[10/25] Ulduar Relative Difficulty

[Barsine]

Mimiron is now significantly easier, I'm not sure what all they nerfed but P4 is nothing like it was last week

They removed hidden mines!
They did something else as well, but can't recall what that was.

[Corpsicle]

Last week we spent hours on many of the bosses. Ignis, Iron Council in particular were difficult. This week we got all the way through Auriaya (minus Iron Council) in about 3.5 hours. The nerf has made 10 man much easier on the normal modes, at least for what I have seen so far.

[Rasmfrackn]

The nerf has made 10 man much easier on the normal modes, at least for what I have seen so far.

Certainly seemed that way last night. Took some low dps people, including a fresh 80 alt, and did the 4 siege bosses. Did you know that someone wearing half lv 70 gear makes the demolishers have only 63k health? Neither did we! We still beat the razorscale enrage easily, and the XT fight was a joke compared to the pain we had last week on the 25. It's amazing how differently they tune the 10 vs the 25... I guess it could be partly due to us being in 213 gear as a 25-man raid group, but we had a fury warrior in literally half lv 70 gear and a boomkin with gear but not so much rotation and we were in danger of being overrun by adds in XT because we hopped from heart phase 1 into heart phase 2. Last week in the 25 version we were barely getting it to 60%...

What exactly was "the nerf"? I see people referring to it as some over-arching change. I've seen the tweaks to each boss individually, but did they do anything more global?

[Corpsicle]

From the daily fixes they are posting, just a multitude of small tweaks to each boss as they decide they are needed. The thread on the general forums listing these changes is here:

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/threa ... rhtml=true

By themselves, the changes are small but they really add up together.

[knaughty]

I think the only bosses that took us more than an hour were pre-nerf Ignis (no kill, got him under 50%, then switched to other bosses) and we haven't got Mimiron yet - people are having difficulty spotting the paled red rune for the rocket. We've only had ~30 mins on Mimiron, he dies Sunday, I would expect.

Post-nerf Ignis is a joke - we one-shot him with no deaths despite truly awful slag-pot targeting (chaining through OTs & important healers).

XT-002 went from a hard DPS check (skip Tantrums) to an easy healing check.

Freya amounts to "Can your DK put a D&D down and get out of LoS? OK, you win"

Thorim requires careful balance with splitting your DPS, took us a couple of tries to work out exactly how much DPS in each group. Once that was done, very easy - your DPS just have to learn not to peel as adds stream in. Didn't see tunnel, I was tanking the arena.

We're raiding 4 hours a night, and getting 3 new bosses per night, until we got to Freya/Thorim/Mimiron - only got the first two. Given time taken to learn the trash (some of which is challenging, and we're not bothering to try and find other people's strategies for trash) we're cruising at roughly one hour per boss.

So far, Ulduar is still the second easiest raid instance in all of WoW. Even Mimiron is still only "mid-grade" - easier than KT or Vashj - he might take 2-3 hours to learn (unless someone finds a magic graphics setting that makes rocket-rune easy to see).

No idea what General and YS are going to be like.

What exactly was "the nerf"? I see people referring to it as some over-arching change. I've seen the tweaks to each boss individually, but did they do anything more global?

A series of minor tweaks to a boss can take it from nigh-fucking-impossible to dead easy.

Ignis in the first week was hugely difficult. Damage input was high enough that you had to execute the strat perfectly or the MT got one-shot. Second add up? Tank is taking 40k hits. Note that adds spawn every 30 seconds, and it takes 20 seconds to melt an add, then you have to add movement time to get the add into the fire, then into the water.

One mistake, one bad cast combo by the boss and ta-da: Wipe.

Second week? We had a massively bad set of slag-pot combos at the start, and spent the entire fight with 2 adds up minimum, with 3 adds up for most of the second half. Complete non-issue, boss one-shot, zero deaths, healers totally unstressed.

10% here, 10% there really adds up.

Same thing with XT-002. Not sure about the other bosses - missed most of the first week's raid nights due to dodgy router at the ISP end.

[Seloei]

Blizzard doesn't do such big nerfs in SUCH a fast time. They've never nerfed an instance so badly in such a short time, they had all the nerfs already planned out from PTR and were just waiting for the hardcore guilds to finish the normal mode, atleast i think so... this doesn't seem right.

