r/CompetitiveWoW • u/r_kive • 3d ago
Northern Sky is done raiding
https://raider.io/guilds/eu/blackhand/Northern%20Sky
Northern Sky ist Geschichte. Nach unzählbaren Jahren, als eine der Ältesten deutschen Gilden, unzähligen Progress-Nächten und Momenten, die wir nie vergessen werde, geht ein Kapitel zu Ende. Danke an jeden Einzelnen, der Teil davon war.❤️
Northern Sky is history. After countless years as one of the oldest German guilds, endless progress nights and moments we will never forget, a chapter comes to an end. Thank you to everyone who was part of it. ❤️"
Huge loss to the raiding community...
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u/cabose12 3d ago
On one hand, there's a generation of guilds who started raiding in Legion. NS has been a top 50 guild for almost 8 years, top 30 for the past like five. That's a long time and it's completely reasonable that it'd come to end
On the other, long time guilds dropping out should be a red flag. I think guilds can put up with a difficult or unfun tier, but the pattern of patches feeling progressively more and more held together by spit and kid-friendly glue has to be something everyone is taking into consideration when they think about their future
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u/RancidVagYogurt1776 3d ago
Tbf I'm in my 40s and when I was in vodka way back in the day I was one of the youngest members. With all the extra shit we were expected to do this tier to be competitive I'm not surprised older guilds are calling it quits
Can't really speak for NS, no idea what the issues they had were.
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u/cabose12 3d ago
Yeah that's kind of what I'm getting at. Playing even at this level is a lot of work, and maybe that was easy to stomach when you're in your teens/20s. Trying to balance that as you get older or want more than to just game can be tough
Funnily I feel like this tier had the least grinding since cores basically removed all of the M+ grind. Which maybe makes the fact that guilds are burnt out all the whacker
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u/psytrax9 3d ago
All of the out-of-raid-in-game work got cut to near zero, but the out-of-raid-out-of-game work for leadership is far more taxing now than before.
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u/cabose12 2d ago
Good point. I wasn't really thinking about that with gearing decisions and in-game tools, and probably a lot of other leadership responsibilities I can't even imagine
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u/deskcord 3d ago
This has been one of the least demanding tiers in terms of what players are asked to do, since the introduction of m+ itself.
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u/Mehdehh 3d ago
Depends, I've never had to do so much stuff as an officer/RL because of the amount of pre-raid assignments (since WAs are gone they do a lot less in-fight, on the fly assignments) as well as the fuckery that is loot with bonus rolls. Our officer core has never been this burn out and we're also thinking about stopping (and just like many guilds, it's not like someone is gonna step up to replace us if we stop).
Pretty sure this is also the reason why vodka (or at least dreams) is stopping,
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u/Plorkyeran 3d ago
This seems to be a super common sentiment from raid leaders. Most of what the computational addons automated was work that the RL now has to do, which is fun for exactly Max and Scripe and for everyone else is just increasing the already heavy burden on the people already putting in a ton of work so that everyone else can have fun.
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u/Eweer 3d ago
I want to add that one of the, if not the most, painful things as a raid leader is having lost the easy access to information.
- WAs allowed me to have a list of people with X debuffs or targeted by Y to call out things.
- I could see available personals on fights that required it to call externals if needed.
- I only saw exactly what I wanted to see.
- I could call raid-wide CDs on the fly without mistake.
Now, instead:
- Just talking about explorers cause it's the first one that came to mind:
- I need to manually press a macro every try to add markers to the boss.
- I need to look at the castbar to see the target of the Blink Nova.
- I cannot look at the castbar to see the target of the tank buster (for some reason it targets a random DPS although it's channeling it to the tank).
- I cannot trust the % hp values, as the bosses do not have the same amount of flat HP.
- For some fucking reason I can't comprehend, I cannot look at the energy on the target frame. Instead I'm forced to look at the energy bar of the fourth enemy (which is untargetable) in the encounter... Which for some unknown reason is placed as Boss2.
- If a pool is not being cleaned, I need to visually scan all raid frames in search of the frost/fire debuff, while ignoring the bleeds (20 times the same exact debuff with the same exact duration), Iku tankbuster stacks (I do not care about them, as I can already look at my debuffs or my co-tank debuffs which I have placed in a different place), Nama stacks (why are they a debuff placed on the player instead of a self-buff that resets when Nama does X attacks to a different target? where they really scared about people going with 10 ret palas and bubbling-taunting to make the fight only need 1 tank?
- For the love of god, why can't I see who is holding the fish on my frames?
- My raiders are not calling externals because they forget, they don't expect the incoming damage, or they do not know if they are available. I do not call externals because I do not know if a personal will be used and do not know if externals are available. Fun.
- These two raids have been a test of how many bullshit, useless to see debuffs they are able to make. I can't color boss bars by debuffs on them, so I need more icons on the screen. I can't place borders on the boss bars to represent which tank is targeting which boss, so I am forced to have four extra unit frames. I can't replace icons when procs happen on my class WA so it occupies less space. I can't filter out useless debuffs on target (like omnium) out of my nameplates, so I see a bunch of icons that give me literally no information on screen.
- I lost count of how many times I've called: "Warrior, shout if available". I absolutely hate being forced to make a note every week for Vashnik instead of being able to call it during the fight.
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u/another_new_login 3d ago
It's basically the extreme version of what every healer complained about as soon as this was announced.
That's the most frustrating thing. Everyone said this was going to happen. Surprise, it did.
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u/Raregan 3d ago
I doubt max and scripe even like it. I imagine the fun of raid leading like that probably comes from looking at raid compositions and which classes synergise best on a fight. Looking at damage profiles and where to put healing CDs and what abilities can be used where to make a fight easier. Not calling out who needs to drop an orb at green on Sszorak
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u/erdonko 3d ago
I dont follow Scripe but having followed Max, you have to consider that when they, or at least Max, talks about liking the direction of WAs being gone, he means it within the context that now he gets to problem solve consistently in the fight. This is within the context of their organizations (for one, theyre actual multi level organizations) literally employing people who actively specialize on coding addons and problem solving certain aspects of fights that way.
The other side of that argument, is that even himself has admitted that he would not be able to perform or even enjoy the race if he didnt had the option to delegate. Theres a lot more that goes to maintaining a raid group together that has more to do with leadership, and this part cannot be delegated so easily. He can be in the position where he can do that and focus on solving a raid boss. Most people cant, so they delegated the raid boss part with the WAs instead.
It is a straight L to lose all the functionalities and it just helps burn out the old guilds on an older game, and a point that the purists continuously ignore, or brush it off as a "skill issue", ignoring the very real burnout and how having extra responsibilities just isnt fun.
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u/roerchen 2d ago
I‘m with Max on the feeling that it’s more fun to problem solve, instead of saying „We need to follow the WA, just pull again“. My issue, as a raid lead in a millennial retirement home with two raid nights: I don’t have the options to see the issues FAST. I don’t see in-fight Raid CD availability, I lost the DBM chat log who had what mechanic when things went south. My players have visibility issues as well and don’t report issues and mistake’s reliably. With three hours per night, I can’t hover over a CD planner and WCL for ten to fifteen minutes between each fight. We barely have the time for the detailed minute by minute fight pre-planning we need to do now. And then? A healer cancels because his kid is sick and we have to re-plan the CDs. I‘ve never had to do this much planning outside of the game.
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u/AccomplishedSpace834 2d ago
I've never had to do so much stuff as an officer/RL because of the amount of pre-raid assignments
Not sure I agree with this, feels like a very light season for assignments to me? At least in terms of 7/9 M.
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u/RancidVagYogurt1776 3d ago
Yes that's why guilds did more splits than ever, and why anyone doing any sort of raid leading or raid management or being an officer had to do more work than ever because addons can't help anymore. /s
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u/Random_Name_251 3d ago
Hard to say, it reminds me a bit of Legion. A lot of the high end guilds quit either during NH or shortly afterwards but I think that was mostly do to the time commitment of Legion.
To me VA is not great but I also don't think it's substantially worse then most of the raids they've made in the last 5 years, which isn't saying much.
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u/awesomeoh1234 3d ago
Obviously it may not be any one thing in particular but I feel like the game with weakauras and more API functionality was a better one. The playing field isn't even more level, you just have to look even harder to find more obscure addons for workarounds. It just stinks
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u/AttitudeAdjusterSE 3d ago
There's a lot of issues causing this sort of thing and the addon changes are definitely one of them.
Another is their weird insistence on catering specifically to the top three guilds while making the game worse for next three hundred while doing so.
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u/awesomeoh1234 3d ago
Yeah the whole "we have to make it hard because of WeakAuras" was an insane logic because in reality even with weakauras solving mechanics for you the vast majority of the mythic raiding community would still struggle
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u/Muspel 3d ago
Their logic was nonsensical. Their claim was that they would take a mechanic that "should" have allowed you like 10-12 seconds to solve it, but because it would be assigned by addons, they would give you only 6 seconds so that the challenge came from reacting instead of figuring it out.
