Week 2 Boss and Other Boss Order

Do we know what our new boss is today? and what the order of the following bosses would be? I want to start drooling about the loot that could potentially drop.

afaik its Jaxx.

so

dispel the flesh thingy

stay away from portals

manage adds

nuke

have fire res aura or totem.

If you talk to the NPC he tells you which boss is coming out next week silly!

Its like necromancer lord somethingorother. Some mageywarlocky guy. Dunno. Prolly will be oneshottable too.

mosa wrote:Do we know what our new boss is today? and what the order of the following bosses would be? I want to start drooling about the loot that could potentially drop.

Wouldn't it be tomorrow? or are they releasing them on Mondays for some stupid reason?

quite encouraging to know that the instance that was supposed to be harder than ulduar so far seems to be on par or even less than naxx was at launch on 25man.

Atleast i hope the later bosses will be harder, altho from what the info on PTR and testings i read they were a walk in the park.

I always though the normals were designed for easy gearing whereas the real challenge are in the heroics/tribute runs.

Meyrinn wrote:Wouldn't it be tomorrow? or are they releasing them on Mondays for some stupid reason?

I sure hope so, otherwise I need to organise a emergency raid for tonight
Cant check myself since Im at work, can anyone confirm?

Seloei wrote:quite encouraging to know that the instance that was supposed to be harder than ulduar so far seems to be on par or even less than naxx was at launch on 25man.

Atleast i hope the later bosses will be harder, altho from what the info on PTR and testings i read they were a walk in the park.

Just because you beat a boss within a few attempts doesn't mean that it's easy. This fight is designed to test the skills you've already learned. It's an entry-level boss: If you can kill it, you're probably ready for the rest of the instance.

Yes, I will agree that Northrend Beasts is not a hard fight. Guess what? Ulduar doesn't have very many hard fights, either. Razorscale, XT, Kologarn, IC, Auriaya, Hodir, Thorim, Freya, Vezax... on normal mode, none of these fights are particularly challenging. There's barely anything going on.

Northrend Beasts is a three phase fight and every phase is completely different. Phase one is easy, yeah, but phase 2 requires planning and positioning. Phase 3 is a movement check.

I'll say that, without a doubt, Northrend Beasts is more difficult than FL, Razorscale, XT, and Kologarn.

Don't judge an instance based on its first fight. And definitely do not ever say that this fight is easy than Naxx. I'm getting sick of people exaggerating claims because a fight is easy. Take a guild that has cleared naxx 25, but hasn't stepped foot into Ulduar, and see how they handle this fight. I bet you they won't down it on their first night of attempts.

If Lord Jaxx is released this week any chance someone could post a little more detail about the actual fight? Being a raid leader it would be helpful to understand what all the boss can/will do and special things the whole raid has to look for. It would help those of use who are stranded at work.

Belloc wrote:Yes, I will agree that Northrend Beasts is not a hard fight. Guess what? Ulduar doesn't have very many hard fights, either. Razorscale, XT, Kologarn, IC, Auriaya, Hodir, Thorim, Freya, Vezax... on normal mode, none of these fights are particularly challenging. There's barely anything going on.

...

I'll say that, without a doubt, Northrend Beasts is more difficult than FL, Razorscale, XT, and Kologarn.

I'm going to guess that you didn't raid on patch day for 3.1. I'm pretty certain that a lot of the impressions of the difficulty of easy-mode Ulduar comes not from current versions, but from the pre-pre-pre-nerf patchday versions. Razorscale fire used to hit for a lot, the chain lightning from watchers used to hit for a lot, and the enrage timer was tight enough that you had to get it in 2 ground phases... a trivial task now, but less trivial on patchday. XT wasn't overly difficult, beyond the tank damage being comparatively extremely high. I think I had 42k buffed hp walking into Ulduar, and XT made my healthbar feel like a yo-yo.

Northrend Beasts was a trivial one-shot. We didn't know the mechanics, we dealt with poisons/burning bile badly, we fubarred tankswaps on P1, and we missed a dodge in P3. Now, yeah, we have a lot of hardmode gear from Ulduar, and everyone regemmed in epic gems on patchday. Maybe we just massively overgear the tuning. But it certainly seemed easier than anyone expected.

Frankly, it's possible that the gear gap is a big culprit. It's something I was worried about with siginificant quantities of hardmode loot... that normal mode bosses would be tuned towards normal mode loot, and hardmode guilds would roflstomp them. It's too early to tell if that's completely true, but it's starting to shape up that way. And that's fine. It probably means that blizzard correctly tuned normal mode Colisseum. But I can also understand where some of the QQ is coming from.

