The Community That Cried Nerf

So, fresh furore over this rather minor comment from a blue.

The thread rapidly derailed into discussing the relative merits of and issues with some heroic boss abilities, based on this li'l snippet:

"With that said, we plan on making some changes to The Old Kingdom in the next minor patch. For instance, Elder Nadox will only get one Ahn'Kahar Guardian and Jadoga Shadowseeker will only use her Ascend ability once during their respective encounters."

And there was some angry blogging about it in various places, too.

My take on the whole afair, this apparent nerf to boss abilities? Good.

When first stepping into heroics, in my mixture of blues and greens, some of these abilities were challenging. They were interesting. They broke up the fight into palatable chunks, and did indeed help train me for some basic aspects of raiding such as target switching, not standing in fire, interrupts, and tank damage spikes. The problem is twofold. The abilities concerned are tied to the boss health bar - so the higher your party's damage output, the more frequently they occur. They also render the boss immune to damage for at least some time, often long enough for a little speech plus the time taken to target and dispose of the add, so their 'interrupt the battle' abilities scale relatively less with increased player damage than their health bar does.

So, essentially, a fight which was designed to be a fun and interesting mix of phases and adds and abilities boils down to 10% time spent tearing through the boss at a crazy rate, 88% watching boss emote whilst invulnerable, and perhaps 2% blowing up a hapless add. This is not fun. I don't care how long the boss takes, within sensible limits, as bosses aren't the bottleneck for heroic runs anyway. The pacing and feel of the encounter have been broken by our gear spiralling ever-higher in item level, replaced with pointless vexation.

Some other examples off the top of my head...
Anub'arak in AN. He barely pops up to say hello before burrowing again.
Svala Sorrowgrave in UP. With even a single geared and competant ranged DPS, the melee are basically sitting on their thumbs as she yoyos. Killing the adds for almost the entire boss fight. Yawn.
Ymiron, again in UP. His stun/fear went from a critical part of the fight (getting stunned in those AoE damage effects was troublesome, I recall), to merely a very annoying but increasingly large portion of the encounter.

Others spring to mind, but the basic point is that this kind of fight doesn't scale appropriately with gear, and thanks to frequent badge upgrades and easier access to high-level gear (both things I agree with entirely) everyone is getting gear these days and exposing the weaknesses. These abilities do not make the boss fights harder, just more irritating. They do make the fights a little longer, but really not by much compared to their sheer annoyance factor.

It could be argued that the designers should have forseen these problems with heroic bosses 'scaling' in the wrong way. Abilities on a timer, or a combination health/timer (will perform X ability every Y% health, but at most every Z seconds) are less likely to break with higher DPS. I think it is entirely reasonable that heroics become trivially easy over time, especially if there's a steady trickle of new five-man instances appropriate to the current level of gear, as long as they don't become annoying.

Yeah, the proposed fix for OK (and probably other dungeons as well, in time) is also a nerf. But really, no-one experiencing the issues with the boss spending more time floating in the air than being smacked in the face should be concerned with that. Hey, if they want to later give those same bosses more health or mitigation to artifically inflate the length of the fight to pre-fix levels, I wonder if anyone would complain?

Oculus, as an aside

I hate Oculus. It's a mess. A halting, on-again off-again mess of an instance. There is no opportunity to play here. The dungeon will not let you engage with it outside the stifling parameters expressed by disconnected platforms and your pitifully equipped drakes.

It is not fun. For a little while, it was interesting at least, but it has no depth and the space circumscribed by its mechanics does not allow for any. As a guild we decided to spice up the Nexus by kiting Anomalus and Omorok to the mage boss, and it seems to be the new standard to drag the Infinite Corrupter to Mal'ganis in CoS for the jokingly titled 'hard mode'. These instances do admit play, so if we feel like making a simple daily run more interesting you can. Oculus does not and cannot, due to simple layout issues and the horrible, horrible drakes.

My resolve weakened enough for me to run it with guildies when it popped as the daily, and lo I was rewarded with a blue drake, a rare gem and some extra badges. Great. Now I can go back to instantly dropping group every time it loads, as even the miniscule bonus of a mount I'll never use is a non-issue. Badges and gems? Pfft. Have to do a lot better than that to convince me I can't find a better way to spend fifteen minutes!