01-14-2008, 02:08 PM
Boss "difficulty" for me is determined by a simple formula:
How many people in the raid need to perform excellently to be successful? Or rather, how many people need to not screw up for the attempt to go well?
These are what I call "points of failure." The more points of failure a raid boss is, the harder it is. This is because we are human beings, and we make mistakes. Depending on your guild, there will be a certain number of mistakes made by its players on every attempt. The fewer opportunities there are for a mistake to be made that wipes the raid, the easier the boss is. Concordantly (omg big word), the smaller the player pool that needs to play very well to prevent a wipe, the easier the boss is.
Back in the Molten Core days, the points of failure involved the tanks and healers for pretty much every boss. That's what made it easier. The game evolved over time to include low DPS output as a point of failure for many bosses, but it wasn't until TBC when this became canon.
The reason Shade of Aran was such a block for so many raiders was because it was the first boss in TBC to include all members in the raid as potential points of failure. All 10 players had to move out of Blizzards; all 10 players had to stop moving for Flame Wreaths; all 10 players had to run from Arcane Explosions. Add to that the CC'ing of water elementals and the interrupts on spellcasts, and it proved very very difficult, especially to inexperienced or unskilled raiders. He got nerfed a ton, but many of the points of failure are still there.
A boss like Teron Gorefiend is "easy" in that it doesn't have too many points of failure - the people who are ghosted need to perform well to eliminate constructs, but for the rest of the raid it's a straight-up tank-n-spank burndown. Compare that to Archimonde, where any player death can often immediately wipe the raid, and it's night-and-day. Magtheridon has many more points of failure (cube clicking) than Teron Gorefiend, when you get right down to it. Thus, I'd rate Magtheridon as harder than a Black Temple boss!
A lot of it likely depends on your guild. If you are in a raid force where clicking cubes is a joke, then Magtheridon is a joke. If you are in a raid force where asking 10 people to perform a specific task at set time intervals is difficult, then Magtheridon is brutal.
Lady Vashj and Kael'thas Sunstrider are absolutely insane with organizational requirements and points of failure. This is why countless guilds are 5/6 SSC, 3/4 TK. It's just so easy for one person to make a mistake over the long course of these fights that wipes the raid. Even after the KT nerf, it takes, what, 15 minutes total to down Kael'thas? Archimonde as well requires the raid to not screw up for about 10 minutes (T6-decked guilds probably have him down to 6-8 minutes). Archimonde is basically C'Thun, except anyone dying would buff C'Thun with a raid-wide silence and a 4k damage hit to the whole raid (at level 60). Yikes.
I still find it interesting that the raid size reduction from 40 to 25, hailed as a boost to "casual raiding," has had exactly the opposite effect. Naxxramas (hi Gort) may have been the hardest raid instance ever, but the average difficulty of raiding in TBC is far greater than pre-TBC by a mile. This is probably due mostly to a lack of a Molten Core style easy intro raid instance, and hopefully Blizzard realizes this and corrects for it in the next expansion. Sit back and think about how much more difficult Gruul and Magtheridon are compared to Molten Core - how exactly is a newbie supposed to learn raiding under that environment?
-Bolty
How many people in the raid need to perform excellently to be successful? Or rather, how many people need to not screw up for the attempt to go well?
These are what I call "points of failure." The more points of failure a raid boss is, the harder it is. This is because we are human beings, and we make mistakes. Depending on your guild, there will be a certain number of mistakes made by its players on every attempt. The fewer opportunities there are for a mistake to be made that wipes the raid, the easier the boss is. Concordantly (omg big word), the smaller the player pool that needs to play very well to prevent a wipe, the easier the boss is.
Back in the Molten Core days, the points of failure involved the tanks and healers for pretty much every boss. That's what made it easier. The game evolved over time to include low DPS output as a point of failure for many bosses, but it wasn't until TBC when this became canon.
The reason Shade of Aran was such a block for so many raiders was because it was the first boss in TBC to include all members in the raid as potential points of failure. All 10 players had to move out of Blizzards; all 10 players had to stop moving for Flame Wreaths; all 10 players had to run from Arcane Explosions. Add to that the CC'ing of water elementals and the interrupts on spellcasts, and it proved very very difficult, especially to inexperienced or unskilled raiders. He got nerfed a ton, but many of the points of failure are still there.
A boss like Teron Gorefiend is "easy" in that it doesn't have too many points of failure - the people who are ghosted need to perform well to eliminate constructs, but for the rest of the raid it's a straight-up tank-n-spank burndown. Compare that to Archimonde, where any player death can often immediately wipe the raid, and it's night-and-day. Magtheridon has many more points of failure (cube clicking) than Teron Gorefiend, when you get right down to it. Thus, I'd rate Magtheridon as harder than a Black Temple boss!
A lot of it likely depends on your guild. If you are in a raid force where clicking cubes is a joke, then Magtheridon is a joke. If you are in a raid force where asking 10 people to perform a specific task at set time intervals is difficult, then Magtheridon is brutal.
Lady Vashj and Kael'thas Sunstrider are absolutely insane with organizational requirements and points of failure. This is why countless guilds are 5/6 SSC, 3/4 TK. It's just so easy for one person to make a mistake over the long course of these fights that wipes the raid. Even after the KT nerf, it takes, what, 15 minutes total to down Kael'thas? Archimonde as well requires the raid to not screw up for about 10 minutes (T6-decked guilds probably have him down to 6-8 minutes). Archimonde is basically C'Thun, except anyone dying would buff C'Thun with a raid-wide silence and a 4k damage hit to the whole raid (at level 60). Yikes.
I still find it interesting that the raid size reduction from 40 to 25, hailed as a boost to "casual raiding," has had exactly the opposite effect. Naxxramas (hi Gort) may have been the hardest raid instance ever, but the average difficulty of raiding in TBC is far greater than pre-TBC by a mile. This is probably due mostly to a lack of a Molten Core style easy intro raid instance, and hopefully Blizzard realizes this and corrects for it in the next expansion. Sit back and think about how much more difficult Gruul and Magtheridon are compared to Molten Core - how exactly is a newbie supposed to learn raiding under that environment?
-Bolty
Quote:Considering the mods here are generally liberals who seem to have a soft spot for fascism and white supremacy (despite them saying otherwise), me being perma-banned at some point is probably not out of the question.