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  1. #1

    Dragon Soul Difficulty Changes Impact, Blue Tweets, Comics, MMO Report

    Diablo 3 - Beta Key Contest Continues, Updated Calculator, Where's Release?, Blue Posts, Diabolesques, and Guild Wars 2 Preview

    Statistics: Dragon Soul Difficulty Changes Impact
    Today we take a look at the impact of the 5% difficulty decrease of Dragon Soul that went live the week of January 31. Spine of Deathwing also saw a 15% reduction in health of the tendons at this time. This time around the sample size was ~5.6 million characters. As always, keep in mind that this sample contains many alts and should not be looked at for the percentage of the overall population that completed an achievement.

    We first look at Heroic Spine of Deathwing and Madness of Deathwing achievements added each week, seeing roughly 4x the number of new kills the week that the buff went live, then a lower amount of kills during the following week. The decrease in new kills is sharper on Spine of Deathwing at ~27% and only ~5% on Madness of Deathwing.

    We don't see the same effect for the number of new Heroic and Normal Deathwing kills. Using Destroyer's End as our method of measurement, we see only a small spike, not even passing the number of new kills that were earned during the week of December 6.

    The 5% decrease in difficulty made a much bigger impact to players that were stuck on a Heroic boss than it did for those who were stuck on a normal boss.

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    Blue Tweets
    Today was a holiday in the US and Bashiok and Zarhym are in France, leaving us with some tweets from Chris Metzen!

    Originally Posted by Metzen (Blue Tracker)
    So how many of you WoW players have played Warcraft 3?

    If a Warcraft character could come back from death, which would y'all like to see (provided the story was good)?

    None. Please PLEASE don't bring any more back. Make NEW stories.
    Working on it! Takes years to get you to care about new ones!

    Hey man, any chance we can see some more strong female villains in WoW apart from Naga? A female big bad would be cool sometime
    I'll see what I can do.

    Comics
    Dark Legacy Comics #327 and Teh Gladiators #316 + #317 are available!



    MMO-Report
    The MMO Report has World of Warcraft, The Secret World, and Uncle Casey's Mail Bag this week!

    Last edited by chaud; 2012-02-21 at 12:37 PM.

  2. #2
    love comics
    I take two in the morning.
    I take two at night,
    I take two in the afternoon
    and then I feel alright.
    I take two in time of peace,
    I take two in time of war.
    I take two before I take two
    and then I take two more

  3. #3
    Well, the spike is there, but not crazy as people thought it out to be. And they thought it would ruin the raid instance.
    My General Gaming Blog *Latest Updated: 9/25/14*

  4. #4
    OH they are SO bringing back Illidan.

  5. #5
    Well, according to that data it seems what Blizzard was going for happened. They said when they put in the nerf that a lot of guilds were roadblocked on heroic content, and it seems like heroic kills saw a spike, but regular is still going up steadily. I'd say it shows that gear coupled with somewhat elite skill is required for heroics, whereas regular is far less gear dependent (and less skill dependent as well).

  6. #6
    Quote Originally Posted by Renwin View Post
    Well, the spike is there, but not crazy as people thought it out to be. And they thought it would ruin the raid instance.
    Lol, Waiting for people to come on and go OMG LOOK HOW BIG THE GRAPH GETS without taking into account the scale bars. Remember as said this is out of a sample of 5.6 million and the scale is in SINGLE thousands.

    Please guys dont freak out without thinking through what youre saying.

  7. #7
    The big thing with Spine wasn't just a 5% nerf, but an additional 15% less hp on the tendon. On 25, getting 2-2-2 is pretty easy now. It doesn't surprise me that the curves for Spine and Madness look pretty similar because once you down Spine, the Madness kills only 1-5 days off. It took my guild two full nights to down Madness. Eventually one plate is going to be feasible on 10 man with Heroism, and that's when you'll see another significant spike. A 10 man 8/8 guild I'm friends with said they weren't far off when they tried, but a 10 or 15% nerf should allow them to do it consistently.

    Thanks for the graphs, they're always cool.
    Last edited by MrExcelion; 2012-02-21 at 05:35 AM.

