Nerfin Them Hardmodes

[Dezzimal]

Flame leviathan just ate two solid nerfs, yogg saron and XT hardmode also ate a few nerfs. I give it one month till Mimiron + another round of Freya hardmode nerfs. What is sad is some of these hardmodes are actually decently tuned, especially flame leviathan minus bugs and XT, yogg is more difficult but it doesn't feel insurmountable except for 0 lights.

Is it right that this much tuning of hardmodes and ulduar in general isn't sorted out before the content is released? I think we've seen at least one balance change for every boss in ulduar.

[Eaglestrike]

Seems they're still following the usual procedure of come out with hard content and nerf as you go to get people through it. The "hardcore" can still still brag about WHEN they cleared the content to be better than others and it makes farming the stuff quicker and it lets the merely decent players see the content all too. I imagine these nerfs are coming to let more people get to Algalon, as the design philosophy is that they want to create content people will see. So they want people to get TO Algalon at least.

[Dezzimal]

Pretty sure they said they wanted algalon-25 to be exclusive to top tier raiders when they first mentioned him. Ten man algalon is very accessible for attentive and geared raiders.

[Palin]

Leviathan went from one of the most rewarding challenges in the game (minus bugs, fixing those would be nice) to devoid of any real strategy IMO. I greatly enjoyed theorycrafting about what setup to use for maximum damage reduction. I felt the fight was perfectly fine after the first nerf of decresaing the vehicle GCD and the adds' health. The new 4 tower has the same HP as the old 3 Tower, its a joke. Glad we got the kill before the nerf.

XT is now pretty easy as well, less Spark uptime = more Ranged DPS on XT, meaning the Berserk is pretty trivial.

However, I do understand Blizzard's point in all this. Flame Leviathan and XT were both gateway bosses that made learning their difficult Hard Modes very tedious. If you wanted to put real time on Flame Leviathan, you had to sacrifice a good chunk of your raid week. At least if you want to do a Keeper's hard mode you can clear everything else but that, and work on it for the rest of the week. I would have prefered though they made an option to make XT and Leviathan skippable, but I don't see how they could have done that either.

I'm sure a lot more guilds will be getting these Hard modes in the near future, and I do expect a Vezax and Freya nerf in the near future. I think Blizzard has accelerated their timetable for 3.2 than they originally first thought, and that might be why some of this stuff that was originally meant to keep guilds goign for a long time is being tuned down.

[Arvin]

I'm happy they're doing this, but at the same time I'm not. Coming from the background of hardcore raiding I can see this being very frustrating, but now that we only raid 2 nights a week it makes doing the other hardmodes sort of viable. We were fairly close to attempting XT and possibly orbituary but now it's a for sure thing this coming raid week. I hate saying I downed something post nerf. Fucking dumb.

[Dezzimal]

Having an entirely non-linear dungeon except for the final boss would be nice, especially if they do the hardmode thing again. It sucks that we shift into "clear the zone" mode by the time we've finished freya/mimir in normal mode and move in to vezax because it is likely monday night. I did manage to get us to do 2 keeper though and that was a blast, hopefully we can rope off some time for 1 keeper this week even though it doesn't technically progress us towards algalon any.

If we had a choice we'd be knocking out vezax hm and testing the 1 keeper water (how worse is it than 2?) before blowing our time on freya for the rest of the week.

As another thread of thought, I love the inability of blizzard to theorycraft. I'm sure any of the people who write simcraft or rawr could come up with a model for hodir and estimate what the fastest possible kill time is down to +- 10 seconds. Instead we get a yo-yoing hardmode timer, 3 minutes, then 2:30, then 2, then back to 3 minutes if I recall correctly. Knocking a full third off the hardmode timer seems like a pretty heavy-handed balance change.

[Boyiee]

This is no different from any other patch, the same thing happened in TBC.

