With health changes as of 2.4.3, roll 7 healers, or burn faster? Won't be completely obvious until raids tonight, but what are your thoughts?

Dependent on how much health has been removed of course, I see no real reason to change your raid make up. We bring 6 healers which covers every job as it is, 3 for Tanks and 3 for the Raid. Our P1 strat is amazingly clean and very quick and P2 is... P2. P2 can get messy at times, and here's where the health reduction will show most.

As a healer I feel that burning M'uru/Entropius down faster helps with healing a lot more than adding 1 extra healer. With 6 healers already covering every aspect, 1 extra will only have his healing wasted on overhealing. That way because healing on M'uru is more about precision than numbers. On Entropius when things become unhealable for the 6 healers, there should be only ~20 seconds to kill anyway. I doubt keeping 5-10 people 10 seconds longer than usual helps with dps more than having 1 extra dps trough whole fight.

Burn faster. Many guilds are probably pretty close to shaving a minute off phase 1 with several weeks of KJ gear.

I really feel for the guilds that are currently working on Muru, especially those on the verge of beating him. I'm not against the tuning down of old content once newer content is already released, but to nerf it now must be very frustrating for guilds that want to kill it the original way.

Likewise with KJ. I can already imagine the "you only killed it after nerf" responses that many guilds will get, even though those guilds would of killed the bosses in due time. ie, the same as killing Hydros, Lurker, Leo (dear god pre-nerf Leo... as hard as any Sunwell boss I honestly believe), Vashj, Alar, Astromancer. Although I never killed pre-nerf Vashj/Alar/Astro, I looked up to the guilds that did.

It is disgusting and stupid that Blizzard is capitulating and nerfing content that was already 100% beatable.

I expect to pull M'uru tonight and discover that the encounter has been nerfed to the same extent Leotheras was. The original Leotheras was a challenging, fun fight, one of my favorite fights in TBC. The current Leotheras is a feeble joke that horrible, horrible scrubs can kill in their first night of pulls.

Is there ever going to be something that remains challenging in this game?

Before we cry about the nerf, lets see exactly how it plays out.

I'm from one of those 'scrub guilds' that will probably kill M'uru tonight, thanks to the changes, and I couldn't be happier. We've been going full hog on M'uru for the last month and our best attempt had Entrop at 21% at the 90 second mark last night. We gave it our best shot and it wasn't good enough. Big whoop. M'uru will be forgotten 6 months down the line. I don't fancy spending another month pulling out the final 20%.

I want something new to do.

This. Whine elsewhere. Analyze the new fight once we know for sure what changed.

It's about time they nerf it. It's been destroying guilds left and right, making tons of players quit.
They really needed to throw people a bone here. M'uru is huge cockblock and one of the most despressing fights ever. It's just not a fun fight when you can't beat it. The best DPS gear drops from M'uru + KJ which makes it even more depressing.
With ~5 months until the expansion and no new content, they might as well let people beat the expansion before they quit out of frustration.

And it was certainly predictable that they were going to nerf it. I don't know why you think it is stupid & disgusting.

Gruul 1.0 and Mag 1.0 were '100% beatable' too, right? They were challenging....... but were they fun for their target audience?

If an encounter is changed, theres alot more to consider than simply "But it was beatable before hand!". Personally, I think Blizzards motivations for changing M'uru now are more in direct response to guildss constant attrition grinding many of them to a halt at M'uru - and vacations/breaks etc don't help either.

Progress and seeing new content is what drives many raiders. Disheartening attrition and stagnant progression - result in bored, uninspired raiders. This is definetely NOT the sentiment Blizzard want their raiding community to have. Many guilds simply cant make the strict class requirements for the encounter consistently, even if they have the skill and coordination required to handle the technical aspects of the fight. If you are in one the guilds that has an amazingly consistent roster, I really do envy you. But most of the guilds Ive spoken to on Muru have one glaring issue: Consistency, consistency, consistency.

M'uru struck me more as a technical, clockwork encounter - the DPS benchmark was high, but never felt like the reason for phase 1.

By relaxing the benchmark slightly, the encounter is shifted more to a coordination/communication test (removing some focus on the very strict DPS requirements for many guilds) and allows a little more flexibility when your guild might not be as roster-consistent as other top performing guilds.

I spent a while talking to our Ret Pally about Retpally VS DPSWarrior interchangeability on a melee-add side DPS group. (2 rogues, retpally VS warrior, enhancement shaman). We noticed that the warrior was simply a better option for the tight-dps-needed and usually sit the Retpally out. I dont like telling people they are being sat out like that. And, of course, its naive to expect that guilds will consciously want to run with a 'suboptimal' raid class setup for a fight like this.

I hope that these changes are designed to *slightly* reduce the pressure guilds are put under to make decisions like this - and *slightly* increase the flexibility we have on handling raidsetup for the fight. Nobody is saying the encounter should be dumbed down stupidly, but im sure many guilds will appreciate a very small change (Like only ~5% on adds maybe? No changes to anything else) to help mould their roster to the fight easier.

I agree that changing M'uru and Entropius HP seems almost like an unnecessary thing to do. But I can certainly understand why the melee adds can be justified to receive a (small) alteration.

