• Dear Guest,

    You're browsing our forum as a Guest meaning you can only see a portion of the forum in read-only mode.
    To view all forum nodes and be able to create threads/posts please register or log-in with your existing account.

    TwinStar team

Buff/Tune AQ40 for a real challenge

Should AQ40 be buffed/over tuned?

  • Yes

    Votes: 50 51.0%

  • No

    Votes: 48 49.0%
  • Total voters
    98
D

DarkStorm

Authorized
Joined
Jan 25, 2015
Something that really struck me when I started playing on Kronos was how extremely easy Molten Core was. I raided Molten Core for the first time on Kronos with my guild at the time Blackwater and with merely 30 people in blues and greens we made it to Majordomo on our first raid. We would have killed Ragnaros & Domo too but we did not have enough dousers to spawn Domo.

BWL proved slightly harder and some guilds actually had to progress here due to trash packs requiring some cordination and that Chromaggus debuffs were going off faster than normal. Nefarian also proved somewhat of a challenge but overall BWL was not hard.

I realize these raids are old and by now they have been deconstructed to minute details as how to deal with each encounter but I hope you will still hear my point out.

Right now guilds have been raiding BWL for 8-9 months and hemorraghing players because of people getting bored of raiding MC & BWL over and over again. This is understandable and it comes with being on a private server. But my concern is the following:

Imagine you release AQ40. The hype is fucking real, guilds have been preparing for months with the war effort and consumable banks are stacked. Synced and Vanguard's penises are fully erect and throbbing for the world first kill. Vanguard of course fails and gets #2 but both guilds clear it within the first day. Rest of the guilds manage to clear it in 1-2 weeks.

And now what? We wait for Naxx for another 8-9 months?

My Proposal:

Buff/Overtune AQ. Increase the hp of bosses and trash. Increase the damage from raidwide spells and abilities. Do whatever you need to do so that AQ40 proves a real challenge. I would rather that AQ40 is released slightly overtuned and having to be nerfed than it proving no challenge for anyone.

Please guys Im begging you, I would love to experience wiping at least a few times before getting down a boss. Steamrolling through the content isnt fun at all.

This is my suggestion, you may disagree and maybe you dont give a shit. Thats fine, but Im glad I have at least let it be heard.
 
^ Bored from farming bwl for 6 months man.. Gief something that average pug wont be able to finish -.-
 
Last edited:
i agree that a buff would be great but just imagine how hard it would be for smaller guilds then.. and just imagine the whine when they overtune it.. i guess you saw what happened after first day of bwl when chromaggus applied his debuffs faster and how everyone was salty about it and it took other guilds 4 more days to get past him :whistling:

but overall a challenge would be appreciated imo but that would also be another step away from "blizzlike"
 
I would love an overtuned AQ40 ! Just to get salty myself and beeing forced to use every single consumable & buff and to maximize the performance of the raid in a tactical way as well.

I'd rather play 2 IDs tuned AQ failing on the dungeon and then get a nerf to BlizzLike then having it cleared on the first evening just as BWL ....
 
Your intention is good, but your solution would have a negative long-term impact. So I will not vote because I agree with your aim, but not with the way to go about it.

First of all, buffing encounters, even by a straight % to health, armor and damage, means changing their initial design, and I am here to re-experience that original design; even though I am far from a purist, I would not want anyone, even Chero, who I would trust with a lot, to customize these PvE Raids more than he already is doing due to lack of information or time.
Second of all, buffing these encounters would sky-rocket consumable use. Now, almost every raiding guild on Kronos is able to motivate their players to fully buff up for progress, but what you propose would translate into players being required to fully buff up during farm as well. And that’s simply not doable for 80% of raiders. Having your entire roster gather at least 5-6 types of consumables and the 2-3 world buffs you must acquire individually for your AQ raids for the next 6 to 10 months after progress has ended simply to be able to clear it in one evening, or at all, would put a tremendous strain on your casual players. Turnover will decimate your roster anyway by the time Naxxramas is released, and at an even faster pace should this proposal be accepted. And you won’t find yourself able to patch it up with Dungeon-geared players as you were able to do for BWL if you seek to only raid 2 nights a week.


In my opinion, an idea that would actually pre-empt both problems above would be to leave encounters exactly as they were and instead remove almost all damage-enhancing consumables and world buffs. Leave utility potions just as FAPs and LAPs, leave Major Mana Potions, Poisons, Thistle Tea, you get the gist, but remove everything from Jujus and Elixir of the Mongoose to Blasted Lands and Tribute buffs. This would A definitely make encounters a lot more challenging, anyone who thinks it would not have a big enough impact simply does not understand the synergy all these buffs accomplish, and B it would actually help guilds, especially casual guilds, reduce turnover by a significant amount, as it would allow the competent but casual player who arrives home 15 minutes before the raid to simply jump in and play the actual raiding content having to rely solely on his skill and teamwork. I.e. the hardcore are faced with a challenge, the casuals are able to keep up, it’s a win-win.


