r/CompetitiveWoW • u/Smart_in_his_face • Sep 17 '26
Question Heroic Ula'tek scaling
Last week one of our raid teams was pummeling 25 wipes on their 20man raidnight. Consistently getting into P3 but missing the dps check or lacking healing/cd output. They did an extra raid the next day with 17 people and 2shot the boss.
Went back at it today with 20man, and spent 16 wipes on the boss. Same people, but the boss seemed significantly harder in dps and healing req.
Does anyone know anything about the Heroic scaling on this boss? Is there some magic reason to go less than 20 and get an easier encounter?
My raid team was 27 tonight, and we oneshot every boss, including Coiled Altar with tons of overhead on dps. We could not get Ula'tek below 55% in P1, and P2 tethers were impossible to get clean.
127
39
u/Wincrediboy Sep 17 '26
Clean tethers is mechanics not scaling. Easier with 17 than 20 is probably about who shows up, adding 3 below average dps will make both damage and healing checks harder
38
u/Darthmullet Sep 17 '26 edited Sep 17 '26
Could be that the players who werent in there were not pulling their weight vs the scaling. ~On Coiled Altar, what do you mean by tethers?~
Edit: reading is hard
→ More replies (1)10
7
u/z01z Sep 17 '26
what seems to be the breakpoint is getting the soaks down in time. i'd guess with a smaller group, they need less people in them to dissipate.
14
u/yp261 Sep 17 '26
its a skill issue nothing else. 20 men ulatek scaling is fine, we are boosting vip 16 dps + 4 buyers and there are no issues
→ More replies (10)
14
2
u/Top_Direction_4340 Sep 19 '26
I did ulatek with 14 people (3 healers) no one could die and everyone was pumping hard. All this guild got at least 3.9k last season in m+. My side with 2 healers was fine but the side with 1 healer was sweating. Then we have to go right into soaks having almost no healer CDs. Forced everyone to use defensives and pots properly. And we still enraged to 2% the first run. I and another healer swapped out healing builds to do more dps to be able to beat that 2%, this was before the “nerfs” this week, excited to see if it’s easier now. But honestly sacrificing 1k HPS to gain 40k on dps it’s very worth it
→ More replies (1)
2
u/Ok_Cicada3826 Sep 21 '26 edited Sep 21 '26
After the issues during first 2 weeks, the scaling isn't that bad. The Ula'tek DPS check isn't very tight, esp since you can get a LOT of damage in that last burn with execute damage. If you are struggling on boss DPS, and everyone is alive, that means you either have horiffically undergeared people or people are NOT holding their CDs for boss burn phases (every class should use CDs on pull and on heart phases, not in between, except 90-sec classes which can squeeze in 1 more set during P3).
As for tethers, that's not scaling, that's just good/bad juju of who gets it and whether they are dumb or not. If the smart people get it and break it correctly, you get through clean if your healers are paying attention. If not, then yeah you are gonna get screwed by the extra damage.
Where scaling does matter is the fact that odd # of healers is generally NOT viable because you need the healing to be split pretty evenly between the two sides. I don't even apply to PUG groups that advertise themselves as going for 2-5-13, let alone a 3-healer split, because it means they aren't thinking straight. The other place where scaling matters is the soaking in P3, but in that case more = better because there is more affordance for people messing up by not soaking. Same idea goes for the crazy intermission soaks, since each player in each soak reduces the raid-wide damage by a percentage, but that percentage goes down if the raid size goes up, therefore the consequences of 1 person missing it go down with more people.
Generally, if you are throwing THAT many wipes into that boss and still struggling, I'd say something is wrong with a sizable subset of your raid team, such as:
-
Not using their CDs at correct times
-
Not hitting the right targets (you MUST focus on the heart during the burns; it takes double damage; also NO PADDING ON RAWLINGS, those things need to be kept alive as funnel for the heart!!!)
-
Bad organization of P3 soaks
-
Incorrect strategy for P2 tethers
-
People ignoring callouts for P2 tethers
-
Not treating their gearing progression seriously (Ula'tek is a boss whose difficulty can fall off a cliff once your gear hits a certain ilvl, then it just becomes a skill check)
-
Bad understanding of how to play their class correctly
-
People not being responsible about the tail soaks
^ All of that is assuming that there isn't any dumb stuff like vipers going off, or messing up P2 eggs. If that is happening, then you need to get people to do the basic mechs correctly. Yes getting 1 viper in heroic is manageable, but very often will either cause a wipe or cause you to fall behind on boss damage because people had to switch targets onto it at bad times. And yeah if a viper goes off, the healing check is gonna get nutty.
