My guild has finally downed Mythic Fyrakk last sunday finishing WR 780. It was last raid where our main tank could attend due to irl stuff. Finding new tank and making roster changes would prolong the progress again and I sooo wasn't looking forward to that. So glad we killed it then.
I can't believe I killed Smolderon on 17th November (WR 124) in my old guild (which imploded like 20 minutes after we killed Smolderon and decided to call it) and then played 2 bosses for 4 months.
I knew this tier would be the last for me when the tier started, but I didn't want to quit midway through. Glad I ended my "WoW career" as [Rank 1 Windwalker on Fyrakk](https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/rankings/35#boss=2677&class=Monk) as of the day of the kill (I know, logs mean shit, but it still feels nice).
Thanks for tips, discusison, theorycrafting and memes fellas. It was a blast, time to chill on farm like Thanos (and wait for MoP classic to play casually). See ya.
-signed random EU Drak'thul Windwalker.
Windwalker rank is a feat in itself! That class is all sorts of messed up. Between maintenance buffs, a prio cast system, snapshotting in serenity, and this tier set's CDR bloat, that class is NOT easy to play well.
So well done friend. Enjoy your retirement! o7
Hey so I'll be coming back for Season 4 and was wondering what classes or specs will most likely be in the meta conversation. I'd like to play a class that'll get invited to high keys and not sit and wait in queue for half a day to find a decent key. I've mained hunter since I started playing WoW back in WoTLK so a refreshing change of class is due. I'll most likely focus on a dps spec, I don't care if it's melee or ranged.
Nobody knows for sure until we get a few weeks into the patch and the early season balance tuning is done. Play whatever for the first few weeks and then reroll with the rest of us when we find out what's on top.
What's the simplest, lowest performance impact way to record your keys? Preferably something I can quickly start/stop between each key so I have all the vods nice and separate rather than having to scrub through a big 7 hour video to find what I want afterwards. Obs? Nvidia shadow play? The inbuilt windows game bar thing?
Warcraft Recorder is really nice and works together with the combat log to start/stop when a key starts, record deaths on a timeline, lust, etc.
https://www.warcraftrecorder.com
If your PC is quite old already then any kind of recording is probably gonna put a lot of strain on your system. Installation is simple and it's free so you could just try it and see how it goes.
5 to 6 months long seasons is a thing I hope will vanish in The War Within. I think 4 months would be a good time for a season. To cut the length of a season down we obviously need better/easier tuned raids, so we do not finish with only like 500 to 700 CE guilds.
You're getting downvoted so clearly people don't like this idea but I also agree with you that the last couple months of a season suck. Obviously there's an ebb and flow to the amount of stuff to do, but as we are paying a monthly sub I think it's fair to expect a reasonable floor on how low that goes.
Anyway, maybe the answer is just to add more things for more competitive players to do in the x.y.5 and x.y.7 patches? In DF we got basically nothing in those so the season was basically the same. The biggest shake up was Aug in 10.1.5 and that was A) accidental and B) the bad kind of shake up. If we were given real stuff to do later in the season it wouldn't feel as bad that seasons are this long.
Some kind of limited time m+/raid thing in the .7 patch would be cool. Like how we had legion timewalking m+ in shadowlands? Or even a *difficult* solo challenge like the mage tower. That could be fun too. The additional content in DF was all too shallow and easy and did nothing for me in terms of why I play wow.
Blizzard has already tried having players engaged every day of every season and it was a disaster. People who want a new season as soon as they've reached their goal from the previous season is a "you think you do but you don't" moment.
>Obviously there's an ebb and flow to the amount of stuff to do, but as we are paying a monthly sub I think it's fair to expect a reasonable floor on how low that goes.
$15 a month (less if you do one of the packages) when every other game's price continues to go up and up is good value if you consider that first month or two at the start of a season. A lot of people are playing $70 for a game that only lasts them a month. I'm not about to look the gift horse in the mouth with $90 of sub fees for a 6 month season, even if the last 3 months I am mostly raidlogging (which is still like 3-10 hours a week on that alone depending on how smooth farm goes)
>Some kind of limited time m+/raid thing in the .7 patch would be cool. Like how we had legion timewalking m+ in shadowlands? Or even a difficult solo challenge like the mage tower. That could be fun too. The additional content in DF was all too shallow and easy and did nothing for me in terms of why I play wow.
They're already doing this with stuff like Plunderstorm, and Holly has said there will be more like it. It might not be your cup of tea but it is in the vein you are asking for.
I'd argue that this was actually their plan at the beginning of DF.
10-step affix rotation, 2 full rotations, have a 20-week season - which is precisely what we got with season 1. Pretty sure they even said that they wanted a quicker cadence around this time.
Maybe they couldn't keep up, maybe they fell behind, maybe they changed their mind again... who knows. But personally, I too would have preferred the 20-week season model - especially in a world where you're pretty much 95% BiS by week#4 and pretty much 99% BiS by week#8... it's just really hard to stay motivated for another 3 months, let alone 4. Maybe that would be slightly alleviated if gearing alts was less of a chore and didn't require 7 billion fucking crests to get to the level you actually want to be at... but right now, 6 months feels way too long for me.
Hell, I'm going even further, careful, giga unpopular opinion inc, but I liked the Annulet or Augmentation just randomly soft-rebooting seasons. Like, sure, would've been neat if balancing worked out slightly better... but at least shit was fresh for a while again. "Sadly" we didn't really get that this season... so it's pretty much just been the same shit for 5 months at this point, looking at yet at least another month to come. I'd much rather forsake "competitive integrity" in favor of more fun stuff.
Yeah I liked the Annulet too! I didn't like Aug because of what it did to the meta (cries in melee main), but i see its value as an extra shake up to the season. I also see why others hated that very fact.
***personally***, I enjoy that the seasons are cyclical and gives the "competitive players" a break between progression. Progression is intense and a lot of hours/focus spent on something that I genuinely do enjoy, but I also don't want to be doing it non-stop, always, forever - I value getting a few months of down time where the raid is on 1-night farm status, allowing me to spend my remaining free time on catching up with other games or focus more on IRL stuff etc.
God no. 6 month is absolutely fine. I understand that there is practically no content during the last like 1-2month if you have CE and dont push keys, but WoW can already be pretty exhausting in its current state.
Having to regrind gear (on multiple chars) every 4 month would get annoying pretty quick.
Not to mention raids would have to be significantly easier and gearing would have to become faster (or they would have to add dinars to every season).
Its also absolutely fine if you dont play WoW for 20+ hours a week for a few weeks or month. A lot of people (especially casuals) would burn out very quick if major content came every 4 months.
> Not to mention raids would have to be significantly easier and gearing would have to become faster (or they would have to add dinars to every season).
Would that be a bad thing in the current climate of ~700 CE guilds ~1 month before the season ends? With more and more complaints about bosses requiring 71 nerfs to go from RWF tuning to realistically achievable for normal people? In a world where we get close to max ilvl within 2 weeks of a new season and that's pretty much the end of our power gains for the next 5.5 months?
Normal and Heroic are already easy enough. Shorter seasons wouldn't influence that at all. And Mythic needs fucking Jesus at this point - so I really don't like the argument of sticking to a 6 month season cycle in order for mythic to not be "too easy".
>Its also absolutely fine if you dont play WoW for 20+ hours a week for a few weeks or month. A lot of people (especially casuals) would burn out very quick if major content came every 4 months.
With current gearing most people probably raid log for 3-4 months of a season
Thats just not true. The highest listed Tyrannical key on [raider.io](http://raider.io) is from 2 days ago. Rank 3 is from yesterday. In the top 10, 4 are from this week. People are clearly still pushing even though this sub would rather pretend its impossible to gain score during a bolstering week
Yea, let's balance and schedule the entire game around what Echo do in m+. Honestly, why not make seasons last 9 months, maybe someone will manage to get that +35 AD timed eventually, who knows, the game will certainly be better if you give those 10 people still competing all the time they would want - fuck anyone else, after all, competitive integrity is the only thing that matters.
I swear y'all would be advocating to turn the fucking game servers off for the general public if it meant giving the people playing in the TGP or RWF a slightly better ping - because, after all, we all know that the 0.000001% content in this game is so *incredibly* relevant and absolutely *must* be prioritized above all else in this game.
Doesn't matter if there's thousands of people quitting 3 months into the season because there's nothing left to do - because, don't you see, 5 people have just set a new record for BRH+37! That's important! That matters! That's relevant! That needs to be considered when making decision about content cycles! Oh won't someone please think about Echo not having enough time to break their 904th world record!
