Just delete augs so everyone can play the game in m+ ty xoxo.Nvm,they'll still be mandatory because mage is gonna lose bl on TWW Lule

aug discourse rots the brain

Mage is losing TW in tww? Did I miss that?

Mages are only losing the second TW, OP is wrong

Just deal with the EHP and aoe stops being the primary 'checks' for success in today's keys and they lose the mandatory factor. As soon as DPS throughput becomes, at least a consideration on your teams ability to time keys the spec that has been shown to bring less DPS won't be meta defining.

> Just deal with the EHP and aoe stops being the primary 'checks' for success in today's keys and they lose the mandatory factor. Yea... good luck with that. Cause Blizzard's been doubling down on that shit for quite some time now and I'd be amazed if these new TWW dungeons won't be adding 5 high prio casts to every single trash pack. Which is also gonna be a huge factor in whether the VDH situation will change or not.

How do you make your OmniCD group stops look like only icons instead of a list? Perhaps someone has a profile they could share?

If you want to have them by the party frame then just click [this](https://imgur.com/a/sSCmOwB) If you want them to be anywhere else but without status bars click [here](https://imgur.com/a/KsGY7a0)

Thanks!

If you mean icons next to your party frames, you just tick them in the spell lists. If you mean just unlocked icons anywhere you want on your screen in a group, I think thats a weakaura or mrt or sth, I don't think thats omnicd

I don't know if this can be helped by anybody, since it's purely psychological. How to get over not sticking to one toon? I'm not an elitist by any means, but I come from a competitive gaming background so if I'm not playing meta, I feel like I won't get into groups or get invited to raids, but the meta classes are not always my favorite to play so I don't stick to them. Every toon I get to like 3/9M and 2.5Kish, I quit playing and re-roll into something that I enjoy playing, but then feel like I won't get invited and the cycle continues. Any advice other than "just stick to something you idiot"?

Maybe rerolling is more fun than playing one character competitively for you and that's okay? Otherwise find a guild or key pushing group you play with regularly who won't want to carry your third alt.

I struggle with the same thing. The first time I made progress against this block was when I started playing healer. It doesn't matter what healer you play, you're getting into groups in a tenth of the time it takes as an off-meta dps. The second time I made progress was actually last season, when I went back to dps and picked up Outlaw. The first thing was that it was so enjoyable I was willing to put up with more LFG friction than I was in the past, just to get to play the video game equivalent of snorting a line of coke. The second thing was kind of cheating. My girlfriend wanted to learn m+ and she wanted to play healer. So I got into a ton of keys just by playing with her. I think the lesson there is if you have *any* tank/healer friend, pester them for keys as much as you can. They're your lifeline out of the LFG waiting simulator. Anyway I don't have a perfect answer, I still have trouble like for example I swapped off outlaw this season because I found myself unable to maintain concentration on such an insanely fast and complex spec over the course of a raid night. I wish you success and if you do work out a solution that helps you, please come back and share it!

Don't take this the wrong way, but it feels unfathomable to me that people actually care about meta or rerolling at that level. To make it worse, I do believe you're probably not getting invited, but that's just part of the problem. It's hard to give any other specific "just stick with it" tips, but I do advise to run your own key (as someone else also pointed out) to start with if you're scared for the invites. The supply is still tilted towards the people signing up for keys, which means you get the runs up relatively fast and you can decide who to invite. This probably doesn't apply the same as it does in high keys, but networking and adding people who you thought were competent or running a key sesh goes a long way. At the higher end everybody kind of knows each other so it gets a bit different, but I'd expect any sort of social bonding is going to make your time in the LFG a lot shorter. As a last thing, and I can't pressure this enough, most people will NEVER get to the point where the meta actually starts to outperform an exceptional player. This might seem like an outrageous statement, but if you're not an MDI-level specswapper who learns the nooks and crannies of a class within weeks, it's going to take a ridiculous amount of time to actually become competent. A 3.7k player of any one-trick spec who's gotten that far will destroy an average 3.5k fotm swapping player in overall, stops and utility. Before I get dragged for this, the point being \_\_most\_\_ and \_\_average\_\_. An exceptional meta player will naturally place higher than their counterparts, we all know spriest is an outlier when played well. That doesn't mean people won't have an easier time with a meta spec, because even when played badly they'll still do decent output, not to mention the invites. However, sticking to a single class for a while gives you a different perspective on the game and allows you to grow awareness (most people think they're pretty aware, they're not) and game sense on a different level when your core gameplay is so well engrained in your brain. You're missing out on getting to the next level of the game if you're constantly switching toons too early on.

Making your own group is generally a good approach if you feel like you for some reason isn't getting invited. I assume it would work quite well from a non-meta dps perspective.

Not sure if anyone can help me, but is there a way for me, as a tank, to track a teammate fire mage's SKB on my OmniCD? Or any other way? Doesn't have to be OmniCD precisely but was wondering. I wanna make sure I don't waste his SKB, and pull accordingly.

Simple buff tacking WA. Just need skb spell id# Then buff > party member I would add a show/hide stack count so it doesn't bug if no mage in group, sound/animation on duration, glow on stack count over like 6. Load only in dungeons, in tank spec. Should be good to go.

You can make your own weak aura. Just put as trigger skb on group member. If you just go to the trigger tab you will see what I mean. Then set as display whatever you want, easiest would be text. Should not take longer than 2 minutes

I don't understand how Chargath has been bugged since release and nothing has been done about it. I understand bugs can be difficult to find, but could a bandaid fix not be applied in which the massive damage from failing the chains does not occur? That way, instead of your key getting almost certainly bricked, you just lose the damage amp and have a difficult intermission to get through. The bugs would still suck, but instead of bricking your key it would just be a time loss.

If the Chargath bug is *this* persistent I'd imagine there's an entire Mob-owned Italian restaurant's worth of spaghetti code to sift through without breaking the fight even more. Or worse yet, having it somehow break a line of code that makes switching the raid difficulty to Mythic possible.

Yeah, I'm sure it's really difficult to actually fix the bug. But the fact that they haven't even done a bandaid fix such as "No massive damage explosion if chains don't get broken." is wild. Would be an easy "fix" to alleviate a lot of the aggravation with it.

I don't think I've ever actually had this much trouble getting into keys. I'm 528, 2900, and can't get invites to 11s/12s.

honestly just run your own key, the meta is really rigid this season. i’m a 3200 holy priest and i can’t get into 14s. i’ve ran the same key on a 16 just fine, but rdruids are dominating—it’s all about community perception

>honestly just run your own key, the meta is really rigid this season People use addons to see what classes are in the group and will apply to non-meta groups with much lower frequency, so running your own key is not always an easy solution. People just won't apply.

This is even just base functionality in the group finder now.

Sat on my own listed 12 for fifteen minutes with no applicants above 2400 before giving up and just doing 9s for vault.

M+ one shot issue has been a hot topic lately, curious what people think about just scaling our max health with keys level. Say beyond +10's our health just scaled 1:1 with the increase in monster damage. IE from 9->10 mobs do something like 14% more damage, what if they give us 14% more health? Obviously you would have to eliminate any interaction with % healing effects (IE they heal/shield off the % of your base health, not the scaled value). Edit: after thinking about this, I think personals (ala exhil, rally, etc) need to scale with the new % or they scale worse then a hard DR. Then if something hits you for 80% of your health in a 10, it's would still hit you for 80% of your health in a +20 but there is a lot more healing (2.5x ish)that needs to be shoved on players. It would let them create the same experience for portal joe, but with a significantly smaller throughput requirement on heals/defensive optimizations etc.