I’ve actually talked to several guild masters after BWL proved to be such a joke in order to forward a joint proposal to Chero to this effect. While some agreed, most objected on the grounds that 1st consumables help good players stand out. This is simply an idea I cannot agree with, I would much rather compete with the 50-60 Rogues on Kronos who have similar gear to mine than with the 15 who have the motivation or time to prepare to the same degree I do in Synced. 2nd that, without the need to grind consumables, their players would become raid loggers and so activity levels would decrease; of that, I myself can only approve. Let your players be raid loggers, let them just enjoy the 2 raid evenings a week you are having them sign up for in the first place; it prevents burn out, it is healthier on the whole. The ones who simply have to spend time in game, even if it means simply gathering consumables for the entire night, to fill whatever void they don’t want to deal with, those people have Alts or Dungeons or a miriad other activities. There’s a 3rd objection no one else had raised at the time, but which I do see as something to take under consideration, and that is a certain impact upon the economy. It would mainly affect Alchemy, however, and even that only partially.

If you want to raise the level of difficulty, do it in a way that minimizes arbitrary design and which benefits the entire raiding community.


EDIT I have decided to vote, and vote Yes, to raise the profile of the increased-difficulty lobby. My comments about the method to achieve it stand, though.
 
Last edited:
The reason why MC and also BWL are and were so ridiculously easy is that we are playing the 1.12.1 patch, where many blue items from dungeons can be attained that are as good or in many times even better than the gear that comes from MC and sometimes even BWL.

That's why everyone was vastly overgeared for those raids, and that's why they were so easy. Just to illustrate, in retail vanilla healers had 0 +heal when they stepped in Molten Core, when I did on here I had over 500 due to the new blues. In retail vanilla, healers had at best 200-300 +heal when stepping into BWL - here, more like 600-700. That's a huge difference. However, the 950 I have now as AQ looms were perfectly attainable back in retail at the same point of time.

AQ und Naxx are very different in that respect because the blue items play little if not no role in them, we are at the gear level that people had in retail and that those raids were designed for. Also, I am afraid a generic increase in HP and damage done will screw up encounter balance. Those are the main reasons why I am strongly against such a proposal.
 
Remove the abuse of soulstones.

With the x7 leveling event there are tons of summoning/soulstone warlocks. We all know that.

Suggestion (idea from Atro, kudos to him):

There is a possibility to check for the amount of active soulstones when engaging any boss (Checking for buffs).
If you have e.g. more than 6 soulstones active in the raid, the system will notice that and e.g. spawn the Guarding of Blizzard to oneshot the entire 40-man raid.

I also like the idea of buffing the bosses HP and downscaling it every now and than until it reaches the original amount after some month.

inb4 warlock shitstorm.
 
Have you considered the guilds which are still progressing through BWL right now? Have you considered the new people who have started playing on Kronos just recently? They didn't have the opportunity to farm Blackwing Lair for months. They didn't get to do crazy shit like filling two raids, each with 20 mains, 20 alts, give main characters priority on loot and stack insane amounts of gear on their raiders.

*If your raid is geared to the teeth with best in slot gear, with tanks who are pushing 12.000 HP, with healers who are pushing 1000+ heal, with DPS who are pushing 3000 AP, 50% crit, then you ought to annihilate AQ40! I'm not kidding!

KJ6vtF8.jpg


There is no reason to make content more difficult than it was during retail classic wow when it was current!

If these kinds of *people start having trouble with AQ40 then how is new blood ever supposed to join the raiding community? Nobody will ever create new raiding guilds! Eventually, existing guilds will just fall apart, just like they did on retail when bosses like Kael'Thas, C'thun, Brood Lord Lashlayer or even Vaelastrasz were major cockblockers.

You want to make bosses even more difficult than they're supposed to be?

Asking to make content more difficult than appropriate just because you're bored out of your mind and are part of the top percent geared raider community is very egoistic imho.

I was in Team Plague when they progressed through BWL on Emerald Dream and got the server firsts. Those HP and damage output buffs applied to bosses on that server didn't stop us at all from steamrolling the place. We didn't do so only because we had sick gear. We had perfectly optimized tactics and a solid strategy. All the bosses traits had been deconstructed and solutions to any possible scenario had been crafted. These sophisticated kill strategies have been born out of the knowledge of a decade of theorycrafting as well as practice! You can't nerf knowledge! Kronos devs do not possess the means or resources to create true difficulty without making it fake difficulty.

We're still a blizzlike realm, right?

