Patch 5.4 patch notes
Virtual Realms feature revealed
The Proving Grounds are coming
The latest patch 5.4 newsBlizzard announces first round of Firelands raid hotfixes
by Mathew McCurley 
Sep 20th 2011 at 2:00PM
Normal difficulty bosses Shannox, Beth'tilac, and Rhyolith took 15% decreases to health and damage, whereas all of the other bosses in Firelands took a 25% hit. Certain trash packs have had their proverbial bite removed, and Alysrazor's tornadoes will now move more slowly. All adds in these encounters have had their health pools and damage decreased in the same proportions to their corresponding bosses'.
On heroic difficulty, all bosses' health pools and damage, along with adds' corresponding health and damage, have been reduced by a blanket 15%, which is a huge nerf for heroic modes. Alysrazor also drops more feathers on both difficulty settings, and her Wings of Flame buff is now a static 30 seconds.
While many players will be upset with these nerfs, I can only imagine the many raid groups that will happily charge forward to finally defeat the encounters that they have been banging their heads against for the better part of the patch. Blizzard has said that there will be more nerfs coming, as this is just the first round, so make use of this time to get as many of the bosses as you can while the getting is hot.
First round of Firelands hotfixes
As announced in the 'Firelands Raid Changes Incoming' blog post ( http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/3494581/Firelands_Raid_Changes_Incoming-9_12_2011 ), we'll be making the below hotfixes which have gone into effect during today's raid reset.
Normal difficulty
• Shannox, Beth'tilac, Rhyolith - health and damage reduced by 15%.
• Other bosses - health and damage reduced by 25%.
• All adds' health and damage have been reduced in the same proportions as bosses.
• Hellhounds and Unstable Magma deal much less damage.
• Alysrazor's Fiery Tornados move slower.
• The Wings of Flame buff duration on Alysrazor is now uniformly 30 seconds.
• Alysrazor drops 1 additional feather for 10-player mode and 2 additional feathers for 25-player mode in all cycles.
• Wrath of Ragnaros in Stage 1 now knocks targets up, but not back.
Heroic difficulty
• Boss health and damage reduced by 15% (Heroic Ragnaros' health has not been reduced.)
• All adds' health and damage have been reduced in the same proportions as bosses. However, Heroic Ragnaros adds have been reduced by 15%.
• The Wings of Flame buff duration on Alysrazor is now uniformly 30 seconds.
• Alysrazor drops 1 additional feather for 10-player mode and 2 additional feathers for 25-player mode in all cycles.
Stay tuned to the 4.2 Hotfixes blog post as these and other live updates are made to the game: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/3019413
Normal difficulty
• Shannox, Beth'tilac, Rhyolith - health and damage reduced by 15%.
• Other bosses - health and damage reduced by 25%.
• All adds' health and damage have been reduced in the same proportions as bosses.
• Hellhounds and Unstable Magma deal much less damage.
• Alysrazor's Fiery Tornados move slower.
• The Wings of Flame buff duration on Alysrazor is now uniformly 30 seconds.
• Alysrazor drops 1 additional feather for 10-player mode and 2 additional feathers for 25-player mode in all cycles.
• Wrath of Ragnaros in Stage 1 now knocks targets up, but not back.
Heroic difficulty
• Boss health and damage reduced by 15% (Heroic Ragnaros' health has not been reduced.)
• All adds' health and damage have been reduced in the same proportions as bosses. However, Heroic Ragnaros adds have been reduced by 15%.
• The Wings of Flame buff duration on Alysrazor is now uniformly 30 seconds.
• Alysrazor drops 1 additional feather for 10-player mode and 2 additional feathers for 25-player mode in all cycles.
Stay tuned to the 4.2 Hotfixes blog post as these and other live updates are made to the game: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/3019413
Brace yourselves for what could be some of most exciting updates to the game recently with patch 4.3. Look at what's ahead: new item storage options, cross-realm raiding, cosmetic armor skinning and your chance to battle the mighty Deathwing -- from astride his back! 