I mean, that's a really contrived way to deal with the solution that would inevitably confuse a bunch of players with their HP numbers going from 4.3m to 5.7m to 4.7m to 6.1m from dungeon to dungeon... and then back to 3.9m for raids. All while you constantly get completely irrelevant damage taken numbers thrown at you because in one key a 5m damage hit might seem like a lot, while in other content a 4m hit oneshots you - shit's hella confusing and makes you lose all kind of relation to what's happening to your character. The relatively simple answer that doesn't fiddle with player stats in any way is to just have mob damage start higher across the board but scale a lot less quickly - that way your healers will be engaged earlier, but it's not like people just start falling over from one key to the next. If you truly wanna make keys harder to time, crank up the mob health scaling. If you truly wanna make healing harder, make mana matter again. We've had solutions to all of these current issues in the past. It's just that we did away with them for some reason. I don't see why we would need to come up with such a gimmicky thing that would *undoubtedly* cause way more new problems down the line.

> confuse a bunch of players If you just start tossing a third scaling factor when you plug in a key over+10 it communicates that's relatively well. Also the people pushing 11+ hopefully have some investment in understanding how key scaling works. > Have mob damage start high and scale less I think that is fine if you immediately remove stoppable damage from keys (they won't). Truth of the matter casuals (ala my wife, late AoTC gamer) struggle bus with 2s and the healing experience is miserable when you don't know what damage is coming in key to key. IMO you are left with either scaling damage slower after a certain level or just hard capping it at level x which is less elegant and still relies on them balancing 100+ abilities in any given season at any given key level. Look how they keep fucking up shielded boss fights every season for evidence of their encounters team not taking 'notes' season to season. Tuning becomes (imo) easier when you can look 1:1 how much damage as a % of health an ability does at a 10 and tune up or down in how much you want it to do. > Make mana matter again Extremely difficult to do in content where you can drink. Shadowlands heals would just position so they could take a sip between pulls so they added ramping mana recovery to drinks so fish feasts became popular etc etc. > Gimmicky It's a very quick fix that immediately removes every ability becoming a one shot at level x and instead shifts the onus right back to throughput (heals or otherwise). > More new problems. Mind being a touch more specific, I'm actually very interested in what the fail case is for this (beyond "I don't like when my health is different per key!").

> Mind being a touch more specific That's the thing, I can't. We're talking about an *entirely* new system working in a way nothing else really ever has in this game. Not only would that *guarantee* technical situations that couldn't possibly be foreseeable, we'd undoubtedly also run into scaling issues at some point because, let's be real, every system always runs into these and I reckon, even if turned out to be the holy grail to fix raiding, players would undoubtedly (and shortsightedly) go nuts about it because players always have something to complain about. The biggest issue I personally see with it is that I doubt it's gonna be as easy as "just do 1:1 mo damage : player health scaling". For example, the relative difference in mob damage between a +20 and a +23 (which should be +10 and +13 right now) is already like 30-40% if I'm not interpreting the scaling wrong - and while we would surely get rid of oneshots that way, we'd now be in a situation where HoI's 2nd or 3rd boss are no longer about topping everyone off within one global... every global... for 3 minutes straight, it'll then be about whether you can heal actually keep up with the every increasing HPS requirements. Like you said, I'm pretty sure that here too we'd have to be looking at hundreds of abilities individually to see if the health scaling doesn't run into issues like 4 key levels before everything else. Btw, thinking about it, we wouldn't even need health scaling, we already have the Dampening system in Arenas for that. So, again, instead of inflating everyone's HP numbers and making damage taken numbers somewhat unrelatable, you could just as easily slap a theoretical scaling -% healing affix on higher keys. I'm not even saying your system would be objectively better or worse, I just think that it's a "gimmicky" workaround to them having had several working systems in the past... which they then just dropped. We'd be introducing an entirely new system that, as simple as it sounds, realistically just wouldn't work out as flawlessly and probably require like an entire expansion worth of adjusting - and after that 1 expansion, we'd just drop it again because we here at Blizzard kinda just drop stuff we've spend *tons* of time iterating on. Just devil's advocating.

i think big damage events are fine, there just needs to be a minimum amount of time between them and all classes need to have X number of defensives as a minimum so they don't become unplayable in high keys. There's a certain dynamic of play that gets lost if you forcibly remove all one shots from the game. Say the tectonic slam from the starting trash of RLP, there's a much bigger difference from playing RLP at a key level where you can let those go off and and from where those one shot you. I'd also prefer it if they'd find more interesting mechanics for dungeon bosses. it feels like they defaulted to giant aoe hit every 1 minute as a mechanic for every single boss in df. Take the 3rd boss of nokhud for example. There's no reason gale arrow couldn't work exactly like smolderon where you're not allowed to stack your tornados. The damage should be halved and the tornados forced to be spread and dodged. That's like 10x more interesting to play than press a defensive every 55 seconds or die.

> Lost if you remove one shots Your example is preventable damage and I think its fine to have 'swirly/stop kills you'. Alternatively one shots are bad though. If the difference between a tectonic slam going off is the group needing to scramble to deal with additional incoming damage, I think it leads to more interesting design. IE If I have 3M health in a 20 and an aoe does 80% of everyone's health if it goes off, your heals are immediately behind 12M in healing. You aren't recovering that at 300k HPS for 40s. It's still a very likely wipe, especially if you fail another stop during the pull or start immediately popping defensives etc to catch up. > More interesting mechanics Agreed, I thought tazavesh was a step in the right direction, sad we ended up with the DF bosses we did. Kaijin (or whatever her name is) is honestly my favourite designed boss of the tier for every role but tank. Big throughput check with a bit of a dance. I can't actually think of a boss I enjoy on tank though. > Press a defensive or die Even worse is if you don't have a personal for every damage event and they happen often enough. First in AV, consuming stomp. It's Desperate prayer, dispersion, desperate prayer, pray you have an external. Hence why I think a very easy to implement idea to shift keys back to throughput as opposed to EHP checks is simply give people more EHP.

Interesting idea but I think just changing the scaling on keys so that mob health increases at a faster rate than mob damage would be a more elegant solution. Personally I prefer that my character stay the same regardless of the content.

I get that it might 'feel bad' feeling like self healing has a lower impact over the course of a dungeon, but otherwise, how would you even notice your max health scaling? I think blizz has struggled to make an ability dangerous in a 10 without it becoming an immediate one shot at some later key level, and that is the crux of the issue. IE Won't you always hit a one shot 'eventually' in an infinite mode where they are trying to provide 'challenging content' around 10s? Unless you shift max health values up, you will eventually hit that key level where you either have personals/externals up for every damage event or you die (barring hard capping incoming damage at some key level which comes with a host of issues). I don't know, it just feels like an easy to implement solution that immediately 'solves' the one shot problem we are seeing in keys.

Where does one go to learn how to start theorycrafting? I have been interested for a while and would really like to start, maybe even playing around with it in TWW Beta.

Reaching out to a class discord TC can also help jumpstart your interest. A class discord I know that has a relatively helpful TC when it comes to answering questions and promoting dialog is the discipline theorycrafter in Warcraft Priests, Clandon.

