Last week, I finally got an individual clear for Ahead of the Curve on Queen Ansurek in a PUG group, tested my limits by pushing a new boundary, and even went and got some progress on the Heroic Nerub-ar Palace raid on my Discipline Priest. Given that, while my raid team continues to work to chip away at a full team AOTC run, I can speak on the tier a bit more and discuss how my opinion of The War Within’s opening raid instance has changed from Normal difficulty into Heroic…and then maybe even a bit of Mythic impressions.

In my post discussing Normal mode, I noted that I found Nerub-ar Palace a bit disappointing, primarily down to a couple of factors – the low difficulty at launch of the fights up to Silken Court, the extreme pre-nerf difficulty leap for Silken Court relative to everything else, and how disappointing Ansurek was on Normal following the struggle sessions on Silken Court. It was also worth noting that Delves helped to create some of this perception as it was not at all uncommon for raiders to show up week 1 for raid in a handful of 603 pieces from doing Tier 8 Bountiful Delves, which put raid loot further into the hole and eased the challenge from power progression far ahead of when that would typically happen.

Heroic has been better on that front by a fair bit. As usual, Heroic raiding is really the tier at which raid rewards begin to shine at least a bit, and in TWW, raid has also been one of the better and more reliable sources of upgrade crests at each level. Heroic’s scaling also brings to the front the challenge of the boss designs, adding relatively few overall tweaks to each encounter but creating a more suitable challenge for a group coming prepared with Delve loot and overall reasonable performance. The changes made over the course of the tier have also brought the fights into a better overall difficulty alignment, as nerfs and changes coupled with the base design ideas for Heroic make the difficulty curve much smoother and overall better. Heroic also brings to the forefront the challenging aspects of 3 fights in particular, as Broodtwister Ovi’nax, Nexus-Princess Ky’veza, and Queen Ansurek all pose unique threats on Heroic compared to their lower-difficulty versions.

Overall Challenge

Heroic Nerub-ar palace is one of the more interesting raids to me given that it actually has relatively few changes compared to Normal. In Warlords of Draenor, as the current raid difficulty system settled in and worked through the teething phase, one of the things that Blizzard made a point of doing was creating mechanical gaps for Heroic, where something would be insignificant or non-existent on Normal but would become substantially more engaging on Heroic, adding new layers and mechanical interactions to fights. Nerub-ar Palace is somewhat unique in that the fights mostly aren’t that different. Ulgrax is basically unchanged saved for raw numeric tuning. Bloodbound Horror gains a rotating death laser that requires better positioning, but it is far from precise and leaves a lot of room for slop. Sikran adds one failure state to players hit by the dash lines and that’s it. Rasha’nan just creates a tight tempo for the encounter and adds, again, one new mechanic with the group stack after he relocates. Broodtwister just has more eggs to hatch, Nexus-Princess has two new AoEs to dodge, and Ansurek adds a very small tweak per phase (extra frothing debuff in P1, web circles in intermission, tight DPS checks in P2, and the add soul mechanic in P3) – and these things absolutely do add up to more difficulty, but it is fascinating to see how little they actually change the fights in terms of execution. Ansurek feels the most changed in particular, but it’s mostly by virtue of the fact that a Normal raid with decent extracurricular gearing will smoke her in each phase long before the threatening mechanical overlaps, which is not the case on Heroic.

These tweaks, however small and odd given the history of the current raid difficulty paradigm, do make Heroic Nerub-ar substantially better to progress and more enjoyable in terms of a clear escalating difficulty curve when compared to Normal. They also, later into the tier, create some frustration points.

