Edit: Proposed changes in the 2nd post on this thread, with concise reasoning for changes, and both nerfs to the current content with compensational buffs to increase difficulty while providing viability for lower geared raiders to complete the content.
Simply put as the title states.
Normal modes are extremely ****ing hard to do at content level, if not impossible.
Heroic modes are piss easy and a joke once you've got the damage to cake walk normal, as the changes from normal to heroic are pretty much nothing.
Why gate keep players from clearing the content on normal and making the changes for heroic minimal? This seems counter-intuitive, and actively harms the server's population as casual raiders can't do the "easy" content while the hardcore raiders farm heroics because they're just as easy as normal.
Marrowgar requires 5.8k dps average from your 6 dps in 10 man. This is a lot for the average players.
Lady 10 man heroic is easier than retail lady hc.
Saurfang heroic is the exact same as retail heroic but with a lower enrage timer, but you won't ever reach that enrage timer as the real enrage timer are marks.
Fester 25 normal requires 9.7k dps average from 18 dps with no icc buff, no access to shadows edge or loot beyond festergut, and this is A LOT of ****ing dps for people without icc buff or raid loot from past 6/12.
Fester 25 heroic has less than a 6% health increase from the retail health. C'mon guys, it's a braindead dps race and you buff it by 6% for a "Hardcore" realm? Anytime I'm raiding on my bis toons our raid clears this boss with a ton of time to spare on heroic, while raiding on my virgin alts can't clear this boss without bringing in a ton of heavy hitters.
Most of the other bosses follow the Festergut principle of having outlandishly high dps requirements to clear on normal mode and then nearly no buff at all on heroic.
Normal should be rebalanced around a 4-piece tier 9 player going into ICC with a few boe's, a few 245 ilvl items and mostly 219/232 fos/pos items. Gearscore requirement for ICC10 and 25 partial clears should be 5.2k, not 5.7k
(Second post before edit/repurposed)
Maybe this idea isn't agreeable, and even normal content should require well organized guild's with well optimized min/maxing to do, but it does actively harm pugs and casuals from being able to run raids.
If this is a good thing perhaps we can discuss that in these comments.
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Member
Lordaeron raid nerf normals and buff heroics
Edited: May 6, 2025
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Member
My Proposed Changes to Lordaeron:
Marrowgar
(No changes to current heroic mode)
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Nerf:
15% reduction on boss hp on normal
Buff:
25% increase to the health and damage of the bonespikes to compensate
Goal: Enforcing the necessity of performing proper tactics fast and efficiently, without enforcing such large gear requirements. This improves the gearing of the server while enforcing even higher skill/performance to clear. Overgearing will be punished while proper performance is rewarded.
Lady Deathwhisper
(No changes to current heroic mode)
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Nerf:
10% hp nerf, 10% mana nerf,
Buff:
30% buff to trash mob health
Bloodlust provided to MC'd target
+40% damage to her death and decay
+30% damage to her single target frostbolt
Goal: Enforcing the necessity of tactics:
Interupts (or defensive cds w/o interupts), trash clearing, CC MC asap
These changes will significantly punish pug raids and force the learning of tactics on this boss fight instead of overgearing and mindlessly AOE'ing the trash and instant-killing of mind control players. Ignoring MC/DnD/Interupts/Trash should be signficantly punished
Gunship:
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No changes
Deathbringer Saurfang:
(Changes apply to hc, hp buff instead of nerf for hc)
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Normal Mode Changes:
Nerf:
Normal mode 10% hp nerf
Buff:
Heroic HP buff 44m -> 50m (about 14% more hp)
Bood beasts hp by +25%
Blood Nova +20% damage on normal, Retail values on heroic (due to hc bloodpower mechanic double dipping)
Boiling Blood retail value, double blood power generation
+300% health leach from Rune of Blood
Goal:
Provides signficantly more lee-way on gear requirements for saurfang, while heavily enforcing tank-swapping as fast as possible, blood beast focusing and handling quickly, and punishing improper positioning for ranged and healers. Boiling blood having retail damage but giving significantly more blood power generation forces proper shielding and/or debuff removal to mitigate this damage and avoid generating too many "Marks of the fallen champions"
Festergut:
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Nerf:
Normal 54.5m ---> 49m
Buff
Heroic 57.5 --> 63m
Goal:
Lower gear requirements for normal while increasing them for heroic. The gear requirements between normal and heroic festergut are marginal, HC Fester is usually progressed before hc marrowgar or saurfang. The dps req increase from normal to hc currently very low which doesn't make much sense for a stand-still-and-dps boss fight.
Rotface:
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No changes
Professor Putricide:
(no changes to heroic mode)
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Nerf:
Enrage 8m -> 10m (Revert to retail value)
Buff:
+60% Duration of debuff from choking gas bomb and Malleable goo
Goal:
-Eating the debuff on this fight punishes a players DPS heavily so Increasing the duration of of these debuffs will punish tactical failure significantly
-Nerfing the hard enrage timer does not nerf the soft enrage timer of too many stacks of Mutated Plague in phase 3
-Having a longer enrage timer without a longer "Soft Enrage" encourages optimized tactics with reduced gear, making room for "Plague Stealing" which is where any class with a taunt may take aggro before the plague hits, spreading the stacks to all the players in the raid.
