Race to World First
Week 1 of the Race to World First is coming to a close and the three frontrunners have achieved 6/8M. The top three guilds put a ton of hours into preparing to make sure they have the best chance of success for the raid encounters, and their item level is usually a decent amount above your average Mythic raiding guild. They prepare 15+ characters and run the raid many many times just to try to eek out every advantage against their competitors.
However, this has led to a problem -- How does Blizzard tune encounters? Do they tune for the Race to World First guilds with their inflated item level? Or, do they tune for the average Mythic guild, at which point the RWF will steamroll the boss.
As of right now, the answer seems to be they tune for the Race to World First as evidenced by Forgeweaver Araz.
The Forgeweaver Wall
Forgeweaver Araz is the 4th boss of the Mythic raid and after 7 days since the NA reset, only 4 guilds have killed this boss. There are over 120 guilds that are currently on this boss, and some that have decided to do Mythic splits instead of even attempting. Some of the guilds on this boss include "non-RWF" titans like Instant Dollars, FatSharkYes, Honestly and poptart corndoG. These guilds have players that are extremely skilled, run splits, but usually don't raid as many hours as the top 3 RWF guilds and yet none of them have been able to kill Forgeweaver Araz. What hope do the lesser skilled Hall of Fame and Cutting edge guilds have?
This is the second tier in a row where the 4th boss of a raid is a massive unkillable wall for the majority of the playerbase after Stix Bunkjunker had a very similar kill rate in the Liberation of Undermine.
Is this healthy for Mythic raiding -- what happened to the 25 to 50 pull Mythic bosses? In an interview with Maximum, Taylor Sanders mentions how they want every raid to have a boss they can sink into. As of right now, this doesn't feel true in Manaforge Omega. Many guilds go from Loom'ithar that is likely 15-20 pulls to a 100-200+ pull boss in Forgeweaver Araz. What happened to the difficulty curve?
Forgeweaver Difficulty
Why is Forgeweaver so hard? There's a lot happening on the encounter and don't forget that the boss already received some large nerfs before the World First kill.
Comp Stacking
Similar to Stix Bunkjunker, this boss requires a pretty specific comp because of the mechanics of the fight. The adds move at lightning speed and due to their high health pool you need the following:
Multiple Druid/Evoker knockbacks
Multiple Ring of Peace
Multiple Evokers for Oppressing Roar
Multiple AoE stuns
Multiple Ursol's Vortex, Binding Shot or similar effects
A high AoE damage comp
These requirement are due to the fast movement speed of the adds as any time that they are not currently handled, they are running into a Collector and wiping your raid. Thus, you need a lot of knockbacks due to the Mythic mechanic, and multiple ways to keep the adds stand still for as long as possible.
Twitchiness of Gameplay
The adds aren't the only thing that moves at lightning speed on this encounter.
First, you have the orbs from the Collectors which look like the encounter is being played on 200% speed in a VoD. These will one-shot players right now and players will dodge up to three sets of orbs simultaneously.
Secondly, you have the Photon Blast cast which is a 1 second cast time on Mythic difficultly. There is no ingame messaging that tells you when this is going to appear and with the average human reaction time somewhere in the 250ms range, this doesn't give you a lot of time to actually move out of the mechanic. Guilds had to make a cycling weakauras telling you to essentially pre-move to get out of the mechanic.
I want to call attention this these quotes from our interview with Taylor Sanders before Patch 11.2.
Taylor: There's probably some room to to pull back a bit on difficulty in Season 3, but not all difficulty is really created the same. There's difficulty that can come from your ability to control your character - dodge lasers, pick up bombs, carry them from place to place. There's difficulty that can come from how much time and effort you've dedicated to your character, and your gear. There's difficulty that can come from how good your strategy and your ability to collaborate with other players is. I think we may try to pull back slightly on the first of those - the twitchiness of gameplay. That, I think, is a place where we'd like to take raiding, overall in the future, is a place that's a little bit more about strategy and your ability to play your character at a very high level.
Taylor: When a mechanic goes out, we want to make sure that players have not only the right amount of time but the right amount of visual and audio feedback in order to respond to a mechanic. There are probably a couple places in 11.1 where we could have given more for players to respond to because as you mentioned in your question where players don't feel they have the apt ability to respond to that and the right affordance for a mechanic, they’ll often go towards other solutions like writing Weakauras or using add-ons for that type of response. So, it’s something that's very top of mind for us, especially coming off the back of a couple of very twitchy fights in Liberation of Undermine. So, we're examining all those areas and Ghosts of K’aresh and making sure that for Manaforge: Omega, which is the raid that will be coming with the update, that we pay very close attention to areas of affordance that we may need to pull back on.
Despite saying that they want to pull back on the twitchiness of gameplay, these mechanics feels like an escalation in the type of twitchiness of gameplay requiring more quick thinking and movement from the player and not less. These types of mechanics also seem to not give players the affordance necessarily to deal with these mechanics effectively, especially in the case of Photon Blast and a 1 second cast time with no warning doesn't seem exactly fair.
Punishing Mistakes & Deaths Not Allowed
The fight doesn't stop there as the punishment for making the above mistakes is a raid death in most cases. The fight is tuned so tightly in terms of required numbers that having a death without a battle rez is probably a wipe. In addition, having a key player dead (e.g. player when it's their turn to CC, or player using DPS cooldowns) also leads to a wipe as having a single add hit a pillar is an instant raid wipe.
Each of the 10 add spawns has to be planned and correctly coordinated and any mistake will have an add run free and cause a wipe. The stop rotations that are needed for this boss have been brought to a new level.
Guilds who don't split likely don't even have a chance at this boss right now even with a perfect pull.
Are Mythic Splits The New Norm?
We're now two tiers in a row where the 4th boss is a massive mechanical, composition and a tight DPS check. That begs the question, should the 4th boss of the raid be all these things?
For two tiers in a row now, many guilds have seen that they are physically unable to kill the 4th boss of the raid and have to wait until nerfs. As such, Mythic splits have become a very real thing. It started in Undermine when only 3 guilds had killed Stix Bunkjunker before the Weekly Reset and Rik was a tough DPS check. This has now continued into Manaforge Omega, where people are splitting Mythic Plexus Sentinel, Soulbinder and potentially Loom'ithar because Forgeweaver is physically not attainable for most guilds. If Blizzard continues to make a massive wall for guilds in Week 1, we'll probably see Mythic splits get more and more normalized. But this shoudn't be blamed on the guilds. People want to raid, but players wouldn't want to attempt something that isn't possible. Instead, they would want to gain as much gear as they can for the nerfs that they know are coming -- so if the 4th boss stops being a massive wall, I think we'd see guilds actually progressing raid bosses instead of Mythic splits because that's what they want to be doing.
As of right now, 4 guilds have killed Mythic Forgeweaver Araz and no nerfs have been announced to the encounter. Dungeon nerfs and class tuning have been announced for the Weekly reset, but there has been no word on raid tuning. If there are no raid nerfs on the Weekly reset, this issue is going to affect a lot more guilds as they stack up on Forgeweaver Araz similar to Stix Bunkjunker last tier.
Forgeweaver is not a fight that can be overgeared as much as the following fights: Soul Hunters and Fractillus. If this fight isn't nerfed on the Weekly reset, you're likely going to see a lot more Mythic splits this week.
