In your Firelands, Nerfin' your Bosses

[Bovinity]

Sure, the kills have ZOMG DOUBLED but 99.05% of guilds still have a very challenging fight ahead of them, right?

No, because most won't even bother trying.

Also, I still don't really see what you're even arguing here. Once everything is easy, more people will kill it? It still isn't going to get non-raiders turning into serious raiders, other than getting them hopping into Firelands for some free loot for now.

[woodyman]

I think everyone should just except the fact that everyone has a point here.
There is still a challenge for 99% of raiding guilds, BUT i agree that the curve has probably increased too fast (maybe a buff like icc would have stopped this?)

One thing i would say that for more casual guilds like myself (2 days a week NM) this nerf has given us a chance to help the non raiders in our guild come into our team and learn how to raid and how to work as a team.

so i think your wrong when you say it wont turn non raiders into raiders...sure they may not become hardcore but i would say that they could learn to be competant normal mode raiders.

[feralminded]

My bad ... you're right, the dungeon is fine and the nerfs are exactly the right thing to do because trivializing content is good for the general populace and game as a whole. All of the raiders love it! :-/

Petulance/Snark aside ... again regard the slope of the curves on wow progress. More than 2x increase across the board ... meaning everything just got half as difficult. That's not a nerf, that's a demolition ... and that's no anecdote.

[Bovinity]

so i think your wrong when you say it wont turn non raiders into raiders...sure they may not become hardcore but i would say that they could learn to be competant normal mode raiders.

I guess when I hear people insisting that nerfing Firelands Heroic modes into the ground will make non-raiders turn into hardcore or at least casual raiders...I look back at basically all of WotLK. Naxxramas? ToC? ICC 30%?

If the same logic didn't turn these non-raiders into raiders back then, why is it going to now? Sure, making it piss-poor easy will entice people to sneak in and snag some free purples while the gettin' is good, but that's about it. Maybe that's good enough for Blizzard, just let people come in and steamroll some bosses, I dunno.

[woodyman]

Actually i agree there about hard modes Nerfing them really was a bad idea and isnt going to turn non raiders into raiders, so when u put it in that context your right

[Aggathon]

It did get non-raiders to raid in ICC though, tons of servers had tons of PuGs. Well... the only real HM they did was gunship, but lots of normal mode PuGs even on really bad servers. It got a lot of people interested, but the overall difficulty of cata and firelands normals (pre-nerfs) were way too hard for this type of PuG.

I will grant that HMs probably shouldn't have been nerfed, or at least not by as much as they were. But being a fairly new 25 man guild that doesn't quite have an established raid roster and is still working out some kinks in the system, the 25 man HMs are still somewhat of a challenge (well alysrazor and beth at least, shannox is even more lulz and we 1 shot Rhyolith). Alys and beth have given us some problems, but we're refining the strategy and I'm sure they'll both be dead in short order. Definitely way faster than we would have before the nerfs, that's for damn sure. Most of the people I've talked to that have said the HMs are all lulz now are people who either were already progressing on them or already were killing them before the nerfs.

H: Baleroc (25): 344 (19.10%)

Last week it was 330, so only 14 more guilds have killed it.

[Bovinity]

It did get non-raiders to raid in ICC though, tons of servers had tons of PuGs. Well... the only real HM they did was gunship, but lots of normal mode PuGs even on really bad servers. It got a lot of people interested, but the overall difficulty of cata and firelands normals (pre-nerfs) were way too hard for this type of PuG.

That was my point. Sure, once things are nerfed into the dirt, people will trickle in for the free purples for a while, but once a new tier comes out and things are tough again for a while they just go back to doing what they were doing before.

[Aggathon]

Oh, I'll grant that, but that's also why I'm actually looking forward to LFR.

[feralminded]

H: Baleroc (25): 344 (19.10%)

Last week it was 330, so only 14 more guilds have killed it.

Um ... bad stat. The total kills went from ~2,200 to ~5,000 last week. You're just looking at 25 man guilds.

Total kills up to 9/19: 2,263.
Total kills up to 9/26: 4,908.

This is no anecdote, this is a slaughter.

[Reev]

Um ... bad start. The total kills went from ~2,200 to ~5,000 last week. You're just looking at 25 man guilds.

You don't think it's significant that only 14 more 25 man kills downed H Baleroc after the nerfs?

[Aggathon]

You don't think it's significant that only 14 more 25 man kills downed H Baleroc after the nerfs?

^

I'm talking specifically 25 man guilds in the US. If you want percentages...

That percentage there means there's 1801 US 25 man guilds. 14 guilds = 0.7% increase in kills in US 25 man HMs.

[Bovinity]

Oh, I'll grant that, but that's also why I'm actually looking forward to LFR.

Yah, the nice thing about LFR is that MAYBE it'll be a permanent place for the, "Does content when it's severely nerfed but isn't really a raider." demographic and Blizzard will leave heroic modes alone.

[feralminded]

You don't think it's significant that only 14 more 25 man kills downed H Baleroc after the nerfs?

I'm also fairly certain that's just US guilds. Almost 1000 worldwide 25 mans have a heroic baleroc kill at this moment, about 500 of which got theirs in the last week. Honestly I cannot verify his numbers here ... wow progress disagrees with him entirely.

[feralminded]

343 US 25 man guilds have a baleroc kill today. 160 had one on september 20th. The only explanation I can see is that Aggathon is talking about new kills *this* week, as in since 9/27. I've been scoping my comments since the nerf on the 20th, not since yesterday.

