16g	Invasion Over - Turn In NPCs Gone
25g	WoW Classic Hotfixes -- Updated December 22
29g	Patchwerk Hateful Strike not Blizzlike
1mo	T3 Warlock 4 piece bonus bugged
1mo	Heigan the unclean - Naxx bug spot

1mo	WoW Classic “Not A Bug” List - Updated Dec 3, 2020
1mo	Naxx Teleport to Sapphiron Bug
1mo	Tracking the First WoW Classic Naxxramas Kills
1mo	Tracking the First WoW Classic Naxxramas Kills
1mo	WoW Classic: Naxxramas is Now Live!

Notizie Recenti

Guarda tutto »

3g	Unique Strategies for Efficiently Clearing Naxxramas
9g	Atiesh, Greatstaff of the Guardian Completed by Players in WoW Classic
11g	New Naxxramas Speedrunning Rules on Warcraft Logs
17g	PSA: Don't Accept Code from Untrusted Sources
27g	WoW Classic Questionairre - Burning Crusade Separate from Fresh Start Servers Restarting with Phase 1

1mo	WoW Classic Feast of Winter Veil Holiday Event Guide (December 15 - January 2nd)
1mo	Comparing Kel'Thuzad Strategies from 2006 to Classic WoW's Modern Approach
1mo	Blizzard Changing Zone-In Location in Classic Naxxramas to Lower Entrance Platform
1mo	WoW Classic “Not A Bug” List - Cannot Return to Lower Naxx After Entering Frostwyrm Lair
1mo	Blizzard Posts the World First WoW Classic Naxxramas Kills

Live

Jdotb BFA Q&A #11 - Reaping, Grievous and Boss Difficulty

Pubblicato 26/11/2018 alle 23:09 da Squishei

Watch live video from jdotb on www.twitch.tv

Part 1: Pre-Season 1 Preparations

Part 2: Learning Skips, Personal Loot

Part 3: Azerite Traits, King's Rest Advice

Part 4: Azerite Armor, Infested and Teeming

Part 5: DPS Roles

Part 6: Tank Meta, Arcane Torrent

Part 7: Mythic+ Currency System, Class Buffs

Part 8: MDI All Stars

Part 9: Mythic+ Healer Balance, Regional Class Preference

Part 10: Explosive, Underrot, Tol Dagor Changes

Part 11: Reaping, Grievous, Boss Difficulty

Part 12: Shadowmeld, Season 2 Item Levels

Part 13: 8.1 Thoughts and Role Rankings

Part 14: 8.1 Dungeon Changes, Keystone Deletion

Part 15: Remaining Issues in Mythic+

Want to ask Jdotb a question? Leave a comment below and we'll pick some questions for Jdotb to answer in the next Q&A!

Jdotb Q&A #11The 8.1 Tides of Vengeance release calendar is starting to become clearer. The new M+ season will include the second seasonal affix of BFA: Reaping. How might reaping affect M+ compared to Infested?As we get closer to 8.1, it’s a good idea to look to the future and start planning. We’re still not exactly sure when BFA’s first M+ season will conclude, but since the seasonal affixes are tied to raid bosses it’s a safe bet that Season 2 will begin at roughly the same time that Battle for Dazar’Alor launches. The community seems fairly confident that will be sometime in mid to late January. So we’ve probably got another month and a half to enjoy Infested before we transition to Reaping.

What does Reaping have in store for us? It’s tough to say at the moment. The affix hasn’t been fully fleshed out yet, but we do have the tooltip for it which reads, “Non-boss enemies are empowered by Bwonsamdi and periodically seek vengeance from beyond the grave.” We also know that this effect will be triggered by mob count, and that each increment of 20% will cause this resurrection (i.e., 20%, 40%, 60%). This means Reaping will have less pull-to-pull impact on keys than Infested does but will instead shape the way you run the dungeon in a more macro sense.

