So BFD has been nerfed with several encounters targeted.
Considering this is the last in a chain of pet dungeons I just don’t understand why.
If people have been unable to complete it what’s wrong with them putting some work into their collection?
Also how on earth can it be acceptable to instantly nerf this but leave Hermit Crab, Twilight Meteorite etc for a whole expansion.
As I said this is just pathetic.
You have mistaken the concept for when something is FRUSTRATING for something HARD.
There is nothing difficult about gathering X amount of pets and simply steamrolling the dungeon. Boost stones are easy to get, you an also borrow or buy the pets needed. With the availability of Rematch addon and possibility of simply sharing pet teams with pre-set abilities, including a move list it just becomes another scripted event that will play out in the same way every consecutive time. It is not fun after the first time and whatever RNG with random enemy crits was involved only made it more annoying.
The original design may have been a slight overkill that severely limited the choice of pets that would work against enemy teams. For something as insignificant as PVE pet battles there is no reason to make it that difficult.
It is a move-based game and not a real time event that involve the player skill to a significant extent. Rather than making it hard in a way that RNG could ruin your run half an hour after you started if you don’t have backup teams, it would be great for the next pet dungeon if they continue this practice had more, but overall much easier fights. Rather than having 10 super hard fights, double the amount of battles and increase the total scenario stage count by double while reducing the overall difficulty.
Now don’t get me wrong. There still needs to be a certain standard of challenge, but it’s in everyone interest to make this more accessible to a wider range of players. With how the gold is already completely devalued, making pets a more valuable commodity is something many players would welcome. Increase in demand would impact the overall player interest and even motivate them to try it out themselves. Currently the pets are just a collection game but with the right nudge it could lead to something much more.
If I knew how they nerfed it, I might be able to comment.
Since I don’t, I would just be waffling.
If they just decreased the numbers, that’s one thing. If they changed the mechanics, like removing that 75% permanent crit buff, that’s a very different thing.
Either way, I’m not sure wht they did it, but those are two very different situations.
So this dungeon needs to be run what 7 times taking up to about 30 mins each run not exactly an eternity. You also have minimum 26 weeks to complete these until the possible chance of a new pet dungeon.
RNG is only an issue here due to the tuning of the battles. There is very limited room for error and minimal RNG protection with many existing strategies. I’d have fully expected players to slowly start creating more efficient teams that reduce the chance of RNG.
Unless you expect the teams to already be fully optimised within 1 week of this going live?
Once this becomes ‘old’ content then nerfs should be made, just not after 1 week because players want easy mode and cannot commit sufficient time.
Heck if you don’t like RNG probably steer clear of pet PVP 
No nerfs should be made, the original dungeon should have simply been designed with more consideration for the average player. There is almost nothing prestigious about this, since it mostly reflects your time commitment and net worth.
Without exceeding the level 25 cap on pets, no pet dungeon at all should be nerfed in any way other than eliminating all possible RNG crits.
For the last few expansions there has been talk about pet breeding, mixing up pets and other nonsense such as allowing the pets to gain epic quality, thus increasing the value of their base stats and in cases completely breaking the existing game balance. Imagine the displeasure on people’s face if they found out they had to level up 300 or so pets up to the new level cap. It would simply drive the existing player base away.
The general idea here should be that the more players participate in pet activities, the more fun it would be for everyone involved. Pet PVP queue wouldn’t take half an hour and more people would be playing for fun or achievements and now it’s just that one guy win trading among 10 of his accounts that are connected at the same time.
At least we agree on something.
You have been able to complete this pet dungeon right? Then the balance is fine its possible to complete.
Investing time is the main theme of this entire game, everything in this game reflects your time investment even in game net worth. Players should have to invest a certain amount of time to obtain this in my opinion.
Other than pet breeding which was at one point looked at by the Devs the rest of this is just forum talk.
I don’t want to derail this thread but PVP pet battlegroups and practically zero PVP rewards are the causes of these issues.
The only major issue I brought up to attention is that despite beating it on the first day and now having almost 3 somewhat reliable teams for each battle, up until today’s nerfs I was unwilling to return inside ever again considering how frustrating and tightly tuned certain battles have been.
I haven’t checked what the current nerfs entail not do I care if they diminish my achievement. It’s likely that after reading the hotfix notes more players will be willing to try it out for themselves.
With how the rest of the patch is looking, I wouldn’t be surprised if no one was interested in doing the dungeon at all, thinking it had gone through almost no play testing.
Today the daily invasion quests are giving almost triple the amount of reputation and almost 5 times the amount of currency. They have finally started acting on player feedback considering how frustrating all this has been for an entire week.
