Embrace the Treadmill

So, there's been a refreshed wave of complaints and praise about the concept of Mists of Pandaria. Some people don't like the theme, which I guess is a valid opinion to hold, albeit one that I find a little odd that in a game that sends you fully grown and domesticated dragons in the mail (What's the shipping cost on that? I can't imagine the hazard pay the Azerothian Postal Service Earns.), people are drawing the line at anthropomorphic pandas. Other people take umbrage with the new features, such as the minipet battles. I for one look forward to sending Stevie the Squire to bleed for my honor in the Ring of Death.

There's another wave of complaints. People whine about the game being a perceived pixilated hamster wheel. Level up another five levels, grind through the heroics again, and get back into raiding/PvP shape. Wooooooo...

This is an MMO. If you wanted a defined end state, well, Diablo III and Mass Effect 3 will both come out soon to sate your hunger for single player games with multiplayer tacked on. And threes, lots of threes this year. MMOs, particularly subscription based MMOs, are a treadmill. The entire plan is to make it so that you can't "beat" the game, and then shelve it until the sequel comes out.

Which brings us back to the people complaining about the expansion. I think they're right. Why should we pay $50 for a box that lets us keep running on the treadmill we're already on? What's the point of another five levels that endgame players are going to blitz through blindly in less than a week, and tacking on another five levels for a new player to wander through? The barrier to entry gets taller and taller, and as a result, the leveling content prior to the current expansion get stretched thinner and thinner, to the point where current players can go from Winterspring, to Hellfire, to the Borean Tundra, to Hyjal without spending more than a few hours in other zones. Level 58-80, and new players miss 90% of the content that exists in those regions.

The current leveling model is an annoyance to established players, and an increasingly insurmountable barrier to new players, whom Blizzard must court to feed Azeroth the bodies it needs to sustain its grim rate of attrition. Why? What's the point? What's the purpose of leveling in the modern World of Warcraft?

Is it to teach players how to play in endgame content? That was one of the old ideas behind it, and one that Blizzard attempted to return to in Cataclysm, introducing quests that simulate raid mechanics such as LoSing casters and dodging void zones, but the penalties were so light that the majority of player bulldozed their way through the quests without learning the intended lessons. This idea is further undermined by Blizzard's tendency to give players abilities right before they hit the endgame, that completely and fundamentally alters the manner in which the player plays their character, which pretty much obliterates most of what they learned prior to the acquisition of that keystone ability.

Is it to increase the power of the characters? They slapped differing scalars on ratings at different levels, leading to the rather humorous reality of a level 80 tank dinging level 81 and losing 60% of his avoidance, or fire mages just now crawling back the levels of crit that they had in Naxx. It's not like you're getting a talent point every level now, either. Come MoP, you'll only be getting six points total, and they're stretched out in a doldrum of 15 level gaps.

Is it a vehicle for new content? It is, but it's not the sole vehicle, and while leveling is failing at all its primary functions, those other vectors, raiding, dungeons, and daily hubs, not only do just as good a job of delivering new lore and content, but they also serve their primary purposes of providing gear, gold, and incentives to come back.

Now, I'm not advocating the death of leveling content. I believe that it should be returned to its roots. Leveling content should be difficult. It should introduce players to mechanics that are seen consistently throughout the endgame. Void zones, LoS, Interrupts, DPS and Heal checks, 3D maneuvering, and kiting should be introduced to players, and reiterated throughout the leveling experience. It should have real consequences, too. If you stand in that void zone when it blows, you should die, and the game should tell you why you died, and let you try again.

What I do want Blizzard to kill off are these little leveling breaks between raid tiers for each expansion. I'm here for the treadmill, not for cross training. You don't run for a half hour, stop and stretch, then run for another half hour, and stop to stretch again, repeating ad nauseum. You stretch to prepare yourself for your run, and then you run until you're finished.

Questing is not the sole province of leveling content. Questing can work as an excellent means for moving the story along. The 4.1 ZG/ZA questline was an excellent example of moving the storyline along through quests that were available only at the level cap.

