[10 heroic] Difficulty level

Hi all

I'd like to know how you feel on the 10 heroic difficulty.

I'm a bit confused by the fact that those *are* hardmodes and loots are just at the 25 raid level which is much easier.

We are a 25 raid guild, we were working on Yogg when ToC came out (no 25 hard mode done).
This week, due to low attendance, we did a 10 raid on ToC. Normal 10 run was pretty easy. However, I have found the hard mode difficulty extremely higher than even 25 normal mode.

We manages to get the beast down in about 15 tries and still we finished 5 seconds before the enrage while nobody died !

I'm a bit confused about the very high difficulty of 10H from a 10 raiding guild point of view.

I'd like to get feedback about how hard you felt about those and what was you progression before.

I'm part of a 10 man raiding guild, the 10 man heroic seems tuned well for skilled 10 man raiders. We only have 10 man gear, and beat the enrage timer by 6(?) seconds with everyone up. I'm pretty sure hard modes are supposed to be hard. :>

Well we cleared the 10 man HM with 2 groups. I have to say that anub is quite a step up from the other hardmodes in here but the others on 10 man were relatively easy.
We've cleared everything in ulduar 25 minus Yog-0. However we haven't had too many kills of firefighter, Yog-1, Freya-3K and Algalon.

Most obvious changes to the encounters are a little more aoe damage and more tank damage. However the little more aoe damage can grow to large unhealable amounts when your dps doesn't pay attention.
So all in all like all hardmodes it requires more attention of your raiders to side affects like dpsing adds, portals, volcanos and better CC then just tank taunting the hard hitting melee mobs in the champions encounter. The usual don't clump up, move out of fire etc apply offcourse.
25 man heroic is a different story but I reckon any guild that can clear the 10 and 25 man normal totc and has 10-15 skilled players can clear the 10 man hardmodes with a bit of overgearing from the 25 man totc at some point.

Ok, so it looks like gearing doesn't help much on those encounters.
The fire damage on the empaler isn't a little bit more damage but much more - we lost a lot of tries due to that and dps not killing fast enough the bosses/adds.

However, I don't agree you just have to pay a bit more attention. My feeling is you just can't afford any error from any raid member.
Just have a little lag on either a fire on the empaler or when focused by the lastest beast and it's a wipe plain and simple.

Well this is the thing, you're coming from the position of a guild only just clearing yogg saron 25 on normal mode.
This is not an elitist comment, it's merely a fact, the normal modes already offer alot of very easy gear to guilds unable to clear ulduar hard modes, so i'm not sure why you are suprised that the hard modes are testing you in toc.

Remember the hard modes of 10 man toc (according to blizzards progression) would be the natural step up to the 10 man ulduar hard modes, so really i think they are potentially too easy when you consider 10 man algalon in comparison.

If you're only doing normal mode ulduar mostly that will mean that most likely you're not overly well geared or as practised in your ways as more advanced guilds and that does mean you will find things more difficult. The first week 2 top guilds completed it with no wipes, this second week we already have over 20 guilds doing it, if things had been much easier then it; likely we would have seen most of the top 100 getting the 0 wipe acheivement the first week and it would have all been rather anti-climatic.

My advice is, don't rush to meet every new challenge that blizzard sends when you haven't finished the previous tier or you will find you hit a cockblock in this way. Many guilds found a similar thing in tbc, blizzard removed the tier 6 attunements, so guilds started skipping vashj and kael.. however once they got to archimonde/gurtogg/ros, they suddenly found themselves stuck since they had deliberately tried to avoid the more challenging encounters until they were actually in their way (i'm not suggesting you are doing this however)

Basically, toc normal modes are designed to give you some extra gear to help guilds still in ulduar to progress further. The heroic modes are for those who have already stomped ulduar hard modes and want a new challenge. If anything I think 10 man heroic is too easy, we finished with i think 46 wipes left quite easily (only wiping on anub). Some of the 10 man heroic loot is also best in slot gear for some classes/specs so i think it's a good thing not everyone can get it just yet.