Firstly, Broodtwister. It’s an overall fun fight, but the managed chaos of it is difficult to deal with in the moment. The egg pops, given the larger number of eggs, require precise positioning and strong attentiveness for players to adapt and move quickly. If one pop is missed at a bad spot, it can end up being a wipe. Even in a clean 90 minute 7/8 Heroic run I did with PUGs on my Priest, Broodtwister was the only fight where we wiped at all because one thing went wrong early enough to start a spiral into failure. The boss’ model is huge and can make seeing eggs underneath her difficult, trying to mark eggs and teach the route to the full raid is a huge challenge (at least on a similar egg mechanic in Vault of the Incarnates on the Diurna fight back in Dragonflight, only the tank who was keeping the boss had to truly know the route, where here, everyone has to know), and the add health and execution check is hard to maintain in the midst of the chaos of the fight.

Nexus-Princess makes use of private auras for her main Twilight Massacre mechanic, which means as a raid lead I have to be able to trust people tethered to adds to know how to move and do it quickly. This mechanic frustrated me so much and led to the first time in nearly a decade I had to remove a raider from my roster based on performance and attentiveness with the various personal responsibilities of this fight. It’s also quite frustrating if your raid cannot sit still during the rotating second phase, as people are tempted to move, move frequently when they should not, and don’t often use the technique of moving along their debuff lines, leading to a lot of accidental cleaves onto allies which are deadly in this fight as any player who reaches 10% is quite likely to die unless a healer has an absolutely clutch full top-off in the bank for that player. It’s not even actually difficult, it just requires a modicum of care and attention and I found that not everyone was willing to accept accountability for their personal responsibility, which was the real issue that led me to removing a player. It was quite telling that prior to removing said player, our only kill on that fight was a week they were absent, and we could not repeat the kill until they were removed, because the escalation in needless damage intake is so severe for even just one inattentive player, which absolutely can create tension in long-standing social groups.

And then there is Ansurek.

Ansurek is a good Heroic end of tier boss, I will say that. The fight demands that players stay calm and execute a series of mechanics quite carefully, and the penalty for failures and flusters quickly kills the whole raid. That being said, none of the individual mechanics are hard in a real sense – popping Froth involves counting down, dealing with the tank combo involves a careful but simple taunt swap between the two major hits and both tanks coming loaded to the gills with defensives, and most of the rest of the fight is just down to being calm and going methodically step by step through each part of the fight. It is actually very forgiving of a lot of simple issues – froth placement can be remedied in a wide array of circumstances even if it is poor, the DPS check requires DPS players to hit 600k average for the fight, which sounds big but my 597 item level Retribution Paladin has done more than that on the fight (in LFR but the overall contours of the fight are similar), and while the tankbuster combo is quite daunting, each tank has some decent combo of defensives that can manage it well and can be cycled on time for each major buster. The healing check is largely based on how attentive your group is to avoiding big AoEs that are predictable, and while the P3 add mechanic is a little more rigorously structured than many such mechanics in older fights, it isn’t terribly finnicky and a good group with high-midrange DPS can end up doing enough damage to skip having to do it at all. Ansurek is the measuring stick that demands your raid play carefully and intelligently with prepared responses to each major mechanic, and if they can do that, then you have a great shot at clearing the fight.

I like that approach to Heroic end-bosses, because it feels like the difficulty is organic. Each component in its own way is simple, easily understood, and quite doable, and the difficulty comes from how the mechanics are layered atop each other and paced to create challenge. The PUG I ended up getting my AOTC kill with was a genuine one pull, one shot win over the boss, and it felt crazy because as each checkpoint in the fight was reached, I could feel the excitement (and nerves!) building for me, because I would never have expected to one-shot a boss like that in a random group, but it happened, and that feeling of everything falling into place was so rewarding.

In a lot of ways, looking at Heroic, what I can say is this – the overall difficulty curve is far more satisfying than normal and it creates real opportunities to shine for those who can stay calm and stick the landing. Given that, Heroic has done a lot to rehabilitate my image of the raid from Normal, which is why the tone of this post is so drastically different than when I wrote my lookback on Normal.

