[BCC] Why not pre-nerf Phase 3 PVE content?

#2 - Jan. 5, 2022, 7:29 p.m.

Pretty straightforward answer; there just wasn’t a lot of sweeping changes to Tier 6 content after it was released. We did a pretty thorough investigation of the data of each patch between 2.1 and 2.4.3, as well as looked at public patch notes and just came to the conclusion that there wasn’t enough of substance for an interesting pre-nerf difficulty.

Most “changes” were essentially bug fixes, with only Mother Shahraz and Archimonde seeing anything resembling a real mechanical change, and even they were actually fairly minor. Contrast that with Tier 4 and Tier 5 that had some major (and highly visible/memorable) mechanical changes happen between patch 2.0 and 2.1 and it just made a lot of sense to really dig in and go big with pre and post-nerf for those tiers.

Sunwell Plateau will have a pre and post-nerf state however, as there were more significant changes there.

#4 - Jan. 9, 2022, 10:56 a.m.

I agree that we could have been a bit more explicit. From our perspective it was “oh turn off the switch that enabled all those changes we made” essentially reverting it back to the 2.4.3 (post-nerf) state that we started with internally.

Of course, from the perspective of players clearing the content weekly, its not as obvious what we did to make it “pre-nerf” so its likewise not as obvious what gets nerfed when we turn those off. You can scour 15-year-old patch notes to try to figure it out, but we’ll try to be more explicit in the future. Sorry about that!

(We’re all busy, of course, so I can only say we’ll try our best! Time is everybody’s enemy! )

Regarding post-nerf stages in general, our overall philosophy was: “when the next tier unlocks we go to post-nerf,” but obviously we let T5 go a bit early so people could get attuned for Tier 6 over the holidays. Also, we need SOMETHING to trigger the nerf of Sunwell since we haven’t announced any content coming after it, so we’ll try to give you a heads-up about when that nerf is coming, but its obviously a ways off since we haven’t even released Hyjal and Black Temple yet. (Soon!)

We certainly want everybody to get a chance to experience the harder versions of these bosses as they were originally released, as well as giving people a chance to progress past them in the form the eventually ended up in.

Hope that helps clarify our intent, even if it doesn’t provide much in the way of details.

#5 - Jan. 10, 2022, 9:06 p.m.

I wanted to clarify that my previous post was a reply to:

It was very frustrating to only be given, “reverting to their nerfed state” re: t5 nerfs.

It was not a reply to the original post (I thought Aggrend answered that very well), and could have been clearer.

I just wanted to add that there are two competing goals here. There is an intentional aspect of discovery and exploration in our hardest content. I wasn’t intending to promise an exhaustive list of all boss mechanics, and I hope nobody took it that way. Only to say that after the content is already live and being defeated by players, and is about to transition to post-nerf, we can probably be better about clarifying what changes are part of that transition.

An example that springs to mind where I think we could have done better, is the post-nerf Karazhan attunement requirement (you can zone in without attuning, but somebody still needs to open the gate for you). After Serpentshrine Cavern and Tempest Keep were released, I saw at least one post where people were confused about whether that was an intentional change or not, and we could have been more explicit about the fact that it was always intended to work that way after Tier 5 was available.

So to sum up, I think we can do better about communicating changes to things that are live, but we’re not going to exhaustively list every single boss mechanic and their details, especially for content that isn’t yet live. Hope that clears up any confusion that came from by earlier post!