Dragon Soul: More Nerfs To Current Content

I've been struggling with my passion for raids for a while now. A lot of this was because my new job meant I couldn't raid as much as I wanted to and that didn't help me feeling detached from the latter half of the Firelands content. This was because my friends in Saturday Knight Fever weren't raiding at the cutting edge and as Firelands was great content and I was happy with that as we were progressing through at our pace.

We'd just downed Rhyolith and were 3/7. Then came the nerfs and in a single raid night (that I missed) Alysrazor died in 3 pulls and Baleroc went a few minutes later, I've already said my bit on the Firelands nerfs, so I'll not rant on more here about that event other than to say they were both too soon and hitting the HC modes too was just plain wrong.

Cataclysm at release was done "right" at least for serious players in guilds, we all know that, sure the "casuals" moaned and yes subscription numbers dropped 2 million and only the men at Blizzard can confirm if a high proportion of the leavers in that time gave their reason as "Cataclysm is too hard". However, I believe Rohan is wrong to assume that the 2 million subscribers lost were because of the difficulty levels but I do believe that he is spot on the money with his thoughts that those of us long term players that love the game this way are also in the minority.

This week I have read 2 very good posts at Kurn's Corner and another by Rohan in his Blessing of Kings blog regarding the state of raiding and impact that the incoming Dragon Soul nerfs are having on the long serving player base and would like to add my thoughts to the debate. Like Kurn I have my concerns over the World of Pandacraft but unlike Kurn I'm hoping it's absolutely awesome and am happy to let it prove it before I condemn it even after the announcement that the nerfing of Dragon Soul will begin at the end of January, which once again will affect all modes of the raid.

While I personally believe that the nerfs are so soon, I'm hoping that this is a sign of the imminent arrival of the World of Pandacraft and hope beyond all hope that it isn't going to be November 2012  before it gets released. But I am very surprised that we are even getting a nerf this time around, simply because we have the raid finder.

I believed that this was the "omg normal raids are too hard" fix for the final raid. I do understand that they have their reasons for nerfing this content on normal modes I really don't see why the HC modes get the same treatment? Clearly I like many of us out here got that wrong. But more the bigger worry for me is that this is not a one off event, more will come each month and assuming its 5% every month means we could be left raiding in Dragon Soul for 6-8 month in total and with the content not being overly hard that scares me and reminds me of Icecrown Citadel (ICC) all over again.

Don't get me wrong, I liked ICC, but in there 4 times a week on normal 10 and 25 (and then hard modes later on) got tiresome and with the Raid Finder and normal/heroic modes now available we run the risk again of raid burnout if we don't get more content soon.