--
Meloree, <Edge>, Garona

Belloc wrote:Yes, I will agree that Northrend Beasts is not a hard fight. Guess what? Ulduar doesn't have very many hard fights, either. Razorscale, XT, Kologarn, IC, Auriaya, Hodir, Thorim, Freya, Vezax... on normal mode, none of these fights are particularly challenging. There's barely anything going on.

Northrend Beasts is a three phase fight and every phase is completely different. Phase one is easy, yeah, but phase 2 requires planning and positioning. Phase 3 is a movement check.

I'll say that, without a doubt, Northrend Beasts is more difficult than FL, Razorscale, XT, and Kologarn.

I disagree strongly, FL is easier, and Scale is on par but XT and Ignis are both definitely harder, and Kolo may be harder.

We went in there and one shot him, we had 6 people die randomly on phase 2 and yet we still had no issues, we lost 2 dps because my addons were broken and someone pulled aggro before I could realize and taunt, and there was lag.

If all those things happened on XT we would wipe, we didnt wipe on Beasts. Beasts is a joke of a boss in my opinion. It is easier then most of the bosses in Ulduar.

Maybe I have a differing opinion but I dont think that every guild should have the 5th boss dead the week he is released. And unless the difficulty scaling goes up tremendously I see that happening. However from a personal perspective I do look forward to clearing it on Tuesday and then having the rest of the week for hards.

Meloree wrote:

Belloc wrote:Yes, I will agree that Northrend Beasts is not a hard fight. Guess what? Ulduar doesn't have very many hard fights, either. Razorscale, XT, Kologarn, IC, Auriaya, Hodir, Thorim, Freya, Vezax... on normal mode, none of these fights are particularly challenging. There's barely anything going on.

...

I'll say that, without a doubt, Northrend Beasts is more difficult than FL, Razorscale, XT, and Kologarn.

I'm going to guess that you didn't raid on patch day for 3.1. I'm pretty certain that a lot of the impressions of the difficulty of easy-mode Ulduar comes not from current versions, but from the pre-pre-pre-nerf patchday versions. Razorscale fire used to hit for a lot, the chain lightning from watchers used to hit for a lot, and the enrage timer was tight enough that you had to get it in 2 ground phases... a trivial task now, but less trivial on patchday. XT wasn't overly difficult, beyond the tank damage being comparatively extremely high. I think I had 42k buffed hp walking into Ulduar, and XT made my healthbar feel like a yo-yo.

Northrend Beasts was a trivial one-shot. We didn't know the mechanics, we dealt with poisons/burning bile badly, we fubarred tankswaps on P1, and we missed a dodge in P3. Now, yeah, we have a lot of hardmode gear from Ulduar, and everyone regemmed in epic gems on patchday. Maybe we just massively overgear the tuning. But it certainly seemed easier than anyone expected.

Frankly, it's possible that the gear gap is a big culprit. It's something I was worried about with siginificant quantities of hardmode loot... that normal mode bosses would be tuned towards normal mode loot, and hardmode guilds would roflstomp them. It's too early to tell if that's completely true, but it's starting to shape up that way. And that's fine. It probably means that blizzard correctly tuned normal mode Colisseum. But I can also understand where some of the QQ is coming from.

--
Meloree, <Edge>, Garona

I certainly did see the original versions of Razor and XT. They sucked, and so did my raid at the time. I don't compare anything to those bosses because those bosses no longer exist.

Would Northrend Beasts be so easy for guilds if they hadn't learned everything from Ulduar? I don't think so. Again, Northrend Beasts is an entry check -- Have you done Ulduar? Do you have the gear? Do you understand how to deal with these mechanics? Ok, you're good.

And, yes, if you have hard mode loot, you drastically over-gear and over-skill the fight. Hard mode guilds should not comment on normal mode content because you just don't see it the way that normal mode raiders do. You have a different perspective, and that's great! That perspective, however, does not apply to normal-mode content.

Phase 1 of Northrend Beasts is obviously not difficult... you tank swap, you kill adds, you're done. Phase 2, however, is difficult. If you don't over-gear the fight, you will lose players to bad play. Failure to manage the poisons means that one of your tanks will probably be immobile, a healer or two will become immobile, etc. Add to that the aoe damage from Bile and things fall apart.

Phase 3 is simple, but enough of a challenge for a first fight in the third tier of raiding. The boss channels about 20k damage in a cone, usually away from the tank. That's raid healing. The boss hits decently hard AND knocks the tank down. That's tank healing, tank swapping if under-geared, and tank gearing as far as the knockdowns go (can't avoid, so you better have a lot of health and armor or cooldowns). Finally, there's the raid stun followed by a charge. If one person dies here, there's a good chance that the tank could die as well. I can't imagine how many lower end guilds aren't aware that the boss can be tranq'd... so they just take the wipe if someone dies at that point. And then there are the little things, like how everyone is stunned immediately before the boss charges: You see him turn in a direction and you know that that's where everyone has to move away from, but they're stunned and unable to move, so they panic. By the time the stun has worn off, they don't realize that they're able to move, so they end up moving too late. Again, not an issue for experienced players, but it still adds to the difficulty. Of course, hard core raiders will often oversee such a factor, because they've progressed so far beyond such behavior.