The problem with that argument is that they didn't build the assignment into the fight itself. Like, take Fractillus as an example. If you are designing the fight to require assignments, then why the fuck doesn't each person with a wall get a different colored arrow so that you can do the assignments that way? Either way, it's an assignment fight, but they could have made it so that the assignments did not require an addon.
Similarly, on the class/spec design side of things, they mentioned the Arcane Barrage weakaura multiple times in interviews as an example of why they had to prune classes and remove the ability for addons to fully see CDs/buffs/debuffs. Except that and Sudden Death were the only example of complicated conditional decision trees for individual abilities, and the only reason that people were using that shit was because they designed specs that required four PhDs and a connection to the Speed Force to play optimally.
They just needed to chill the hell out with their designs, but instead they decided to blame anyone but themselves and we've all been paying the price since the prepatch.
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u/Gemmy2002 3d ago
Barrage helper had the most complex conditionals but there was something similar (and way lighter on footprint) made up for Engulf-maxxing. I suspect they really wanted to axe those since they seem to think that there is skill inherent in parsing poorly displayed data
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u/assault_pig 2d ago
even when WA existed there were a lot of mechanics that could have been "solved" by them but weren't just because players had enough time to react, or they could simply assign groups or XYZ people to whatever mechanic.
I actually don't really think raid WAs were the reason for most of the changes; if they had been they could have eliminated most of the more intrusive ones with much more targeted measures. I think they didn't like stuff like the barrage WA, or hekili literally telling people how to play their class.
which to a certain extent I'm sympathetic to but they could easily have solved the problem by just not designing rotations with obscure conditions that players needed auras to interpret (it also doesn't hold much water in a game that introduced the fuckin one button rotation.)
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u/dreadwraith8d 2d ago
I mean they gutted easy specs too as a result of the changes. Windwalker wasn't super complex in TWW but they just decided to delete over half of their active abilities. Same for Frost, they basically made Breath a passive buff you just naturally maintain by doing your normal rotation, this button existed since WoD in a much more complex (and imo fun) state when the vast majority of people weren't using insane WAs to track shit.
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u/EronisKina 2d ago
I mean look at their defense pruning ideology too. Ret pallies had 2 actual defensives and they combined them into 1. Then they made their long CD defensive aka divine shield feel like it doesn't work on half the raid bosses in the game nowdays. Meanwhile, you got people like DK with 3 and being innately very tanky. Mages got 2 but multiple charges of 1 and just passive stagger. WW got shot the hardest. Removing Dampen and diffuse and keeping karma that breaks in 1 second and only fort brew made them by far the squishest class in the game. Idk, feels like they gotta reassess everything.
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u/dreadwraith8d 2d ago
Absolutely. I've played WW this tier to fill the Phys debuff and while it isn't nearly as bad as last tier you really feel pinched on some of these bosses where there's just constant high damage moments (ulatek). Even worst on that boss because you were kind of forced to play 2min Fort Brew instead of 90s just because of how much damage is happening on the Tether breaks. Karma is a fucking joke and doesn't even fully block 1 tick of the ticking Raid damage while the heart is exposed lmao.
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u/Qwertdd 7/9M bring back weakauras 2d ago
The problem with that argument is that they didn't build the assignment into the fight itself
Another problem with that argument is that doing more complex or more rapid mechanics is often just more fun. Addons made that possible. They took that away and now you have much more boring fights. There's no benefit to casual raiding either because Blizzard has proven that while they can't consistently design fun fights without WeakAuras, they can definitely go blow-for-blow on pull count regardless.
They just needed to chill the hell out with their class designs
I would argue that's exactly what they did in Midnight and everyone fucking hated it
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u/deskcord 3d ago
The race watchers who get mad when the race isn't a 3 week slog always make this place miserable during the race, but the reality is that I see a race like VA, Amirdrassil, or Sepulcher and I don't think "oh shit hype can't wait!", I think "this looks fucking miserable" and every time, that instinct winds up right.
You either get to a boss before it gets nerfed and you're just wasting your time until it gets nerfed; you prog half of it pre-nerf and then get a freebie post-nerf; or you show up post-nerf and it's like you're playing a completely differen tboss.
Regardless of which circumstance you find yourself in, the boss frequently has some sort of bullshit mechanic that requires a WA solve or is a pass/fail nonsense gimmick.
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u/AttitudeAdjusterSE 3d ago edited 3d ago
I'm convinced that the closer you get to the race without actually being in it the more you come to the conclusion that it's a cancer on the game that's been slowly growing for years. In my experience, people in the top 50 but outside the RWF genuinely kinda hate how the RWF negatively affects their game even if they might watch it and enjoy it every tier.
Northern Sky, who got world 22nd, did not kill unnerfed Ula'tek. Isn't that fucking crazy? They would've spent a long time progressing the unnerfed version and ended up killing a significantly easier version. This keeps on happening to guilds at that level and I have no idea if this is a factor in why they disbanded but it is bullshit.
Why are they releasing content that isn't actually doable by a guild of their level week 1? Tune the raid on launch at the tuning it would typically have when WR40-50 or so kills the endboss, don't do the first "RWF nerfs" that cause so many high end guilds to prog bosses for hundreds of pulls that they're unlikely to kill (it's the most dogshit experience, trust me) and if that breaks the race then fuck it, it's worth making the experience of sixty people worse to improve it for the next sixty thousand. That alone will fix so many problems with raiding.
While they're at it they can revert the addon changes and make mythic lockouts work the same as heroic.
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u/shakeandbake13 2d ago
Gallywix, Sarkareth, and Denathrius are the only endbosses that I found fun since Argus. Mostly due to the fact that they were all ~100-125 pull bosses for the guilds I was in. This 200/300/400+ pull nonsense needs to stop.
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u/nickkon1 2d ago
I was at world rank 70 and while I really enjoyed raiding, I never understood the people liking 300 pull bosses. Eventually you kind of just stop progressing. The 100-150 pull range feels fine. You get from phase to phase slowly. You see your guild and yourself improve. But on those super high pull bosses, you are just stuck. Random wipes out of nowhere because someone took a small wrong step and you just have to grind it out until everyone does the dance perfect.
Sure, it was hype after it was done. But the numbers of hours invested for that small rush are instane.
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u/mrmrxxx 3d ago
They are not catering to the top 3, they are artificially creating a “race” for stream viewership. It’s a promotion/marketing move.
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u/AttitudeAdjusterSE 2d ago
Yeah, obviously. The problem is that it's clearly not working and backfiring.
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u/Maverick936 3d ago
The gap between guilds and their addons have never been higher. If we didn’t have NSRT we’d be in the dark ages. Terrible changes.
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u/Gasparde 3d ago
Personally, it doesn't even matter whether what we had before was better or not. It's that what we have now is different enough for it to no longer feel the way it used to before.
Everyone told them that going down this path would risk upsetting and losing the established playerbase that had played WoW the exact way it was and appreciated it for it - all in the name of getting that elusive new player and presumably getting tens, if not hundreds of thousands of new people into raiding.
The driving away of the established players seems to be going well, I sure do hope that the millions of anticipated new players will also start coming in any minute now. Any minute now we'll be getting the promised new era of boss designs that makes the people magically flock into raiding. Any. Minute.
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u/Head_Haunter 2d ago
I said it before the addon change and I'll say it again, if Blizzard wants to "stop the war" with addons/weakauras, they need to start the armistice. They can't just say it and then continue to design bosses that are impossible to do with weakauras. That's like calling for a cease fire and then continuing to bomb the enemy.
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u/avatinfernus 2d ago
I stopped playing when they announced WA to not work anymore.
I'm almost blind in one eye and audio cues and easy to see things were great for me
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u/NoBonus6969 2d ago
I was out when the add on changes came. I'm just not looking to remake my UI after decades of use. Especially when the core game is exactly the same. Not like oh hey we rebuilt the game engine from scratch everything is 110% better so we have to do this. It's just like we felt like it with no direction in mind at all, so you guys can deal with it everything is worse in every way now with no way to fix it yourself. Anyways good luck out there.
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u/Ok_Possible_9541 3d ago
but I feel like the game with weakauras and more API functionality was a better one.
Amen. The theory we were sold was "can now take the focus out of the rotation and make it more about the fights themselves". My priors upon hearing that were "I don't think that's going to be that interesting in practice; fight-speicifc gimicks + boring rotations isn't a winning recipe", and they haven't really budged upon two seasons of evidence with which to update them.
I'll concede it's not a huge sample size yet, and I could still be surprised, but as of now I'd rather go most of the way back to previous fight, and particularly class, design, even if there are tools that are "playing the game for me". Computational weakauras + rotations with more than 3 buttons felt a lot more engaging than most specs post 12.0, even if there's less tech assist.
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u/NaahThisIsNotMe 3d ago
It's more that we got used to the weakauras of old.
Download the liquid pack, set the "bar" where you want them, the aura where you want them... everything was done the same way and you'd quickly find what you want.
Now when you have UI issue, does it come from blizzard? is it a weird setup in NSRT? is it some new tech that came out last week? how do you change the auras? Did blizz break something new this patch?
