot and Difficulty
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Geposted
16.05.2022 um 04:52
von
blooblahguy
BDGG has given their thoughts on the Sepulcher of the First Ones raid in Patch 9.2, going over their favorite and least favorite bosses, the loot systems and the difficulty of the raid!
Introduction
Sepulcher of the First Ones lands firmly in the most memorable tiers ever released, but is it there for all good reasons? It's certainly the flagship raid of Shadowlands and Blizzard has tried some major changes compared to other Shadowlands Raids.
I've sat down with some of the leadership and raiders at
BDGG
to get their opinions on how this raid worked out.
Bosses
What Was Your Favorite Boss?
Overwhelmingly it seems that the raiders agreed that
Halondrus
and
Rygelon
were the favorite coming out of the raid. Casters throughout the race predicted that while Halondrus progression was nothing short of haunting, it may come back as one of the favorites for the raiders like Painsmith Raznal did in Sanctum of Domination.
Minatozaki - Priest" type="box
Halondrus
. In my opinion, for rdps players, the ability to manage movement while losing as little damage as possible is one the most fun parts of the role, and one of the best ways of differentiating good from great players. Also, the approach we took to having the bomb pairs be in private disc call in addition to raid voice in teamspeak is very cool, and it was fun for me communicating with my bomb buddy.
Lozy - Monk" type="box
Rygelon
. This fight was just full throttle from beginning to end, as well as being gorgeous aesthetically.
Machii - Priest" type="box
Rygelon
- It was a super fast paced, straight-forward fight that required lots of healing and damage.
Dorovon - Mage
Rygelon
was my favorite encounter. I personally always enjoy "Patchwerk" bosses, especially when they are placed late in the raid. I played Frost Mage for progression on this boss, which is a specialization that requires extremely high uptime to perform well. The mechanics of the boss require just enough movement that it was hard but still possible to maintain perfect uptime, which results in a lot of fun personal optimization when progressing on the boss. I also really liked the ending of the fight where there was no way to avoid the final Massive Bang.
What Boss Stuck Out?
And the winner is... Halondrus! By a mile. Well done to Blizzard for the design of this encounter. 3 different boss locations, bomb juggling, interesting mechanics with the mote knockbacks and slow fields. This boss really did stand out. Maybe was a little too difficult for it's place in the raid though.
Minatozaki - Priest
Crab is an all time great boss that was just a bit too hard for its place in the raid.
Lozy - Monk
Halondrus
for sure. Was very out of place difficulty-wise, but also pretty well designed and fun to prog.
Dorovon - Mage
While it wasn't my favorite or least favorite encounter,
Halondrus
definitely stuck out as something very different. The distances players had to traverse during the intermissions were very significant, especially when carrying bombs, and resulted in the encounter feeling very different.
Yipz - Warlock
Halondrus
definitely. After testing on PTR and seeing the fight change completely on live servers it was refreshing to see that the boss was not buggy and also had incredibly interesting mechanics. The boss was punishing but it was interesting and kept you engaged. Similar to unat. Fights like this are good but maybe not for a 6th boss of the raid.
Machii - Priest
Halondrus
. Although it may have taken slightly too hard to kill, the mechanics required to kill this boss made it very satisfying once it died. People enjoyed watching it, people for the most part enjoyed playing it, and the placement in the raid was perfect.
The raiders pointed out 2 encounters negatively, but the rest they enjoyed.
Lords of Dread
and
Pantheon
seem to have not worked out. Both seemed promising on heroic, but ultimately the Mythic Mechanics didn't add a meaningful change to the encounter and it ended up being more hectic or having simple changes trivialize the key mechanic.
Dorovon
offered some good insight into why Lords of Dread in particular didn't pan out, especially as a ranged player.
Dorovon - Mage
Lords of Dread ended up being my least favorite encounter because the the positional difficulty for ranged players paired with the tight tuning of the fight resulted in uninteresting strategies. Specifically, the tuning of the fight required that Slumber Clouds be positioned efficiently along the edges of the room, but Clouds of Carrion on ranged players can significantly constraint movement, especially when paired with Aura of Shadows. While figuring out how to efficiently place all of the Slumber Clouds with a lot of ranged players would have been fun to work out, the simpler strategy was unfortunately to just use a minimal number of ranged players.
Overall Design of the Raid and Bosses
I think we can all agree that Supulcher is one of the most visually striking raids that blizzard has ever released. Thematically it feels like the perfect extension of Zerith Mortis and will earn its spot among the coolest looking raids every released.
Machii - Priest
I liked having more challenging bosses earlier in the raid, towards the middle. I like how the first 4ish bosses were very easy. Every boss besides Pantheon was enjoyable and unique. This version of Artificer was great. The Jailer, while not being the best end of xpac boss, was really good.
Yipz- Warlock
Most of the time, raids will have at least one boss that I do not like doing every week during farm. This time, I don't think there are any bosses that I really dislike.
Loot Systems
So, what worked?
Lozy - Monk
Fight-wise, pretty much everything. Loot-wise, pretty much nothing.
High praise and harsh realities. You won't find many differing opinions on the Race to World First level. Loot merits its own article, but let's touch on it. No tier has ever had such an enormous weight on how effectively a guild can manage getting their gear. Tier in particular ended up being in a system that players could manipulate and put a massive gap between the top guilds and those trying to stake their name in this race.
Do You Think Loot Systems Need to be Changed?
