I fully agree with this. Why do people (especially those who knew the nerf bat was coming) get bent out of shape that now maybe 20% of a server can kill the guy?
Because if things become VERY VERY easy then they find them boring, and when they find things boring they don't care to play.
I don't understand how it still comes as a shock, but there are many people who don't play the game for the loot or such silliness, they play because they find the challenging aspects of the game enjoyable.
There's a difference between a nerf that makes it easier and a nerf than makes it sleepwalk easy. They could at least have put in an intermediate, moderate, nerf before this stage so people didn't have to go from yawning through Gruul to crying at Hydross.
Because if things become VERY VERY easy then they find them boring, and when they find things boring they don't care to play.
I don't understand how it still comes as a shock, but there are many people who don't play the game for the loot or such silliness, they play because they find the challenging aspects of the game enjoyable.
There's a difference between a nerf that makes it easier and a nerf than makes it sleepwalk easy.
I'm sure that if you look hard enough, you can still find a challenge somewhere in the World of Warcraft.
The reason Ony was so hard at the begining was because people had little to no clue what they were doing, they were just getting into the idea of WoW Raiding.
I guarantee if you got 25 people who have never raided before, Gruul would be as hard as ony was back in the day.
I'm sure that if you look hard enough, you can still find a challenge somewhere in the World of Warcraft.
That's beside the point.
The point is that there will be little challenge to anyone, not just the hardcore guilds, with this change to gruul. This makes him easy to the majority of raiding guilds. That is the point.
I think the the challenge should be equal to the numbers; if most guilds are stuck on or around Gruul he should be a challenge to them. This was not the case before, and wont be the case now. He goes from being too hard to be too easy, and thus the point is shifted forwards, to Hydross.
Whom, we shall assume, will be too hard. Your response would be to nerf him to the new Gruul level.
But this is a slipperly slope that leards to a raiding game not worthy of the name.
I personaly think they tune the places harder to begin with to give the hardcores something to challenge themselves, as well as slow progression, then nerf it once it seems there are enough people hitting the wall at it.
I also think this is a pretty sound way to do it.
I don't think it's sound at all really. Ideally they should tune it to the appropriate difficulty and leave it.
The problem that arises with your method is that most guilds will get complacent and just wait for the inevitable nerf. There are a lot of raiders who aren't Nihilum hardcore who still want a good challenge without insane consumable needs. Those people would get screwed when the rest of the guild decides to wait for the loot piñata they know is coming.
Gruul was overtuned at the end of beta because he was beaten relatively quickly by a DnT-led PuG. Serpentshrine is just now getting it's public beta testing thanks to the guilds that pushed through Gruul and it should be appropriately tuned (not nerfed) by the time the bulk of the raiding guilds hit it.
But you're right in that the Blizzard philosophy is to tune high and be very cautious in retuning. Look how long it took them to adjust C'thun. These sudden hotfixes before the 2.1.0 patch (contrary to Tigole's statement that he wanted Gruul changes on the PTR first) seem to speak more of political pressures within Blizzard than anything.
Problem is we all initially believed GS/Shatter to be the primary 'factor' of the whole encounter, and now it has become akin to the Sleeping Clouds @ Emeralds.
Its there... its annoying but its rarely going to wipe you.
Given the task of him being an entry level encounter, I believe we have all let our thoughts become scattered on what we believed Gruul to be. Part of me thinks this change is good, the other part thinks it should not of been nerfed down to this level at all, perhaps it should of been like Gothik instead of Sapph? however now we have Flamegor.
Im expecting early SSL & TK to be 'hit by the nerf bat' and the zones will become AQ'esk with a pretty easy start, a ramp up half way and then a gritty final boss.
Hyjal & BT will then become our 'Naxx' of TBC.
Given the current level of of Gruul, do people find him to be on-par with Kara/Maulger? is he really ment to be considerd an 'uber end boss' like C'Thun or Nef? or is it simply a 2 boss zone of relative difficulty.
The point is that there will be little challenge to anyone, not just the hardcore guilds, with this change to gruul. This makes him easy to the majority of raiding guilds. That is the point.
