A new way to 'nerf' raids

[Markluzz]

This wasn't originally my idea it was blackmist's but it was buried in a thread never to be seen and I thought it was quite smart.

"Start the content at a low enough level that allows most players (not the 99%, but the middle 40%) to be able to clear normal in last tier's gear and heroic in current normal gear.

For the higher end players, have a boss buff that increases damage done and boss HP in 5% intervals. Progress is measured in how much of the buff you can handle before it becomes mathematically impossible (at which point another guild will prove you wrong with some neat class stacking). At the end of the raid patch, the top few percent get a mount and a title to show off.

In short, the very opposite of what we have now. The current model is flawed, the content suits a very narrow band of players at any one time. Blizzard also put a cap on the level of skill you can show. It would be like Usain Bolt running 100m in 9.58 seconds, and then just having it recorded as "100m in 10 seconds: World 58th"."

I'll add in my say by saying I like the idea but there needs to be extra perks for adding the buff and maybe even make it a challenge mode style raid except it just measures how fast you killed the boss, kill it fast enough you get the 5% nerf and a cosmetic reward. Plus killing the bosses with a 30% or more nerf, and when the next tier comes out your personal 'nerf progress' locks and rewards are given for making it to 30% or more and a mount to the guild that got the highest nerf with the fastest time on average for all the heroic bosses. The nerf would be on heroic only.

[boomkinhero]

I completely disagree. after clearing content, you don't want it to get harder. You want it on farm. The EXACT same stuff just doing more damage and more HP is part of what made Naxx2.0 such a travesty. If raids are designed correctly, a subtle nerf over time is exactly what is needed. A good example of this would be Heroic LK.. or rather its a little more of the upper-bounds of correctly "numbered" bosses.. since world first happened like a day before the release of the 10% buff. Your model would require essentially people to play over the entire duration of a patch to get rewarded, which is rather unfavorable to many people. Your addition reminds me of the original hardmodes in a way, back in Ulduar, which is a large reason why Ulduar is so favored. The heroic mode button isn't just an on-off switch, but a different mechanic to the fight, more interactive. Sinestra had a little hint of this, being a heroic-only boss as well.

All in all, it would be terrible to slowly buff content.

[Harsesis]

I'm still in favor of the old way of nerfing content and not the flat % nerfs they have been doing. I would prefer targeted nerfs to whatever seems to be the problem areas of a fight. If it's boss health giving enrage timers a problem then nerf that. If an ability is one shotting tanks then maybe make it require less cds to live through.

[Deleted]

I liked the ICC model which buffed the players, inflating their output. The only problem was that it inflated your output and they didn't want that :P

The steady nerfing over time we have now isn't too bad imho, as long as they don't nerf it too soon. By the time they start applying nerfs most hardcore guilds should have already cleared it so it helps people who are actually stuck. It's an easy model to implement as well, otherwise they would need to build a system that keeps track of your progress and automatically buffs/nerfs but that's almost impossible to do - groups change all the time so how do you decide that a certain group gets a nerfed boss and another a buffed boss? If you have to swap 2 top DPSers out for 2 crappy ones (or you lack heroism at one point) for the next boss but you got a buff on it you won't be able to down it.

Speaking as someone whose guild wasn't able to kill Madness normal with the nerf at less than 15% and only just killed HC Yor with 25% I can safely say that if not for the nerf we would probably have stopped raiding altogether. I'm not proud of or happy with this but such is the sad state of our DPS atm.

[Azshira]

I don't really like the idea but it has some interesting merits. My personal feeling on this matter is I never liked nerfs unless they were really needed because the encounter was ridiculous. The wall shouldn't need to be lowered over-time, players should attempt it as it is, it makes content last longer essentially, and if they get bored of trying to get over the wall over weeks/months is that a bad thing? Logically then they need to figure out a better strategy or tell player X to do better whilst farming for better gear. Practically any decent guild should be able to clear all normal modes and eventually try your worth against hcs. If you can't kill all hc content during that patch then so what? You just weren't good enough/ready, people need to accept that but the developers will never see it that way. The way they do things now is continually make the game easier and that throws off the majority of their long-time subs, it killed it personally for me too. I don't think they'll get it right with this xpac either and might even have gradual nerfs increments of % nerfs from tier 1, I hope not or the content gets too dull too soon in terms of raiding. My two cents.

[Deleted]

They should just make gear matter more tbh. I mean people killed DS hc in 2-3 weeks using mostly firelands gear eh?

[Zinnin]

I think things should be tuned the way the are currently. But whenever a 5% nerf goes in, you can choose to buff it by 5% instead. Once you get close to the next teir (lets say 2 months or so) they stop putting in buffs \ nerfs. Then things like titles \ mounts should go to guilds that have cleared it in the top difficulty.

If it starts out too easy it takes months for the PvE race to mean anything, and that will be not fun. However If every month or so a 5% difficulty increase goes in, it gives top end guilds something to strive for, and gives them a reason to keep improving instead of slacking off for 6 months and getting bored \ quitting the game.

[Tharkkun]

I'm still in favor of the old way of nerfing content and not the flat % nerfs they have been doing. I would prefer targeted nerfs to whatever seems to be the problem areas of a fight. If it's boss health giving enrage timers a problem then nerf that. If an ability is one shotting tanks then maybe make it require less cds to live through.

The old way they would basically modify each boss's damage output 5%. It required changing each boss and every mechanic so that could be hundreds of changes per tier. With the buff it achieves the same goal but with 1 single change required.