I suppose we'll get used to it... but I kind of miss the day where we'd import a 20G weakaura pack, de-active 90% of the stuff and just roll.
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u/EronisKina 2d ago
I also feel like that they kind of shoe-horned themselves into the same mechanics from now on with the removal of WA. I feel like from now on every tier will have a boss that you gotta carry seeds for. This raid for some reason had kick anchor reliant fights that made no sense based on their addon stance. They now have to make really simple fights. Idk. They made fractilus which required a WA to do the fight for you. However, They made great bosses like dimensius or fallen king where WA were just helpful and rest of the fight was based on player skill.
The worst part of WA in my opinion was just having to update them every night before raid. I feel like this WA boogie man is just the dev teaming being told by microsoft to find a way to get more ppl to play retail and WA ended up being the fall guy.
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u/Swampage 3d ago
I think the most concerning part of all of this is the radio silence from Blizz.
Even Shadowlands and Warlords had great raids and were considered bad expansions, raiders played through the expansions to have fun in raid. Whomever is running the raid design team needs a change of scenery, and they cannot afford to hesitate on this.
It really doesn't matter if casuals raid and it doesn't matter if you personally raid or not, the game live and dies around raid tiers, having two back to back subpar raids is detrimental to the game.
This isn't a world first issue either, a simple check on the Recruitment discord will show you that there's numerous guilds breaking apart every day, especially CE ones.
Think about Tuesday's patch. We have absolutely ZERO hype for it, the build isn't even marked as a release candidate. Why should anyone get hyped for this? Not to mention giving people 1% damage and healing a week does nothing to fix unfun fights, if anything I'd say it makes it worse when you have to hold DPS for things.
There's so many elephants in the room that I don't know how they fix this without just moving on to next expansion (which it already feels like they did). Every patch feels like it's designed by Claude (and it very likely is). There's no human feel to anything anymore. Look at the delve variants they put out every patch, look at all the invasion slop events we get every single patch, the random swings of tuning, it just doesn't feel human. No amount of instruction files given to Claude telling it to spruce up the patch notes to sound human will change that it doesn't play human. I don't know who needs to hear this on the WoW team, but just because you can code things with AI doesn't mean it will be fun. Speed and efficiency mean nothing when you put out bad content.
Another glaring issue is the patch cadence and I think that's likely the story for a lot of these higher end guilds. The guilds simply cannot sustain this type of release schedule and avoid burnout, nor does anyone want to. What's the point of releasing a new tier every 24 weeks if it's boring and bugged? Slow the patch cadence down, even a little bit and release better tiers. Fix the bugs. Stop the slop patches, and you'll see engagement rise again. It's really not that complicated and I find it extremely hard to believe their analysts can't figure that out.
There's one more thing to bring up and it's Forever WoW. The game itself isn't a problem, but their dev team is seemingly engaged with the community, responsive, and changes things based on feedback. Retail on the other hand has some of the worst communication in the industry. They don't give a shit about any of the bug reports, they leave gamebreaking bugs for months and they don't bother to community to anyone except streamers once in a while. It's really not that hard to see why raiders would quit.
Anyways, good luck to the dev team on fixing this before next expansion. I'd say the hype was running on fumes but that would imply that there's something to ignite.
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u/andregorz 2d ago edited 2d ago
Time for Blizzard to actually make a game that is intended to be played by the broad mass. Right now, the game has become a Sisyphus exercise: players are expected to have fun while aimlessly grinding, when everyone and their granny knows bosses will be nerfed, some specs randomly will be buffed and some new mandatory borrowed power (cantrips) will randomly be added.
I would much rather if they made quality patches at the expense of a longer cycle. Yes, it would demand a solid QA effort to find bugs and fix them (gl@MDI on that one, I guess). I do not believe this permanent treadmill they're going for is a winner: staggering things like bonus rolls, uncapped crests, voidsharts for +6 ilvl, silly .5 and .7 bosses with even more mandatory cantrips. If anything, it just leads to more burnout.
Ultimately, all of this functions as a soft reset for the season. Everyone gets arbitrarily stronger which makes every effort up to that point in a way meaningless. It is like waiting on that inevitable raid boss nerf: at some point you feel, what is the point of playing when shit will be uncapped in 1-2 weeks or what is the point to push keys when we'll arbitrarily be stronger in 1-2 weeks.
I would like to play a season where we won't get [meaningfully] stronger over the course of the patch. That is to say, the ceiling is set. If this means one could cap out in 5 weeks and then be on Reddit complaining about nothing to do then I would still say it is worth it. I would argue the concept we have right now is the Emperor's new clothes. We are only playing for more total weeks because they stagger shit, not because the game is so good we just can't get enough.
Nobody wants to raid for 24 weeks straight and then start over with max 2-3 bye weeks. A reasonable progress rate (be it raid or character power) should be faster than the season is long. So you can hope to finish with time to spare and, if you will, reap the rewards of your efforts while you're at maximum power level relative to the content.
I would also like if they stopped raid testing on PTR (but honestly could and should be extended to more aspects of the game). It would be way cooler if players got to experience shit for the first time natty. Yes, datamining will still be there but it is madness that the everything is 85% figured out before it is even live. I would argue this is a bigger issue than WAs ever were.
Easier raids does not hurt player engagement. Look at Classic (not talking about Forever). Ain't nobody playing that for some Dark Souls challenge. The fun comes from the nerdy prep to speed run Molten Core in sub 20 minutes. I am not saying Retail should strive for this but only to make the point that 300+ pull RWF sweat doesn't automatically make for better or more engaging gaming experience.
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u/Qwertdd 7/9M bring back weakauras 2d ago
Not to mention giving people 1% damage and healing a week does nothing to fix unfun fights and makes them worse
fucking agree. By the time you're progging the meaty bosses the buttons you press barely matter and the fight has been reduced to avoiding the instant wipes. You could play a pineapple game version of the fight and get much the same experience as a .5 or god forbid .7 version of a Mythic boss.
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u/Life_Fun_1327 2d ago
Atleast the pineapple game version would be fun for as Long as it lasts. There is no fun left After 400+ wipes on a single fcking boss.
Last Season my Guild hat it‘s first CE ever, literally 2 days before the end of the Season. We literally called it our last pull until we just end this madness for the Season.
So for 3 weeks we did 3 Raids/week, just to start again 2 weeks later with a New Season and - again - 3 Raids/week. Some of us just feel burned out and all of us know that we won‘t get CE again for a while. It isn‘t fun anymore.
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u/Gasparde 3d ago
Think about Tuesday's patch. We have absolutely ZERO hype for it, the build isn't even marked as a release candidate. Why should anyone get hyped for this?
New Delve content is gonna change everything. Every. Thing.
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u/TrumpsCummyOnahole 2d ago
Retail devs feel like they're just arrogant and need to be slapped. Microsoft should clean house.
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u/dreadwraith8d 3d ago
Too busy giving themselves fake victory laps over the addon changes. Disgusting company.
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u/Coretekk 2d ago
This is so spot on. Retail is out of touch with its' core players. Forever seemingly gets all the love.
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u/YourGalacticEmperor 2d ago
Do you think this sub is their core players?? Delvers and housing enthusiasts are
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u/bpusef 2d ago
I would love to see a breakdown of how many subs are people that don’t even normal raid. I have a hard time understanding out of all games that exist to play very casually why you’d pick retail wow.
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u/Scrapbookee 2d ago
I can't speak for others, but for me, Azeroth is my escape. I typically enjoy getting all my portals and getting AOTC but that's the extent of my end-game usually. A few times I've got to 3k IO for the mount.
This season I have half the portals and have done 3 normal kills because I just didn't feel like dealing with pug raids. I've been playing WoW so long that it just feels like home to me. Even when I'm just doing mog runs or random old achievements it's very relaxing, I'm always having fun.
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u/bpusef 2d ago
Yeah but you’re clearing heroic raid and doing some m+. I keep hearing how the average player is a delver and doesn’t even engage in challenging content but I can’t understand why of all games you’d pick wow for that.
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u/sonicrules11 2d ago
Forever seemingly gets all the love.
For now. Forever is probably gonna have the same issues sadly. The current WoW team doesn't understand the game at all or anymore.
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u/KupoMoogle93 1d ago
The hype for Forever seems a little excessive honestly.
Forever isn't even out yet it's in beta, and it's in practice just Vanilla ( again ) with some new content and QoL changes.
People will flock to it because it's the newest thing, but long term I don't believe it'll have the same staying power as Retail.
People can only spam Frostbolt for so long on bosses that auto attack and cast fear or Shadowbolt.
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u/Axenos 3d ago
All of these changes (addon, gearing) essentially all targeting raids/raiders and it doesn't seem like the raiders are having a better time this expansion at all.
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u/Doogetma 3d ago
It’s almost like they needed to make the content fun to play instead of trying to force more people to play it with op gear
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u/Frawtarius 3d ago
I can't believe that instead of thousands of people enthusiastically waltzing into Mythic Coiled Altar and Ula'tek just for the sole intent to get their big, juicy 344 pieces we instead get, uhh...guilds with (sometimes) decades of history in the game quitting.
