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Kronos PVE difficulty: it's an old debate, but since KIII is on its way, let's try to solve it for once and for all

L

Lehran

New Member
Joined
Feb 14, 2015
(poll: https://www.strawpoll.me/15268093)

Hi guys,

So, as we all know, Kronos III is around the corner (it’s hard not to know with the hype right now). However, before we all start enjoying ourselves in a few weeks, there's one issue that people keep (legitimately) talking about:

PVE on Kronos has always been a tricky thing: the team philosophy was always to make it “blizzlike”, in the sense that dungeons and raid encounters should be just like they were in patch 1.12.1…and of course, you guys know that dungeons, early raids, and even aq40, are quite easy on that patch if nothing is changed because of:

-talent trees changes

-spell values changes and spell scaling changes from 2004 to 2006

-itemization changes

-raid encounters nerfed several times

And so on…

Naxxramas is the only raid that was retuned on Kronos, and it was actually hard, because people asked for it. Tons of people were happy to see it changed, because it was a challenge for many people.

On nostalrius/Elysium/light’s hope, most of the dungeons, and ALL the raids were retuned to take this into account, which is why MC and BWL, and especially AQ40 and naxxramas (even though early raids are still easy), are considerably less easy to clean. As for the dungeons, the issue is the same:
https://www.reddit.com/r/wowservers/comments/4oirml

However, let's be clear: The “undertuned” word might be too strong here: we’re used to overtuned/retuned content from Elysium/LH, which is just fine because otherwise it would indeed be faceroll, but we don't really know if Kronos is THAT undertuned, it's a 12 years old game. Still, at least, we now have a basis to discuss things:

To you guys who want to roll on KIII, would you prefer the raids to be left in their “blizzlike state” (aka non-retuned) or would you like the Kronos team to actually retune them like the other big project did in the past to get more challenging encounters?

I also posted the thread on reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/wowservers/comments/84davc

Now, please try not to turn this into a KIII vs LH war, the only reason I compared both philosophies is because I know that the most problematic issue left on Kronos is how easy PVE is in general. Yes, they’re removing the 16 debuff slot thing early on, and the OP items, but we already know that it’s just a small part of the issue.

/discuss people
 
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They should increase the stats of everything by 50%, then Kronos will be the "real vanilla" and LH will be undertuned.

Then they will complain about their server being undertuned and they will raise stats by 70% and become "real vanilla" again.

Then we will be undertuned again and have to raise stats by 90%.
 
I'd like to increase queue threshold on server start. It will be really sad if queue will start after 2k connections
 
It is a myth that dungeons are undertuned. When players type shit like Deadmines undertuned etc. I don't find them hard on LH either thats the same server as nost. Questing and dungeons are pretty much the same. For raids i don't know havet done them on anyone of them.
 
Lenni said:
I'd like to increase queue threshold on server start. It will be really sad if queue will start after 2k connections
Click to expand...

Ah yes.... Last time Kronos launched I could not even get in the first weekend I feel like.

It sucked.
 
Makoto said:
It is a myth that dungeons are undertuned. When players type shit like Deadmines undertuned etc. I don't find them hard on LH either thats the same server as nost. Questing and dungeons are pretty much the same. For raids i don't know havet done them on anyone of them.
Click to expand...
Dungeons were undertuned.. I don't know if it's still the same but this is how bad it is (was?):
 
Kronos history:
I remember Black Fathom Depths to be quite undertuned in 2015 Kronos 1, at least some mobs.Then there were Gurubashi Warriors in front of Zul Gurub dealing not enough damage with white hits.
So it's not all myth, but it has been fixed - not sure if sufficiently so (will test on K3 thoroughly).

To buff or not to buff:
Does adjusting mob health and damage in raids help actually?
It seems that hardcore guilds will deal with it easily, but casual raiders might be screwed then.

One more thing to consider:
This is WoW vanilla, no content will be added anymore (only TBC possibly) so buffing Naxx as it is the final raid is very appreciated. Should all raids then be adjusted to at least provide a difficulty curve not too steep? Take into consideration that raiding MC after some months becomes really boring and tedious, but mostly because of its minimalistic mechanics, wherefore i am unsure that a general numerical increment will provide the wanted effect of a better raiding experience... quite the dilemma indeed.

