MM knocked the socks off 🧦 these dancing sociopaths last Tuesday. After a staggering 169 pulls… yes… Midnight members were more than happy to see the frolicking blood drinkers kick the bucket. Now firmly, 7/10M, MM joins roughly 4 thousand other guilds worldwide on Mudfister, a typical Wednesday night for Clumsy. Oh, excuse me, I meant Sludgefist. I must’ve read that wrong. 🔍
Shimmy… *PTSD triggered* Enjoy the video below!
What’s Wrong With Castle Nathria?
Sire Daddy’s castle is an unusually hard tier for a first raid tier of an expansion. Coupled with this patch being exponentially longer (content drought), we’re still seeing very few guilds make progress. Why is that? When we look at the other first raid tiers from BFA and Legion, the numbers suggest varying degrees of success:
For one, CN has 10 booses, where both Uldir and EN have 8. EN saw the most amount of guilds achieve CE, where many got stuck at Fetid Devourer in Uldir. In CN, Council of Blood is the first big wall for guilds pushing for CE and after that, it only gets harder. If we compare CN to Tomb of Sargeras, though:
ToS and CN have similar difficulty towards the later bosses. ToS nicknamed “Tomb of Soakgeras” was difficult in a different way, in that for every boss you needed a minimum of 3-6 immunity soaks. M KJ is also regarded as one of the hardest M bosses in WoW’s history with entire guilds swapping to Horde so their healers could go Goblin for the rocket jump. 🚀
The Problem
CN has its problems but it’s not the worst first tier of the most recent expansions. If we look back to BFA, guilds struggled to have any success in Uldir, especially beyond M.O.T.H.E.R.. And it didn’t help that there were 3 walls, ouch. 👊
CN has done a great job with the first half of the raid, but there are still issues. We’re seeing similar progression to other later tiers and bosses with significantly more time available… the problem here is time and tuning. ⏰
- M EN opened September 27th (ToV opened November 8th) and ended January 17th = 112 days
- M Tomb opened June 28th and ended November 28th = 154 days
- M Uldir opened September 11th and ended January 22th = 133 days
- M CN opened December 15th and it’s May 1st… = 137 days and counting (expected 200+)
CN is much more like Tomb of Sargeras, than we realize and as we add more days to the tier, it’s becoming more apparent. If CN were like EN, we’d expect to see 10 times the amount of guilds kill Sire and if were like G’huun, double. CN is almost like a later raid tier in difficulty.
I’d argue that raid tuning is not being done right, and hasn’t been done right for multiple tiers. I’d hope for another round of nerfs to the last four bosses if Blizzard wants to create a true guild curve, but I think I’m being too hopeful. Usually a new patch comes with a lot of renewed optimism, and with 9.1 being right around the corner (finally), I hope we can take that enthusiasm with us into Torghast and leave 9.0 behind.
MYTHICC-MALGANIS 