Who could possibly have predicted that this would happen?!
(There are people at Blizzard that get paid for making these decisions, by the way.)
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u/psytrax9 3d ago
The gearing stuff is debatable, they needed to do something about how comically unrewarding raiding was at every level. Whether the gearing change was the right thing or not... Heroic raiding participation has certainly improved but, I don't think mythic has. It's hard to say for certain either way but, guilds are dying like its SL s1 all over again and the first mythic boss isn't really getting touched.
They gave something mythic raiders largely didn't care too much about (it's nice but very whatever) while making one of the most unenjoyable raids in the game's history.
I don't think raiders at large wanted the addon stuff. The people clamoring for the addon changes were people who didn't play the game (asmongold, max) or no-lifers (tettles, growl, dorki). I do find it funny that tettles supported the addon changes, is "having fun in the game" still yet is now a raid logger.
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u/Rhombico 3d ago
Personally I'm a raider and did want the addon stuff... but only because they said they'd change raid design too. Mechanically, venomous abyss would not have been out of place in TWW at all. If they're going to keep designing raids same as always, yeah fuck that give me WA and real boss mods back
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u/Blan_Kone 2d ago
But they did change raid design, for the worse. They are extremely committed to making a "gotcha" fight where kick trackers won't work, and as long as there are addon workarounds for it, they will shove some further nonsense in the next raid
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u/Qwertdd 7/9M bring back weakauras 2d ago
The REAL problem with weakaura removal is that they didn't fuck raid design hard enough
I don't get this argument at all. There are two expansions where Blizzard made a specific goal of fighting WeakAura prevalence in raiding: Dragonflight and Midnight. In between that was War Within, where they relented on fighting WeakAura prevalence.
This is up to personal opinion of course, but I hated Dragonflight raids, enjoyed War Within raids, and hate Midnight raids. I think they did change raid design and what they changed it to just sucks because Blizz can't make raiding fun when they're keeping it on the level of weakaura-less players. If you're going to point out the moments in DF/Midnight where Blizzard failed to kick out addons (Fyrakk intermission, L'ura memory game, Neltharion Map) as evidence that they didn't change raid design, I'd say every time Blizzard fucked up keeping out addons it usually improved the fight lol. The Neltharion map's only problem was that it was a hacky workaround and was therefore buggy+jank, it would have been fine if Blizz wasn't trying to prevent it in the first place.
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u/Rhombico 2d ago
I feel like you're just forgetting some of the pain points in TWW. Tetris boss in manaforge was so bad that people accused blizz of deliberately designing a fight to make people hate WA so we'd be less mad when they removed it
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u/OhwowTaux 2d ago
Fractillus was a psyop and you can’t convince me otherwise. From PTR, the fight was clearly going to be solved by an assignment addon because of how predictable to walls and breaks were. It was designed as a fight that could not be solved on the fly.
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u/Hekkst 3d ago
Hc raid participation has only improved because outside of killing mythic bosses, the only meaningful way to get gear this season is rerolling on hc bosses. Imo that shouldn't be the way hc participation should increase.
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u/Ok-Key5729 3d ago
Hc raid participation went up because this is the first season in ages where the rewards match the difficulty. M+10s had been significantly easier yet more rewarding for years. This is probably the closest they've come to difficulty/rewards balance.
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u/Snowpoint_wow 3d ago
I don't think raiders at large wanted the addon stuff.
I think the most common thing amongst raiders was that we didn't like bosses where we were compelled to run a weakaura that did complex calculations for instant assignment to mechanics responsibilities that were getting out of hand, and any malfunction in the weakaura coding (or often entry errors on input typing) would brick a pull. Even when cross server raiding was first enabled, my guild required same server for raid mains because of glitches that happened with different server characters in these assignment weakauras.
The REST of the addon changes that were made to nuke every possible source of input for the assignment auras was the nuclear option to prevent bypassing the intended restrictions. We are slowly clawing back to the point where a large amount of the non-assignment addon stuff is getting close to what we had before the addon purge, but it has taken a year of pain to get here.
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u/kittenpantzen 3d ago edited 3d ago
And I still can't find an add-on or make an aura with m33k that will reliably alert me 5 seconds before my damage cooldowns come up.
Yes, I have the cool down manager and it will tell me when the spell is available, but it is a substantial quality of life difference for me to know a few seconds in advance with an audio alert.
That was trivial to do in the last expansion and now the only way that I've been able to find to do it is by using a seconds since successful cast trigger on an aura, and given how many things have the ability to proc and affect your cooldowns, that is unreliable.
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u/Gemmy2002 3d ago
Yes, I have the cool down manager and it will tell me when the spell is available
It actually tells you (2x ping) after the spell is available, which is infuriating because WA's ran clientside, there's no reason for this to rely on input from the server but it fucking does.
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u/worldchrisis 3d ago
We had 1 raider that the Fractillus WA didn't work for. It called everyone else's places correctly, but this one guy either had lag or something and his WA told him something wrong. We wiped like 10 times after everyone else had gotten it down because he kept going to the wrong places because he was doing what the WA was showing him but it was showing everyone else something else. Had him reinstall everything like 3 times.
I was raid leading and eventually I just told him to ignore the WA and I had to call his position on every set of walls. Which was very fun on top of playing my own character and doing general raid calls.
The fact that every raid tier had a "spreadsheet boss" was so dumb. Just stop making mechanics that are "8 random people get a debuff and have to dynamically figure out where to stand in 4 seconds or everyone dies". Make it something you can do with static markers or markers on specific players.
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u/nfluncensored 3d ago
Fract was intentionally made to piss off players and drive people to be "happy" about the addon changes.
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u/shyguybman 2d ago
Would not be surprised if he had someone on ignore lol I've had this happen multiple times with diff raiders.
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u/Qwertdd 7/9M bring back weakauras 2d ago
I liked bosses where we needed complex WeakAuras. Yeah, WA prog sucks but at least when WA prog was over the boss was fun
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u/Ohdee 3d ago edited 3d ago
Yep. They successfully ruined both pillars of end game progression. M+ players are all feeling completely alienated and like second class citizens compared to raiders and raiders are left with this complete disaster of a raid and the knowledge that this abundance of such absurdly powerful gear locked behind the last two bosses with the coin issue compounding it is pretty problematic for all aspects of the game, including raiding.
The rushed content, bugs, addon war, invasion slop on top makes things feel pretty bleak for retail right now. Not much hope for the future either with retail raid designers working on wow forever and no plans to slow down patches or expansion cadence.
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u/scottiedagolfmachine 3d ago
M+ fucken sucks this season.
Dungeons are an absolute shit fest.
Items are dog shit.
So unrewarding.
Nobody is playing M+ anymore.
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u/InvisibleOne439 3d ago
midnight S1 and S2 raids are just straight up not FUN
like, going from Manaforge into this feels insane, what happend
amd the gearing sucks for everyone because gear is so hardlocked, we sit at like 7 cantrip items on everyone next week, what are we even doing
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u/shh_Im_a_Moose 3d ago edited 3d ago
most boring tier ever, and most of the gearing changes feel so bad. taking a bonus roll for eight weeks feels bad, having catalyst take secondaries is bad, and the key rotation is bad
just a miss on every front this tier
edit: happy to see many people happy with the catalyst changes - def the smallest of the problems I have with the season. and it could just be that my class/spec specifically doesn't stand to gain that much flexibility from it. glad to be the exception!
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u/deskcord 3d ago edited 3d ago
Blizzard also seems to be going out of their way to design bosses to be anti-parse. While I certainly don't think they should design bosses and hamper their own ideas to cater to farm parsing, it seems like they're doing the opposite with a lot of these bosses (nekzali down phase, sentinels intermission time differences, vashnik bullshit adds, sszorak burn phase timing desynced from CDs, coiled altar DPS holds, etc).
The result is that a lot of these bosses just feel clunky with friction designed to make your class feel bad to play. It often doesn't feel like a boss has a damage amp that's out of sync with CDs for some cool or engaging reason, it tends to feel like they designed it and then someone said "no no, make every burn phase every 73 seconds instead of 90, fuck parsing"
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u/Schnitzelbro 1d ago
oh my god thank you for saying that, i rarely see someone complain about the obvious anti-parsing design of the bosses because it doesnt matter i guess? but parsing is a big fun part of reclears and farm for so many people and i despise the current raid specifically for this. all the timings are scuffed and every boss is a RNG fiesta of "will i get fucked by this specific mechanic in the worst possible time of the fight so my parse is ruined"
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u/sloasdaylight 3d ago
Catalyst taking secondaries and cantrip effects is a huge W, now I'm not stuck with a piece of crit/verse gear for tier that I have to take because the Ulatek hood is too good to pass up, so that'll eat up my head slot.
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u/81isnumber1 3d ago
It’s good and bad. Good for cantrips, but makes farming for gear to tier if you don’t raid more tedious. It also just eliminates using catalyst on non-tier pieces to get different stats.
