Blizzard recently made a “fix to boosting” where they snuck in a nerf to players ability to run dungeons. After 20 seconds in combat, mobs become immune to slows, snares, stuns, and start teleporting to you. The claims I’ve heard were that this change was snuck in to nerf farming gold, but it’s hard to know for sure without proper transparency.
Putting all other issues aside, this is causing what I’m assuming is unintended changes to legitimate gameplay. For instance:
- New mobs will suddenly teleport to the group during an encounter (e.g. the early bridge in BRD) even though it’s a group of “correct level” 48-55 players. This seems like a clear bug. I’ve seen bizarre issues like this in each dungeon I’ve run since patch (including ZF, Mara, ST, BRD).
- Unless the group is on the upper level and also geared, every pull takes > 20 seconds, meaning legitimate gameplay hits this play-nerf every single pull.
- In dungeons where there’s “runners” where the mob runs on low health, utility skills like Concussive shot, Hammer of Justice, Crippling Poison are now useless for handling runner mobs, which was part of the original intended gameplay and skill for handling these kinds of mobs.
- To make it worse, frost mage as a spec has lost most of its value.
Putting it another way, legitimate gameplay for a regular dungeon has been forcefully change. There’s now only one single “blizzard approved” way to dungeon, and it’s be mid-upper leveled, be geared, and ONLY pew-pew. Very plain and dull.
In addition, this changes the “classic experience” that blizzard, among others, claimed to be heavily focused on.
What I’m wondering is why mess with something people were enjoying? Can this play-nerf be reversed, or at a minimum, altered? It would be easy to change this nerf. For instance, blizzard could:
- Increase the nerf from 20 seconds to anything (1 minute?) 20 seconds is soooo low.
- Have the mobs only become immune if a very high level is in the party.
- Remove the nerf all-together. This change really is one that demands more discussion and planning for a proper “fix” → if one is actually needed.