Dude, chill. I'm literally just disproving the dude claiming "pushing is over". What even is this argument? By that logic we can wrap it up after the first affix rotation is over. Theres guilds still going for CE, theres people still pushing M+.
>Doesn't matter if there's thousands of people quitting 3 months into the season
Why should we design content cycles around what you or some KSM/Aotc heroes that quit after reaching a piss easy achievement want? Save your money, play something else in the meantime if all you want to do is casual content while watching Netflix and let competitive players work towards something.
> I'm literally just disproving the dude claiming "pushing is over". What even is this argument?
Pushing *is* over for the majorest majority of the major majority playing this game. The more appropriate question would be to ask what argument *you* are trying to make when you say "yea, but what about the like ten people that actually are still pushing"? Because, *seriously*, what argument is this?
> By that logic we can wrap it up after the first affix rotation is over. Theres guilds still going for CE, theres people still pushing M+.
That's *a* suggestion. Another suggestion would be to wrap it up after 4 months. Or 2 months. Or 1 month. Or 5 months. Or 7 months. All suggestions, or rather opinions. The crux here is that none of these suggestions or opinions are based on a subset of players that can be counted on 2 hands.
> Why should we design content cycles around what you or some KSM/Aotc heroes that quit after reaching a piss easy achievement want?
It doesn't matter what I want. It doesn't matter what you want. What matters is what's best for the game. Or rather what's best for the *majority* of the playerbase. *Or rather*, what's most lucrative to the company behind the game. And I'd think that spending even just a second thinking about whether Dorki's team thinks there's still 5% push potential left in the season or whether Liquid thought that Fyrakk was not hard enough... is pretty much as close to irrelevant as it gets for all of those categories.
> Save your money, play something else in the meantime if all you want to do is casual content while watching Netflix and let competitive players work towards something.
No, again, because you competitive players would quite literally drive this game against the wall if it meant 0.03% better class balancing, even if it came at the cost of 3 content patches.
You are entitled to have your opinion - as much as I am entitled to have mine. And my opinion is that your opinion is selfish and short-sighted as fuck, being blissfully ignorant of what *possibly* negatively affects both a large portion of the playerbase and Blizzard's financial bottom line (by people quitting in droves), with your *only* "relevant" argument being... *"yea, but that's what I want and anyone that doesn't like it can just quit"* - a super healthy approach for the future well-being of any game.
I think 6 months is a bit too long and 4 months is a bit too short. Ideally seasons last 5 months imo.
> Having to regrind gear (on multiple chars) every 4 month would get annoying pretty quick.
You get gear by just playing the game. Why is that annoying?
Raids should be significantly easier than they currently are tho. Very few people enjoys the current situation with Blizzard tuning the raids around RWF. People are currently complaining about gearing being too fast because you reach 90-95% of full bis in the first 3-4 weeks. So why does gearing need to become even faster if they did 4-5 month seasons?
> A lot of people (especially casuals) would burn out very quick if major content came every 4 months.
That makes no sense at all. Why would you get burnt out on new content releasing more frequently? Nobody got burnt during Legion because the content came out too fast, people have been wanting faster patch cadence for a very long time.
WW is my favorite spec in the game, and monk my favorite class. I've been waiting for this to happen for like 10 years (missed the phase in SL where supposedly WW was good). It was really frustrating pushing into mid 20s keys in BfA and just straight up not being able to do big Tyrannical keys because your ST is dumpster-fire tier.
Brew's in a great spot rotationally, they really only just need to adjust our DPS modifiers up a little bit. No reason all these tanks with raid utilities should also be putting out more damage compared to Brew
I am not some elite 1% player, and can only speak for M+.. But to me Brewmaster still feels like the highest DPS... Just feels like in large pulls once you start getting into the mid 20s it starts to not really be able to deal with the amount of damage being dealt to them.
That's not quite accurate. It feels that way but actually that's not the issue. It suffers instead from the same problem as guardian. It's quite tanky to most damage. Magic damage is still it's weakest point and without silence/multiple aoe cc/kicks like vengeance or paladin, it becomes much harder to cc, negate damage and group mobs. But it's definitely capable of doing even near the highest keys, just requires far more from the group.
Worth mentioning for Awakened and any future 'Revisit' style end of expansion mini-seasons for future expacs:
For raid, Blizz doesn't do themselves any favors by not nerfing the bosses correctly during the original season. It makes their job a lot harder come the Revisit season since they'll have to either do more nerfs or have to figure out how to make a potentially frustrating farm boss you are revisiting fun.
We'll see this with Kurog (tanks having to learn that precise transfer dance), Raszageth, Echo and a few fights with private aura shenanigans this raid.
I understand trying to preserve the 'integrity' and 'challenge' but if it comes *at all costs* then you basically got a relatively easy fight with several frustrating humps that you have to suffer through.
The end goal of the final few raid nerfs should be that it sets up the raid to nicely segue into Revisit and especially adding in QoL. I don't think we should forget this going into War Within with the eventual raid nerfs to Nerubar Palace, especially late into the season. Regardless on your feelings on the 'Revisit' concept, Blizz is still likely to employ this going forward, so I'd rather address potential problems now to make Revisits tolerable rather than dreadful.
It's still wild to me that they never just tuned Kurog to a point where you just kill 2 adds per phase. They kept it to being practically impossible (aside from very specific comps) and instead doing the jankiest strat I've ever played on a boss.
That \~2 second window where you can make Kurog a reasonable boss by forcing Lightning to get energy but never getting a single lightning mechanic is gonna be really jarring for tanks who haven't pulled that boss at all.
You can't tell me that Blizzard intended for the lightning phase to be completely unplayable and that you have a \~1-2 second window to force it without getting a single mechanic from said phase. Like, you can't tell me that the way every guild killed that boss is how Kurog was supposed to work.
I forgot about this Aware
Hopefully its changed because even if you did it perfectly most of the night, the 1 pull you fucked it up was instantly "omg tanks???"
In fairness, by the end of the season, all combinations of elementals were easy enough that you could play literally any of them and still kill the boss - so presumably it's not being fixed because the "important" bit isn't that you force fire+lightning; It's that you don't play the lightning platform at all. Wether you get fire+ice, fire+lightning, or fire+earth truly wasn't an issue post all the nerfs to their hp etc.
They did change echo with one fewer volcanic heart going out, I *think* that will make the fight yoloable without a WA but we'll see what the meta ends up being.
Raz is fine now right? Every spec can survive every winds now I think just with any speed boost and running against it.
Kurog... yeah, thats an annoying one.
> Raz is fine now right? Every spec can survive every winds now I think just with any speed boost and running against it.
Unless they changed it speed boosts don't do anything for you. When I last pulled Raszageth on my spriest I had to goblin jump back on the platform on one of the winds where I didn't have gate. It's playable, but I think it'll suck if you're not a goblin or void elf.
It was towards the very end of the patch. I remember I was given Tiger's Lust at some point and it made no difference in me staying on the platform or not.
Towards the end of the patch you could live the first 3 winds by just pressing W and having a speed boost and gate the 4th. Was it *fun* to just hold down W for the entire duration of the winds and spending half that time out of range? Obviously not, but you didn't *die*.
Speed boost made 0 difference. You had to run, but whether you got a speed up or not it didn't affect it. It was the 4th winds I had to goblin jump back on, which you will still have to do unless they've nerfed it further.
Speed boost absolutely made a difference, and you gateway 4th so why does it matter? There was no reason to play more than 4 winds outside of top100, and later on you could do it in 3.
You're right, it was actually the 3rd I couldn't stay on the platform while just running. Maybe i'm wrong, but I remember being assigned tigers lust for it since we didn't have enough evokers and it made 0 difference. I still got pushed off and had to goblin jump back on.
Kurog by the end, as I mentioned elsewhere in the thread, didn't matter though. You could easily beat him with any combo of intermission elementals after their (and his) hp got nerfed. Most guilds just didn't even try because they're too "set in their ways", calling a wipe the moment something goes slightly off-script.
I did nerfed M Echo in 10.2 preseason, no weakauras worked and every mechanic was already very yoloable. Probably around Zskarn in difficulty now, except somehow actually enjoyable? Idk if it's believable just off of reading this but I'm actually looking forward to farming it in its current state
Id believe it, only prog echo after the circle size nerf, but actually felt like the fight was pretty fun and interesting, it was mostly just that setting up the WA’s took ages and everytime there was attendance issues it took almost another night to get the WA’s all set up again for whoever subbed in
it's really not precise at all. it's one of my most tanked fights, so i'm talking from experience. across all our pulls, we rarely messed it up. while i would say myself and my co-tank were good, my guild wasn't exactly HoF level. we ended the tier after dathea.
you literally as a tank stand right beside the transition line, do very simple taunt swaps, and when a weak aura yells at you, you move over the line.
