Pretty straight forward question. Many are wondering why we are not getting pre-nerf Black Temple and Hyjal. One aspect of the community definitely enjoys the “challenge” that is presented with experiencing these raids as they were early on, rather than their post nerf states.
Unironically, many called for nerfs (read: fixes) to Vashj and KT’s various bugs early on but I think once those settled it certainly was nice to still have quite a challenge of managing the multitudes of mechanics those two fights in particular had. Now with nerfs, T5 content feels like an absolute joke to those experienced (and yet somehow there’s still a large number of 8/10 teams…).
I’m a bit weary that the nerfed content is not going to feel as exciting as T5 was because it doesn’t have that “pre-nerf” oomph.
Any insight onto the reasoning behind going straight to post-nerf, possibly including details on what actually changed? (if you know)
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Pretty straightforward answer; there just wasn’t a lot of sweeping changes to Tier 6 content after it was released. We did a pretty thorough investigation of the data of each patch between 2.1 and 2.4.3, as well as looked at public patch notes and just came to the conclusion that there wasn’t enough of substance for an interesting pre-nerf difficulty.
Most “changes” were essentially bug fixes, with only Mother Shahraz and Archimonde seeing anything resembling a real mechanical change, and even they were actually fairly minor. Contrast that with Tier 4 and Tier 5 that had some major (and highly visible/memorable) mechanical changes happen between patch 2.0 and 2.1 and it just made a lot of sense to really dig in and go big with pre and post-nerf for those tiers.
Sunwell Plateau will have a pre and post-nerf state however, as there were more significant changes there.
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I would love to have a clear, written out list of what changes pre- and post-nerf SWP will entail (when it’s time- not necessarily right this moment.)
It was very frustrating to only be given, “reverting to their nerfed state” re: t5 nerfs. Nobody knew what that meant until the PTR. Imagine our shock when we were expecting Kael and Vashj to be slightly HP nerfed, then experiencing… all of that.
I personally combed through dozens of pages of patch and hotfix notes and I still think I only ever got a quarter of the changes that were pushed.
In future content and potential nerfs, please be more clear about what the changes and nerfs are. I’m excited to see pre- and post- nerf SWP, however. Why were the massive t5 nerfs pushed?
Are you planning on gradually releasing the instance like in ye olden days, as well? How long after pre-nerf will it be post-nerf? Nerfing it all in one fell swoop like t5, or more progressively/dynamically? Will we get to see Muru in its original, “impossible” state? I know these questions are decently far in advance, I’m just curious as to where the team might be headed with it and what your thoughts on it were. Thank you!
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I agree that we could have been a bit more explicit. From our perspective it was “oh turn off the switch that enabled all those changes we made” essentially reverting it back to the 2.4.3 (post-nerf) state that we started with internally.
Of course, from the perspective of players clearing the content weekly, its not as obvious what we did to make it “pre-nerf” so its likewise not as obvious what gets nerfed when we turn those off. You can scour 15-year-old patch notes to try to figure it out, but we’ll try to be more explicit in the future. Sorry about that!
(We’re all busy, of course, so I can only say we’ll try our best! Time is everybody’s enemy! 
)
Regarding post-nerf stages in general, our overall philosophy was: “when the next tier unlocks we go to post-nerf,” but obviously we let T5 go a bit early so people could get attuned for Tier 6 over the holidays. Also, we need SOMETHING to trigger the nerf of Sunwell since we haven’t announced any content coming after it, so we’ll try to give you a heads-up about when that nerf is coming, but its obviously a ways off since we haven’t even released Hyjal and Black Temple yet. (Soon!)
We certainly want everybody to get a chance to experience the harder versions of these bosses as they were originally released, as well as giving people a chance to progress past them in the form the eventually ended up in.
Hope that helps clarify our intent, even if it doesn’t provide much in the way of details.
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I wanted to clarify that my previous post was a reply to:
It was very frustrating to only be given, “reverting to their nerfed state” re: t5 nerfs.
It was not a reply to the original post (I thought Aggrend answered that very well), and could have been clearer.
I just wanted to add that there are two competing goals here. There is an intentional aspect of discovery and exploration in our hardest content. I wasn’t intending to promise an exhaustive list of all boss mechanics, and I hope nobody took it that way. Only to say that after the content is already live and being defeated by players, and is about to transition to post-nerf, we can probably be better about clarifying what changes are part of that transition.
An example that springs to mind where I think we could have done better, is the post-nerf Karazhan attunement requirement (you can zone in without attuning, but somebody still needs to open the gate for you). After Serpentshrine Cavern and Tempest Keep were released, I saw at least one post where people were confused about whether that was an intentional change or not, and we could have been more explicit about the fact that it was always intended to work that way after Tier 5 was available.
So to sum up, I think we can do better about communicating changes to things that are live, but we’re not going to exhaustively list every single boss mechanic and their details, especially for content that isn’t yet live. Hope that clears up any confusion that came from by earlier post!
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I think for me personally, the specific nerfs and details aren’t too important but rather what changed and maybe a brief description. For example “Vashj no longer casts MC” is a pretty significant change and could be noted. Though like you said there’s already notes on it too - the ones that weren’t commented in public patch notes prior are the more interesting ones I’d imagine.
I appreciate the thorough response and hopefully maybe a little patch notes on changes could be considered in the future for post-nerf changes. I definitely think pre-nerf is nice to have the discovery aspect but with that also comes doubt from players of “is that how it really was” and sometimes whatever data you guys are working with is incorrect and that gets adjusted. If that was straight-forward info that was already given on how it changed pre-nerf, that takes away some validity that the community is doing to say “double check your work” so to speak. I like the sense of discovery and figuring it out too, even if it takes a little bit of detective work from 480p 20 fps fraps videos 
On a slightly different topic but still content related - If you can comment, is there a road map for the rest of Classic that you guys are able to share? Like say “phase 4 in Q3” or “phase 5 in Q1 2023” something to not only give players an opportunity to plan ahead, but also something to look forward to and kinda expect. Obviously wouldn’t want to narrow down exactly when and then something come up and can’t reach that target, but giving a general idea of how the next few phases may last is imo better overall.
Right now the season ending today seemed abrupt to some with barely 2 weeks notice - and way too long to others (idk why because season 2 was 23 weeks long in og TBC vs 17 weeks here… but I digress).
So far we haven’t exactly followed TBC’s timeline, and I don’t really expect it to, but season 3 was the longest of all 4 by several weeks and included the release of ZA. Then season 4 was pretty much cut short due to wrath coming out (or at least seemed that way).
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