Instances are out for a little, someone gets world firsts within a few days, then slowly they nerf things so the rest of us have a chance at it.

What makes some of the instances so hard to begin with is the people clearing them within the first week or 2 are still at full last content gear, or even earlier. Do you remember the gear illidan was first killed in? lol. By the time anyone else actually clears it, most of their members have a lot of gear from the instance already.

[Correction]

I'm sure any of the people who write simcraft or rawr could come up with a model for hodir and estimate what the fastest possible kill time is down to +- 10 seconds.

Juggling the contributions of 10 classes with random floor AOE, random floor buffs and randomly placed floor 'places to stand' with a boss who forces movement every few seconds?

No, this isn't theorycraftable.

Meanwhile Mimiron seemed super tightly tuned only to those guilds willing to stack their brute-force shit hard enough to kill it first (read: Ensidia).

For raids without a lot of interchangeable raid-ready alts and standbys nerfing = oh boy we can actually alter our raid composition once in a while. Yes it sucks to kill stuff post-nerfs but really Blizzard's goal of making content more accessible, even hard-mode stuff, hurts only your pride. Having to be better than 90% of the players across all servers isn't that humiliating when before you had to be better than 98% of the players across all servers.

[Lordwafik]

I know I'm no WoW vet, but I much rather would see devs making their content more accessable than have it denied , years just because they want to make something retardedly rare for no reason.

[Khelek]

I know I'm no WoW vet, but I much rather would see devs making their content more accessable than have it denied , years just because they want to make something retardedly rare for no reason.

Man could you imagine a game where there'd be a boss like that? Unkillable for years, except maybe some unintended flaws in mechanics that resulted in a few kills before it would be "fixed". I'd hate to be part of a game like that.

[Correction]

Man could you imagine a game where there'd be a boss like that? Unkillable for years, except maybe some unintended flaws in mechanics that resulted in a few kills before it would be "fixed". I'd hate to be part of a game like that.

While we're at it let's make WoW more hardcore by making bosses more likely to wipe raids the more melee damage you put on them. And let's reduce magic damage by 50% just because. It'll be like Molten Core 1.0 all over again. Who misses that like I do, c'mon!

[aurik]

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Let's keep this about WoW guys.

[Arvin]

This is no different from any other patch, the same thing happened in TBC.

Instances are out for a little, someone gets world firsts within a few days, then slowly they nerf things so the rest of us have a chance at it.

What makes some of the instances so hard to begin with is the people clearing them within the first week or 2 are still at full last content gear, or even earlier. Do you remember the gear illidan was first killed in? lol. By the time anyone else actually clears it, most of their members have a lot of gear from the instance already.

Illidan wasn't killed 2 weeks into Black Temples release.. Vashj wasn't killed weeks after, neither was Kael'thas or Archimonde. A huge chunk of raiders never even got the opportunity to see Hyjal or BT for a very long time afterwards. Did you ever get to experience the as shipped Al'ar or even the as shipped Vashj? They remained that way for a very long time, as did a lot of other bosses, namely Mother Shahraz. Mother was the absolute biggest cock block, not only because of SR but because she was INSANE. It took them more along the lines of half a year to nerf things and even so, they didn't nerf them into oblivion. It still took the casual-hardcore guilds a bit to do them.

I don't know what TBC you're talking about, but as shipped and pre-nerf lasted for a way longer length than WOTLK has. So I respectfully disagree with you. You're right about the fact that they're nerfing, but they're nerfing them at a very fast rate which is not cool.

[Correction]

I don't know what TBC you're talking about, but as shipped and pre-nerf lasted for a way longer length than WOTLK has. So I respectfully disagree with you. You're right about the fact that they're nerfing, but they're nerfing them at a very fast rate which is not cool.

The 'length' of TBC is grossly skewed by the fact that everything up to Hyjal was presumably available at launch, and as soon as the overtuned trash/buggy bosses started falling to Nihilum the peanut gallery clicked on their "Where's BT?" stopwatches, stopping only for the, what, week (?) it took Nihilum to kill Illidan, at which point they started them again for "Where's Sunwell?"