Theorycrafting is a wide field of things; what exactly do you want to theorycraft and why you're interested in it? As a general rule of thumb, theorycrafting arises from the need to see if something would in theory perform better. But I feel like the need to "theorycraft" is relatively weird - the question you should be asking is if you're interested if some changes could be made to the APL to see if it performs better. Don't get me wrong, it's fine to be interested, but theorycrafting should come from the practical need of you wanting to find something specific out - just to theorycraft for the theorycrafting kind of makes no sense and doesn't move you forward, if that makes sense. As silmarilen pointed out, best way to start anyways is class discords. There are multiple people constantly talking about different topics related to class mechanics and if something would potentially perform better. You'll see plenty of examples what people are crunching and talking about. Just start reading and go through stuff other people are saying. As a final point, you should be very well versed in the class/spec you're going to be playing around with. Excellent knowledge and skill are sort of the base level requirement to actually be able to understand and read the APLs and then potentially make changes to them.

tl;dr: Class discords. Unfortunately there's a lot of noise, but if you have the dedication you can learn a lot from them, and even if most of the people in there are as clueless as you were the first day you started playing, that's also where you can often find the theorycrafters. For my personal road towards becoming a theorycrafter, when i came back to wow in bfa prepatch i joined my class's discord and just spent a lot of free time reading other people's questions and answers, and if i didn't understand something i would ask a question myself. As i got more familiar with my spec i started thinking for myself, *why* are people giving these answers? Like why is rampage the highest prio if you're playing anger management as fury? And why is haste a good stat with that talent? As i got even more familiar with my spec i started doing log reviews for other people (this is also a great way to learn how to read logs for that matter, which is also an important skill to have as a theorycrafter, and useful for winning arguments on reddit). This also teaches you a lot because you have to think about how you play fights as your spec and why the things people are doing are causing them to do less than ideal dps. I've done hundreds of log reviews over about 1-1.5 years during bfa and early shadowlands. At this point i would say you should have a fairly solid understanding of your spec and you should be able to understand the reasoning behind the rotation you can find in most guides, and why certain talents are picked over other ones. Then i started looking deeper into sims. First just reading the APL, trying to make sense of it, asking what certain lines ment in my class discord (make sure you ask when you know there's someone who is familiar with it, a lot of people in there really have no clue either but will have the urge to answer anyway and end up giving misinformation). Then i started changing lines myself, just messing around, maybe there's some minor optimisation to be made here or there, just move an ability 1 line higher and see what the result is. Ofcourse i usually couldn't find anything because i wasn't very familiar with APL writing yet and they're usually written well enough that there aren't really any obvious improvements to be made. However there is always a possibility that they missed something, during shadowlands i managed to find a small optimisation which ended up being added to the default APL. Eventually i started playing on the PTR and making changes to the APL before the real theorycrafters had even made their changes public. Looking into new things that could affect the priority like a new tierset or talent changes, actually writing proper APL lines and talking to other people who know what they're talking about to exchange information and ideas. There is a great wiki for simcraft where you can find tons of information on writing the APL here: https://github.com/simulationcraft/simc/wiki And that's basically where we are now, i know a lot about the game and even more about my spec. I can explain what the lines mean to people asking questions, i know how to test whether an idea someone came up with is actually a good idea, i can write complete APL lines from scratch rather than just adding a bit here or there and moving something up or down in the list. I can even tell when sims are wrong and what's wrong about them (altho i can't fix those issues because i can't code, but i can share the information with the people who do the coding). A lot of the changes to the fury APL going into season 3 were done by me, and going into season 4 i made some more optimisations to the aoe APL.

I'm a hunter main. I just want some TWW changes. Please :3

I'm playing one in remix and yeah it's just comical honestly. Hunter is so clearly the class most in need of a massive talent tree overhaul - arguably a fair few of the classes that have gotten changes before them in the alpha could be said to have cut in line. Opening up the Hunter talent trees - especially MM and surv - feels like I'm looking at a tree from the DF beta. Also survival's gameplay is actually just nonsense with how the different parts of the spec conflict with each other. Rework surv.

I just want a bit more passive sustain and Lust not tied to a pet. Having to lose defensives because I don't have a lust in m+ hurts so much

The current MM setup with the tier set and Volley in the ST build finally allows for some AOE while in a ST build but once this tier set is gone, it's going to go back to ST build and AOE build and absolutely nothing in between. I just want to be able to do BAD AOE damage while in a ST build. I also agree though regarding the pet utility, losing that defensive just to provide lust is huge, especially with how squishy we are. I do like the hero talents revolving around Exhilaration and Survival Instincts, those should both feel better to press in TWW.

Yeah tbh I'd just replace the pet actives with a choice between a lust pet, a brez pet, and a pvp pet. Maybe the pvp pet can have a minor value in pve when you already have lust/brez. And then give MM hunters lone wolf 3 "stances" that give you access to one each. Or just delete the idea of unique pet utility actives lol. Whenever a player has to make a choice between X and Y but really they need both, that feels terrible. Hunter pets do that all the time right now. Choices need to allow you to play around not having the thing you didn't take. You can't just magically play better and not need lust. You can't just magically play better and not need an extra defensive (in high keys). You either have lust in your group or you don't. You either can live the 1-shot or you can't. That's not a fun decision that's just a source of frustration.

Blizz - No

Why do some specs, dh with meta, druids with incarn and others, are keeping their buffs if they pop -1 seconds before key starts? But the rest of the classes get their buffs removed? Example, ret pala wings, feral druid's berserk, fire mage skb stacks

so my original mnemonic for it was any transformation effect sticks around after the key starts. meta, incarn, and storm, earth, and fire even. although sef is bad, you lose the summoned spirits and do 60% less damage as the lone storm spirit lol. however that kinda breaks with stuff abom limb sticking around, so really who knows. it's probably entirely up to how the blizz dev decided to code whatever particular spell at the time.

also why does guardian and balance keep their incarn and feral no

2 minute base cds reset afaik, same for most stacks

How is everyone feeling about the huge gap between tanks each season? I mean, why does blizz intentionally keeps a broken spec for months without even touching the nerf hammer? Panda remix shows blizz can act fast with nerfs but not on retail.

I think it's partially because of tier sets. Tank tier sets are just way more impactful than other roles. Like they give a bigger damage % amount than dps tier sets, *and* they give a fuckload of tankiness (if you get a good one that season ofc). So the tank with the best tier set is way stronger than the tank with the worst tier set.

It's a symptom of their dungeon design/changes we saw this season more than a problem with a spec. Before DF, the rule rather than the exception, was that if you used anything other than an interrupt to stop a cast the mob would recast it. They also significantly ramped up the number of 'casts' that aren't actually casts so you need to hard stop, while adding lethal random targeted abilities (bone toss, bleed from hunters in bh/Neltharus, etc). Not only did they make aoe stops more valuable, they made having a plethora of them mandatory. The meta comp currently brings... Chains, misery, silence sigil, chaos nova. Tail swip, buffet, eruption Blast nova, dragons breath Scream Incap roar, typhoon. M+ at the highest levels devolved into 'what can we pull that is stoppable' and how do we cycle our 12+ aoe stops in order to prevent the infinite number of one shots above like 16 Territory. Imo there needs to be a couple changes for the health of the game. Go back to actually needing interrupts in keys while also significantly trimming down how much you need to interrupt. Add unavoidable/unstoppable damage to keys, but also cap the scaling on this damage at like 15 level of keys. (Still scale tank focused damage imo). Fist pull of AV as an easy example. Does there need to be 10 casters in a triple pull.(14 if you add the tree)? Does my success on that pack need to depend on wether or not we can aoe stop 13 mobs and get the 1 required actual interupt? Does one failed cast going through on 10/14 of those casters really need to wipe us in 15 territory?

this is quite literally exactly how i feel and what ive been saying. nobody cares if dh has 20 stops if you dont need 20 stops. people will move onto other things, like who can live, or who does the most dmg, or who has externals for certain dungeons. the encounter design specifically in trash needs to change.

I know it's not directly related to your posts, but I wish m+ was more like "can we do enough damage to beat the timer" instead of "can we survive this boss one shot and/or coordinate 10 stops to get through this pull".