What Reaping does is still a bit unclear, though. I find it hard to believe that all the mobs you’ve killed in a dungeon just pop back up with all their abilities and a head of steam, so my guess is that we’ll get generic mob types (casters, melee, archers, etc.) or mobs with a limited life span. I’m not too worried at the moment because this affix would venture into ridiculous territory very quickly if the mobs are actually difficult to deal with. You’ll be summoning them four times each dungeon, and presumably each wave will grow bigger, so the mobs themselves almost by definition have to be somewhat easy or you’ll be instantly overrun.

What will be more interesting is if there are ways to cheese the mechanic. I’m sure the first thing any seasoned M+ veteran is wondering is if there’s a way to avoid aggroing the mobs via stealth mechanics like Shroud of Concealment or Shadowmeld (is the time for the great faction swap of 2019 nigh?). I can’t imagine Reaping would be short circuited that easily, but I also know that technically you can Shadowmeld the Spawns of G’huun right now and they’ll scamper off to nowhere and disappear if they never entered combat with you. I’m sure teams will try a bunch of ways to shake the Reaping mobs, and some of them will probably work.

Dungeon planning will become even more important in 8.1.5, since you’ll need to keep track of your mob count and try to hit your 20% breakpoints at convenient times. Advanced teams right now will map their pulls to avoid Infested packs as much as possible, but now you’ll need to figure out how to hit 60% in a convenient spot with good line of sight while making sure that you aren’t still in combat with a nasty miniboss. I’d be remiss not to plug the most helpful M+ addon of all time at this point, Method Dungeon Tools, as it will be invaluable in helping you figure out how you’ll get each 20% mob count increment.

Regardless of how Reaping feels, I think I speak for the community when I say that at least Infested won’t be missed.Blizzard made changes to another affix last week, Grievous. After playing through a week of Tyrannical/Bolstering/Grievous, what are your thoughts on the adjustments?Truthfully I haven’t noticed much of a difference in Grievous after the changes. It’s easier to clear it early on, which is nice for quality of life and ease of mind. It hits harder when fully stacked, but generally something has to have gone majorly wrong in your encounter if you’re dealing with more than one or two full stacks of Grievous. And if you’re in that situation, you’re probably popping healing cooldowns to deal with it which is what you were going to do anyway prior to the Grievous change. So as far as I’m concerned, the Grievous change was mostly just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

But this week DID feel worse than the last go-around with Grievous, and that’s because it was our first opportunity to experience a Grievous through the lens of Tyrannical. And it’s...a problem. Not in all dungeons, and not for every boss, but there are some fights which are just clearly not designed with Grievous in mind, and it shows. I suspect some folks did dungeons this week, noticed that Grievous seemed more impactful than the last Grievous week, and came to the conclusion that the Grievous changes must have actually made the affix worse. I don’t think this is true, rather pairing Tyrannical and Grievous is just always going to be significantly worse than Fortified and Grievous.

What makes Tyrannical so much worse than Fortified for Grievous? Mana, mostly. I know Tyrannical makes a lot of people think, “Oh man the bosses are going to hit hard this week,” but this is really only an issue when dealing with one-shot mechanics which BFA thankfully has many fewer of than Legion. Where Tyrannical becomes a real problem is the 40% increased boss health. Not only does this slow down keys significantly, but it also makes mana a real concern for healers. There are several boss fights right now (Galvazzt, Avatar, Triad, Unbound Abomination, to name a few) that are long and feature significant group damage. Unlike trash pulls, where you can engineer breaks for the healer to regen mana, a boss fight locks you in combat for the duration. And some of these fights can easily last 4+ minutes on Tyrannical. These fights will tax a healer’s mana even with no other affixes.

So when you throw Grievous into the mix, the mana equation explodes. There’s a sign I’ve seen at some businesses with the words “Good, Fast, Cheap” and underneath that, “Pick Two”. And healer spells are often the same. The mana-efficient spells available to healers are either mediocre throughput or have cooldowns. In low-damage environments, healers can usually stick to these mana-efficient heals and keep their mana pool in good shape. As damage ramps up, though, healers are forced to dig further down into their kit. And as you get deeper, you start using spells that are mana-intensive. Tyrannical already forces this decision on fights like Galvazzt, and Grievous compounds this. You burn through your mana-efficient spells even faster and spend even more of the fight having to resort to the mana-intensive spells. The result is a completely untenable mana situation.

