Garalon Changes - Raid Finder, Normal, Heroic

We’ve recently hotfixed the Raid Finder version of Garalon, reducing both his health and Furious Swipe damage. In addition, and also exclusive to the Raid Finder version of this encounter, Garalon's Crush ability now has a cooldown, and we’ve corrected an issue with his aggro radius to prevent players from drawing aggro until a player has entered a ring.

With regard to all raid difficulties, after further testing the encounter, we realized that certain abilities were having unintended effects. Blade Flurry, Inferno Blast and Sweeping Strikes were doing double damage to Garalon's body while attacking his legs, which was not intended. We are currently implementing a hotfix, which should take effect after realms are restarted, that will cause these abilities to do normal damage to the body while continuing to do double damage to the legs.

Further updates can be found here, including a change to all classes who have pets.

The real question is, is this a change to underlying bf mechanics or just a special case change to garalon.

Sort of, and something we should take this opportunity to clarify. In Cataclysm, cleave-type mechanics double-dipped on damage bonuses, but we changed that universally in Patch 5.0 on a fundamental level. If you go back to Halfus or Wind Lord Mel'jarak, you'll find that cleave effects that derive their damage from the initial hit now only award the bonus damage on the target that is receiving increased damage.

Note that this works both ways. If you Sinister Strike a target that has a 50% damage reduction effect on it, your Blade Flurry will still do full damage to a secondary target, which previously would not have been the case.

The pending hotfix addresses a bug specific to the Garalon encounter which cause these new rules to not apply. Abilities that can hit a leg and the body simultaneously will still be extremely effective on the boss.

11/10/2012 10:48 AMPosted by Cyous

You realize that without stacking, a 6min enrage was really tough to meet--for a normal mode, right?

Garalon's berserk timer on Normal and Heroic modes was adjusted from 6 minutes to 7 minutes last week. So far, we've seen many Heroic kills (10H and 25H) where a balanced raid composition was utilized, many of which were well ahead of the increased berserk timer.

We have a few updates regarding the hotfixes, and a couple new changes based upon some of the feedback we've received:

In Raid Finder, the 30-second cooldown added to Garalon's Crush ability didn't properly apply through our most recent hotfix. We've isolated the issue and will apply a new hotfix to address this tomorrow during restarts.

Also included in the next hotfix, the Raid Finder version of Pungency (with relation to Garalon's Pheromones ability) will only stack 20 times, and Fury will only stack 5 times.

Once the realms are back up tomorrow, classes with pets can rejoice! All class pets will now gain the Weak Points buff in all versions of the encounter (Raid Finder, Normal, and Heroic).
EDIT: Clarification, not just Hunter pets, but all classes that have pets.