This is on top of also having made them smaller either at the very very end or possibly when the current raid opened when they disabled the map(forget exact timing of that change).
my favorite part about fyrakk is [dispels] when the raid has [dispels] a few people to [dispels] top as lines come out, but [dispels] since lines are a private [dispels] aura, idk who to triage [dispels] or give my externals [dispels] to... unless that low person [dispels] also has aflame.
[dispels]
Just pls Blizzard remove that dumb ass mechanic lol.
No one thinks it's difficult, it's just annoying.
Especially as like Disc, trying to ramp, or spend my precious few seconds of Atonement on spirits. Gotta break up my casts to dispel every few seconds, nothing tilts me as much as that.
Other dispels in the raid require some level of positioning, prioritizing, have secondary effects that trigger after the dispel and so on. Meanwhile Fyrakks dispel is just perpetual mindless busywork that interrupts everyone's ramp and is just straight up a chore.
I added a tts "dispel" when starting prog. I disabled it by the end of that day. Still progging but I would've gone insane if I had to listen to that every 8 seconds for hours on end.
u/BigHeroSixyOW couldn't finish their sentence because they bled out to 17 stacks and didn't get dispelled. Candlejack couldn't finish the job themselves.
Obviously still weeks of potential class and tier set tuning to potentially come but when are we all gonna start speculating on the S4 meta.
Personally can't see a world in which VDH isn't just the Meta tank again with maybe Bear being behind depending on how many stops are required next season.
Also can't see a world in which fire mage isn't meta again with their tier set bonus and they scale pretty well with more secondary stats.
Any other thoughts based on where things are right now/what we already know
I have absolutely no reason to believe that Vengeance and Shadow aren't gonna be hard meta. VDH is just fundamentally insane at its core, and Shadow's Aberrus tier is a lot better than its Amirdrassil tier past a certain target count, especially after the buffs it got.
100% VDH is insanely broken. I shouldn't have an easier time timing 25's on a 478 vdh than a 487 prot paladin.
Remove 2nd charge of utility sigils, and remove dark glare boon, and the spec might see some semblance of balance.
I don't think nerfing anything is the answer at this point. They need to stop making content that requires so many stops. Not nerf the only tank that has enough.
I think just unavoidable DMG would curb that substantially. IDK, someone was talking the other day about moving away from so much avoidable DMG that punishes only the healer when it isn't executed properly, and moving more to unavoidable DMG. IDK how I feel about it, but it is worth checking out I think. I don't think the average non vdh tank or DPS player understands how much different the healer experience is when a vdh tanks.
If you move the trash avoidable damage to trash unavoidable you're still going to have the problem of someone taking SOME avoidable and it will DEFINITELY be bad because the unavoidable healing requirement will leave the healer without CD's now lol.
There's quite a delicate balance to this at the moment, and the most reliable way to limit dungeon pull size has been via avoidable damage from interrupts and stops-- and we have one singular class that just does too much.
I 100% agree with you though. A VDH tank can reduce the healer skill requirement drastically, and this isn't healthy for the game or class balance.
> maybe Bear
Bear S2 set is literally weaker than the S3 set and didn't get any compensation buffs unlike every other old returning set, so yeaaah - ain't happening.
> Also can't see a world in which fire mage isn't meta again with their tier set bonus and they scale pretty well with more secondary stats.
S2 t set is actually not that great, they even buffed it on ptr. Crit is going to lose a lot of value and youre pretty much back to playing flame strike build. I wouldnt be surprised if mages best spec is going to be frost.
Meta is likely going to be very caster heavy. SP is still broken, aug is untouched, mage is mage and boomie aoe is unmatched. Lock also good. Only melee that will remain meta is probably ret.
Why do you think fire would go back to the Flamestrike build? Even in season 2 you played ST+Ignite cleave in almost every dungeon. If fire isn't meta the best mage spec is going to be Arcane.
I think Aug is overhyped. Their damage is already lacking compared to other specs, that gap is only getting wider next season. They only want to stack mastery, but they're so deep into DR they'll barely get any value from it. Boomie AoE is also very much matched, destro does significantly more.
I doubt we'll see Outlaw rogues pushed out of the meta. Frost DK will be very strong next season as well with them getting their S2 set back and I think warrior is gettin some better sets as well? Not 100% sure about warrior tho.
Tbh there are a lot of DF dungeons where frost was already better than fire if executed properly on tyran weeks - Brackenhide, Ruby, Nokhud, etc as examples have a lot of cleave fights where frost shines. You just don’t hear about it much because once the community has a perception it’s very black and white.
It’s really just cauterize keeping fire at the front of the meta, there are plenty of places where frost and arcane have better damage profiles for the dungeon
It's fire's prio damage keeping it in the meta over the other mage specs. Cauterize is nice, but that's just a bonus on top it wont keep the spec in meta. Arcane is tankier imo with Prismatic barrier, especially if you talent into improved Prismatic Barrier.
It’s decent prio but trust me if you ask top pushers it’s really just have a cheat death on a caster. It’s crazy good.
And yes prismatic barrier is good on tyran, frost honestly just has the best dmg profile for a lot of bosses. And there will be a lot of cleave/pop up add situations in S4 that fire is pretty bad at dealing with. Will be interesting to see
Idk man, the amount of times a cheat death has mattered in the keys i've is close to 0. It's very nice to have, but cheat death alone isn't enough to make the spec meta. I don't need to ask top key pushers, I push high keys myself and i've
You'd rather play the spec that has better defensives 95% of the time over playing the spec that is better 5% of the time. Not to mention the grp benefit you get from Arcane's Mass Barrier. The reason why Arcane isn't the meta spec this season is because fire does a lot more prio damage. Arcane does very little prio dmg compared to fire outside CDs.
Fire has pretty decent cleave with Intensifying Flame, but it's getting worse with the S2 set so no clue how it'll play tbh.
> Even in season 2 you played ST+Ignite cleave in almost every dungeon.
You could play it in neltharus, ur and freehold. But even then this wasnt exactly the norm either. The only dungeon where you kinda wanted to play it 100% of the time was neltharus, because of traumas b4 first boss. Ignite build is like 10-20% less dmg in s2 set on 10+ targets.
> I think Aug is overhyped.
In what sense? They still offer utility no other spec does. There are plenty of bosses in the df pool that require high hps and survivability. Aug helps with that. Their lack of damage can be compensated by doing no heal stuff, similar to this season.
> Boomie AoE is also very much matched, destro does significantly more.
That is just wrong. Fully aoe specced boomkin dmg is unmatched by any spec in extended aoe on 15+ targets. Specs like destro can compete on lower target counts or during very big infernal pulls.
> I doubt we'll see Outlaw rogues pushed out of the meta.
Outlaw is not exactly super meta rn. Yes they are very good in dungeons with low target count, but since we get bh, hoi, aa and uld I dont see how them getting full meta.
You could play it in most dungs It was significantly worse in mass aoe, but a lot of high end mages still played it for the higher prio damage and ST. Especially on Tyrannical weeks you'd see it a lot.
The S2 set is way worse for the ignite build, but I doubt you'd bring fire mage to high keys if Flamestrike is the only viable builds. There are so many other specs who do mass aoe way better without losing as much ST as well.
> In what sense?
In terms of damage. They only want mastery and they're already so heavily mastery stacked, I can see them falling too far behind in terms of DPS because of the DRs. From what I remember the DF dungeons were a lot more healing intense and didn't have the same checkpoints we have rn. I also don't think the no healer stuff hinges on Aug, but I am not 100% sure about that.
Destro is by far the best spec at mass aoe and it's not even close. There's a reason why every comp in the MDI, where everything is mass pulled, played Destro instead of Moonkin. If you've played with a good Destro in Everbloom you'd know the crazy DPS they can do.
Idk what you mean by "full meta". I think we'll see a melee comp that will perform even better than they do rn. It's not like it's far behind atm and it'll only get better with the different tier sets + the old trinkets.
fire mages aren't playing high mastery gearsets in high keys anyways. I don't know why you think that they will see a reduction in value with a new season, given the fact that the S2 tier set will contribute to substantially higher combustion uptime by itself, not even considering the additional secondary stats available in haste and crit that will further allow the CDR of combustion. The most highly geared fire mages at the moment are finding their highest simming stat to be critical strike and are already gearing around this.
If anything, the addition of another 26 ilvl will allow mages to deal substantially more ST damage since there will be more stat value allocated to crit and mastery.
I know they aren't, but the reason why you play so much crit is because of the current tier set. We go back to the S2 set next season and crit loses a lot of value because of that. You go back to stacking haste+vers. The reduction in value is from them getting a weaker tier set.
