Lord Jaraxxus -- Too Easy?

I like that this fight spreads the difficulty around throughout the raid. It's not just damage on the tank, but healing random players, dealing with the buff on Jaraxxus, interrupting the boss, interrupting adds, healing other random players, kiting a fire...

Compare it to XT: light left, gravity right, light left, gravity right, light left, gravity right, tantrum, spam aoe heals. DPS heart, ... harder... ok, you guys break off and aoe those adds. Ok. Tank those pummelers on top of the melee so that they get killed by splash damage. Light left, gravity right, light left, gravity right, light left, gravity right... heart. The only risky parts of this fight is healing up the damage.

Yes, it is an easy fight from a numbers perspective. If your players don't pay much attention and react quickly, however, it becomes difficult. I think fights should be easy when everyone plays well. It's rare when so many players have to react to so many different things.

Belloc wrote:I like that this fight spreads the difficulty around throughout the raid. It's not just damage on the tank, but healing random players, dealing with the buff on Jaraxxus, interrupting the boss, interrupting adds, healing other random players, kiting a fire...

Compare it to XT: light left, gravity right, light left, gravity right, light left, gravity right, tantrum, spam aoe heals. DPS heart, ... harder... ok, you guys break off and aoe those adds. Ok. Tank those pummelers on top of the melee so that they get killed by splash damage. Light left, gravity right, light left, gravity right, light left, gravity right... heart. The only risky parts of this fight is healing up the damage.

Yes, it is an easy fight from a numbers perspective. If your players don't pay much attention and react quickly, however, it becomes difficult. I think fights should be easy when everyone plays well. It's rare when so many players have to react to so many different things.

I don't at all agree with your assessment of it compared to XT. Both XT and Jaraxxus are at fairly trivial "complication" levels and have very little risk. There really isn't much to react to on Jaraxxus at all.

I think just about anything that can be oneshot the first time people see the fight is dissapointing. Ulduar bosses are "harder". You've described Faction Champions fairly well with that last bit however imo, but not Jaraxxus.

XT10 pre-nerf was seriously hardcore for a group of people in 10-man gear. We managed to kill him but it came right down to less than 10 secs on the enrage.

As for Jaraxxus: we did him for the first time last night. I hadn't read the tactics much beyond "stay out the fire and DPS prioritize the adds". We one-shotted him. No-one died, I don't think anyone even dropped below 50% health.

No one is saying that the mechanics of the fights are naxx level. They are saying the difficulty, mechanics /= difficulty

Also you can simply every fight like you just did the xt one if you want. Like for jaraxxus, interupet if you want, heal the buff you set up on grid, dps adds when they spawn. A perfect example is magmadar. When you think of magmadar it's probably that hes pathetically easy and boring as hell. Well back in the day he was considered to be the brick wall amongst brick walls of bosses. Ppl complained that if you weren't alliance you couldn't beat him, or that you HAD to have an undead tank to beat him. Then one day blizzard released a patch which reduced his dmg, and amazingly on my server alone 7 new guilds beat him that day. Mechanics can be the exact same but tuning will be what makes the fight hard or not ultimately.

Yeah, I haven't had or seen any complaints about the mechanics of the ToC bosses so far (well, people bitch about the lack of mechanics of Faction Champs I guess) - Northrend Beasts, Jaraxxus and FC all have interesting enough mechanics, and Twin Valkyrs sounds even more so. The complaint in this thread is that the numbers on everything are so low that you can ignore or fail at most of the mechanics and still kill the bosses. Don't really understand how the two worms work? Don't even know the name of the first miniboss or what he does? Don't want to kill the adds on Jaraxxus? Doesn't matter, your tanks can probably live through a bad strat, and your DPS can zerg down the boss before anything really becomes a problem. Jaraxxus doesn't even spawn enough adds to be worrisome before he's dead. It's almost like post 3.0 sunwell, where a little thing like DPS going up and mob health going down made some extremely challenging fights complete walkovers, just because zerging DPS let you ignore tons of dangerous mechanics.

