I wouldn’t go as far as to say that it is impossible for mid level players to complete… just a matter of learning new mechanics
Yeah, while digging through the logs, I noticed a certain mechanic on boss 4 being completely ignored because it doesn’t have a big enough impact. So I want to find time to tweak it so you can’t ignore it.
Yah so you think a boss scaled to +2 gear (which is gotten from lvl 4 shard dungeons, normally on your first day after dinging 30 in a guild, just a reminder…) should require alot of training, of players who run up to shards 10, like, to try for 2h to no avail? Not sure what you refer to here, but we couldn’t do “mechanics” with our stronger, experienced group, almost everyone being part was OG players, geared in +3 and up. UNTIL we figured we got enough dmg anyway so that mechanics are irrelevant, then it went down in a minute - a shortcut the groups the raid was meant for definitly can’t take, so yea that really can’t be it LOL.
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we actually found that the only way for us to beat it with our +2 gear was to just ignore the mechanics entirely and burn the boss down. This is really sad because the raid is supposed to be tuned to be beatable with +0 gear and boss 2 is by far the hardest boss in the raid.
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Ya that is interesting. As far as I know every group can only beat it by ignoring the mechanics of boss 2 normal. Or has a REALLY hard time doing it right. (About 5 different groups I know of now)
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@Atropos and i suggested one single change that would make the boss work better, but sadly it was ignored.
The biggest issue we found (aside from how much health the mobs have) is the alternating pattern of the mob spawning and the shield. The first wave of mobs is significantly easier to kill than the second wave simply because the second wave you only have one dps phase to kill both before you get more adds.
Instead of spawning 2 mobs every other time, they should spawn one mob every time the shield switches to the boss. This would make the boss significantly more manageable imo.
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Clearly you have never played an MMO with difficult bosses / mechanics before or you would know that 2 hours is barely anything when you are trying to complete some of the hardest content in the game for the first time (which is what a raid is). Good luck on the hard raid, because you’re probably going to need it.
i think the problem here is that the boss isnt inherently difficult… the boss is just tuned badly for the gear it is supposed to allow. It is like hitting the enrage timer on the first boss of icecrown when you have gear from the last boss of icecrown, and it isnt because of not knowing the mechanics… it is simply that it has too much health.
Think second boss of the last raid. Obviously the intended strat wasnt to kite around a thousand mobs with your musketeer and crash the server. The intended strat was obviously to kill the adds. The only problem was that you couldnt actually kill the adds fast enough to make it even worth attempting. This is basically the situation we are in with boss 2 on this raid. If you follow the intended strat, it is nearly impossible to do correctly with the gear it is supposed to be tuned for.
Keep in mind, they said the dungeon was supposed to be doable with t+0 gear.
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2 hours the first time, to learn the mechanics? Sure.
2 hours the second time, to practice the mechanics? Maybe.
2 hours of failing over and over and over again every single time because no matter that you know the mechanics and do them right you don’t have the damn gear enough to down the adds fast enough? No. Not okay.
Boss 2 is absurdly hard. @Xicor and I suggested an alternative that would make it a whole lot better for a lower-geared group, while still making it so you need to manage the adds and the boss and the phasing and all the other mechanics. That was denied on the basis that Alphabet and a few other t4-geared groups managed to down it just fine. The same group that didn’t even know about the enrage timer on boss 3 because they killed it too damn fast.
Edit: I recognize that dps races are a thing. That they’re needed in a lot of content to make sure that you’re geared enough or skilled enough to overcome a gear check. I can understand the occasional dps race with an enrage timer. It adds to the mechanics that you need to kill it fast enough, and forces players to work on other avenues to gear up.
What doesn’t make sense is having a dps race on bosses where there are a lot of other major mechanics at play. On boss 5 in oldbus? Sure. Not much at play there, so it makes sense to add it. Boss 3 in reborn? Sure. It’s basically a set of dodgeball and target practice, so it makes sense to have some kind of timer. Boss 2, though? It has its own enrage, plus its own enrage buffs, plus add spawn, plus tankbuster, plus shockwaves and the pre-wave damage. Making it a dps race doesn’t make sense. It should be a ‘can you hold your own with the mechanics’-check only, because there’s already so much going on. Having the second wave of adds spawn so that you have one dps cycle on them to kill both (and any remaining ones) doesn’t make sense, because unless your dps is high enough or you ignore the mechanic in its entirety, you will enter the third wave with at least 4 at once
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I agree that Boss 2 is the hardest normal mode boss, it was the most challenging of the Perfect achievements, took us around 4 hours to do it whereas the other Perfect achievements we either did 1st time or 2nd time
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Yea it’s supereasy with enough dmg and yet you can’t do that with low-dmg groups - it’s not only the gear, but mages practicing etc. -, as we tested. Btw it’s hard to test since taking in only one veteran player could make a change. Some do as much dmg as a whole pug-raid, alone. But content is hardly intended for people pulling others like that.
