i disagree. today's raiders are much WORSE overall players than the original MC raiders.
i disagree. today's raiders are much WORSE overall players than the original MC raiders.
I was in a MC raid guild back in vanilla, and we had to do everything without add-ons. Hell, we didn't even have Vent. Everything was done thru TeamSpeak.
Healers actually had to pay attention to health bars.. tanks had to watch the aggro levels closely, because KTM sucked... Remember everyone waiting for 5-stacks of sunder?
As for Lucifron 2.0, I think some of the mechanics of the fight would be trivialized by newer abilities... especially the Priest's Mass Dispel. To be honest though, Lucifron wasn't even that hard of a fight, and most of the fights were hard because:
a) The gear as absolute junk and typically hard to get. .
Main tank will take position at the upper right side of the small spikes in the ground, with a small group of supporting casters who can decurse/dispel/heal and support the main tank till the two adds are taken care of. You should designate a mage to decurse all members of the Main Tanking party.
The two adds should be pulled by two Hunters with distract shot, followed up by two Warriors pulling agro from the hunters, and off tanking them back in the very very back of the cave. Priests should be dispelling the Dominate Mind, and have everyone focus fire on one add, take it down, then the next.
Once Lucifron's two adds are down the raid party should focus on Lucifron. All paladins and mages should be using the CTraid Auto-Decurse to remove the Impending Doom and Lucifron's Curse so that it does not affect the raid.
Now do this with the Lucifron encounter. The Mages have to decurse and dps the proper target. The rest of the dps have to target the right target. The tanks have to tank the target in front of them. The tank healers have to heal their tanks. The raid healers have to heal anyone who did not get decursed. Sounds even easier.
When you break it down like that the players are just doing what they should with no real stuff thrown in. That is why vanilla encounters are so stupid. The difficulty never really came from the mechanics of the fight. ie Something cheap but rather from the ineptitude of the ragtag group of 40 people you threw together.
It sounds like you just wiped. You didn't account for the mind control at all, your whole raid dies when your mage gets mind controlled and you don't have a secondary plan for dealing with the curse.
Also,
>The raid healers have to heal anyone who did not get decursed.
I hope you are just using the lazy meaning of "decursed" as to mean not being dispelled, as the curse doesn't deal damage, the doom (a magic effect, not curse) is what does the damage.
A fight can sound very simple while in practice it is very very complicated. Without over-gearing Lucifron isn't the joke you might think it is.
The real strategy to win the fight is much more complicated, and it's not a matter of just pressing buttons hard enough or following boss mods.
Every healer can remove magic debuffs now.* Impending Doom: AoE Magic De-buff much like call of the grave. 10 seconds to dispell everyone possible, or they receive an instant 2000~ damage.
Remove this with a mage and if you do not have one set a healer on it any healer worth their salt has click casting or mouseover macros so this is not really a problem at all especially with the joke that mana usage has become once in T11+ gear which is available from justice points. Really any Druid or Shaman could do this as well. Hell I could probably manage it while tanking especially after they kill the add that I'm supposedly tanking.* Lucifron's Curse: This curse will increase mana/rage/energy cost of all abilitys by 100%
This mechanic was one of the main focus' of Cho'gall and that fight has 400 other things going on in addition handle it the exact same way.* Lucifron's adds also have a spell called Dominate Mind, much like a Priest version of Mind Control. This can be dispelled by a Priest's dispel, but CANNOT be dispelled by a Paladin's cleanse since it only works on friendly targets. For Horde, Shamans are able to Purge this if a Priest is not able to.
Oh god I said decurse instead of dispel.
Healers should be removing:
Every healer can remove magic debuffs now.
Remove this with a mage and if you do not have one set a healer on it any healer worth their salt has click casting or mouseover macros so this is not really a problem at all especially with the joke that mana usage has become once in T11+ gear which is available from justice points. Really any Druid or Shaman could do this as well. Hell I could probably manage it while tanking especially after they kill the add that I'm supposedly tanking.
This mechanic was one of the main focus' of Cho'gall and that fight has 400 other things going on in addition handle it the exact same way.
Is that clear enough? This fight is a complete joke compared with what an average raid does on any boss that isn't Shannox in Firelands and Firelands is a lot easier than T11 was before its nerf.
I think the issue that I pointed out with gear still stands, because not only did we not have good gear, but the gear itself had awful stats on it. My Rogue tier 1 set had dodge on it, for Pete's sake!![]()
25 people just going auto-attack/afk.
I still don't really see the problem? That's why you have vent and communicate while in a raid. If the mage gets mind controlled you have your alternate curse remover or you could even dedicate 2 curse removers because at that point its a 2 healer fight. If you wanted to 3 heal it have one of your healers dispel 2 of them each rotation. 404 issue not found.
Eh, the tier gear was bad but the blue dungeon gear was pretty terrible, some even worse. Getting your tier piece with wasted stats on resist and dodged seemed lame until you looked at the trash blue you were replacing and saw it was even worse. Dire maul actually had some nice blues that were arguably better than some MC epics, but it wasn't released until after MC.