Reader Comments (Page 2 of 8)
Mortenebra Sep 20th 2011 2:49PM
Same here... a combination of RL events and an inconsistent team-- mostly, trying to find a good 10th person-- really killed our raiding efforts. We got Shannox down to a science and *finally* got Beth to her burn phase... And that was it. Kaputzki. Don't even get me started on Rhyolith and his inability to dance. lol
Hopefully RL will settle down for some folks and our 10th person sticks around in time for us to blow through the rest of Firelands in time for 4.3.
mazca13 Sep 20th 2011 2:49PM
We were doing the same... annoyingly, we finally had a breakthrough and managed to drop Rhyolith, Beth'tilac and Baleroc too in the last lockout! At least we did get them down before the major nerfs, should be very comfortable now.
cptgrudge Sep 20th 2011 3:12PM
How does this occur? I mean I don't *want* to sound elitist or anything, but I don't understand. Our little 10m guild isn't exactly the most progressed, as turnover and RL got in the way of our casual schedule which resulted in three or four weeks of lost raiding time. But we still managed 6/7 normal, and are working on Rag, all on 8-9 hours of raiding per week.
We're nothing special...some still occasionally die to fire, or tunnel vision and die, or fail to interrupt, or whatever, and we still managed it.
Perhaps it might be something better posed for the WoW forums, but it's an honest question that I would ask of those that are still struggling on more than 1/7. What is it about the bosses? After 3 months of raiding the fights the mechanics of them have to be understood. Or are they?
Do the healing or dps requirements seem to be too much? Or are the fights too unforgiving when needing to bring a new player up to speed? Simply inconsistent attendance?
Again, I don't want to sound mean or judge anyone, I'm just trying to understand how this can happen if things were fine in the previous tier.
Skarn Sep 20th 2011 3:36PM
We got Shannox down easily in only 4 attempts. Beth and Rhyo were a lot harder. 20+ attempts for both of them. Beth was largely about finding the right assignments to deal with adds. Once we had those worked out, it was pretty smooth. Rhyo was some of the same, figuring out the best way to deal with adds, but there was also a big factor in learning how to drive him. When they removed the knockback from his Stomp it helped quite a bit.
Baleroc was no more than a dozen attempts, but Alysrazor was another 30+. Tornadoes were (and still are) the biggest thing on Alysrazor, followed by tank deaths to a combination of Gushing Wound + Tantrum. We worked all that out. Staghelm was pretty easy actually. The hardest part of Staghelm was planning cooldowns and Adrenaline stacks. It was more planning the fight than actually trying it. Alysrazor was mostly about "doing" it to practice, Staghelm was figuring it out beforehand. Staghelm was only a dozen or so wipes. (By the way, Staghelm tip for 10s: During the Burning Orb cat phase, drag the boss next to an orb and have your melee "tank" it. This worked amazingly well for us, greatly reducing the RNG issues of the Cat jumping on the orb "tanks" since he can't jump on a melee.)
I'm sorry to hear people are still struggling on post-Shannox. :( I'd be happy to try and help figure it out, if these nerfs aren't enough. (Also, WOW these nerfs are pretty crazy. We should mow through Ragnaros this week easy.)
mazca13 Sep 20th 2011 3:40PM
@Cptgrudge
In a word - trash. Your 8-9 hours of raiding a week is likely more than many manage. Given the size of our pretty casual guild we struggled to fill raids during the summer, and generally only ended up with one raid for 2-3 hours a week. We started progressing in the last week or two because we finally had enough consistent players who got comfortable with the fights, and finally started to manage more than one raid per lockout.
You can reasonably spend an hour or so clearing to Shannox if you aren't rushing, and then if you take a few tries to drop him you've all of a sudden got through at least an hour and a half if not more... that's not always enough time to get a good try at a second boss. Then the next reset, you do the same... Blackwing Descent was different, you could take several tries per boss and still at least clear 3 or 4 of them in a 3 hour raid because it only took a few minutes of trash between them.
Hal Sep 20th 2011 3:58PM
@captgrudge
Well, as the raid leader for my band of intrepid-but-unprogressed raiders, I'd be happy to offer up some insight as to how it happens.
-Inconsistent attendance. If everyone who had the rank of "raider" in our guild was on for every raid, we'd be doing 25m raiding. But we generally have ~7 consistent people, and then another 5 who cycle through those remaning slots any given week. Why? Life just kicks your butt sometimes. Gather up your real-life buddies and see if you can find one night a week that you can get together and have everyone show up consistently. That starts becoming very difficult once that group starts having gainful employment, getting married, and having kids.
