Board 8 > Oh hey Shadowlands launched.

(+) Yeah! (+)

So in conclusion, the typical launch tier consists of 17 bosses.

Over the past few expansions (Mists, Draenor, Legion), Blizzard had intentionally been giving the first half of the initial raid more and more time to breathe before opening the gates to the second half, which I actually somewhat agreed with.

But by the time BfA rolled around, the gap was too much. They finally flipped the switch and snipped off the second half of the first tier, moving it into its own 'tier'. Dazar'Alor clearly could have been that second half. Uldir was not a fun launch, and frankly I lost interest and unsubbed before the next raid came out

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i got spanked in torghast today. made it through level 7 and got kicked out of 8

sounds like they've nerfed pretty much everybody in there, including the fun talents. feels like they don't understand the appeal of roguelikes...

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banananor posted...

sounds like they've nerfed pretty much everybody in there, including the fun talents. feels like they don't understand the appeal of roguelikes...

Yeah, not sure why they decided they wanted to make it challenging instead of fun.

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banananor posted...

Dazar'Alor clearly could have been that second half.

Dazar'alor was the best part of BFA though. Definitely was a full raid.

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banananor posted...

Highmaul combined with Blackrock Foundry was the first raid tier of WoD. That's 17. The main reason WoD was so panned was because there were only 2 raid tiers.

Foundry took 2 months to launch. It was definitely not a single tier because Foundry made Highmaul completely worthlesss.

banananor posted...

Emerald Nightmare combined with Nighthold was the first raid tier of Legion, that's 17.

Emerald Nightmare lasted 4 months.

Also again, Nigthold was even more of a separate tier than Foundry.

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Also I did infact forget all 3 Pandaria raids launched together. Mainly because not all 3 were really of equal quality.

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WoD wasn't panned because of the number of raid tiers.

It was panned because they cancelled the end of the expansion and there was no content except for daily quests for 18 months.

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Why did they cancel the end of WoD anyway?

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My hunch about the Torghast nerfs, is that they really want people to group up for it.

They want to allow solo, but they don't want it to be the optimal solution.

So, I imagine healers (and tanks?) were targetted for nerfs especially, because people probably were having a hard time starting groups, because they couldn't get any healers to come along! (Why would the healer want to come when they can solo!)

So blizz was like, ok, people shouldn't have a hard time starting groups!! We should nerf tank/heals solo so that those people are encouraged to join.

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Why would Blizz want people to group up? I can think of two pretty decent reasons:

1. It's too hard to balance it fairly for soloing, for all classes specs. Groups solve the balancing problem. Just like how there's no 1v1 arenas.
2. It's an MMO.

But I generally agree with the sentiment that Torghast should be fun and fast--don't nerf fun builds, just make sure they can't be repeated every run.

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It was already faster to group up as a healer. Scaling made grouping effective.

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GildedFool posted...

WoD wasn't panned because of the number of raid tiers.

It was panned because they cancelled the end of the expansion and there was no content except for daily quests for 18 months.

you guys are taking me so literally :(. it was panned because of a lack of content/patches, including raids. there was supposed to be a middle tier in shattrath that they ditched

even at the time blizzard called brf part of the launch raid set. this was before people noticed how short & easy highmaul was and/or that highmaul didn't have a raid set.

https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/2vw2b9/hm_brf_thats_all/
https://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/1730749-Raid-tiers-in-WoD

blizzard has been slowly decreasing/weaning our expectations over time.

i think wow is healthiest when there are at least two current raids available. one that is easier, introductory, and outgearable with currently available gear, and another that is meatier, more challenging, more complex, and cannot be outgeared with currently available gear.

this is one reason why many 'mid-expansion' raids are so often lauded. They get to be more complex, and the casuals can still enjoy rolling through the raid's content. Ulduar had naxx, icecrown had ToC, firelands had bwd/bot, throne of thunder had msv, BRF had highmaul, nighthold had EN, battle for dazal'alor (apparently), etc etc

When the relationship is reversed- the current 'top' raid is less complex than the tier below it- no one runs the previous raid and things start going sour. The ToC -> Ulduar patch is quite possibly the clearest example of this.