So basically we don't know without trying, so i propose to go for a temporary buff on raids and see how it works out for a month or more.
If players and guilds still enjoy the raiding experience after that test time, well, simply keep it.

edit: don't forget to analyze dungeons as well as raids. check reddit for additional information, some posts:
[–]realshroomie
Hi, I currently am playing on Kronos (or K2, whatever you want to call it). I'm surprised that one one has mentioned that molten core was JUST BUFFED AND RETUNED on Kronos. About 4 weeks ago, there was a patch that made several changes, the biggest of which were huge buffs in difficulty to the Geddon and Shazz fights. Basically they adjusted the cooldown timers of these bosses to be faster in most cases (like shazz arcane explosion and CS) and slower in others (the curse).

My guild is naxx geared and we usually get through MC with 20-30 people in about an hour. The week after this change we nearly wiped on baron, and did wipe on shazz. We were all calling it "mythic shazz", because it actually has become a real boss fight.

This shows that the Kronos developers are already addressing this concern. You can read about these changes in their Discord. You could argue that these changes aren't enough, and I may agree, but they definitely need to be included in the discussion. I personally think these changed bosses will be pretty hard on K3, and they're a definite step in the right direction.
[–]serious_cake
It's not "easy to make raids way harder", the standard simple solutions (increase damage output, increase health pool) almost never translate to added difficulty in a linear way. It actually requires a lot of cleverness to make certain fights harder without breaking them. There were servers where devs didn't realise this; they would slap a flat +X% increase on a boss and be done with it. The result would range anywhere from zero impact to breaking the fight and making it either impossible or too RNG based to bother with (or possible, but only if you overgear it by one tier or use ridiculous gimmicks / raid composition etc.). In short, a disaster.
 
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Blai said:
Dungeons were undertuned.. I don't know if it's still the same but this is how bad it is (was?):
Click to expand...

Warrior gets hit for 14 by the wolves, just like the Bearform druid does in your video from Kronos

Son of Arugal, level 25 elite, hits a level 24 warlock for 64, 67, 54

If you watch the players health throughout the video, it seems as if there's hardly any damage happening towards the players. The low-level instances doesn't really have anyone dying unless you pull more packs than you intended. They were designed for players whose items are multiple levels behind their current level, and they have more in common with simple group-quests than any raid-instance in terms of need for strategy.
If your position is that you want it to be "harder than blizzlike" then fair enough, thats a position that can be argued for.

The changes made recently in Molten Core are all blizzlike also, when we saw aspects of the fights that made it "easier than blizzlike" we corrected them. But we also corrected the issues that made it "harder than blizzlike". A similar revamp of Blackwing Lair to that which happened for Molten Core is also planned.

Going forward in this conversation, I encourage everyone to compare the Kronos-version to the 2006-version. That's really the only reference we care about in the team. That doesn't mean to say that you cannot think that we should use different values. However, saying you want it to be something compared to another project, we're not really in a position to evaluate a statement like that. It will just be disregarded.
 
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realshroomie said:
Hi, I currently am playing on Kronos (or K2, whatever you want to call it). I'm surprised that one one has mentioned that molten core was JUST BUFFED AND RETUNED on Kronos. About 4 weeks ago, there was a patch that made several changes, the biggest of which were huge buffs in difficulty to the Geddon and Shazz fights. Basically they adjusted the cooldown timers of these bosses to be faster in most cases (like shazz arcane explosion and CS) and slower in others (the curse).

My guild is naxx geared and we usually get through MC with 20-30 people in about an hour. The week after this change we nearly wiped on baron, and did wipe on shazz. We were all calling it "mythic shazz", because it actually has become a real boss fight.

This shows that the Kronos developers are already addressing this concern. You can read about these changes in their Discord. You could argue that these changes aren't enough, and I may agree, but they definitely need to be included in the discussion. I personally think these changed bosses will be pretty hard on K3, and they're a definite step in the right direction.
Click to expand...

Just an example of how a wrong perception/information of vanilla raids can lead to suddenly "buffed and retuned" even tho we just simply fixed stuff to a blizzlike state. Equally applyable to so called "undertuned" content. (Or maybe our version was just bugged for too long :)but you get the point.)