-Lack of practice. If we don't have a full guild group, we don't go to Firelands. This probably hurts our progression, since we don't get to see the fights as often. But the alternative is not that great. Pugging for just 1 boss generally means being laughed at in trade chat for being, as people keep saying "bads," while getting raiders who just aren't geared for Firelands asking to go because they know the fights on their other toons. It hurts morale to cancel a raid night, but it's just as bad to spend half your night finding people to fill the empty slot and then make no progress anyhow.
-Difficulty of recruitment. It's been mentioned by the columnists on this site frequently, but guild recruitment has been pretty tough since the release of Cataclysm. I can only speculate as to why. But we've had people who, for example, joined the guild, signed up for every available raid on the calendar, then quit the same day. Is it the player or the guild? I don't know, but it's not a recruiter's market out there.
-Reticent raiders. When I post the raid schedule, I point out which bosses we'll be doing and ask raiders to get up-to-date on strategies for those encounters ahead of time. I've asked my raiders to read up on their specs for the best gearing/rotation/glyphs/etc. They don't always do this stuff. I know it hurts our progression sometimes. But . . .
-Irreplaceable raiders. Remember the part about the recruitment above? I couldn't replace that guy doing 12k DPS if I wanted to. Yeah, we'd probably do better if we weren't staffing a 10m raid with 3 paladins, 3 druids, and 2 hunters, but again, recruitment. Plus, these are long-standing guild members who have done a lot for us. I can't really say, "Yes, you played a huge part in helping the guild with [insert achievement here] but I'm cutting you from the raid team because we really need a mage."
So, there's some insight. Yeah, we're not making the cut for Ensidia anytime soon, but there's a lot of other issues stacking up. But we've stuck it out, and will continue to do so, because we like playing together and have made a good environment for it. Encounter nerfs mean we, and guilds with similar issues, don't have to content ourselves with steamrolling T11 on those nights that nothing is working.
DragonFireKai Sep 20th 2011 4:14PM
Hal, those are all discipline and leadership issues that can all be solved with minimal time investment outside of the raid hours.
You ever see the Mighty Ducks? Rag tag bunch of misfits who get crushed because of inferior leadership and apathy amongst the players? That's your guild. You need to be their Emilio Estevez. Otherwise, you'll be right back in this hole in T13, waiting for blizzard to rescue you from your own failure.
Boobah Sep 20th 2011 5:05PM
How does it happen? Partially it's the summer doldrums... if you can't field a consistent raid team because every week one or two of your main crew is off on vacation or whatever, you have to teach someone new the fight every week. And that's if you've got alternates that are geared enough to make a firelands raid. If not, you're off to tier 11 to fill in those gaps, or calling the raid off altogether.
Then there's the enormous amount of trash you have to clear before even spawning Shannox. If you're raiding on the timescale my guild did, you clear to Shannox and half your night was gone. Only got him to 5% before the soft enrage killed you on your best attempt? Sorry, next raid night you're still stuck with an hour of trash before you can make another boss attempt.
And trash made worse because it's constantly pathing across other trash packs; waiting for dogs or surgers or giants to stop standing in scorpions or whatever added quite a bit of time to the clear, not least because of wipes because they weren't as clear as the puller had hoped.
Stilhelm Sep 21st 2011 11:49AM
My guild was 6/7 FL, on 6-9 hrs/week of raiding. We could have gotten Ragnaros in the next week or two without nerfs as well, the biggest part was getting everyone to understand that in the transition, adds far from the hammer just need to be slowed as quickly as possible, instead of focusing on one and letting others go full speed. With the nerfs, he'll drop this week because 25% is a huge nerf.
We took our alts in last weekend (pre-nerf) for our first serious attempt at Firelands on those. Previously our alts only had a few attempts on Shannox, so most were in 353-359 gear and lower. We also had a hunter who was maybe 348 ilvl, hadn't even been to the Zandalari dungeons yet. Of the tanks, one had never set foot in Firelands and the other had seen a few attempts on Shannox. We killed Shannox in a few attempts and Beth'tilac in probably 5 attempts. We'd have gotten Beth'tilac an attempt or two sooner but it took me a bit to learn the damage patterns toward the end of the fight and how to heal while avoiding meteors up on the web (my main is a hunter so I'd never been up top). Once everyone picked up their new roles (mostly me, I'm not the best tank healer) it went down pretty easily.