[Deleted]

I don't really like the idea but it has some interesting merits. My personal feeling on this matter is I never liked nerfs unless they were really needed because the encounter was ridiculous. The wall shouldn't need to be lowered over-time, players should attempt it as it is, it makes content last longer essentially, and if they get bored of trying to get over the wall over weeks/months is that a bad thing? Logically then they need to figure out a better strategy or tell player X to do better whilst farming for better gear. Practically any decent guild should be able to clear all normal modes and eventually try your worth against hcs. If you can't kill all hc content during that patch then so what? You just weren't good enough/ready, people need to accept that but the developers will never see it that way. The way they do things now is continually make the game easier and that throws off the majority of their long-time subs, it killed it personally for me too. I don't think they'll get it right with this xpac either and might even have gradual nerfs increments of % nerfs from tier 1, I hope not or the content gets too dull too soon in terms of raiding. My two cents.

At the risk of sounding like a mod suck up, this is exactly right.

Nerfs should be for fixing "inbalanced" encounters, not for downtuning so x% more people can kill content.
Encounters are already passively nerfed each week as the raid group increases in ilvl and skill, why the need to dumb it down from the other end simultaneously.

[Harsesis]

The old way they would basically modify each boss's damage output 5%. It required changing each boss and every mechanic so that could be hundreds of changes per tier. With the buff it achieves the same goal but with 1 single change required.

Yes it would be more work on Blizzard's end but I believe it's better for the playerbase overall.

[Iracor]

So what you want is for pve content to follow the pvp model. The problem with that is that guilds will have to go incredibly try hard constantly and it wouldn't be able to sustain itself. The top guilds in your model would be the guilds that are capable of forming multiple runs to maximize their gear output. Even in current tiers people aren't able to get full bis before the next tier is released, so you'd have guilds that are screwed over just because they aren't able to sustain multiple 25-man raid groups.

Your model would also make 25-man raids have a distinct advantage against 10-mans in that a 25-man guild has a higher chance of actually obtaining the gear they need. Blizzard has stated that they want for 25-mans and 10-mans to be fairly equal in terms of progression potential.

It's also worth noting that your sort of model would put pve class balance under a microscope and would require extensive internal testing on Blizzard's part to prevent any gimmicky class stacking like feral druids on Nef. Blizzard tends to nerf the various class stacking strats once they've been used for a kill and it becomes public. This would stir quite a bit of controversy in that the guilds that were able to get kills with those class stacked raids would be "ranked" higher than guilds that are no longer able to class stack due to nerfs/hotfixes. You could remove those kills from the "ladder", but then the guilds that did class stack would claim it was a completely viable strat based on the fight they were given before the hotfixes.

[Tharkkun]

Yes it would be more work on Blizzard's end but I believe it's better for the playerbase overall.

Why spend more time doing the same thing just to make people feel warm and fuzzy inside? Besides there's a far greater risk of introducing a bug by changing every ability on a boss. So for example, they could change http://www.wowhead.com/spell=103327
and modify it 5% less on 10/25/10H/25H including the change to the tooltip which takes a client side patch.

Or they could add the zone buff for 5% which covers it all. So from a programming standpoint the zone wide buff is the best solution.

[Gihelle]

How about we just don't nerf anything at all and people adapt to farming at that %?

[smegdawg]

I like the increasing buff that rewards something before the next patch.

[Vanisari]

They should just make gear matter more tbh. I mean people killed DS hc in 2-3 weeks using mostly firelands gear eh?

I agree with this. The upgrades from the previous tier to the current needs to be more significant. For instance, gear check fights should be next to impossible if the majority of your raid isn't in the current tier. It would slow down progression and make content last longer (in theory. The community would probably rage over it.)

[hellcat1991]

well tbh the nerf should only affect normal modes like they did for t11 content when the nerf happend i was able to kill all the bosses on normal and i was happy with that which is the way it should be.

[Zinnin]

I like the increasing buff that rewards something before the next patch.

I think if they implemented something like this well it would solve a lot of qq for players that hate the nerf, it won't matter if the content is nerfed if the people are given another way to continue progression after 8\8H is cleared. I would love to see a 'renewed' progression race every month or so when the next increasing buff goes out.

Hell, maybe my guild would still be raiding right now instead of just sitting around waiting for mists to release if we had a goal to work towards like 8\8H with a 20% buff

[Dracodraco]

Your model would also make 25-man raids have a distinct advantage against 10-mans in that a 25-man guild has a higher chance of actually obtaining the gear they need. Blizzard has stated that they want for 25-mans and 10-mans to be fairly equal in terms of progression potential.

that part is just not true, unless you use biased methods of calculating the odds (EG, assume the 10 man team has 3 cloth users and the 25 man only has 6, instead of the 8-9 they're supposed to in that calculation). There's the same chance for the raid as an unit to gain BiS in 10 and 25 man, however, for the individual there is a higher chance in 25 man (which on the other hand means that other people get shafted, so it is not a valid way to run a guild).

The rest of what you say, I agree with - optimising gear intake would become way too big of a thing for guilds, along with the race lasting an entire tier, only to be replaced by another race - or in worst case, the top 10 guilds would be doing 5-10 25man raids a week to maximise gear and get BiS for everyone, then pound the hardest difficulty they can possibly squeeze through when EVERYONE are decked in 100% BiS. Meaning the race becomes about who can run the most alt raids, and who has the stamina to keep raiding to get BiS before attempting anything "hard".