Many people call stuff undertuned or easy just because they "remember it from retail vanilla" being different or "harder". That has no value in terms of being a valid argument. I am sorry.

The same goes for comparing Kronos to other private servers, that has 0 value. You may call it "harder/retuned" on other private servers, ok, but maybe the encounter is just bugged or not in a blizzlike state, what would make it "harder" or just simply longer. And we are not gonna intentionally make encounters not blizzlike like others... not if we can prevent it. I am not saying we are perfect, maybe we have bugged encounters which make it indeed easier? Help us find the bugs and report them on our bugtracker. But again, you get the point.

As Bazzil said, compare Kronos-version to the 2006-version, that is something we are highly interested in. And as of now, we dont have any plans "retuning" or rather making encounter not blizzlike.

We are currently in the process of revisiting many areas of the game and fixing what we can find and what time will allow in preparation for K3. So you might see those "retuned and buffed" encounters or other content on Kronos which were simply put into a blizzlike state.


(Tho, I don't make the call, so who knows what the higher ups will do in the end :eek: This is just my personal opinion and may not reflect the official Kronos/Twinstar opinion, so no need to quote me on reddit again and tell everyone "Kronos Staff said so and so", thx o_O)
 
Bazzil said:
Warrior gets hit for 14 by the wolves, just like the Bearform druid does in your video from Kronos
Click to expand...

Hey Bazzil, note that in the video you linked the warrior has Stoneskin Totem effect. I don't exactly know how the calculation is done, but you can basically add 7 (or 8 if the shaman has talents) damage per hit. add the 10% damage reduction that warriors get using defensive stance and you can see that the number you mentioned seem far off.

SFK is possibly the worst example because it doesn't have any outdoor elite mobs.
Try comparing the damage the outdoor elites deal around any dungeon's entrance and then check the elite's damage inside the dungeon.

Do you believe Blizzard balanced the game dungeons in a way that a level 22 druid would kill the bosses in Wailing Caverns alone? because that's how I got all of my items. By soloing content that was not meant to be soloed by any class at that level bracket.

This project is great and you guys are doing amazing work, but you can't say that it's tweaked around Blizzard's values when it's not.
 
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8 debuff slot, Not using 1.11 pvp gear and 1.11 items at the server release, is already a good start . There is no point making MC any harder than Blizzlike by buffing HP or armor. This is mostly tank and spank boss strategy and it's boring.

Still I'd suggest for the fun to make Nefarian not respawning if you fail phase 2 for 12 hours like it was in retail for few weeks. It would add some pressure for the guild rushing bwl the 1st night.

Anyway, the features making pve way to easy on Kronos is the low respec cost which allow anyone to have the optimal spec for each fight/instance, and it seems it's a taboo here to even ask to at least rise the cost to 10g-20g.
 
^ good points, Mc should probably stay like it is, mostly.
I think buffing some bosses, like Shazzrah and Ragnaros (The firelord, come on, who also drops very strong loot) would be fine.

5g-10g doesn't hurt anyway. Still a thing worth considering.
 
I think the PvE-Content...no matter if Raidbosses or lesser Instances should be the hard experience they were at the beginning of WoW.

So increasing /adapting them will be a very good thing. Of course there will be people that will cry for nerfs but i think we should take it like a known Chewing Gum:

If they are to strong u are to weak :)

Easy Pve-Content without outgearing is boring and will make all the competition between raidgroups made a funny joke
 
IMO, tune Ragnaros so hard that it requires the whole raid to be decently fireres-geared. Hope they'll do it on WoW Classic for authenticity.

Kronos isn't doing Blizzard job, they use the Blizzlike numbers, while also gating some gear and limiting debuffs. Maybe the poll can make them change their mind on it and go further though. Like Warmane Lordaeron, but Vanilla.

Indeed, re-tuned Naxx has received quite a positive feedback, a good reason to re-tune the other raids.

Making the respec costs higher is something worth considering too, because 5g respec indeed makes raids significantly easier, while its actually questionable whether it's promoting PvP much.
 
nimeralos said:
IMO, tune Ragnaros so hard that it requires the whole raid to be decently fireres-geared. Hope they'll do it on WoW Classic for authenticity.
Click to expand...