Basically, that's why I think it's important that expansions feature more than 7-10 bosses within a couple months of launch

redrocket posted...

Why did they cancel the end of WoD anyway?

according to the general fan understanding, blizzard rearranged some expansions and rushed out WoD to try to synergize with the warcraft film's release. when the film itself was delayed (replaced the director, who then threw out the script, among other things) the devs kind of gave up on the expansion and just started working on pumping out legion as soon as possible.

i'm not sure what the real reason was, but i remember the moment that the fans realized what was going on- it was "the twitter patch"- if they had called given "Patch 6.1" a different number, like "Patch 6.0.4", they could have kept the ruse going. But having the biggest feature of the first 'major content patch' being the ability to directly post your screenshots on twitter inflamed the playerbase.

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I mean, yeah, they definitely like to trickle content to us. I don't think that's a secret, is it? Every aspect of the game is trickled. All the currencies have weekly "caps", renown has a weekly cap, they hold back features and trickle them in every week, they hold back quests and introduce them during a set week, they hold back difficulty levels and trickle them in (raids, mythic+, torghast), etc.

So yeah, I don't doubt for a second that they're putting less raid content into the expansion launch and holding it back for months. Totally believable.

Sure, they're probably doing it so people can't obey their temptation to devour the content instantly and get bored and unsub.

But, personally I appreciate it. As an extreme casual, I feel like I'm not as far behind as I would otherwise be.

And, I used to be hardcore in the Vanilla days (we raided 7 days a week, 6 hours a night, no skipping allowed), and I was extremely depressed that I had zero time in my life to play other games--I would have loved more built-in reasons to force us to slow down, and enjoy other parts of my life mixed in with the wow.

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Epyo posted...

And, I used to be hardcore in the Vanilla days (we raided 7 days a week, 6 hours a night, no skipping allowed)

lolwut

thats pretty damn ridiculous even by hardcore standards

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Back in the day, people were figuring out what was reasonable, i guess

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Honestly really enjoying this raid. First boss is the first boss and the patchwerk boss is patchwerk, but all the other fights are interesting.

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I really like Torghast, but I do have a few issues with it.

-It SHOULD be soloable and group friendly as well. Why force people to group? You already have content for groups of 5; they're called dungeons and have existed forever.

-It really, really, REALLY needs cosmetic rewards akin to Island Expeditions. To make it more fun and replayable, I really want to get random drops like pets, mounts or cosmetic gear.
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Yeah, I don't like feeling obligated to squeeze in two tower runs just so i'm not falling totally behind on my soul ash

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Soul Ash is honestly not that important unless you're really doing competitive content or have like 10 legendaries to get. I already have a max legendary this week and we're still like 25% into the cycle.

and I dont even need that if I am being honest, I am just try hard.

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I don't have quite enough for a T4 legendary yet because I had difficulty getting any tower runs together the first two weeks, so i'm stuck waiting until next week.

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Yeah but what type of content are you running that needs a 235 piece? You should never feel pressured tbh

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I like to be able to try to join M+ lobbies and have it not take 30 minutes because I'm constantly getting declined. A high ilvl is good for that.

It would also be easier if I haven't gone 0/6 on drops in my last 6 M+ runs. I still have several 171 pieces screwing up my average.

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The PvP vendor can get you 184 pieces in every slot, and the ranked PvP vendor can give you 200 ilvl pieces with a rating of 0.

And Torghast cosmetic stuff is coming in either 2 or 3 weeks time. After the Bolvar chain/your covenant story ends.

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I solo'd my wing 8 torghasts this week. With the nerfs it was a cakewalk.

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Forceful_Dragon posted...

I like to be able to try to join M+ lobbies and have it not take 30 minutes because I'm constantly getting declined. A high ilvl is good for that.

It would also be easier if I haven't gone 0/6 on drops in my last 6 M+ runs. I still have several 171 pieces screwing up my average.

I am a 208 enhancement shaman and get declined for 30 minutes for 10s lol.

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The declines are because raider.io is toxic.

