Raid and Dungeon Encounter Update

#0 - Aug. 2, 2007, 1:45 a.m.
Blizzard Post
I wanted to update everyone and highlight some upcoming changes in the 2.2 patch for some of our raid encounters. Many of these changes are not on test yet, and this isn't every single improvement that's being made.

Archimonde
- Archimonde's Fear had a recast time that could be very inconsistent, which would cause problems for tanks who were waiting to react to the fear being cast. Along with making the fear more consistent, the minimum time between fears has been increased and the casting time will be 1.5 seconds.
- Grip of the Legion will not be able to target players who were just Air Burst, and it now has a non-infinite range.
- Red Soul Charges silence for 4 seconds instead of 6 seconds.
- The bug where Priests with Spirit of Redemption creating two Soul Charges on death is fixed.

Mother Shahraz
- The players targeted by Saber Lash now gain the immunity to Sinister Beam and Fatal Attraction, regardless of whether or not Saber Lash actually landed.
- Shahraz will now pick a new beam to cast after every 3rd cast, instead of every 5th.
- The first two seconds of Fatal Attraction now deals reduced damage.
- Prismatic Shield has been completely reworked. The shield is no longer adaptive. She periodically picks a random school to be resistant to, and the "opposite" school gets a bonus. Casters rejoice.
- In a later patch, we're blocking off some of the nastier places to get placed by Fatal Attraction, and the "Couches of Death" we'll be fixed. In the meantime, you should be able to mitigate a problematic Fatal Attraction teleport by tanking Mother Shahraz away from these locations.
- Also in a later patch, we'll be able to disable the "decreased melee swing time" effect caused by Mother Shahraz parrying a melee attack. The parry mechanic is exacerbating the already rather intense burst damage that Mother Shahraz can inflict.

Reliquary of the Lost
- Essence of Desire's Spirit Shock and Rune Shield will no longer be able to be cast nearly simultaneously. We added in a very small, but very significant delay in between the two.

Prince Kael'thas
- Completing Phase 1 of the encounter will now take considerably less time.

Heroic Dungeon Changes
The list is too extensive to go into here, but we have been monitoring the Heroic Dungeon Feedback thread and we've made some further changes to quite a few trash creatures and bosses. A more complete list of changes will be available as 2.2 testing on the PTR progresses.

Tempest Keep and Serpentshrine Trash ability tuning
We're making some further adjustments to several of the more punishing abilities on trash creatures in these two zones.

I'll see you all at the Raid & Dungeon panel at Blizzcon!
#61 - Aug. 2, 2007, 6:43 p.m.
Blizzard Post
Some clarifications:

- Phase 3 of Kael'thas will be unchanged.
- I didn't mention that we also fixed the bug with Mother Shahraz where sometimes less than 3 players get teleported and linked by Fatal Attraction.
- Casters should indeed rejoice at the Fatal Attraction change, but when Shahraz gains a vulnerability to a school of magic it's nowhere near 90%. The intention is not to completely reverse the current situation and promote stacking the raid with casters instead of melee.
- There are no plans currently to globally shut off the "parried attack = the next swing comes sooner" mechanic, we'll be able to do it on a creature by creature basis where we feel it's warranted. It's just another tuning tool in our arsenal that allows us to better control the possible burst damage of an encounter, just like how we can turn off the ability for specific creatures to land crushing blows.