So you have your main tank, 1 tank for each add (3 tanks), 2 dispellers, 1 healer for main tank, 1 healer for add tank, or you go 3 healer... and then you have 3 tanks, 2 curse dispellers, and 2 people mind controlled... that doesn't leave anyone to DPS in a 10 man raid. Not sure how you are going to win with your strategy, unless you are just going to rely on tank dps...
Being more generous, assume you can instantly dispel both mind controls (won't always happen because sometimes your only offensive dispels will be the one who get MCed) you have 2 people DPSing, about 50% of the time (can't dps while cursed or runs out of resource), or the equivalent of 1 full time DPS: do you think that will be enough to win the fight before you start running out of mana?
Here is how the fight is intended to actually work, in 40 man MC and in any re-implementation of it.
You split the raid, tank + healer + decurser fight lucifron more or less alone, out of line of sigh of the rest of the raid. Decursing is manageable because only 3 people get cursed, same for the doom. Depending on tuning you might need 2 healers with the maintank, hard to judge really scaling down to 10 from 40 changes a lot of the fight.
The remaining 6-7 should be 2 tanks or 1 tank + a dps who can offtank or a tanking pet, at least 2 offensive dispels (really only choice is shaman or priest) which can also dps, and 1-2 healers, and if there is extra room a misc dps.
Even after the adds are dead you can't just have everyone run in and DPS the boss, as dispelling the curse/doom from the entire raid is very mana trying and while possible it isn't a good way to do the fight. You have the tank healer and dispeller remain close, and melee dps can come in and get dispelled by the tank dispeller, while you keep ranged at max range and -important part- the ranged healer/dispellers can sit outside of curse range, reducing the number of people you need to decurse or dispel down by 2-3.
Note that even with this optimal design, some worst case scenarios can easily cause a wipe. If you have 2 offensive dispels and both are randomly selected as mind control targets at the same time, it's almost a guaranteed wipe. But for the most part if everyone does their job at the correct moment you will finish fine.
This is how such a fight is intended to be done, if you try to do it without using LoS and splitting the raid you will not have enough DPS because of all the time soaked by casting dispels. I know that is probably exactly what raids did in vanilla, after gear trivialized it, but you can't use that strategy and win if the fight is correctly tuned. I mean really, tuning is the only real determination of difficulty. A fight with no variables can still be the hardest fight in the game if it is tuned to require 100% perfect dps rotations and 100% efficient healing. No fight is ever tuned that close of course, original vanilla patchwerk was closest and a lot of the first kills only killed him after he destroyed all the tanks and was busy working through the raid at his last % of hp.
The point is, you can make a technically simpler fight harder and complex fight easier just by adjusting the tuning, and in normal mode cataclysm raids the knob is tuned FAR in the "easy" direction. There are some complex mechanics, but the DPS and healing requirements are very forgiving and outside of the mechanics the fights are trivial.
Vanilla wow was about the opposite at first- mechanics were trivial (although apparently lucifron's mechanics confused you enough that you would have wiped a few times before learning) but the DPS/healing was tuned more strict.
So your assuming they won't scale it down in any way? Thats just flat out stupidity. Imagine it scaled down for 10 man instead of assuming it will work the same as it does with 40 people.
In order to kill Lucifron and his two adds within that time you need between 140-170 dps if you take 25 dps 3 tanks and 12 healers. Now I am no vanilla expert but to me that sounds manageable I can do that with the fancy new gear and the fancy new talents at level 50 or so. I'm sure that is doable even with the badly itemized gear.
Fact is at the end of the day bad players and little knowledge is what made the dps and healing requirements "tight".
Anyway, about your point re: tuning it down to 10 man- I don't agree with your logic. first of all, this is a thought experiment- if you start nerfing the difficulty of the fight or dumbing it down by removing adds then you are moving into a completely different question. Second, look at history. 10 man naxx has the 4 horseman, blizzard didn't remove one of them. I'll give you they simplified the marks which made it doable with 4 tanks instead of requiring 8, but based on that history I don't see why they would change lucifron to require fewer than 2-3 tanks. As well, once you start making changes in mechanics to compensate for the smaller raids, you also must assume blizzard will go for tighter tuning and numbers as the 10 man heroic raids have shown- in a 40 man, they assume x% will be slackers or even afk disconnected and the fight should be possible with less than perfect play from everyone, but in a 10 man equivalent all that goes out the window- everyone has to play perfect.
I agree with the first part, but not with the second. You are looking at different raids with multiple variables and not accounting for all of them.
Vanilla to Cataclysm- Raids got more complex (we both agree on this, more or less)
Vanilla to cataclysm- tuning got harder (you say this, I disagree)
40 to 25 or 10 man- tuning made raids harder (this is the real reason)
Reason is pretty simple- if a single DPS does X dps in entry gear and 1.2X DPS in gear after farming a couple weeks, it's pretty obvious that for every 5 farmed DPS you have you can totally carry an afk or baddie. This is always going to be true, but it's less noticeable in a small raid. You have 6 DPS and 1 healer in your small raid, after farming a few weeks you can probably carry 1 baddie along with 5 of your farmed DPS. But in a 40 man raid, with your 25 or 30 DPS, once you have been raiding a few weeks the difference of 1 or two or even 6! players gets lost in the noise as your veterans put out more DPS and pick up for the slack. And needless to say, even without adjusting anything this would instantly be corrected if lucifron was scaled for level 85 10 mans.