I personally don't agree with this. Gruul is certainly easier if your raid has spent some time with the mechanics of the fight (or beaten it outright before), but imagining beginning guilds (perhaps with no prior raiding experience outside of Kara) it still requires a personal level of awareness that a lot of us who have raided for a while didn't get until several instances in.

I think that, coupled with the healing demands a low-dps guild will be faced with late in the encounter, make this at least on-par with the other tier 4 fights.

Again, like it's been said in this thread it's really hard to gauge the difficulty of a recently-returned but already-beaten encounter. Post mortem, any change on the side of nerf feels pretty significant.

From my own experience tonight on the second time we've ever even tried Gruul (The first time was pre-nerf; which resulted in a surprising *Shatter* half-raid dead), it certainly still feels difficult enough. We still had a few shatter deaths, though those got less bad as the evening progressed and people learned to deal with the ability better. Previously the fight felt, well, too hard, now it feels about right for a guild on the level of my own (Which is a halfway through Naxx pre-expansion guild, up to Thaddius if that means anything; Karazhan is cleared for us).

I am embarrassed at the fact that our healers managed to let the MT die a few times at 8 growths however.

We haven't killed the bugger yet despite an evening of attempts, so for a guild which is effectively newly learning him the challenge in the encounter is certainly still there. I can believe it feeling trivial to people who had killed him before or were close to killing him though.

We did take a few hours for originally learning Maulgar as well; but it does feel like there's a progression in encounter difficulty, but as opposed to it being like you originally climb a small hill and than get told to go scale Mt. Everest, you instead get pointed to a slightly higher hill, I certainly don't find him easier than Maulgar. The tactical part is a lot less complicated certainly, but it's not like Maulgar whom we killed the first time we managed the pull to go well (Which did take us a while, I have no idea why really).

Edit:

Oh and Hurtfuls were fixed in Europe about halfway through the evening, which led to some amusing melee deaths the first pull Gruul was doing them again.

Gruul was totaly over-nerfed. We spend total of 9 hours on him before the first kill and after it we stoped using flasks on the DPS. The encouner was fine the way it was , I even liked it. We went today to kill him on first try with zero deaths in like 10-12? growths (sorry dont remember , but he went down noticebly faster than before)

He does hurtfuls now so have to see next week how he is, it seems a bit more what i thought he would do, when I heard he didnt do hurtfuls i figured that was a bug, personally.

I get the feeling from this thread that there are 2 different gruuls out there - 1 with 4.6million hp and 1 with 3.5 million. I can certainly understand how 3.5million would be way way easier. Perhaps we'll get that version next week and I'll see just how much of a joke it feels like.

If you've done Gruul before the nerf without flasks, you're not supposed to be challenged by him I think.

You're from a guild that killed 4 Horsemen. Gruul is supposed to be as hard as Onyxia 6 months into retail. He's supposed to be really, really easy for your guild.

Question now is... buff Gruul (causing a lot of uproar, though not from this crowd) or nerf Maulgar?

Personally, I feel that Maulgar in current incarnation would be more or less on par with Majordomo Executus in terms of raid coordination and strategy planning. Perhaps a little harsh in terms of the first large-scale raid encounter, but then again, Karazhan is quite a bit of pre-content.

On one hand, if Gruul is their benchmark for the "Introduction to Large Raid Mechanics 101", then I'd say Maulgar as it is is slightly overtuned... Honestly, experienced pre-TBC tanks asking about ways to deal with his 1-round combo? Hmm.

On the other hand, I personally think that with the standard raised overall in terms of 'l2p', (5-mans vs Strath/Scholomance/DM*), Maulgar as it is, is perfectly fine. And in that case, Gruul was over-nerfed. I'd say leave Shatter as it is currently as it was the main reason of frustration, and shift focus more to other aspects of the fight - for example, Resonance could easily be turned into a Maexxna-length "Oh shit!" period for the tank, easily survivable with TBC HoT stacking.

I have the feeling that hot-fixes don't hit all the realms at the same time. For example, after the 2.0 patch in December when progression guilds started ranting about Patchwerk vs new armor formula, guilds were reporting very different numbers over the span of a few days.


* (Scholo/Strath post-tuning >_>)

I thought about that, Falk, but we definitely had the shatter change and no hurtful strikes.

The only problem now with Gruul is that now he's so easy, can we really demand 2 T4 tokens from him?

When the quality of T4 is as poor as it is I doubt that is an issue. Risk vs Reward is much more inline after the nerf.

Nerfs to High King fight would not be able to do much (least imo) just because the fight is pretty straight forward as long as you can control it. I guess if anything the damage the high king himself puts out may seem out of line for some guilds I do not think it is out of range for a guild with filled with kara loot as natural progression goes.

Perhaps a couple of hotfixes in a row?

