Entire mechanics removed, some mechanics redesigned into something new, some mechanics being changed to allow players to be able to cast during them, some mechanics having a DR added to allow players to not get continuously effected by it.
What are trying to say? Because what you said earlier was that you can just remove some gear and the dungeons are the same, implying all they did was reduce damage/health values.
From what you posted, 2/8 got removed if you want to be harsh on it and 6 adjusted aka tuned. I count Altairus as adjusted as well, since that’s obviously not a huge change in terms of difficulty. Making something less annoying is not like a significant nerf in terms of difficulty.
Of course it is significant. Because players would get caught up in the tornadoes for long periods and then die. This fight also has a lot of group damage going around, the targeted breath too. You combine that with higher values and a situation where a player has made a small mistake and lost control of their character and you have a recipe for a wipe.
Ok now add a DR which allows players to be immune to that if they make a mistake, that entire scenario is prevented. Same with many of the other changes, where they took a certain death ability and gave players more time to react, your gear is irrelevant in these situations. The gameplay was made easier, moreso than the actual number tuning.
Well, first of all you can still cast, so it’s not that big of a deal and it’s just rng. It’s basically annoying but it doesn’t make anything difficult. You still have to avoid tornadoes just like you did before. Is the punishment less? Yes. But does that mean that the previous version would punish you more? No, since it’s rng.
Not really… lol^^ It’s mainly the breath which is easily healed with one button.
The wipe was caused mainly due to rng after a “small fail” if you wish.
Ye but the strats remain the same. It doesn’t somehow become harder to dodge the tornadoes, do we agree on that? You still move your character the same in both versions. Idk maybe on some omega bot level you can say it makes it easier, sure but it’s not like moving your character 2 steeps in one direction is some high skilled gameplay.
Idk the majority of it is tuning imo. Are there less punishments at some point? Yes. Did they remove many significant mechanics? No.
But I also didn’t find HC dungeons actually hard back then. The mechanics were simple, it just simply depended on people if they actually want to play the dungeon or doing something on the side.
Edit: If anything I’d argue taking off gear makes the dungeons more difficult in a better way than having to deal with rng non-sense but being geared.
I think you’re just moving the goalposts.
Taking off your gear does not result in the same dungeon experience as in the past. The majority of the tuning was things other than the damage/health values, and more in changing how certain abilities interact and the timings of them, which change how you can approach a fight, in particular how forgiving it is from a gameplay point of view.
Things like the static charge on last boss VP being 1.5s timing instead of a 1s timing drastically reduced the chances of getting rooted, it’s a gameplay adjustment rather than a gear related one.
Well if that’s something people consider difficult, then yes, I guess you are right. For me it’s simple tuning and doesn’t change anything.
It’s worth mentioning that most of the big changes that actually made the dungeons easier are these timing changes, mechanic adjustments, visibility changes, range changes etc. If you look at the number tuning it’s not that much, some stuff even got buffed.
The result was that the day the dungeons got nerfed people were rolfstomping them, people who were getting killed by stuff because they were slow were now surviving. Whether you consider them difficult or not doesn’t really matter, I cleared these all on my hunter the week Cata came out, then on my Warrior too, the changes weren’t made for experienced players.
What? It is massive change in difficulty, pre-nerf, getting hit by a cyclone usually meant you get knocked off the platform, and thus insta gibbed by the boss. Now the cyclones are only mildly annoying.
I do find them highly annoying to be fair considering that almost all of my heals are with the cast time with the exception of Holy Power Spenders and the weakest one in Holy Shock. Add in the fact that at least in this point of time it takes significantly more than 1 spell to actually heal someone so time wasted in a cyclone can mean a death sentence.
From a perspective of a player that never experienced original Cataclysm Dungeons I will say though. These while not the hardest they could be are a strong step up from Wrath. Even when taking Titan Rune into consideration. They’re not a cakewalk by a long stretch unless you somehow end up bringing best geared top classes because let’s be fair you’d need to crank up the lever up to eleven to somehow make it challenging for Blood DKS and top DPS but then you’d likely make it impossible for others.
We do it as a guild with not so optimized party (we often end up with Prot Paladin, Holy Paladin, Arms Warrior, Ench/Ele Shaman and Ret Paladin/Shadow Priest) and it’s definitely interesting. We wipe because of fumbled mechanics, poor priorities, fumbled Interrupts or CC or just biting too much.
Otruk’s mechanics are still a pain for me especially since as a Healer I have no counterplay to those. I’m not hitting him often enough to get the DoT that would break paralysis on time and said stun lasts long enough for Shatter and about two AA to happen. Definitely not fun trying to pick up the pieces.
I was busy with MoP and was just about to level my cata char, but this thread saved me the time since engaging random HC were the main reason I wanted to replay cata.
Cheers.
You can use judgment couple seconds before the stun happens to get the dot on you to deal with paralysis, holy palas really have it the easiest to deal with it.
… I keep forgetting that Judgement is counted as Physical attack.
if you played TBC, we can say it’s Jetlag
after TBC there is no CC needed in heroics (no sap, no sheep, etc), after TBC is bulldozer game
a blood dk could be near to solo anything lol
But not every RDF Party has Blood DK. And I wouldn’t mind if they were nerfed. The ratio of damage, Healing and bulk on that one is so messed up it’s unreal.
Blood DK is strong mostly due to vengeance, but it won’t scale with stats like dps classes will scale and so it’s a (mostly) temporary thing. But in Cata/MOP the whole point of Vengeance was to give tanks more competitive damage/threat, which encouraged them to make larger pulls and often optimise their gear around Mastery + Dps stats (aka rolling on dps gear with mastery on it).
In MOP Vengeance is so strong that tanks are regular contenders for top damage in raids, where as that wasn’t a thing in Cataclysm. I don’t think DK’s need to be nerfed, we are playing Cataclysm patch 4.3 and this is what we get. I think they could tune up some of the much weaker specs though.
Maybe you’re right. But seeing Blood DK consistently with high damage and having burst of heals stronger than my current healing spells can ever achieve with the gear just feels wrong. And that’s without comparing them to remaining Tanks. Getting Druid, Paladin or Prot Warrior as a tank in random dungeon vs getting Blood DK makes a huge difference for me as a healer. Usually said difference resulting in my sustainable healing being not enough forcing me to get oom pretty much every bigger pool.
Disappointed like hell to finally learn that the reason for easy Heroics is because they were released in their nerfed state.
Terrible start to the expansion Blizzard.