And do you get the BUFF of 15% on heroic encounters as well?
Yesterday I found myself in a situation that my 2-weeks-at-80 warlock, 5.3GS, could apply to a guild.
A guild on ES was recruiting an affliction lock, so I decided to apply. The guy goes all anal on me on that I dont have any logs and thats difficult and that I should parse this and that.
I felt it was too rude to say: if you’re that hardcore, then why havent you down LK HC yet then? Because (mabe) LK HC is still difficult even now, and a 5.3K GS warlock is just not enough. I do not know this.
So I just said I don’t think its gonna work out, because we are too different in mindset, and probably true. If bosses die I’m cool, and have always been. I don’t care about taking more risks to overdamage bosses and then look at some website and see some stats no one in the world but me is ever gonna notice.
So sure it aint no match. But my question remains: how difficult is LK HC right now, and does the raid get the 15% buff on HC as well?
I haven’t done a single ICC raid since late november, so I really can’t comment on the difficulty post buff being introduced.
But from my perspective as someone who saw more than half of the encounter at 0%. LK HC is absolutely a step up in difficulty from all the previous raid bosses in classic WoW. Everyone needs to pull their weight and bring their best game, and a small mistake from one player can result in a raid whipe. And the boss fight is/was above the 15+ minute mark. So you need 25 people to play more or less flawlessly for a good amount of time if you want to stand a chance.
As said, I haven’t had the opportunity to try LK HC with the buff in action. But my assumption is that the buff will help you with some things, like getting through pure dps checks such as nuking val’kyrs before they start dropping people off the platform (even though this step also can be made easier by proper stacking, obviously). But a bad defile placement will most likely whipe you, regardless of a stacking power boost.
Also, LK HC has a rather steep learning curve compared to previous classic bosses. If you’re not very familiar with the boss from before, you need to put in the time to actually learn it, both as an individual and as a team. And it seems that large parts of the classic community is not up for putting in the progress hours. People seem to have this mindset of bosses having to fall over the first reset or two, if not they just give up instead of actually grinding it through.
Perhaps someone who actually has raided for the past 6 resets or so can fill in on the above though.
It’s harder then anything else in classic. The buff helps a lot with DPS and HPS checks like adds and healing in the intermission and the valkyrs, but there are still mechanical checks that will not make it free loot even at 30%.
The biggest difference I’ve noted is the valkyrs and second transition aren’t the hardest part anymore
Healing infest is also easier especially when healers get grabbed and the intermissions and start of phase 3 is much easier because fewer adds are alive.
You can also eke out a kill even if you lose a couple of people in p2 with the buff.
You can also more aggressively prespread for defile after valkyrs and still have time to kill them in time.
You can also eat an explosion or two downstairs without dying.
Your tanks are also less likely to die to soul eater.
No, I am just this ill informed. I had no idea bosses would still be considered hard by most with such a big buff existing. Then the next thing to ponder would be: was LK even killed by many guild on Heroic, without any buff.
Not that this is truly relevant for the situation at hand; LK HC is still not for average people it seems.
We can take a look! Buff was dropped on 5th of december. At midnight 4th of december, there were 784 different raid teams at 12/12 bosses killed in ICC 25 HC. So around that mark, is the answer to your question.
From someone who cleared all Cata raiding content back in the days, things are not gonna get any easier either.
What does 784 raid teams mean? I think its loads, especially because so very few realms exist, what are we looking at, 35 raid teams per server or so? That is if your number is Worldwide, if just EU we are looking at 70 teams per server or so.
I used Warcraftlogs progression list for the statistics (edit: apparently you can’t provide links on this forum, had to remove it).
What it shows is logged clears of ICC 25 HC from (what I assume are) different uploaders. The 784 number is worldwide, all regions and realms combined. For EU, the full logged clears pre december 5th are 327, according to that list. For stricly english speaking realms, it’s 217.
