I’m wondering if someone can make an analysis between Normal and Heroic raid difficulty tuning.
Ever since mid-Legion, I find that Normal and Heroic raid difficulties are too similar. A lot of bosses don’t even get extra mechanics or even mechanical changes going from Normal to Heroic difficulty, with the only real difference being the numbers and sometimes the frequency of mechanics, but that’s it.
The mechanical differences aren’t big enough to warrant 2x difficulties IMO. And the numerical difficulty is negated by better gearing as it seems to me that the damage of the mechanics scales one to one with the better gear you are supposed to have for the higher difficulty(Heroic).
Do bosses deal higher percentage damage to the player’s health on Heroic than on Normal with mechanics and regular hits assuming you are 13-15ilvls below the loot drop of the difficulty?
I don’t think they do, but if they do can someone explain to me, do the Hit Count to Kill per mechanic and regular attack change from Normal to Heroic(at appropriate gear ilvl), or the Heal Spell Count to fill up the player change?
I’m thinking it in Hits to Kill and Heals to Cap health because it’s more practical than raw numbers, since again your gear inflates the raw numbers, but does it really change the count of hits to kill or heals to cap health per mechanic and regular attack?
There is a pretty big difference between normal and heroic if you’ve ever pug raided, even in this tier (or especially in this tier!). Typically pugs are able to clear normal without a hitch, maybe a couple of wipes etc, but on heroic it is more often than not the case that a pug group will not be able to fully clear the instance.
Normal is the LFR where you’ll need to understand the mechanics on a very fundamental level, heroic is where that knowledge is put to test since they are far more punishing and wipes occur more often. Some slight mechanical changes do also exist. That being said, I’d be fine with removing normal altogether, it’s a very awkward difficulty that in my mind doesn’t really fill a particular purpose. But heroic is definitely very noticeable harder than normal, even with better gear (and this feeling has been consistent for me for expansions now).
It depends on the level of content you aim to do, I suspect.
For mythic raiders, the difficulty of normal and heroic probably feels subjectively quite similar. To people who only go as far as HC (I am one), the difference feels much bigger. Even where the mechanics are the same (and HC adds a new mechanic on most bosses), mistakes are punished more harshly on HC than on normal.
When we cleared normal first time, we maybe had a wipe or two on most bosses while we figured out the mechanics (Sire went down on our 3rd pull - I remember that and it lulled me into a false sense of security). On HC, we struggled on Inerva, we struggled on Council, we spent a couple of hours wiping to Sludge, and then we got to Sire… Four weeks later, we finally killed him.
To put into perspective, we’re casuals. Our raid community has a few core members, but otherwise we raid once a week with whoever turns up. But it does illustrate the huge difference between normal and HC.
For my current and previous two guilds, it has been the exact opposite. Normal we wipe 3-4 times on the harder bosses when the raid opens, Sire D we wiped on normal a lot, we were very under-geared though(most were ilvl 170-175, I was 184 though), but in heroic we just nail most of them.
Still, I’m looking forward to some numbers because going based off of feeling is really hard to actually get concrete data. I think Normal has been a pretty obsolete difficulty for quite a while, but I can’t really confirm it.
Also, I’d say a lot of bosses don’t get new mechanics on heroic compared to normal, it’s usually the end bosses that do and the problem with most heroic added mechanics is that they are way too minor most of the time.
It’s known that the last bosses on one level tend to be harder than the early bosses on a harder level. It’s common, for example, that a guild progressing on HC and stuck on a later boss may try the first couple of bosses on Mythic to get a gear bump. And of course, bosses may be idosyncratically hard or easy, out of line with expectations.
But if you want to pursue this, I know the best place to start: take two logs from a Normal and a Heroic kill of the same boss and compare them.
I just found two from Shriekwing. I don’t claim that they are the best possible samples for what it is you want to investigate, but they should give you a decent set of data:
If you haven’t used Warcraftlogs before for analysis, do take your time learning all the features available to understand what happened. You can isolate every element of damage and healing on both sides.
I don’t think we were particularly more geared than that - I know our RL set a minimum ilvl of 170 to participate and some complained about struggling to reach it before the raid opened - but it did seem like we were able to ‘brute force’ a lot of the bosses, including Sire. It was only when we got to HC that people had to really understand and do the mechanics.
And bosses don’t all have added mechanics on HC, but they tend to have something added to an existing one that requires greater group coordination. Two shades at a time on Altimor, for example.
As a casual raider, I certainly wouldn’t want to go straight to HC without having the chance to practice on normal first.