This highlights a problem with affixes that is bigger than just Grievous which is that many of the dungeons in BFA (and Legion before it) were clearly designed and balanced independently of affixes. Several of the boss fights I mentioned above are very well-tuned and fun to heal when the weekly affixes don’t have unavoidable damage (e.g., Volcanic, Teeming, Skittish, Raging). But when you introduce affixes like Grievous or Quaking (or even Explosive), those fights get exponentially more difficult. And it’s frustrating as a healer to hit that wall where you realize that something is just mathematically impossible to heal.

In the short term I don’t think there is a quick fix to this issue (other than maybe making non-Tyrannical affixes never affect bosses akin to how Raging is a trash-only mechanic), and I think long term the affixes that deal unavoidable damage need to be completely scrapped and reworked. It’s impossible to balance around them because if you design a boss fight with those affixes in mind, that boss will be relatively toothless on other affixes. Ultimately it’s a change that I think would tremendously improve the week-to-week variability of affixes that plagues M+ at the moment.What do you think of dungeon boss difficulty in M+ this expansion? If you take the same keystone level across different dungeons there isn’t any sort of balance. There are bosses like the 3rd boss in Siege of Boralus (Hadal Darkfathom) who are relatively simple and then there are other bosses like Galvazzt in Temple which can be a hard stop for even the most experienced of keystone groups.Certainly there is a discrepancy in the difficulty of bosses, though this isn’t specific to BFA and isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Some dungeons in Legion were known for their boss difficulty (like Seat and Darkheart), others for their trash (Arcway and Maw). I don’t have a problem with asymmetrical boss difficulty across dungeons because realistically you’re never going to have that kind of parity. There will always be something that makes one fight easier or harder than another.

The issue in BFA is that some bosses right now are probably just too difficult. And by “difficult”, I mean they do too much damage. None of the fights in M+ are overly complex from a mechanics standpoint, at least not compared to their raid counterparts. Most fights can be explained within 30 seconds, and that’s not a bad thing. Personally I’m not a fan of the evolution of raid bosses which have become incredibly complex in recent expansions in an attempt to combat the ever growing tide of hand-holding addons. The cycle is perpetual, since addon makers will always try to trivialize mechanics, and the arms race between addons and developers doesn’t appear to be slowing down.

Whereas M+ has fairly straightforward encounters that simply get more and more punishing the higher you go. The problem in BFA is that some of these encounters are decidedly more lethal than others, and often in ways that are unavoidable. The beams in Galvazzt have to be soaked; there are no two ways about it. And they hurt a lot. Everyone in the group is going to take Pulse damage from Avatar of Sethraliss no matter what they do. It doesn’t matter how well you play, you’re going to take a lot of damage.

These types of fights existed in Legion, but they weren’t as big of a deal for a few reasons. Mana in Legion wasn’t as tight as it is in BFA. Tank self-healing was much higher, allowing healers to focus almost exclusively on the group, and a few DPS classes (like warlocks and DHs) could also do a ton of self-healing. You could gear swap on punishing boss fights to pick up more Avoidance or Leech or use mana trinkets, and the trinkets themselves in Legion were much more impactful than their BFA counterparts which are basically stat sticks. You had legendaries to tailor your kit to a specific fight. Legion allowed you to adapt throughout a dungeon.

In BFA you’re forced to use a jack-of-all-trades approach to dungeons where you need to wear gear that is generally useful in all scenarios, so the niche pieces you have that might be super useful on one specific boss just stay in your backpack forever. I don’t necessarily mind the change, and I’ve gotten used to it, but it’s definitely had an impact on survivability.