Or, speculating wildly, it could be due to Gruuls that are already spawned in a raid-id created before the hotfix is applied (i.e. a guild that kills Maulgar, gets saved), has 4.5 million hp, whereas raid-id's created post-hotfix will spawn Gruul with the intended 3.6m value, but ability changes affect both.

Who knows? We'll see what happens when the servers go down for maintenance on Tuesday and all the raid-id's are resetted.

We had killed Maulgar on Wednesday and our Gruul last night had been nerfed (and had no HS)


-edit-

Australian timezones, we killed Maulgar after maint and before the Gruul hotfix.

I doubt it works that way, I'm definitely certain that loot being predetermined by your Raid-ID is completely wrong; we had Netherspite respawn twice last week and in all three kills he dropped different loot, if it was a Raid-ID thing he'd drop the same loot.

Personally I don't think Raid-ID stores much more than what you have and haven't killed in an instance.

Or it could be that your mob health mod didn't recalculate his health...

I'll have a datapoint for you tonight. Guild was 3 bosses into Nax. 3 King kills, though they still take a couple of hours. About 2hr of learning on the old Gruul. If he falls over tonight, he was overnerfed. If we bag him at the end of the night on Sunday, it's probably about right.

I didn't say anything about loot (I agree with you here), and I threw that speculation out there as an example of one in thousands of possible ways the mob's hp discrepancy could exist. I think you'd agree with me that in a game as complex as WoW, some glitchy code always surfaces (I have a screenshot of a 3500+ rend tick from some random trash in Heroic Slave Pens, for example) and hotfixes aren't something you see every day.

Quigon: An earlier poster in the thread posted how much damage he did plus his percentage of raid-wide total damage.

It wasn't QA, NCSoft took a number of artists/devs a while ago.

Speaking as someone in a guild that hadn't killed him pre-nerf - he's very much easier. In a full night of attempts before the nerf we never got him below 60 or so (don't remember the exact number). We went in last night and 2-shot him. First pull was 30%-ish, 2nd pull was kill. Now, if they've put hurtful strike back in (as is rumored) he'll be a bit harder, due to the increased healing requirement... but he's defenitely pretty darn easy now.

However, that honestly doesn't strike me as a bad thing. There are a fair number of people in the guild who are pretty close to having farmed out Karazhan, and High King Maulgar just isn't enough raiding to occupy a raiding guild. The fact that we can now start messing around with Magtheridon and Serpentshrine is going to make life a lot more fun and interesting - there's actually enough content accessible to keep us busy.

That said, the hurtful-strike-less version of him is probably a bit on the easy side. I suspect that if that's put back in he'll be in a good place difficultywise.

Remember also the pattern in beta, where the Gruul that was released was a lot easier, and was then tuned upwards. A possible explanation for this is that the design/testing team and the tuning team are a different set of people, and were working under different assumptions.

If we're speculating, try this one for size. The designers are well aware of the average skill/commitment/consumable level of WoW raiders in general, and supplied an encounter tuned appropriately for that. The tuning team then (as of course is their job) adjusted that encounter based on the beta testing. i.e. it got tuned to the average skill/commitment/consumable level of the raiders in the beta. Problem is that the top raid guilds in the world had been given beta invites, that respecs were free, that guild banks would have been transferred multiple times making the economy for flasks etc. very different. Was the raiding population in the beta in any way representative of the wider raiding population? Personally (and I know this is speculation), I would guess not.

Hey presto, that's how you get a badly overtuned encounter, even though both the design and tuning teams were doing their best according to their own briefs.

Can any beta players comment - did the same happen for other raid encounters? What about the first relase of Magtheridon, SSC etc. Did they get much playtime in beta, and if so which way were the encounters adjusted? It may be there are some lessons to be drawn about who and how to invite into future beta tests.

Certainly the most *logical* way to beta-test raid content would be to supply appropriately-geared toons with a set consumable supply, and ask the testers to see how well they do within those parameters. Rinse and repeat for a range of different gear / buff levels. However, from what I hear there were no pre-mades in beta or in any recent PTR (probably because a lot of people just want to gank each other rather than actual beta testing). Perhaps that wasn't the wisest decision? Unless you supply pre-mades, your testing population isn't a controlled variable - so how do you trust the results of the testing?

encountered his 4.5 mil hp , hurtful striking version tonight with a largely new raid (only had 2-3 attempts pre-nerf)

We had some low geared people with us, but we have also cleared kara and killed maulgar a couple of times and I can assure you we did not have the dps to kill him. Our best try was 40%, with a few buffs on left and right. Fully flasked we could have taken him down perhaps another 20% (which means if he would be dead if he had 3.6 mil hp), but I know most of the guild is not willing to flask for it.

Leave him as he is right now (with 3.6 mil hp) he is fine