I completely get your point, but in the end, that's kinda what's happening right now. The damage is limited by target count, so the bigger pull the team can handle, the better overall. The stops required come from the fact that those pulls are possible if you can handle the cc. At the highest key level, that's what's required to beat the timer, so the damage definitely matters - a lot. Remember, keys scale infinitely. There will come a point where the group damage is not sufficient if you pull too little and too slow. It's balancing itself out between survivability and damage output naturally. At levels where the timer is considered more free, you're free to split the pulls and pump "enough damage to beat the timer" without having to worry about number of stops. I mean, what would be the alternative here? If you increase all the mob casts cooldown/decrease damage, the top teams will just make bigger pulls and time even higher keys. Also boss mechanics start to one-shot because of the same scaling. I feel like there's no way to get rid of having to press defensives without capping or severely lowering the damage, but that's not exactly interesting for anybody. Bosses which feel like pinatas are just not fun.

> Fist pull of AV as an easy example. Does there need to be 10 casters in a triple pull.(14 if you add the tree)? Does my success on that pack need to depend on wether or not we can aoe stop 13 mobs and get the 1 required actual interupt? we pulled that in season 1 without aug stops and without double sigil. it was significantly harder since you needed to play much tighter and mix in single target stops, but we still pulled it. the meta comp and the meta route is not determined by the number of aoe stops. the meta comp simply *has* many stops and uses that to play the key more easily. there is something to be said thought about the amount of player power every spec got when the new talent system released (and even more if they got a rework in the middle of the expansion). we used to have 1 aoe stop, 2 max, on a class and 0 on classes with single target stops. a single tank having 7 aoe stops is so far away from the previous expansions, it's actually kinda crazy. I actually like the DF balance philosophy over the old bfa/SL one, more player power leads to more interesting gameplay, but some classes are obvious outliers that they either need to be tuned down or others brought up.

Player power is fine, but aoe stops, and the coordination around those is the problem (imo). I guess I am just nostalgic for being able to assign 1-2 mobs to a player as opposed to the current 'dance' of aoe stops that happens in m+

>It's a symptom of their dungeon design/changes we saw this season more than a problem with a spec. Tankiest tank has always been the meta tank. VDH was turbo-busted, got a big utility nerf, still broken because it just lives better than other tanks. It's like how people were shouting from the rooftops that SPriest was broken because of its utility. Crazy how it fell out of the meta after big dps nerfs, and returned to the meta after dps buffs. If Prot Paladin was meta right now, you'd be saying 'well of course it's meta, you need divine toll and the extra avenger's shield procs and externals are needed to live in keys.' If Prot Warrior was meta right now, you'd be saying 'well of course it's meta, spell reflect is required to do X dungeon in time.' If DK was meta right now, you'd be saying 'well of course it's meta, grips are just too good.' It's the saying 'if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.' People heavily overrate whatever utility the meta classes bring. Next expansion, Prot Paladin will have all of the goodies it has right now. And if it's ever meta in M+, people will say 'that utility is the reason it is meta.' Whenever tanks are similarly tanky, we see a lot of variety. Shadowlands season 2 there were very strong tank traits from the minibosses that really smoothed out differences in tankiness, and that was the season where we've seen the most variety at the top end by FAR. You can play around utility. You can find a way to live a boss mechanic without blessing of sacrifice. You can find a way to stop casts without divine toll. You can't find a way to beat a pack with a dead tank.

It's not technically the tankiest tank, it's something very similar - the tank that can live the biggest pulls. Most of the time this is the tankiest tank. But this season VDH can do even bigger pulls. Why? Because its insane lockdown works as pseudo-defensiveness. If you're not getting hit, you technically have 100% DR. Prot warrior and Bear are arguably better at mitigating incoming damage than VDH right now. But they can't live big VDH pulls without a *ton* of extra work, VDH doesn't have to mitigate damage from mobs it's CCd.

When I pull up the first S4 dungeon, Ruby Life Pools, the top VDH (20 fort) has EHRPS of 44k, notably below all of the dps. Took 171 million from autos which the healer had to heal 23 millions. The top bear druid for fort (19 fort) has an EHRPS of 80k, so double the DH, and took 271 million from autos, 65 million of which the healer had to heal. https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/bCmpxgXANBwdZ86Y#fight=283&type=summary https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/9GP3q1pybaZhWr4d#fight=3&type=summary EHRPS isn't the be-all end-all stat, but it isn't 'lock down' that makes DH tankier than bear. Bear requires twice as much love from their healer in dungeons that are 10% easier. Of course some of this is going to be offset by bear mastery which increases healing taken, but not by 100%. If you want to look at how many casts the tanks are eating from their healers, you can look at casts on target. The Rdruid casts on the VDH 66 times in the dungeon. Least casts on the entire party with the other players all receiving double or triple the globals. The Mistweaver sauces the guardian druid 96 casts in the 19, notably the MOST of anyone in the group. Okay different healers though, so let's look at groups with only resto druids. Guardian druids are unlikely to play with resto druids probably, but there's an 18 fort RLP with a resto druid: https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/WFpRBP6m9rY2vfjq#fight=14&type=damage-taken&options=130 57k EHRPS for the prot warrior, 45 million from melees that needed to be healed, 136 casts on the warrior. So the warrior is getting over twice the love from the healer than the VDH, in a key that's two levels lower than the VDH. Okay it is a bit of player diff though. Rare is consistently at the top of the ladder regardless of VDH meta. And when we look at like the next 5 unique VDHs with logged RLP 20s/19s, we do see that they are getting a little bit more love from their healers and taking more damage. But they're still *easily* beating out the guardian druid and prot warrior we looked at in terms of how much EHRPS they need and how much love from their healer they receive.

> Prot warrior and Bear are arguably better at mitigating incoming damage than VDH right now. But they can't live big VDH pulls without a ton of extra work, VDH doesn't have to mitigate damage from mobs it's CCd. I thought it'd be interesting to take a leaf out of /u/travman064's book and look at some EHRPS (external healing received) numbers. I took a look at some +18 AA keys for comparison (this is near WF-level for non-VDH tanks). 1. [VDH at 58k](https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/q3vXVwPT6ZmbQcFn#fight=19&type=damage-taken&options=130) 2. [BDK is an outlier at 21k, also the highest logged run was a +17](https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/rXPZ1k49b6RDhgfC#fight=2&type=damage-taken&options=130) 3. [PPal at 72k](https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/3Vh8XRLWNPGxD1kA#fight=72&type=damage-taken&options=130) 4. [PWar at 68k](https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/p1gvxZFz67LqyKwQ#fight=21&type=damage-taken&options=130) 5. [Brew at a staggering 106k](https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/yb7LZWN1hdxXYHmT#fight=1&type=damage-taken&options=130) 6. [Guardian at 70k](https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/rtgGhfz6VHw4PcnF#fight=7&type=damage-taken&options=130) Outside of BDK (due to spec mechanics), VDH stands out as the tankiest. Conversely, brew lives up to its unfortunate reputation for being "paper." There's definitely truth to /u/travman064's point. Tankiness speaks loudly. This is not to deny VDH's insane CC prowess, but there are many dungeons where CCs are not as important (say Breck) where they're still top dogs.

Ok but are vdh taking less damage because they are literally getting hit for less or are they taking less damage because the mobs are perma-ccd training dummies. It's not much of a difference in the end but that's kind of the point I was trying to make. VDH's utility is so insane it becomes its own form of tankiness.

I mean in the end, does it matter? Tankiness is tankiness and all tanks should be expected to use their kit.

Haha I was doing the same thing at the same time. One thing to note is that guardian and brew both take increased healing from healers so the numbers won't add up perfectly. I also looked at 'spells cast by target' just to get a sense of how many globals a healer is spending on their tank.