The good news is that Blizzard has recognized throughout the expansion that some bosses need to be retuned as evidenced by nerfs like those to Static Shock on Aspix and Adderis and Galvanize on Galvazzt. Hopefully this balancing continues as we go forward as it’s realistically the only avenue we have as players. I think this is an area where feedback to the developers can be very valuable (to them) because there are a lot of dungeon bosses, and I’m sure it’s difficult to maintain awareness of the relative difficulty of each boss as those bosses scale up and up and up. So we as players need to stay vocal on forums and social media when it becomes apparent that certain bosses are dramatically more difficult than their counterparts.Weekly Affix AdivceDungeons Most Affected by FortifiedKing’s Rest - The mini bosses following the Golden Serpent (Queen Patlaa, Queen Wasi, King Rahu’ai and King A’akul) are all scary without buffs, so giving them more health and damage makes this room uncomfortable at best. Spectral Berserkers leave a nasty physical DoT on the tank that stacks, and it can quickly get out of control on Fortified weeks. Watch out for Spectral Beastmaster’s Poison Barrage as it can easily wipe a group if it hits multiple party members. Shadow of Zul will deal a lot of damage to the tank, so make sure to have cooldowns ready.

Waycrest Manor - The Heartsbane witches and Bewitched Captains do tremendous damage to the tank, and the Matrons have a lot of health. The confined quarters of the manor don’t leave much room for kiting, either. The Gloom Horrors before the final boss do a lot of damage when they jump, so you will want to be careful about which party member is standing furthest out (which is what determines who gets leapt on).

Underrot - Be careful on packs with Headhunters (who root) and Blood Matrons (who charge and cleave) as you can get one-shot by this combination. Bloodswarmers will be at the very least incredibly annoying and potentially lethal if their Sonic Scream interrupts healers. Pay very close attention to the Spirit Drain Totem from Bloodsworn Defilers. Fetid Maggot’s Rotten Bile can quickly kill a ranged player if it isn’t interrupted. Maddening Gaze from Faceless Corruptor’s needs to be avoided at all costs.

Motherlode - Be sure to interrupt Hired Assassins as their Toxic Blades / Hail of Flechettes combo can easily wipe a group. Mine Rats target random players with Throw Rock, so be careful not to pull too many and risk bad RNG on who gets targeted. Taskmaster Askari wrecks tanks, so make sure to have cooldowns ready for him. Watch out for Mastermind’s Energy Lash as it hurts quite a bit, and don’t let Feckless Assistants finish their Transfiguration Serum cast or they will turn into Grotesque Experiments which are much more difficult. Be vigilant with Crawler Mines on the way to Mogul as they will do quite a bit of damage if they explode on a player.Dungeons Most Affected by SanguineWaycrest Manor - Most of Waycrest takes place indoors in tight hallways, so the potential for a misplay where you drop Sanguine pools in a bad spot is high. Try to engage trash mobs in rooms that are more open so you have room to move when the mobs start dying. Pay special attention to the trash outside Raal’s room as the hallways are narrow and there are lots of mobs in each pull.

Tol Dagor - As you’d expect of most prisons, this place is cramped. You spend a little bit of time outdoors at the start of the dungeon, but the bulk of your time will be in close quarters without much room for kiting. Be especially careful about killing mobs in doorways (which is easy to do), as it can make it almost lethal to try to move into the next room until the pools disappear. Be mindful of the trash around Jes Howlis as he will run back through the cell block and might potentially stop for a few seconds in a recent Sanguine pool.

Shrine of the Storm - Shrine isn’t terribly constricted, but it does feature lots of big packs that have the potential to drop tons of Sanguine. The mini bosses (Windspeaker Heldis, Runecarver Sorn and Elemental Guardian) all have a tendency to stand still and cast uninterruptible spells, so be especially careful where you drop Sanguine pools around them.Dungeons Most Affected by NecroticWaycrest Manor - Waycrest gives minimal room to kite and has several large trash pulls, so it’s hard for tanks to avoid racking up stacks and harder still to get rid of them. Waycrest also has some notoriously heavy hitters for bosses (Goliath and Lord Waycrest), and tanks will feel the burn if they get unlucky with stack resets.

