Hi all, I’ve read a few of the threads on here RE: the nerf, but most of them seem to be focussed on the boosting/anti-boosting and RMT/bot aspects of the recent nerfs, not the impact they’re having on players levelling through relevant dungeon content.
This past week, a few friends and I rerolled alts when the Winds buff came out. We’d just come back to the game two weeks before and had just recently done the full 1-70 questing experience, so we wanted to do some dungeon levelling instead and shoot the sh*t in Discord etc while having fun together. We grouped up at SM:GY for the first time at level 30––me on a pally & three of my friends on mages (we all wanted farming alts). We picked up the first healer that responded in LFG, and the 5 of us have done dungeon spam every night together since then.
It started out as a blast, namely because we twinked our toons out with level 60-70 enchants, Engineering trinkets and toys, and some hilariously unnecessary consumables. During our 30-40 stretch in SM, the fun for us was outdoing our previous speed clears. By the end of SM, we had GY down to a 3-pull dungeon (at level 32) in 6 minutes, Lib down to a 5 puller (34/10 minutes), Armory down to a 4 puller (36/9 minutes), and Cathedral–my personal fav–at a fun 7 minute 4-pull run by 40. We had time to take food breaks whenever we hit the instance cap and brainstorm how to fix any pull that might have gone wrong in the previous run, and it was a blast.
But them, we left SM, and all of our copium depleted from our systems…because of two specific issues wrought by these changes:
1. XP reduction severely affecting party members if there is a slight disparity
On our last night at SM around level 39-43, we hit up RFD because we had a few quests for it and it seemed like a nice break. One of the mages logged off early, so we invited another one of our friends, a level 35 rogue, to the party to get him some quick XP. One of us dinged 44 early through the dungeon and all of a sudden, the rogue was getting significantly reduced xp per kill, even though the last half of the instance is 40-41. Kind of insane considering this used to be a very normal thing in my Classic experience––sure, we knew we would probably get reduced XP from killing a few of the mobs since we slightly outlevelled the instance, but we did not think our lower-level friend would get penalized. The dungeon itself was within our range; we didn’t check levels for it but all of our quests for RFD were anywhere from green-orange, so it seems ridiculous to penalize both us and our friend so hard for that.
This has been a continual issue for us as we’ve levelled as well, even within our small group. We are five people with different schedules and commitments right now, and sometimes one of us might stay up a bit later to do an extra quest for a really good SP dam trinket (lookin @ u Winterspring trinket) or push up a level to 35/50 to be able to work on the next tier of profession stuff. We have all been really conscientious about not outlevelling each other more than 1-2 levels because of the boosting nerf, but there have been clear times when we’ve had to leave really good dungeons to go spam really bad ones because one of us dinged 2 levels ahead and now half the mobs are gray.
2. Anti-kiting measures activate too early and too aggressively for at-level players
This is the most frustrating one, mainly because we didn’t see it coming for so long. We went all the way to 40 without seeing any anti-kiting measures, but once we did, they seemed to pop up in every new dungeon we entered.
Once we left SM and made our way to ZF, I was stoked. I remembered there being so many good AoE pulls in there, and loads of places for me to pillar-LoS for tightly stacked meat-grinding piles. I’d done a ZF while levelling with my first toon earlier this month, and I remembered the pally tank doing some crazy huge pulls that were really fun (and fast) with our slightly coordinated group. So I mounted up, and ran around the first room, bringing them all back to a pillar to get the casters to group up too. Everything went normally for the first 10-15 seconds, and then we realized (much to my chagrin as the tank) that all of the mobs were slow-immune and roots-immune.
We did some heavy testing in that first night in ZF, and if anyone’s interested I can try to post some clips to illustrate the way it works, but from what we learned there, from the second you enter combat with a mob, it starts a 30-second countdown. At the end of that countdown, the mob will no longer be slowable or rootable, even if it’s running in fear. As you can imagine, when rounding up to LoS pull mobs in ZF, by the time the pack groups up it’s often 10-15 seconds into the pull, which leaves your group 15ish seconds to obliterate it before it obliterates either (a) your tank who can’t kite now, or (b) your DPS who have aggro and can’t get away anymore.
You might say: “Why is this a problem? Just pull smaller”. But slowing & kiting is an integral part Classic dungeon tanking, and having such a huge tool yanked out of your box when you don’t have many abilities yet is incredibly excruciating. Thankfully, we were so twinked out that after a bit of creative tweaking of our pulls we could get ZF back to a really efficient XP grind, but for the average group, this kind of change is hell. Slowing mobs that are fleeing to a nearby pat is crucial to preventing wipes in the average group. And now that the timer starts from the first instance of combat, it means every second your tank spends running further away from the next pack before stopping to establish threat (to circumvent runner issues) is also eating into the slow timer. It’s a lose-lose.
So, out of curiousity I tried a random pug, rather than my spellcleave stack, to see how the changes would affect an average dungeon experience. I put together a random group and grabbed the quests and shared them with them, so we knew we were going to do both the orange and purple wings for completion. It’s been years since I’ve done Mara, and I remembered it being a slog, but this was something else entirely. Yes; I will preface this by saying I was perhaps underlevelled for the instance at 42, but the rest of the group was 43-47, and most of my job consisted of taunting off the mage and kiting them back into the RoF/Blizzard/Cons spam anyways. Once we got to the end of each wing, the mobs became 46-47+ rather than 42+, which meant we had to start using CC anyways on some of the scarier packs. But because of the anti-kiting mechanics added to Mara, after about 20ish seconds of combat time, they would all become immune to slow or HoJ or roots, and it more than once became a game of rotating DIs and SSs. While yes, we had fun, I also was the top damage as the tank thanks to religious dynamite use. With a less geared tank who needs to rely on slows more than I did, I can only imagine the repair bill.
Suggestions to fix it
Look, I’ve had countless conversations with friends this week about who the intended target of these nerfs is. If the intention was to prevent max level characters from boosting low level characters through dungeons, I can’t speak to it because I’ve never been in a boost and haven’t seen much of it this week. But why is the change applying to toons that are the proper level for the dungeon? If I’m in a group of people levels 42-48 in a Maraudon run, there is no world wherein the anti-kiting measures should be in effect. It feels like you’re adding an Inspired affix!
If a level 70+ joins the group, yes, immediately those should kick in. It’s the kiss/curse trade you make for having someone who can “carry”. But if you’re in the proper level range for the dungeon, what developer decided it was a good idea to make it a 30-second timer before the pull needs to die or it becomes unwieldy?
The exact same logic can be applied to the boosting nerfs too. There is no reason why they should be implemented in such a black-and-white way to levelling groups. Yes, sure, if there is a level 26 in your SFK run it might be slightly easier, but it is not a boost. Make the XP nerf applied to your friends into a gradient scale that tapers off x% per level, at least in Classic where the dungeon level ranges are so vast.
All in all, I’ve had a lot of fun this week in dungeons, but we’ve had to strategize a lot more than I would have thought to pull off what we could do with ease last week pre-nerf. I’m not advocating for a complete revocation of the nerf, because I think the intent was great, but please–someone at Blizzard HQ–fix how it effects levelling groups before I get my next alt ready!