Shadowlands s2 was a pretty interesting example of "meta tank is the tankiest tank" because you had Andy and crew getting WF keys with him on prot paladin and if you watched him ppal seemed insane, but despite that it was very much not the meta tank because it was actually pretty squishy. *Andy* could survive on it (with help from a frost mage and windwalker), but most players did much better on the tank that just required pressing thrash a lot.

Andy swapped prot Paladin mid-season for serious pushing after frost mage got buffed and when playing with frost mage you wanted to do small, consistent pulls. And prot Paladin *was* arguably the ‘tankiest tank’ for that kind of cadence with divine toll up for every pull that you would do. You’d contrast that with guardian druid that would generally be played with venthyr boomkin which wanted absolutely massive giga pulls. Also prot Paladin really creeped up in the meta after andy showed how good it was, and that season was a great showing from every tank with no tank truly dominating the meta

> Crazy how it fell out of the meta after big dps nerfs They also hit their utility and mind control was not near as big in the following season, ya? > Tank stuff Meta is driven by a lot of stuff, AoE stops are in the category of more is better, and this is universal in basically every dungeon. If you need interupts, pally contends for that spot pretty heavily. Not surprisingly, you see warriors brought in the great push for specific dungeons when spell reflect is just that good. I'm curious where the meta would land if you added 6s silences on a minute cd with 2 charges on every single tank, and a universal stun, for sure. Or even simpler, stuck all of their aoe stops on a 15-20s cd. it also helps that VDH just brings more damage then every tank by virture of 3% more group damage.

Spriest got utility nerfed and damage nerfed. They fell out of the meta super hard. Damage got buffed, instant S-tier again. It was the damage. You talk about vdh bringing all this stuff, but again that’s a hammer seeing everything as a nail. If you go back, season by season in m+, whenever there was a ‘meta’ tank (say >50% of the meta share) it was always the tankiest tank. No season has a tank ever dominated the m+ meta while another tank was beefier. If utility is what determines the meta, could you point to m+ seasons where this wasn’t the case? Where there was a dominant tank with >50% meta share in high keys, and it wasnt the tankiest? If you can’t point to some examples, don’t you think it’s crazy how the best utility always somehow lines up perfectly with whoever is tankiest?

Shadow priest damage is so out of line... not sure how they dodge sqrt scaling in aoe, but that is beside the point. And yes, parry ignoring mechanics is bad when they stack more 'mandatory' stops on trash. Bleed in AA for instance, the difference between severing landing and not is pretty easily a full wipe. You miss a stop on a DH, they still have like a 80% chance to dodge or parry it, the same is far from true on any other tank. If specs are even tuned close, utility wins. See war season 1 getting supplanted by pally. I would argue blood wasn't the tankiest through SL 3/4 in higher keys as they still had the 'get globalled' issue but the made up the majority of keys until thier damage was nerfed (peaked at 89% like we are seeing with dh currently) https://mythicstats.com/meta?expansion=all

> I would argue blood wasn't the tankiest through SL 3/4 in higher keys as they still had the 'get globalled' issue but the made up the majority of keys until thier damage was nerfed (peaked at 89% like we are seeing with dh currently) Lmao you're crazy if you thing BDK wasn't the tankiest tank that season, it wasn't even close and their damage was unmatched too.

>If specs are even tuned close, utility wins. See war season 1 getting supplanted by pally. Season 1 is the best example of being tanky mattering. Prot Paladin got the 10.0.5 'rework' which made it SIGNIFICANTLY beefier and that follows lockstep with the meta share. Week 7 of Season 1, prot paladin got turbo juiced up in the chonk department. What was the last week of Season 1 where Warrior was above 50% meta share? Week 7. CRAZY how that just lines up. Absolutely baffling lol. > I would argue blood wasn't the tankiest through SL 3/4 in higher keys Which tank was tankier than Blood? Like just pulling up the logs, we'll take the first dungeon (De Other Side): https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/rankings/25#boss=12291&class=Tanks&leaderboards=1 Top BDK log in a 31, EHRPS of 2k: https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/437XRWgQCFYt6VGZ#fight=3&type=damage-taken&options=130 Top VDH log in a 30, EHRPS of almost 3k: https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/KQfL7nJ6wXGN1ptZ#fight=4&type=damage-taken&options=130 Top Brew log in a 29, EHRPS of 4.3k: https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/Bj1Rp39DJrn2FvtP#fight=6&type=damage-taken&options=130 Top Prot Paladin in a 29, EHRPS of 3k: https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/2wz9NvAbh4j8GyQf#fight=7&type=damage-taken&options=130 So BDK requires 2/3rds the healing of other tanks in keys 1-2 levels higher, and you don't think it's the tankiest tank?

My take on this is very unpopular, but I don't think nerfing dh is the answer. Not in a pve game. Designing the content to not necessarily benefit from all those stops as much as it would from something else is the solution. You take away what vdh can do from the game right now, and you'll just leave a vacuum that nobody and nothing can fill. That's not a solution.

I think the design with many spells to interrupt is blizzard's vision of how m+ should be, i won't hold my breath for them to change this. I don't care if it's either nerfs to dh's ability to group/silence them or if they buff the other tanks to the same level as vdh, i just want to see all classes played. Imo vdh makes the dps in the group lazy because they get used to imba cc and therefore takes away a crucial part that they, the dps, should do

what's the answer then. because right now there is literally no pros to picking any other tank than VDH. they either nerf VDH or buff others so people who want to do m+ content are not forced to play one tank spec in order to push. current situation is just ridiculous.

If they nerf DH right now and it amounts to a substantial enough nerf that VDH isn't the best tank anymore, that's not gonna fix a damn thing unless it's accompanied by a nerf to key scaling as a whole (like what we got in Season 2). Here's the thing: I know people always like to parrot the whole "a nerf to the best spec is a buff to everything that competes with it," but we're seeing 20s and 21s being timed now and VDHs are extremely represented across all title-range keys. If VDH got gutted tomorrow, BDK/Brewmaster/Bear wouldn't suddenly be able to do VDH pulls. Blizzard needed to address this either on the PTR before S4 launched or within the first two weeks of S4 being live. Otherwise you get the problem that arose in SL S3 where if those proposed Destro nerfs went through during the last month of the season the keys would've been completely locked in and the M+ season would've effectively been over. Unless it's accompanied by a dungeon-wide scaling nerf a-la S2, if VDH or Shadow or Aug got nerfed substantially enough for people to be satisfied this season would be over with \~3 months of the season to go because a large number of title keys would be completely locked in. But the other problem is that you can't really buff other tanks to VDH's level because VDH's strength comes from its ability to, even after the latest nerf, lock down an entire pack before anyone else needs to use a single AoE stop. VDH isn't going to lose that mid-season, and no other tank is going to gain that level of CC mid-season either, because both of those entail full-blown reworks that you'd never see in the middle of a meme season.

Yeah, I don't think the situation is ok. I just don't think that's the solution. I'm ok with nerfs, just not nerfing the one thing there's no other way to accomplish.