So what I'm proposing is that Blizzard embrace the treadmill nature of the endgame of WoW. They need to acknowledge that they create two games, the leveling game, which is largely a solo game, and the endgame, which is both a single player and multiplayer game. They need to create a leveling game that serves their purposes, and then allow that to stand on its own. Once players complete the leveling game, the basic training of WoW, they should be at least competent at the class they leveled. That's when they hit the endgame. They've finished their stretches, and they step onto the treadmill. Content updates should come every six to eight months, and should introduce multiple levels of content. There should be a set of daily quests for solo play, along with quests introducing the new multiplayer content. There should be about ten to twelve new five man bosses, in two to three new dungeons, and a new tier of raids with ten to twelve bosses. What there shouldn't be is thirty hours of solo content acting as a barrier to entry to the new content. They can realign the talents when needed, and introduce new zones, new abilities, and new BGs as needed. You don't need a new expansion to do that. You just need a patch.

Numbers 2.0: Insight Into the Design Theory of Cataclysm, Casual Raiders Are Not the Majority, Churn and Attrition Are Two Different Things.

So, my last numbers post got me thinking about some more numbers. Go figure.

One of the metrics people were using for analyzing the difficulty of T13 content was that by Christmas, only 175k characters had downed Madness of Deathwing on normal difficulty, which is only 4% of the total level 85 population. What I found interesting about that particular metric, was it gave me something that I didn't feel like putting in the effort to find on my own. The total number of level capped characters in World of Warcraft. There's a hair under 4.4 million level capped characters.

This is interesting. We all know that there's 10 million active accounts in World of Warcraft right now. It's something that they slap onto every single advertisement for the game. That means, that if we make the patently false assumptions that no one has a level capped alt, and that no one with a level 85 character has let their subscription lapse, then we wind up with the figure that 56% of paying players have not hit level 85 yet, and that's the absolute lowest percentage it can be. Even by the most conservative estimates, if you've hit level 85 in World of Warcraft, you're in the minority. In reality, the percentages are more skewed.

Two and a half million net players have quit since the release of T9. Two million alone in the last year of Cataclysm content. Some of those were players who made it to level 85 and quit playing. Those players were listed in the 96% of players who hadn't downed DW, and as such, are listed in the 4.4 million. This means that the percentage of endgame accounts is actually smaller than the 44% posited in the most conservative estimate.

Further complicating the issue is the matter of alts. How many people do you know who have another character at level 85? Or two? I have five, there's another player in my guild who has ten, and I know a couple people on the server who have 15+. Of my five level 85 characters, I only raid seriously on two of them. Those other three get lumped in as casual players incapable of raiding without help from papa Blizz. If you assume that half of the players who make it to level 85 also have one alt at level 85, then suddenly the percentage of players in endgame content plummets to 29%. That's lower than the President's approval rating. Over 70% of the players who pay for this game never make it to level cap. Now, because my brain makes jumps like Bob Beamon at times, I was reminded of somewhere else I saw 70% in relation to WoW demographics.

In the 2009 4th Quarter shareholder's conference call Mike Morhaime, President of Blizzard, cited that their internal numbers showed that 70% of new players to WoW quit before they reach level ten. Any guild master will tell you that retention's a bitch. Hell, Bioware could tell you that after they lost 15% of SWTOR's playerbase after the first month. By taking all the numbers we've seen here, we can see the force of attrition at work here. For every player that quits the game, Blizzard's gotta sort through 2.3 new players to replace them. For every level capped player that quits, the number of new bodies that have to be hewn through is probably closer to 5.3.

Attracting new players to replace those lost to attrition becomes increasingly difficult as the game ages. Not only are there new competitors out there which have the advantage of having learned from the mistakes made during WoW, but the barrier to entry becomes higher and higher. At Cataclysm release, it was over a $100 investment in boxes alone to break into the game from the start and make it to level 85, not including subscription fees. That's a lot of money to sink into a game, and keep in mind that for every dungeon buddy, arena partner, or raider, that has quit your guild in the past year, Blizzard needs five people to replace them. That $100 becomes a pretty steep price.

