Upcoming Siege of Orgrimmar Changes

Effective with next week’s raid resets, we will be making some targeted difficulty adjustments to a few encounters in Siege of Orgrimmar. Overall, the difficulty curve in Siege has met our expectations, and while there are some major challenges deep in Garrosh’s sanctum, we see raid groups continuing to make steady progress at all levels. However, there are a handful of encounters at specific sizes/difficulties that present a disproportionate jump in challenge, and so we’re making some adjustments to smooth out the difficulty curve overall. We wanted to provide a bit of advance notice, both for guilds that are extremely close to kills and want to get in under the wire with the coveted “pre-nerf” kill, and to provide some hope to those who are looking at the wall ahead of them and despairing.

Galakras

We will be reducing the health of the Kor’kron troops in 10-player Normal and Flexible difficulty, because smaller raid groups have fewer tools to deal with the various enemies, and are further impacted when a portion of the raid must break off to deal with towers. No changes to Heroic difficulty at this time.

Thok the Bloodthirsty

We will reduce Thok’s unavoidable Fearsome Roar and Shock Blast damage in 10-player Normal, Heroic, and Flexible mode – again, smaller raid groups have fewer raid cooldowns to handle the increasing damage as Acceleration ramps, and we’re seeing 10-player groups and smaller Flex groups having much more difficulty with this encounter than their 25-player counterparts.

Siegecrafter Blackfuse

This encounter’s Heroic mode is a huge step up in difficulty from the preceding 11 bosses. We’re looking to smooth out that spike somewhat, while still keeping the fight quite challenging. The following changes apply only to Heroic difficulty: We are reducing the unavoidable raidwide damage inflicted by Magnetic Crush and Shredders’ Overload, as well as the damage from Superheated (to make belt groups’ lives a bit less painful when an Overcharged Laser is active). We’re also reducing Disassembled Turret health. Finally, on 10-player Heroic only, we’re reducing the health of Crawler Mines, since 10-player raids have fewer available tools to keep them controlled.

Paragons of the Klaxxi

Moving on to Heroic Paragons, we’d like them to continue a steady increase in difficulty that culminates with Garrosh. They’re already pretty close to that, so we’re just making a couple of tweaks here, reducing the damage of Multi-Shot and Fiery Edge on Heroic difficulty. This should keep most of the coordination difficulty of the fight, but reduce some frustrating deaths due to burst damage interactions between different abilities.

We have no further changes planned at this time, but we’ll continue to monitor players’ ongoing progress through Siege of Orgrimmar, and may make further adjustments if needed.

01/17/2014 02:35 PMPosted by Naérwen

If this is true, I don't understand why any changes are being made.

I agree. I also am not sure why removing the trivial healing mechanic from Sigecrafter is even...worth it. Most guilds are 4 healing this encounter to kill it, now it's definitely going to be a 4 heal fight. Directly after your tuned for 6-8 fight, Thok. ???

Seems a strange thing to change.

Raid groups are largely making steady progress, but as I said, there are exceptions. Regarding Heroic difficulty in particular, it's pretty obvious that there is a very large jump in difficulty from Thok to Siegecrafter. Siegecrafter/Paragons/Garrosh are currently very close to equal in difficulty, with each presenting different challenges and guilds taking roughly the same number of attempts to defeat each. We'd rather see an upward slope in difficulty, which leaves guilds feeling like the next step is within reach given enough time and dedication, rather than a sudden jump up to a much higher difficulty plateau. That's why we're nerfing Heroic Blackfuse moderately, Paragons just a little bit, and Garrosh not at all.

The changes shouldn't be enough to meaningfully alter healer composition, but they will make some of those "combo" deaths to two damage sources overlapping a bit less likely.

I'm certain that guilds who have already defeated these encounters or who are on the verge of doing so will find that the adjustments make a big difference, but remember, that's because you've already refined a working strategy and have practiced the execution. Guilds coming into the fights for the first time will still need to handle the precise movement associated with the different Blackfuse phases, belt teams will have to learn to navigate the belt lasers consistently, and so forth. Both Blackfuse and Paragons will remain quite challenging. And then there's always Garrosh....

Re-using this thread for an additional update.

In the upcoming patch 5.4.7, we will be making a few small adjustments to the 10-player Heroic Garrosh encounter. There a few factors that contribute to a disparity between the difficulty of the encounter in 10-player mode versus 25-player mode, and these changes are intended to help correct for those differences.

We are slightly reducing Garrosh's health in all phases (by roughly 5%).

The fight as a whole is a series of hard DPS checks, where failing to meet certain benchmarks makes things tremendously harder if not impossible, but extra DPS above and beyond that threshold doesn't necessarily help all that much. We're seeing some kills (a minority, but some groups nonetheless) feeling the need to single-heal the fight even at this point, and that has a number of negative gameplay and social issues. We can't really prevent single-healing (other than by increasing the outgoing damage, which isn't an option at this point), but this change should at least make it so that no one feels they need to single-heal in order to meet the various checks, without lessening the coordination requirements of the rest of the fight.

We are reducing the health of Minions of Y'Shaarj (by roughly 10%).

Most 25-player groups are able to kite and otherwise control the Minions thanks to the additional available manpower, while 10-player groups generally have to kill them. This change should improve parity between modes by reducing the difficulty of this particular mechanic for 10-player groups.

We are increasing the clump size required to trigger an Iron Star in the final Heroic-only phase of the fight from 3 to 4.

Iron Star detection previously required 3 players on 10, and 8 on 25 (a standard ratio), but this causes a discrepancy when it comes to the overlap between Bombardment and Malice. Malice requires 2 soakers on 10H and 5 on 25H (again, a standard ratio), but this means that the total clump sizes required to handle Malice are actually 3 and 6 respectively, such that a 25-player group could cover soaking Malice #4 (which fully overlaps with Bombardment) without triggering Iron Stars, whereas a 10-player group generally could not. This change should, like the rest, increase parity when it comes to this mechanic.

"Why did you wait this long to make these changes?"

We're very conservative when it comes to reducing the difficulty of a Heroic final boss, since the entire point of such encounters is to represent the pinnacle of raiding challenge. For most of the initial months of the patch, the sample size of players killing Garrosh on each difficulty was too small to draw meaningful conclusions about the relative difficulty on 10 vs. 25, but now we've reached a point where it's clear that there's a problem, so we're taking the above actions.

"Thanks Blizz, way to nerf the only hard fight left in the game..."

Sorry, we do wish we'd gotten the tuning right in the first place. 10-Heroic Garrosh will still be plenty hard -- this is just bringing the encounter in line with its 25-player counterpart.