Massive Firelands Nerfs Starting Next Week

[PsiVen]

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.

I am absolutely livid about these nerfs as they mean that hundreds of guilds like mine sitting 6/7H will be bored to tits until 4.3 and most will be robbed of the chance for even a post-first-nerf Rag kill.

If you are as outraged as I am by this announcement, I urge you to make your voice heard before we head straight back into WotLK.

[rodos]

As a pretty light-core raider (6/7 normal, 2 nights per week), I think these nerfs are coming far too soon. I feel like our team can deal with normal Rag on his current difficulty level given a little more practice (Sons of Flame still kill us far too often). Now I feel like we have to kill him this week or we failed the tier.

What's unclear from the blue post what kind of timescale they're looking at -- just that they're starting next week. If they go through the normals in order, nerfing one encounter every week, then the same on hard modes (i.e. 14 more weeks of one-nerf HRag), then I can probably get behind that as a way of having people catch up on gear before 4.3. We re-formed our raid team just before 4.2, and went into Firelands with only 1 4-piece set in the raid, and a lot of players in the mid 350's gear-wise. Progressive nerfs adding a few puggable bosses each month would have helped us there.

If they go with across-the-board nerfs there's a good chance guild runs could devolve into grindy Legendary-farming exercises for the next few months.

I'm interested to speculate on what to make of the timing. Are the nerfs so soon because:
* 4.3 is coming sooner than we think. (Mogging, new Fair, dungeons, raid seems like a lot to rush)
* Blizzard really want to tune the 4.3 raids around a higher ilevel (to counter Deathwing Radiance, mastery changes, etc.)
* Blizz don't want raiders to feel like they have to farm the 4.3 5-mans for drops.

[Teranoid]

Welcome to World of Warcraft 2.0 where the only challenge to shiny purple gear is making sure you typed your password correctly on the login screen.

[Passionario]

I guess they finally looked at the popularity (or, rather, lack thereof) of post-4.2 T11 instances, compared it to post-nerf Ulduar and ICC, and reasonably concluded that the old strategy of nerfing content while it's still relevant is clearly superior to the new model of leaving it alone until it becomes obsolete.

[Sagara]

I guess they finally looked at the popularity (or, rather, lack thereof) of post-4.2 T11 instances, compared it to post-nerf Ulduar and ICC, and reasonably concluded that the old strategy of nerfing content while it's still relevant is clearly superior to the new model of leaving it alone until it becomes obsolete.

/sarcasm
Blizzard? Using factual data with the purpose of improving enjoyment? Preposterous! Besides, that's not even a good reason because rant rant rant.

/sarcasmoff

[rodos]

Actually Teranoid, the challenge to shiny purple gear, if you define "shiny" as raid drops, is getting a group together.

Rohan has been making some good points over at Blessing of Kings about how he thinks Blizzard are misunderstanding their audience. Making raid content easier to try and lure more casual players into raids is a failure. It's the general format, lockout system, and lack of automatic group-creator that keeps out the player who thinks "Hey, I have an hour or 2 spare, why not raid?" (the true casual).

Also, a commenter there posts "Only 17.9% of the NA/EU playerbase have killed nerfed Magmaw nine months into this expansion." Conclusion: Massive nerfs to the current tier are just going to annoy people who are genuinely trying to beat the content, and won't really open it up to more players.

Passionario: I think the success of (nerfed) ICC was largely attributable to the dual lockouts, and the lack of an Emblem of Frost cap.

[Worldie]

My only thought about this was "Too soon".

[Treck]

Making raid content easier to try and lure more casual players into raids is a failure. It's the general format, lockout system, and lack of automatic group-creator that keeps out the player who thinks "Hey, I have an hour or 2 spare, why not raid?" (the true casual).

Also, a commenter there posts "Only 17.9% of the NA/EU playerbase have killed nerfed Magmaw nine months into this expansion." Conclusion: Massive nerfs to the current tier are just going to annoy people who are genuinely trying to beat the content, and won't really open it up to more players.

Passionario: I think the success of (nerfed) ICC was largely attributable to the dual lockouts, and the lack of an Emblem of Frost cap.

You bring up some good points.
A shared lockout system is NOT "good" for the casual raider.
And the main reason for this is that honestly, it limits the ammount of time you can spend in the game.
IF the first 4 bosses are "easy", you will end up doing them twice.
If they share lockout, you will only be able to do them once.
Also a big point in this is that the casual raider will end up pugging a lot, thus a raid with a fail pug, means you might not be able to raid anymore at all that week.