I wouldn't mind seeing that. Having Molten Core be beaten within the first month or two is kind of lame.

edit: although, k3's decision to limit debuff slots to 8, and to not allow world buffs in raids for the first month, coupled with the fact that ony/mc wont even be released til 2 months have passed, is a pretty damn good substitute
 
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Lehran said:
(poll: https://www.strawpoll.me/15268093)

Hi guys,

So, as we all know, Kronos III is around the corner (it’s hard not to know with the hype right now). However, before we all start enjoying ourselves in a few weeks, there's one issue that people keep (legitimately) talking about:

PVE on Kronos has always been a tricky thing: the team philosophy was always to make it “blizzlike”, in the sense that dungeons and raid encounters should be just like they were in patch 1.12.1…and of course, you guys know that dungeons, early raids, and even aq40, are quite easy on that patch if nothing is changed because of:

-talent trees changes

-spell values changes and spell scaling changes from 2004 to 2006

-itemization changes

-raid encounters nerfed several times

And so on…

Naxxramas is the only raid that was retuned on Kronos, and it was actually hard, because people asked for it. Tons of people were happy to see it changed, because it was a challenge for many people.

On nostalrius/Elysium/light’s hope, most of the dungeons, and ALL the raids were retuned to take this into account, which is why MC and BWL, and especially AQ40 and naxxramas (even though early raids are still easy), are considerably less easy to clean. As for the dungeons, the issue is the same:
https://www.reddit.com/r/wowservers/comments/4oirml

However, let's be clear: The “undertuned” word might be too strong here: we’re used to overtuned/retuned content from Elysium/LH, which is just fine because otherwise it would indeed be faceroll, but we don't really know if Kronos is THAT undertuned, it's a 12 years old game. Still, at least, we now have a basis to discuss things:

To you guys who want to roll on KIII, would you prefer the raids to be left in their “blizzlike state” (aka non-retuned) or would you like the Kronos team to actually retune them like the other big project did in the past to get more challenging encounters?

I also posted the thread on reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/wowservers/comments/84davc

Now, please try not to turn this into a KIII vs LH war, the only reason I compared both philosophies is because I know that the most problematic issue left on Kronos is how easy PVE is in general. Yes, they’re removing the 16 debuff slot thing early on, and the OP items, but we already know that it’s just a small part of the issue.

/discuss people
Click to expand...
Considering that Kronos is in a far better state than LH at least based alone on solutions what you get is more of the actual vanilla feel, i can understand your desire for harsher conditions with artificial increase in npc stats but it does not really make it harder at all it only increases time & adds a bit more pressure. If they where to artificially increase every npc's stats what we get is not vanilla but a funserver which is similar to the servers where they change level cap, modify or add new items and so forth.

Kronos is also the only blizzlike host around the web so far... yup it sounds like a stretch but lets think for a moment, some servers have a personal wowhead imitation however even less have their own ranking & nobody but Kronos has armory. And that is even before mentioning all the extra features twinhead has over wowhead.

Fine & all that others use Legacy & Realmplayers to track raid stats however this info still depends massively upon what the addon records and it is quite simple to modify making it appear better than it is, i am not saying people do this but some will defenitely considering how easy it is. However Kronos has its own along with it that it gets directly from the server which catches more than the combatlog on private servers at times tells.

Lets also consider the fact that Kronos is transparant about its problems & solutions in the fact that anyone can report and you can track & follow up upon a case or verify if it was solved before you start something you know every other server has bugged. This means there is safety & follows a blizzlike release for gear & debuff slots which adds a realistic difficulty which cannot be achieved through custom numbers.

If you truly wish for a custom difficulty addition beyond blizzards original youre better off adding it in the form of a script, for example you could add an enrage timer or condition that causes a boss to get one of the enrage buffs or do something if he goes below X health but that would be better off as an option and not a behavior all would face. This could be a difficulty setting players can set before a dungeon/raid for example that is needed before entering and records into a different dmg/heal meter ranking etc. which is something only kronos would be able to pull off as rival wannabe servers havent put the least effort into options outside the game except forums...
 
nimeralos said:
IMO, tune Ragnaros so hard that it requires the whole raid to be decently fireres-geared. Hope they'll do it on WoW Classic for authenticity
Click to expand...
Make it an option that needs to be activated before anyone has entered through a command like "/Raid Difficulty Hard", this causes all normal trash start off with 100% higher armor & resistance and upon going below 75% they loose this bonus and enter an enraged mode where they gain 5% attack speed & damage every second up to 50%.