@Sift you’re entirely missing the point, sorry. I played mmos 15y before you were born, likely 
. We had 8h raids in Wow back then, with 40 people and went for server firsts over a long time, not only practicing but reading up on mechanics before new bosses even came out.
However, this is VR and the raid is NOT the hm (which we won’t even attempt with a low-dmg group why should we??) and the topic is also NOT that the raid is hard. It is about one single boss sticking out of the others which is not even the endboss. All similar balance-threads are misunderstood easily if you can’t grasp the logic behind.
So nope, you are not supposed to ‘practice’ countless hours on minor bosses where you know the mechanics already and which you overleveled by 2 tiers of gears, filled to the brim with enh. potions, why should you. If you have to it’s just bad design.
And where on earth did you get that raids are automatically the “hardest content in the game” btw - the opposite is the case, here a repost:
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So apparently you still lose stuff with pvp on when graveyarding when back from the hard raid 
So the thing about mages practicing is that the skill required for ‘balanced’ damage is relatively low, on the order of one spell per second. The issue at play is that, unlike other classes who are balanced at their maximum output, mages have a super high, nearly unlimited maximum output going along with their skills. The skill cap is virtually non existent and because of this, mages that get better than the balanced one spell per second are able to put out completely unbalanced dps and break the balance of the content. Bringing a mage who can cast twice per second is equivalent to bringing at least 2 rangers at maximum dps output and probably 4 to 5 unskilled dps.
I’d recommend using your home teleport while in the raid and then graveyard from the void in your house, I lost 2 sets of potions trying to leave the raid normally, so the next time I left I home teleported and it was fine
I just want to clarify some things here:
Our best ranger can deal a nice 45k dps stable. I deal 45k dps stable. There are only 2 other mages in the game that I know of who can comfortably go above the 45k dps threshold and that is it.
Our best ranger who deals 45k dps is also not using the ‘intended optimal PvE talent set’ because it just does not work for PvE viably right now (something brought up with the dev team that I hope they address).
I would argue that rangers are unable to play using optimal talents hence a lack of damage to reach cap.
Quantifying the damage output from reading many logs i can say that this is not true. A mage casting at 2 spells per second can deal around 60k dps. 1 rangers maximum dps output (as I clarified above) is around the 45-50k dps mark (depending on circumstances and bleed luck). That leaves space for maybe one dpser learning to play who deals lets say 10-15k dps or on the extreme a practiced dpser at 20k dps.
So yes, the highest dealing mages can scale harder on damage than a ranger but let’s not over exagerate things…
On the subject of boss 2 in normal…
I believe the perfect achievements are doing quite well at showing a ‘holding your own’ on the mechanics.
if we can see that teams are taking down boss 2 with some practice, then whats the problem? Maybe make boss 5 on normal to be harder somehow?
The dev teams intention if I remember correctly (something Riley wrote a while back) is that the normal bosses should be kill-able with a bit of practice. if there are bosses you are killing without ‘practiced players’ in normal mode, you should let Riley know.
Oh nevermind. It looks like normal mode boss 5 is probably harder now.
2 thinga: The people who are taking it down have higher gear than the intended +0. We are also not using the intended strat to take it down because thats not really possible.
Unless you way out gear the content, you are pretty much only going to be able to kill one add per dps phase. This would be fine (still hard due to stacking mobs), except that they don’t always give you 2 dps phases to kill the adds before more spawn. If you only kill one add per phase (the norm), on the third add wave, you are guaranteed to have 3 adds up. On the 5th add wave, you would have 4.
All they need to do to make it possible (for the intended gear level) is to always give 2 phases to dps the adds, or to spawn one add each time the shield goes on the boss.
Remember, just because it can be beaten doesn’t mean it is balanced correctly, especially when the people who are beating it are either way out gearing the content or are completely ignoring the mechanics of the boss and just hoping they can burn the boss down before everyone dies.
The Dev team know that you can burn the boss down and off tank the ads. That’s why they added the perfect achievements (which are not supposed to be easy to get).
I believe it is their intention that the boss is built this way.
Unless you are saying you are unable to burn down boss 2 whilst off tanking ads with some practice then I don’t see the problem.
but the perfects are easy to get for most of the bosses… and you should be able to kill the boss with the intended strat (perfect) without having more than +0 gear. The second boss in the dungeon should not be the hardest by far like it is.
the only reason you can ‘just burn the boss down’ is that the mechanic for the stacking buff isnt punishing enough( or there is some bug that limits how many stacks he gets or if there is a bug that resets his counter).
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So what you’re telling me is:
- You don’t even bother to kill the adds (a whole half of the mechanic, mind you)
- The devs already know you don’t bother to kill the adds
- The fact that you can kill the boss while an offtank runs around with the adds just like boss 2 in Oldbus is okay with them?
This just proves the point that the obviously intended fight (switch off adds and boss) is not happening.