  8. #8
    High Overlord ares1023's Avatar
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    Oh I wish they could some how bring Illidan back into WoW. I think a really awesome idea would be to actually have a War of the Ancients raid where you follow both Malfurion and Illidans side of the story, and have players involved in the battle fighting against the Burning Legion somehow. Would be good to include the battles of the demi-gods that fight there too. Otherwise I really would want to see Turalyon and Alleria back in the mix since they are currently MIA, and even more Medivh would be great. Blizzard should play it safe though and not bring anyone back from the dead, but re-incorporate old characters back in through means of Caverns of Time (as they did with the Well of Eternity instance).

  9. #9
    Just to think that over 1.5 million people were raiding in wrath just in 25 man raiding format alone. Oh where have all the raiders gone.

  10. #10
    Deleted
    Quote Originally Posted by DarkPhoenix View Post
    Lol, Waiting for people to come on and go OMG LOOK HOW BIG THE GRAPH GETS without taking into account the scale bars. Remember as said this is out of a sample of 5.6 million and the scale is in SINGLE thousands.

    Please guys dont freak out without thinking through what youre saying.
    The "thousands" from 5.6 million is as it should be - doubt all 5.6 million are heroic users
    Now to wonder what does other people do since most guilds are still stuck at normals and heroic guilds are almost clearing the raid already. Also yes, please please strong females apart from Sylvanas (who has been little silent). Now to cross fingers "enemy female story" doesnt turn into "lol sylv went bad"

  11. #11
    Deleted
    Quote Originally Posted by MrExcelion View Post
    The big thing with Spine wasn't just a 5% nerf, but an additional 15% less hp on the tendon. On 25, getting 2-2-2 is pretty easy now. It doesn't surprise me that the curves for Spine and Madness look pretty similar because once you down Spine, the Madness kills only 1-5 days off. It took my guild two full nights to down Madness. Eventually one plate is going to be feasible on 10 man with Heroism, and that's when you'll see another significant spike. A 10 man 8/8 guild I'm friends with said they weren't far off when they tried, but a 10 or 15% nerf should allow them to do it consistently.

    Thanks for the graphs, they're always cool.
    I can confirm it's similar on 10-man; we've just started progressing on it, and we're not seeing major issues downing the tendons with 2 lifts of each plate. I can, however, see how this would have been an uphill struggle before the nerfs, and really commend the people who managed to do it.

  12. #12
    Great comic from Dark Legacy. Love it.

  13. #13
    I have a question about these graphs: Are the lines between datapoints just interpolated spines or real data? if not it would be easier to interpret on first sight without the lines but with markings for special events like the date of the nerf.

  14. #14
    Quote Originally Posted by Hightotem View Post
    Just to think that over 1.5 million people were raiding in wrath just in 25 man raiding format alone. Oh where have all the raiders gone.
    Of which like 1m were getting locked to Marrowgar every week ^_^

  15. #15
    Mechagnome Honkeymagoo's Avatar
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    Dark legacy was hilarious.

  16. #16
    The real interesting comparison, and I think it's not currently possible due to Blizzard hiding the data from the Chaud's of the world, is how many in that same sample had completed Dragon Soul on LFR difficulty.

    The reason that would be an interesting comparison is that a total of less than 400,000 (heroic/normal DS achieve) seems low to me. It may well reflect a "negative" impact of LFR in that having "seen the content" and gotten welfare epics the incentive to continue at "higher" difficulty levels may have been greatly reduced.

    If LFR, in actuality, is lowering the incentive and/or desire to do normal/heroic raids then it's introduction may have had unintended consequences that will have a significant negative impact on the future of what we now refer to as "raiding" in WoW.
    Last edited by Sensa; 2012-02-21 at 06:16 AM.

  17. #17
    Quote Originally Posted by Mormolyce View Post
    Of which like 1m were getting locked to Marrowgar every week ^_^
    More then 1.6 million downed anub 25 in 25 man raiding guilds alone, this excludes the strict 10man guilds.
    1st 2 wings of ICC also had over 1.6 million in 25 man raiding alone.

  18. #18
    Hands down best Dark Legacy comic ever.

  19. #19
    Maybe I am not reading the graphs correctly but it looks like the rate of new kills decreased in each case the week the nerfs went live. The week leading up to the nerf (ending 31 January) is steeper than the week following it.

  20. #20
    Old God endersblade's Avatar
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    OK, how the HELL did I not know about Earthrise? Only to learn about it after they announce the closure of the servers >< God dammit! I just spent about an hour watching vids of that game, it's like Tabula Rasa! GRRRRRR!

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