To help you with the encounter now i've ranted a bit though, beasts is a bit of a test to your tanks' gear as well as your ability to dps within a series of soft and hard enrage timers while handling all the existing abilities. Basically it's a bit of a gear check but you should be able to do it just about at your current level I would think with a stacked group. Make sure to use 3 healers. After that you should find jaraxxus and champions kinda free loot, i would imagine if you struggle on beasts that anub'arak will be out of your reach somewhat for now but twins is pretty laughable in heroic since they didn't really make it much harder so i reckon if you can breach the barrier of the beasts you can make some headway. They downtuned it a little in some hotfixes that may help you a bit.

I can assure you that what you are feeling in 10 man is the same in 25 man even more so however, the step up is significant (as it should be) but that's far from a bad thing.

My surprise was mostly that 10 HM and 25 normal have similar gear level, I expected both to be on equal difficulty. I never though there was such a gad between 25 normal and 10 heroic.

We didn't focus on 10 HM ulduar because we are a 25 raiding guild and never been anything better than 20% on XT-002 heart.
Last week, we decided to give a try to Ulduar 10 HM and did XT-002 with 8 players (we were waiting for 2 others), had one wipe on Thorim, 3 or 4 on Freya, banged a bit our heads on Mimiron because we didn't worked on the strat before and we had probably too many melees (5).
Maybe those hard modes have lured me into a false feeling that they were not that hard.

Ulduar 10m hard modes aren't hard WHEN you have 245 loot from ToC and 226 from ulduar25.

Try doing them with only loot from Ulduar10, and they are hard!

So this means that ToC10 will be hard when you have all 232 ilevel loot, and easy when you have all 245 level loot.

I imagine you don't outgear ToC10 hardmode yet, so thats why its hard.

Candiru wrote:Ulduar 10m hard modes aren't hard WHEN you have 245 loot from ToC and 226 from ulduar25.

Try doing them with only loot from Ulduar10, and they are hard!

So this means that ToC10 will be hard when you have all 232 ilevel loot, and easy when you have all 245 level loot.

I imagine you don't outgear ToC10 hardmode yet, so thats why its hard.

I have seen quite a few people in 10 man strict guilds saying they've cleared it in 10 man gear, and liked the difficulty - it was still hard, but doable.

I suppose I just restated what you said, but the point is that people are doing it with just 10 man gear and being successful.

We are mostly just geared from 10 man hard modes in Ulduar, some Ulduar 25 pieces,and 1 or 2 pieces of 245 gear per raider at best. The beast encounter on hard mode was difficult for us, but we were able to get to the third phase with our raid up on Monday - at which point our SP lagged a bit while targetted, Icehowl enraged and our rogueless hunterless group got eaten. We called it at that due to sleepiness, but we could have gotten the fight down had we started earlier in the week and spent a bit more time on it. We still had over 40 tries left when we called it.

For experience comparison, our 25 man has killed Hodir a couple of times and can kill the first 2 bosses in ToC 25 man. Our 10 man has done all the drake achievements except for Firefighter and Yogg +1. For our 10 man, it feels like the ToC heroic modes on 10 man are well tuned - we should find it hard but doable, with time and practice and no mistakes. I like the difficulty level - if it was facerollable for us, it would be undertuned and very disappointing.

We've taken people into 10 man Ulduar hard modes that had 25 man experience and no hard mode experience. They almost always end up dead the first couple tries and in some cases we have had to call fights and just do them on normal or not at all. Being able to do 25 mans in no way means you can automatically do 10 man hard modes - not in Ulduar and not in ToC. Likewise, a 10 man guild that focused on 10 man Ulduar normal mode and could clear it should be able to go into 10 man ToC and clear it, but should find the heroic mode a step up and perhaps unbeatable. When we first started working on hard modes in Ulduar 10, after not having done such a ramping up before, we had huge repair bills for awhile until we developed a bit as a raid and got better at our jobs. If a 10 man team never went through that process in Ulduar, then it is very reasonable to expect them to have to go through it now.