From the perspective of a guild directly affected by these changes: no, we are not rewarded by having Zskarn get turbo-buffed.
The boss needed to be fixed, but now we have to prog a fight that’s realistically somewhere in the realm of 80-130 pulls when another guild did it in 20 just because they raided a day or two earlier than us. Because they not only fixed a broken boss, but buffed the living daylights out of that boss.
Guilds that killed Zskarn pre-hotfix will now never, ever reclear until Sarkareth is dead. Meaning that weekend guilds and guilds that raid less hours just had their rankings completely torpedoed by these changes because they’ll be spending several weeks progging a boss that guilds above them killed in a couple hours tops.
For guilds trying to push Hall of Fame, it is definitely not over. Guilds that raid later in the week can still be HoF contenders (not saying mine is, of course), but now they’re completely screwed by the timing of these changes.
The ~210 guilds that killed the broken version of Zskarn all basically have their HoF spots locked in now.
The only ones that lost progress are the ones that have started the boss with the current strat but havent managed to kill him. The people that have already killed him will opt to extend unless the nerfs to his health is so significant that a new zerg start emerges before reset in ones specific region.
The race isnt over given the halls of fame. Also not every guild aims for RWF or Halls but still wants a relatively high world rank.
That Zskarns design was flamed to the high heavens already on PTR also adds to it (plus even his designer himself used the cheese strat)
Don’t worry so much about the hall of fame, if you are not currently in the top 200 You already lost and there is nowhere to rush. You are literally asking Blizzard to keep a broken boss for personal advantage. Nobody will allow this. Maybe put a bag of loot instead of the boss? You defeat Rashok, run at Zskarn, and instead of a Zskarn there is a bag of loot, you open it and jump down to the magmorax. Stop asking for it literally. Where is your interest in the game? You should be challenging a difficult boss, not a loot bag Instead of a boss.
I’m sorry but doing this in the middle of the week is one of the most punishing hotfixes you’ve ever done to an encounter.
You’re directly targeting guilds that didn’t kill the boss using an actual bug abuse, and allowing the ones that did to continue extending the raid with a kill that’s straight up invalid?
The “go to a corner” thing, you could excuse as a clever use of game mechanics, sure.
The “remove a trap before the bombs spawn so that the boss doesn’t spawn them AT ALL” is a VERY clear bug abuse.
This feels like such a middle finger to players who wanted to play the fight in the way it was intended.
I’m not suggesting a rollback, but letting this go unpunished by not locking the raid so it’s not extendable next week, only reinforces and encourages people to abuse bugs as hard and as early as possible.
There’s not a single world in which these changes “maintain its prior level of difficulty” in which ~200 guilds just killed Zskarn within ~10-20 tries
Zskarn needs much harder nerfs or no change at all and you just need to accept that you’ve failed with this boss, similar to how you did it with Kurog.
All the other changes seem fine, but adding this change really ramps the difficulty for heroic and hurts guilds that only go for AOTC. A random activation of tactical destruction makes it so that my team can no longer learn a repeatable movement pattern.
Please either keep this mythic only or revert this change for all difficulties.