Let the hardcore guilds get their challenge of beating a hard instance on 25 man, then make it all accessible to casual raiding guilds. If you reached / killed Yogg-Saron on the first week, then went back the next week... The difficulty level difference was.
First week -> BT progression (with crap gear).
Second week -> Gruul
Gruul still needs tactics, but the dps/gear check isn't that big as it would of been. The first week, it felt like progressing through BT again, but with us wearing kara gear.

edit: It took them 2-3 weeks before they nerfed Mu'ru, a few months to nerf the first raid instances in BC but ulduar they nerfed to hell in less than a week. Most fixes in place before even the 3. day was past

[kakashi]

25 man

Flame Leviathan - 1
Ignis the Furnace Master - 1
Razorscale - 1
XT-002 Deconstructor - 2
The Assembly of Iron - 2
Kologarn - 2
Auriaya - 2
Mimiron - 4
Freya - 3
Thorim - 3
Hodir - 2
General Vezax - 2
Yogg-Saron - 8

Yogg is a very nice fight. Downed him last night, it needs a lot of people doing their jobs correctly.

[Jasari]

Background:
We're a purely 10man guild, we all have 1-3 pieces from 25 Naxx that we've gotten though various pugs before 3.1

So far we've cleared everything up to Mimron/Thorim, and have had 3 attempts on Mimiron last night, hoping to get him down tonight.

Flame Leviathan: 1
Ignis the Furnace Master: 4
Razorscale: 3
XT-002 Deconstructor: 2
The Assembly of Iron: 3
Kologarn: 6
Auriaya: 4
Mimiron: 8
Freya: 7
Thorim: N/A
Hodir: 4
General Vezax: N/A
Yogg-Saron: N/A
Algalon the Observer: N/A

As a reference, so far nothing has taken more than 5 tries, most have taken 2-3 besides Kologarn which took 8, but that might have been because it was late and everyone was pretty tired. Also the first 2 attempts were only about 30 seconds because the healers let the tank die (not totally blaming them, he does hit pretty hard and I think they just weren't expecting that kind of burst damage... also the 7th attempt was a 1% wipe)

I'll update after we down more bad guys!

[inthedrops]

I've done everything on 10 man but missed a few fights in 25 man due to sharing tank load with other tanks. So I'll just not comment about 25 (we're working on Yogg in 25)

10 man:
Flame Leviathan: 2
Ignis the Furnace Master: 5
Razorscale: 3
XT-002 Deconstructor: 4
The Assembly of Iron: 3
Kologarn: 3
Auriaya: 3 (used to be a 4)
Mimiron: 7 (P4 can still get sketchy)
Freya: 3
Thorim: 5
Hodir: 4
General Vezax: 4
Yogg-Saron: 7
Algalon the Observer: N/A

Yogg took our team 15 pulls to learn it and kill it, mostly just figuring out the timing in P1 with when to move the adds and then a couple P2 attempts for melee to figure out how to maximize dps below. We spent much more time on Mimiron before the fixes.

[Euphoria]

10-man

Flame Leviathan: 1
Ignis the Furnace Master: 1
Razorscale: 2
XT-002 Deconstructor: 2
The Assembly of Iron: 3
Kologarn: 3
Auriaya: 2
Mimiron: 7
Freya: 3
Thorim: 2
Hodir: 4
General Vezax: N/A
Yogg-Saron: N/A
Algalon the Observer: N/A

Note: We have two 10-man groups. One that is run by the officers and the stooge run that I tank for that picks up the people the officers don't take. The stooges are currently ahead in progression. A little competion between guildmates is good and it keeps us all sharp.

Apparently I'm doing it wrong (or right) but the Auriaya fight seemed to be incredibly simple. We one shot her on a progression kill with nobody having seen it before. I just walked down the stairs with a bubble up, threw a shield, let the druid taunt a cat off me, and dropped bubble. Went like butter. It was so smooth we were debating killing the defender all nine times just for giggles, but we didn't.

Ignis we hadn't managed to down pre-nerf. Now he's cake. Flawless kill. Freya was guild progression and quite possibly the funnest fight I've seen in Ulduar so far. Having to moderate our AE output took some getting used to on the detenators but was doable. Didn't have issues with the other adds at all.

Our 25-man group, with the extra retards added in, has significantly more issues than either of the 10 man groups. All bets are off there.