This explains the idea behind investing the bulk of the expansion into revisiting the leveling content. In the back half of Wrath, the retention rate on players dropped low enough that the attrition rate caught up, and they went through 18 months of no real growth. Looking at this, they decided that rather than attacking the attrition rate of established clients, they would try to increase the recruitment rate of new players by making the early leveling content more attractive. The more cynical side of me thinks that they were hoping to keep people interested in the game long enough to build enough baggage in the game that they'd not quit when they hit the dearth of endgame content. The more optimistic side of me thinks the cynical side of me is a jerk.

This idea, to mortgage the endgame in favor of the leveling game, was a rather spectacular failure. WoW lost 1/6th of its player base in less than a year, after six years of nearly uninterrupted growth.

So the question is "why?" When you don't put resources into the endgame, the game ends. It sounds like a tautology, but it's not. By creating content for the endgame that is properly farmable, interesting, and challenging enough to hold a player for an extended period, then it's easier to retain a max level player, rather than telling them to just roll an alt and start over. By revamping older content, especially to the degree they did in Cataclysm, they're wasting resources, for several reasons.

1: There's already content there. They're replacing content that they already spent resources on creating, and gained nothing in terms of additions to the game. The players spend the same amount of time in Northshire as they did before. The fact that the Orcs are burning our vineyard down doesn't really make a big difference.

2: New players don't know any better. If anything, revamping the old world just makes the newer content less engaging when you reach it. I know it's a pain leveling alts through some of that stuff, and the new content was a godsend for those of us who couldn't stomach the idea of having to choose between Winterspring or Silithus again. But when I was leveling Dämmer, Eastern Plaguelands was the shit. I murdered Scourge with gusto. Then I got to Hellfire Peninsula, I flew through the Dark Portal, and witnessed Fel Reapers striding the wastes, shaking the ground with their steps, and casually crushing curious players who wandered too close. Then I got to Northrend, and I surfed a harpoon across a gaping canyon after gunning down a plethora of super vikings riding primordial dragons. The bar was constantly being raised, and kept me engaged the entire time. Granted, when I went back to Azeroth to level my warrior, I had a new perspective, and found it painful to level, but that's what heirlooms are for. The revamp screwed up the perspective of new players.

3: It's too much to put on one plate. I'm a firm proponent of getting it done right, rather than rushing it out the door. However, with Blizzard's glacial working pace, there comes the side effect of leaving players in the same raid instance for a year, or whole projects simply sublimating into vapor. So there's a caveat that needs to be attached to it: Don't promise what you can't realistically deliver. Cataclysm was a very ambitious idea for an expansion, one that Tom Chilton's crew did not do justice to, at all. On the EK/Kalimdor revamp, there's a ton a places where they simply repeated the exact same thing that happened in the zone before hand. Elywnn forest is just tragic. I'm still trying to hook Romeo and Juliet up? Didn't I fix that years ago? Other things that I harped on in previous posts, like the horrible treatment the Worgen get when they leave Gilneas, speak to unfinished content that was rushed out the door to meet a deadline. Even worse, the endgame content, the stuff that the expansion is built around, also felt the sting of over extension. When Wrath launched, Ulduar was already deep in development. When Cataclysm launched, they had nothing set on T12 content beyond the broadest ideas. Hence why Ulduar was a 14 boss masterpiece, and T12 was a 7 boss abortion that had an entire second instance, The Abyssal Maw, cut from development, leaving half an instance with an over-bloated loot table created due to trying to squeeze 14 bosses worth of loot into a 7 boss bag. Because of the crunch applied to T12, T13 suffered, becoming the Deja Vu Tier, where you're pretty sure you've killed every boss in the instance before, because they're all recolors of previous bosses, not even reskins, with the sole exception being the tendons on Spine, and Deathwing's head and limbs on Madness.

The lesson to take from Cataclysm is this: Don't waste resources "revamping" old content. As much as it pains the lore geek in me to say this, don't ever revamp any non level cap content again. No Outland revamp, no Northrend revamp, nothing. Sure, you can add zones for level capped content to the continents, sure. But don't try to make the new player experience amazing, because new players won't know the difference, and the players who will notice the difference, the current players, will notice that the revamp is coming at the expense of new content for them.