Lozy - Monk
Yes, but also no. I think any loot system is going to get pushed to it's limit by the top-end guilds anyways. I would love it to be easier for us to acquire our tier, but I understand this was not made for us. The most glaring two issues are that the loot system:
1) Rendered a certain number of toons unplayable week 1. If you can't make a 4 set, you are a bench analyst. This is a TERRIBLE feeling, and happened with shards as well in Sanctum.
2) No one pulled a mythic boss on day 1 of mythic week. Maybe this is a hot take, but mythic week should be for mythic raid.
Dorovon / Mage
Generally, there will always be optimization and abuse of loot systems and I do not think there is any design short of not having loot be used at all that would prevent it. That said, some of the optimizations used in Sepulcher of the First Ones highlighted some issues that may need to be addressed, especially because they impact everyone who plays the game and not just the RWF guilds.
Sepulcher of the First ones and also Sanctum of Domination before it had a style of loot where tier sets and shards of domination were by far the most important loot and optimizing those specific drops had too much impact. I think the biggest issue for Sepulcher in particular was that two of the five tier pieces were from Lords of Dread and Rygelon, which meant that characters that could not get 4 pieces the first week of Mythic were not determined until that week.
Yipz - Warlock
Loot is always a problem for guilds in the top tier but I think for casuals especially with the catalyst the looting system was ok. The only gripe I have for players not in a top guild is the tuning of the mythic raid being around 4 piece and double legendary when it takes potentially multiple weeks to access these items.
Machii - Priest
Yes. Bring back master looter or make tier tradeable if you at least had the item level. Even during PTR when tier bosses dropped 4 pieces of tier plus the regular loot table would've been very nice.
Aestis / Rogue
100% - I think the current loot system is far too abusable and is very unhealthy for the RWF, but also I think it has flaws from a more casual point of view as well.
It's notable that the raiders try to be aware that the loot systems affect different parts of the raiding population differently. While this loot system was particularly unhealthy for the RWF, it's more complicated for everyone else. With the raid being tuned for gear that only the top guilds could optimally get, that does seem to be punishing specifically for lower guilds who can't manipulate 4 pieces on to their desired characters.
Most Difficult Tier Ever?
Loot plays another role here. Was it too difficult before 2 piece and double legendary? Too easy after? It's clear that the raid was tuned around the power spikes this gear had to offer, you have to imagine how this all would have played out if the top guilds didn't force 4 pieces in the first week.
Lozy - Monk
I feel like it's a lot more on par with what we expect out of a raid at this point. I think I like "fewer, harder" bosses rather than more filler. In Castle, the first 7 bosses got torn through in the matter of a day, that's kinda weird. Sanctum, same thing Guardian to Sylv. I think this tier had a few too many of these since most of us want this to be done in under 14 days, but that had to do more with length than difficulty. Anduin was maybe a little too easy (because bug), Halondrus a tad too hard, Rygelon and Jailer are probably spot on though. I would have like Lihuvim to be a harder tuned fight as well.
Machii - Priest
I really enjoyed the difficulty, however I think having 2-3 bosses that take 250+ pulls is a little much. I think for an 11 boss raid, 1 300 pull boss, 1 200 pull boss, 2-3 100 pull bosses, and the rest 50 pulls or less would be perfect.
Aestis - Rogue
I think the difficulty of the raid was about 2 or 3 notches too high. I think if any of the hard bosses (Halondrus, Anduin, Rygelon, or Jailer) were knocked down to a more medium difficulty boss the difficulty would've been on the edge of being too much, but the current state was just way too difficult.
What to Change
One popular piece of feedback was to have Creation Catalyst and double legendary available week one. This would have resulted in the raid being only slightly easier for the top guilds, but it would have increased consistency for every guild across the board. Most importantly it would have saved a ton of heartache and unfun activities. We get to hear from a lot of players who got to play the raid, but for many who weren't able to secure their 2pc week 1, they rode the bench most of the tier.
Dorovon
and
Lozy
offers another interesting take on splitting the raid into two parts instead of 1 huge raid:
Lozy - Monk
Split it into two raids. This tier ending at Anduin, even with the Halondrus fiasco, would be an excellent tier, if not remembered as the GOAT. Instead, it will be remembered as a marathon grindfest where everyone in the World top 100 lost their minds.
Dorovon - Mage
Personally, I would have liked to see the experiment of splitting the raid into two parts pushed a little further. If the last three bosses opened several months after the first eight, we would not have seen the same level of burnout. In the past, something like this happened with Crucible of Storms after Battle of Dazar'alor and while participation in that raid was relatively low, I think it could work out well at the end of an expansion like this.
Machii - Priest
Not making the raid take so long. This is a combined factor of requiring so many splits to get gear, and too many higher pull count bosses. I think had loot master been a thing, or tier tokens being tradable if you just had the ilvl in conjunction with making some of the bosses slightly easier, this tier would've arguably been one of the best tiers. With that being said, it was still overall a very good tier and probably the best of the expansion.
Aestis - Rogue
I think if Halondrus was brought down to a 100-200 pull boss and splits / gearing weren't what they were the raid would've been in a lot better position.
In Summary
Sepulcher of the First Ones will always stick out in my mind as one of the most unique tiers ever created. We've seen how views change and people start to love things that they once hated (see: Halondrus) or vice versa, so only time will tell how the world remembers Sepulcher, and Shadowlands, in the future.
Thanks again to some of the guys at BDGG who took some time to talk about this. We'll be back with some more insight into this raid's designs and systems that presented a unique challenge this RWF.
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