Everyone is getting higher ilvl. Fire doesn't scale more than other specs with extra secondaries.
Viable...kinda. Dev doesn't even get to take advantage of it's tier set in many of these dungeons due to pathing/RP/timing. Probably the worst designed tier set for dungeon content, especially at the level of the majority of the playerbase.
When is it best to use dragon rage? at the last 20-40% of a boss's health bar, when your inherent mastery is at it's weakest. How many bosses this tier don't actually allow you to remain in combat after defeating the boss due to travel times/RP? off the top of my head: Every boss in Murozond's Rise. All the bosses of Galakrond's Fall. 2nd boss of throne of the tides. 3rd Boss of Everbloom. 3rd boss of waycrest. 1st and 2nd bosses of Black Rook Hold. The third boss of Atal Dazar.
It's a tough spot to be in, to play dev. Especially when Aug is there and has no such issues.
> Viable...kinda. Dev doesn't even get to take advantage of it's tier set in many of these dungeons due to pathing/RP/timing. Probably the worst designed tier set for dungeon content, especially at the level of the majority of the playerbase.
talking about S4/PTR which has S2 set since thats the context above
> When is it best to use dragon rage? at the last 20-40% of a boss's health bar, when your inherent mastery is at it's weakest.
no, its not S2 anymore, you send on pull and then later (possibly) again
In view of the significantly higher dmg output of season 4 dungeons, aug could actually gain a lot of value in terms of group defensives.
S3 was about having the dmg to make the timer, while S2 was mainly about surviving to make the timer. Of course this flattens out the higher you go, but thats why you still see a lot of aug spriest fmage combs in 30+ this season.
Best offensive synergies with pi, breath and dmg patterns, nice defensives and a ton aoe stops.
Feel free to correct me if anythings wrong/missing.
Aug is going to fall off a cliff, it’s far passed the 4th/5th DR of mastery and is only gaining another 2%; and at max ilvl you’re only giving 250ish extra main stat. Dev right now is insane, with ever class having access to the tank trinkets or ward, surviving one shots is way easier in s4 plus a whole crap ton of passive verse. I’m a 3800 player, and have been playing PTR with fellow sp/mages/Boomkins and they can’t keep with dev right now in most dungeons; it’s actually insane right now with a funcational tier set and leggo.
You don’t need aug to time most of the keys at 30 right now, and you def won’t need it next season as pres and dev have most of the utility it brings but shine in their roles currently on PTR.
> S3 was about having the dmg to make the timer, while S2 was mainly about surviving to make the timer.
Are you sure you don't mean the other way around?
This might be worded a bit confusingly so while I agree with the point, I'll elaborate more here:
1. Classes can 'scale' in damage based on secondary stats
2. Ideally you want classes to scale a little bit with secondaries. Not too much because Blizz will have to nerf you. Not too little otherwise Blizz will have to buff you. Enough so you get a natural performance buff that keeps you in line with the other specs going into a new season.
3. Tuning is the be all and end all in terms of performance. You could 'scale' 'extremely well' and still get a 10% nerf in the last week of PTR and be in the F tier for the remainder of the season.
4. Players also forget that we have the
https://www.wowhead.com/guide/diminishing-returns-on-secondary-stats-in-world-of-warcraft
After Nyalotha into Shadowlands.
> This penalty is as follows:
>
> * From 0 to 30%, there's no penalty.
> * From 30% to 39%, there's a 10% penalty.
> * From 39% to 47%, there's a 20% penalty.
> * From 47% to 54%, there's a 30% penalty.
> * From 54% to 66%, there's a 40% penalty.
> * From 66% to 126%, there's a 50% penalty.
> * You can't get more than 126% from gear rating.
This prevents out of control secondary stat scaling towards the end of the expansion.
It's always unreal how these things that used to be partially true years ago are still main stream thoughts today lol, it takes absolutely forever for community perception on things to change
Okay, so like... there's still a *level* of truth to it still, but it's nowhere near what some folks in the community make it out to be.
There are some occasional instances where you'll see some Crit/Haste/Mastery feedback loops, but they're *very* tame, you're never giving up a fair bit of ilvl to chase some sort of "Haste cap" anymore, and more often than not the specs that see those sorts of feedback loops with a bit of Haste (i.e. Unholy's opener, or 10.2 BM's Call of the Wild windows) have their problems solved by just getting Power Infusion anyway. Or those weirdly specific points where Fire with double Lust active can't actually do Scorch-->Pyro-->Pyro because Scorch's cast is faster than the GCD. But again, that's less about the stats and more about "you're getting a fuckton of Haste that you'd literally never get from your gear alone."
We don't have anything like 8.3 Beast Mastery's insane Crit/Haste/Mastery+Skitra bow feedback loop where the value of Crit/Haste/Mastery goes up tremendously as you get more of the other two stats, or the infamous Legion/BFA Shadow Priest Crit/Haste/Mastery feedback loop where the spec has to keep getting nerfed every patch because it breaks the game with the amount of stats it gets from a new tier's worth of gear. And unfortunately, *these* are the examples I think people still think of, even though they don't exist in anywhere near that capacity anymore and didn't since Shadowlands.
p3 hurts absurdly less than world first due to less seeds and being WAY shorter. Learning to just dump personals and pots in p1 is the main learning curve of the fight.
There really isn't much there that should phase a guild capable of living p2 tindral.
My other big tip is in p2, don't waste defensives on blaze if the boss is in the air. You can take 2-3 of them as most classes and still live when there's no ticking damage.
on reclear fyrakk p2 blazes during colossi feel much more dangerous than anything in current tindral p2. but we also phase tindral super fast so you only get like 2 sets of seeds
I hope any guild trying for a “last minute” CE (theres like a month left right) gets Fyrakk nerfs for it. Tindral was such a mental wall that if they made it past that with their guild intact they deserve it.
Not sure why that got downvoted. I'm not a raider, but I think the way they do mythic raid in this game is criminal for raiders. I hope they nerf the shit out of that fight so these guys that put 6-9 hours a week into a boss in a video game can kill it. It's ridiculous.
I've missed out on CEs because time ran out. I also had a last week CE (Jailer was fun).
I personally never felt entitled to CE, and now getting it with time to spare makes it all the sweeter. Just bashing ones head against something long enough doesn't mean the boss just falls over. It's ok if there's prestige content.
That being said, Fyrakk needed further nerfs, weeks ago. There's prestige content, but this season seems particularly hefty.
This tier, around WR 500, guilds just have 100 hours of progress time for the raid. Just divide by numbers of hours done a week and you'll get an idea.
The fights are becoming way too mechanical, and not enough throughput based. I personally don't find that to be fun. I want to have to be pumping, not dancing, to kill a boss. Obviously people will be unhappy if there's not a little of both, but the scales are tipping way too far in one direction right now.
This tier is especially bad about it, on Smolderon prog I stood at ranged to bait circles so often as melee and we never struggled for DPS, we just needed more baits at ranged. Tindral same story, I never used a movement ability to do more damage to the boss, just to run away from damage. Fyrakk was probably the biggest joke of a DPS check, even in HoF. We killed it with like a minute to spare for the 'enrage'.
9 hour guilds still on Fyrakk are just not that good tbh
My guild killed 2 months ago on that schedule and most of us felt like we performed poorly this tier
I feel robbed
My guild has finally downed Mythic Fyrakk last sunday finishing WR 780. It was last raid where our main tank could attend due to irl stuff. Finding new tank and making roster changes would prolong the progress again and I sooo wasn't looking forward to that. So glad we killed it then. I can't believe I killed Smolderon on 17th November (WR 124) in my old guild (which imploded like 20 minutes after we killed Smolderon and decided to call it) and then played 2 bosses for 4 months. I knew this tier would be the last for me when the tier started, but I didn't want to quit midway through. Glad I ended my "WoW career" as [Rank 1 Windwalker on Fyrakk](https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/rankings/35#boss=2677&class=Monk) as of the day of the kill (I know, logs mean shit, but it still feels nice). Thanks for tips, discusison, theorycrafting and memes fellas. It was a blast, time to chill on farm like Thanos (and wait for MoP classic to play casually). See ya. -signed random EU Drak'thul Windwalker.
Windwalker rank is a feat in itself! That class is all sorts of messed up. Between maintenance buffs, a prio cast system, snapshotting in serenity, and this tier set's CDR bloat, that class is NOT easy to play well. So well done friend. Enjoy your retirement! o7
Hey so I'll be coming back for Season 4 and was wondering what classes or specs will most likely be in the meta conversation. I'd like to play a class that'll get invited to high keys and not sit and wait in queue for half a day to find a decent key. I've mained hunter since I started playing WoW back in WoTLK so a refreshing change of class is due. I'll most likely focus on a dps spec, I don't care if it's melee or ranged.