Same with the pet dungeon run, I would not enjoy having to spend half an hour or longer inside and have my entire run ruined based on one random pet crit near the end of the scenario. People didn’t enjoy wasting half of their chasing 4 rares for 50 currency either.
Having checked with an admin on Xu-fu’s I understand that they had RNG proof teams for every encounter when this went live.
Many of their strategy curators had PTR access so were able to test strategies.
The initial tuning was changed on the PTR due to their feedback suggesting it was too difficult.
Mate in the end it is a question of how many people will be willing to try it out. It is very time consuming while not really fun or rewarding at the same time. Consecutive runs could be performed with success by a brain-dead mouse, this is also a problem. Except the mouse would likely go mad the third time after experiencing unexpected RNG and drill a hole in your wall as revenge for forcing him to participate in the activity.
If only a small number of players keeps doing it and considers it enjoyable, why would you as a game designer even waste time and resources on creating new challenges? You are misunderstanding the point I have been trying to get across.
The real question is how can you make it more fun and enjoyable while keeping the challenge factor somewhat intact, while at the same time attracting more players.
Hi.
As Rosqo said it’s already been nerfed once.
Since the beginning we’d been expecting a difficult dungeon as the meta achievement and lil’ bit of story enclose.
There are multiple ways to achieve difficulty:
and the preference for them might be somewhat debatable.
It seems only some of them are used the most, and treated more separately from one another than it looks. The stat tweak seems way easier than anything else, especially redesigning the encounter (which could be way too controversial too), so no wonder it stuck.
The feedback, albeit humble, was there and it was mostly about RNG going mad and how one ability changes everything 
TBF I do not understand the second nerf either. Mostly because we’ve got no Argus-like levels of frustration. Just a bit of surprise over some discords. I could see it being justified, though, if someone needed to make a first step towards Shadowlands changes without it looking too suspicious.
IMO the Uldum and Vale pets are showing that the team remains open to the players who want to make it quick.
If they’re worried about Valkyr+stampede combo and other things that might be able to completely stomp a certain battle, there are much more elegant solutions, such as prohibiting the use of more than on 1 pet of any kind or breed in the first and all consecutive fights.
This might help against the possible cheese mechanics simply by forcing a player to have more max level pets available, but at the same time noticeably increase the difficulty, considering you can catch 3 of a wild pet much easier than you can acquire 3 of the same through other methods.
While not the case with this dungeon, that could have worked in the previous dungeon Stratholme where most if not every battle was against undead pets.
Most people won’t try this dungeon because they don’t have any or enough max level pets not because it’s challenging. Make this easier to obtain and more people would participate.
There’s nothing wrong with a ‘challenging’ dungeon. Some players don’t just load up a rematch string to beat these dungeons and try to figure them out on their own.
It comes across you purely want to complete this dungeon in as little time before going off to spam m10+s.
The issue with the doom Bird strategies is that it dominates pretty much becoming the only strategy required. Devs want to ensure that world quests are relatively easy and possible across all families so have limited scope to prevent it via mechanics. The solution will be to reduce the effectiveness of the dominating strategy.
If you can only use a per ability once throughout a dungeon it would become far too complex. 3 abilities each pet with 3 pets in a team then say 10 encounters is 90 across that dungeon. Keeping track of that isn’t practical or player friendly.
Thanks to DragonsAfterDark, I now believe that the nerfs were just to numbers.
I find this odd.
What prompted them to nerf it after one week? I honestly can’t think. I did it on the PTR, and there was a case for nerfs then. Actually, I think there was a case for mechanic changes. But from live?
I promised to look at a couple of strats this week, and I’ll take the opportunity to see how these nerfs affected it. Maybe the nerfs will have made borderline RNG strats more reliable?
The main reason people don’t try BRD is because they’re not invited. Look at the numbers from WorldofWarGraphs
| Dungeons | Percent |
|---|---|
| Pet Battle Challenge: Wailing Caverns | 4.90% |
| Pet Battle Challenge: Deadmines | 4.50% |
| Pet Battle Challenge: Gnomeregan | 2.50% |
| Pet Battle Challenge: Stratholme | 1.90% |
Most of the people who started the dungeon crawl didn’t even make it to Stratholme, much less start BRD. Is it difficulty, or lack of interest? Gnomeregan didn’t seem to me more difficult than DM, but it did need less commonly used pets. Pet-wise, Stratholme was a doddle, with Rabbits and Frogs MVP.
Of those who did try BRD, I would expect that they would know to look on Wowhead or Xu-Fu’s if they were stuck. Or am I wrong about that? Is there a huge pet base out there that never interacts with sources of information?