People running say a 10 key want people with 800+ raider.io. But to get 800 io, you need an average of a successful 10 key in every mythic dungeon. And to get a successful 10 key in every dungeon, you need to run keys of 10 or higher. But to run a key of 10 or higher you need 800+ io.

So its a casual player trap where you will never have the io to get an invite to do the type of keys you want.

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red13n posted...

The declines are because raider.io is toxic.

People running say a 10 key want people with 800+ raider.io. But to get 800 io, you need an average of a successful 10 key in every mythic dungeon. And to get a successful 10 key in every dungeon, you need to run keys of 10 or higher. But to run a key of 10 or higher you need 800+ io.

So its a casual player trap where you will never have the io to get an invite to do the type of keys you want.

Yeah people are paranoid. Like I did a 10 this week with spiteful and before I ran a key everyone was whining about how it was so unfair to melee. But like... it was super easy and we two chested it with me as the top dps over a boomkin lol.

Like I can see if you're really pushing the upper limit of keys but 10s-12s are not that.

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Yeah, they fixed torghast

Also the difference between t1 and t4 is no m totally not worth it, depending on how gold savvy you are. The legendary effect is just as good on a 190 piece

And the ilvl upgrades on m+ are so small that it seems barely worth it

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The stat differences from a t1 legendary to a t4 legendary are huge.

Remember that 3 ilvl now is basically equivalent to 5 ilvl in previous expacs.

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Yeah, that's true. I must've been reading a comparison on t3 to t4

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really cool event this week in torghast, everyone can choose pets from a couple different archetypes and keep buffing them up with anima powers

did a group of 3 and it made party play a lot easier due to having 6 bodies with scaling for 3, and me playing resto druid

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I've been soloing my way through Twisting Corridors! Finished layer 4 last night. Not sure if I'll be able to solo all the way through, I hope so though.

I cannot solo regular Torghast wings past layer 5...but in TC, I have way more time to get my build set up... so I might be able to do it.

I loved Torghast at first, but aspects are definitely annoying me, especially in Twisting Corridors:

• Obviously, each layer is waaaay too long (2.5 hrs each time for me).
• There really aren't that many different powers. It feels like there are about 50. Yet, when I finish a TC run, I have about 100. So I'm making pretty much the same build every time, with slightly different stack counts, and maybe 1 different Epic power than last time, and 2 the same.
• By the time I finish a TC run, the anima powers go off the screen, and I can't scroll to see them all.
• The Mort'regar theme only has like...5 different floors, it feels like? The better themes are the ones where they just have simple hallways and randomly connect them, feels more interesting to explore.
• It seems the only correct strategy in TC is to find unbeatable high-damage combos, so you can kill the last boss in <20 seconds. But often, you have to just guess whether a combo will actually work or not--you have to guess the order of operations behind the math. Pretty annoying when the math doesn't work how you thought.
• At least for my class, I only really can see 1 really good damage combo, so I kinda just go for that every time. Doesn't feel like a roguelike, more like a puzzle that I've solved already.

That being said, I'm still generally enjoying it. It's not a fascinating roguelike, but it's an interesting slightly randomized puzzly-combat-challenge in the context of an MMO, and that's pretty cool.

(Because I'm hilarious, I crafted the Torghast legendary +25% phantasma and have been using it for TC. It's pretty fun. Not amazingly useful, but it's ok.)

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just tried TC a bit ago and got to final floor and just kept getting oneshot

got really unlucky with defensive powers, the max hp ones never popped up

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Yeah, there's nothing shittier than spending 3 hours in Torghast, only to lose to an unbeatable final boss.

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Oh yeah. Last week my TC layer two or whatever was taking way longer than i expected, and i had to rush to finish before raid time

That meant i took beelines to exits and missed out on a ton of powers. The final boss wrecked me and i had to give up...

'Oops!'

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On my DH, I've been reliably getting to 100% dodge chance and using that plus whatever random damage powers I can find to beat Torghast.

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Feral druid here, I can solo the 8th layer of regular Torghast wings okay (as long as I get a few decent powers near the beginning - aka buff my Convoke so I can burn bosses down). Absolutely refusing to do TC though, seems way too long. I just did the first six floors 3x to finish that one Bolvar quest.

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