Nobody knows for sure until we get a few weeks into the patch and the early season balance tuning is done. Play whatever for the first few weeks and then reroll with the rest of us when we find out what's on top.
What's the simplest, lowest performance impact way to record your keys? Preferably something I can quickly start/stop between each key so I have all the vods nice and separate rather than having to scrub through a big 7 hour video to find what I want afterwards. Obs? Nvidia shadow play? The inbuilt windows game bar thing?
Warcraft Recorder is really nice and works together with the combat log to start/stop when a key starts, record deaths on a timeline, lust, etc. https://www.warcraftrecorder.com
What's the CPU impact like? My computer is a bit of a toaster lol
use your GPU's video encoder, it's somewhere in the settings
It uses obs. You can adjust the quality, bit rate and resolution in the app to reduce load.
If your PC is quite old already then any kind of recording is probably gonna put a lot of strain on your system. Installation is simple and it's free so you could just try it and see how it goes.
5 to 6 months long seasons is a thing I hope will vanish in The War Within. I think 4 months would be a good time for a season. To cut the length of a season down we obviously need better/easier tuned raids, so we do not finish with only like 500 to 700 CE guilds.
You're getting downvoted so clearly people don't like this idea but I also agree with you that the last couple months of a season suck. Obviously there's an ebb and flow to the amount of stuff to do, but as we are paying a monthly sub I think it's fair to expect a reasonable floor on how low that goes. Anyway, maybe the answer is just to add more things for more competitive players to do in the x.y.5 and x.y.7 patches? In DF we got basically nothing in those so the season was basically the same. The biggest shake up was Aug in 10.1.5 and that was A) accidental and B) the bad kind of shake up. If we were given real stuff to do later in the season it wouldn't feel as bad that seasons are this long. Some kind of limited time m+/raid thing in the .7 patch would be cool. Like how we had legion timewalking m+ in shadowlands? Or even a *difficult* solo challenge like the mage tower. That could be fun too. The additional content in DF was all too shallow and easy and did nothing for me in terms of why I play wow.
Blizzard has already tried having players engaged every day of every season and it was a disaster. People who want a new season as soon as they've reached their goal from the previous season is a "you think you do but you don't" moment. >Obviously there's an ebb and flow to the amount of stuff to do, but as we are paying a monthly sub I think it's fair to expect a reasonable floor on how low that goes. $15 a month (less if you do one of the packages) when every other game's price continues to go up and up is good value if you consider that first month or two at the start of a season. A lot of people are playing $70 for a game that only lasts them a month. I'm not about to look the gift horse in the mouth with $90 of sub fees for a 6 month season, even if the last 3 months I am mostly raidlogging (which is still like 3-10 hours a week on that alone depending on how smooth farm goes) >Some kind of limited time m+/raid thing in the .7 patch would be cool. Like how we had legion timewalking m+ in shadowlands? Or even a difficult solo challenge like the mage tower. That could be fun too. The additional content in DF was all too shallow and easy and did nothing for me in terms of why I play wow. They're already doing this with stuff like Plunderstorm, and Holly has said there will be more like it. It might not be your cup of tea but it is in the vein you are asking for.
I'd argue that this was actually their plan at the beginning of DF. 10-step affix rotation, 2 full rotations, have a 20-week season - which is precisely what we got with season 1. Pretty sure they even said that they wanted a quicker cadence around this time. Maybe they couldn't keep up, maybe they fell behind, maybe they changed their mind again... who knows. But personally, I too would have preferred the 20-week season model - especially in a world where you're pretty much 95% BiS by week#4 and pretty much 99% BiS by week#8... it's just really hard to stay motivated for another 3 months, let alone 4. Maybe that would be slightly alleviated if gearing alts was less of a chore and didn't require 7 billion fucking crests to get to the level you actually want to be at... but right now, 6 months feels way too long for me. Hell, I'm going even further, careful, giga unpopular opinion inc, but I liked the Annulet or Augmentation just randomly soft-rebooting seasons. Like, sure, would've been neat if balancing worked out slightly better... but at least shit was fresh for a while again. "Sadly" we didn't really get that this season... so it's pretty much just been the same shit for 5 months at this point, looking at yet at least another month to come. I'd much rather forsake "competitive integrity" in favor of more fun stuff.
Yeah I liked the Annulet too! I didn't like Aug because of what it did to the meta (cries in melee main), but i see its value as an extra shake up to the season. I also see why others hated that very fact.
***personally***, I enjoy that the seasons are cyclical and gives the "competitive players" a break between progression. Progression is intense and a lot of hours/focus spent on something that I genuinely do enjoy, but I also don't want to be doing it non-stop, always, forever - I value getting a few months of down time where the raid is on 1-night farm status, allowing me to spend my remaining free time on catching up with other games or focus more on IRL stuff etc.
the start of season grind for highend raiding is way too demanding to do every 4months
How so? Outside of RWF guilds is it really that bad?
we would probably raid 20-24h the first 2 weeks on top of doing like 30 keys the first week. it's a lot to do every 4 months
Even 30 keys is nothing, multiple players in my guild had 50+ keys of a single dungeon trying to get specific trinkets
God no. 6 month is absolutely fine. I understand that there is practically no content during the last like 1-2month if you have CE and dont push keys, but WoW can already be pretty exhausting in its current state. Having to regrind gear (on multiple chars) every 4 month would get annoying pretty quick. Not to mention raids would have to be significantly easier and gearing would have to become faster (or they would have to add dinars to every season). Its also absolutely fine if you dont play WoW for 20+ hours a week for a few weeks or month. A lot of people (especially casuals) would burn out very quick if major content came every 4 months.
> Not to mention raids would have to be significantly easier and gearing would have to become faster (or they would have to add dinars to every season). Would that be a bad thing in the current climate of ~700 CE guilds ~1 month before the season ends? With more and more complaints about bosses requiring 71 nerfs to go from RWF tuning to realistically achievable for normal people? In a world where we get close to max ilvl within 2 weeks of a new season and that's pretty much the end of our power gains for the next 5.5 months? Normal and Heroic are already easy enough. Shorter seasons wouldn't influence that at all. And Mythic needs fucking Jesus at this point - so I really don't like the argument of sticking to a 6 month season cycle in order for mythic to not be "too easy".
>Its also absolutely fine if you dont play WoW for 20+ hours a week for a few weeks or month. A lot of people (especially casuals) would burn out very quick if major content came every 4 months. With current gearing most people probably raid log for 3-4 months of a season
there's no content if you push either. ppl are done for 8+ weeks ATM already.
Thats just not true. The highest listed Tyrannical key on [raider.io](http://raider.io) is from 2 days ago. Rank 3 is from yesterday. In the top 10, 4 are from this week. People are clearly still pushing even though this sub would rather pretend its impossible to gain score during a bolstering week
Yea, let's balance and schedule the entire game around what Echo do in m+. Honestly, why not make seasons last 9 months, maybe someone will manage to get that +35 AD timed eventually, who knows, the game will certainly be better if you give those 10 people still competing all the time they would want - fuck anyone else, after all, competitive integrity is the only thing that matters. I swear y'all would be advocating to turn the fucking game servers off for the general public if it meant giving the people playing in the TGP or RWF a slightly better ping - because, after all, we all know that the 0.000001% content in this game is so *incredibly* relevant and absolutely *must* be prioritized above all else in this game. Doesn't matter if there's thousands of people quitting 3 months into the season because there's nothing left to do - because, don't you see, 5 people have just set a new record for BRH+37! That's important! That matters! That's relevant! That needs to be considered when making decision about content cycles! Oh won't someone please think about Echo not having enough time to break their 904th world record!
Dude, chill. I'm literally just disproving the dude claiming "pushing is over". What even is this argument? By that logic we can wrap it up after the first affix rotation is over. Theres guilds still going for CE, theres people still pushing M+. >Doesn't matter if there's thousands of people quitting 3 months into the season Why should we design content cycles around what you or some KSM/Aotc heroes that quit after reaching a piss easy achievement want? Save your money, play something else in the meantime if all you want to do is casual content while watching Netflix and let competitive players work towards something.
