Mythic Jaina Hotfix (4/9)

Gameplay Dungeons, Raids and Scenarios
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Can we get a blue response on what exactly the purpose of these changes are? Let’s go through them one by one:

  • Howling Winds duration increased to 10 minutes (was 2 minutes) on all difficulties.

This change completely ruins a strat which many guilds have been running for about 3 weeks now which is to spend 2 minutes rotating Iceblocks during the first intermission to avoid a very dangerous part of the fight. This strategy is no longer viable. This is not a nerf.

  • Gathering Blizzard’s progress is now reset at the start of the second intermission on Mythic difficulty.

At the end of phase 2, the current strategy is to reset stacks with the 3rd barrel, then phase her to the 2nd intermission right after the blizzard. With standard DPS for Mythic guilds at this level, we often have to stop DPS on Jaina so that we get the blizzard right before the phase. This change makes it so if your DPS is high, you don’t have to stop DPS. This helps guilds that are doing P2 so cleanly they have to stop DPS to wait for the blizzard. Not a nerf.

  • Ice Block health lowered by 25% on Mythic difficulty.

Ice blocks have 710k before the nerf, now around 500k. This will I guess help you get IB’d player sout faster but in P1 and P2 the damage checks are neglible. In P3, the danger of an Iceblock is not that the player is frozen, but that the shards that appear on the Iceblock do a ton of damage and will kill players hit by them. Currently, if you get Iceblocked players in P3 it is likely a wipe, not because the player is frozen but because people will die to the shards. Maybe is a nerf, but not really. As we all know, P3 Jaina is a DPS check. If Blizzard intends us to break Iceblocks in P3 to avoid the shattering lances (I believe they go away if you kill the Iceblock) we will probably run up against the DPS check. The current strategy is that because tanks get extra stacks from jaina’s tank nuke, they either purposely die to avoid the Iceblock and get rezzed. This is of course terrible design as 300 kills in, the strat is still to suicide tanks multiple times in P3. This change does not alter that strategy at all.

  • Shattering Lance charge up time increased to 9 seconds (was 8 seconds) on Mythic difficulty.

These are the shards that appear when a player gets Iceblocked. I guess in P3 you have one more second to break them out before everyone dies to the shard. IDK what the point of this is. Not really a nerf.

  • Jaina will now always teleport to a predictable location during the first intermission on Mythic difficulty.

No idea what this means. If Jaina spawns in the same spot every time all it means is a Hunter no longer has to call who goes where, but the phase is done the same way with the same difficulty involved. Not a nerf.

In essence we have a few minor quality of life changes and a complete removal of a strat many guilds that were close to a kill were using. Many guilds killed the boss using this strategy that is now removed.

Basically this is annoying as hell and I would appreciate an explanation on why Blizzard chose these particular changes, making the fight actually harder for many guilds, and not really much easier for others.

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Howling Winds Change:
This change was implemented to prevent groups from circumnavigating an intentionally challenging and coordination-based part of the fight. You are correct that it’s not a nerf, but it’s also not a bad change.

Gathering Blizzard Change:
This change prevents the need to “stop dps for 30 seconds at the wall” so that the blizzard can be forecd-reset so that range damaging the boss during the p2 intermission can take place; thus improving the flow of the encounter.

Ice block health & Shattering lance changes:
Previously, if you used your brez’s prior to p3, your group virtually couldn’t succeed because either tanks died and couldn’t be brez’d, or they got iceblocked and the blocks couldn’t be killed effectively, so they and others would die anyway via shattering lance.

This change makes it so that getting to p3 with no brez’s available isn’t an automatic wipe, and along those lines, is also far less punishing of tank chilling touch errors, as it allows them to get blocked and freed before the shattering lance causes problems.

Jaina teleport change:
Previously there were 6 potential teleport spots, all of which had their own unique group movements required to doge tornados and image circles.

This change makes the p1 transition far easier, especially for groups who are new to the encounter by requiring the group to learn only 1 series of movements that remains constant; thereby removing any RNG factors that would previously prohibit progression into p2

All of these adjustments with the exception of the change to howling winds (and you can argue this was just fixing a mistake developers made initially by allowing you to complete avoid it) are indeed nerfs/increases to the leniency of the encounter/friendlier for less-advanced groups.

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Many guilds were not using the intermission 1 cheese strat LOL

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Yeah, the nerfs weren’t really helpful at all. Hoping for another round of them very soon…such an unfun fight with all of the RNG. Not only that, super annoying to rekill AND there’s no raid skip to the last few bosses like in Legion.

I suspect that the Jaina mount is going to be one of the rarest mounts because of all of this.