Raiding - Heroic Hellfire Assault is REALLY HARD!

I pugged a normal Hellfire Assault yesterday and after Balinar said it was very easy, I wanted to see what it was like. I only did Iron Reaver but that on normal with a bunch of pugs not knowing what they were doing was quite easy.  So I thought that heroic was a good option.  Crooked did normal as well and he says it was very easy just lots of trash, really.  Didn't have to think much.

But.

The Heroic Hellfire Assault was totally NOT easy.  We couldn't get past 70% and the tanks would just go splat because those Beserkers were killing them.  The adds seemed to go down ok before that point when a few Beserkers were out and the stacking debuffs were just nasty.  The siege would make it to the cannon before it was killed because we had everyone killing the Beserkers so that the tanks could live.

And of course in the first night after patch there was a mini maintenance right in the middle of raid which cut our raid time in half at 1 hour.  So that wasn't helpful.

I wondered what we were doing wrong and I didn't want to go do normal.  Normal was just too easy for what we were doing and the challenge for us SHOULD be at heroic, where we would struggle a bit but learn, but the time pressure didn't feel like we were learning anything.

There was a lot of complaining on MMO-Champion.  Guilds similar to ours, with 10/10H BRF on farm were unable to get past the first boss of heroic.  Mythic guilds of course were getting through, and there was a lot of criticism from them saying that you can hardly expect to do heroic BRF and think you can just walk into heroic HFC. I don't think any of the people in there are "expecting" that they deserve to kill the first boss of HFC if they are 690+ ilvl but I think they expected to make a bigger dent in it. I understand that, and I expect it to be difficult but I didn't expect it to feel this difficult.  I am sure there is something we are missing.  It does feel like the difficulty jump between normal and heroic is VERY large.

Icy Veins and Fatboss all say that the adds need to be single target focussed down, but everyone was cleaving because there are so many adds (except for the siege of course). We also had some laggy issues so people were lagging and that probably didn't help things much especially with all the AoE that was going on.  I had whispers from officers in Athanasy saying normal was a joke but they could not do heroic at all, with their tanks being destroyed at a similar time to ours. They were very sad about it.

My healing was abyssmal but I admit I was spending a lot of time focussing on tanks instead of the raid, trying to time my cooldowns right.  And we were all a little bit everywhere with our healing cds as well.

Anyway, I think I will have to dump germ and go back to moment of clarity whilst we work this out. And I wonder what that one hour maintenance was for.  Perhaps we have to do normal of the whole raid before we are ready for the first boss of heroic.  I was hoping just to do from Kilrogg on normal, but it may look like we have to get rid of the whole lot on normal and go to Kilrogg if there is nothing that we can do to improve things on the first boss tonight.

Comments

  1. I was watching a streamer last week who was in a PTR test raid and he said that the patch honestly felt rushed and that he believed that not enough people had been through to test the content for it to be balanced. And now I read this.

    I'm sure you guys will figure something out, you always do! :)

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    1. Hey Neri! More Frostwolves fluffing around and we will figure it out!

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  2. We found exactly the same thing. Admittedly we had a couple of people who were a little under-geared due to sudden main changes but not really under-geared so while we weren't expecting a walk through we didn't expect to hit the wall against the first boss so hard.
    With the shutdown cutting our raid time too, we ended up flicking it to normal to concentrate more on gearing the couple that need it and the difficulty decrease was phenomenal,. I'm not sure if there is an imbalance but it went from a nightmare to being able to one shot the first 3 bosses with ease. I'm not sure if previous tiers had this degree of difference between the levels or not.

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    1. Previous tiers did not have this degree of difference, in my experience.

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    2. It is weird the difficulty difference, don't you think!!!

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  3. You are making me very happy we started with normal. We only downed the first four in about an hour and a half and it was easy, but that is fine. Not sure doing normal this easy however is going to prepare us for what you are describing. I wanted to do normal as a stepping stone to learn the fights an I have a feeling, at least for the first two bosses, no one learned anything. They felt more LFR level than normal level. However, with that said, the first two bosses of a big raid like that should be pretty easy. Perhaps they are just overtuned for heroic. Either way, after reading your experiences, I am not looking forward to heroic just yet. Maybe we might finish normal first and wait for them to patch it. lol

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    1. I don't think anyone will learn anything from doing the first boss on normal - and the guild will see it on Sunday after having done it on heroic and I guarantee you they will think it's a bit of a joke how different it is. BRF difficulties weren't this different, but at least now, having done it, the encounter IS doable. It felt terrible at first where you couldn't even make a dent, but I guess once you figure out the strat, it just clicks.

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    2. I think they separated normal and heroic a bit, which I do not like. I want normal to be heroic with the 30% nerf like we had at the end of DS. That is all normal should be. It should not have different mechanics. Just my opinion of course, but normal should be to learn and not something entirely different.

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  4. This is exactly as intended. 10/10N guilds will start from scratch; 10/10H guilds will breeze through the first few bosses of normal, and then be able to start heroic after they get some gear; 10/10M guilds will breeze through the first few bosses of heroic, and start mythic soon after getting some gear.
    Stop complaining and get some damn gear. Normal gear is TEN freaking ilvls higher than your heroic BRF gear!! You don't think that MAYBE you should go get some of that first? That didn't occur to you? It's a new tier, not just a new raid. You are starting exactly where you are supposed to.

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I hope these comments work! Not sure why people can't comment lately, it makes me sad :(