I think the the challenge should be equal to the numbers; if most guilds are stuck on or around Gruul he should be a challenge to them. This was not the case before, and wont be the case now. He goes from being too hard to be too easy, and thus the point is shifted forwards, to Hydross.
Whom, we shall assume, will be too hard. Your response would be to nerf him to the new Gruul level.
But this is a slipperly slope that leards to a raiding game not worthy of the name.
Nothing in Gruul's Lair should be a challenge for any guild that was clearing or nearly clearing Naxx. End of story.
These sudden hotfixes before the 2.1.0 patch (contrary to Tigole's statement that he wanted Gruul changes on the PTR first) seem to speak more of political pressures within Blizzard than anything.
I didn't even think about that, but you may be right. Sounds like it could be something like "fine, if you're gonna keep complaining, we're just going to nerf it to the point where absolutely no one will complain about it being too hard again" and kind of overdoing it out of spite or something. Kind if interesting if that would actually be the case, and of course there's no way for us to ever know but it could have some interesting implications further down the line.
Also it confuses me, do people think it goes:
MC -> BWL -> AQ -> Naxx -> Gruuls & Mag -> TK25 / SSL ---> ? or
MC -> BWL/Gruuls & Mag -> AQ/TK25 & SSL -> Naxx/Hyjal -> BT ?
Are we ment to be carrying on from where WoW left off? or are we starting the the raiding cycle again just a little bit further on than before.
Look, my guild is a smaller one (~30 accounts I'd say?) and we've been progressing at a medium pace I'd guess. Maulgar dead a bunch and cleanly, Kara clear w/Nightbane (run two a week now) and good progress on Gruul. No one liked going to Gruul though much and the last time we went over there was the first time I can honestly say that we felt like we were really getting progress. It was a matter of a short time until we'd really be able to put out a serious night with some flasks and so on and we'd get ourselves a dead whatever-gruul-is.
I should feel cheated I guess but damned if I do. Honestly, I don't know what the future raids will bring for us and it's entirely possible that they'll be nothing but increasingly frustrating in comparison to Gruul. I'll deal with that later but for now, I won't miss a moment of that stupid encounter. I just never found a reliable way of troubleshooting what was causing wipes given the number of variables involved.
So he is no longer a Loatheb or arguably a Patchwerk but instead is a Onyxia. Can anyone seriously argue that isnt where he should be in the progression?
As mentioned in the 2nd post the removal of hurtful strike was probably unintended but it wouldnt be the first time Blizzard have done double nerfs or double buffs as if 2 seperate people were working completely independant.
So next week if hurtful strike goes back in it wil be just a bit harder.
As a Guild we havent been pushing 25 man content, why arrive at another must use consumables too fast, so I havent seen Gruul at all.
But as a server where perhaps 30 guilds had killed Nef, 10 had killed Patchwerk. Gruul died for the first time on Proudmoore 3 days ago!
Also it confuses me, do people think it goes:
MC -> BWL -> AQ -> Naxx -> Gruuls & Mag -> TK25 / SSL ---> ? or
MC -> BWL/Gruuls & Mag -> AQ/TK25 & SSL -> Naxx/Hyjal -> BT ?
Are we ment to be carrying on from where WoW left off? or are we starting the the raiding cycle again just a little bit further on than before.
I would assume the second of the two, although with Gruul/Mag where AQ40 was, and shift everything appropriately. Currently pre-nerf Gruul/Mag are where they are in the first diagram, yet SSC is not (both morogrim and karathress were kinda easy imo, although Hydross is still on the level of Gruul. Someone seems to have screwed up exactly what they want from encounters). MC and BWL were learning experiences for Blizzard as much as for us tbh, and they found the encounter design where it should have been near the end of AQ (c'thun especially - I don't know of anyone who doesn't like that fight), although the beginning of AQ was hardly bad design, merely not tuned quite far enough maybe.
It should be a continuation of good design with some space for an early learning curve, not just dumping anyone who has picked up WoW when BC comes out finding themselves with a brick wall in their face when they try and raid, which is how it is pre-nerf. Post-nerf I believe it's probably the same, as Gruul sounds like he's been nerfed so far that Hydross will be the wall now (as has already been said in this thread).