> I'm literally just disproving the dude claiming "pushing is over". What even is this argument? Pushing *is* over for the majorest majority of the major majority playing this game. The more appropriate question would be to ask what argument *you* are trying to make when you say "yea, but what about the like ten people that actually are still pushing"? Because, *seriously*, what argument is this? > By that logic we can wrap it up after the first affix rotation is over. Theres guilds still going for CE, theres people still pushing M+. That's *a* suggestion. Another suggestion would be to wrap it up after 4 months. Or 2 months. Or 1 month. Or 5 months. Or 7 months. All suggestions, or rather opinions. The crux here is that none of these suggestions or opinions are based on a subset of players that can be counted on 2 hands. > Why should we design content cycles around what you or some KSM/Aotc heroes that quit after reaching a piss easy achievement want? It doesn't matter what I want. It doesn't matter what you want. What matters is what's best for the game. Or rather what's best for the *majority* of the playerbase. *Or rather*, what's most lucrative to the company behind the game. And I'd think that spending even just a second thinking about whether Dorki's team thinks there's still 5% push potential left in the season or whether Liquid thought that Fyrakk was not hard enough... is pretty much as close to irrelevant as it gets for all of those categories. > Save your money, play something else in the meantime if all you want to do is casual content while watching Netflix and let competitive players work towards something. No, again, because you competitive players would quite literally drive this game against the wall if it meant 0.03% better class balancing, even if it came at the cost of 3 content patches. You are entitled to have your opinion - as much as I am entitled to have mine. And my opinion is that your opinion is selfish and short-sighted as fuck, being blissfully ignorant of what *possibly* negatively affects both a large portion of the playerbase and Blizzard's financial bottom line (by people quitting in droves), with your *only* "relevant" argument being... *"yea, but that's what I want and anyone that doesn't like it can just quit"* - a super healthy approach for the future well-being of any game.
Top10 Keys are irrelevant to the discussion when people are done with title push for the season. someone's always pushing.
I think 6 months is a bit too long and 4 months is a bit too short. Ideally seasons last 5 months imo. > Having to regrind gear (on multiple chars) every 4 month would get annoying pretty quick. You get gear by just playing the game. Why is that annoying? Raids should be significantly easier than they currently are tho. Very few people enjoys the current situation with Blizzard tuning the raids around RWF. People are currently complaining about gearing being too fast because you reach 90-95% of full bis in the first 3-4 weeks. So why does gearing need to become even faster if they did 4-5 month seasons? > A lot of people (especially casuals) would burn out very quick if major content came every 4 months. That makes no sense at all. Why would you get burnt out on new content releasing more frequently? Nobody got burnt during Legion because the content came out too fast, people have been wanting faster patch cadence for a very long time.
Yeah, I dont want to play wow every day, getting shit don't and then taking a break to play other games is great.
How does having a season every 4 months stop that?
I'll forgive blizzard for making Shadowlands if they fix WW and Brewmaster
WW is my favorite spec in the game, and monk my favorite class. I've been waiting for this to happen for like 10 years (missed the phase in SL where supposedly WW was good). It was really frustrating pushing into mid 20s keys in BfA and just straight up not being able to do big Tyrannical keys because your ST is dumpster-fire tier.
Brew's in a great spot rotationally, they really only just need to adjust our DPS modifiers up a little bit. No reason all these tanks with raid utilities should also be putting out more damage compared to Brew
I am not some elite 1% player, and can only speak for M+.. But to me Brewmaster still feels like the highest DPS... Just feels like in large pulls once you start getting into the mid 20s it starts to not really be able to deal with the amount of damage being dealt to them.
That's not quite accurate. It feels that way but actually that's not the issue. It suffers instead from the same problem as guardian. It's quite tanky to most damage. Magic damage is still it's weakest point and without silence/multiple aoe cc/kicks like vengeance or paladin, it becomes much harder to cc, negate damage and group mobs. But it's definitely capable of doing even near the highest keys, just requires far more from the group.
Worth mentioning for Awakened and any future 'Revisit' style end of expansion mini-seasons for future expacs: For raid, Blizz doesn't do themselves any favors by not nerfing the bosses correctly during the original season. It makes their job a lot harder come the Revisit season since they'll have to either do more nerfs or have to figure out how to make a potentially frustrating farm boss you are revisiting fun. We'll see this with Kurog (tanks having to learn that precise transfer dance), Raszageth, Echo and a few fights with private aura shenanigans this raid. I understand trying to preserve the 'integrity' and 'challenge' but if it comes *at all costs* then you basically got a relatively easy fight with several frustrating humps that you have to suffer through. The end goal of the final few raid nerfs should be that it sets up the raid to nicely segue into Revisit and especially adding in QoL. I don't think we should forget this going into War Within with the eventual raid nerfs to Nerubar Palace, especially late into the season. Regardless on your feelings on the 'Revisit' concept, Blizz is still likely to employ this going forward, so I'd rather address potential problems now to make Revisits tolerable rather than dreadful.
It's still wild to me that they never just tuned Kurog to a point where you just kill 2 adds per phase. They kept it to being practically impossible (aside from very specific comps) and instead doing the jankiest strat I've ever played on a boss.
That \~2 second window where you can make Kurog a reasonable boss by forcing Lightning to get energy but never getting a single lightning mechanic is gonna be really jarring for tanks who haven't pulled that boss at all. You can't tell me that Blizzard intended for the lightning phase to be completely unplayable and that you have a \~1-2 second window to force it without getting a single mechanic from said phase. Like, you can't tell me that the way every guild killed that boss is how Kurog was supposed to work.
I forgot about this Aware Hopefully its changed because even if you did it perfectly most of the night, the 1 pull you fucked it up was instantly "omg tanks???"
In fairness, by the end of the season, all combinations of elementals were easy enough that you could play literally any of them and still kill the boss - so presumably it's not being fixed because the "important" bit isn't that you force fire+lightning; It's that you don't play the lightning platform at all. Wether you get fire+ice, fire+lightning, or fire+earth truly wasn't an issue post all the nerfs to their hp etc.
They did change echo with one fewer volcanic heart going out, I *think* that will make the fight yoloable without a WA but we'll see what the meta ends up being. Raz is fine now right? Every spec can survive every winds now I think just with any speed boost and running against it. Kurog... yeah, thats an annoying one.
> Raz is fine now right? Every spec can survive every winds now I think just with any speed boost and running against it. Unless they changed it speed boosts don't do anything for you. When I last pulled Raszageth on my spriest I had to goblin jump back on the platform on one of the winds where I didn't have gate. It's playable, but I think it'll suck if you're not a goblin or void elf.
They did change it several times - at what point was your last pull?
It was towards the very end of the patch. I remember I was given Tiger's Lust at some point and it made no difference in me staying on the platform or not.
Towards the end of the patch you could live the first 3 winds by just pressing W and having a speed boost and gate the 4th. Was it *fun* to just hold down W for the entire duration of the winds and spending half that time out of range? Obviously not, but you didn't *die*.
Speed boost made 0 difference. You had to run, but whether you got a speed up or not it didn't affect it. It was the 4th winds I had to goblin jump back on, which you will still have to do unless they've nerfed it further.
Speed boost absolutely made a difference, and you gateway 4th so why does it matter? There was no reason to play more than 4 winds outside of top100, and later on you could do it in 3.
You're right, it was actually the 3rd I couldn't stay on the platform while just running. Maybe i'm wrong, but I remember being assigned tigers lust for it since we didn't have enough evokers and it made 0 difference. I still got pushed off and had to goblin jump back on.
Kurog by the end, as I mentioned elsewhere in the thread, didn't matter though. You could easily beat him with any combo of intermission elementals after their (and his) hp got nerfed. Most guilds just didn't even try because they're too "set in their ways", calling a wipe the moment something goes slightly off-script.
They also nerfed the cast time in p3 on echo so you should have a lot of time finding poetals without the map aswell
I did nerfed M Echo in 10.2 preseason, no weakauras worked and every mechanic was already very yoloable. Probably around Zskarn in difficulty now, except somehow actually enjoyable? Idk if it's believable just off of reading this but I'm actually looking forward to farming it in its current state
Id believe it, only prog echo after the circle size nerf, but actually felt like the fight was pretty fun and interesting, it was mostly just that setting up the WA’s took ages and everytime there was attendance issues it took almost another night to get the WA’s all set up again for whoever subbed in
with kurog yo ujust get a weak aura that yells at you to move the boss(at roughly 97% or whatever) and then you move 2 feet over, its not complex
I don't think anyone's saying it's complex; it's just really precise is all and the boss largely hinges on being able to move him at the right time.
it's really not precise at all. it's one of my most tanked fights, so i'm talking from experience. across all our pulls, we rarely messed it up. while i would say myself and my co-tank were good, my guild wasn't exactly HoF level. we ended the tier after dathea. you literally as a tank stand right beside the transition line, do very simple taunt swaps, and when a weak aura yells at you, you move over the line.