Now with more and more guilds seeing the content they realize they shouldn't be so impatient; It's not like Mimiron just falls over and loot starts gushing out of his ass. Guilds find themselves needing to gear up substantially for hardmodes in a way that wasn't required by OS/EoE/Naxx. Except now they can gear up the characters they want with the nerfs, instead of only their Ret Pally for Brutallus or their Shamans for M'uru.

[Dezzimal]

Juggling the contributions of 10 classes with random floor AOE, random floor buffs and randomly placed floor 'places to stand' with a boss who forces movement every few seconds?

No, this isn't theorycraftable.

All of hodir's mechanics could be represented in a simulator like simcraft. The framework is there for simulating nearly an entire raid with all of their class mechanics, storm power, moonkin beam and toasty fire would not be too hard to add. The only thing that isn't in there is movement, but we could fake that.

[Plow]

I know I'm no WoW vet, but I much rather would see devs making their content more accessable than have it denied , years just because they want to make something retardedly rare for no reason.

Content being accessible is the entire point of hard modes, there's pretty much no excuse to nerf them other than obvious balance issues.

[Eanae]

Their changes don't seem too bad. Their BC raid nerfs were a tad over the top though.

[Gulkeeva]

I don't mind hard mode nerfs... my guild needs it, some people are pretty terrible... and after staring at the mostly to see what they do its like... wow.

Like the pic I posted of a 10mil hp regained general vezax... about 4mil of that was from a shaman we repeatedly tell/yell at in vent to not do that.. raid warning spam etc. unfortunately can't replace him because... o the lack of healers ;/

Also for some reason alot of our demo drivers... "have to hump FL" for reasons I'm unsure of... when you can safely launch/attack people from 300y+ away (well probably that range) ...

[Arvin]

The 'length' of TBC is grossly skewed by the fact that everything up to Hyjal was presumably available at launch, and as soon as the overtuned trash/buggy bosses started falling to Nihilum the peanut gallery clicked on their "Where's BT?" stopwatches, stopping only for the, what, week (?) it took Nihilum to kill Illidan, at which point they started them again for "Where's Sunwell?"

Now with more and more guilds seeing the content they realize they shouldn't be so impatient; It's not like Mimiron just falls over and loot starts gushing out of his ass. Guilds find themselves needing to gear up substantially for hardmodes in a way that wasn't required by OS/EoE/Naxx. Except now they can gear up the characters they want with the nerfs, instead of only their Ret Pally for Brutallus or their Shamans for M'uru.

I'll agree with you that people need to be patient, yes. But, right now as it stands a lot of this content is extremely easy in comparison to TBC bosses.

Also, the length of TBC isn't as short as you think, they killed Illidan himself in a weeks worth of attempts (HIM in a week, not the instance) which is saying a lot. It took them a week to kill 1 boss out of the 9 available. It took them a week to kill Yogg-Saron (and ultimately, the whole instance in a week) Hardmodes took them about 4 weeks and that itself I would count as entirely new encounters The nerfs didn't come too quickly either, as I recall we were on Kael'thas for approximately 3 weeks before we killed him. When he was killed, he got nerfed in a months time. We reached Shahraz pre-nerf and killed her. 1 Month later, she was nerfed. There are plenty of easy fights inside of Hyjal and BT but there are those encounters that just stand out as a cockblock (Teron, Bloodboil, RoS, Shahraz, Archimonde) and it took more than 3 weeks for them to nerf it.

The way Blizzard is nerfing stuff right now is they're gradually nerfing each encounter instead of spiking it all in a months time, slowly but surely it will all be watered down to 25 people with downs being able to kill anything.

[Gulkeeva]

Kael'thas was a awesome 25man encounter, especially when it was challenging.