Poster: Overen at 1/5/2006 9:25:12 AM PST
Subject: Blue: Why did you massively nerf BWL |
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Seriously, why?
Blackwing Lair wasn't really /that/ difficult to begin with, compared to many of the zones found in EQ, at least. Most fights, except for Vael, normally ended without anyone even dying once you learned how the encounter worked. It was challanging at first, however, to learn new tactics and work hard to beat the encounter; with the way several of these are laid out now, there's no learning curve, in fact, there's little challange at all to much of it.
Here's what I'm guessing was changed:
1) Razorgore - The adds seem to "max out" at a much lower number than before making them far easier to kite and (I'm guessing) ridiculously easy to just kill since you really aren't ever in danger of being overwhelmed anymore. Most of the difficult of this encounter was based around the fact that regardless of what you did you often times got overwhelmed towards the end. That's not a danger now. Razorgore's a snoozefest, in fact.
2) Vael - Wow. You guys majorly nerfed him. I don't know whether it was a massive AC nerf or a massive HP nerf but he died literally 45 seconds faster than we've ever killed him last night. Vael was always the stumbling block for most guilds trying to break into BWL and was the one truly challanging encounter in the zone. You've fixed the challange though, for sure. Any guild with 5-6 rogues, regardless of how they're geared, should easily be able to kill him in three minutes now.
3) Broodlord - Barely MS's. Barely kicks. He was pretty simplistic as it was but now he doesn't deaggro nearly as badly (and when he does it seems pretty easy to recover from it whereas before it was a wipe). He wasn't MS'ing the tank nearly as often and he seemed to blastwave with half the frequency (I was able to stay in twice as long as I normally do before hiding from BW). Geddon and Shazzrah are more difficult than Broodlord now.
4) Firemaw - Didn't seem to be nerfed.
5) Ebonroc - He was barely healing from Shadow of Ebonroc, maybe 25% of what he used to heal. He was already incredibly simple, why did he need to be nerfed?
6) Flamegor - Didn't seem to be nerfed.
7) Warlock/Goblin packs - The goblins, warlocks and spellbinders do far less damage than they used to. These used to be hard pulls, but not anymore. One of the most difficult parts was breaking the warlocks away from each other so that rogues didn't instagib. Not so anymore, who cares where you tank them now when a priest casting group heals can easily keep the entire group up. Boring.
So why was it done?
To me it looks like you're saying "Let's let the weaker guilds get into BWL now that the stronger guilds have AQ to play around in." That's a slap in the face, however. Some of us have worked hard for months to learn the encounters and figure out exactly what had to be done to win. You've just given us all a slap in the face by dropping it so drastically in difficulty because of the inclusion of the new patch. This is becoming a pattern, and not a very smart one (remember all the nerfs to MC when BWL came out)?
Why is it that myself and others in many of the top tier guilds are expected to work hard to get gear that's almost given away to others a couple months later? What is the incentive to continue playing/working at this game when it's going to be continually dumbed down so that even the worst player can have access to the best gear?
Is this trend going to continue?[ post edited by Overen ]
| | | http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?fn=wow-dungeons&t=295729&p=#post295729 | | | Poster: Tigole at 1/6/2006 8:11:00 AM PST
Subject: Re: Blue: Why did you massively nerf BWL |
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We didn't make any changes in Blackwing Lair. We did alter the way the Nefarian reset works, but that's about it.
We have also since gone through all our data and verified that no changes were made to any mobs hitpoints or damage output.
Please note, we did make significant improvements to performance in Blackwing Lair. We added a performance slider to your graphics options. Also, we made some changes to the way the game reacts to UI modifications which caused a huge reduction in lag for many people. When players complained about lag months ago, we made it a priority to work on the issue. We've also been warning people for quite some time now that there are some pretty inefficient UI mods out there. We'll continue to work with the mod community to help them improve their performance.
| | | http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?fn=wow-dungeons&t=295729&p=#post297554 | Poster: tigerclaw at 1/6/2006 6:00:17 PM PST
Subject: Re: Blue: Why did you massively nerf BWL |
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Q u o t e:
You could also improve YOUR OWN UI and put in YOUR OWN efficiency optimizations instead of having everyone rely on add-ons ;)
Also, you could stop breaking UI addons every time you patch...that would be sweet as well.
Well, many of the changes in 1.9 do exactly that (tune up behavior of the stock UI subsystems).
Keeping UI addons working correctly in all cases is a tricky problem, which is why we encourage mod authors to participate in PTR, so they can see how they are doing. In the case of 1.9.0, it's my best recollection that all the Blizzard UI tune up work was done before the first PTR release.
As far as which features the design team chooses to bring into the fold and make part of the built-in UI, that's really a designer question and I can't speak to that issue.
| | | http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?fn=wow-dungeons&t=295729&p=#post298507 |
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