[Aggathon]

Ya, I don't really have a problem with that either. Like, 3 months in and only 160 guilds had the second to last boss down in a 7 boss instance?

[feralminded]

Ya, I don't really have a problem with that either. Like, 3 months in and only 160 guilds had the second to last boss down in a 7 boss instance?

160 US 25 man guilds. Over 2000 world anything guilds. You keep ignoring that your positions is artificially scoped ... at least compared to the terms everyone else is using in this thread. It's important because it makes your position sound stronger than it is. Before the nerf ~7% of all raiding guilds had down the 2nd hardest boss on heroic. Without the nerfs that number may have risen to ~10% by the end of the tier ... maybe even higher. That would put it significantly higher than the percentage who got down the 2nd hardest boss last tier or in ICC (even with it's buff). (for the record HC-Sindragosa was ~9.5% killed, HC: Al'Akir was ~3% killed and we have 7 months to do it verus the 3 months here).

By all accounts pre-nerf this tier was already easier than T11 ... most likely due to the quantity of the bosses or maybe it was just easier.

[Aggathon]

So then go by percentages. World wide is a LOT of guilds, and only 14.1% of guilds 10s or 25s throughout the entire world have killed H-Baleroc 10. I'm saying you know, in the US ONLY that many. There's also little debate that 10s (rag excluded) are easier than 25s, perhaps maybe nerfed at a different rate, but you can also look at the curves (that blizzard looked at) and could tell they were plateauing, the "worse" guilds were getting stuck.

Anyways, my overall thesis is still: Normal mode nerfs were okay, I see the "plateau justification" that blizzard gave for nerfing HMs too, maybe it was nerfed a little much, I can grant that, but i don't really have a problem with people progressing after nerfs 3 months in to the content.

[feralminded]

If I may paraphrase ... essentially you are asking the question: "Should more guilds see the heroic content?".

I think it's a good question worthy of its own debate. To be clear I'm not attempting to respond to that question at all ... I was simply responding to earlier questions and stating that: This tier, pre-nerf, a larger percentage of active guilds saw more of the heroic content faster than ever before in any tier with heroic content. Post nerf we will no doubt have on our hands a MASSIVE increase, by percentage, of people completing heroic encounters. We already did pre-nerf.

Whether that's a bad or good thing is really the question you posited. I don't have a good answer right now

[Aggathon]

Well and that's where plateauing and staggered nerfing come in to play. There are guilds working on HMs that just can't get past a certain point, whether that's Rhyolith or Baleroc or Rag, there's various plateaus of people that just end up bashing their heads against the wall. I did not know that more guilds saw more heroic content way faster than T11. I think to answer that a lot of it comes down to balance between 10s and 25s, when you lump everyone in, 10s was WAY easier than T11 10 man content overall, but 25s felt about the same, maybe even slightly harder. At least from my perspective.

I mean, does it matter WHERE the plateau is and how many people got to those kills before the plateaus occurred? Or just that a plateauing effect happened? I'm also willing to bet that things will start to plateau again, and the big leap was guilds that were at the wall scratching and clawing at it (be it Baleroc or Rhyo or whatever) and already had strats down, and when you nerf by 15% and you have all the strategies down and all you have to do is clean it up and beat the enrage timer or whatever, then a 15% nerf makes it seem really easy after banging your head against the wall pre-nerf.

[Kerchunk]

I still don't really see what you're even arguing here.

At the moment of your quoting, I'm arguing that to claim "the challenge is all gone! every fight is easy mode!" while a full 99%+ of the guilds haven't completed the tier is either disingenuous or ridiculous hyperbole. Probably a bit of both.

Your own assertion that most of the remaining guilds "won't even bother trying" seems to support my position, unless I misunderstand you.

Saying "15% is a bit much" is one thing (and something you could easily get me to agree on). Saying "We don't have anywhere to test our skills anymore!!!" is just goofy and unhelpful to any reasonable discussion.

It still isn't going to get non-raiders turning into serious raiders

The number of active raiding guilds has increased so much this week that 1400 new Shannox NM kills actually represented a DROP in the total % of guilds with a successful kill. Clearly somewhere some non-raiders are being turned into raiders. Whether they're "serious" or not, I don't know; it's never clear ot me what the criteria are when making arbitrary distinctions like that.

Is some of the increase due to people just "sneaking in for free purps?" Yah, probably. Though, there again it seems an arbitrary distinction with a lot of grey area. At what point does a guild graduate from "just getting free purps" to "casually raiding" to being "serious raiders"? These are all just lines in the sand. At the end of the day, people who weren't killing stuff before are now, that's all we can tell from the numbers and that's what Blizzard stated they wanted to accomplish by nerfing the content.

My bad ... you're right, the dungeon is fine and the nerfs are exactly the right thing to do because trivializing content is good for the general populace and game as a whole.

I'm not arguing that trivializing content is a good thing.

I'm arguing that it hasn't been trivialized. An increase from 0.48% to 0.95% does not, to me, indicate a wholesale trivialization of the content on the scale that your continued hyperbole seems to indicate.

If you feed a starving child and he gains a half pound, do you dance around the room pointing at him and yelling "Fatty! Fatty!"? 'cause that's what your response feels like to me.

Post nerf we will no doubt have on our hands a MASSIVE increase, by percentage, of people completing heroic encounters.

Going from 0 to 1 is a MASSIVE INCREASE BY PERCENTAGE. When you slice it like that it's easy to argue things are out of control.

340 guilds out of 35 THOUSAND have completed the current tier of content. I'm sorry there's just no amount of wordplay you can pull to make that seem like an alarmingly high number.