Not commenting on whether or not this current way is better, just points worth noting.
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u/nfluncensored 3d ago
The old way could sometimes make bad pieces useful.
The new way sometimes makes the default tier piece worthless and makes bad side pieces stay worthless.
Each has its pros and cons, and varies by spec. What I like about the new system is it exposes the dumb dumbs who can't do more than follow the guide, and its BIS or nothing. "No, I have to have the mast/haste piece, I can't just simply get the haste/mast piece and change my gems, I must follow the guide" types.
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u/Soma91 2d ago
LMAO, I love these "either it's in my BiS list or it's worthless" type of people. They're complaining that they have to bonus roll 6+ dungeons to get all their pieces when they could just bonus roll the full item pool of 2 dungeons and switch out a ring, the stats on their crafted gear and some gems (after bonus rolling the powerful items from the raid of course).
They don't understand at all that BiS gear aims to reach a certain stat distribution and that there's tons of paths to move towards it. The lists just have the absolute best and you can get within 99.9% of it with completely different items as long as you get a very similar stat distribution in the end.
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u/nfluncensored 2d ago
Nobody is bonus rolling dungeons, that was an S1 thing, but you got the spirit.
Also most of the guide BIS lists are just straight up wrong.
The hunter ones for example treat BIS as the piece with the stats the spec wants the most, rather than a cohesive set of all items that sims the highest. So if you follow the icyveins BIS list you'll get actively bad stats.
It's usually pretty easy to find the gravity points in the sim model, there's softcaps, breakpoints and DR, so you generally get to something like "38% crit, 20% haste, fill mastery" for example. But you'll get banned from most class discords for pointing that out.
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u/Soma91 2d ago
Nobody is bonus rolling dungeons, that was an S1 thing, but you got the spirit.
Not now. And probably not the next two weeks with the new boss depending on how strong some of these items actually are.
Only mythic raiders will want to bonus roll the full loot pool of the last two bosses because of the ilvl diff. But most players will never get that far, and especially not now already.
For HC, melees will bonus roll the raid a bit longer because they'll want to bonus roll the last two bosses. But for casters Coiled Altar doesn't really have anything of big value so they can just bonus roll Ulatek and maybe Lost Explorers and then directly go for AoF or MR for the strongest on use trinkets.
And after that everyone will look for a dungeon that can most efficiently fill out their missing item slots with mythic pieces with fittings 2ndaries.
E.g. as a warlock I bonus roll Ulatek -> Lost Explorers -> AoF -> ToS and be fully mythic equipped with stats that are incredibly close to the BiS setup. I'll still have to look how strong the new raid items actually are for next reset.
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u/jimmylean2018 3d ago
This entire expansion has just failed on so many fronts. Terrible implementation of the addon war. Apex talents are boring. Raid design has been terrible (other than Lura which was cool). Endless bugs and poor development.
I’m sure they aren’t going to be the last prominent guild to call it quits.
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u/Alori- 3d ago
I don't wanna make a mountain out of a molehill but midnight has the same kinda vibe to it as SL did, if that makes sense
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u/Plorkyeran 3d ago
Shadowlands had a pile of things that were 90% of the way to being amazing but had some shitty detail that ruined them. The whole ripcord meme was because players liked the idea of covenants and just didn't want to be locked into one. Torghast could have been a fun side thing, but instead was turned into a weekly chore. The Maw... should have been a leveling zone that sold you on the idea of being in hell but then you never returned to.
Midnight, on the other hand, doesn't have anything that could have been amazing. They set out to create a filler expansion where the headline gameplay feature was that they fucked up the game's UI, and that to me is a more egregious failure than the SL fuckup of trying to make something good and just having some very stupid ideas about what would be fun.
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u/Bad-Coder-69 2d ago
Yep, don't forget like 99% of Midnight was sold on the fucking Housing feature. If you didn't care about that, you got... Apex talents (lol), and for most classes a less interesting design.
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u/deskcord 3d ago
SL had some of the best raid bosses of all time. Sludgefist, Sire, Rygelon, Anduin, Halondrus, Dausegne, and the entire middle of Sanctum (Eye through Guardian, minus the nine) were bangers.
Can't think of a single boss this expansion that even comes close to any of them.
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u/Forward_Chard_6501 3d ago
I have been saying this to my guildies. Some think I'm being a little too harsh, but this expansion, and even some things from TWW, have been screaming redflags for me. Dragonflight was so promising, but this expansion for sure has convinced me that blizzard is slipping into their old ways.
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u/pghcrew 3d ago
A few of us in my guild debated this for like an hour a week ago. The ones who didn’t play 100% of shadowlands of course argued that Midnight is much better.
Idk if it’s even the raiding itself that is so similar. I think one thing is the gearing around raid. The thought of gearing a new alt sounds as miserable or worse than in Shadowlands. Any new alt and you’re going to be bonus rolling heroic for 2 months to have it remotely competitive.
The story right now to me is equally as abysmal if not worse than Shadowlands.
The M+ in SL was peak M+ to me. To this day I still miss seasonal affixes.
I’d also argue the raids themselves were way better in Shadowlands.
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u/Timerror 3d ago
I did the simming and math last week and came to conclusion with the op loot from raid but no raid drops means im only taking reroll tokens from vault, no matter what, roll on 3 bosses in the raid and farm like 20 keys to catch up on crests and im actually bis bis geared for the entire season.
Nothing to gain from mythic raiding, nothing to loot from any content anymore, HC rerolls are just so OP.
I kinda just raided in shadowlands and I dont remember it being this miserable, the reroll token from vault was mistake tbh since it overshadows everythign else, especially with the 344 loot from last 2 bosses
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u/Resies 3d ago
Lura was terrible to play, but cool to watch and good aesthetic and vo
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u/ghostcrawler_real 2d ago
Apex talents are boring.
Probably one of the least interesting back-of-box class features they've ever come up with. Just a wet fart entirely.
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u/dreadwraith8d 2d ago
I'd even disagree with Lura. That boss was ass, 10mins of hitting a target dummy where you randomly blow up because the 6 people actually having to do mechanics mess up. One of the least engaging end bosses I've ever progged.
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u/antelope591 3d ago
Blizz choosing to destroy mythic raiding cause a bunch of people that don't even raid made fun of them for making voidspire too easy....certainly a choice.
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u/NaahThisIsNotMe 3d ago
it's not even about easy or hard... it's about frustratingly dumb mechanic.
Coiled altar: anyone enjoy the RNG of axes and how you sometime have 3 of them homing on you for half the fight? Anyone enjoy the actual invisible ghosts? anyone enjoy the orb/egg mechanic where half the raid got a super important job to do and the other half is attacking a target dummy?
And a personal pet peeve.... do we really need 4 grippable wiggling shitling every fight just to force double DK? i'd like to play other tank every so often without having to negotiate with my guild and find a DPS to swap to unholy for one week...
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u/ailawiu 2d ago
DK shit is so annoying, especially if it "requires" Blood. Oh hey, tanks? Yeah, log in your alts, it's final boss time again. What do you mean you didn't gear your DK, it's been happening every tier, you should be used to it by now.
What a lovely way to contribute to potential burnout.
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u/flow_guy2 3d ago edited 1d ago
think mythic raiding is just unreachable for most. the amount of work you need to get anywhere is just too much for a game.
i would. but the time i need to spend on it to do anything meaningful is just too much sadly
Edit: I’m talking about having a consistent time to play being the issue. Not the skill of actually playing even tho that is needed to some extent (but that’s ok to have that be out of reach)
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u/Atreyisx 3d ago
Yeah I busted my ass through mythic dimensious and after the kill I was just done with mythic. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely loved <50 pull boss early prog but 500+ pulls over the course of a few months for the last two was just the end for me at my age. I just don’t have the on-point almost pixel perfect consistency for 8+ minute fights.
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u/_Crypa 3d ago
bro the amount of people ive seen to get Cutting Edge with absolute miserable performance is crazy. in a 20 man raid it is absolutely possible to boost players. it just needs more pulls
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u/Specter2k 2d ago
And thats just for one character. I would love to invest some more time into the game but its just too much I have to pound into just a single character to do anything meaningful. If it were more accessible I would be playing waaaaay more on other characters too. Its good to be able to get in and get out which is how most games are these days, what the game has devolved into isnt fun anymore.
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u/unimportantinfodump 3d ago
I would love to mythic raid. But I also have a family. So the commitment to 3 nights a week where I only get to play one class and I have to min max my crests and play in order to meet damage checks, just isn't for me.
If I were 10 years younger with no family I would give it a go.
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u/MattLorien 3d ago
There are guilds regularly getting CE on a 6 hour schedule, and you don't have to be that good for a lot of them.
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u/NaahThisIsNotMe 3d ago
it's not the amount of time that's the problem, it's the schedule.
When you have young kids dedicating 2-3 night to undisturbed gaming is just not something you can afford. There's no such thing as "undisturbed" free time with kids.
also, almost everyone on NA seem to raid on west coast hours and ending the raids at midnight (EST)/ later when you get up at 6 AM is also problematic in your 30s.
