The W Podcast is about everything related to World of Warcraft, hosted by your friendly neighborhood healers – Wolvy & SaucyJay. Join us as we explore Azeroth from the perspective of everyday players striving to conquer Mythic raid bosses and navigate the treacherous PUGs of Mythic+. With weekly episodes, we share the highs, lows, the good, the bad and the ugly of pressing buttons and managing healing cooldowns in WoW’s toughest content.
In Episode 03 we are talking about the Nerub’ar Palace Raid in Season 1 of The War Within. Design, bosses, enjoyment, bugs and problems that we encountered during this tier raid along with limitations and problems caused by the difficulty curve and the ever-increasing requirements to conquer Mythic bosses, we cover all kinds of points of view in this The W Podcast episode!
Follow us and our hosts using the links below:
The W Podcast on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheWPodcast_WoW
Wolvy on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@thelegendbehindthecow
Wolvy’s Discord: https://discord.gg/bjFkEqSUa2
Follow SaucyJay using the links below:
https://www.twitch.tv/saucyjay
https://www.youtube.com/@saucyjay99
https://www.instagram.com/saucyjayttv
Chapters:
00:00:00 Raid Season So Far
00:05:00 Raids Are Getting Harder
00:07:28 Problems That Occur in Regular Guilds
00:10:23 Attrition & Keeping People Engaged
00:20:22 20-Man Limit & Sitting People Out
00:30:15 RWF Impact on the Gamev
00:36:46 Splits & Preparation Required
00:43:05 Broodtwister WA Hell
00:48:04 The Rest of the Bosses in Nerub’ar Palace
00:50:59 So Many Bugs This Season
00:54:14 The “Scheduled” Maintenances Problem
01:01:49 Nerub’ar Palace Raid Bosses Tier List
01:28:00 Severed Sands Buff is Big W
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Enjoy the podcast. What is the name of the new guild you guys formed?
15:55
The fundamental difference between a sport like basketball and wow's mythic raiding is, in the former, the bench exists to rotate out players that are physically exhausted, to fill a specific niche or to offer a counter to the opponent's strategy – and this regularly happens within the match itself. The bench players rarely feel or experience being totally left out, because the majority of them will, in fact, see game time for any given match.
In mythic raiding however, especially in midcore mythic raiding guilds, the 20 players who go into raid is more or less fixed for the night, if not for the entirety of progression. This rarely changes unless there are real-life emergencies, or very egregious underperformance issues, like in the ballpark of dying 30 seconds into the fight for 10 attempts in a row, or doing extremely low dps/hps as a dps/healer.
This means your mythic raid bench is often completely wasting their time turning up for the night, having to commit to raid hours while doing absolutely nothing. They can't start M+ because who knows, in the infinitesimal off-chance they are needed, they have to abandon the key they are in, so they are stuck doing mundane, non-committal stuff like reading, watching videos, gathering. Of course it results in many benched mythic raiders just disappearing entirely, because being a benched player is just a terrible, no-engagement experience in WoW.
And HoF/RWF raiding guilds aren't immune to attrition either. On the surface, it might seem like they are largely insulated from the same kind of attrition you see in midcore raiding guilds and below, but just think about it, where do RWF raiders come from? They come from HoF guilds. Where do HoF raiders come from, then? Oh right, it comes from CE guilds. Where do CE raiders come from? They come from midcore guilds. And so on and so forth.
So if the low-mid tier player pool dwindles, the HoF/RWF may not immediately feel the effects – but when it does happen, it's devastating.
The conclusion is mythic raiding does need reform to solve issues with organization, logistics and retention at the mid-lower tiers, because attrition is a negative feedback loop, and there are significantly less raiders this tier compared to DF S3, to DF S2 etc. Raid nerfs need to be more heavy-handed after HoF is filled, to give less hardcore raiding guilds the motivation they need to stick around for mythic raiding, so they don't just quit and feed into the negative feedback loop of lesser players leading to even lesser players.
Great podcast! So refreshing to have a realistic conversation about Mythic Raid/Endgame experiences.
Oh I somehow stumbled into civilian mythic podcast! There is important thing tho…this tier is not hard, if you JUST killed 5th boss you (the guild) are just bad. I get why you feel that tho. First 4 bosses are compleate joke, and then 5th and 6th are slightly harder than your usuall mid-tier boss, so the difficulty curve from "total joke" to "harder than usuall" is not a curve at all, it's a deam wall
Wow…I'm supriced there is a single person out there who did kill a single mythic boss, and don't instantly know "flex mythic" is the stiupidiest idea ever, that would accualy give you THE EXACT OPPOSITE resoult.
The other guy seams to get it tho, but let me explain. First X bosses are just gloryfied loot piniatas, so you HAVE TO bring 30 people, to get more gear for team core…that on itself is toxic AF, but technicly in worse guild you might not care as much abaut gearing speed, BUT once the bosses get hard there ALWAYS will be the optimal nr of players to have in the team. With a set in stone 20man raid you have to figure it out with 20, thats it, BUT if you had flex mythic…well if 6th boss is the easiest with 14 people, and 7th boss is easiest with 23 people, suddenly you have 9 people sitting on bench…and they are not people you want to replace, they are all as good as the other 14, cuz you bring them for next boss, that is overall harder cuz thats how the bosses in this game are…well anyway, it would be EXTREAMLY toxic, logistical nightmare, and would probably kill mythic raiding overnight
Thank you so much for doing a podcast on this subject.
Idk how I missed the first 2 episodes but will catch back up on the later.
We are progging on kyveza right now (RSham) and just getting blasted by teeny positioning mistakes.
On another note, yes this raid is just hard lol. I mean it’s fun but it’s very hard. I’m wondering if they didn’t make it harder on purpose because they knew overtime the finery buff would make us a little stronger each buff.
Anyway, great content always love to see it.
Our casual Guild IS able to do a 8/8 mythic clear in 2 hours what are you on about
Getting 20 very good players to commit 9-12 hours per week just for raiding is extremely difficult due to the scarcity of very good players and scheduling. The jump from 10 to 20 players is not linear, it's exponential. Getting 5 extras for the bench adds even more difficulty. The more players required, the more likely one will have RL issues.
Also, Mythic raiding is not the hardest content in the game, high keys are, due to their infinitely scaling nature. 119 guilds, so around 2380 characters have killed Queen in NA/Oce, only 1026 characters have M+ titles. Some players push title on alts, very few get CE on multiple characters; they kill the last boss then either sell carries or quit for the season.
Mythic raiding difficulty is artificially inflated due to organizational issues. If bosses were tuned for 10 players and just as hard, there would be at least twice as many guilds killing a last Mythic boss per season.