Tol Dagor - Sand Queen has lots of little adds that will pile up Necrotic stacks very quickly on the tank, so killing them ASAP needs to be a priority. Once inside the prison, tanks have very little room to maneuver so it’s hard to reset Necrotic. The Jes Howlis encounter can get tricky if you don’t open the cell doors on his floor before engaging him as he will unlock all of them when he runs around at 50% HP, which means a lot of adds will be beating on the tank.

Temple of Sethraliss - Galvazzt is already a painful fight that spreads the healer’s attention thin keeping the group up, and if the tank requires extra healing from Necrotic it can easily be the last straw that forces a healer out of mana. Avatar’s Heart Guardians put a nasty debuff on the tank that increases damage taken, so if the Guardians are left up for very long Necrotic can become an issue.Dungeons Most Affected by This Week’s AffixesTol Dagor - Sand Queen is the M+ boss most transformed by Necrotic as her adds come out in waves and are difficult to kite with all the mounds on the ground that can stun you. Luckily it’s a Fortified week so the fight should be short, but this encounter will punish tanks heavily. Sanguine will be a real issue once you’re inside the prison, so be diligent about when and where you’re killing mobs. Jes Howlis releases all the prisoners on his floor when he transitions to phase 2, so you’ll need to have a plan for Necrotic stacks there.

Waycrest Manor - Fortified Waycrest hurts a lot, and the tight confines of the manor will make Sanguine an issue. It can help to try to pull trash out to the courtyard to kill it so that you’ve got more room to work with. Necrotic can be painful on Goliath and Lord and Lady as the tank damage is already high without a healing reduction.

Shrine of the Storm - Necrotic won’t necessarily be a huge deal in Shrine, but Sanguine makes many of the trash pulls annoying at the very least. It’s a popular tactic to drag trash onto bosses in Shrine, and Sanguine will make that risky. Dungeons Least Affected by This Week’s AffixesAtal’Dazar - Atal’Dazar features very few mega pulls, so Sanguine should remain manageable throughout. None of the bosses are overly affected by Necrotic, and several of the more dangerous trash packs don’t even strictly target the tank enough to make Necrotic dangerous.

Underrot - There is lots of room in Underrot to drop Sanguine safely, and while some of the trash hurts on Fortified, it doesn’t punish the tank with Necrotic. About the only elevated risk in Underrot this week is if your group is slow with squashing ticks on Cragmaw, as those will swarm the tank and stack Necrotic quickly.

Commenti

Accedi per Pubblicare un Commento 19 Commenti

Commento di lovelywazI have said it before, I will say it again. Just copy/pasting previous xpac's affixes was a BIG mistake and laziness on their part.

You cant do that with all the affixes when there are major class changes and fight mechanics.Commento di omedon666I have said it before, I will say it again. Just copy/pasting previous xpac's affixes was a BIG mistake and laziness on their part.

You cant do that with all the affixes when there are major class changes and fight mechanics.Commento di MightylorddkI have said it before, I will say it again. Just copy/pasting previous xpac's affixes was a BIG mistake and laziness on their part.

You cant do that with all the affixes when there are major class changes and fight mechanics.Commento di BigBadDadCall me crazy but it would be cool if blizz broke dbm and similar addons forcing us to actually watch the boss and react to the boss's animations instead of staring at your ui watching timers the whole time.Commento di Nnycogrievous and necrotic should just removed at this point, those traits just take away all fun from m+Commento di assieAs a pretty casual m+ healer I actually enjoy things like Grievous and Necrotic, not a big fan of the seemingly unaviodable late expansion lack of need for healers, which seems to spread to m+ as well, making us some weird low dps/support tag-along. Don't get me wrong, ofc dps is important I just feel like dps-classes should to dps, and as a healer I want to heal. I want to be needed as a part of the team, same as dps classes always pushing their numbers - I want the same challenge. If I wanted to dps I'd pick a dps class/spec.
Affixes like Grievous and Necrotic makes healers needed again, and personally I find that much more fun than competeing with the tank over the last spot on the meters.Commento di FixiSee, it’s all about perspective. It’s clear that Blizzard don’t intend for players to get as deep into M+ as early or as easily as they did in Legion. As an outsider looking in (I generally only observe M+ as I don’t have the time to commit to a recurring team, which is clearly the intended way to experience M+) it’s clear that expectations on the community end don’t align with the developers. Players probably think they should succeed further and deeper because they succeeded in Legion, when really... I mean anything above the lowest of keys can’t be called “scheduled success” if Blizzard doesn’t think it should be.Commento di lovelywazI have said it before, I will say it again. Just copy/pasting previous xpac's affixes was a BIG mistake and laziness on their part.

