Blizzard is testing a series of nerfs which will be applied to Ulduar which fit in with their philosophy on raiding in World of Warcraft Wrath of the Lich King.
As a bit of a semi-hardcore WOW player I don’t like it when Blizzard nerf’s great content: the guild I’m in is slowly, but not too slowly, going through the 25 man raids within Uldar and it seams a shame to make it easier for those not already fortunate enought to be able to reach the end game content in Wrath of the Lich King yet.
See http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=16888489439&pageNo=5&sid=1#99 for Blizzards Blue post.
It’s a good post, Aavryn. Thank you for taking the time to write up some good feedback for us.
With that said, I think our views on raid content are at odds. If you’re having difficulty comparing the raid content of Wrath to the raid content of Burning Crusade, it’s because our philosophy changed a little bit. You say Ulduar’s difficulty is supposed to be on par with SSC and TK, but that’s not really true. The primary goal in this expansion — and the reason we’ve implemented 10/25-player, and hard modes — is to give as many people access to the raid content as possible. Just given the nature of raid dungeons, so many resources need to be poured into making them, from art, design, and story boarding, to programming and testing. It’s a very intensive process and we want our players to experience the end result.
For this reason we’re continuing with the philosophy that pick-up groups should have some level of success when raiding. Coordination and effort will still be necessary, as will the appropriate level of gear; but we don’t want capable groups hitting brick walls, at least not within the first few boss encounters of Ulduar.
The difference in difficulty between 10-player and 25-player modes should also be fairly minimal. The distinction here is between the guilds that might not have the resources to more-than-double the size of their raid. 25-player content should be more difficult, but only incrementally. You’ll find all the brick walls and incredibly challenging encounters in hard modes, and they’re worth the effort and status for the experienced raiders.
I hope you don’t take any of this to mean we expect anyone to waltz through Ulduar. That’s not necessarily the case. You still need to know what you’re doing and be appropriately geared for the fights. Even so, we want to get players in the door and have them feeling a natural, though slight progression in difficulty with each boss encountered.
When it comes to nerfing difficulty, we do intentionally tend to slightly over-tune things at the start. Our goal is to watch players of all levels of skill attempt each encounter, and then adjust the encounters according to the percentage of raids we expect to be killing specific bosses. While some may see this as us giving content to be people who don’t deserve it, we feel it’s a lot better than taking away content if we were, say, to make encounters too easy from the start and then buff them up after the fact.
The days of a marginal amount of players having a go at our raid dungeons are mostly over. We’re continuing to brain storm ideas to keep the most-skilled raiders feeling challenged and rewarded, but we’re going to continue ensuring that smaller guilds and players who haven’t as much time to play each week get a reasonable chance to progress in each Wrath raid dungeon released.
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