Yeah, I don’t see why the nerf. Who is it meant to encourage or help?
ok zoomers (and grainne :smudge:)
just wanna throw some opinions in here
so if my memory serves me right the dungeon was first opened on PTR on the 9th of november (could have been 8th tho) and the first pixy strats on xufu were released the next day.
the first nerf hit the dungeon on the 22nd. i do agree that nerfs were necessary, but even then i think they overdid it. i’m like 95% sure there were no changes to mechanics- if there were some they weren’t meaningful.
so what they did was pretty much scaling down the stats of everything… and that included the mini bosses. those were brain dead oneshots before and -as a surprise to no one- they still are.
this makes me believe that (at least looking at the changes) blizz didn’t put a lot of thought into that dungeon and did the bare minimum to stop the crying in the forums.
BUT everybody who has beaten at least a few of the trainers will notice that actually there were indeed some thoughts put into the design of the fights. ironically those encounters were based on previously made poor/questionable design choices (TCS, black claw+stampede, clone dance, traps, imps, idols, og chrominius, photosynthesis,…)
also some people might have noticed that a couple of the harder pets in there had a speed of 324 and there were counters to those pets with 325 speed, so i don’t think they just randomly put some numbers on the fights and called it a day
aight, this tells me two things:
A) blizz is well aware of their mistakes in pet battle balancing but they can’t be bothered to make things right (or they need two expansions to fix issues from one, but those two expansions bring new problems on their own)
B) they designed the dungeon with some sort of a plan and suddenly didn’t have the time to react to PTR testing with as much attention as it maybe needed (sounds familiar? 
)
so where did it go wrong? there is this obvious jump from DM to gnomer in participation. and what did also move on that point? the quest giver. so i have no clue how it is for alliance but on horde side the starting quests for the BfA pet dungeons are somewhere where the sun never shines and i know that there are casual pet battlers who still aren’t aware of this corner in dazar’alor that is made for pet battle content.
But this is just a theory of mine, I’m sure there are multiple other reasons that come into play.
Yeah like that one.
tl:dr
the first nerf on the ptr was mostly reasonable and i’m sure no one can disagree that some of the fights were overtuned
the second nerf…just why? i think the dungeon was already at a decent difficulty and pretty much the only thing that happened now (at least imo) is that alran is less likely to win to RNG (traps are cool, eh?)
also, this has been mentioned here before but it can’t be stressed enough: this is the last dungeon in this story line and it should not be easy.
this whole journey started extremely easy and the fights became harder over time, so you would think that the people adapt to the increase in difficulty and learn how to deal with hard fights.
if anything, i blame the people for avoiding to think for themselve and instantly googling for a cookie-cutter approach
That dungeon was a poor joke from devs. You literally needed very specific pets or you had no chance to complete… had to buy the hydra just to complete it because no alternative strategy seemed to work ;0
Which is good. You shouldn’t be able to defeat every dungeon/encounter with the same few strategies, otherwise there would be no challenge in creating a new one against specific trainers.
Also thanks for confirming my last statement in the previous comment.
Sorry buddy but at least half of them do for sure
You’re unhappy that you just needed to purchase one extra pet to complete this dungeon? Lucky it wasn’t two pets you needed
That doesn’t explain why this nerf, though. 
The battles were entirely do-able already. How much easier did this make them?
I have a bee in my bonnet about that Ravenous Prideling. I do see other strats, not using it, appearing now, and I’m going to take some time over the weekend having a look at them. It might have been very clever of the devs to have required some pets earned from the earlier dungeons. Your own use of Tricorne is an example of how this dungeon might have satisfyingly brought together some niche abilities of pets we earned along the way. But that crit buff is otherwise just not the right thing for a dungeon, unless it was a reference to an earlier one in the chain. If they had removed that, I would have applauded. Even so, that should have been done before going live, not after a week.
So I’m still not seeing the point.
Great minds thinking alike:
I always go Dala->Breanni, because finding either pet shop in BfA feels like it takes longer than the dungeon. 
And do you also blame the people who make and post strats enabling those who do not want to think for themselves, beyond pressing “A” repeatedly?
:smudge:
Often I do, shouldn’t be a secret that I blame everyone :smudge:
But I’m not forcing them to use the strats. I mostly do that as some sort of competition for DaD and others.
Also let’s not get into the scripts, that’s a completely different story.
Because it’s not an attempt on trying to explain it. For me the nerfs make as little sense as for you
According to wowhead the nerfs were implemented because some encounters were heavily RNG and also relied on specific pet breeds rather that play choice or style.
Most players agree the nerf was necessary as a result of the above.