The key to kill raid bosses is the knowledge to how to beat them. Contrary to many people's perception, there were only very few true gearcheck bosses in wow outside of Naxx. Especially inside Naxx, if you failed to grasp a boss mechanic and reacted accordingly, you'd mercilessly get beat down, no matter what your gear is. That is true difficulty.
Yes one could cheat a little with consumables, but those only got you so far. They barely were enough to create some tiny room for error, to breathe. You couldn't cheat yourself to a KT kill with a bunch of ignorant fools, such things were impossible!

[...]

I quit ED shortly after BWL was released so I don't know how the rest of the content was tuned and what implications those tunings had.

Of course I'd love to have bossfights where I can pop Death Wish twice, lol.

How about we get a PTR to test the AQ40 bosses first before we complain about possible lack of difficulty?

I'm only speaking for myself here before anyone gets any crazy ideas.
 
Last edited:
Horo said:
How about we get a PTR to test the AQ40 bosses first before we complain about possible lack of difficulty?
Click to expand...

I agree. This time people should actually report bugs instead of keeping them to them for themselves though. I can remember a certain guild that did the raids on PTR back than but didn't care to report bugs but rather abused them when the raid got added on the live server.

But I don't need to go on the PTR to know that people will be abusing soulstones.

Yes, this is a private server. But if people keep talking about blizzlike they should also realize that you had to pay 13 bucks a month for an account. No 'sane' person would pay that just to be able to soulstone himself. I don't even care about summoning warlocks on every worldboss tbh. You won't be able to stop that anyway. But you can stop the soulstone issue.

Having 30+ soulstones in the raid will make the content a joke. And yes there are guilds that 'force' members to get a summoning/soulstone warlock in order to participate AQ.

Deal: Donate 13 bucks to Kronos every month and I'll be fine with it :lol: win:win situation :cool2:
 
Last edited:
Why do you keep going on and on about soulstones. You do realize they only last 30 mins and going out and back in to refresh them constantly would take forever?
 
Remove all world buffs upon entering a 20/40 man raid instance. Dedicated players can go ahead and farm their consumables, raidloggers can just log in once in a while to buy consumables through AH, and we wont have TBC-Level dps and hps from anyone. At the moment someone with absolute pre-raid gear can do 800+ dps with correct buffs/consums/rotations on many encounters. This is just stupid for vanilla. If you remove all world buffs a new guild with blues/greens wouldnt be able to brute force through a boss mechanic and totally avoid it.

There you have it, its what blizzard thought also, if you don't want to buff raids, nerf players(by putting a debuff or restriction on them)
 
Last edited:
bl4ckc0d3r said:
Why do you keep going on and on about soulstones. You do realize they only last 30 mins and going out and back in to refresh them constantly would take forever?
Click to expand...

1. It's not about speed, it's about having a way easier time killing the boss which you would normally wipe a couple of times due to the lack of gear or whatever

2. There are several ways to get out and inside the instance in like 10mins max

3. People probably won't 'abuse' it on every boss. But on bosses like Twins, C'thun or Huhuran I can see that happening. (Give C'thun pre-nerf please :D)

4. Don't you like a challenge? Must be weird personal taste if you just want to run through the content without having to break a sweat from time to time (I don't judge though)
 
Copy blizzard and release it in a buffed state and then 2-4 weeks afterwards you remove the buff.

for example Health/damage/armor/resist increased by X%

This would allow lead raids to be slowed just a tiny bit but still get what they want and newer raids to catch up.

They could even make it more prestigious by making the buff really high first week then cut the buff by 50% next week and the week after that bosses would be normal such reducing chance it is cleared on day one and being first would be more of a challenge instead of just being first there as i can assure you they will have Darkmoon Buff + ZG buff + Onyxia and flask.

To Inform players of the buff a message would need to be displayed when entering or a visible buff icon on the boss which of course cannot be dispelled.
 
Lots of great proposals in this thread. My idea of buffing the raid with +hp and +damage is just one idea. I would leave it up to the devs to figure out the best way to make it challening. Removing soulstone abuse seems to me like a solid idea.

I dont really care if you nerf it 2-4weeks into it. Like I said I would rather it be overtuned and having to be nerfed than being ezpz.

Zul'gurub was way too easy. I remember Vanguard even reporting it in the ZG Beta thread.


Removing consumables Im not so sure about. You have to realize that affects an entire economy and its a huge part of what vanilla is about. Removing world buffs? Yeah maybe, it doesnt break the economy and it removes stupid teleporting around the world before every raid.

Either way my point is this: Make AQ40 challenging at launch, a real first challenge for Kronos. If its too hard, tune it down. Vanguard will cry of course.. But really, is there ANY time Vanguard isnt crying over some stupid shit?
 
