Blizz increases difficulty of Hyjal and Black Temple
by Elizabeth Wachowski 
Jun 6th 2007 at 3:41PM
Daelo, Blizzard's lead encounter designer, posted today on the forums that they had decided to ramp up the damage of six bosses in Hyjal and Black Temple: Gurtogg Bloodboil, Teron Gorefiend, Mother Shahraz, The Illidari Council, Illidan Stormrage and Archimonde. This contradicts Tigole's earlier statements that the raid game was where they wanted it to be.
Daelo also said, "Our intent is not to make the encounters impossible. Even with the increased difficulty, I do expect some of them to be quickly beaten again after guilds experience the changes and adapt." But it's hard to see this as anything other than a slowdown of progression for high-end guilds. There's some discussion about this on the Elitist Jerks forums.
What do you think?
Image from Nihilum via the Elitist Jerks boards.
Filed under: News items, Raiding, Bosses
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Sterling Jun 6th 2007 3:51PM
Wow. 10 minutes after this blog posting and the forum page with all the juicy details is down.
Sylvina Jun 6th 2007 3:52PM
Corrodias will be saying "See, toldja so."
But as for those who all said "Who cares what Nihilum does?" Well, here is an exact change resulting from what they did. They crushed the content quickly, and so Blizzard made some changes to make it slightly harder for them.
If you don't plan on raiding, then obviously you don't care about Nihilum. But if you ever do plan on doing ANY of this content, you should care about what Nihilum is doing.
Ryan Jun 6th 2007 3:57PM
News flash: Blizz takes another giant dump on healers. Details after this break.
Mike Schramm Jun 6th 2007 4:32PM
Wow. Blizzard needs to tell one hand what the other's doing.
Tridus Jun 6th 2007 4:53PM
@3:
LOL, yeah. When in doubt, make life harder on the healers without changing things for anybody else.
Half the stuff in Heroics is the same way. Same mobs, 3x more damage. Its always fun watching Holy Priests get 1 shot by trash. (WTB Pally healer.)
RogueJedi86 Jun 6th 2007 5:01PM
Sounds like Blizzard has started to tailor content in the game for ONE GUILD, and not the player base in general. Maybe they could wait until a dozen guilds have done Black Temple and Hyjal before tweaking difficulty? ONE hardcore guild beats them both, and Blizzard starts making it harder for them. Hello? What about those of us still having trouble with Karazhan and Gruul? Making the unattainable content even harder isn't going to help us. It's solely for Nihilum.
Gurei Jun 7th 2007 9:51AM
Once again these proves that blizzards makes WOW for the most hardcore outthere,making it evne harder just for one guild
EQ3 maybe? lol could be it has the same peeps working for it.
SC2 will crush wow
Verit Jun 6th 2007 5:26PM
I suspect someone at Blizzard and Nihilum are laughing their arses off. This must be some grand social experiment to see what people will do to obtain some drop in a game.
Remember the April fools black temple attunement chart? I actually believed it until the heroes call section (where you have to beat all the bosses in outlands in heroic mode within 10 minutes of each other) because it was just the kind of thing I'd expect :). Still if it was that way - I'm sure Nihilum would have figured out a way to do it.
Pingmeister Jun 6th 2007 6:30PM
I hate to be the idiot optimist here but my guess would be that Blizzard watched the takedown and decided it went a bit too quick.
I think that's fair. Be nice if it was done on Beta but still, I think it's fair that they tweak stuff.
I think it would be very difficult to design an encounter and consider EVERY strategy a team might use against it.
When someone shows up and smacks it down real quick it would be easy to decide to rethink it.
knulpm Jun 6th 2007 11:40PM
This is completely backwards of what Blizard should be doing.
They should allow guilds like Curse, Nihilum to blow through all this "new content" in a few weeks with their 8 hour a day play styles.
When they whine about the lack of new content Blizz can state
"We gave you content that would take even an above average players months to advance through. You chose to devour it all as fast as possible."
They need to start discouraging these "first" guilds just like they discouraged reroll locusts. Catering to them is NOT good for the health of the game and the majority of the players.
Tyler Jun 7th 2007 2:20AM
/applaud #9
Nuff said.
The Anonymous Jun 7th 2007 3:44AM
@9: Who's whining? I've not heard any of those guilds go "WHERES MORE", why are you putting words in their mouth? The Hyjal/BT bosses simply *were not retuned* after the epic gear buff - ergo they're not as hard as they should be. You don't think Nihilum clearing BT with barely ONE piece of T6 on half the raid is an indication of that?
There is no catering to re-roll locust (what a stupid accusation). There's been no special catering to raiding since TBC. BT was supposed to come with it (as they stated), this and the rest of the raiding changes are simply things that should of been in 2.0.
The Anonymous Jun 7th 2007 3:53AM
Edit: Take back the re-roll locust thing. Haven't woken up. ;P
Barnabas Jun 7th 2007 6:58AM
Too little too late. Shouldn't Blizzard focus the more attitude towards 2.2? Kil'jaeden is the true end game boss in burning crusade. Oh well, it's not like they changed the mechanics of those instances. Just have to heal a little more than before. I guess they figured they'd make the PuG bosses a little stronger. Though the damage that Nihilum inflicted on Black Temple is done. So I really don't understand the sudden interest? They'll probably see the error in their ways over this and decide to leave the content as is. It's working as intended. =)
Circle24 Jun 7th 2007 8:10AM
Just make Heroic Black Temple tbh....
ben1778 Jun 7th 2007 10:34AM
Nihilium is at least partially sponsored, so they do have an obligation to their sponsor to go for the world firsts. They don't get free high end headsets, mice, etc for sitting on their butts watching TV all day.
About the cheating issue I don't know enough about the drama other than to say that I consider buying gold to be cheating and I've talked to enough players on my realm to know it's not that uncommon. So with the amount of people in Nihilium I would assume statistically that some of them probably DID buy gold, but not all of them.
Anyhow I enjoy PvP more so the raiding issue doesn't get me all hot under the collar. I'm banking points for season 2 deliciousness.
Iskur Jun 8th 2007 1:10AM
Personly I don't give a damn about Nihilium I care about blizzards dumb ass developers who cater the game around them. New rule no devolper can pay any atention to what Nihilium does. If they watch one Youtube or read one thread they are fired. Let Nihilium do their thing don't let it have any effect on the rest of us.