The second point you bring up is even after content is nerfed, people still dont go in there and kill it.
One of the main reasons for this i think is that people honestly get scared.
When the raid comes, "hardcore" raiders walk around in their epics saying "OMG this was so hard to get!", the casual raider isnt always going to be the one who keeps up with every nerf they ever implement, and 5months later, they might still think stuff is "hard" to get, even after massive nerfs.
And some encounters do get "nerfed" without actually beeing a lot easier, so its hard for them to know if its been nerfed enough so they can give it a shot, or not.

3rd point about the emblem cap, also holds true.
If theres no reason to get more valor, why raid?
You should NOT be able to get as much valorpoints per week if your not raiding, as someone who does raid.
Since you simply DONT need raid gear if your not going to be raiding!
IF you would need to do raids to get more valor points, people would atleast give it a go.
And ICC also had the buff, that was casual friendly.
NOT only in the sense that it made stuff easier, but mainly cuz they would go in there, without much success, just killing a few bosses, thinking "well, the next buff comes in 2 weeks, lets give it a shot then".
Currently noone has any idea if/when things will be getting easier, and when its worth trying out again, and if theres no nerfs on the horison, then why continue playing at all?
This goes for the new 7dungeons/week system as apposed to the once a day system aswell.
Sure its nice not having to drag your ass online each day to assure you get capped, BUT that is the main reason people play the game, to actually PLAY it, not to do a lot one day then not log in the rest of the week, so people quit.
Personally, i really do like blizzards current game, it makes me "have" to do less, especially dual lockouts, that would make us have to progress even more.
But even if its "great" for me, its the casuals who are the majority anyway.

With the new raidfinder, a few of these things are supposedly beeing changed for the "better".
Raid locks are suppose to clear when you sign up for the raidfinder, so you can go in and raid whenever you want (more or less), you can go in and raid when you can, and not when a group of people you kinda know can raid.
Also, theres a lot of speculation about an "easymode" beeing introduced with the raidfinder (ICC kinda did have 3 difficulty levels, 10 normal, 10hc/20norm and 25hc, they were to some extent similar to easymore, normalmode, heroicmode, and blizzard can make it work in the future if they want to)
Easy content for the very casual players who just wanna see some of the raiding.
They also KNOW its easy, and wont be scared of it half a year.

[RedAces]

A massive 20% nerf to everything (including heroics) is faaaar far far far far too soon, I don't care if the nerf them with the release of 4.3 (like nerfing T11 with the release of T12). But nerfing them (so hard!) before 4.3 is just a plain failure...

[Iiro]

I really hope they listen to the playerbase on this one. I don't know anyone, casual or hardcore, who thinks this is a good idea until 4.3 is out. I'm not generally the "sky is falling" type, but this would do it for me.

[Fetzie]

a 20% nerf would reduce the health of at least half of the heroic bosses to less than their current normal counterparts. Many of the non-heroic T12 bosses would have less hp than T11 normal mods had. While I do not know the extent of the nerfs, I feel this is totally overkill.

[Invisusira]

http://www.modenstudios.com/RagOnFirelandsNerfs.mp3

[KysenMurrin]

So what's the ideal duration of a raid tier before nerfs or new content?

[Lieris]

Our group 1 (they have killed heroic Ragnaros) like the idea of these nerfs because they've already got the prestige of the pre-nerf kill a few weeks ago and it means they can now gear up their alts really fast. I imagine most other top 50 guilds are like this.

At the other extreme, those who just want to PUG a raid every now and then will be happy too.

And that's the problem, these extreme nerfs and the shunting people from tier to tier just caters to these two extreme sets of players with everyone else caught in the middle who just want to progress at their own pace on decently tuned content feeling really put off.

[Volitaire]

I am seriously not happy about these nerfs. They are way to early. I am 7/7 and working on heroic content and am exceptionally happy with our progress. My second guild I run with is only 3/7 but they simply should be better than what they are but the raid team has some pretty major commitment issues and focus issues. I am also entirely against the idea of nerfing the heroic encounters. At a bare minimimum those need to be left untouched for those that still need too make progression before 4.3 comes out the opportunity. We didn't nerf T11 heroics so why gets T12 heroics nerfed.