And yeah, somewhere between ~100 to ~30 kills from different uploaders on the largest EU realms sounds about right. Looking at the crowded or somewhat crowded EU realms, the logged kills pre december 5th vary from 97 (Gehennas) to 32 (Golemagg), 31 (Firemaw), 18 (Earthshaker), 15 (Pyrewood Village), 14 (Mograine), 7 (Mirage Raceway), 2 (Nethergarde Keep).
Considering that every mentioned realm above is home to several hundreds of raid teams doing some form of heroic ICC progression, it’s really not a high percentage of classic heroic raiders who actually killed LK HC without the buff. With Gehennas being bit of an exception to this with their 97.
I checked on Golemagg (the realm i’m on), and my guild killing it in ID 4 was Server #11, and in the top 32 I can see first pass at least 4 groups who are in there twice, namely their guild group and their GDKP.
That too is a lot of GDKPs which have overlapping attendees.
I’m not on Gehennas, but just from those I know, #2 and #36, and #3 and #37 share most members because it’s guilds and their GDKP pugs.
You can be in there as many times as you create guilds in WCL, for instance Zoomer Pug and Sunced share most of the same people on Golemagg.
Yeah, fair enough. It’s not an exact science with a few overlaps. WCL progress statistics are still the most accurate data we as players have availible though, atleast that I know of.
It’s not that little though right, by comparison kills on M’uru in TBC (original) were only performed by around 120 guilds EU, on a population of around 4 million.
It’s what I compare few kills to, but perhaps then everything is few. On the Golemag server exampled, the amount of logs is only 9000, lets round that up to 400 raids. If even if you get only 32 different tags of kills on LK HC on the Golemagg server, but from your post it seems there is more, then the participation into actual HC kills must be somewhat close to 10%, probably higher, of those that even entered ICC during that timeslot.
I would say that that is a very high% of HC kills being performed.
Quite a skewed comparison though, if you’re referring to M’uru back in 2008 or whenever it was launched originally. In the 2022 Sunwell re-release, 800 logged M’uru kills were passed already in day 2. You can’t really compare new content that nobody has ever seen before, and content that’s been known for more well more than a decade. Aswell as the almost two decades worth of general game knowledge we have these days.
LK 25 HC wasn’t even killed without the buff back in the days by the way. Paragons world first kill was done at 5%.
You must be either joking or extremely elitist. 6k GS means a very decent nr of 25h hc items with some normal 25m stuff mixed in, and more than enough for all the content. Anything higher would be almost fully 25m hc geared.
It’s harder than Heroic Fyrakk in retail, imo, a lot harder even. The thing is it’s mostly a dps/healing check once you have the basic concepts of the fight down, so it’s only going to get easier. It was only really hard before because you had to juggle these mechanics with very tight dps/healing requirements, and that left you with very slim margins.
With 15-30% buff all you’re going to need your raid to do is get their positioning right each phase, the dps/healing will be a non-factor for any semi-organised group.
Muru had tight tuning but it’s laughably easy/simple compared to LK. In TBC the professional hardcore raiding scene wasn’t even really born until Sunwell, but by WOTLK it was highly competitive.
That’s why you can’t compare boss difficulty by how many pulls. The quality of the guilds in WOTLK were much higher, just like the quality of guilds in retail now (or even Classic WOTLK) are much higher than in WOTLK 2010.
I always feel that the ability to queue up spells has a much higher influence on the performance of people than it currently often is made out to be.
If you can fully and effortlessly negate lag and ping to a high amount, and also keyboard spamming, once essential, you will have much higher dps and healing output.
And that is imo the biggest difference between TBC original and what it was now. I am not debating that on average players got better, and that there is much information, and that the correct type and amount of classes are present in guilds at the start of an expansion because the future is fully known.
Yet still I think that whereas better players etc is handy, it being so much easier to make those raw dps and healing checks these days to be the main factor.
coudl easily boost it to 5.3k if i bothered to buy crafted pieces