It's not a hard fight for experienced guilds, that much is obvious. It is, however, more complicated and challenging than the entry level fights in Ulduar. If you can't see that, it's because you're not looking at it. Like you suggested, you're thinking of the original tuning of the Ulduar fights. If it's not that, then people are thinking about how they one-shot the fights in Ulduar now and how easy they are. Once someone gets far enough, they lose perspective. As a raid leader in a guild that isn't quite ready for hard modes (outside of Orbit-uary), but has managed a few 25-man Yogg kills, I am required to maintain this perspective. I'm required to see the things in a fight that will cause some of my lesser-skilled players issues. If we were downing Mimiron hard mode (or even Iron Council hard mode), I wouldn't have to worry about this stuff and I'd probably complain about how easy the fight is. That's not my raid, though, and so I see the challenges from an outside perspective.

We've killed XT every reset since he came out, and XT hard for quite a while too, and still wiped a hell of a lot more on the new XT last week than we did on Beasts. Not sure what to make of that. Maybe because we're used to doing XT hard with several high DPS who quite recently making for a tough transition and also ignoring adds, whereas Beasts pretty much has no DPS requirements.

We still 1-2 shot IC, Thorim and Hodir hardmodes, but haven't tried Mimiron25 hard or Freya25Hard, for some idea of where gearing is.

Like you said Belloc, a lot of the problems on Beasts go away as soon as people in the raid learn to respond to them. Even inexperienced raids shouldn't take too many wipes to read/discover the various things. XT on the other hand has nothing much to discover that makes the fight easier, you just have to do the fight. If your raid's gear/ability isn't up to it, you fail. I would consider that harder than a boss whose difficulty is "go read stratfu".

My guild doesn't have any hardmode loot and we only downed Yogg for the first time last week. We have also been running with a lot of undergeared new recruits for the last two weeks and I will openly admit that some of our raiders are "special" at times.

Even so, we one shot Beasts last week and got Jaraxxus on the second try with barely any idea of the strat. Heck, half our raid was shocked to hear there was a second boss to kill this week.

If the future of raiding in WoW is ridiculously easy regular modes with hardmodes of the same exact fight that are, well, hard then I am not particularly interested in raiding anymore. To me killing the same boss in a harder way just isn't appealing. I don't want to turn this into a discussion of the merits of hard modes, it is just the initial impression I have of this instance.

Personally I am holding out for Icecrown Citadel. If this follows a similar pattern I will be quite disappointed. I am not ready to cancel my subscrition yet though, and I do hope that this is just a "filler" instance they decided to make easier. Perhaps they are experimenting with different models to find the best way of balancing dungeon difficulty.

I'm not saying our guild is a "hardcore nerd raiding guild" but we managed to down every boss except yogg-saron on the first launch week and yogg the next week after.

The nerfs to ulduar were MASSIVE. I kept thinking how the designers of the instance were crying since what they had promised to be a challenge was changed into a almost joke compared to what they had originally intended.

Think going from MH to gruul level, if you raided in tbc with keeping the same gear.

I was hoping... praying actually that blizzard wont take this monstrosity even further by making yet another instance they might aswell have changed to a 5man. I'm not going to pass judgement on how much they have failed on this instance before we see how hard a 45+ tribute chest run is but with we heard about how hard it was on ptr (hard modes) it sounded easier than ulduar normal modes.

Ulduar normal pre-nerf, was perfectly doable in the sense that it was a classic jump from gruul -> SSC
"oldschool" raiding guilds managed to clear it in a few weeks while normal guilds geared up on the earlier bosses to reach the end in ssc. Quite the same would have happened in ulduar where guilds would of been stuck on say Siege area bosses + Council while they geared up the dps to be able to beat the grip on kologarn to reach the keepers level where they would of spent a few weeks on the keepers to get the tacs working.

Yes, there were a few bugs but the bugs did not merit a damage reduction on trash / bosses by 30-95% with reduced health triple the enrage timers and a lot other minor tweaks.

The way ulduar was nerfed so badly in the first week almost killed off our guild completely to think how low blizzard was willing to go get their "cash" from... what i still call "Casual weekend raiders" who do not know how to play their class and refuse to try to get at least a GOOD idea of what they are doing. aka "wow i hit 2.5k dps on this fight! my new record!"