As the fallout from the nerfs trickles through the blogosphere, and I read about how trivial the content is now and how terrible it is that the nerf bat came so quickly, I am going to weigh in here on the side of support for Blizzard. These nerfs are good for my guild, and I think that my guild is fairly average in the wide spectrum of WoW guilds that raid. If its good for my guild, it must also be good for a lot of other guilds.
We’ve stalled in T12. It sounds like I’m making excuses, but these fights play to our weaknesses. My guild has always had trouble with highly technical fights, going back to Thaddius and Heigen in Naxxramas, Rotface in ICC, and the Double Dragons in BoT. In past raids, for every technical “stand here then here then move here” kind of fight, there were also some fights that just measured throughput or skill at using your class abilities. We excelled at some and struggled with others. Firelands mostly seems to have “dance” fights with lots of target switching and little room for error. Its not our strong suit.
As a result we’re stalled at 3/7 in there. Some weeks we only get Shannox and are blocked by Beth’tilac and Rhyolith.
We’ve stalled in previous raid tiers as well. However, Firelands feels… different. In the past when we would stall, there was the feeling that if we all just got one more gear upgrade, or maybe just got one good break to fall our way, then we’d find success. That expectation of success being just out of reach would keep us coming back and back and back. For example, we wiped on the Lich King over 60 times, and it never got old or boring.
Firelands hasn’t given that feeling. Wipes on Rhyolith don’t usually feel like we’re teetering on the cusp of success. It doesn’t feel like one more upgrade or one good break would make the difference. We just get annoyed at the fight mechanics. Its much like Heigan back in the Naxx days, when people would wipe doing the dance, and no amount of gear could fix that. So it is with the current content. It has become frustrating.
For guilds like mine, this nerf will bring a fresh feeling to the raid. Perhaps you don’t insta-die from every misstep. Perhaps if one dps misses his spot and is killed, the raid can still pull out the victory.
Does that make it easy-mode? Perhaps. Does it diminish our accomplishments? In some eyes, certainly. However, given the choice between killing the nerfed bosses, or gradually having our raid team lose interest due to frustration, I’ll take the nerfs.
———————————————————————————————
Edit: I will admit that I am puzzled as to why Blizzard doesn’t implement a more gradual nerf the way they did in ICC.
