The purpose of this post is to raise awareness about the historic nerfs that occurred in WoTLK and to argue for a pre-nerf state.
In the wowhead interview on 16th of May Brian Birmingham states:
“That wasn’t the case as much with Wrath of the Lich King. There just weren’t as many “catch-up” nerfs outside of a few outliers such as health nerfs in Naxxramas and direct skips to Sapphiron and Kel’Thuzad. We plan to review those outliers and see if it makes sense to ship those in their original state, but it’s not something we plan to build a pre/post system around this time, since there aren’t as many noteworthy changes as there were in Burning Crusade.”
I hope the above statement is only in relation to tier 7, and that tier 8 hasn’t been considered by the team yet. There were many documented nerfs to tier 8 and I believe the above statement is misleading to this fact. See below for documented changes.
Nerfs to six bosses two weeks after release can be found on the first result for mmo-champion when searching ‘ulduar nerfs blue post’ on google.
Many nerfs are documented on the blue tracker website for the weeks/months following ulduar release. Look at April 2009 onwards.
Below are some examples from the blue tracker website three weeks after ulduar release:
- The Auriaya encounter has received the following changes: The range of Savage Pounce has been slightly reduced, the impact and periodic damage has been reduced in Heroic difficulty, the Guardian Swarm ability now summons 10 Swarming Guardians instead of 25 but their individual damage has been increased.
- The reflected damage done by Elder Stonebark with his Petrified Bark ability has been significantly reduced.
- In the Hodir encounter, the time to complete the hard mode has been increased to 3 minutes. (This will be applied during maintenance on Wednesday May 6.)
- The health of the Heart of the Deconstructor in the XT-002 Deconstructor encounter has been reduced.
- In the Thorim encounter, the Iron Ring Guard’s Whirling Trip ability will now only hit the tank.
- In the Assembly of Iron encounter, the duration of Overwhelming Power has been increased to 30 seconds in heroic mode and the amount of healing that Steelbreaker receives from Electrical Charge has been reduced to 20% of his max health.
Brian goes on to say:
“We think there are plenty of challenges for serious raiders to sink their teeth into between that and the Ulduar hard modes although we recognize that players are considerably more skilled and experienced today than they were in 2009. We’re talking about what we can do to keep things challenging, but we do also want to make sure the raids aren’t so difficult that they turn away speed runners, or players who just want to hang out with their friends and spend an evening smashing internet dragons.”
When considering both of these statements I am concerned. They want to release raids in one iteration as opposed to using a pre and post nerf system. This makes sense for raids that did not receive many historical nerfs, but this is not the case for Ulduar. They also want to appeal to speed runners and casuals. This reasoning could result in a single release of Ulduar in a post-nerf state. If this happened I think most players would be dissappointed in the difficulty level.
Brian’s comment about speed running is surprising. The logic of making the game easy for speed runners is backwards. Speed running exists because the content is too easy and players seek to challenge themselves. Challenging bosses replaces the role that speed running serves.
Ulduar deserves a pre and post nerf state considering the many changes it went through and the relative ease of the post nerf state. Challenge is fun for the whole player base.