It's most likely these nerfs are causing unintentional holdups for people on the heroic version. The normal version, at this point, is likely an after thought.

This is just me giving an educated guess though, I don't know for sure.

I too am curious why these changes were delayed 'til now. I assume they're a result of the devs looking at player progress/feedback and reevaluating their designs.

But whatever the reason I'm not complaining. I've done all the fights in regular mode and a few in heroic, and at this point it's like "Yeah, I've seen the content, I've already done some of the fights more times than I care to remember, so anything that makes it easier to faceroll is fine in my book".

Hasn't this always been the way with raids? They open them up, give the hardest of the hardcore a month or so to work their way through, then slowly tweak them so pugs and "casuals" (I use that term loosely) can have an easier time at it?

No.... it's been that way with raids since Bobby Kotick said that accessibility equals profit. Before that, people that didn't end game raid still had an amazing game to play with, and they still saw about 95% of it.

Oh wah-wah-wah more.

Seriously...I'm tired of that crap. I love the fact that my guild had Rotface on farm since long before the nerf and the Hellscream buff. The fact that other people can now down the bosses that I did doesn't take away from that achievement, and there's the plus that what is now a boring boss fight goes faster for my guild and I so we can get onto the fights that we're working on.

So relax.

Blizz has done a great job opening the world of raiding to those dreaded "casuals". You "hardcore" players have 25-mans, you have first crack at new bosses, first crack at hard modes, legendary weapons, and all the bragging rights that go along with world and server firsts, super-rare mounts, and having a weapon with orange text. What's wrong with the rest of the game having a shot at watered down versions of those fights? What's wrong with the rest of the millions of players in the game getting a go for some weaker version of your loot. Does it honestly, HONESTLY detract from your own sense of achievement when that happens? Really? If it bothers you SO much that people are getting the chances to put in their own fair share of effort, and get a proportional amount of gear, then you need to check your priorities in life.

@Cyanea

There's nothing wrong with 'casual' players having access to content. There is something wrong with content being aimed at extremely bad players.

To try and explain that more clearly:

There is nothing wrong with not knowing everything about your class or role providing a tiny part of you actually wants to learn and get better at playing the game. However, there are players who don't want to get better, don't care about getting better, and just want to get whatever they can for as little effort as possible. These come on both 'hardcore' and 'casual' varieties, and are what I refer to as 'extremely bad players'; bad at the game and don't give a damn.

In response to all the people saying that arguing against the ICC buffs is elitist:

Yes, there is some elitism inherent in the complaints. However, there is a valid concern as well.

My guild is hardly a server first guild. We're currently wiping on Festergut25. The 5% buff will help us. However, I am concerned about what's going to happen when the buff gets higher. It's a LONG time til Cataclysm, and we will probably clear all the way through ICC before it gets here. Especially with these buffs going up every month. 5% is a nice boost, but 30% or more is going to make ICC insanely trivialized. I could already see the a noticeable difference with the buff this week (either that or our dps really brought their A-game).

So in a few months once Arthas dies what is my guild going to do? Some people will probably just want to take a break til Cataclysm, and some people will probably want to do heroic modes. My guess is the decision will lead to drama in my casual raiding guild. Happily I'm not an officer so I can bury my head in the sand and ignore it. But I do recognize people complaining about the buff aren't all elitist snobs who want to keep all the gear to themselves.

FWIW I think the ICC buff should've been capped out at about 15% or so. Something that's definitely helpful, but not so much that Arthas should be a cakewalk.

@TobiasX

Define "getting better." I'm an okay casual, I read up on good gear upgrades I want, try to learn new tricks and develop a rotation... but I'm not going to sit down and repetitively practice my rotation to max my Hunter's DPS, or break out a spreadsheet to figure out which gems will give my Pally tank a 0.4% better Block value.

Does that make me a "bad player" in your book? Because it sure sounds like it.

@BubblePriest

I think what we may see is that the buff never gets to 30%, if the penetration into ICC reaches the level that the Dev's want. The buff is an easy way to get further in for folks that are struggling at some point in the fights.

The concept is to make sure that 80% of the people have access to 100% of the content. There are 20% that just won't care (they pvp or roleplay only, and doing the raid content doesn't excite them). This expansion has always been about the epic storyline, and Blizz has stated they want to make the whole story as accessible as possible to people who want to see it. That doesn't mean you can just faceroll it with greens, but if you want to work on it you should be able to see the whole story.

I'd assume that the dev's are parsing the data from failed event attempts and working on fixing some of the "random fail button" issues.

I've got some sad news for you.

Blizzard is a COMPANY. A COMPANY is in business to make as much money for themselves as possible. I'm sure somewhere in some meeting room, they pulled up some spreadsheet that says that X% of people leave the game because there's damn squat to do once you hit 80 if you don't raid. Once an expansion hits, there's precious little that gets added to the game that you can see by yourself. Most new content focuses on raids.

So these accountants and pencil-pushers tell the dev team to fix that, and try and make raiding more open so that some of that x% stay ingame. The dev team realizes that it'll be tough to water down raids so that idiots can get gear, while keeping it fresh and entertaining for people like you and I. Enter: Hard modes and achievements. This lets those with the barest amount of ability to stand out of fire have something to do once a week that's not a daily or Gundrak for the bazillionth time, while still creating a separate, and difficult layer of content for the hardcore crowd.

We're lucky in this respect. Blizzard is a company. Blizzard owes us nothing, really. They could've made it so ALL raids are easymode now. But they didn't. They separated it nicely. What more do you want?

@Bubblepriest: If they do five percent a month, that's another six months until the buff is capped out. I think your guild will have plenty of time to get in, get Arthas down, and get a couple of hard modes under your belt before the content truly becomes "trivialized". All of the health and healing buffs in the world won't do you any good if you don't know the fights.

@ everyone

Im not sure how the 30+ everything buff will work but I really dought that it allows you kill things in hard mode. The whole purpose of the new "hard" n "easy" modes are to allow "hard" n "easy" too. See what Im saying is blizzard is haveing their cake and eating it too. They figured out how to let the hardcore players still get hardcore gear so they can talk about how cool they are in /2 while laid back people like me can do stuff "easy". Hell I pay the same price per month I want to see the zones they spent my money crafting, I dont care if the gear is lesser.

In all honesty, don't we all already know who are the top players on our server? Isn't it clear to everyone that we are playing a game designed by a company to turn a profit? So, if they nerf some content, who the hell cares as to why and how it will be perceived? You still know that downed it before the nerfs, so why does it matter so freaking much?