Alt Progress

Before sitting down to write this, I also went a quick 7/8 Heroic on my item level 620 Discipline Priest as a healer, which was an interesting perspective to see in the raid. While I had the accumulated knowledge of raid leading as a tank, playing to AOTC as a melee DPS, and generally understood the healing challenges from having healed normal on two different priests in both healing specs, actually playing the healer role in Heroic was quite an experience. However, I would say that healing Heroic, including some attempts in a learning group on Heroic Queen, reinforced my perception of how Heroic improves the raid overall. The challenge felt pretty appropriate and balanced for how planning-heavy a lot of healing is in the modern WoW game – if you know how to align your healing ramp and burst to major mechanics, you can do some crazy numbers. I had openers on Heroic Queen where my Disc Priest was reaching 1.8 million HPS, and it was really satisfying to see how properly sticking to the ramp and maintain cycle on Disc was leading my cooldowns to natural inflection points, like being able to refresh Atonements and pop my Voidwraith prior to the Venom Nova knock-ups so that I would have high passive healing during the time I couldn’t cast, and coupled with taking Vampiric Embrace in my Disc healing builds, I had other tools available to hit so that even if I couldn’t refresh Atonements sufficiently in time, I could still blast a lot of healing provided I could do my damage rotation far enough to get the Voidweaver Hero spec’s Entropic Rift out and churning damage during flight. It was really cool to see that my reward for keeping my cooldowns cycled was that I always had something big for each Venom Nova to keep my healing peaking as damage was rolling.

Outside of that, I did some additional Normal runs, clearing the full Normal raid on an Outlaw Rogue and Holy Priest, and I did the last two bosses on LFR on my second Ret Paladin (yes second, no I don’t have a problem) to see how Queen felt on Ret given that I need to understand it more to help an underperforming raider and see the failure points. Overall, I found Normal slightly more engaging on non-tank roles (having to do more of the mechanics makes a fight more interesting, who would have thought?) and I think that helped me realize a part of the ennui I felt with Normal was down to the tank role, which often just doesn’t get targeted by most random selection mechanics unless the raid is wiping and down too many people, which means that tanking overall can be dull without tank-specific toys to play with. Luckily, the survival checks on several Heroic fights bring a sufficient level of pain to create more opportunities for tank gameplay and I found that really satisfying.

The Non-Value of Meta Chasing

I’ve been grousing here about Brewmaster Monk a lot lately, because I switched off of Protection Warrior since I was enjoying Monk during leveling only to find that Brewmaster had been made way squishier from the tank changes. In raid, I’ve generally found Brewmaster to be okay – I am squishier and have to play a lot more diligently, but it isn’t that much worse. I hit a wall that made me reconsider – the tankbuster on Heroic Queen is absolutely nasty since it plays around a traditional raid strength of Brewmaster with Stagger. In the current game, Stagger tends to be either drastically insufficient (in a lot of optimized dungeon scenarios where you can have 10+ mobs wailing on your ass with white swings, the bar fills quickly and doesn’t reduce as much damage as you’d like) or pretty powerful (in raid mostly, where you are in combat with a smaller number of targets with longer gaps between auto-attacks allowing you time to let the bar fill and then Purify it down). On Queen, her tank combo, either hit, doesn’t matter which, will basically overflow your Stagger and have a lot of damage leftover which is dealt directly on top of leaving you with a 1+ million damage per second DoT ticking on you from Stagger. Purifying Brew will knock that down to 500k DPS of DoT, and the talent Bob and Weave will push your Stagger out to 13 seconds instead of 10, which does reduce the incoming damage a smidge while giving you slightly more time to react, but it is still a ton of damage which Brewmaster can only truly effectively mitigate by stacking their standard defensives and rotating at least one longer cooldown, talented defensive in to the mix. While I was finding a groove for it, I also found it frustrating how soft and weak I felt on the buster’s incoming damage – so I tried bringing in my Prot Warrior, who was 9 item levels less but a defensive machine that’s highly valued. Surely it would work, right?

Haha, nope!