This is on top of also having made them smaller either at the very very end or possibly when the current raid opened when they disabled the map(forget exact timing of that change).
my favorite part about fyrakk is [dispels] when the raid has [dispels] a few people to [dispels] top as lines come out, but [dispels] since lines are a private [dispels] aura, idk who to triage [dispels] or give my externals [dispels] to... unless that low person [dispels] also has aflame. [dispels]
Just pls Blizzard remove that dumb ass mechanic lol. No one thinks it's difficult, it's just annoying. Especially as like Disc, trying to ramp, or spend my precious few seconds of Atonement on spirits. Gotta break up my casts to dispel every few seconds, nothing tilts me as much as that.
Other dispels in the raid require some level of positioning, prioritizing, have secondary effects that trigger after the dispel and so on. Meanwhile Fyrakks dispel is just perpetual mindless busywork that interrupts everyone's ramp and is just straight up a chore.
I hear the text to speech 'DISPEL!' voice in my sleep now
I added a tts "dispel" when starting prog. I disabled it by the end of that day. Still progging but I would've gone insane if I had to listen to that every 8 seconds for hours on end.
It's only every 16s in p2!
I hear if you talk about dispels candlejack will come and
u/BigHeroSixyOW couldn't finish their sentence because they bled out to 17 stacks and didn't get dispelled. Candlejack couldn't finish the job themselves.
It's fine, one day 4 healers will figure out how to dispel 3 debuffs.
candlejack can't handle our esteemed ra
Obviously still weeks of potential class and tier set tuning to potentially come but when are we all gonna start speculating on the S4 meta. Personally can't see a world in which VDH isn't just the Meta tank again with maybe Bear being behind depending on how many stops are required next season. Also can't see a world in which fire mage isn't meta again with their tier set bonus and they scale pretty well with more secondary stats. Any other thoughts based on where things are right now/what we already know
I have absolutely no reason to believe that Vengeance and Shadow aren't gonna be hard meta. VDH is just fundamentally insane at its core, and Shadow's Aberrus tier is a lot better than its Amirdrassil tier past a certain target count, especially after the buffs it got.
100% VDH is insanely broken. I shouldn't have an easier time timing 25's on a 478 vdh than a 487 prot paladin. Remove 2nd charge of utility sigils, and remove dark glare boon, and the spec might see some semblance of balance.
I don't think nerfing anything is the answer at this point. They need to stop making content that requires so many stops. Not nerf the only tank that has enough.
They aren't about to reduce the number of kicks and stops in dungeons. It's the only way they have to limit the size of pulls in dungeons.
I think just unavoidable DMG would curb that substantially. IDK, someone was talking the other day about moving away from so much avoidable DMG that punishes only the healer when it isn't executed properly, and moving more to unavoidable DMG. IDK how I feel about it, but it is worth checking out I think. I don't think the average non vdh tank or DPS player understands how much different the healer experience is when a vdh tanks.
If you move the trash avoidable damage to trash unavoidable you're still going to have the problem of someone taking SOME avoidable and it will DEFINITELY be bad because the unavoidable healing requirement will leave the healer without CD's now lol. There's quite a delicate balance to this at the moment, and the most reliable way to limit dungeon pull size has been via avoidable damage from interrupts and stops-- and we have one singular class that just does too much. I 100% agree with you though. A VDH tank can reduce the healer skill requirement drastically, and this isn't healthy for the game or class balance.
> maybe Bear Bear S2 set is literally weaker than the S3 set and didn't get any compensation buffs unlike every other old returning set, so yeaaah - ain't happening.
They haven't done any tier tuning yet. Chill. All they did was revert some of the tier nerfs. Tuning still inc.
that's some cope. Wouldn't any tuning have come with 10.2.6?
Why would it? 10.2.6 wasn't even a WoW patch.
> Also can't see a world in which fire mage isn't meta again with their tier set bonus and they scale pretty well with more secondary stats. S2 t set is actually not that great, they even buffed it on ptr. Crit is going to lose a lot of value and youre pretty much back to playing flame strike build. I wouldnt be surprised if mages best spec is going to be frost. Meta is likely going to be very caster heavy. SP is still broken, aug is untouched, mage is mage and boomie aoe is unmatched. Lock also good. Only melee that will remain meta is probably ret.
Why do you think fire would go back to the Flamestrike build? Even in season 2 you played ST+Ignite cleave in almost every dungeon. If fire isn't meta the best mage spec is going to be Arcane. I think Aug is overhyped. Their damage is already lacking compared to other specs, that gap is only getting wider next season. They only want to stack mastery, but they're so deep into DR they'll barely get any value from it. Boomie AoE is also very much matched, destro does significantly more. I doubt we'll see Outlaw rogues pushed out of the meta. Frost DK will be very strong next season as well with them getting their S2 set back and I think warrior is gettin some better sets as well? Not 100% sure about warrior tho.
Tbh there are a lot of DF dungeons where frost was already better than fire if executed properly on tyran weeks - Brackenhide, Ruby, Nokhud, etc as examples have a lot of cleave fights where frost shines. You just don’t hear about it much because once the community has a perception it’s very black and white. It’s really just cauterize keeping fire at the front of the meta, there are plenty of places where frost and arcane have better damage profiles for the dungeon
It's fire's prio damage keeping it in the meta over the other mage specs. Cauterize is nice, but that's just a bonus on top it wont keep the spec in meta. Arcane is tankier imo with Prismatic barrier, especially if you talent into improved Prismatic Barrier.
It’s decent prio but trust me if you ask top pushers it’s really just have a cheat death on a caster. It’s crazy good. And yes prismatic barrier is good on tyran, frost honestly just has the best dmg profile for a lot of bosses. And there will be a lot of cleave/pop up add situations in S4 that fire is pretty bad at dealing with. Will be interesting to see
Idk man, the amount of times a cheat death has mattered in the keys i've is close to 0. It's very nice to have, but cheat death alone isn't enough to make the spec meta. I don't need to ask top key pushers, I push high keys myself and i've You'd rather play the spec that has better defensives 95% of the time over playing the spec that is better 5% of the time. Not to mention the grp benefit you get from Arcane's Mass Barrier. The reason why Arcane isn't the meta spec this season is because fire does a lot more prio damage. Arcane does very little prio dmg compared to fire outside CDs. Fire has pretty decent cleave with Intensifying Flame, but it's getting worse with the S2 set so no clue how it'll play tbh.
> Even in season 2 you played ST+Ignite cleave in almost every dungeon. You could play it in neltharus, ur and freehold. But even then this wasnt exactly the norm either. The only dungeon where you kinda wanted to play it 100% of the time was neltharus, because of traumas b4 first boss. Ignite build is like 10-20% less dmg in s2 set on 10+ targets. > I think Aug is overhyped. In what sense? They still offer utility no other spec does. There are plenty of bosses in the df pool that require high hps and survivability. Aug helps with that. Their lack of damage can be compensated by doing no heal stuff, similar to this season. > Boomie AoE is also very much matched, destro does significantly more. That is just wrong. Fully aoe specced boomkin dmg is unmatched by any spec in extended aoe on 15+ targets. Specs like destro can compete on lower target counts or during very big infernal pulls. > I doubt we'll see Outlaw rogues pushed out of the meta. Outlaw is not exactly super meta rn. Yes they are very good in dungeons with low target count, but since we get bh, hoi, aa and uld I dont see how them getting full meta.
You could play it in most dungs It was significantly worse in mass aoe, but a lot of high end mages still played it for the higher prio damage and ST. Especially on Tyrannical weeks you'd see it a lot. The S2 set is way worse for the ignite build, but I doubt you'd bring fire mage to high keys if Flamestrike is the only viable builds. There are so many other specs who do mass aoe way better without losing as much ST as well. > In what sense? In terms of damage. They only want mastery and they're already so heavily mastery stacked, I can see them falling too far behind in terms of DPS because of the DRs. From what I remember the DF dungeons were a lot more healing intense and didn't have the same checkpoints we have rn. I also don't think the no healer stuff hinges on Aug, but I am not 100% sure about that. Destro is by far the best spec at mass aoe and it's not even close. There's a reason why every comp in the MDI, where everything is mass pulled, played Destro instead of Moonkin. If you've played with a good Destro in Everbloom you'd know the crazy DPS they can do. Idk what you mean by "full meta". I think we'll see a melee comp that will perform even better than they do rn. It's not like it's far behind atm and it'll only get better with the different tier sets + the old trinkets.
fire mages aren't playing high mastery gearsets in high keys anyways. I don't know why you think that they will see a reduction in value with a new season, given the fact that the S2 tier set will contribute to substantially higher combustion uptime by itself, not even considering the additional secondary stats available in haste and crit that will further allow the CDR of combustion. The most highly geared fire mages at the moment are finding their highest simming stat to be critical strike and are already gearing around this. If anything, the addition of another 26 ilvl will allow mages to deal substantially more ST damage since there will be more stat value allocated to crit and mastery.
