Firelands Nerfs

[Shadowwolf]

[blizzard author=Blizzard link=http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/3494581]With the final showdown against Deathwing approaching, we've been keeping a close eye on players' progress through the current Firelands raid content. Before patch 4.3 is released, we want groups who are working on Heroic-difficulty content to be able to get as close to Ragnaros as possible, and we want players who are tackling normal progression to be able to experience as many of the encounters as they can. To achieve these goals, we'll be toning down the difficulty of both normal and Heroic raids through hotfixes in the coming weeks. In general, we plan to reduce health and damage of all raid bosses in both normal and Heroic Firelands by around the same percentage we brought difficulty down for the original Cataclysm raids when Rage of the Firelands (patch 4.2) was released.

We're looking forward to seeing more groups of players face off against the firelord in the weeks ahead. However, before we make these changes, we want to give everyone a final shot at the bosses at their current difficulty level -- so this is a heads up that we're planning to apply the difficulty hotfixes beginning the week of September 19.

Stay tuned to the Patch 4.2 Hotfixes blog for these and other live updates to the game as they happen.[/blizzard]

[Shadowwolf]

So I know a few of us have been questioning the above announcement coming so soon and the reasoning behind it. Tankspot did an interview with GC a few days ago and he gave a more detailed explanation as to why they are nerfing Firelands so soon. Looking at the percentages on sites like wowprogress and GuildOx, it is true that a lot of guilds are still slowly moving through Firelands normal and the ones on heroic are far spread either almost or done with Rag heroic, or barely past Shannox heroic.

Plus its interesting to see that my suspicions of people at Blizz watching us raid are true, lol. Now when the boss does something odd or abnormal to cause a wipe I know my blaming Blizzard is even more justified, haha.

[blizzard author=Tankspot link=http://www.tankspot.com/showthread.php?77571-Interview-with-Greg-Street-AKA-Ghostcrawler]So recently, Ragnaros has been hotfixed, and now there's the big tier-wide hotfixes coming up as well. What's the thought process that you guys use in determining when bosses should be nerfed? How do you come to the conclusion that, say, "X amount of guilds have killed Ragnaros, we need to nerf him. X amount of guilds are still working on Heroic Shannox, we need a zone-wide nerf"?

GS: We gather... I would call it a staggering amount of data on boss kills and number of attempts and things like that. We look a lot at how many new kills have there been for a particular week, like okay this guild couldn't kill Shannox before but killed him this week. The flows to those curves tend to be pretty steep at first because, you know, the really talented guilds roll in and kinda clear everything quickly, and then they start to slow down over time as you might expect, you know, not everyone gets a new boss kill every week, and then at some point they really start to plateau, and that is, the raiders now are just not moving. And we know that we risk losing raiders. They may not unsubscribe, but they may just stop raiding any time they hit a brick wall for too long.

Now, if you're Paragon, and you don't mind making 300 attempts, that's one thing, but a lot of raiders don't have that staying power. They're willing to wipe on a boss for a few weeks, but not for months and months and months for a boss that's early on in the tier. So once we start to see those boss kills fall off, we go in and selectively nerf things that players are having trouble with. We kind of want everyone to feel like they have finished Firelands before 4.3 comes out. That doesn't mean that every guild in the world needs to have killed Heroic Ragnaros, but we do want them to feel like they were making steady progression, and it wasn't like "Well, we killed 7 bosses, then we did 1 boss on heroic, and then we couldn't ever kill that second boss on heroic for 4 months." I mean, that isn't fun, so we try to make sure that everyone feels like they're always making some level of progress.[/blizzard]

[Grendeel]

This is utter horseshit!

He must think people are really stupid and i find that offensive.  If what he said was true then heroic modes would have been nerfed in 4.1.  They werent.  Maybe what he is saying is true........as of firelands content but if so its only been implemented since ...well.....now.  I wish tankspot was more "thorough" with their questioning.

My guess is retention numbers started to drastically change and this solution is what they came up with in hopes of stemming the tide of lost subscriptions.

Do people really look at it as progression once a nerf has happened or is it just "lets clear up our older content".  I for one dont.  I look at the cho'gal fight.  Knowing it took us 4 adds and cycles of slimes to down him and then see us take 1 or 2 cycles to kill him after the nerf, it makes it seem more like clearing up older content than progression.  It becomes more of a "lets see the content at least and clear up the achievments involved...while we are attempting new content

This early nerf makes me feel like ive been robbed

[Shadowwolf]

I think some aspects of the fights should have been slightly nerfed, but not a blanket one. Same with the 4.1 content. Some small adjustments to some bosses and abilities woeld have been fine. That or leaving things as is but making the next tier of gear a larger step up like wrath and bc were. The diff in gear stats in cata is really tight so it feels a lot like min/maxing and not really a new tier. Instead they dumb it down a lot so much that the mechanics dont mean anything on most fights after the nerfs. It's sad.

I almost feel like it's just easier to wait for the nerfs on stuff instead of wiping for weeks on over tuned encounters cause thats the kind of system they are doing in this exp. They go from insane over tuning to dont need to try without any in between. If they tested this crap on ptr better than a day per encounter and then changing spells and crap around on them at release to keep it "fresh", they'd have a better set of fights that wouldn't need this kind of crap to be done to them for casuals to see them thru successfully.

[Kothnok]

Seems like with such a massive stat nerf you don't need any of the Firelands gear to beat Rag. If this is a taste at "how things will be" in that you have to bust your ass on daily grinds as fast as humanly possible to get the gear in order to finish their normal content before the nerf bat swings and renders all that gear accumulation pointless.... I doubt I will see the fun factor lasting long.  Like Gren said, "after the nerf, it makes it seem more like clearing up older content than progression".  I feel as if I'm being punished for not devoting every waking moment to this game.  Cater to the "hardcore" crowd, and that's all you'll end up with.  GL surviving as a company on just that 1% (if that) of your playerbase.

[Air]

Quite a few AAA games coming out in the next few months like Skyrim, MW3, BF3, Rage, and the new Batman game.  Plus SW:Tor must be making them especially nervous with atleast half a million pre-orders with still no release date announced. 

Blizz killed the underwater raid which was BS, and announced the Death wing raid instead.  And they announced the DW raid at a gaming convention which is something I don't remember Blizz ever doing in the past few years.  It's almost certain there going to announce an expansion at Blizzcon.  There recent actions just scream them being scared as hell about losing even more people.

[Shadowwolf]

I can see killing the underwater raid now and saving it because lets be honest, they are kinda running out of baddies to fight which is why we see so much recycled crap in Cata.