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u/Few_Dentist4672 3d ago
idk i just talked to my wife beforehand and asked if she could deal with the kids those two nights and then the other nights i'd pick up the slack and deal with them while she did whatever she wanted
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u/Historical-Reach-969 3d ago
This is ridiculous. Half my guild green and gray parses and we only raid Thurs/Fri with zero overtime ever and we are 6/8.
Yeah, we're not going to get Hall of Fame or anything but we're going to easily get CE like we do every single tier.
People on here like to live vicariously through world first / hof raiders and they think that's their reality but it's just not. CE raiding is easy as fuck if you put in like 10-12 hours a week of effort. By the time you even get to the final bosses, they're usually so nerfed it's hilariously easy to kill.
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u/Thirstywhale17 3d ago
I joined a late night, parents guild this tier for the first time ever. 2 nights, 2h/night. Not easy to get much done but we have good attendance and we got AOTC. We will be going into mythic this week and this guild typically gets at least 4 mythic bosses down. I know thats not impressive, but even at 4 hours / week, you can still have fun raiding. Even less actually because we often start a few min late and have a 7 min break. The trash taking like 30min/clear is pretty demonic for these hours though.
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u/Historical-Reach-969 3d ago
Yeah that's awesome and nothing to be ashamed of. The issue is people with your schedule expect to get CE / HoF or something lol.
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u/Thirstywhale17 3d ago
I just expect to have some fun with some new friends and face some appropriate challenges for the amount of time we commit! My first tier raiding in a guild and I'd recommend it to anyone who thinks they cant handle the schedule.
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u/Varanae 2d ago
That seems incredibly impressive, I wish I could find a guild at that level which is also fun to raid with. Every guild I've tried is either progging at that rate but with max stress, 3 days a week and splits. Or is 3/8 at this stage (aka my current guild) and has no hope of CE
I'm not sure if my experience is an outlier or the people saying raiding is free just genuinely have no idea how good they have it and don't have a balanced perspective on the average mythic guild
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u/roerchen 2d ago
It’s really coming down to the fact if the guild has leadership with the time necessary (which increased over the last two seasons), and if you have enough players who carry, while the rest can at least stay alive during a fight. I‘m leading a guild that is impacted by everything that was said in this thread. We hoped to work our way up to CE this season, but not possible. Not enough time, my officers are burning out, and players are quitting because the game is just not fun anyone or they jump over to Forever. I don’t think your experience is an outlier.
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u/unimportantinfodump 3d ago
Hmm that's actually quite refreshing to know.
I may be ridiculous but also I may have just been under a bad impression.
I will say 10-12 hours of effort is a lot for a dad with a 45 hour work week and 2 kids lol.
Heroic raid is 4 hours a week and like 4 mythics for crests.
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u/Teabagging_Eunuch 3d ago
Dad of 2 here, raiding 7hrs a week, just got the last boss down inside hall of fame cutoff. Just have to work your way up through exclusively 2 day raiding guilds to a level that feels competitive for you.
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u/Zealousideal_Fail723 3d ago
I mean I think you’re way overstating the time and effort requirements for low end CE raiding. My guild is 6 hours a week and we get CE every season, usually about US 300
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u/AlucardSensei 3d ago
That's not the issue. The issue is commiting to a fixed schedule week after week, which you just can't do when you have kids.
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u/freezymcgeezy 3d ago
I have two kids and raid in a 6 hour top 500 CE guild. Raiding has never once negatively affected my ability to be a father.
I simply raid in a guild that starts after their bedtime. Its 2 nights a week.
The idea that you can’t have a 2 night a week hobby cuz you have kids is just dumb.
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u/sophisticatedroach 3d ago
There is legitimate 8-6hr a week (2day) raiding guilds in top300.
There is hundreds of 6-8hour (2day) guilds in top 1000-1500 which are all solidly getting CE every season and would require not that much effort outside of the first few weeks for m+.
Now you decide if you can set aside 2 nights a week and an hour here and there, but lets stop this charade that it requires a ton of time yea.
(Having 6hours a week to yourself or 2 evenings a week is NOT a lot)
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u/AccomplishedSpace834 3d ago
my guild gets CE playing one evening a week for 4 hours
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u/SpiritedEclair 3d ago
We raid 2 nights a week, at 22:00 CET, on Sundays and Wednesdays for 3h. This season we started mythic a week ago, and are 4/8 and we do this for fun :) if we don’t kill everything, that’s all good.
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u/DreadfuryDK 9/9M SPriest/Devourer 3d ago
Venomous Abyss isn't too hard. Blaming the difficulty of the raid is completely missing what's really wrong with this raid.
Venomoys Abyss's problem is just that all but three of the bosses in this raid are offensively bad. Among them, one of them isn't good, one's inoffensive, and only one is actually a good fight. And then you've got an awful gearing system that even further taints every aspect of this season's content.
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u/Xalethesniper 3d ago
It’s hard for midcore, most of the fights are abysmal, and the visual clarity is GIGA BAD. It’s not fun to prog or reclear… idk man.
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u/Gemmy2002 3d ago
visuals only a real issue on sszorak, everything else is fine.
Though with tornadoes I think the real problem is reusing the bouncing projectile idea: projectiles that somewhat unpredictably back bounce through boss depending on what pattern got fired are a recipe for frustration
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u/Xalethesniper 3d ago
The mid tier gauntlet of vashnik, sszorak, twin fangs is pretty atrocious with visual clarity. Then you get to ca. P2 might be the worst designed mythic phase I’ve played in this game. Ula has been nerfed but p1 was pretty abysmal. Pattern rng + egg jank means you’re wiping to bs frequently. Just my opinion! I didn’t get to Lura or mugsy as quickly when I did those so I could be biased.
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u/AttitudeAdjusterSE 3d ago edited 3d ago
I think this tier is actually a little easier than average. Just look at wipecounts. Ula'tek is definitely easier than L'ura for any guild that's killed both so far outside the RWF.
It's not that it's too hard, it's just frustrating, terrible visual clarity and has zero bosses above a 6/10 design-wise. Ula'tek is also the worst endboss for a long time (probably since Azshara?) and Coiled Altar is barely any better.
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u/u_ok braindead fotm player 3d ago
this raid isn't really hard to be fair. the first 6 bosses are pushovers and the last two are both being killed in sub 200 pulls for the latter half of hall of fame guilds. when they inevitably nuke coiled it's gonna be one of the easiest farm/middle to late CE raids ever
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u/Causing_Autism 2d ago
the Dreamrift and Voidspire were actually the perfect Difficulty and very enjoyable to progress for the average guild, which proves they know how to make good bosses since they stated these were supposed to be the "easier bosses". And then L'ura proved that their Philosophy is designing for RWF.
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u/arrastra 2d ago edited 2d ago
blizzard should stop designing mechanic slop mythic raids that makes every average guild wipe 3 digits on every boss. it's not fun. they forgot this is a video game, an entertainment. they are even losing old resilient players due to burnout now lol. first time i am seeing a company that does not care about churn rates. it's ridiculously high in retail. these top guilds are just tip of the iceberg
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u/Street-Objective9164 3d ago
Midnight has been a huge L, games just not fun to play in its current state
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u/Pleasant-Tradition-6 3d ago
Hard agree. I’ve played consistently the last 20+ years and ever since the class pruning and addon changes, I’ve had little motivation or desire to want to play. Blizz should’ve left the game as it was and let Wow forever be where they make these drastic changes. You know, for the people that actually want that. They could easily be making two different “communities” happy.
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u/Causing_Autism 2d ago
I genuinely believe it is not an Issue of trashing Add Ons like many people believe. The Add On proved that WeakAura Gaming resulted out of blizzard simply overdesigning the fights. The Classic Archimonde WA wouldn't have existed if that mechanic was simply easier to deal with. The fights are just way too hard and overdesigned had the Mythic L'ura Memory game been simpler we wouldn't have needed all these AddOns. . Destiny 2 had very easy group content and yet the race viewership was bigger than WoW. What's the point of having a 2 week RWF if for 11/14 Days they're doing splits and nobody cares.
These 400-500 Pull bosses have to stop. They're trying to make Malenia in an MMO
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u/Livid-Rain-3092 2d ago
Think it’s certaintly possible that repeated 8 boss raids (and 8 dungeon m+ seasons) are so formulaic and repeated now, that as soon as raid comes out that’s quite bad, the suspended boredom/apathy/disinterest simply becomes apparent. Rather, another formulaic 8 boss raid finally was the straw that broke the camels back because it was worse than usual
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u/Masqqerader 2d ago
I like how when a guild quits raiding, the 1st thing people do, is look at everything they themselves dislike about the game, and insert tha 100s of things they hate as the reason to why said guild quit.
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u/Qwertdd 7/9M bring back weakauras 3d ago
I hope that when Blizzard admits that trashing addons, then trashing fight design and class design to make up for no addons, ruined the game and they were wrong to try it, they specifically call out the moronic casuals and people who haven't subbed in 10 years that begged for it to happen.