EDIT:

Downed Thorim and Hodir last night. Hodir took 5 tries (pro-tip, don't tank while you're on the phone) and Thorim took 2. We had him to 6% before I DC'd and wiped the raid on the first try. Mimiron trash wiped us more times than Hodir. And Mimiron himself...whew, that's going to take a while to learn.

[Arquine]

our guild has different sort of issues compared to other guilds; we got stuck for 2 raid nights at Thorim while pretty much bulldozed through most bosses.

Flame Leviathan 1
Ignis the Furnace Master 2
Razorscale 2
XT-002 Deconstructor 2
The Assembly of Iron 3
Kologarn 3
Auriaya 2 (I'll give it a 10 for the pull ;P - good luck with immortal on this one)
Mimiron 6 (10 with the p4 p3wx2 laser bug - at one point he didn't hit anyone but just turned 180)
Freya 2
Thorim 8 (our hardest encounter so far for 25, easiest for 10 man)
Hodir 3
General Vezax 6 (only killed it on 10 so far)
Yogg-Saron -
Algalon the Observer -

[culhag]

Blizzard doesn't do such big nerfs in SUCH a fast time. They've never nerfed an instance so badly in such a short time, they had all the nerfs already planned out from PTR and were just waiting for the hardcore guilds to finish the normal mode, atleast i think so... this doesn't seem right.

Conspiracy !

Seriously, I think they never had such a big audience at the opening of a new raid, so they're just able to spot bad tuning and react faster than before. They may also have better developpement tools to push hotfixes faster.

[Splug]

The main change to Mimiron was reducing how often the laser barrage would bug out and spray the entire room in phase 4. While the bug is still present, it is much less frequent. They also increased the repair time on phase 4, but that's minor.

Most of the changes I saw were minor elements that make things slightly easier, but didn't really amount to much. The core changes were bug fixes which often resulted in a random unavoidable death or random unavoidable wipe (Ignis potpunch, Auriala prowler respawn, Mimiron room spray), and I'm glad they're addressing those quickly.

-Splug

[Eroslight]

First off - I HUGELY disagree with the 25 man Yogg achievement (10 man easy mode - sure easysauce is easysauce) BUT a "5" for a fight where 1 person not performing means wipe does not warrant a 5.

BTW - 1-2 means to me that people can die during the fight and it doesn't matter at all.
3-5 means you can still wipe if people die, just its not an insta-gib/OMGWTFBBQ type death they usually have to repeatedly stand in bad stuff and not get healed.
5-7 means people need to pay attention and actually be mentally present
8-10 means you f-up and we're dead. We're all dead.

Second - here are my ratings:
25 man:
Flame Leviathan - thats a boss? 1 on easy: Add 1 per tower.
Ignis the Furnace Master - 3-5 pre nerf - 2 nerfed.
Razorscale - 2
XT-002 Deconstructor - 3 easy mode - 5 hardmode (still haven't downed but have activated - dps isn't there yet).
The Assembly of Iron - 3 easy mode - 5 hardmode
Kologarn - 3 easy, 4 hard.
Auriaya - the pull = 7, the rest of the fight - 3. hardmode: 6
Mimiron - 6 to 8. Haven't done hardmode
Freya - 4. 1 elder = 5
Thorim - 3. Hardmode - 6 or 7
Hodir - 3. Hardmode (Not enough Vespean Gas ...er dps)
General Vezax - 6 (I LOL at casters in hardmode)
Yogg-Saron - 8-9 (I shudder at hardmode)
Algalon the Observer - I hope to god its a 10+


10 man:
Flame Leviathan - 1 (go go world first 9 man?)
Ignis the Furnace Master - 2 post nerf
Razorscale - 1
XT-002 Deconstructor - 3 (DPS can faceroll)
The Assembly of Iron - 4 (get out of stuff fast = 2)
Kologarn - 2 nerfed
Auriaya - 3
Mimiron - 5 easymode
Freya - 4 (add 1 per elder)
Thorim - 2-3 easy 4-5 hard
Hodir - 3-4
General Vezax 4-6
Yogg-Saron 5-7
Algalon the Observer I hope 10+

[Lewid]

10's

FL - 1/10
Razorscale - 2/10
Ignis - 3/10 gearing 1/10 skill
XT - 3/10
Assembly of Iron - 3.5/10