A new nerf for the current final boss of World of Warcraft is live. Small raid groups in particular benefit from this and now have an easier time playing.
Even though the current raid “Amirdrassil, Hope of the Dream” is certainly not the most difficult in the history of World of Warcraft, there are still some harder passages. The final boss Fyrakk in particular is much tougher than the previous bosses and requires a lot of coordination – even on normal difficulty, but even more so on heroic difficulty.
Smaller raid groups in particular had their problems here.
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What was the problem? Fyrakk is comparatively easy to defeat with a large group. With 25 or even 30 players in the raid, the mechanics are easy to manage and neither DPS characters nor healers are overwhelmed. However, this changes when the number of players in the group decreases. Then the performance of the individual heroes must increase significantly in order to win the fight. An “unfair” disadvantage that shouldn’t actually happen in flexible raids.
What has been changed? Blizzard has made five changes to Fyrakk that are effective in small groups. The adjustments in detail are:
In summary: Smaller groups have to do less damage and use less healing to be able to cope with the fight.
How do these problems arise? Since all difficulties except Mythic scale with the number of characters, bosses can vary in difficulty to overcome. To ensure that the fight doesn’t become too easy as the number of players increases, not only does the boss’s life points increase, but also the damage that his abilities cause.
But there’s more going on: depending on the number of players, how many characters are affected by abilities changes. While with a group size of 10 only 2 players might receive a strong debuff, with a group size of 20 there could be 4 players.
This is problematic when these debuffs bring with them effects that reduce the space for fighting or require more movements because more effects have to be dodged.
Especially at the “breaking points”, i.e. the limit at which a mechanic affects more or fewer players, the unpleasant situation often arises where raid leaders decide to make the group smaller or larger – depending on the mechanic.
Nerfs like those mentioned above can help reduce these issues and in this case allow smaller groups to defeat the boss.
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