Current content difficulty over time

[Dextralus]

I've been reading a lot of fail lately, of which a great deal is based on a total misunderstanding of Blizzard's stated design with regards to raid difficulty over time. While I'm not here to comment on the merits (or lack thereof) of that design, I'm getting awfully tired of seeing people whining and boasting who have clearly not read any of the Blues explaining their intentions. So I made an ugly graph to clear some things up and, hopefully, succinctly demonstrate Blizzard's stated plan with an arbitrary difficulty scale:



As you can see, Heroic mode receives few to no nerfs in difficulty over time. Of course there may be bugfixes and adjustments which may alter the difficulty slightly - I chose not to represent this. Every major raid tier added is immediately preceded by a drop in difficulty of the then-current normal mode raid tier. Allegedly this is so that new guilds are realistically capable of catching up in content, but it also throws a bone to the less skilled guilds. The prestige associated with normal mode raiding (whatever you assign to it) will naturally drop, but that associated with heroic raiding should stay approximately the same. Of course the heroic rewards will eventually lose their prestige as people become geared from higher tiers and the earlier content becomes more and more amenable to facerolling.

There is one bit of guesswork here: I'm not entirely sure how much more difficult each raiding tier is going to become, relative to its predecessor. To make the graph a bit more clear (at least to me), the changes in heroic difficulty from tier to tier are exaggerated somewhat, while the changes in normal difficulty are compressed. Also, the final tier of content (I took a guess here and assumed two more after Firelands) may or may not receive nerfs under this plan by Blizzard.


Final note: As I stated above, I'm not here to argue for or against this scheme. For the sake of full disclosure, I'm not even subscribed at the moment and have no stake in the nerfs - but the reasons are financial rather than game-based.

Sanity addendum: Read this before posting

[zealous]

1) that graph isn't really very clear, you should explain that those sections are supposed to be tiers or you're gonna confuse people

2) where did you get the idea that hc mode receives no nerfs? from what I saw in the patch notes, most of the boss abilities were scaled down in heroic too

3) what financial reasons might we be talking about here? oO

[Dextralus]

1- I did explain it - in the paragraph. I don't have a lot of graphing skills (particularly not in Open Office where I made that) but I will keep that in mind and perhaps go through and edit the graph in GNUpaint later.

2 - show me the heroic nerfs. If they're there and as strong as the normal nerfs, I will by all means fix the graph. The key point here is that I'm trying to represent what Blizzard is saying that they want to do, not what they're actually doing (or will do)

3 - I can't afford a sub right now

[zombie0]

what does the left side of the graph represent? we can assume difficulty (making it a difficulty vs time graph), but then the lines dont make sense. specifically the heroic lines, but also what the control group we are observing is. are we looking at some specific guild with specific players that never change? are we looking at pug groups?

how can previous tier heroic stay higher, especially high enough to never reach the highest normal mode. typically, the end boss in normal mode is harder than at least a few of the fights in heroic. is this represented? no, because the graph is mushing together far far too many variables that must be assumed or ignored to reach this pattern.

tl:dr useless graph. please reconsider your lazy slap-dash observations and put some actual work into them before you push the "post" button again. please.

[zealous]

1- I did explain it - in the paragraph. I don't have a lot of graphing skills (particularly not in Open Office where I made that) but I will keep that in mind and perhaps go through and edit the graph in GNUpaint later.

2 - show me the heroic nerfs. If they're there and as strong as the normal nerfs, I will by all means fix the graph. The key point here is that I'm trying to represent what Blizzard is saying that they want to do, not what they're actually doing (or will do)

3 - I can't afford a sub right now

Much easier to show you the only lines in that giant wall of text that the patch notes are that have the word "normal" in them:

1. "The damage modifier on Normal has been reduced for Arion, Elementium Monstrosity, Feludius, Ignacius, and Terrastra."

2. "Atramedes. Modulation no longer causes Sound in normal difficulty."

3. "Al'Akir. Will no longer use Static Shock on normal difficulty in phase 1 or phase 2."

Everything else seems to apply to both normal and heroic as far as I can tell, i.e. stuff like "Chimaeron. Health reduced by 20% and melee damage reduced by 10%."

And there's a lot more lines not mentioning normal mode than the ones that do.

[vizzle]

1- I did explain it - in the paragraph. I don't have a lot of graphing skills (particularly not in Open Office where I made that) but I will keep that in mind and perhaps go through and edit the graph in GNUpaint later.

2 - show me the heroic nerfs. If they're there and as strong as the normal nerfs, I will by all means fix the graph. The key point here is that I'm trying to represent what Blizzard is saying that they want to do, not what they're actually doing (or will do)

3 - I can't afford a sub right now

There are always heroic nerfs, they just aren't as extreme as the normal mode nerfs. Omnitron, Atramedes, Halfus, Maloriak, Nefarian, everything was nerfed. But it wasn't. The red line should go down a bit per tier, but not as drastically as the blue line goes down, and then I think your graph would be more accurate.

[Dextralus]

what does the left side of the graph represent? we can assume difficulty (making it a difficulty vs time graph), but then the lines dont make sense. specifically the heroic lines, but also what the control group we are observing is. are we looking at some specific guild with specific players that never change? are we looking at pug groups?

