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.
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.