[Notes] What TBC raids can + cannot be 5-manned with this plugin?

[steenburgh]

I use this mod on a server with ~5 players that regularly attend raids. We've done most of the TBC content now. I was chatting with @BarbzYHOOL and mentioned that many TBC fights were completely impossible to 5-man, even with this mod - he suggested I post them here so the info is not lost. I'm not 100% sure what can be done about these issue, but I do want to make sure to add my experience here so devs can use it to improve the plugin.

Notes

• We use a custom inflection AutoBalance.InflectionPoint setting for 10 and 25 man raids: 0.35, which we've found to be pretty much perfect - at least for the bosses without mechanics that make fights impossible. The default setting, 0.5, made 10/25 mans way too easy when scaled down.
• Our group consisted of the following:
  • Shaman: Enhancement/Resto
  • Death Knight: Blood(tank)
  • Mage: Fire
  • Warlock: Destro/Affliction
  • Flex character, usually a healer. I'm a GM so I made a character of every class/spec to fill whatever role we're missing for a given fight.

Karazhan: 8/8 doable, 2 not attempted

• ✅ Attumen the Huntsmen: Doable
• ✅ Maiden of Virtue: Doable
• ✅ Moroes: Doable
• ✅ Opera Event: Doable
• ✅ Nightbane: Doable
• ✅ The Curator: Doable
• ✅ Terestian Illhoof: Doable
• ✅ Shade of Aran: Doable
• ❓ Netherspite: Did not attempt. We were under-geared at the time and never went back to reattempt.
• ❓ Chess Event: Not scripted on Azeroth Core at the time so we were unable to attempt it.
• ✅ Prince Malchezaar: Doable

Gruul's Lair: 2/2 doable

• ✅ High King Maulgar: Doable, but difficult. We had to use 2 tanks and a paladin healer with beacon of light for the 60yd range, allowing us to keep Maulgar away from his adds without using 2 healers.
• ✅ Gruul: Doable

Magtheridon's Lair: 1/1 doable

• ✅ Magtheridon: Doable

Serpentshrine Cavern: 3/6 doable

• ✅ Hydross The Unstable: Doable. Requires 2 tanks
• ✅ The Lurker Below: Doable
• ✅ Leotheras the Blind: Doable
• ❌Fathom Lord Karathress: Possible but only just barely. This is hard because you normally have to have 4-5 tanks top keep his adds separated from him. In particular, the dude that mana burns your healer(s) is a problem. We did it using 1 tank and 1 healer so we could burst down the dude that mana burns as fast as possible. We barely managed to do it by soulstoning our druid healer and having them just die when they ran out of mana + regen cooldowns, and resurrect via soulstone to restore their mana (no, I'm not joking around here). We also had a shaman who could reincarnate, and also supplement healing while the druid was resurrecting.
• ❌Moongrim Tidewalker: We quickly figured out that this fight was not going to be possible when we got to the phase where he summons 4 waterfalls that CC most of our raid group, then kill the players if they are not healed in time. If the final person leftover is not a healer, everyone dies - and even if they are, they aggro the boss.
• ❌Lady Vashj: Phase 2 of this fight was completely impossible as there are adds coming from several directions that we have to keep away from the boss, and while all that is going on, we have to kill the tainted elementals that spawn far away from the boss to get the items required to end the phase.

Hyjal: 5/5 doable

• ✅ Rage Winterchill: Doable
• ✅ Anatheron: Doable
• ✅ Kaz'rogal: Doable
• ✅ Azgalor: Doable, but possibly because we were able to interrupt his 'Doom' ability.
• ✅ Archimonde: Doable

Black Temple: 6/9 doable

• ✅ High Warlord Naj'entus: Doable
• ✅ Supremus: Doable
• ✅ Shade of Akama: Doable
• ✅ Teron Gorefiend: Doable
• ❌ Gurtogg Bloodboil This guy puts a stacking debuff on the closest 5 raid members. You're supposed to alternate between groups of 5 players to manage stacks of this debuff, and let stacks fall off. Since we only have 5 players, it becomes a DPS race before the healer is overwhelmed. We've routinely gotten him to 50% before everyone dies. To get past this boss, I turned god mode on and resurrected the raid once we died the first time. Make his blood boil only target 1 player and this fight will be doable.
• ✅ Reliquary of Souls: Doable. Using a Discipline priest made the fight an order of magnitude easier thanks to Power Word: Shield getting around the 100% healing reduction in one of the phases of the fight.
• ✅ Mother Shahraz: Doable
• ❌ Illidari Council This was impossible because you need to separate the bosses using 3 tanks, and you need a dedicated healer for each tank, and you need dedicated groups interrupting one of the bosses.
• ❌ Illidan Stormrage This was impossible for multiple reasons - the first one we ran into was that parasitic shadowfiend damage was not scaled, then we couldn't deal with the twin flames that spawned becuase you had to have a 2 separate tanks stacking fire resist or they'd die instantly, next, the fact that you need a shadow resist capped lock tank, and finally the four shadow demons that spawn, leaving only 1 person to kill them all. To deal with this, I gave our one tank max fire resist via 6 instances of a test aura that gives +60 fire resist and our warlock 6 instances of a similar test aura that gives shadow resist. Then, I used a WoW spell editor to reduce the number of shadow demons to 1.

Sunwell: 0/1 doable, 5 not attempted

• ❌ Kalecgos This was impossible because we had to split up our already tiny group across two realms. Generally this is done with 3 groups, and try as we might, we couldn't do it with less.
• ❓ Brutallus: Likely doable, but we're pretty sure we failed because we were not properly geared
• ❓ Felmyst: Probably doable, but we did not get a chance to find out due to a nasty bug that broke the fight: fix(scripts/Felmyst): Adjust beam target azerothcore-wotlk#4055

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[MrLavender]

I had a similar experience going through these raids recently but don't see that much can be done about specific fight mechanics. It would be an enormous amount of work to change individual encounter scripting based on number of players.

One suggestion is to adjust difficulty using AutoBalance.playerCountDifficultyOffset instead of AutoBalance.InflectionPoint. At the default setting of 0 everything is very easy so increase that number until you have the difficulty you prefer. Then in many cases you can get past otherwise impossible encounters by temporarily lowering it back to 0 with in-game command .autobalance setoffset 0.

Also, in the case of Lady Vashj the main reason it's so hard is that summoned mobs like Tainted Elementals don't get scaled. So they have full 25-man hp and damage. To fix problems like that you can add the mob id (22009 in this case) to the AutoBalance.ForcedID25 list.

In the end this module does one simple thing which is stat scaling. Anything else is likely out of it's scope.

[BarbzYHOOL]

if every parameter was adjustable per dungeon, per number of player (in a table), then it would be feasible

[kjack9]

I want to convert this very-helpful post into something in the project documentation. Marking this as an enhancement with help needed for now.