Hypocritical Blizzard Garalon Hotfix?

#1 - Nov. 2, 2012, 1:29 a.m.

Blizzard has stated on many occasions before that they don't hotfix bosses midweek as it's unfair for the guilds that raid on the days before the hotfix. For example, heart of the wild change on Heroic Gara'jal wasn't implemented until the next raid week.

Well now we have 2 Garalon Hotfixes in the middle of the week. First his enrage timer is increased by a minute and now his mend leg ability is cast more often.

Why is this happening? It's pretty contradictory to what they've been saying.

Edit: Stone Guard Heroic + Normal also nerfed? (Jasper Chains are cast less)

Edit2: In regards to the Bashiok's post, thanks for the reply; however it is actually required to complete normal to unlock heroic modes. We raid on Tuesdays and Wednesdays and we literally spent 2-3 hours wiping to normal Garalon with 5% left on the enrage timer and those 2-3 hours could have been spent clearing the rest of the instance to actually unlock heroic mode.

With the advent of that nerf, we basically wasted a raid night whereas guilds who raid multiple nights or after Tuesday would be able to do the encounter in its nerfed form thus allowing them a lot more time to clear the instance and unlock heroic modes. I just feel like this all could have been fixed if the encounter was properly tested - I believe his health was doubled compared to the beta however was there no internal testing to actually see if his new enrage timer is obtainable in reasonable levels of gear?

Bashiok

Community Manager

#6 - Nov. 2, 2012, 2:35 a.m.

The hotfix list posted covers a pretty large window of time (October 26 - Nov 1, as stated). The Jasper Chains change on Stone Guard was made at the end of last week, and corrected the fact that the ability was being cast with roughly the same frequency on 10-player as on 25-player mode. This meant that an entire 10-player raid could quickly find themselves chained to each other, while a majority of a 25-player group would still have been unfettered after the same amount of time. That was never our intent.

Now, as for the Garalon hotfixes, the Mend Leg hotfix was made on Tuesday afternoon, before more than a few dozen people in the world had seen the encounter at all, and certainly before any guilds had defeated it. The berserk hotfix was enacted the following morning. Ultimately, both of these hotfixes were intended to bring the DPS requirement down to an appropriate level for a Normal mode encounter halfway through the zone. Normal mode encounters should be reasonably beatable using available Normal mode gear; we were seeing Heroic-caliber guilds with a significant number of ilvl 502 items (from Heroic Mogu’shan, and more powerful than the handful of 496 epics available from the first two bosses of Heart of Fear) struggling to meet the berserk timer on the fight. We made an adjustment accordingly, and we feel that Garalon remains a step up in difficulty from the prior two encounters in the zone.

Our rationale regarding avoiding midweek hotfixes that make a fight easier only applies to Heroic encounters: When a guild encounters a Heroic boss that seems excessively difficult, they may opt to defeat it on Normal and move on. If we make the fight easier midweek, they don’t have the option to go back and fight that easier version, and that can be frustrating and seem unfair. A Normal mode brick wall is a brick wall regardless, so there is no such potential unfairness.

Bashiok

Community Manager

#9 - Nov. 2, 2012, 2:44 a.m.

Thanks for clearing that up Bashiok.

P.S you still never told me where you got that rainbow fountain statue thing on your desk you showed in a post a couple of years back.

Thats right, I STILL REMEMBER.

Creepy! ;) Got it from Goodwill for $2. Probably the best purchase I've ever made in my life.