Chalk Cataclysm up as a learning mistake. You screwed up, lost two million subscribers that probably won't come back. As far as mistakes go, it's a big one, but not a lethal one. The time you spend trying to reduce the churn in the lower echelons of the player base is time wasted, and it allows attrition to take its toll.

Cross Realm Raiding is a Go!

Saz, of World of Saz, has been kind enough to set up an enjin site for all the twitteratti and Bloggers who want to take advantage of the new cross realm raiding feature introduced in the recent patch.

You can find it here. I'm going to try and squeeze in a few raids if at all possible, and I'd love to see it flourish.

Fail of Deathwing

Yeah, my guild hates Madness of Deathwing. I've never seen so much vitriol reserved for an encounter we downed in five attempts the first time we tried it. For an encounter on normal mode, this amount of hate is truly unprecedented. Personally, I'm kind of ambivalent towards it, but the fact that I've had to drag raiders kicking and screaming to finish the encounter has prompted me to take a hard look at what exactly creates such antipathy towards this particular encounter.

1: "It's a trash fight!"

Personally, I don't subscribe to this idea, that just because you're not crossing swords with your foe directly makes the encounter dull. I firmly believe that the finest end of tier boss this game has produced was Yogg-Saron, a fight which consisted of me doing nothing but tanking minions and tentacles. At the same time, having a static boss that can't change position does severely limit the perception of freedom in an encounter, and I can understand that idea.

2: "It's so looooooooong..."

Yeah, fifteen minute fights can be a pain in the ass. They can also be amazingly epic. Kil'jaeden, Yogg-Saron, Lich King, Nefarian in both incarnations, were all amazing encounters that took a long time to kill, even when they were on farm. It sucks when you wipe late in an attempt and you have to start all over, and it's a bit of a kick in the crotch when you look at the clock and realize that despite whipping your raid for quick turnover between wipes, you've spent an hour and only gotten four attempts in. I don't think that this is something that makes a fight bad in and of itself, but it really exacerbates other factors, such as...

3: "Rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat, rinse, wipe"

I understand what Blizzard was trying to accomplish here. They wanted to make a dynamic encounter that evoked shades of Yogg-Saron with the four godlike beings assisting you at varying levels. This is what they wound up with: a fight where nothing matters until ten minutes into the fight. The encounter is completely trivial until the final platform. A lot of the mechanics are solid, CD coordination checks, positioning checks, AoE strength checks, and single target coordination checks. They're all good, but for most of the fight, they're completely trivial. It amounts to the Kael'thas or Tirion RP before the fights in BC and Wrath, it's cool the first time, but God it gets old fast, and I can't even go get a drink during this stuff.

4: "Thrall Hates Me."

This is the one that really irks me. Blizzard dropped the ball on the coding for the wind tunnels on this encounter, and often enough to be a noticeable problem, Thrall will just drop players while making the transition to Kalecgos' platform, which also tends to be the one that groups go to last. While it's bad when this happens to a DPS, when it happens to a healer or tank, it's pretty much guaranteed to be a wipe. You can't battle rez them, you can't prevent it, you can only lament the ten minutes of your life you'll never get back. It's happened to me with two different guilds, and at least seven different players. I'm not the only one who's seen this problem. Honestly, Blizz, what were you thinking here? Besides, Green Jesus is supposed to be the Aspect of Earth. Just have him make a goddamn bridge. A nice solid bridge of stone that if a player falls off, its their own damn fault. On an entertaining side note, if you open a ticket citing this glitch as an example of Horde Favoritism, a GM will answer it in three minutes flat.

While Spine of Deathwing doesn't have near as much hate as Madness on normal mode, it still suffers from the same flaw of repetition.

So, how would I have fixed this problem, making Deathwing into a fight worthy of the end of an expansion?

1: Combine both encounters into a single fight.