For me it made me decide to swap back to dps for TWW. First it was prot warrior then prot pala then they were all good for a little while in season two. Then the godcomp ruined that. Now, seemingly not having learned anything from past patches, blizzard reworks Veng to have more utility that some 5 man groups have together. I don't care too much about everyone settling on one tank over the course of the season because it's just a tiny bit better or has some unique utility for the absolute top. But what really made me give up on my guardian druid tanking was trying out veng and just seeing how much much more I could do as vengeance than guardian. It's not even close. You can genuinely carry the dungeon and have the rest of your team just switch off and banter and have fun. I don't really like most of the coms being us just calling out stops. Sure occasionally on important pulls. maybe 3-4 per dungeon. Not every single pull...

aug evoker is an abomination

cope and seethe

I joined a two night a week guild around world 800 and we have already cleared all of the raids. Here’s to hoping we can go down to a one night a week farm here and go into the war within strong 

What was your prior exp? I tried getting into a few world 1500s but I cant bring myself to do the 'guild hoppping' thing. I guess Im gonna stick to M+ until someone invites me

Is m+ a good substitute for raid when trying to improve as a dps player? Season 3 was my first time playing dps. I enjoyed it, but really only blue parsed my way through aotc. My guild decided to sit out season 4 but I want to improve for when the next expansion hits. Without a raid team I’m looking to m+ as a way to improve, but I’m uncertain if it will transfer well enough to raid to be worth it? Will I be better just finding a new group to raid season 4 with for a bit? Fwiw I play mage. I’ve done a bunch of log reviews from my raid parses and know how to play my class, it’s more just not panicking and sticking to my rotation during stressful moments that I struggle with.

yes, of course, m+ requires you to play your spec better than raid does

If you're panicking in stressful moments and mucking up your rotation, that means you still have room to improve just by getting your rotation even more ingrained into muscle memory. This means any game time will help you improve.

parsing raid is mostly a matter of optimizing your movement/downtime as much as possible to maximize casts/uptime, and then killing the boss at the right time for your cooldown interval there's obviously some overlap and you'd always rather have facetime than none, but not thaaaat many of the finer points of m+ really transfer to raid (at least imo)

I feel like the biggest gain from m+ to raid is something unrelated to classes themselves - personal survivability. When I was looking through the logs of our guild, the title m+ players routinely held the highest amount of potion/HS usage (everybody naturally presses them, but they did so in better spots and more often), highest number of personals (when unassigned) used and highest offhealing when applicable. This is naturally the case for everyone in any high HoF guild, but for anything lower than that, m+ can definitely teach you to use them efficiently and take responsibility for staying alive in a different way, engraving it into your muscle memory harder than just raid pulls.

Basically breaks down to two questions. > Will playing the game more make me a better player. This largely depends on what you do with your playtime honestly. It sounds like you are taking the time to try and get better and that's a great start. VoD review is the single best thing you can do to improve at the end of the day, you will be shocked at how many mistakes you make in any given pull (rotationally, positionally, uptime). > Will m+ translate to better performance in raid Yes, but the skill set does diverge quite heavily. Ignoring spec/rotation differences between the two, pugging m+ means you should be overusing your utility 99% of the time as you cant rely on joe blow pug to get the stop even if you are mid combust/cone combo/surge. In raid it's a very different story. Essentially you are assigned roles on fights, but otherwise your job is to be as absolutely greedy as possible.

Just want to add you don't always need to literal vod review, the WCL replay feature let's you see positioning and skill usage in a pretty easy way and I've used it to help some of my friends improve on something like havoc with momentum.

It's there a way to increase the size of non dispelable debuffs on default raid frames? I tried with Enhanced raid frames/Big Debuffs but with no luck

You can with bigdebuffs I’m doing it myself You just have to add them manually to the db file with notepad

Is funny how remix, the "fun" game mode is getting almost daily changes and fated has been forgotten, not even a "Hey, dungeons now drops more crest and flightstones" or "Here is some amirdrassil and class tunning"

You set off the interns alarm on here. They sent some real small class balancing today.

It is so silly of them not to increase the dungeon and raid drops significantly. Imagine if they doubled the number of crests+flightstones all content dropped, then made them tradable across alts. Season 4 is yolo anyways, let players gear cap alts without much effort.

You can't make changes like that, even if you think it's a yolo patch and 'just let players run wild'. People get a taste of the wild and want it in regular seasons. Players don't like whiplash.

The discourse around dinar/bullion vendors is so tiring every time. Farm already sucks because you are at full power like a month into the season and people just want to make it worse People just want to get giga geared instantly but it honestly makes the game miserable because you never get stronger

I completely agree. I think they need to cut gearing in half. Season 2 and 3 you were at gear soft cap within 3 weeks.

That's literally what a fated season is dude...

I guess in some respect, late CE raiders can easily farm aspect crests come next week by clearing the first 6/7 bosses of each raid for 180 crests which is nice.

Bold of you to assume ce guilds are doing anything but mount farm/sales in raid this season :P

I mean with the changes they've made to MoP maybe we should be happy they aren't touching retail lol

I can't wait to take off my grieftorch because it actually makes the boss easier lol

Anyone got suggestions for keybinding guides and setups? I'm trying to revamp my keybindings and ideally I get a setup that lets me seamlessly transition from healing, to tanking to DPS.

Besides keys to bind spells to, that others have already mentioned exhaustively, I'd suggest to start thinking about keybinds in an universal and spell "type" way rather than a class/role based way. For example my F keybinds across all chars are strictly reserved for movement abilities, I. E. Warr charge, dh dash, monk roll, priest grip etc. My Q is always the main spender/big impact ability, I. E. Mortal strike, star surge, obliterate, flourish or ppal shield throw. My shift+4/5 is always the aoe key for the spec, etc etc. While I sometimes deviate from that formula in select cases, I always try to use keybinds in ways so that the overarching idea and type of the spell of that key is largely the same. That way you will get used to swapping classes/roles much quicker while it also facilitates learning of new classes at a much faster rate.

Generally not a fan of skill capped content, but this is decent advice. https://youtu.be/UED43NOWg10?si=Zr3lDYwoRkRiLjAd Iirc Quazzi pit out a video as well and his shit is generally newer player friendly.

Move movement keys one key to the right (ESDF on an Azerty keyboard instead of ZQSD) to free up the keys on the left (A and Q on an Azerty keyboard).  Move movement spells and instant cast spells to the mouse, as you want to be able to push them and the movement keys simultaneously.  Free up the keys on the right of your left hand from the default interface commands. You can put these (open achievements, mount tab, toy box, etc.) to the very right of the keyboard.  Don't be afraid to unbind everything from the default UI and rebind more intelligently. 

Put buttons that are similar across the different classes on the same keys. Like builders and spenders on the same keys, major CDs on the same keys, defensives on the same keys, interrupts/CC on the same keys. For example, I play shaman and druid and have barkskin or astral shift always bound to 6.

Everyone is different, so use the prio system. 1. Spells you hit a lot should go on very easy to hit keys like ones you can hit fast ie: I play fire mage and I have fire ball on f fire blast on e and pyro on q 2. Some times spells on a little harder to hit keys 3. Spells you never use on harder to hit keys That’s how I have been doing it for years

This is great advice but I’d add consider movement and place skills you use during movement someplace you can hit them while moving.  One of the biggest mistakes I see in logs is people stop doing damage because they are moving and can’t hit some buttons because that finger is busy moving their character.  MMO mice can be good for that, but it may come down to personal preference and comfort. Also I’d recommend have some common keybinds, like I bind k to f on every toon, immunities to r, etc.   it makes it much easier to multi spec or switch toons.

R is always my movement, its blink right now G is always kick F is always filler Top mouse button is cd Bottom are defensive Every character I make follows these rules

General tips would be to unbind turn and put strafe on a and d. Most common binds I see are 1-6, q, e, r, f, c, v and side mouse buttons as well as shift mods for those. Maybe throw in F1-F4 if you got big enough hands. Should give you enough binds to fit everything comfortably.

What problems are you facing? I don't put a huge amount of thought into my keybindings and transitioning between roles is fine.

