Not nerf, fix. :-)

nerf

Why does everyone think the Akil'Zon fight was so hard? Dispel the debuff and cast a HoT on the tank and you never have problems. Wow, that was hard.

@acurry08

It's not that dispelling is hard, it's that dispelling every single person in the group is hard if they refuse to be properly spread out.

While I've healed many excellent groups where the melee (and ranged) have been awesome and not spread the debuff or got it from the tank, I've healed just as many where they either haven't known about it or didn't care to observe the potential danger of a growing amount of people with the debuff.

@ accurry

Everybody thought it was hard, because it WAS. After the last patch for hotfixes, the fight became either overtuned or seriously bugged. The debuff was jumping like crazy, to everyone, ALL the time, nicely hitting for 35K if you were unlucky. There were reports of the debuff also jumping to and from pets, minipets and the little bears from the arch buff.

In a fight with more than one melee dps, this became healer hell. You'd have the debuff jumping to at least 3 players, and once you were done disspelling those with barely time to throw out a heal, they were already applied again or jumped to someone else. And don't mention what happened if someone with a debuff was picked up by a bird, flying over the heads of those who had been debuff-free before.

I did the fight on my resto shaman a couple of times in the bugged/overtuned mode, and the healing going on there was more intense than for example the first phase of Halfus. Now, I am a pretty good healer and running in 359 iLvl, with groups of competent people that know when to move, when to shoot birds, when to stack etc. Still, yesterday's attempt left me with only the tanks standing and myself at 10% health. I pulled out about 2.3 million in heals, disspells around 30.
If you are a healer that actually needs gear from these bosses, good luck on that without running OOM from disspells alone halfway through the fight.

If you want to read more experiences from 346 to heroic raid geared healers on this fight, here's a nice thread: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/2456906582

So yes.. definitely not a nerf, but a much-needed fix. These are dungeon bosses for people that need gear, not raid fights.

Funny, this dude was my FIRST fight as a healer in 4.1 with ilvl 354 -- I figured I was screwed. I even have the glyphed dispel (3% heal per dispel) and we still wiped 3 or 4 times and then finally got him down with 3 people left. Subsequent runs weren't much better.

So ya...I'm definitely rejoicing.

Indeed.. I was running this as Resto shaman and got annihilated a bunch of times. It was dispel hell! I'm glad it's fixed.

@acurry-- It was easy, as long as you had, at most, one melee. More than that, and there wasn't room to spread out. The healer can't very well be cleansing constantly on that fight.

All this nerf does is makes this fight possible with 2 or 3 melee. If you had a lot of ranged, the fight is effectively unchanged.

Given that they swapped the numbers (5 seconds became 12, and 12 yards became 5) I think someone might have made a wee mistake when configuring the fight on Blizzard's end before the patch released. Could be just correcting a transpositional error, and this is actually how it was supposed to be the whole time.

@brainded

Excellent point. I hadn't noticed that.

@acurry

I think kittens put it very well, but ultimately it boils down to this: Up until the fix/nerf/whatever, a minimum of 1.5 out of every 5 seconds (1 GCD) was being used to dispel the debuff. The other 3.5 seconds (~2 heals depending on your class) had to be used to heal up the 35k static disruption (heaven forbid it hits more than 1 person), the boss's melee damage, whatever 20k attacks the little bird adds did, and the 20-25k hits that kidnappers put on their targets. That's massive healing on multiple targets, regardless of if you have a hot on the tank or not. And for players of appropriate gear and skill level it was way over the top.

I'll be looking forward to actually queueing for the instance again.