No break to loot in between Spine and Madness. You pry the armor plate loose, Thrall takes his shot, everyone lands at the Maelstrom, DW erupts out, and you go right back to carving him up. Recovery time is for wimps, tempo is everything. This also sows the seeds for a badass RP moment. The finest RP moments in raids are always the mid fight ones, not the ones that get handed to you just for pulling. I think part of it is because when they occur midfight, they have a built in tempo that prevents them from taking too long, and I think that having them occur mid fight keeps you from focusing too hard on them. It's like a Monet painting. It looks beautiful from a distance, but the closer you examine it, the more it looks like just a few colored blobs. For me, the coolest moment in the game is the phase two transition on Yogg-Saron, where Sara goes into a brief monologue, her voice warps into Yogg's, and Yogg emerges from the ooze laughing maniacally. Kil'Jaeden's eruption from the Sunwell is up there too. I think Deathwing clawing his way out of the Maelstrom could rival that if they didn't give us the nonchalant period of bitching over which trinket dropped before hand.

2: Scale back the repetition, scale up the individual mechanics.

Instead of three plates on Spine and four islands on Madness, I'd go one plate on the spine, leading into one island on Madness, which automatically breaks into phase two when you've cleared the Limb Tentacle. Increase the health on the Burning Tendon, so you force the group to pop two amalgams to proceed to the next phase, and once the tendons goes, Thrall blasts Deathwing, and you leap off right before he hits the Maelstrom. Token "Nothing could survive that..." from Green Jesus right before Deathwing rears up out of the Maelstrom and strikes down all four aspects, forcing the team to break his grip upon the island, and the Aspects. Increase the health on the Tentacle to force most groups to go through 3-4 impales, rather than 1-2, and it would make the tank swaps more interesting, as the tentacle will probable still be up when the Bloods come out. Extend the duration on Cataclysm by 50% to compensate for the decreased uptime and the lack of the spellweave buff when dropping blistering tendrils. Phase two remains pretty much unchanged, aside from the fact that it's now actually phase three.

I think that these changes would aleviate a lot of the major complaints about Deathwing. It would shorten the duration of the fight, although not dramatically. It would decrease the repetition, and it would completely remove the RNG Aspect of Derp deaths that infuriate people.

Lets Talk Numbers: Raid Kills, Difficulty, and Proper Interpretation.

Ok, this has been something that I've been noticing in the recent storm of blog posts and comments about the Dragon Soul nerfs. It's been mostly happening in comments, but some of the more prominent bloggers have fallen into this trap as well. They don't know how to look at the raw data we've been given by sites like Wowprogress and MMO-champion, and turn that data into a usable analysis. From Matt Rossi:

Even if you just consider the 800,000 players who finished Firelands, only a quarter of them are done with normal Dragon Soul. This means when players make comments like "Dragon Soul is easier than Firelands," they're not at all supported by the statistics. As many people had completed Firelands pre-nerf as have now completed Dragon Soul. Pre-nerf Firelands was, statistically speaking, on par with and not harder than Dragon Soul is right now.

That's not only incorrect from an analytic perspective, it's also factually incorrect. Wowprogress shows us that there were 19,500 Deathwing normal kills by January 19th, the date that the article was published. That was 52 days after the instance was opened up on November 29th. On August 18th, 52 days after Firelands was released, there had still only been 9,500 Ragnaros kills. 10,000 more guilds have killed Deathwing than killed Ragnaros in the same time span, a 105% increase. This is an indication of Dragon Soul being significantly easier than Firelands was, not "on par", as Mr. Rossi claims.

I've spoken before about how raid groups will settle onto their appropriate place on the curve of raid kills. There's essentially three factors that decide if you're going to down a boss. There's skill, gear, and commitment. Skill is the combined ability of the members of your raid to know how to play their class and role, and their ability to learn and adapt to the mechanics of the encounter. Gear is just that, the quality of the gear that your raid has. This provides a buffer, stronger tanks are less likely to die, bigger healing throughput keeps the raid up, and more damage output shortens encounters. More gear means an easier encounter, which means less skill is required. Then there is commitment. All other things being equal, a guild that raids five days a week will progress further than a guild that raids five hours a week like Legacy. Skill x Gear x Commitment = the timeline upon which a group can expect to down bosses, assuming the difficulty is equivalent.

Many people measure the objective difficulty of encounters via commitment required to down the boss, either in number of pulls, or number of weeks spent learning a particular encounter. The reason for this is that within a raid group, skill and gear tend to be equivalent at equivalent points of progression in different tiers. A guild in 346 gear working on Halfus will take about the same amount of time as a guild in 359 gear working on Shannox. It's a rare occasion where Mr. McEatstheFloor suddenly becomes an amazing player. These things rarely change.

A guild that requires three months of farming gear in order to raise their SkillxGearxCommitment quotient high enough to down the final boss in the instance does not magically become skilled enough to clear the next instance on the first day, or in the first week, or in the first month. If you were not in the first 10K Ragnaros kills in T12, then you shouldn't expect to be done with normal mode Dragon Soul yet. However, 10k players beyond reasonable expectation have already cleared the instance. We can use this to establish just how much easier Dragon Soul is than Firelands, and through that assessment, we can build reasonable expectations for when a raid group that cleared Firelands should expect to be able to down Deathwing.

The 19,500th Ragnaros kill didn't occur until September 26th, 91 days after release. There's a 39 day disparity between hitting that benchmark in Dragon Soul, and hitting it in Firelands. You can either make the assumption that the lack of difficulty simply frontloaded guilds, that the guilds that downed Rag in the first month downed him the first week, and then things settled. You can also look at it as a compressed schedule, where every day spent in Firelands is equal to 60% of a day in Dragon Soul. It's more likely a combination of the two. However, this shows that it's reasonable to expect your group to reach a milestone in DS about three to five weeks earlier than it took them to hit that level in Firelands. It is not reasonable to expect kills to be rolling in three to five months sooner.

Nerfs Again: Blizzard Recognizes the Dangers of the Skill Gap.

I've talked before about how dangerous having a profound skill gap in between bosses is harmful to the game. Blizzard has taken note of this, and has decied to implement a stacking debuff that reduces the health and damage of everything in Dragon Soul by 5% per stack, akin to the Strength of Wrynn buff in Icecrown Citadel. This debuff, called "Power of the Aspects", will apparently scale beyond the 30% that the ICC buff capped out at. When asked about the reasoning as to why they're nerfing normal and heroic modes, Bashiok spoke up:

Believe it or not there are actually guilds and raiding groups that are attempting to progress through Normal and Heroic raids, but are hitting a wall, and have been hitting a wall. We have actually statistical date we base our changes on, we know exactly how many people are clearing these raids each week, we know exactly how many people are able to down just a few bosses, and how many were only able to down a few bosses every week for weeks on end and then stopped raiding altogether.

The issue we're constantly trying to combat is the one where people feel like they're just out of options. One way this is an issue is the content is too easy, they blasted through it, have everything they could possibly want, and have nothing else to do. Ideally that's a small subset of very hardcore players. For everyone else it's a feeling of just being stuck with no possible way to progress. Very few players are willing to suit up, buff up, do all the necessary requirements to raid, jump in, and then do no better than they did last week for hours and hours, only to return next week and do the same.

This is the skill gap that I warned of. This is dangerous, especially in the year long wait that we're going to have to endure in this short tier. Running out of options this early is fatal. It's good to see Blizzard recognize this. However, in his later comments, and in the actions that Blizzard has decided to take in combating this problem, show that they don't really understand the problem and how it relates to the player base.

The first issue is the timing. From Bashiok:

We feel the content has been out for quite a while now, that most people who have progressed and downed Deathwing on Heroic have done so, they've had sufficient time to celebrate in their accomplishments, and these very small progressive alterations will only help guilds that are already doing well in the raid get over some hurdles they may be facing.

Bashiok, let's make this clear: The content will have barely been out for two months when you roll this nerf out. That's 1/3 of the normal six month life span of a raiding tier. Not only that, but one of those months was December. For those guilds that aren't commited enough to raid through Christmas and New Years, the content has only effectively been out for six weeks. Six weeks is not "quite a while".

