First Reactions to the Nerfbat

Well, for better or for worse, we repeated our Heroic Shannox kill (3rd kill) without needing Jagged Tear to drop off our Shannox tank at ALL, ending the encounter with 15 stacks on him.

We downed Heroic Rhyolith for the first time, after 46 total attempts, 40 of which were pre-nerf. (That brings us to 2/7 HM, btw.)

And then we flipped it to normal to take out Alysrazor and Baleroc.

Since we had someone working on the charged focus for Alysrazor, we needed two “full powers” from her, so that’s two full cycles.

We had to call “DPS OFF!” several times.

The Initiates who cast Fieroblast? They apparently now cast Fieroblast after every third Brushfire. In fact, it took us several initiates before we realized they even still CAST Fieroblast.

Tornadoes are very slow, now. You can keep ahead of one and actually run into the next one with just a single feather.

Healers were healing Gushing Wound on the tanks because there was basically nothing else to do. I wonder what four healers for that next week would be like.

Baleroc melted. You can COMPLETELY screw up the healing order for the shards and people will probably still live.

I think we’ll be pulling Heroic Beth’tilac and Heroic Majordomo Thursday/Sunday, so we’ll see what they’re like. Those are new (to us) heroic fights, but it’s clear that the normal modes are just so completely ridiculous now, at least for a group that’s done three full clears and probably a few 6/7 weeks.

Really, it’s kind of sad.

Having said that, the raid group was in fine form on Tuesday night. Lots of laughing, lots of joking… for some reason, at one point, people were openly pondering the gestation period for a Smurf.

So we had a “fun” raid night with good spirits and good moods, for the most part, but it feels weird. The Rhyolith kill doesn’t feel hard-fought. The hardest part on Alysrazor was NOT killing her faster.

Normally, for me, the best part of any night is any progression on a boss.

Tonight, it was that I got the Eye of Purification.

Ah, well. We’ll see what the next few months hold for us, eh?

Oh, and don’t forget to listen to this week’s episode of Blessing of Frost! We post a new one just about every Tuesday, so be sure to keep listening. Next week, we’ll reflect on the Firelands nerfs and talk about some of the community’s reactions and you’ll doubtlessly hear me bleeping myself again. ;)

12 Replies to “First Reactions to the Nerfbat”

  1. Turns out I was wrong. That’s a first… (joking!).

    I agree with you that I was sad at the regular encounters. We did normal Beth and she was below 50% before even coming down from her web! :( Moved on to heroic Shannox and just like you never bothered dropping the jagged tear. The fight was over before I knew what happened. So we did heroic Lord Stompy Pants which we’ve never done before and killed him. Spent an hour on heroic Alysrazor (also never done her) and nearly killed her. It made me sad. I fear we’ll be 5/7 by the end of the week and rather than being proud of our accomplishment I feel a bit cheap by it. I’m even embarrassed to post the update on our recruitment thread in the realm forums.

    Still – killing things is always nice. I hope 4.3 is relatively soon. I fear playing WoW on god mode will get boring very, very fast.

  2. Serrath – You’re not the only one who thought it would be gradual. Sadly, knowing I was right is not much consolation. :/

    I still don’t think 4.3 is coming up anytime soon, but it would certainly be nice.

    Borsk – The staff questline? The charged focus from Alysrazor.

    “Each time a Voracious Hatchling spawns from an egg, it will leave behind a Pyreshell Fragment. Loot three of these and use them to obtain a Dull Pyreshell Focus. Then, place this new item under Alysrazor during either Stage Three or Stage Four, and it will become a Charged Pyreshell Focus when the boss reaches 100 energy. Afterwards, simply loot it from the ground.” — Icy Veins

    So you need 3 birds to spawn (2 per ground phase) and then you need Alysrazor to hit 100 energy after the second ground phase.

    If we had wanted to kill her quick, she would have been dead easily before she reached 100 energy the first time. We initially just started slowly and then called DPS off for basically the majority of the second cycle. Then we started DPS up again and had to stop because she was going to die between the time she was grounded and hit 100 energy, and we needed her to hit 100 energy for someone’s staff quest, so it was DPS off again.

    Nutty.

  3. For guilds who were doing Heroic Shannox and progressing/killing Rhyolith and/or Beth, the nerfs put the first 4 Heroic bosses on a platter. Mechanics do still matter, of course, but Heroic Alys feels like Normal from a month ago and Rhyolith & Beth are more forgiving in their final phases.

    Everything I’ve seen regarding Staghelm points to him being a bit of a pushover for a coordinated/experienced raid. After a very ugly kill on Normal last week (4 scorpions, oh so ‘fun’) I don’t think he’ll pose a big problem.