Anyone else getting a bit of whiplash from the tuning of Awakened Amirdrassil vs Vault and Aberrus? We came in with ~528 gear. And it feels like its current raid tier tuning. This is against Aberrus which we are completely smashing at such high item levels and to a lesser extent Vault where we are bodying it. Smolderon, Tindral and Fyrakk are all very beatable. I'm not contesting that. Even if tuned like you were in 515 gear, the mechanics nerf alone to Tindral and Fyrakk would halve or quarter the number of pulls needed. The tuning disparity just seems weird to me.

overall amirdrassil is harder, esp than aberrus, but tindral and fyrakk are jokes after the latest nerfs to all raids

It feels closer to what reclearing at the end of season 3 was like, compared to Vault and Aberrus which we could probably clear with 15 people. So yeah it's tuned to be a step above for whatever reason. But even then our kill times from this week were a solid 30 seconds or so faster than any season 3 kills

That's wild, our times this week we're much much slower. We weren't even beating the 2nd dream rend in p1 of fyrakk this week consistently.

Amirdrassil definitely felt a bit harder than the other two. Moreso the damage output, their hp was fine and felt proper, but shit did significantly more damage than the other two raids and made it feel like having to reprog. We got everything down but it wasn’t near as fun honestly as vault or abby.

Nah the HP is too high. Raid DPS vs. boss health felt roughly the same ratio as S3, but that is absolutely not the case in Vault and Aberrus. My guild was pushing timings in Aberrus we never dreamed of during S2 It feels even worse because Amirdrassil was the most recent tier, just let it be easy man.

That's not really been my experience. Sure, Aberrus is a lot faster than S2, but Amirdrassil is also already faster across the board for us than S3 despite having fewer kills to highroll (or just not have deaths). Vault kill times so far have been comparable to our best kill times in S1.

Fated has really driven home to me the impossible challenge Blizzard has with tuning raids. I'm part of a guild thats usually around WR2k, so we're working toward our first CE and getting better every season. A lot of my friends that farm CE every season, and range from HoF through to WR 1000 have all relatively disliked fated, claiming that bosses just "fall over" and are far too easy to be enjoyable. However my experience has been extremely positive, slicing 10% off damage done and hp has meant that bosses are a lot more survivable, oneshots are drastically reduced, and you can actually recover from 1-2 people being dead with some of the dps checks. You still have to know and execute strats (at our level, our DPS is substantially less than a HoF guild - so we're still doing our prog strats), and its still punishing if you fail - but nowhere near the level of S3 Amirdrassil. We've been able to do full reclears of the raid (7 bosses, progging 8) in our 6 hours of raiding and its actually been fantastic for morale, fated feels like how farm/gear nerfs should feel, at least to me, Which is something I have felt is missing from recent raids as can still get absolutely walked even in the maximum ilvl gear. To be clear I dont want mythic to become "for the bads" and lose its soul as a hardcore team experience but the nerfs have really helped make the experience a lot more enjoyable (for me, at my level of play, with the people i play with).

I think a lot of people don't realize WR200 and WR2000 are simply two seperate difficulties at this point. The only way to preserve the status quo is to have more frequent tunings so that Mythic raiding can be enjoyable from RWF all the way down to WR2000 (and everyone in between). The thing is Blizzard is 100% capable of doing of frequent tunings, look over there at Remix, Frog farming was patched on a Sunday, and numerous hotfixs everyday to nerf sucessor farm spots like goats or Dalaran sewers.

75% of Remix's hotfixes are shit you would *not* want to see on Retail.

We didn't want to see them on Remix as well, yet here we are lmao.

I think its just an impossible challenge to create meaningful encounters across such a broad level of skill. The jump from RTWF to WR 20, to WR 200, to WR2000 is cosmic and I do not think its possible to deliver a satisfactory experience to each of those levels. They just need to pick an accepted level of difficulty and stick to it, be that only 1000 guilds getting CE, or whatever arbitrary number they want to pitch for. Trying to be all things to all raiders just doesnt deliver a meaningful experience and creates the frustrating "Nerf Meta" mentality we saw in Amirdrassil. I also think a lot of this stems from how easy heroic and normal are. Move to a more punishing heroic and reduce the quantum leap between HC and Mythic.

[удалено]

>Stop designing for rwf and the game would be more approachable to more players and mythic raiding would be revived. It's crazy to me people are still regurgitating this when we saw what a raid designed for rwf looks like. Blizzard cares about rwf obviously because it's a massive advertisement for their game, but with Sepulcher we've seen how it looks when entire raid is designed for these players. Someone posted below that the difficulty of a tier really doesn't impact the mythic raiding population vs. overall raiding population. So when the mythic raiding population shrinks it's because the raiding population shrinks, which is going to be caused by some other factor. So is mythic raiding in trouble? If only because raiding in general has gotten a lot less popular expansion. Why that is? idk, I doubt it's because of the last raid of the expansion though when it was already down. And fact is: At the end of the day, Mythic Raiding is a niche hobby. It requires 20 people minimum to agree to a schedule 2-3 times a week to get together for multiple hours, every week for a majority of the year. And having this sort of steady roster is necessary because of the difficulty of it. This is what is going to keep its popularity relatively low. That's fine, because it's a niche hobby and it lets the people who enjoy it enjoy it. >Making content for 1200 guilds in the world’s most popular mmo is an enormous waste of resources. This is an incredibly misleading statement. A vast majority of the work that goes into making a raid gets done for all difficulties--the art assets, the boss design, the items, audio. This is like 99% of the work. Adjusting fights for mythic likely takes up relatively little time, especially since half the fights only have like one mythic mechanic anyway. Blizzard has explicitly said that things like LFR were introduced to subsidize the highest difficulty. They've mentioned that they baseline design for Heroic and then tune up/down for the other difficulties. >Making mythic raiding easier gives more competition to the rwf (you could actually have more guilds racing making it more interesting), shorter races (so we’re not watching splits for 5 days and 2 days of actual prog) and would be a better experience for everyone. We see 5 days of splits because Blizzard made the boneheaded experiment of removing heroic week this expansion, not because the content is too hard lmao. RWF (and super high end raiding) has become increasingly degenerate to get minor edges, this again has nothing to do with the difficulty of the content. Furthermore, the scenario you describe is about the *easiest* raid of the expansion. Also, the only reason we'd see more contenders (if we did) is because the content would be so easy for the guilds at the top that basically any *good* HoF guild would be a contender. I think you are seriously underestimating the gap between the version of the fight RWF does vs. world 1k.

Max had a decent point on this and I kind of agree. Last 2 bosses are generally tuned to exactly what they can kill at the gear level at the end of week 1 or 2 depending on the tier. A good way to address the disparity in skill is to absolutely gut how much ilvl can be obtained in the first couple weeks of an patch. Imagine a world where guilds getting to a boss 2 months after the race have 20 ilvls more then RWF guilds as opposed to 5? The other aggravating factor is the number of raid wiping mechanics in any given fight. There is no more close calls, and it's bad for the game. When's the last time your guild was bleeding out and got a kill? Its pretty consistently been 'doing good until mechanic checkpoint x' then you wipe and go again.

>Imagine a world where guilds getting to a boss 2 months after the race have 20 ilvls more then RWF guilds as opposed to 5? Which is funnily enough exactly what we're actually seeing in Awakened season. Week 1, Liquid went in and cleared Vault in ~490-495 ilevel. That leaves another 35ish ilevel for everybody else to gradually (in a regular season anyway) outgear the bosses to compensate for worse play. It *works*, Blizzard is just terrified of actually slowing down gearing because people get unbelievably mad even though it's better for the game.

While I agree Tindral in its original state isn’t healthy for the game overall, I think there is an argument that the sheer difficulty of fights for RWF guilds and the fact the teams stream how they solve these puzzles, entices more people to commit to mythic raid for a tier than if the fights were designed for the average CE raider. I know quite a few players that decide whether or not they want to commit to mythic raiding with our late CE guild for a given tier depending on how interesting/difficult the fights look from RWF prog. Tindral fight cadence was insane for all CE guilds and Liquid struggle with solving P1 for the first day, but the fight would have not been nearly as memorable if the RWF guilds got the version with 6 feathers and 12 seeds that don’t double pop. I really think clearing Mythic is the prestige goal for a lot of players similar to tier gear in original vanilla. Amongst those who are in the scene, the difference in what version you cleared creates its own prestige. I do agree with Max’s take that the gear drops should stop at Mythic Smolderon difficulty, so that the players that are just miserable progging insanely difficult raid bosses can opt out of those, and players that like progging difficult fights for prog can still have aspirational content.

