Their excuse is because people were 'hitting a wall' on the Fall of Deathwing half.

It can. Don't use the spell.

Christ, calm down. You can turn it off. Anybody's that's done LFR knows that it's hardly the most engaging of experiences, as cool as it is to be able to see the content you wouldn't have had a chance to before.

These progressive nerfs just seem like Blizz's way of making the Normal modes accessible to other players without crippling people's egos by making it a non-optional nerf. I like it.

@wrinklestein, the "don't use the spell" option is not realistically available. It can not be chosen by an individual for themselves. It requires an entire raid team to agree on it. For that to happen, you need overwhelming support of the other 9 or 24 members (or the GM will rightly fear defections to other guilds.) To have that support, you need an entire team full of people who do not care about relative standings. Even this late in the game, many "average" guilds care about getting that next boss before the other similar average guilds on their server that they've been competing with all along.

So in essence, the option is not really available to anyone. I wish Blizz would have the guts to release that statistics on how often it was used, which would show its purely a "marketing" option with no effect in game.

Because some people simply don't have the group that can do it as it is right now. Not everyone runs with groups where every dps/heals/tank pulls the maximum their gear allows.

BK is right, turning off the buff is not really realistic, most GMs feel like it is there responsibility to deliver kills to the members, the nerf helps them do that. even if they personally don't want to take the nerf (as my GM does not want to) they still do it because nerfs may suck but recruiting sucks even more.

The question I have for the anti-nerf crusaders is simple. Where is your team in DS progression and how long have you been working on the boss you are working right now? from my point of view you are either 8/8H or stuck on some boss. Getting a push to get your group past that boss is a good thing. I mean you aren't going to get any more gear than you already have at this point, and the skill you have on your team is rotting every week that you don't get kills (people leave guilds that are stalled).

So, tell me your story. make me see how the nerf is hurting your group or making WoW less fun for your team (NOT you individually, raiding is a team sport).

@AltairAntares That's called failing, and it's okay. My guild has killed Deathwing, but last week our raid group just wasn't working well enough and we got stuck at Blackhorn. So we'll go back next week and try harder. That to me is the point of raiding: improving as a team. The point of content is it's something that you work at and then complete, not that you try it, can't do it and then Blizzard changes the content so you can do it without making any more effort.

Not being 8/8H is not the same as being "stalled." My 10 man team is currently on Ultraxion. We only got an hour on it last week. I estimate we need 1-2 more hours of practice and we'll have it. We are a small team -- total roster of 11 -- who attempts to raid nine hours each week, but usually gets only 3 or 6 hours of productive progression raiding because a couple members are unavailable one night. Although we all have most of our 397 gear, there are still upgrades going out every week from the hard mode bosses we started farming only recently, and those rarely-dropping items from normal mode.

I would have much rather Blizz introduced a powerful, effective Raid Team finder function -- ie. something that could make it easier to have a roster of 12 or 13 without a ton of recruiting that feels like work, not fun. That would be a big help. The nerf is just a welfare handout we didn't need and don't appreciate.

matt, It's rather simple actually. Saying this buff is not an imposition, like BK wisely put, is outright bull**it. If you are not the leader of your group, you'll have to suck it up cuz he'll most likely want the buff. And if you're the leader, you'll be forced to suck it up and use the buff because if not then most of your group will defect.

Now, onto your question: I currently can' t say I have a group, unfortunately. I spent most of this expansion too busy to raid, and now that I found a way to fit raiding into my schedule, it's been pretty hard to find commited people to make a solid composition. That said, I was able to be whisked away a few times into a friend's group who's 1/8H (altough they say my gear is still too low to do heroics - iLvl 392).

Anyways, I believe you shouldn't NEED the PERFECT RAID COMPOSITION to be able to get down bosses and clear a raid. No. But you should need SKILLED PLAYERS. Every fight should be a CHALLENGE. To overcome a boss should mean something. What blizzard is doing is trivializing the challenge, to the point where most people don't CARE. "Necessity is the mother of evolution". You don't need to play 8 hours a day to be a skilled player. Being a "casual" is not an excuse to be a bad player or to not care about gemming/enchanting your gear. At least it SHOULDN'T be. If you just say to everybody "you don't need to care about being a good player; we'll just trivialize the content until the point where even you'll be able to plow through it", where's the incentive? where's the drive? where's the motivation?

If you lift weights in a gym and you can't pull the 30 lbs. weight, do you put a cartoony "30 lbs." sign on the 10 lbs. weight and lift it? or you train so you are able to actually lift the real 30 lb. weight?

What you seem to be saying is that the buff is an imposition because most people you raid with will want it. I hate when people use democracy to impose their will like that.

It would be much better if the minority could impose their will.

Yes, given that everyone else in the server / game is using the nerf, raid teams are "choosing" not to be gimped relative to all the other teams.

But that is very different than choosing to have the nerf available in the first place.

"If you lift weights in a gym and you can't pull the 30 lbs. weight, do you put a cartoony "30 lbs." sign on the 10 lbs. weight and lift it? or you train so you are able to actually lift the real 30 lb. weight?"

I totally get this. but in the world of running guilds, folks quit if your group can't lift the weights, regardless of how they are labeled. I had a guild implode in ICC25 because it took us 2 weeks to get festergut and rotface down.

I completely see your point about your place in progression though. that's actually where we were when the first nerf came down. we took a generous break around the holidays and when we cam back we only had one week for a "pre-nerf" kill we weren't stalled, but we had not had the time on bosses yet. That said, getting our madness kill the night of the nerf was no less satisfying (I thought it would be). Getting our first DS heroic kill last night was not a bummer, it was fun.

Sure we may have been able to make 8/8H without the nerf but I doubt it. I don't really care about our server ranking. I just want to have content that is appropriate for my groups skill level available until the next tier comes out. without the nerf our run in DS (and potentially our guild) would probably end at 2/8H, with the progressive nerf I would not be surprised to see us get an H madness kill in the next 2 months.

It's optional.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0y2mgEAe0hY

And before you're like "well Pyro, they're the best guild in the world, they're just that good" i'll just remind you that they did this in the middle of july of 2010, right in the middle of the doldrums of wrath of the lich king, after ICC had been out well over 6 months. They wanted to give themselves a challenge, and they tackled it.

I'll also say, blizzard has progressively nerfed virtually every single raid in the game over time. Frankly, you are playing the wrong game if you find that distasteful. It seems like this happens over and over - raid gets nerfed, people complain, but then they go kill stuff and wear their shiny new titles with pride.

I mostly read Wowinsider on my Google Reader Feed, but I can't see the comments. So I opened the actual article just to see if people would have understand by now what the "The spell can be disabled by talking to Lord Afrasastrasz at the beginning of Dragon Soul" means.

Sadly, I'm not surprised =/

I hate the way they nerfed Molten Core by making everybody be level 85. If they hadn't handed out welfare buffs like that, completing Molten Core would be just as prestigious now as it was in 2004. Practice, people! Practice!

People should work very hard at this computer game, like I do. And that's why I put all my raid achievements on my resume.

@matt my guild is 5/8 heroic, averaging 2 weeks per boss. Most of us dont want the nerfs, but it's the difference in fielding a good comp or having 2 pallys, 3 warriors, 3 rogues, Druid and a priest - I.e. a really bad comp.

We are actually talking about going back and redoing heroics without the buff, or trying to turn it off before we complete regular madness. As it stands on that fight, with the buff active, we are killing stuff to fast and almost wiping because we get over whelmed by raid damage.

IMO, don't increase the buff anymore.

If you're turning it off, why does it matter how high it gets?

The door marked Special Snowflake is right over there.