Only did 1 full AQ clear on retail, wasnt that hard really but then again haha
Most in the pug had tier3 haha but still, even if u have "GEAR" it should not be a walk in the park.
 
Well if we wanna look to the past we can look at Emerald Dream. Emerald Dream was pretty much dead, people had been waiting for AQ40 to release for a very long time and then when AQ finally came lots of guilds returned to ED to do AQ40. What happened? Well they all cleared AQ in no time and left pretty much instantly after.
 
Horo said:
*If your raid is geared to the teeth with best in slot gear, with tanks who are pushing 12.000 HP, with healers who are pushing 1000+ heal, with DPS who are pushing 3000 AP, 50% crit, then you ought to annihilate AQ40! I'm not kidding!

KJ6vtF8.jpg
Click to expand...

All that and the best you've ever done was 1285 on Vael.

AQ40 will be steamrolled by some and be challenging for others. Wow!
 
Buffed raids were the reason ED was anoying at times. Chillout raids like ZG turned into wipefest if you brought a few alts to jindo. I for one love the fact that you can easily bring alts to Kronos raids and fool around, have a split MC with 25-30 people or whatever and not wipe on the slightest mistake. If you cannot enjoy yourself doing as you call it 'boringly easy' raids then why even bother with vanilla at all. AQ will be cleared in the first week by all of the prepared raiding guilds anyway, you just want to make it harder for no reason and cockblock startup guilds from doing anything in AQ.

In 10 year old content what do you wanna prove really? It's already pathetic that people think they are so good when playing 10 year old content, compared to when people didn't have all info to google and never knew how to prepare for future content because it wasn't 100% known what preparation would be needed. Don't people play here to just relive aq/naxx again, or maybe they missed doing so back in the day. Aren't people always crying for blizzlike stuff? Buffing raids like BWL and AQ will just annoy the majority of the playerbase in favour of a few people that should be playing retail mythic or w/e instead. You shouldn't look for a 'sick 1337 l33t challenge' in vanilla and thinking you have a high epeen for performing so well is pathetic when you will never have to adapt like vanilla players had to do, running into a totally unknown bossfight and guessing their abilities. Taking a single look at old vanilla vids and then comparing to ppls dps output now should've instantly told you this realm wasn't gonna be for you.

Only suggestion I liked was removing world buffs like dm north ones. It was only used (in my guild at least) on loatheb and the final 3 bosses in naxx and it gets overused in pvt realms imo, but that's just because I am a lazy person and get fed up at the 1 hour raid preparation these days before raidinvites even start. Not because I want that sick-ass challenge. :wink:
 
The problem is that people remember vanilla being hard and now, when most bugs are fixed, classes are somehow balanced and everyone knows how to play his class, they are surprised that it is much easier than it was and they want it to be hard again. But it is just not possible. Vanilla offers so many ways to buff yourself up, that top guilds are able to show insane performance and making encounter just gear-check is not a good solution.

As blizzard content designer sayed at first blizzcon - There is one thing we are realy good at: killing players. But we want the game to be fun, not frustrating.
 
Last edited:
cthun in pre-nerf state may be the one exception that wont trigger the non-blizzlike alarms while still providing some serious challenge for endgame guilds. it could get nerfed again when naxx is released for those who couldn't beat it.
 
Just imagine Cthun, with half raid having soulstones, Ony Head/Hakkar Heart/Rend Head/Songflower buffs on everyone.
What exception are you talking about? Unless a boss has sure-to-wipe ability that you cant overpower through, anything and everything will be easy as fuck. It's 11 year old game.


I think i have to go into a bit of detail. Dragonslayer, Zandalar, Tribute, Rend Head, Songflower, Blasted Lands, Dark Moon Faire, AND SILLY LOL buffs all last for a long time, have 0 benefit on economy and just exist for the sake of e-peen points of people(like myself), but if you remove them we can still compare our e-peen's while actually bringing out a certain bit of challenge and feeling of progression to the server. Because with all those buffs, dps potential doubles in many cases. Imagine bringing 20 extra dps players to a 40 man raid, thats how stupid it is. I for one, was severely disappointed the first time i joined an MC on Kronos just like OP. Because in my former servers it was super anti-melee, Lucifron and Geddon you had to go in and out, Shazzrah wrecking shit on full t2 tanks and killing cursed melees in 1 shot, Magmadar 2shotting t2-t3 tanks unless tranqed etc etc... Ony as well, but at least people still wipe on Onyxia if they are making mistakes. And it was fun, in my opinion, however i wouldnt suggest a buff like that to content from Kronos, taking an indirect aproach to it and limiting dps boost from buffs is a much better choice.

Please dont release AQ with this state of things.

Kind regards.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom