#0 - Jan. 12, 2010, 5:34 a.m.
Now, once you hit p3 the damage of the debuff triples per application. At 4 stacks the debuff ticks for a manageable 4-5k. Then at 5 stacks the debuff starts ticking for 12-15k. This is not manageable healing. Basically, Blizzard is forcing you to either make a very tight soft enrage timer, or use three tanks, which is a simple solution, but not one you see coming.
Now most of the time, I wouldn't really care about this. Encounters get stealth-buffed and nerfed all the time, it's not usually a big deal. But consider all the aspects of this buff.
1. This is done mid-week, after several kill videos are released. You can say this is a problem for the people who assumed killing the boss later in the week would result in more information on it, but a lot of people do that. Replicating a video of a kill earlier in the exact same week and wiping to something completely unrelated is really silly.
2. This isn't a small change that is easy to work around. This is a substantial change in the encounter that comes at the last possible noticeable moment. Not only because a third tank has absolutely @!#% to do in the first two phases of the encounter, but because the damage increase to the stacks is completely unpredictable up until the fifth stack, at which point you basically instantly wipe. If you memorized the damage on the previous videos you might feel like the damage is increasing a bit fast, but people don't really do that. The actual application of adding a third tank isn't hard, but you don't even learn that you have to do this until 5 seconds before you wipe, and its completely contradictory to all previous knowledge on the encounter. This isn't even hard, it's nit-picking. There is nothing fun or challenging about the change, it's just a random way to screw a good portion of the mid-high end raiding population out of their attempts.
3. On that note, attempts! Yes not only did you ninja change an obscure last-moment part of this encounter, but you did it on an encounter with limited attempts. I'm sure you've ninja buffed/nerfed encounters in the past, which isn't a big deal if you have unlimited attempts, and which is one of the reasons I could care less for the Rotface/Festergut changes that were announced. Why on earth would you do this to an encounter with limited attempts? Are you going to do this in the future? I dislike limited attempts but I don't really have a problem with them. Changing an obscure but necessary factor in the final moments of an encounter with a handful of attempts with absolutely no warning is incredibly dumb. We almost lost our server first kill to some random U.S. 300 guild soley because they knew from our experiences that you need a third tank for the encounter.
I really don't get it. You're just being a @#!*. Even if you make the argument that we should have to learn the encounter like the guilds that killed it before thursday or whenever this nerf took place, you're only confusing people that are less willing to adjust from confirmed information. If you think it's fair to cause guilds to lose rank based on their willingness to use available information, you have a twisted and obscure view of what is fair.