    With a handful of pulls last night, Heroic Baleroc looks like he’ll be the real 6th boss for a lot of guilds.

  4. Interesting post – thanks. (As you already know we’ve featured it on the Pot).

    I’ll be interested to hear how Ragnaros (regular and HC) is affected by these nerfs. At a much more casual level, when the T11 raids were nerfed, my guild facerolled everything in BWD except Nefarian, but we still found he presented a non-trivial challenge. I wonder if the same will be true of FL?

  5. We cleared 6/7 on normal last night.
    Shannox didn’t feel too much different, apart from the dogs were feeble; same on Beth, the Drones almost fell over by themselves, but she didn’t feel that much worse.
    Alysrazor; as you said the Initiates were very easy to finish off, and we got her down in 2 rounds. At least it made a boring fight so much quicker.
    Rhyolith, I didn’t notice that much difference from healing pov, maybe people were slacking.
    Baleroc, he was a joke, really. We built up stacks on the first crystal, then didn’t bother getting any more after that. We one-tanked him with our Warrior rather than our DK, and we got the achievement, too.
    Staghelm, wow, this seemed by far the most nerfed of the lot. We had an alt tanking him last week, and the cats kept killing him. This week the cats went down almost as soon as they spawned. We didn’t even get to Burning Orbs, Staghelm was already dead by then.
    So, next week, Ragnaros…

  6. Boy am I not looking foreward to raiding tonight. My guild has been pretty much a carbon copy of for firelands progression (except ours is 10m). Almost had H Rhyolith last week but we were missing a normal raider and our stand-in just wasn’t putting out the dps we needed. That’s so disapointing, I really we would’ve had with our normal group, now it looks like it’ll be a breeze with all the nerfs.

    I really hope ragnaros has not changed much. We spent a LOT of time learning him, and I love that fight so much that I really don’t want it to be a complete joke now.

  7. Posting again after our whole raid week.

    I’ll mostly reiterate that any guild clearing Normal smoothly should really take cracks at 4/7 or 5/7 Heroic. I’m not just saying this from a “Progress! Progress! Progress!” point of view. The Heroic versions of the first four fights are more interesting and provide a lot of nice upgrades.

  8. Rag is a complete joke on normal. (You can let the adds hit the hammer and not die. Meteors aren’t instant death if they hit you.)

    Some of the fights need to be retuned a bit and bump up the difficulty just a notch. At least on Domo and any other boss.

    As for Rag HC, he had already been hit by the 15% health nerf before and now he was hit with the 15% damage reduction. The adds were hit with the health nerf this time around. Guilds who were already pushing phase 3 and phase 4 have easily downed him. Guilds who have just started working on this will still find it challenging enough, but the challenge may seem to come the people within the raid.

    (6/7HM Pre-Nerf)

  9. Borsk – We do all the staff stuff during our 9 hours a week because our off-nights are pretty busy with alt raids, rated BGs and the like, plus real life stuff, so yeah, it was hilarious to have to hold off on DPS and such for Alysrazor. Sad, though.

    Joe Ego – I completely agree that the first four (Shannox, Beth’tilac, Rhyolith and Alysrazor) are easily accessible to a coordinated raiding team, now. Absolutely. I’ve heard similar things about Majordomo, but I’m unsure as to the veracity since we’ve wanted to get Alysrazor down before pulling him and we’re probably going to cancel this Sunday’s raid due to Thanksgiving (in Canada, Columbus Day in the US) so it might have to wait a bit longer!

    Hugh – Regular Ragnaros is ridiculous. We’ve had at least two kills in Apotheosis that we should not, in any way, have gotten. But we did. If you even came close on the fight pre-nerf, you’ve got it now, no question. And if you’d defeated him pre-nerf, you’d be amazed at all the mistakes you can make and get away with.

    I’m glad I saw the original normal-mode Ragnaros and beat that.

    AliPally – How’s Rag coming along? I agree on the Domo nerfs, pretty insane nerfs to the cats. :/

    Elladrion – How’s Rag on 10m? I hope some kind of challenge remains, but I kind of doubt any version of normal Rag is “hard”. :(

    Joe Ego – I don’t think I’d say that Heroic Rhyolith is more interesting, nor is Shannox. If anything, Shannox is more interesting to me when dealing with dog health pools rather than dealing with Jagged Tear stacks that will not come off. >.> ;) But I agree overall. Not sure where Apotheosis will be after Thursday the 6th, but we should be solidly 5/7 next reset for sure.

    Maker – haha, isn’t that always the challenge, though? The people within the raid? ;)

    Really nice to have your opinion, given your pre-nerf progress. Thanks for your comment. :)

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