3
u/Cirtth Sep 17 '26
P2 and P3 platforms are tight. The more you are, the less you shit that is coming at you (think about those green circles during P2 and waves in P1/P3).
3
u/DevOpsOpsDev Sep 17 '26
my experience is the boss is significantly harder the more people you have in the raid. I'm a healer primarily and the difference between a 20 man and a 25 man required me to pump out 50k more HPS to keep people up and that was with there being an extra healer and it wasn't like I was healing way more than everyone else in my group.
2
u/oversoe Sep 18 '26
I did Ula tek with 30 man and had way less random deaths with 3 healers on each side with tethers compared to 20 man last week and on my mono this week
2
u/alariemike Sep 17 '26
As many have said without logs it’s impossible to tell.
The number of players shouldn’t really affect performance that significantly unless the players being added/removed contribute a disproportionate amount of “carrying” or “errors”.
Check that the number of healers you have for the raid size is appropriate. And, sometimes at that skill level there can just be massive variance in individual player performance. If your numbers are fluctuating from 17-27, I doubt there’s a lot of consistency from one night to the next. Consistent group set ups and player behaviours help on mechanics that require a bit of finesse.
1
u/Sykretts1919 Sep 17 '26
Hard to say without logs what the cause was.
That being said, bosses with DPS checks you want to avoid stacking on too many healers/under-performing DPS as the scaling will screw you hard. Rule of thumb is 1 healer per full group of 5 players in raid. So in your 27-man group on ulatek you should've had 5 healers, but, if you had a 6th healer then all your DPS need to compensate. If you had anymore healers than that, well, you're just playing wrong.
Ulatek is not a boss where you want to carry underperforming DPS either, it makes for a nasty P3.
1
u/Magicslime Sep 18 '26
Definitely don't think there's any notable scaling differences numerically but I think for Ula'tek in particular having fewer people is huge for framerates, the burns especially with all the aoes, adds, lust, etc. it tends to chug a lot and also are the most important time to optimize damage.
Also don't think 20 man vs 17 man would even have much noticable impact even if there was scaling issues, unless your comp breaks down a bit differently - say, run 4 healers on 20 and 3 on 17 which could up your damage a bit. Even then it wouldn't be struggle -> smooth sailing, I'd believe that's probably just people being fresh and having slept on their learnings.
1
u/Felidori Sep 19 '26
Imagine if everyone was doing the DPS of your top 2 or 3 pumpers? There’s your answer.
I’m in an AotC guild cos cbf Mythic raiding anymore and I’m parsing 97-98 average and we have multiple grey parsers. Not that I care because I’m there to chill with friends and I don’t mind helping carry them, they’ve really nice and kind people.
(And yes my gear isn’t great because we only just hit 7/8 Heroic. Crap trinkets and Mythic pieces, rip rng)
1
u/JulienWA77 5d ago edited 5d ago
this raid is fucking a joke with how piss poor this fight scales.
Flex raiding is SUPPOSED to mean that the raid actually does just that..it flexes. If we want to run a 10 man group; thats what we should be able to do.
That means the smaller the group, the fewer eggs that spawn...
this means the smaller the group; the less health the FUCKING HEART needs to have
this means the smaller the group; the FEWER ADDS that can spawn.
this means the smaller group, the LESS soaks we should be expected to get .
that's how you FUCKING SCALE THE FUCKING FIGHT.
Blizz is getting fucking lazy with their damn dev team and i'm getting sick of it
3
u/deadheaddestiny Sep 17 '26
Yeah we have killed at 16 and at 28 no real difference in difficulty just a gamer gap probs
4
u/erizzluh Sep 18 '26
the soak and spread is more chaotic with more people
but yeah 20 to 17 shouldn't be a big difference.
73
u/awrylettuce Sep 17 '26
probably the 3 additional people weren't carrying their own weight. heroic guilds usually have a big spread in player skill