Nerfing Gruul was needed - as much of a nerf as people seem to be saying has happened was almost certainly not.
Nothing in Gruul's Lair should be a challenge for any guild that was clearing or nearly clearing Naxx. End of story.
Why? Why should things be boringly easy just because they're introductory?
There is nothing in Gruul now that is going to be that challenging for those guilds who wern't in Naxx, let alone those that were.
They could have lowered his HP by less and decreased the shatter by less and still have him be unchallenging for those who were in Naxx, but challening, and doable, for those that wern't.
That's the point. I've restated it here because the first one seems to have gone over your head.
The reason Ony was so hard at the begining was because people had little to no clue what they were doing, they were just getting into the idea of WoW Raiding.
I guarantee if you got 25 people who have never raided before, Gruul would be as hard as ony was back in the day.
OT, and I hate to do this again, but the original version of Onyxia had a lot more to do with the fact that the encounter was basically, Welcome to raiding enjoy C'thun in stage 2. That and the lack of any healing/MoT/Spell dmg gear, etc, along with numerous other game changes like the 5 second rule.
Tigole already stated that Gruul and Mag should feel like Onyxia 6 months into retail. That is their benchmark for the fight and the only one that counts, frankly. So please stop bickering.
It's been stated before but it bears repeating, the original version of Ony was damn hard. I had a guild at the time that was extremely experienced at raiding from EQ, was extremely focused and dedicated and was also most capable of dissecting encounters and dealing with whatever devs might throw at us. Ony was still painful.
Just killed him for the first time tonight after having spent a fair amount of time wiping to his previous version.
I personally feel the changes are pretty good aside from the whole fact that he's not using hurtful strike. Fix that, and I think it will be in line with where it should be.
I'm hearing of people who say they can't go over 4k dmg on a shatter even when standing on top of someone, but I still managed to stand right on top of someone to test it and got hit for the usual 9k whenever you stack on top of someone. It seems pretty clear that the formula for shatter damage has changed to me.
As far as his HP goes, my SW meter shows him taking 4.5 mil for the duration of the fight. I'm not sure what he had before, but wasn't it around that much?
I suppose our Gruul could have been screwed up and not had the fixes, although it seemed like we could live through the shatter much easier than we did before. It also could have been that everyone was playing better since they thought he had been changed and were excited for a kill. Or yeah, maybe he really was different. I'm wondering if that 4k for standing right on top of someone is an exaggeration or if we just had a different Gruul because I most definitely did take 9k stacked right on top of someone.
As far as his HP goes, my SW meter shows him taking 4.5 mil for the duration of the fight. I'm not sure what he had before, but wasn't it around that much?.
Worked on him tonight and the shatters were noticeably more forgiving (didnt find out about the hotfix until we were prepping for a trash reclear). However the HP number was exactly the same, or so it seemed.
Too many are forgetting their own skill level. Of course your guild is stomping all over Gruul now. I've not seen any indication that the population of active posters on this board are in any way representative of the average spread of guilds in WoW. This is the entry level 25-person raid in The Burning Crusade, not something that a collection of generally advanced players in relatively "hardcore" guilds should need to theorize over for two months on a forum and still have only a few guilds per server kill. Gruul today is intended feel like Onyxia over a year ago: the easily accessible raid boss that even the most casual of raiding guilds can kill. A boss of the intended caliber has no business being as difficult and begging of theorycrafting posts as Naxxramas bosses (the former mysteries of Ony phase 3 aggro aside ). There's only every other raid instance in the game to tackle if you want a bigger challenge.
We seriously spent like 91 pages complaining about itemization and how this guy is a horribly designed raid encounter for a variety of reasons, and now people are upset they nerfed him?
He drops Prince level loot. He should never have been harder. Just let him die, this was a needed and necessary nerf to a poorly designed and implimented fight.
Yeah, it would have been nice if he'd just been properly tuned and interesting from the start, but he wasn't. Still, an overnerf is vastly better than the alternative many were expecting, ie nothing for a month. Kudos to them for keeping many more raiders interested in the game.
03/21/07, 11:12 PM
). There's only every other raid instance in the game to tackle if you want a bigger challenge.
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