With just over a month’s notice, the developers of WoW have let the community know that Season 4 of WoW Shadowlands starts in early August 2022 and Raider, as of today (7/4/2022), only have four Raid IDs left to earn the Frontrunner and Ahead of the Curve achievement respectively. Five months after the release of the current raid, that would hardly be a reason for panic among WoW raiders in the past, but due to the tuning of the Mausoleum of the First, despite the five-month progress time shortly before the end of Shadowlands Season 3, it will still be a race against the Time.
Even guilds that “only” want to get the ahead of the curve achievement for defeating the jailer in heroic mode sometimes have to keep up. To make it easier for the players, once again the really big Nerf club swung for the jailer and his henchmen. This isn’t the first major nerf for the expansion’s final boss, though.
154 nerfs and still too heavy
With Shadowlands, the developers made the raid content so difficult across the board that one had to ask oneself whether it was really due to the level of difficulty, or if we just got worse as players. The answer should let WoW raiders breathe easier: raids have never been as difficult as in the current expansion. It wasn’t until the beginning of July that the Alliance filled the Hall of Fame (100 guilds defeated the final boss in mythical) and whoever defeats the Jailer in mythical mode today can call themselves a top 500 guild, whoever does it in heroic mode is among the 900 best guilds of Germany.
In Shadowlands, Blizzard either brought inhumanly good raid testers onto the team, or they simply leaned far too far out of the window when developing the bosses. There were 154 in total, which primarily reduced the health, mechanics, and damage of attacks from Halondrus, Anduin, and the Jailer. and these are just the nerfs for mythic mode by the way. That doesn’t even include adjustments to mechanics, bug fixes, and the Heroic and Normal nerfs.
In order for the Hall of Fame to be full at all, the following had to be changed in the life points of the jailer: First, it was fixed that he can die from a bug that caused some world first kills. Then his health was reduced by 5% twice (on April 5, 2022 and on April 26, 2022). After that, it was changed so that his shield no longer heals him and then reduced the shield’s health by 75% and started the final phase earlier. A total of 33 nerfs hit the Jailer in Mythic mode.
Anduin is the leader and possibly the most inflated and at the same time most weakened boss in WoW history. In Mythic mode, the developers had to give him a total of 39 nerfs. Since the release of Anduin, his health has been reduced by 15% and his adds by 35%. If you include the bug fixes, Anduin even comes up with 43 adjustments that make fighting in mythical mode easier. These are such massive nerfs that one wonders what godlike raid testers Blizzard actually hired for Shadowlands. By the way, we asked ourselves that with the “crab boss” Halondrus, for which top raiders needed 340 attempts. An overview of all mausoleum nerfs had already compiled Phil, who now, barely two weeks later, is already outdated again.
Hopefully no view of Dragonflight
As someone who has been WoW (buy now ) Classic has seen every raid on almost every difficulty when it was up to date, I hope Blizzard doesn’t stick to this raid difficulty patch policy with Dragonflight in mind. It’s not so much about how exhausting the raid is or how few players will not see the end boss in heroic mode compared to previous expansions.
It’s also about these nerfs not feeling good. As we already did in buffedCast #595 have discussed, a guild is deprived of the good feeling of having defeated a challenging boss due to the sometimes very severe nerfs. If you nibble on Anduin’s last health and oneshot him in the next ID because the boss’s health was reduced by 15% with ID reset, you have a sense of accomplishment that somehow doesn’t feel right.
In my opinion, Blizzard isn’t doing themselves any favors by making the mythical mode more and more challenging as well. No, I don’t want loot pinatas or anything for free. But Mythic mode has had a reputation for being “just for the 1% of players” for a while now. And in the Mausoleum of the First, it’s more like 0.1%, if not 0.01% of all raiders. This “elitism” does not go down well in the community. I hope the Mausoleum difficulty isn’t a preview of what’s to come in Dragonflight. What do you think about the difficulty level in the current last raid of WoW Shadowlands? Did you just march through with your guild, or did you also have to wait for nerfs? We look forward to your opinion in the comments.