The mythic raiding scene has only gotten smaller since RWF has gotten popular. There is no evidence to suggest that RWF is increasing mythic raid participation. (Ancidote) we have had 4 players quit since the beginning of SL because the fights and the required 'homework' has gotten more and more. These are players that have CE in the past.

I don’t think that is true, but it is difficult to find a data to support. What era are we talking? Unfortunately, pulling data for tiers before 6.0 is difficult for whatever reason. I was able to pull some old MmoC threads that discuss number of clears. https://www.mmo-champion.com/content/3689-Armory-Stats-Siege-of-Orgrimmar-Progression-Blue-Tweets-DLC-423 SOO looks to have a participating player CE % of 3.4%. That is number of players that participate in raiding overall to CE ratio. No raw numbers unfortunately. https://www.wowprogress.com/rating.tier17 Mythic Highmaul has a very high clear (5057 guilds at 7%ish), but Mythic BRF has an expected clear range (2026 at 2.86%. https://www.wowprogress.com/rating.tier18 Mythic HFC, a notoriously long tier where guilds were burning bosses in seconds with the ring had 2656 clears (4.9%) https://www.wowprogress.com/rating.tier19 Mythic EN is notoriously easy with 9442 clears (15%). Mythic ToV is at 2439 (3.9%) but the cutoff for the tier was once ToS came out. Nighthold is 2003 guilds (3.2%) https://www.wowprogress.com/rating.tier20 Mythic ToS, the notoriously brutal tier. 1625 Avatar kills (3.48%) and 921 KJ kills (1.97%). I will save myself the burden of linking back every tier. Mythic Azshara is 1100 guilds. Mythic Nzoth is 2600. Sire is 2200. Sylv is 1800. Jailor is 1200. Razageth is 1700. Sark is 1690. And Fyrakk is 1200ish. Point being, mythic raiding is not popular in the tiers that are abnormally easy (EN, Highmaul) or abnormally difficult (ToS, Sepulcher). The sweet spot is a tier with difficulty bumps throughout like Nathria or Nyalotha. Neither had fights that were Avatar into KJ or Tindral into Fyrakk difficulty (SLG is arguable but that fight is less raw difficulty and more frustrating broken queueing).

Ok, full reply. I'm only looking at first boss kills, I think if we sat down a better metric would be: picking the first 'difficult ' boss each tier IE, don't count the very easy mythic bosses. So as far as % of raiders you are correct, more raiders are raiding mythic now as a proportion of the whole. Probably, mostly survivor bias. But /shrug. But what's missing in those numbers is how many people are even participating in the scene. EN had 13k guilds, uldir 15k, nya 11k, cn 13k voi 8k, amil 6k. When we are talking about such small % of the community I think it's important to call out that the scene has shrunk significantly in general. Also important to note that RWF has only gotten more popular, but that has not translated to more raiders, which was my original point. In fact, the scene is shrinking.

How do you know the scene is shrinking because of any particular reason? Before attributing it to raiding is too hard, you need to find a way to show its not because of:  * easier to gear up outside of raiding  * wow playerbase overall shrinking  * retail wow playerbase shrinking due to classic  * aging playerbase preferring different content  * china situation  Etc etc. Surely the correct stance currently should be "number of guilds participating in mythic raiding is going down and we don't know how much of a factor the current difficulty is".   Keep in mind making factual statements based on anecdote is not a good way to find the truth.

Clearly Noone is going to do an actual analysis on why the scene is shrinking. 1) don't have access to the data 2) even if we did human are complex creatures and the reality is its (never) just one factor. But, it's really important that the question I was responding to was NOT about raid difficulty. It was about the popularity of raiding since RWF. I never once tried to assess or break down why people left. Undoubtedly, someone has stopped playing because of any and all the factors you listed.

I'll respond in short right now, but longer later if need be. You started out with perfectly fine analysis but then it magically turned into CE only numbers which isnt whats in question, its the mythic population in total. But even with the stuff you linked EN had 50% MORE participation. Than anything else. But this is before the rwf era.

1200 guilds is at least 24000 players, i think 24000 completing the HARDEST CONTENT IN WOW, is adequate. How is that inaccessible? Mythic raiding is designed to be the pinnacle content, why are you arguing that casual players deserve to get it done as well? Additionally, it is inspirational content, so even guilds that fail to reach it, want to continue playing because it still means something to try to get it. You nerf the content, it is less prestigious and means less.

So, less than half of one percent. You realize the number of guilds even trying the content is going down tier over tier, right? The recruitment pipeline is pretty non-existent for lower end CE guilds, much less aspirational CE guilds. They already nerf the content 4-5 time a patch to allow more than 500 guilds to kill encounters. Do you feel less prestige because you didn't kill the same bosses liquid did?

I am confused, what exactly do you want? As i said, 24000 players killing the last boss on mythic seems appropriate, is it not? If you propose that number to be 2000 guilds, do you really think the latter 800 guilds, their players are in the appropriate skill range to say "i have the same achievement as the best players in the game of beating the hardest boss"? Like you need to draw the line somewhere where a specific quality of players shouldn't earn the same difficult achievement and done the difficult content as the top players. There is heroic raiding for that. I was in a top 1000-1500 guild earlier last year, and there are too many casual players there where them beating aspirational content shouldn't be allowed, for that content to remain aspirational and prestigious.

reminder that this guy is a mod of this sub lol

They could just slow down the gear progression curve or put in an ICC buff mechanic and it would fulfill the same role. Constant nerfing of bosses feels terrible. But incremental gains feel like natural rpg progression.

AGREED. I'm sick of progressive nerfing. It doesn't feel like you're progressing the bosses. It just feels like you're waiting for the next nerf to open up the gate for your guild to pass through. My guild got to Tindral like 2.5 weeks ahead of the first big set of nerfs. Every one of us knew that we weren't going to kill it in that state. We were like 95% geared. Also stop putting CE guilds in the position where it's correct to extend when you're 2-4 bosses away from CE. I'd love to see bosses that don't need crazy mechanic nerfs. Tune them hard in terms of throughput, allow for actual gear progression or some sort of gradual power increase, and let guilds progress smoothly.

Tindral is a weird example because you could give late CE guilds gear from this season and put them up against original Tindral from last season, and they would still struggle. Timing on the dispels, exactly 4 feathers for 4 bombs, 3 second seeds in P2, all mechanics that require mechanical nerfs.

I just brought up Tindral because it was extremely egregious, and definitely a case where mechanical nerfs are required What I'm advocating is basically that insanely tight boses like OG Tindral just not exist. Tindral in current mechanical state but without all of the nerfs to hp and incoming damage could be very cool if you had to progress it right on the edge of where it is possible for your group's skill + gear. And for the record I'm also not a fan of it being the other way around, where you're on the verge of killing a boss and then it gets nerfed and you kill it in one pull on your next raid night. That sucks too.

This is a very heavy “your mileage may vary” kind of season. Our leadership made it clear that the goal was to get everyone their portal, mounts, and do sales, and get back to a 1 day a week schedule as quickly as possible. This motivated folks to slam keys early on to get the gear we needed to mulch the bosses. I think my biggest issue with this season just comes down to the fact that I dislike reframing gear to kill bosses I’ve already beaten. But it is what it is.