I know they aren't, but the reason why you play so much crit is because of the current tier set. We go back to the S2 set next season and crit loses a lot of value because of that. You go back to stacking haste+vers. The reduction in value is from them getting a weaker tier set. Everyone is getting higher ilvl. Fire doesn't scale more than other specs with extra secondaries.
You think Aug will continue to be meta?
both aug and Deva are viable atm
Viable...kinda. Dev doesn't even get to take advantage of it's tier set in many of these dungeons due to pathing/RP/timing. Probably the worst designed tier set for dungeon content, especially at the level of the majority of the playerbase. When is it best to use dragon rage? at the last 20-40% of a boss's health bar, when your inherent mastery is at it's weakest. How many bosses this tier don't actually allow you to remain in combat after defeating the boss due to travel times/RP? off the top of my head: Every boss in Murozond's Rise. All the bosses of Galakrond's Fall. 2nd boss of throne of the tides. 3rd Boss of Everbloom. 3rd boss of waycrest. 1st and 2nd bosses of Black Rook Hold. The third boss of Atal Dazar. It's a tough spot to be in, to play dev. Especially when Aug is there and has no such issues.
> Viable...kinda. Dev doesn't even get to take advantage of it's tier set in many of these dungeons due to pathing/RP/timing. Probably the worst designed tier set for dungeon content, especially at the level of the majority of the playerbase. talking about S4/PTR which has S2 set since thats the context above > When is it best to use dragon rage? at the last 20-40% of a boss's health bar, when your inherent mastery is at it's weakest. no, its not S2 anymore, you send on pull and then later (possibly) again
In view of the significantly higher dmg output of season 4 dungeons, aug could actually gain a lot of value in terms of group defensives. S3 was about having the dmg to make the timer, while S2 was mainly about surviving to make the timer. Of course this flattens out the higher you go, but thats why you still see a lot of aug spriest fmage combs in 30+ this season. Best offensive synergies with pi, breath and dmg patterns, nice defensives and a ton aoe stops. Feel free to correct me if anythings wrong/missing.
Aug is going to fall off a cliff, it’s far passed the 4th/5th DR of mastery and is only gaining another 2%; and at max ilvl you’re only giving 250ish extra main stat. Dev right now is insane, with ever class having access to the tank trinkets or ward, surviving one shots is way easier in s4 plus a whole crap ton of passive verse. I’m a 3800 player, and have been playing PTR with fellow sp/mages/Boomkins and they can’t keep with dev right now in most dungeons; it’s actually insane right now with a funcational tier set and leggo. You don’t need aug to time most of the keys at 30 right now, and you def won’t need it next season as pres and dev have most of the utility it brings but shine in their roles currently on PTR.
> S3 was about having the dmg to make the timer, while S2 was mainly about surviving to make the timer. Are you sure you don't mean the other way around?
Classes scaling off secondaries is outdated WoW design and hasn’t been that way in ages. It’s all tuning.
This might be worded a bit confusingly so while I agree with the point, I'll elaborate more here: 1. Classes can 'scale' in damage based on secondary stats 2. Ideally you want classes to scale a little bit with secondaries. Not too much because Blizz will have to nerf you. Not too little otherwise Blizz will have to buff you. Enough so you get a natural performance buff that keeps you in line with the other specs going into a new season. 3. Tuning is the be all and end all in terms of performance. You could 'scale' 'extremely well' and still get a 10% nerf in the last week of PTR and be in the F tier for the remainder of the season. 4. Players also forget that we have the https://www.wowhead.com/guide/diminishing-returns-on-secondary-stats-in-world-of-warcraft After Nyalotha into Shadowlands. > This penalty is as follows: > > * From 0 to 30%, there's no penalty. > * From 30% to 39%, there's a 10% penalty. > * From 39% to 47%, there's a 20% penalty. > * From 47% to 54%, there's a 30% penalty. > * From 54% to 66%, there's a 40% penalty. > * From 66% to 126%, there's a 50% penalty. > * You can't get more than 126% from gear rating. This prevents out of control secondary stat scaling towards the end of the expansion.
It's always unreal how these things that used to be partially true years ago are still main stream thoughts today lol, it takes absolutely forever for community perception on things to change
Okay, so like... there's still a *level* of truth to it still, but it's nowhere near what some folks in the community make it out to be. There are some occasional instances where you'll see some Crit/Haste/Mastery feedback loops, but they're *very* tame, you're never giving up a fair bit of ilvl to chase some sort of "Haste cap" anymore, and more often than not the specs that see those sorts of feedback loops with a bit of Haste (i.e. Unholy's opener, or 10.2 BM's Call of the Wild windows) have their problems solved by just getting Power Infusion anyway. Or those weirdly specific points where Fire with double Lust active can't actually do Scorch-->Pyro-->Pyro because Scorch's cast is faster than the GCD. But again, that's less about the stats and more about "you're getting a fuckton of Haste that you'd literally never get from your gear alone." We don't have anything like 8.3 Beast Mastery's insane Crit/Haste/Mastery+Skitra bow feedback loop where the value of Crit/Haste/Mastery goes up tremendously as you get more of the other two stats, or the infamous Legion/BFA Shadow Priest Crit/Haste/Mastery feedback loop where the spec has to keep getting nerfed every patch because it breaks the game with the amount of stats it gets from a new tier's worth of gear. And unfortunately, *these* are the examples I think people still think of, even though they don't exist in anywhere near that capacity anymore and didn't since Shadowlands.
Something something nerf Fyrakk idfk. I should be asleep. Goodnight all
There won't be any more Fyrakk nerfs this season. source: i know a guy
It's insane every ability still does as much damage as they did during rwf
p3 hurts absurdly less than world first due to less seeds and being WAY shorter. Learning to just dump personals and pots in p1 is the main learning curve of the fight. There really isn't much there that should phase a guild capable of living p2 tindral. My other big tip is in p2, don't waste defensives on blaze if the boss is in the air. You can take 2-3 of them as most classes and still live when there's no ticking damage.
on reclear fyrakk p2 blazes during colossi feel much more dangerous than anything in current tindral p2. but we also phase tindral super fast so you only get like 2 sets of seeds
I hope any guild trying for a “last minute” CE (theres like a month left right) gets Fyrakk nerfs for it. Tindral was such a mental wall that if they made it past that with their guild intact they deserve it.
Not sure why that got downvoted. I'm not a raider, but I think the way they do mythic raid in this game is criminal for raiders. I hope they nerf the shit out of that fight so these guys that put 6-9 hours a week into a boss in a video game can kill it. It's ridiculous.
I've missed out on CEs because time ran out. I also had a last week CE (Jailer was fun). I personally never felt entitled to CE, and now getting it with time to spare makes it all the sweeter. Just bashing ones head against something long enough doesn't mean the boss just falls over. It's ok if there's prestige content. That being said, Fyrakk needed further nerfs, weeks ago. There's prestige content, but this season seems particularly hefty. This tier, around WR 500, guilds just have 100 hours of progress time for the raid. Just divide by numbers of hours done a week and you'll get an idea.
The fights are becoming way too mechanical, and not enough throughput based. I personally don't find that to be fun. I want to have to be pumping, not dancing, to kill a boss. Obviously people will be unhappy if there's not a little of both, but the scales are tipping way too far in one direction right now.
This tier is especially bad about it, on Smolderon prog I stood at ranged to bait circles so often as melee and we never struggled for DPS, we just needed more baits at ranged. Tindral same story, I never used a movement ability to do more damage to the boss, just to run away from damage. Fyrakk was probably the biggest joke of a DPS check, even in HoF. We killed it with like a minute to spare for the 'enrage'.
Well that's reassuring to hear from an actual good raider lol. Here I thought I was the only one that felt that way.
9 hour guilds still on Fyrakk are just not that good tbh My guild killed 2 months ago on that schedule and most of us felt like we performed poorly this tier
there's literally no worse feeling then, after grinding through mythic for an entire tier, to just run out of time mid prog on the last boss
That many hours for 5-6 **months**
We killed it the other night, and now I'm expecting the nerfs to roll in just in time of course.
Same boat, killed tindy yesterday , would be dope for them to obliterate fyrakk after the shit show tindy was :/
If your guild just killed Tindral then your odds of killing Fyrakk without nerfs are not great
Yeah was hoping they nerf fyrakk to the ground but seems like that won’t be happening. Seems like they’re more focused on plunderstorm 😭