Quote Originally Posted by Apatheist View Post
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.