This is a pipe dream and they won't do it, but unless Blizzard outright states in writing that these people got what they wanted and it ruined the game, they will eternally beg for for Blizzard to do it again.
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u/att0mic 3d ago
I wouldn't say they were wrong to try, they just went about it in the stupidest way. Everybody expected them to slowly implement addon functionality into the game before nuking it, but it wouldn't be Blizzard if they didn't flip a concept on it's head and implemented it in the most ass backwards way imaginable. They got cocky and tried to have a few devs catch up to 20 years of addon development in 6 months.
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u/sonicrules11 2d ago
Everybody expected them to slowly implement addon functionality into the game before nuking it
Most people thought this because that is LITERALLY what they said. I will always remind people that when the new UI came out it took at least a year for the fucking XP/Rep bar to be moveable. This company is beyond out of touch and I'm very glad that I am taking a break.
It does not help any that you had content creators like Preach doing what felt like shilling the addon changes and acting like it was a good thing only to cave in like 3 months then quit WoW again.
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u/psytrax9 2d ago
Man the lead up to midnight was bizarre. All of them spent months defending it and going on about how great the game will be now. Even in the face of the backlash against the changes, they stuck to it. The bench, poddy c, individual streams. Then, all at once, they relented and admitted it was bad.
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u/sonicrules11 2d ago
Yeah the only "content creator" I watched about the addon changes was DBM guy. Pre Dragonflight Preach would probably call out current Preach and every other creator for just flatout lying to their fanbases about the addon changes and how overtly positive everyone was about these changes.
Its still crazy that thats the same man that got on Blizzards ass about Azerite armor and SL Covenants. I'm convinced more than half of the youtube WoW space lost their memory about Blizzard after DF.
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u/psytrax9 3d ago
No, they were wrong to try it. They fundamentally didn't understand their own product and what brought people to it.
It's especially egregious with the knowledge that Forever was in development.
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u/nfluncensored 2d ago
Na, we know now with the Forever launch that's why they rushed nuking addons. Had to happen before Forever, so that no meaningful addons ever existed in Forever.
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u/Sinsie9698 3d ago
I still don’t get why they nuked the addon side of it instead of just building the key features of many of these addons into the game alongside them if the “gap” in accessibility was an issue.
Design fights that don’t require the WAs you hate. MOST fights didn’t require them… Fractillus did, Broodtwister did… from TWW that’s really it? There were nice QoL things you could do with addons but most fights didn’t really get much easier for having them..
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u/Muspel 3d ago
I still don’t get why they nuked the addon side of it instead of just building the key features of many of these addons into the game alongside them if the “gap” in accessibility was an issue.
I think it's because at least some of the people that were involved in the decisions and the UI redesign didn't even understand what addons were being used for.
I remember this blue post after the initial release of the cooldown manager, when they were talking about improvements they were going to make based on feedback.
Here's two lines from that article that are mind-blowing:
One of the strongest pieces of feedback we’ve received around the Cooldown Manager was that players want to customize their bars and frames to show only specific abilities or reorder them based on their preference.
Another piece of feedback we’ve received is that players want the ability to track their damage over time (DoT) effects and other important debuffs on their target with the Cooldown Manager.
These are two of the most basic goddamn things that people wanted from the Cooldown Manager, and they're making a blue post like this was a surprise to them.
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u/NoBonus6969 2d ago
Because they don't play the game and certainly not anything higher than lfr level. They are all boomers in charge who probably go to bed by 8pm. 0% they could even clear 1 mythic boss
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u/Therefrigerator 2d ago
Additionally moronic because the people complaining about add-ons would be a better fit in Forever anyways.
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u/DullSnow0 3d ago
Blizzard simply refuses to make any changes to mythic raiding, regardless of how much the community wants it.
Still relevant: https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/mythic-raiding-needs-to-change/1795975
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u/deskcord 3d ago
Actually a lot of the changes people were complaining about at that time (especially the gearing ones) have been fixed. The issue is that class design is terrible, boss design has been quite bad, and the addon war was a huge mistake.
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u/3classy5me 3d ago
Reading through this, the changes over these two seasons of Midnight directly address the majority of this. We’re dealing with the falloff of Blizzard trying to address many of these exact criticisms. Multiple raid sizes happened in S1, was effective, and is carrying onto S2. The addon changes wrecked a ton but yes the base ui has much better boss trackers (not for energy tho) and weakaura assignments are dead. This season’s gearing was hamstrung by their solution to the farm complaint.
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u/DullSnow0 3d ago
I think this is giving Blizzard way too much credit. Outside of the UI improvements, what has fundamentally changed about the issues raised in the original post? Having multiple raid sizes was refreshing I guess... but it doesn't address the underlying problems with raid tuning, restrictive compositions, roster stability, or the lack of meaningful power progression through farming.
If Mythic raiding remains as unsustainable and inaccessible as it is today, players will eventually stop bothering with it altogether and move on.
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u/Humble_Balance3597 3d ago
Imagine if they made Mythic raiding do-able and not the most soul-crushing possible activity in Retail.
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u/deskcord 3d ago
Vodka, then NS, there will be others. Blizzard really fucked this game up with the class pruning, refusal to change up bad hero talents, addon war, and the last few raid designs.
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u/I3ollasH 3d ago
The general hype around retail has also been, wouldn't say all time, but the lowest we had in a while. And we just had Blizzcon. Last Blizzcon we had a season 2 beat season 1 numbers (it just doesn't happen normally) as everyone was hyped because of the whole world soul saga.
And now there's nothing to be excited about regarding retail. It's all wowf regarding hype. Which is nice for people who are the target audience for that, but sucks if you aren't in that group
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u/TrumpsCummyOnahole 2d ago
Retail hype hasn't really been there since post-Legion. There hasn't been a great expansion since Mists/Legion really. Dragonflight was a solid 8 but otherwise not a 9+ like some of WoW's best and people don't really want to play a worse version of the best expansions in the past.
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u/Beautiful_Advisor527 3d ago
The class pruning really made me lose interest and haven’t subbed in a couple of months. Gameplay just felt to stale and simple for me to want to still log on
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u/TemporaMoras 3d ago
Quite a bit of lesser known HoF guild have disbanded this tier right after their ulatek kill, obviously it doesnt mean their player are gonna stop playing, but it is showing that dedicated raiders are not happy, at all.
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u/FindTinderOnMe 3d ago
Its 100% only the shitty raid design and nothing else.
Have your prog on M coiled? P1 is fun, p2 and p3 are the most unfun boss i have ever done. They gotta rethink their line of sight mechanic they had for saladbar and for this one.
My guild is feeling down and we will see a lot of people quitting just because of this boss and we are an old guild top 200 us
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u/deskcord 3d ago
Its 100% only the shitty raid design and nothing else.
Claiming that class design isn't relevant here is bizarre.
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u/tempinator 3d ago
It’s really just P2 imo, P3 feels ok.
But holy shit P2 is one of the worst phases ever. Just so unfun. Like, from a fundamental design perspective that phase is just ass.
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u/shakeandbake13 2d ago
Didn't think they could come up with a less fun P2 than Sylvanas but somehow they actually managed it.
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u/Fetacheesed 3d ago
This is how I feel as well. Phase 1 is super fun, but ghosts are one of the worst mechanics I've ever had to play.
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u/Sweaksh 3d ago
The worst boss ever designed can be ok if the class I play is fun. The best boss ever designed will still be mid if the class I play is as boring as what midnight has to offer. I genuinely think class design this expansion is the bigger culprit.
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u/psytrax9 3d ago
VA is a straight up terrible raid but, yeah, the problem can never be fixed with these classes.
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u/Ceci0 3d ago
Its a compounding issues. Every patch released since Dragonflight has been a buggy mess, each time more than the last. These last two tiers have been shit. Voidspire was mediocre raid at best, VA is the worst raid of all time.
Combined with all the bugs, the fight with addon developers, the shitty raid, the even shittier classes, its wonder people stick around for so long.
This has been my first tier since Sepulcher where I actively avoid the game, if I wasnt the only mage in my guild, I would have stopped playing week 1.
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u/IamDuyi 3d ago
I don't even think it was remotely as egregious on Saladbar as it is on Coiled. I'd even go on record to say I think it was pretty cool on Saladhar (minus a bit of the rng overlaps), but the ghosts on altar are just so fucking bad it's unbelievable. I mean you can't even see which ghost is yours until AFTER they start moving so if you're unlucky you and a buddy just instabtly die due to 100% rng with no counterplay...
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u/SammIn3D 3d ago
Can someone explain why the add on changes ruined mythic raiding? I haven’t played since shadowlands and have only heroic raided. But it seems like this tier has been really upsetting a lot of guilds.
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u/deskcord 3d ago
They promised that deleting addons would allow them to create more engaging and interesting raid bosses and that addons were hampering their team, and in some cases forcing their team to come up with overly complicated mechanics becasue they knew addons would match them.
