#1 - March 13, 2013, 2:24 p.m.
Lead encounter designer Ion Hazzikostas (Watcher) has been reading through a lot of your feedback regarding the raid boss hotfixes, and he passed along the following response:
I just wanted to offer some context for the recent tuning hotfixes to the Horridon and Council of Elders encounters in the Throne of Thunder raid.
First off, the Council change, reducing their health in 10-player modes, was honestly just a bug fix. Yes, it made the encounter easier, which also makes it a nerf, but we simply goofed on the numbers. We generally aim for a 3:1 ratio of health for enemies in 25-player raids as compared to 10-player mode, since 25-player raids typically have ~17 DPS and 10-player raids have 5 or 6. Instead, the ratio on the bosses themselves (but not the Loa spirits or Sand Elementals) was mistakenly 2.5:1, and we didn’t notice until we started taking a closer look at why 10-player groups seemed to be having a harder time with the encounter. I apologize for the error on our part.
Second, regarding Horridon, that change was an intentional difficulty adjustment, with the aim of smoothing out the difficulty curve of the first section of the raid. By reducing the health of the trolls pouring out of each gate, we reduced the DPS requirement (and thus the gear requirement) of the encounter, but generally kept the mechanics checks intact. The trolls having 10-15% less health doesn’t mean that raids can suddenly fail to interrupt Venom Priests, ignore Effusions, stand in Sand Traps, or cuddle up with Frozen Orbs. It just means that there’s a lower DPS requirement to keep up with the waves while doing so.