Lord Jaraxxus -- Too Easy?

You'll be happy to know this will be my last post on this topic! I think I've taken this as far as I can take it.

The last word will be yours!

Meloree wrote:Of those who haven't, how many actually put in a level of effort to do so and are actually skillcapped before Yogg

This is an excellent question to which neither of us really have the answer. Ideally, the number of people who would have killed yogg + 4 by now would be incredibly high. 80-90% would be appropriate. You want people finishing up these normal modes. Killing the last boss in a zone is a pretty big deal, even if Yogg isn't really the last boss.

Because let's face it. Not many eyeballs will be seeing Algalon until Icecrown or the next expansion.

Meloree wrote:I'm not sure that there should exist a right to success in this game.

This strikes me as an odd thing to say, which probably explains why we disagree to a large extent. People's right to success isn't what's driving the content. It's Blizzards lack of a right to people's money that drives the content.

In my mind the question is more along the lines of what do the subscription numbers look like if 90% of your raiding population doesn't get to see much of the final instance? And should you even be making a final instance at that point or allocating resources elsewhere to improve retention. Do they look better if 90% of your raiding population sees the final instance?

They didn't seem to be hurting too badly in Vanilla or TBC subscription wise! So I could be way off the mark. But you sure do see fewer people complaining about Blizzard's penchant to make 'raider only' content in these later expansions. (Though there's a significant sample problem there!)

I was thinking I would say that there's a right to fun, but I'm not sure that's even true. There's just a right to cancel your subscription.

So a 'right to success' is certainly among the long list of things people don't have a right to in World of Warcraft.

Not everyone wants a challenge in this game (unfortunately). Are there enough players that want to be challenged to justify spending money on instances that are really challenging? I don't know the answer. But have you even asked the question? Maybe you have.

Meloree wrote:Coliseum normal should be tuned to be a challenge.

Yes. The current content is tuned to be too easy. I'm not sure how much harder it should be, but I'm confident many of the people in this thread would be terrible arbiters of what is too easy, you included. There should be a steeper learning curve and there currently isn't on some of these bosses. My first post in this thread laid out a few reasons for why that's the case. I've also explained why I think fights are being held back a week, and why hardmodes are being held back a month.

I'm not sure releasing these fights as too easy to begin with is any worse than releasing (normal) ulduar with the fights being as hard as they were. Some of those fights were nerfed a ton, and pretty rapidly upon release. They can certainly take the feedback from these first few fights and ratchet up the numbers on the next few (and the hardmodes, obviously).

If the rest of the instance is as easy as these first two bosses, I think that will raise some concerns. But let's see what happens.

If you feel the hardmodes are too easy, then I think you'll have a major complaint.

But then again, you don't have a right to be challenged. (And Blizzard doesn't have a right to your money.)

The only hard boss was 2 worms.

10 and 25 man they are compareable to post nerf Ulduar Keepers.

I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with there being elements or teirs of content that only a few people of the playing population get to see or kill.
You NEED that scaling, and the proportion able to beat everything NEEDS to be small. The reason is that you have to maintain motivation to keep playing. You need something to aspire to. Theres a very interdependant relationship between the "hardcore" raiders and the lower level raiders and the non-raiders in this way. It is actually a BAD thing for casuals for content to be made easier and easier.

You should read some of Rohan's classic posts on blessingofkings.blogspot. She's done some very thoughtful writing about why high-end raiders pushing very hard content are a good thing for lower tier raiders working on lower difficulty content.

imho colliseum 10 and 25 are a bit too easy, specially given the level of loot being given out.
Got some bracers from Col10 that are equivalent to U25 ones.

And no, we arnt a fantastic guild, got yogg down once or twice so far in 25.

His difficulty is appropriate as for someone summoned by a super-elite gnome warlock. If summoned by orc warlock I'd say he needs a buff.

Great boss to main tank if you need to AFK in the middle.

I'd say he's tough enough. We run 2 10man groups and 1 25man for this raid. 10man Ulduar we've not cleared, though we've seen yogg a few times and done some medium modes. Uld25 we're up to Vezax.

Our 10mans in the first week, 1 group one shotted northrend beasts, the other took 3-4 attempts. then we 2 shotted beasts on 25.

Second week both 10 mans one shotted northrend beasts, my group one shotted jaraxxus 10, the other group took 3-4 attempts (so reversal from the first week). on 25 we one shotted northrend beasts, then struggled on jaraxxus, we eventuallt killed him (with 360 pain spike) after 6 attempts.

On the whole, easier than Ulduar, sure. But then gear since 3,2 has ramped up fast, everyone's been hitting the new ToC 5man heroic and lots of dungeons to improve gear and that's been going pretty fast.

I can't complain really, my guild isn't cutting the edge but I walked out with a Crystal-plated Vanguard in week 1

I don't think any guild on any level should be able to just walk in and one shot a 3rd tier of the expansion zone. I just don't get how people can prefer content that requires absolutely no challenge or thought.

