The Firelands Nerfs and Me
On Tuesday (9/20) Blizzard nerfed all bosses in Firelands regular and Heroic by 20-40%, depending on the boss (earlier / easier bosses were nerfed less than later bosses).
Some background about me and my guild before I get to my thoughts on these nerfs:
We’re a fairly casual guild. We raid two nights a week for about 3 hours a night. While I think we all like progressing, it’s not the primary focus of the raids – for example, we have a BM Hunter on the team, which certainly no hardcore progression guild would allow. We didn’t get Tier 11 finished until after the 4.2 nerfs.
Between a rotating group of players and so relearning the fights, and having to spend our first night on farm content (and trash) even if things go smoothly, we’ve had one night of progression on good weeks. On Sunday, before the nerfs, we killed Alysrazor for the first time, bringing us to 5/7 (normal).
On Tuesday, after the nerfs, we killed the first 5 bosses in Firelands in about two hours.
That doesn’t sound like so dramatic a difference – everything but Alys was on farm, and Alys was the most nerfed fight in the instance. But we also had a DPS warrior along who had never seen most of the fights, and were missing one of our regular healers, who was replaced by a relatively ungeared Priest on some fights; others we just 2-healed. I’d say we were at maybe 90% of our regular strength, but still pretty much steamrolled everything.
The Baleroc and Alysrazor kills, in particular, drove home how severe the nerfs are. We beat our best time on Baleroc by almost two minutes. Alsyrazor (which actually has an undocumented nerf, in that the druids cast Fieroblast VERY rarely – they attempted to do so only once on my half of the room the entire fight) became difficult primarily in that it was hard not to run into the tornado you were following. We’d only killed Alys once before, but one-shot her easily.
I was glad we’d killed her before the nerf, because it felt… cheap. Maybe Majordomo Staghelm and Ragnaros will still feel like an accomplishment when we down them, but none of the other bosses do.
I understand why they wanted to nerf the content – they want us going straight into the Deathwing raid when 4.3 hits. (Early December?) But I feel like the nerfs were just far too much. I expect we’ll kill Staghelm within a couple nights of progression, and given the multiple nerfs Ragnaros has been through, I don’t see that taking more than a month (i.e. four nights progression).
I appreciate that we’ll be able to down Ragnaros before the next tier, but I also can’t help feeling that we don’t deserve to – that we’re no longer working for kills, they’re just being given to us.
Update: It didn’t take a couple nights progression to kill Staghelm – it took 3 attempts. With another weaker than usual team, and without Heroism. Blizzard has made every boss but Ragnaros equivalent to the PvP boss – they don’t really count anymore.