Dragon Soul, nerf 2 inc

[zenga]

During the scheduled server maintenance on the week of February 28, the “Power of the Aspects” spell will grow more powerful, reducing the health and damage dealt of all enemies in the Dragon Soul raid by 10%. This spell will grow progressively stronger over time to reduce the difficulty and make the encounters more accessible. The spell will affect both normal and Heroic difficulties, but it will not affect the Raid Finder difficulty.

Don’t need the help of the Dragon Aspects? The spell can be disabled by talking to Lord Afrasastrasz at the beginning of Dragon Soul.

We hope you continue to enjoy Dragon Soul, and that these changes encourage you to attempt a higher difficulty, or just keep pushing to down that next boss.

Posting this as it might concern some boxers who are looking to start raiding while boxing. A 10% nerf makes everything much easier compared to how it was 3 weeks ago.

[Ashley]

So, over time their health will go down. Nice mechanic.

[zenga]

The 5% has been in place for like 3 weeks now. At it's really noticeable. The 10% gonna make even a bigger difference. Hope my team is raid worthy in a week or 3 to get started with DS.

[Shania]

Myself and my guildies are far from pleased about the nerf.
We have been stuck on 3/8 HM for weeks due to not being able to find a decent 3rd healer and 1 dps.
This is our hinder not the difficulty of the mechanics which isnt that hard on Heroic Zon and Hag.

The nerf is a shame regardless if it can be toggled off and on. But its happening and thats how it goes once again.

[zenga]

Myself and my guildies are far from pleased about the nerf.
We have been stuck on 3/8 HM for weeks due to not being able to find a decent 3rd healer and 1 dps.
This is our hinder not the difficulty of the mechanics which isnt that hard on Heroic Zon and Hag.

The nerf is a shame regardless if it can be toggled off and on. But its happening and thats how it goes once again.

You can't really blame blizzard for the fact that your guild can't find a healer and a dps. There have been so many additional gear lockouts by now that most of the guilds are stuck at their limit cq real potential. Most guilds that are 3/8 hc by now will even with best in slot gear not be able to kill warmaster hard, yet alone spine or madness without a nerf. Every guild that was still progressing during the first nerf was probably close to their next kill that they wanted so badly. But that is how it goes. It was like that in icc, in firelands and in ds. The current way of gradually nerfing the hp/damage done is a far better way than adding pew pew to the players like in icc or making one big ass nerf like in firelands.

[Multibocks]

Here we go, casual vs hardcore fight.

[Apatheist]

Here we go, casual vs hardcore fight.

Casual means casual, not bad. There are plenty of casual guilds that do quite well without dumbing down the content to suit bad players.

most of the guilds are stuck at their limit cq real potential.

Seems to me the solution to this should be for players to take the steps necessary to improve (change composition, bench a player that's not carrying their weight, adjust strategy, etc). If you can't kill a boss, you shouldn't be able to kill the boss.

I've seen the difference in attitude post-nerf over many tiers. You spend the rest of the tier grinding gear out of habit and so people don't get bored and stop logging in. Any sense of achievement for a challenging kill or improving as a guild is completely negated.

[zenga]

Seems to me the solution to this should be for players to take the steps necessary to improve (change composition, bench a player that's not carrying their weight, adjust strategy, etc). If you can't kill a boss, you shouldn't be able to kill the boss.

I've seen the difference in attitude post-nerf over many tiers. You spend the rest of the tier grinding gear out of habit and so people don't get bored and stop logging in. Any sense of achievement for a challenging kill or improving as a guild is completely negated.