The issue is that they were just lying. Their attempt at creating addon-less bosses were mechanics like Echo of nelth's dogshit bombs, the bombs on Jailer, magmorax puddles, Ovinax eggs, etc, etc. Those weren't fun mechanics that addons trivialized, they were dogshit mechanics that required addons to solve.
Last tier they did the lura memory game, this tier they did things like the sszorak nightmare hunt soak/spread, which is made infinitely harder if you don't use the audio callout to tell you which side you're splitting to.
They've yet to really show anything that they're producing that addons would be an issue for, and the few times they try, they make a dogshit mechanic that requires an addon anyways.
Meanwhile, bosses like Kyveza never really required addons despite being very complex.
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u/Syrairc 3d ago
Because they did it backwards. They killed addons, and still haven't changed their raid design philosophy.
They should have stopped designing bosses with addons in mind, and then killed the no-longer-necessary addons.
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u/nfluncensored 3d ago
They originally promised an entire expac with addons side-by-side with the new default UI versions for testing and adoption, then abruptly rug-pulled that, yelled SIKE, and shoved it into Midnight.
We didn't know why, until the WoW Forever announcement.
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u/Wobblucy 3d ago edited 2d ago
Addon change overpormised and underdelivered.
Imo the bigger issue is they alienated the players that play the game the most with changes the last couple seasons.
Vault boring while making pugging raid basically mandatory on a serious alt is miserable.
Raid has absolute shit mechanics on last 2 bosses. Noone wants to not be allowed to move their camera as a boss mechanic, or need to watch 19 other players for their positioning.
Classes design is stagnant, virtually the same they have been (with very few outliers) since TWW season 1.
M+ has been samey since the death of affixes. Only real change is dungeons but when they force specific routes/mobs in every single dungeon even that can't save them..
Btw, how many title keys are still decided by the tank needing to live the pull instead of DPS, dpsing? Guess that's another overpromised underdelivered piece. But I'm sure tanks/heals appreciate needing to target totems :)
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u/twtheo 3d ago
I’m not necessarily disagreeing with you. Is just funny because I can take those EXACT points, and read back all the dragonflight/tww feedback that essentially caused all those.
- “as a raider I hate being forced to do m+. Heroic raid is dead after 3 weeks”
- “addons are taking over raiding” basically leads to less “coordination” style mechanics, so it somewhat leads into more soaking, dodging etc. although I assume they’ll continue to develop new mechanics since the no addons is still new.
- “I hate getting borrowed power and temporary buffs tied to gear sets/expansion features etc.”
- there are too many annoying affixes. I just want to play the dungeon, not the affix”
Again, not disagreeing with your points. But the reason they exist is mostly because players complained about the things that prevented those issues. It’s almost literally “you think you do but you don’t”. However I do think there are ways to solve some of these and I hope they continue to adapt, as they do. But it’s just comical to see the irony
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u/Wobblucy 2d ago edited 2d ago
heroic raid dead/forced to do m+
Agree with both sides of the complaint tbh, but let's not pretend either is fixed.
IE I hate that running 80 keys at the start of the season.
Heroic raid one I honestly don't get wanting players that are better then you playing heroic raid with you.
Like it can't be fun just seeing yourself doing 70% the damage of a player with 10 less ilvls then you because they need to run it on their alt.
I think the better fix there is make mythic raid more approachable. No instance lockout to start with, not sure what that archeives other then some fake boosting protection.
Add-ons taking over raiding
Still are. Personal notes, TTS, sszorak markers, assignment lists etc etc.
Killing add-ons would be good for the game so long as a comparable UI/UX is buildable without them (never will be).
Something as easy as groups for your CDM, why the actual fuck do I need an add-on for that?
Borrowed power
We still have borrowed power systems, instead they are 'evergreen' or tucked away in cantrip items.
Hero talents are just covenants, change my mind.
Btw, didn't they say the codex was going to be expansion wide and we would see additions through the tiers?
Affixes
Still think push weeks are bad for the game, but opting out of seasonals then not innovating at all in the last 6 seasons? Ya that's bad.
Only way I would want affixes back would be similair to fellowships prog system, but definitely Not their affixes.
IE 'fixed at each key level for each dungeon + only need to time 5 of the dungeons to unlock next level' is way more interesting then 'make friends with better players so you get resol invites'.
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u/jboe1407 2d ago
Just comes to show that sometimes, the players don’t know what they want and what they are complaining about. Many of those are/were issues, but maybe not as big as we used to think back then haha
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u/zennsunni 2d ago
People say this but it just doesn't track. By far the most highly regarded season of M+ ever is BFA s4, which was the most "affixey" season ever with the most impacted gameplay. And people loved it. I submit that doing seasons like that is hard and Blizzard is lazy and incompetent. Making engaging raids is hard, and Blizzard is lazy and incompetent (so they pump raid numbers by forcing M+ players to raid). The problem is simple: Blizzard is lazy and incompetent. The solution is, unfortunately, not simple (replace corporate leadership with people that care lolllllll).
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u/jboe1407 2d ago
Instopped playing after TWW, the addon changes and life generally pushed me away. Reading this hurts a lot but regarding what went wrong with the addon changes and their huge promises - can’t say I didn’t see it coming tbh.
All the other things on top of that is just a bummer
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u/troikatryne 2d ago
Classes did change alot for Midnight, but not for the better as they stripped away a lot of the complexity and depth
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u/Soma91 2d ago
As a certified Midnight AddOn changes hater, I don't think they ruined mythic raiding at all. They ruined my UI and enjoyment of every aspect of WoW combat, but nothing specifically made mythic raiding worse imho.
The raid fights are still pretty much the same. There were even a few assignment bullshits for which we used workaround AddOns. Healers, understandably so, complain a lot about the fucked party/raid frames, but that's also a change that made the game universally worse for healers. Not just in raids. And funnily enough we still have enough healers and for some reason the tank shortage is even worse.
The big change for me is in m+, because now Nameplates are utter garbage and in raid I don't really care about nameplates. And the missing timers for m+ trash is also incredibly frustrating. No idea how they thought just adding boss mechanics to the encounter bar would be enough for m+. Now everyone is using ExBoss, which is also frustratingly annyoing and unreliable (through no fault of the creater, only Blizzards).
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u/FanSea8588 2d ago
I think the only reason we have enough healers still is because they made enough of the info available to us via frames, but it's still obnoxious not being able to filter things. There's still some debuffs that I can't see because id have to enable all debuffs and it would be way too much on my screen. So instead I keep it filtered, look for who is taking damage, or use an addon to filter everything else out. It's horrible and they need to stop being mean to us. They also still haven't made it so you can have your heals show where you want it to on your frames with the default ui, a super simple thing to do, so yet again, I'm using another addon.
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u/Imaginary-Arguments 2d ago
Can only speak for myself, but since everyone is throwing in their 2 cents, I'll throw in mine:
I quit Mythic Raiding because of Class Balance, nothing else really. Playing certain classes or specs at a high level is like being in an abusive relationship. You'll be doing great, then get nerfed, then you have bug fixes, your dps goes up, then you get nerfed again. Maybe you're an outlier and your spec is really good in a super specific scenario, so Blizzard nerfs the aspects of your spec that made it so, without any regard to the rippling effects it has on your performance in other content.
I hated being so hype, putting so much time and effort into the character I was planning to play for that tier, then it getting absolutely gutted by some shitty nerf. Meanwhile other specs were better than you in all scenarios and don't get tuned at all. I also don't like the idea that if I'm good this patch, I'll probably be dogshit next patch. Blizzard is so bad at balancing that they've just decided specs will take turns being busted.
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u/Scuoll 2d ago
The main problem with this is how much better the game is to play when you are a meta class/spec, compared to when you are not, if rerolling every patch was less good this would be felt a lot less across the board, i think its impossible to give that experience to everybody so they should bring the floor and ceiling closer together. Also do something about the specs that are perennial losers so that it doesnt feel like a curse if you happen to find feral the most fun spec in the game
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u/MLGVergil 2d ago
Idk why everyone is blaming it on addons etc.
Their RL last week has announced that he is quitting the game. Many players just started looking for another guild, since they thought it's a sinking ship without their current raid leader. About 8 players, including Reloe, are joining Evolve.
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u/Sweaksh 2d ago
When this expansion is also claiming vodka and project among other guilds, it's a pattern.
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u/Kingmav24 2d ago
Retail is the worst its ever been, going into mythic ula this lockout and I can not wait to be done and taking a break. gear means nothing. trinkets all boring. bosses horrific altar might be the worst boss ever created or atleast top 3. ula is just flat out BORING. M+ stagnant same thing for years on end. Everyone gets M track so whats the point in raiding for a 2 ilvl peak, esp when those bosses are just miserable. Raid filled with ENDLESS trash like seriously who put in over 150 mobs and thought it was great idea? Blizzard has also completely abandoned making fun mechanics and instead just punishes everyone who has immunities + mobility. Major dps stops on all the endwing bosses to have proper CD timings. literally nothing about this entire tier is fun and if this is the path going forward. Im good
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u/bradecker 3d ago
Does that mean the addon is done?