Didn't label my axis - fair enough (that will be fixed). However I'm getting the distinct feeling you didn't read most of the post if you're wondering about a control group. With regards to guild vs pug - could you explain a bit more? The "difficulty" is going to be higher regardless of whether a pug or a guild is going to face a given challenge, but the Guild will certainly (I hope) have an easier time dealing with it because of coordination.

how can previous tier heroic stay higher, especially high enough to never reach the highest normal mode. typically, the end boss in normal mode is harder than at least a few of the fights in heroic. is this represented? no, because the graph is mushing together far far too many variables that must be assumed or ignored to reach this pattern.

This is primarily related to the compression problem that - surprise - I already mentioned. Because the final raid tier is speculative and we're dealing with somewhat of a new policy, I wasn't comfortable assuming that the Deathwing tier would be equal in challenge to the beginning level heroics. It may well be! In the end I chose not to have the end of the normal line not reach the minimum of the heroic line, but that's a fair point and it may bear out that I was wrong on that. The salient point was supposed to be the differences in the behaviour of the two lines, not their exact values - which is why the difficulty scale is abitrary.


tl:dr useless graph. please reconsider your lazy slap-dash observations and put some actual work into them before you push the "post" button again. please.[/QUOTE]

[vizzle]

Much easier to show you the only lines in that giant wall of text that the patch notes are that have the word "normal" in them:

1. "The damage modifier on Normal has been reduced for Arion, Elementium Monstrosity, Feludius, Ignacius, and Terrastra."

2. "Atramedes. Modulation no longer causes Sound in normal difficulty."

3. "Al'Akir. Will no longer use Static Shock on normal difficulty in phase 1 or phase 2."

Everything else seems to apply to both normal and heroic as far as I can tell, i.e. stuff like "Chimaeron. Health reduced by 20% and melee damage reduced by 10%."

And there's a lot more lines not mentioning normal mode than the ones that do.

I am pretty sure all those nerfs are normal mode only. If you read through it, none of the mechanics nerfed are heroic-mode only mechanics, which would be part of the 20% across the board nerf if it was a heroic mode nerf, which it isn't. It's just normal modes.

[Dextralus]

Much easier to show you the only lines in that giant wall of text that the patch notes are that have the word "normal" in them:

Zealous, I am afraid you have not done the required reading, but thanks for responding regardless

[zealous]

I am pretty sure all those nerfs are normal mode only. If you read through it, none of the mechanics nerfed are heroic-mode only mechanics, which would be part of the 20% across the board nerf if it was a heroic mode nerf, which it isn't. It's just normal modes.

How do you see stuff like this as a normal mode only nerf:

"Magmaw - Damage and hit points reduced by 20%"
"Maloriak - Health, damage, Aberation health/damage, Arcane Storm damage, Prime Subject damage, Flash Freeze/Shatter damage, and Scorching Blast damage has all been decreased by 20%."
"Chimaeron Health reduced by 20% and melee damage reduced by 10%."
"Halfus Health, melee damage, Fireball/Fireball Barrage damage, Furious Roar damage, Scorching Breath damage, Shadow Nova damage, has all been reduced by 20%."

Nowhere in those sentences or anywhere near them are there mentioned the words "normal" or "heroic", while in this one, there is:

"The damage modifier on Normal has been reduced for Arion, Elementium Monstrosity, Feludius, Ignacius, and Terrastra."

What's the sense in clearly stating "normal mode" in one sentence and not stating in the others unless it's an all-mode nerf?

Only thing I see from the lack of heroic mode ability nerfs is just that - the lack of heroic mode ability nerfs.

---------- Post added 2011-05-25 at 04:03 PM ----------

Zealous, I am afraid you have not done the required reading, but thanks for responding regardless

Well in that case the patch notes are a bit confusing and sloppy. I don't really make it my business to track down every blue post that might be relevant to a random thread on mmochamp. Sorry.

[Dextralus]

Worry not, zealous, I had not yet put that link in the OP when you posted

EDIT: I agree the patch notes are not great. Blizzard assumes that everyone realises that if they don't specify heroic (or both), that changes apply only to Normal mode.

[zealous]

Worry not, zealous, I had not yet put that link in the OP when you posted

EDIT: I agree the patch notes are not great. Blizzard assumes that everyone realises that if they don't specify heroic (or both), that changes apply only to Normal mode.

Well if they didn't specify AT ALL, I would maybe assume they just missed an explanatory sentence at the start.

But it's quite stupid to clarify in one nerf "this is for normal mode, guys" and to not mention a thing about modes in all the others. Makes me assume that since that one was "for normal", every other one is for both modes.

[Dextralus]

My guess is that Blizzard originally intended to specify normal modes for all the nerfs, then decided that would be a waste of text, and then didn't edit their notes very well. It's a crappy way of communicating a change, to be sure, when a simple "Normal unless otherwise stated" would have sufficed.

[Rockmanzero]

Ok is very simple.
Hardcore/people with a brain goes away because it is too easy.
Whiners always whine but always stay so Blizz gives them what they want.
A game where you literally get evrything altho you don't know what the **** to do.

And that is the reason why Blizzard still gets money from whiners and not from the people that are hardcore or have a brain.

(This is also the reason I stopped playing WoW but get back here every day out of habit (Bad Habits)).

[cFortyfive]

Not sure what this is supposed to show...hardmodes received several significant nerfs already a couple weeks ago.