Patch 9.2 Hotfixes - May 2, 2022

[Stoy]

Patch 9.2 Hotfixes - May 2, 2022

Classes

• Death Knight
  
  • Blood
    
    • [With realm restarts] (2) Set Bonus: Maximum Strength stack cap is now 40 (was 75).
      
• Hunter
  
  • Ambuscade (Conduit) will now grant the correct amount of cooldown reduction to Disengage at item level 278.
    
  • Beast Mastery
    
    • [With realm restarts] All damage abilities increased by 4%.
      
      • This change does not apply to PvP combat.
        
• Monk
  
  • Windwalker
    
    • [With realm restarts] All damage abilities increased by 4%.
      
      • This change does not apply to PvP combat.
        
• Rogue
  
  • Outlaw
    
    • [With realm restarts] All damage abilities increased by 4%.
      
• Priest
  
  • Holy
    
    • Guardian Spirit will no longer fail to heal an ally who receives multiple fatal blows at the same time.
      
• Warrior
  
  • Arms
    
    • [With realm restarts] All damage abilities increased by 4%.
      
• Warlock
  
  • Affliction
    
    • [With realm restarts] All damage abilities increased by 4%.
      

Dungeons and Raids

• Sepulcher of the First Ones
  
  • Vigilant Guardian
    
    • Fixed an issue where dying with the Unstable Core could cause it to become non-interactive.
      
  • Lihuvim, Principal Architect
    
    • Lihuvim's corpse can no longer become stuck in the air if killed while casting Realignment.
      
    • [With realm restarts] Acquisitions Automa's Detonation radius reduced to 20 yards (was 40) on Normal and Heroic difficulties.
      
    • [With realm restarts] The cast time of Detonation has been increased to 2.5 seconds (was 2 seconds) on Normal and Heroic difficulties.
      
  • Artificer Xy’mox
    
    • [With realm restarts] Xy Spellslinger health reduced by 20%.
      
    • [With realm restarts] Debilitating Ray periodic damage reduced by 20%.
      
  • Prototype Pantheon
    
    • [With realm restarts] Wildstorm has been removed from Normal and Raid finder difficulties.
      
    • [With realm restarts] Sinful Projections has been removed from Heroic difficulty.
      
    • [With realm restarts] Decreased the health of Necrotic Ritualists by 30% health on Normal difficulty, 15% health on Heroic difficulty.
      
    • [With realm restarts] Decreased the health of Withering Seeds by 30% health on Normal and Raid Finder difficulties, 20% health on Heroic difficulty, and 10% health on Mythic difficulty, but also resolved a bug that caused them to trigger an Invigorating Bloom at 90% health instead of 100% health as the spell description states.
      
    • [With realm restarts] Resolved a scaling issue causing the Withering Seeds to increase their health too steeply on larger raid sizes.
      
  • Halondrus the Reclaimer
    
    • Fixed an issue causing damage from Lance and Lightshatter Beam to ignore some damage reduction effects.
      
    • Fixed an issue causing Volatile Charges to break if the player carrying the Volatile Charge disconnected.
      
    • [With realm restarts] Lightshatter Beam damage decreased by 30% on Raid Finder, Normal and Heroic difficulties.
      
    • [With realm restarts] Reclaim's periodic damage effect scales more slowly on Heroic difficulty.
      
  • Skolex, the Insatiable Ravener
    
    • [With realm restarts] Missile travel time for Devouring Blood increased to 2.5s (was 2s) on Heroic difficulty.
      
  • Dausegne, the Fallen Oracle
    
    • [With realm restarts] Duration of Disintegration Halo debuff lowered to 5s (was 6s) on Heroic difficulty.
      
  • Rygelon
    
    • [With realm restarts] Increased the duration of Collapsing Quasar Field to 10 seconds on Normal and Heroic difficulties.
      
    • [With realm restarts] Decreased Rygelon's health by 5% on Heroic difficulty.
      
  • The Jailer
    
    • [With realm restarts] All trapdoors will now close in Phase 3 on Normal difficulty.
      
    • [With realm restarts] Decreased knockback of Decimator on Normal and Raid Finder difficulties.
      
    • [With realm restarts] Decreased knockback of Misery on Normal difficulty.
      