If they had simply lowered the HP of the adds and M'uru, but left Entropius alone, it would have loosened up the class requirements and allowed a little more diversity that guilds had been crying for, all while not really severely nerfing the difficulty of the fight. I know we don't have any solid numbers yet, but even its as low as a 5% nerf (which I'm willing to bet its at least double that) that is a very big difference in Phase 2. That means you only have to live for 85 seconds instead of 90, and in Phase 2 alot can happen in 5 seconds.

So yea, I think nerfing phase 1 would've been fine, but nerfing Entropius HP was just too much.

I can't understand how you could fall in love with phase 2. Its an intergalactic-sized pile of random bullcrap causing people to run all over the place like headless chickens combined with graphical effects that make it very difficult to even see what you need to avoid. Combined with the fact it only lasts up to around 90 seconds its more prone to failure than most encounters. One miniscule mistake and you're back to another 5-6 minutes of add-killing.

Is the appeal in the adrenaline rush of actually managing to pull off a kill within that clusterfuck of randomness?

Well check the wowprogress.com muru chart. First month ~100 kills and second month ~50 kills. So the number is decreasing instead of increasing what usually happens.

As part of a guild that had 150 wipes at M'uru in the last two weeks and we at a point were p1 is mostly controlled this is a slap in the face. And not a gentle one...

I am sure with 2 - 4 more weeks of attemps we could have killed him and it would have been an achievement that I would have been proud of, but now we WILL cheer when we kill him but there always be the bitter taste, that it wasn't the real challenge we hoped it would be...

Btw because of the news the raid tonight collapsed, we won't get a kill tonight so there is absolutely no motvation for tonight

For me that has more to do with starting holidays, Soccer European Championship and a lot of other stuff not the fight itself.

http://www.wowprogress.com/i/graph/Sunwell_world.png says none of the Sunwell bosses had an increased rate of kills as time went by.

Think of it this way, if you can kill the new Entrop by 60-65 seconds in, you probably would have killed the old one.

That is far far from the truth. The last 30 seconds of Entropius - when you're trying to burn that last 20% - is one of the most intense healing challenge in Sunwell. Not only do you need to have very good personal awareness to dodge orbs and step out of void zones, the entire raid is just taking massive amounts of damage. Unless you've played a healer on Entropius, it's hard to appreciate how fast the damage comes after the 60 second mark.

Last night we got Entropius to 1% so this change to the HP level of the adds, M'uru and Entropius is not necessarily welcomed but gives us the confidence that we'll get the kill this week.

I don't see the point in whining about nerfs to months old content. You beat it, this is a casual friendly game and they want EVERYONE if possible to finish the content before Lich King. It's expected this is going to happen, save your breath and just enjoy the content early.

Slap in the face? Give me a break.

So they're not allowed to *ever* make modifications to content that they've decided is unreasonably challenging, even months after its release? For every person for whom this change is timed poorly, there are plenty more who consider it a benefit; those who've been struggling with it for longer than they'd care to, those who have beaten it but find it to be unpredictably difficult to deal with every week, or those who've entered Sunwell fairly recently and find it encouraging that a razor's edge boss has been made a little more approachable.

If they've nerfed it too thoroughly, then that's a separate issue. You don't know if they have. All you're doing here is implicitly suggesting that Blizzard should never alter their own content after releasing it, and that's foolish. Particularly when that content is in a race with an expansion release cycle, after which it loses much of its relevance.

I think some of you who have only 'just' gotten to M'uru (less than 1 month of wipes) don't quite appreciate how painful it was for those of us who watched our guilds slowly splinter away nibble by nibble starting around the 6th-8th week of M'uru wipes. Do you really believe that guilds who reached M'uru 1-2 months ahead of you are/were worse than yours in some way? Poorer raid leaders, poorer players, bad tactics? Perhaps you do, ego is an amazing thing.

For my guild (I'm not an officer), it went something like this. We're most likely not unique, the the situation isn't unique to M'uru either, he was just the worst offender in recent memory.

Phase 1 - Progress
1st - 2nd week - tentative tries, never got past P1 50%
3rd - 4th week - serious tries - best tries have P1 to around 10-30%
5th - 6th week - nearing our peak - best tries have us practicing P1->2 transition

Phase 2 - Stagnation. Tensions are high, people starting to burn out. A few go casual/quit.
7th - 8th week - approaching burnout(starting to lose players) - best try is P2 60%
9th week - more players burnout - no longer able to reach P2

Phase 3 - Critical Failure, normally started by a key player quitting causing a chain reaction
10th week - Loss of multiple key players - no longer able to REACH M'uru
11th week - Failed to even down Kalecgos

Phase 4 - Tentative recovery. Some new recruits. Most of the people who were at danger of quitting/guild-hopping have left already.
12th week - Re-downed Kalec/Brut
13th week - Re-downed Fel/Twins

Some guilds can stay at P2 for much longer. Some have never been forced to experience P3. Many who experience P3 never reach P4. It all depends on how the guild is led and what holds it together. But if you haven't tried M'uru yet, or haven't wiped on M'uru for at least 9 weeks, forgive me if I don't believe you understand what some of us have went through.

PS. Also, regarding all those posts by people saying that each week of Sunwell clears, you get upgrades that make M'uru easier? That only works if you get gear faster than you lose it via burnout. Around our 8th - 9th week, this ceased to be true.