So, the devs buffed Heroic Dark Animus and he went from less than 900M hp to a bit over 1B hp. And Durumu went from 1.2B to 1.4B (Other Examples: Horridon went from 2B to 2.3B, Lei Shen went from 1.8B to 2.1B) . Gotta congratulate the devs on missing the point. Now raid groups are gonna be asking 450+ ilvl so they can zerg animus and have 1 stacked tank manage all bots meanwhile. People didn’t ask for this lol. They asked to be able to do Dark Animus the way its meant to be but you essentially did a completely unnecessary buff (roughly 20% more hp).
Man, Blizzard seems to enjoy shooting themselves in the foot lately. Buffed heroic raids that nobody asked for, No bronze discounts, no bronze discounts for alts if your main is already geared and a general lack of bronze drops.
What a complete waste of an event. I’m just dissapointed
Edit: Turns out its NOT just ToT, but every pandaria raid except MSV has been buffed.
MSV: No buff.
HoF: bosses have 10% more hp
ToES: Bosses have 20% more hp
ToT: Same as ToES.
SoO Heroic: around 10% more hp or so.
Oddly enough, the only raids that didn’t seems to be affected are MSV and mythic SoO.
Edit 2: A lot of people seems to be missing the point. I fear this is just the start, and if people don’t push back, they’ll do more and bigger hp increases while we dont get more stats to compensate for it. When you hit a brick wall with a 1.5-2B hp dark animus you can’t zerg before he wipes the raid, NOW you WILL care about it.
Exploit early, Exploit often. Can’t believe they screwed over people who struggle with ToT and effectively enforce raising the bar for pugs to be able to zerg it, instead of buffing the bronze (Along SoO) and addressing the design issue in Dark Animus. And this is AFTER the ward nerf as well, meaning you are double screwed now thanks to no ward and buffed bosses. 10/10 design
Saying no ward is false. My bear was still popping 40ish million wards in a zerg SOO normal run I did this evening post nerf and was easily within the top 3 of my damaging abilities on bosses that all died within a lust/hero window (was a full 30 flex raid) and I scuffed up many of those wards because I was chatting with a friend and kept forgetting I have 2 less seconds to cram things in).
Sure I’m not quite sure what a warrior or monk is going to do with post ward nerf, but animus also heavily benefitted from the void shield power too. People can/should be running vindication and with 1 healer at absolute most (and ideally none) along with 1 tank.
I don’t pre pop anything. I pull boss and pop ward. I hit beserk and get a frenzied off and then renewal, frenzied, dark pact, frenzied, healthstone, frenzied, regrowth proc (if exists), frenzied. Some fights (like galakras → iron jug) renewal won’t be up so I just weave in more frenzied regen after each tick.
Even my most scuffed one was still like 8-10mil or so. I think on that one, I literally hit beserk, renewal, and dark pact and completely missed ward. I just spammed frenzied and regrowth procs and still at least got something off.
Edit - Don’t think the scuffed was actually 12. I think it was less but it was shameful and absolutely did not matter at all to the fight anyway.
I checked other raids, and sans MSV and mythic SoO, everything was buffed. What’s going on? This raids didn’t need to be buffed, but instead they needed to fix Dark Animus and not much else. What a nonsensical change.
They “fixed a bug” aka uncapped the cloak after it was pointed out numerous times it had a cap on it, and told us the power gain from gear upgrades is exponential. As more players will be upgrading their gear now – because they also told us they will not decrease costs (they’ll flip their tune on this in 8 weeks) – so player power will be going up soon enough.
As such, they need to buff raid encounters to compensate because they still don’t understand that players actually like blowing up bosses quickly.
Anyone who really feels as though they wont be able to clear the heroics at least once / has been put off by this change, feel free to add me and we’ll get it done ezpz. Gusher#11304, typically run most raids starting like 4 EST and ending whenever. Just bringing 1-2 people to tag along each night. Not forming a full raid toward this end
And punish whoever joins Remix late huh? Stellar game design.
I mean, it only raises the bar for raids to kill bosses. Now people are gonna be asking for higher ilvl, not lower. Instead, they essentially changed nothing for groups who can still zerg, and those who cant will now struggle more.
I’m just scratching my head. I join zerg groups so most of the time we will prob still clear, but its a gratuitous change, and people who aren’t zerging are just gonna have a harder time. There have been plenty of groups that are roadblocked in dark animus cuz they can’t zerg and normal strategy doesn’t work due to tinker gem’s abnormal aggro generation among other things, and this change does absolutely nothing to help.
Feels like it came from the same place as the Zaralek Cavern nerf.
Oh well. I was considering trying heroic raids (and mythic SoO) when my gear was maxed but with changes like this I’m not sure if I care anymore. Mounts and transmog are enough for me.
You can still go for it, but you will need to gear up quite a bit. Saying this because while it IS possible to try at lower gear than average 430, it’s gonna be a struggle with how pugs work right now. Zerg groups wants geared folks so they can be done with raids quick, and people who take lower ilvl will often hit walls with bosses like dark animus, so its not that great of a situation. As it is, spending bronze on gear is the best thing you can do since the more geared you get, the better raids you can make and the more bronze you’ll get. You can, alternatively, just run your own groups since if you get geared enough folks, mechanics do not apply even on mythic SoO as a whole.
I’m not looking forward to making my own groups. Not for social reasons, but for the sheer clusterscrew of having a billion people whispering me and needing to check their gear.
Probably not so much for normal (with even a second person I’m already strong enough to do everything on normal I think. I can solo MSV at the very least.) But mythic, at 20-30 people? Nope.