    • [With realm restarts] Decreased rate of growth of Defile on Normal difficulty.
      

• Tazavesh, The Veiled Market
  
  • Fixed an issue causing Bazaar Strongarms to sometimes ignore a player carrying market goods.
    
  • P.O.S.T. Master
    
    • Fixed an issue where the P.O.S.T. Master was missing a boss frame.
      
• Mythic+
  
  • Encrypted Affix
    
    • Fixed a bug that would cause two sets of Encrypted Relics to spawn with Amarth, the Harvester after the boss reset in The Necrotic Wake.
      
    • Fixed a bug that could sometimes prevent Encrypted Relics from spawning with the dueling warlords before Xav the Unfallen in Theater of Pain.
      

Player versus Player

• Items
  
  • [With realm restarts] Gladiator's Echoing Resolve now increases the duration of crowd control by 25% (was 20%).
    
  • [With realm restarts] Gladiator's Echoing Resolve now lasts 12 seconds (was 15 seconds).
    
  • [With realm restarts] Gladiator's Echoing Resolve no longer increases the duration of root effects.
    
  • [With realm restarts] Gladiator's Echoing Resolve no longer causes the target to become immune to root effects.
    

[thunderdragon2]

I'm surprised they only nerfed the jailor on normal, was expecting hc also to entice ppl to get their curve, also BM need more then 4% but I'll take what I can get at the moment

[LordVargK]

I'm wondering about some of those nerfs... Pantheon and Dausegne are already easy enough. Jailer on normal is also pretty easy and the knockback on normal is minimal as is...
My biggest wish is an "hardmode" option for Vigilant Guardian, where you can spawn all the adds at the same time. The first phase is 50% waiting for enemies to spawn while doing absolutely nothing, that's terrible encounter design.

[Leadsop]

Buff to BM Hunter? They finally got around to an across-the-board 4% buff that's been needed for 4 years?

[Pratt]

Anima storm or wild stampede. Wildstorm not a thing?

[Mardux]

Buff to BM Hunter? They finally got around to an across-the-board 4% buff that's been needed for 4 years?

Now thats just false.

[Twdft]

I'm surprised they only nerfed the jailor on normal, was expecting hc also to entice ppl to get their curve, also BM need more then 4% but I'll take what I can get at the moment

Blizzard looks at how many raids are stuck on a boss and nerf it accordingly. Expect Jailer nerfs in 2 or 3 weeks when the current Ryg nerfs result in enough kills for people to get stuck on Jailer.

[Gogox]

#UncapBladeFlurry

[Phob]

Buff to BM Hunter? They finally got around to an across-the-board 4% buff that's been needed for 4 years?

4 years? have you even been playing for 4 years?

[exochaft]

Just remember, "the raid isn't overtuned", "4pc + double leggo will fix it", etc. etc. etc.

Dead horse beating and copium overdosing aside, these changes are not insignificant, which is kind of worrying to some degree. There has been a gradual problem over the years that Blizz has been tuning people out of their desired difficulty of content by increasing its difficulty over time, and having to implement such nerfs so late is likely an indication that people aren't progressing to where they did last tier.

Heck, even the mythic Hall of Fame looks abysmal for this time in the raid's life... especially Alliance, as there's still only 6 guilds that have cleared the raid on mythic, although Horde only have 66 HoF slots filled. As a comparison, you'd typically have about 40 Alliance guilds in the HoF as well as an already-full Horde HoF by now, even if you account for the extra week this tier of delayed bosses. If your best of the best is taking a lot longer than normal even compared to other end-of-expansion raids, there's likely some sort of problem. The most optimistic reason is that the raid is difficult to where people are just behind normal progression, the less optimistic (but realistic) reasons are that less people are playing the game in general compared to other end-of-expansion times, or people thought the raid was too difficult (either from playing it or word-of-mouth) and just stopped progression at a boss... or just stopped progressing period.

This is one of those issues that people reference when they talk about Blizz 'catering to the 1%', as it mainly has to do with effects that trickle down. If you make or design content for a minority of players that doesn't adversely affect everyone else, no one would complain... well, you'd get a few trolls, but it'd barely register on anyone's radar. The issue comes in when you design content for a minority of players that does adversely affect everyone else, and how Blizz goes about designing and balancing raids does that... even beyond just the raids itself, as it affects M+, gearing/scaling of gear, world content, and so forth. I used to be one of those people who got really excited for the introduction of mythic raiding at the end of MoP, but looking back I realize that its implementation and trickle-down effect on the game over time was likely very damaging to the game as a whole.