Every boss could start off with a 200% bonus to defensive stats while above 75% ofc without the enrage.

Ragnaros could start off in a similar manner however upon going below 75% health he starts summoning an elemental, and every 15-30 seconds he summons a new one at that point.

note: ofc all mobs & raggy would need a small amount of frost/nature resist in that state and all combat in this hard/hardcore mode would be added to another ranking list.
 
Brochette said:
8 debuff slot, Not using 1.11 pvp gear and 1.11 items at the server release, is already a good start . There is no point making MC any harder than Blizzlike by buffing HP or armor. This is mostly tank and spank boss strategy and it's boring.

Still I'd suggest for the fun to make Nefarian not respawning if you fail phase 2 for 12 hours like it was in retail for few weeks. It would add some pressure for the guild rushing bwl the 1st night.

Anyway, the features making pve way to easy on Kronos is the low respec cost which allow anyone to have the optimal spec for each fight/instance, and it seems it's a taboo here to even ask to at least rise the cost to 10g-20g.
Click to expand...
If you make ragnaros as he was prenerf nobody would kill him. But nobody in private servers has the values.
 
I think the idea of adding a “heroic difficulty” mode would be kind of cool. It would be setting identical to how you change difficulties in live before you enter the dungeon and once you are saved to a heroic boss kill, you must complete the whole raid on heroic.

The loot would be identical, so the only incentive would be bragging rights. So many might not even do it given that, but at least the option would be there.
 
I'd much rather see that some bosses live up to their supposed grandeur, without the need to add heroic modes.

Ragnaros
Hakkar

should make players whine and wimp if they dare to challenge them with mediocre gear, as it was first intended by Blizzard.

edit: Also, why should everyone be able to down these demigods in the first place, that's such an old debate admittedly.
Well, it's still more interesting then most other mmorpgs at the moment, to me anyway. Got to make due with what we get.
 
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When Kronos is considered to be too easy, it's not because that is an result of patch changes up to 1.12, but because Kronos (as all other private servers - some more, some less) is not blizzlike enough.
For example, attack speed, weapon damage and things like spell usage are basically just a rough guess. A lot of things can be reconstructed by watching a lot of "historic" videos or text sources or even old combat logs, but especially for level dungeons, there is just not enough data to get it EXACT.

Easy example to show what I mean: Login right now to Kronos, equip a weapon where you have a low weapon skill and hit a mob at your level (so mob defense = mob level * 5 > weapon skill). The larger the difference, the more glancings should occur. Last time I checked, there were no glancings at all. Maybe the glancing rate is hardcoded for level 60, because I saw discussions about glancings, but not for lower levels.

There are more of these "little" things which actually make a big difference in how the difficulty is perceived.

So at first, all the "little" differences should be worked on (using the ticket system) to make it more blizzlike. Making manual adjustments before would just screw up precision more and more



Concerning the percepted difficulty of MC / BWL back in the days, most people did just not the "correct" thing. They hated minmaxing and theorycrafting. Casters stacked Int and didn't want to use +spell power. Paladins wanted to wear their set plate instead of going for pure int/+heal/MP5. Some of our raiders flamed me for establishing a tankpoint-like formula (which had the effect that many of our tanks just doubled the amount of damage they can take just by better equipment choices). The whole mindset was different then.
 
The content is mindblowingly easy.
Our guild did whole MC in 2 hours with only 2 wipes due to bad coordination at Majordomo Executus, Ragnaros in 2 minutes and Onyxia in 2 minutes without even her entering P2... It's not even a challenge at this point, just running for free loot. I do appreciate the server stability and overall quality but the followings raids could be considered a bit harder.
 
Rag dies in 2 minutes huh?.. LOLz.. The First boss in deadmines which drops white items takes 5 mins at least ....
 
I can't determine if you are with me or against me with this answer, but our Ragnaros fight did last around 2min40s. [One of top 5 guild in server, 40 man and mostly full pre-bis]
 
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