Markoh wrote:I don't think any guild on any level should be able to just walk in and one shot a 3rd tier of the expansion zone. I just don't get how people can prefer content that requires absolutely no challenge or thought.

I have to agree with you here.

Markoh wrote:I don't think any guild on any level should be able to just walk in and one shot a 3rd tier of the expansion zone. I just don't get how people can prefer content that requires absolutely no challenge or thought.

I think people got used to getting quality stuff for little to almost no investment. Right now people in my guild are complaining it's tedious to do 3 dailies per day to get some repair money. They prefer to log in for raid, easymode it in an hour and get the loot. Then bang, they're off to play their army of alts or post pictures of their babies on the forum.

Jaraxxus is Rage Winterchil of Wotlk but he does not require any attunement.

So to "test out" how hard it is on a pug level, i went in on my dk in a total random pug of guilds who i seriously doubt have seen anything past naxxramas. 2 wipes due to no poison dispelling on the worms. One shoted Lord without anyone dieing. Almost everyone was half blue geared at the most and our server isn't a "top of the line" one. 10man that is.

The only tactics i said was:
bosses 1 : nuke, cleanse poisons via burning bile, move away when he looks at you
boss 2 : interupt everything, kill adds

Should Jaraxxis be easier than even the easiest Ulduar hard-mode? Yes
Should Jaraxxis be regularly one-shot? HELL NO.

hell, he even melees for ~7k after block, that's just not right for a *T9* boss

Morendin wrote:Should Jaraxxis be easier than even the easiest Ulduar hard-mode? Yes
Should Jaraxxis be regularly one-shot? HELL NO.

hell, he even melees for ~7k after block, that's just not right for a *T9* boss

The lowest of three levels of T9, mind.

This is going to be an odd perspective here, and since Faction Champions were released yesterday, I am going to include them a little bit into here.

For point of reference, my guild isn’t particularly breath taking in its accomplishments. We are on Yogg 25, and haven’t killed him yet, and done a handful of 10 hard modes. We are not one of the guilds clearing Firefighter, Knock 3, Observed, or Death’s Demise. Hell, we may never finish them until much farther in the future. The examples below are in reference to 25 man versions of these encounters.

The difficulty level of the early bosses should be about Keeper level challenge to start with. What we have instead, are bosses that we went in with 19 people, a half a dozen socials, and a pug priest simply so we could have Fortitude. We then proceeded to two shot Beasts of Northrend. This, coming from a guild that STILL regularly has issues with certain Ulduar bosses; and putting it in further perspective, we spent less time on Beasts of Northrend than we did on Hodir this week. That’s a horrid scaling in challenge.

Moving on to Jaraxxus, it took us three attempts, one attempt was the realization that Nether Power was 10 stacks (Whoops…) and the second was for people to learn the difference between Incinerate and Legion Fire; and considering that the only thing we had to go on, was spell names and abilities and a foreign video, we still dropped it rapidly. This week it was a straight one shot.

Finally on Champions, it took us three attempts to down it. First, we didn’t realize they would jump directly into us from the stands (Whoops…) and the second was while we actually paid attention to which mobs were most dangerous and getting kill orders/CC planned out. Third pull was a pretty clean kill. If we get Hodir down this week in less than 3 pulls, I’ll be ecstatic…

Why are bosses that are crapping out 245 iLevel gear, so notably easier than the normal “easy” mode bosses that drop gear nearly 20 iLevels lower? Mimiron, Freya, Thorim, Hodir, Vezax all are much more challenging encounters even on their easiest difficulty, yet reward much worse items. Worse, is that all of them have a decent amount of trash on the way to them (Exception: Thorim) and are at the bare minimum four bosses deep. On any keeper, I have to watch the mechanics. The only mechanics you have to pay attention to here, of the first three bosses are “Dispel Paralytic Toxin from tank, everyone else is mostly expendable,” “Dispel/Steal Nether Power” and “Don’t get hit by the giant yeti” and even the last one is optional if your hunters are fast on the Tranq Shot.

I don’t particularly want each of these new bosses, on normal to be Yogg + 4 challenge or harder to start with. I would hope that the first 2 were Keeper/Vezax challenge, 3rd would be on Yogg challenge and 4th and 5th would surpass him, providing a handful of new challenges to those who might be stuck in late Ulduar and some challenging encounters for those that are finished with it.

Ard wrote:Judging by what's being said in this thread, even a casual guild should just steamroll it, hardly noticing you just killed the latest boss in Warcraft. Well... that ain't happening.

We haven't been able to down Thorim yet on 25 normal, but we downed Jaraxxus on our third attempt first night, on a night when 7 of our top 8 DPS were out and we were using non-raider subs (and still only had 24 slots filled).

We might have beat him on the second attempt, but I called a wipe so we could do it with more people alive to pump folks up in prep for two hours of grinding on Thorim. We might have beat him on first attempt except I had a typo in my Mistress pickup macro AND my elemental pickup macro and we lost a few healers early (and, thinking the content was hard, didn't want to use combat resses yet).

He was too easy in my opinion.