There are ways to add difficult content to the game without adversely affecting everyone else, but the way Blizz does things right now has too many negative implications on other aspects of the game. Unfortunately, even with all the Dragonflight announcements and interviews, everything positive seems to be done as a form of placation, not fundamental philosophical change. At a macro level, Dragonflight is like implementing hotfixes to WoW as a whole game, but they're still not addressing fundamental issues/flaws with the game itself, as well as showing no signs of addressing said issues/flaws anytime soon.

[Neotart]

Just remember, "the raid isn't overtuned", "4pc + double leggo will fix it", etc. etc. etc.

Dead horse beating and copium overdosing aside, these changes are not insignificant, which is kind of worrying to some degree. There has been a gradual problem over the years that Blizz has been tuning people out of their desired difficulty of content by increasing its difficulty over time, and having to implement such nerfs so late is likely an indication that people aren't progressing to where they did last tier.

Heck, even the mythic Hall of Fame looks abysmal for this time in the raid's life... especially Alliance, as there's still only 6 guilds that have cleared the raid on mythic, although Horde only have 66 HoF slots filled. As a comparison, you'd typically have about 40 Alliance guilds in the HoF as well as an already-full Horde HoF by now, even if you account for the extra week this tier of delayed bosses. If your best of the best is taking a lot longer than normal even compared to other end-of-expansion raids, there's likely some sort of problem. The most optimistic reason is that the raid is difficult to where people are just behind normal progression, the less optimistic (but realistic) reasons are that less people are playing the game in general compared to other end-of-expansion times, or people thought the raid was too difficult (either from playing it or word-of-mouth) and just stopped progression at a boss... or just stopped progressing period.

This is one of those issues that people reference when they talk about Blizz 'catering to the 1%', as it mainly has to do with effects that trickle down. If you make or design content for a minority of players that doesn't adversely affect everyone else, no one would complain... well, you'd get a few trolls, but it'd barely register on anyone's radar. The issue comes in when you design content for a minority of players that does adversely affect everyone else, and how Blizz goes about designing and balancing raids does that... even beyond just the raids itself, as it affects M+, gearing/scaling of gear, world content, and so forth. I used to be one of those people who got really excited for the introduction of mythic raiding at the end of MoP, but looking back I realize that its implementation and trickle-down effect on the game over time was likely very damaging to the game as a whole.

There are ways to add difficult content to the game without adversely affecting everyone else, but the way Blizz does things right now has too many negative implications on other aspects of the game. Unfortunately, even with all the Dragonflight announcements and interviews, everything positive seems to be done as a form of placation, not fundamental philosophical change. At a macro level, Dragonflight is like implementing hotfixes to WoW as a whole game, but they're still not addressing fundamental issues/flaws with the game itself, as well as showing no signs of addressing said issues/flaws anytime soon.

Tldr
/10char

[Tiwack]

Last bosses in the raid still need addressing for flex, they're way too dificult as it is for 10m compared to 30m due to number of significant abilities being the same regardless of raidsize.

[Alayea]

Posting a snippet I made elsewhere since it's relevant to the discussion here:

My AOTC guild only defeated Sire Denathrius and Sylvanas Windrunner four times each, and at least one kill from both were us helping out another guild get the achievement. To compare, for example, we defeated Queen Azshara in BfA more times total than those two bosses combined. That is how painful raiding has been this expansion, and Blizzard's tuning for 1% of the 1% has only hurt everyone not gunning for CE.

These are much-needed nerfs here, but like @exochaft said earlier, I'm not convinced that Blizzard has changed the overall philosophy. If there's anything I could compare my SL raiding experience to, it would be patch 5.0 when Blizzard upped the tuning difficulty for Normal raiding without communicating the design change to the raiding community and didn't acknowledge it 'til near the end of MoP. The "Flexible" raiding difficulty that existed during patch 5.4.0 helped rectify some of the damage, but it was still too little and far too late.