If they even just added 50% hp to every mob in the instance so far, it would become a fair bit better tuned to post-Ulduar DPS. Upping the raidwide damage by 50% might not be bad either. I'm guessing both will happen for the hard modes, although I hope that's not all there is new on the hardmodes.

Dammit.

Twin Valkyrs really looked like a fun fight, seemed like the first one that'd take a least a few attempts for everyone to learn the mechanics and stack the buffs high enough and get positioning right... nope. Still just pull #1 to see the abilities, and pull #2 to kill them with most people (including me) not really clear how the abilities work :S

It *is* a pretty cool fight though, and fun. Just tuned for Naxx gear instead of ulduar gear.

We did have Northrend Beasts randomly despawn at the start of P2 though, was odd.

Then spent the rest of the night wiping to IC hard, so it's not even like we were fielding a good roster tonight.

Yeah, Twins was a bit of a let down. We did it last night, and two shot it, and the only reason we didn't one shot it is because the light Twin tank apparently clicked his portal by mistake during the heal (When the off twin dual wields) and ended up getting stomped when he ran it accross the room without telling anyone...

It only lasted long enough to do 2 heals and 1 vortex so the mechanics didn't even have to be learned that much.

The biggest challenge we had was that Icehowl's corpse WOULD NOT DESPAWN and stayed up the entire raid (Which made Faction Champions a bitch when they ran inside the corpse and were hard to see, and impossible to see any annoyances they did in there like Hellfiring or dropping totems).

Senador wrote:
The biggest challenge we had was that Icehowl's corpse WOULD NOT DESPAWN and stayed up the entire raid (Which made Faction Champions a bitch when they ran inside the corpse and were hard to see, and impossible to see any annoyances they did in there like Hellfiring or dropping totems).

Seriously, this was by far the hardest part of the fight. In our raid, Icehowl decided to hold onto his badges too, so we all had to put in tickets.

We got them down on the 3rd try even though it was clear many people still had no clue what they were supposed to be doing. Looking forward to seeing whta all these fights are like on heroic. We should be able to start those next week after Anub'arak is down correct?

We usually pull icehowl into a corner before killing him to avoid that >.>

We usually pull icehowl into a corner before killing him to avoid that >.>

He died from DoT ticks during Massive Crash He launched everyone to the walls, then fell over dead...

Well, it's pretty clear that, aside from faction champions, the normal mode of this instance is designed to be sort of a gear reset; a break from the increasing challenge that was displayed with the progression from Naxx to Malygos to Ulduar.

I really don't mind that it's a reset... we all get some nice loot for Icecrown, after all. And, let's be honest, even if they're not as challenging as Ulduar hard modes, ToC hard modes will still be too much for many guilds.

Really, the only negative I see with this instance is that super hard-core guilds have to wait for the hard modes. It is fortunate, then, that most hard-core guilds are still working on Ulduar hard modes (particularly Algalon and Yogg+0).

Until Icecrown, ladies and gentlemen.

what makes you think they wont make icecrown normal mode a joke just like this? So that everyone can see arthas on their very first week! (that is if they can field 2 raids of 10mans in a week)
As long as the hardmodes are not a 'roflheroicmode?' where you get the "heroic" tokens for free like this... this might not be a utter fail instance as it so far has been. Both 5 man and 10/25 mans.

Well, the 5 man is actually harder than the 25 man so far, because of the buggy first encounter.

Seloei wrote:what makes you think they wont make icecrown normal mode a joke just like this? So that everyone can see arthas on their very first week! (that is if they can field 2 raids of 10mans in a week)
As long as the hardmodes are not a 'roflheroicmode?' where you get the "heroic" tokens for free like this... this might not be a utter fail instance as it so far has been. Both 5 man and 10/25 mans.

I give Blizzard more credit than that. I expect Icecrown to be at least Ulduar difficulty.