With Rhyolith it was pretty much the same, except it was the tank who'd never been to Firelands at all learning how to drive Rhyolith, and getting the tank with sparks to not run all the way to the edge of the island out of healing range, and Rhyolith dropped as well in a few attempts.
The point is, you don't need everyone doing 20K+ to down bosses in FL. It doesn't hurt anything, but it's not necessary. It helps more on Baleroc, allowing you to run 3 healers, and Staghelm, but the first bosses are pretty much entirely about technique.
Someone mentioned they didn't want to pug undergeared alts of those that have done the fights on their mains, but really, the undergeared alt of a raider is exactly who you want to pug in. They can give you a different perspective on the fight, maybe show you something you missed that makes the fight easier. In addition, even some undergeared alts of raiders can do surprising dps. Just this morning my assassination rogue in mostly blues (350 ilvl) was consistently beating a marksman hunter with all the FL BOE pieces and 2pc T12 (ilvl 365 or so) in a Zandalari by a fair amount. On my hunter main at that ilvl in zandoms I was generally over 20k, while that hunter was doing 12-14k. Most pugs would take that hunter to FL over my rogue, and yet my rogue would pound them on every fight, in addition to already knowing the mechanics.
Austin Sep 20th 2011 2:07PM
I'm all for nerfing the content after it's somewhat obsolete, but I think this is too far. 25% is huge.
Lorne Sep 20th 2011 2:09PM
Yay more catering to BADS (not casual players) because normal mode firelands bosses were pushovers already.
sperrone Sep 20th 2011 2:14PM
My guild has only been able to down Shannox on Normal. Call us whatever you want (casual, bad, RL friends), but I'm pretty darn happy right now. I'm really looking forward to seeing more of the content.
I am surprised they nerfed heroics, but it really doesn't effect me at all.
Daedalus Sep 20th 2011 2:14PM
Yay more name calling by people who think that having 20 hours a week to dedicate to WoW is some kind of skill.
Ralod Sep 20th 2011 2:14PM
DERP BADS DERP DERP
It's people like you that make me hate the WoW community.
(cutaia) Sep 20th 2011 2:15PM
"BADS"
Can people like you possibly learn to make your point without talking like a five-year-old?
BADDIE BADDIE BAD BAD. Christ, man.
Diop Sep 20th 2011 2:34PM
"Yay more name calling by people who think that having 20 hours a week to dedicate to WoW is some kind of skill."
The opinion that you have to spend unreasonable amounts of time playing the game to be good is just as stupid as the opinion that all casual players are bad. You can play for only a few hours every few nights and still make very good progress by spending minimal time looking at guides on how to gem or enchant your class/rotations/etc.
Aaron Sep 20th 2011 2:45PM
That's a bad ass comment. Too bad it's black. That's a bad look.
Guttsu Sep 20th 2011 3:01PM
Lorne I feel so embarrassed for you...
Daedalus Sep 20th 2011 3:02PM
@Diop:
It still all comes down to having enough time to dedicate to raiding. Case in point, Paragon, one of the most highly skilled guilds out there (according to some) taking 500 attempts to down heroic Ragnaros. Yeah, they're good players, but they also put a ton of time into it.
Regardless of how little time normal raiding takes a week, there are always going to be players who don't have that much time to spare, and assuming they're worse at the game because of it is asinine. Whatever amount of time investment normal raiding takes, LFR will (hopefully) take less, opening up more content to more players. I don't see that as a bad thing.
And for the record, your example is pretty close to what I said to begin with; a few hours (3 to 4) a few days (3 to 4) works out to 9 to 16 hours a week. Add in time preparing for raids, getting supplies, and (as you mentioned) researching fights, gear, gemming, and enchants, and I don't think my 20 hour estimate is that far off.
tony.nguyen.enmax Sep 20th 2011 3:21PM
@ Daedalus
At least the first 3 bosses in normal mode Firelands can be dropped with as little as 3 hours a week. Throw in just a second day after that and it's possible to eventually drop the next 2 after a few weeks. The biggest time constraint is all that trash, IMO.