You cant do that with all the affixes when there are major class changes and fight mechanics.Commento di insatiable7I have said it before, I will say it again. Just copy/pasting previous xpac's affixes was a BIG mistake and laziness on their part.

You cant do that with all the affixes when there are major class changes and fight mechanics.Commento di insatiable7I have said it before, I will say it again. Just copy/pasting previous xpac's affixes was a BIG mistake and laziness on their part.

You cant do that with all the affixes when there are major class changes and fight mechanics.Commento di LolusI have said it before, I will say it again. Just copy/pasting previous xpac's affixes was a BIG mistake and laziness on their part.

You cant do that with all the affixes when there are major class changes and fight mechanics.Commento di PeredhilCall me crazy but it would be cool if blizz broke dbm and similar addons forcing us to actually watch the boss and react to the boss's animations instead of staring at your ui watching timers the whole time.Commento di kutana

And that's how you detect wannabe elitist raiders. Maybe adding some "back in my days" flavor. Blame addons because the UI is not optimized. May I ask how you will avoid the beams on Zek'voz - for example- without spreading before cast- and you need a timer to know when you should spread ? Mythic, ofc, LFR or normal mechanics are more forgiving :D.
Just in theory - if boss mods are banned, the mythic raiding will basically be done with. That would surely help the game.Commento di TataheCall me crazy but it would be cool if blizz broke dbm and similar addons forcing us to actually watch the boss and react to the boss's animations instead of staring at your ui watching timers the whole time.Commento di lovelywazCall me crazy but it would be cool if blizz broke dbm and similar addons forcing us to actually watch the boss and react to the boss's animations instead of staring at your ui watching timers the whole time.Commento di iceman994Dis guy doesnt understand the affix problem. As a Disc Priest it was hurting way much more harder than any other healers. Right now they nerfed the stacks to 4. It wont fix dis issue on harder difficulties.Commento di PandastuckCall me crazy but it would be cool if blizz broke dbm and similar addons forcing us to actually watch the boss and react to the boss's animations instead of staring at your ui watching timers the whole time.Commento di Peredhil. And I do not want to ruin anyone's raid, I do give my best to do mechanics and everything, and DBM helps me a lot. Of course pro raiders and hardcore cores doing Mythic do not need this, they'll learn. But peeps like me who pug raids now and then and are already kicked a lot from those cuz my DPS just suck a lot would never get a chance without it. I like to raid now and then, and I don't want to wait until two years and overgear to be able to run normal or even heroic raid.

I know anyone could say "Then don't do raids" "You just suck" "No one cares about you" and most times "Casual are ruining the game", but hey I like to play too and I just don't want to be a burden. Without DBM I would just don't raid at all. It's nice to have the chance! I doubt those addons make much difference in the Top 100 guilds, but they sure do to me! Just my pov.Commento di Seriniel
I know anyone could say "Then don't do raids" "You just suck" "No one cares about you" and most times "Casual are ruining the game", but hey I like to play too and I just don't want to be a burden. Without DBM I would just don't raid at all. It's nice to have the chance! I doubt those addons make much difference in the Top 100 guilds, but they sure do to me! Just my pov.

« Messaggio Prossimo

Messaggio Precedente »

Jdotb BFA Q&A #11 - Reaping, Grievous and Boss Difficulty

Commenti

Scrivi un commento