I spent 30 minutes of pulls burning major CDs on Warrior and still being absolutely flattened before I realized that while yes, Brewmaster is often weaker than Protection Warrior in a lot of scenarios, I was practiced, built, and geared on Brewmaster and I had gained enough comfort (“comfort”) with the tank combo on my Monk that switching actually didn’t make sense or work all that well. What also helped was stepping outside of pure cookie-cutter talent builds and spending some time looking over what I needed to survive. In the recommended Brewmaster builds, you tend to not take the class talent Vivacious Vivification (a near-free, instant, buffed Vivify targeted heal every 10 seconds) but the more I thought about it, the more I wanted it over the endcap Lighter than Air talent, which I suck at using anyways, so I switched. It helped a lot with the buster, mainly because coupled with other talent choices and learned gameplay, I was able to have a lot more control over my own survival, developing my own cooldown rotation to survive the busters and their alternating hits (always have Celestial Brew shield rolling into the initial hit, pop Diffuse Magic for Liquify and then immediately Purifying Brew and insta-Vivify on hit, and for Feast which I generally take only one time in our rotation, pop Zen Meditation with a Celestial Brew rolling and then immediately the same Purify/Vivify combo, with Dampen Harm and Fortifying Brew still available to use for two out of 3 hits. Overall, while my heart was in the right place with the switch, it didn’t end up working out at all and within that same raid night I was already back to Brewmaster and pushing much better.

A First-Ever Look Into Mythic

When I PUGged my AotC kill on Heroic Queen, it was with a half-guild group whose raid team pushed into Mythic with spare time, so I stayed and went for Mythic Ulgrax. It was an interesting experience.

Firstly, a lot of the anecdotes people share about first bosses on Mythic are true – honestly, the last boss of Heroic is generally harder than the first 1-3 Mythic bosses because the level of required coordination for an end-boss is higher. Ulgrax on Mythic, while noticeably more difficult, is also not changed that much – you have to alternate the web grabs to avoid instagibs, need to ensure at least 6 people are in each grab so the boss doesn’t immediately enrage, and then the pull on the web is no joke, requiring active downtime to run halfway across the room and fight the pull with a movement cooldown like Stampeding Roar from a Druid. There’s also a new add during the add phase that pulses AoE damage, requiring you to kill them first to avoid ramping groupwide hits, but outside of that, the fight is largely similar, it just requires more coordination (which you would expect given that Mythic is the coordinated group in voice chat difficulty). It took about an hour of pulls to get down (ironically, the guild group had several DPS who were just not performing and they were usually dying first and doing poor damage which lengthened the fight too much), but we got there, marking the first time ever I have killed a current-tier Mythic raid boss.

As an experience, it wasn’t necessarily super-instructive – it confirmed my prior suspicions and community hearsay about how Mythic first bosses generally are. But at the same time, it felt really cool to do, because I was playing outside my standard role in raids, near the top on performance, and it reinforced my perception of how my gameplay has improved over the years.

Now, did it make me want to do Mythic more seriously? No, not at all. I know that later Mythic bosses are shitshows, like poison triangles on Rasha’nan, the double-pops needed for Ovinax with Weakauras for assignments that can make or break a group, and the higher level of stress as the raid winds on. But it does make wonder about maybe starting to consistently PUG the first 1-2 bosses on Mythic, because it seems like an easy-enough way to expand my gearing options and to slowly creep up to more Myth-track gear (albeit from a very limited selection).

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Overall, Heroic Nerub-ar Palace changed my perspective on the raid a lot by introducing the things I wish it had on Normal – a logical difficulty curve scaling up as you go deeper, more rewarding mechanics, better overall loot viability, and more interesting encounters that add very little but reflect far better versions of the bosses in the raid. My little foray into Mythic sated my appetite for that higher-end of gameplay while also making me curious to try a little harder, and I still have the task of working to coach my team to get to their AotC kill and to feel everything click into place for them. With Season 2 still a few months away, I know we’ll get there and we’re still fully in line with how we performed back in Season 1 of Dragonflight – so all that’s left to it is to do it.