Furthermore: "Most people who have progressed and downed Deathwing on Heroic have done so", huh? Most people with blonde hair have blonde hair. Obvious statement is obvious. This isn't about the Paragons and Vodkas of the world. This is about the other guilds. The guilds that would progress if given more than six weeks to down all current content that Blizzard also inexplicably expects to last us another eight months. Six weeks is not enough time for any guild with a reasonable amount of skill and who raid on a reasonable schedule to be hitting their limits. The insinuation here is that if you aren't in the 67 guilds that have cleared all content in the first two months of raiding, then you're toiling hopelessly and Blizzard needs to save you from your own incompetence. Not only is this insulting to the guilds who choose not to raid five+ days a week, it's also irreparably damaging. All kills from February onward will be tainted.

The second issue is the implementation. This is not the proper way to go about correcting the skill gap in content. Skill gaps exist because the content was not properly tuned. Each raiding tier should have equivilent difficulty when attempted at the appropriate level and gear. In properly tuned tiers, guilds will see similar progression on a similar timeline. A guild that cleared all heroic content in the first month should be able to clear all heroic content in the first month. A guild that takes six months to clear half the heroics should expect to clear half the heroics in about six months. A guild that struggles to clear normal mode in that six months should expect to take close to six months to clear all the normal content.

There should be a smooth distribution of difficulty across all the encounters. A guild that can clear one encounter should not find the next encounter hopelessly out of reach. Likewise, a guild that finds the previous encounter trivial should be able to clear the next encounter. The skill gap is created when there's significant jumps in difficulty. This is more likely to occur in stunted tiers like the seven boss Firelands and the eight boss Dragon Soul because fewer divisions means greater stratification between encounters if the end state remains the same as better developed tiers such as the 13 boss T11, 12 boss T10, and the 14 boss T8.

By implementing blanket nerfs, the gaps remain. All you've done is artificially lowered the end state. You've done nothing to remove the gap itself, which is the problem. You address the symptoms, but you allow the underlying cause to continue to fester, and that introduces new problems down the road. This is the equivalent of giving a person with an infected wound a shot of morphine and sending him home. He might feel better, but it's going to wear off, and he'll be in even more pain, and possibly have long term damage because of the short sighted approach to repair.

Blizzard, if you want to avoid running into these situations every tier, you have to bite the bullet, and actually balance the instance. Don't just throw some derpy blanket cut on the instance and call it good. Heroic Spine of Deathwing is an extremely poorly designed encounter. Forcing players to rely on short term burst on the only target that is beneficial to damage renders multiple classes completely useless. The solution to fixing Heroic Spine of Deathwing is not to nerf normal Ultraxion, it's to fix Heroic Spine of Deathwing. All that's happening with these blanket nerfs is that Blizzard is trading the long term health of the game in exchange for a little pain relief right now.

Everything I Need to Know About Playing My Shaman, I Learned From Thrall.

Stand in all the Ice Tombs!

Pop Bloodlust 55 seconds into a one minute encounter.

Mounts are for chumps, real Shaman use Ghost Wolf.

AFK until the tank notices you.

One handed strength mace? Ele weapon!

Wear all the cloth!

"Lok'tar, Friend!" is orcish for LEEEEEEEEEROOOOOOYYYY!

Drop only one totem, any more and you're just being elitist.

Pull all the trash! Seriously, all of it, including that pack that's way across the room. I might drop my totem in there.

Melee attacks are crucial for elemental DPS.

When you drop your raid cooldown, it's important that you yourself do not stand in it. This might make you seem selfish. So stand away from your bubble, even if it means you get hit by the giant boss AoE and can't help in the second half of the fight.

Wind Shear is a brutal DPS loss. No matter how many mobs are casting, never wind shear, it's time that could be better spent meleeing.

See that hunter that just disengaged out of the tank's AoE? Full single target burn. The tank must want it dead, because he let it get out of the group.

Drop the melee DPS enhancing totem on the healer, otherwise how will they heal the melee?

AoE pull? Lava Burst! Single target pull? Chain Lightning!

The group only gets one bloodlust per instance.