There are a few reasons why I disagree:
- Certain fights on heroic mode in DS benefit from a very specific setup (i.e. having a dk tank on certain bosses is a huge win over a warrior e.g.), and then there is spine heroic. Sping hc got extra nerfed apart from the zone wide nerf, prior to that only a few 100 guild met the dps requirements to beat this encounter (on 25m hc it was even more nuts), and it basically mean that the more rogues & mages you could stack, the better your odds were. This had nothing to do with skill, it was a stupid fight. We had to bench our legendary boomkin and our gladiator hunter because their class just couldn't deliver the required burst (each 1,5 minute you had an 18s nuke phase that required incredibly dps, this 6x during the fight). Even with full bis gear that wouldn't be possible. A ret paladin could for example only do the required dps every 2nd nuke phase cause of his wings cd, which was not enough for the fight. Point being, if you are unlucky to not have a particular class in your roster, a slight nerf can help you overcome this when you are not a top notch player.
- I can't imagine how a player can actually get better from farming the same 2-4 bosses for months, while the remaining bosses are still a wall. Giving to less skilled/less experienced players the chance to discover every boss and all different mechanics every tier will result in much better players overall. Looking back at ICC, the fights were people learn the most in terms of raid awareness, how to deal with debuffs and positioning are probably putricide hc & sindragosa hc. Players that - without the nerf - would never see those bosses, would 've missed out on plenty of the mechanics and would lack experience for the next expansion. In fact I know quite a few players who were in a bad guild in ICC and who started mid WotLK with the game, but who did great in T11, just because they had experienced from ICC thanks to the nerf. Without a nerf, it would 've taken them at least till firelands before they would 've the same experience (not to mention a huge drop out from farming same few bosses for months).

About it not being an achievement to kill it after a nerf: guilds who are no match whatsoever for e.g. Warmaster HC (as in totally getting raped by him) are not going to kill this boss out of the blue thanks to a 5% nerf. What might happen is that they will get further in the fight, and actually have a chance at learning it rather than getting wiping at 80% all the time.

[Apatheist]

@ Apatheis:
Does your sense of achievement is in some way lessened because others take advantage of the debuff?

Of course it does. Not the debuff specifically, since progression was mostly done by the time this was implemented, but game changes that allow easier access to top tier content effects progression. When you're recruiting and managing a progression guild on your server, your position relevant to other raiding guilds has a big impact on the quality of players you attract. Nerfing content, access easymode 10man "hardmodes" and free gear all dumb down the game to the point where high end content feels like a grind rather than a challenge.

People seem to forget that hardmodes are supposed to be hard. If you're in a guild that isn't up to the harder heroic fights, that's what normal modes and LFR are for.

.

Those are matters of game balance. If there's a fight that's too class dependent, I have no issue with minor adjustments and class balance. My issue is with sweeping changes that allow guilds that would otherwise not be able to complete certain content to steamroll through it the day after the patch (exactly what happened to my guild). We were improving, getting further and further in the fight we've been working on for a month or so. We had some of our best attempts the week before the patch. After the patch, we strolled through it and it was really disappointing to have something we put so much effort into dumbed down so much.

I agree, we're 4 months into the patch, NOTHING you might do is impressive, let lesser mortals get their jollies.

I'm one of those "lesser mortals". I just like to feel like if we kill a boss, it's because we've put in the time and effort to beat it. Not because Blizzard has spoon fed us.

This discussion reminds me of a George Carlin's bits, "Child worship".

[zenga]

We were improving, getting further and further in the fight we've been working on for a month or so. We had some of our best attempts the week before the patch. After the patch, we strolled through it and it was really disappointing to have something we put so much effort into dumbed down so much.
...
I'm one of those "lesser mortals". I just like to feel like if we kill a boss, it's because we've put in the time and effort to beat it. Not because Blizzard has spoon fed us.

Really, just ...

Turn off the debuff

You are contradicting yourself: either you want to satisfy your own progress road and you don't give a shit about ranks, or you follow the blizzard road and then everyone will know that you killed boss x after a nerf. If the latter you'll have to admit at one point that you weren't good enough to keep up with it. We had a 5% wipe on the last tendon on spine heroic prior to the nerf (that's like nothing, a pally bubble and the dots would 've finished it off), roughly 200 guilds in the world had killed him at that point. We were unable to reproduce such a good attempt that lockout, and in the next one it got nerfed. While we cursed a lot about that wipe, we have to admit in the end that we weren't good enough to kill it prior to the nerf. It would've been a major accomplishment for our guild, but we follow the blizzard road so we failed and killed it later with the nerfs (and extra gear). It's that simple: blizzard designs the encounters and you have x amount of time to kill them, if you fail to do so a nerf kicks in. And the only ones to be blamed for that is yourself.

And if you don't follow the blizzard road you have the option to turn off the nerf, but then you cheat a bit as well as you have more gear to kill it than you should have had (remember paragon killing LK hc in ICC without the buff, but they were in BiS gear at that point, so - while still very hard - it didn't really tell anything).