-DPS requirements for this fight will still remain high as ooze hp is unchanged resulting in not enough dps causing a looping effect of dps focusing on ooze spawns instead of the boss. This is then off-set with good tactics like stacking the boss alongside the ooze as it moves to increase raid dps.
Blood-Prince Council:
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No changes
Blood-Queen Lana'thel:
(Buffs apply to heroic aswell)
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Nerf:
Enrage timer from 5m -> 5.5 minutes (Revert to retail enrage timer)
Buff:
Hp increase by 10%
Goal: Enforce less overgearing, and more proper tactics/distribution of the vampire bites/no deaths during the fight. With the current enrage nerf, this only punishes proper tactics as bites/dmg buff distribution is back-end oriented. This boss fight could instead use a health buff while having it's enrage timer set back to retail value, forcing raids to distribute the buff properly.
Valithria Dreamwalker:
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Unchanged
Sindragosa:
(Heroic unchanged)
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Nerf:
Hp -> Reverted to retail values
Enrage -> 7m current to 8.5m
Buff:
Frost Beacon damage: +30%
Blistering Cold damage: +20%
Chilled to the bone damage: +40%
Instability damage +25%
Goal: Enforce tactics more, reduce gear requirements. Proper play rewarded while nerfing overall dps required to clear.
Reasoning: Sindragosa is a very tactics-intensive fight and is probably the hardest normal mode boss fight in the entire instance.
By buffing the damage done by Frost Beacon, this will remove "Tomb Stacking" and force players to not just aoe down the tombs during phase 1, instead having to cordinate proper damage distribution among all 5 spread out tombs.
By buffing blistering cold damage players will get obliterated if they don't run away fast enough, punishing slow-responders rather than just afkers.
By buffing instability and chilled to the bone players who ignore these mechanics are punished with death instead of getting off lucky with more pressure on the healers.
The Lich King:
UnchangedEdited: May 6, 2025
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Member
I completely agree that in normal modes these meaningless buffs should be removed and left only in heroic mode. It's just funny when raids in normal mode are collected from 5.7 and require achievements.
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Member
I also agree.
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Member
I disagree with the sentiment that normal mode raids should be reverted back to retail. That's not what I'm arguing for.
Normal mode should be buffed, but marrowgar normal on hp-alone is nearly twice as hard, being 6.9m to 12.5m, then factoring in the enrage timer, makes the minimum dps for a 6 dps 2 heal 2 tank composition about 6k dps. This can be problematic for gearing players who are playing "Sub-Optimal" classes.
The raids should be buffed, but not to the extent they are on normal mode, and the jump to heroic is as simple as "Do we have brains?". The change from normal to hc on lordaeron is as simple as tactics being different, with gear, stat, and requirements remaining the same.
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Member
This is my first post here, but I agree. The raid shouldn't require you having all the gear from the raid before you even start the raid. It's kinda off-putting when you finally hit 80 grind out your 4pc T9 with badges from doing heroics because no one on this realm wants to do the old raids even for badges and no groups will take you into anything not even VoA with less than 5.5k gEaRscOrE. I'm all for harder content but that harder content should be in the harder mode of the Raid to enable fresh players on the realm at least a chance to progress their gear up to it. I chose to play on lordaeron because there is no queue to log in and the chat is not spammed with WTS garbage all day long. But since I've been stuck for over 2 months with more or less the same 4.7k gear I sorta feel like my time would be better invested on the other realm.
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Member
see them censoring me . meh mad...
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Moderator
Be glad all that happened was it getting deleted. Your post had nothing to do with this thread, on top of being absurd and something we have said no enough times that a toddler would get the hint.
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Member
I gotta agree with this. This sentiment is the same as the majority of the players, with raids requiring perfect composition, overgearing, perfect tactics, no deaths AND 95%+ rotation perfection on class dps from all members of the raid.
My last raid had like 5 players that were near bis trying to carry the rest of the raid and we still failed to even kill festergut on normal, since having too many players only do between 6k to 8k dps means 12 players were doing 1600 to 3600 dps less than required to clear the boss.
I personally think a dps requirement of 9.7k on Lordaeron to clear festergut is ridiculously high for normal mode clears.
Whenever I raid with heroic raiders we have to question if the bosses are even on normal or heroic because we opt to do heroic tactics everytime and the difference is negligible on many bosses. There is no reason Saurfang heroic has to have the same health/unbuffed retail numbers as retail heroic saurfang on a buffed server. Most HC Raiding guilds clear this boss with minutes to spare and wish they could dps him harder.
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Member
The troll aside, what're your thoughts on this topic Obnoxious? Have you ever pug-raided on Lordaeron?
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Moderator
No, I only played on Lordaeron back when it launched, for a little while.
Going strictly by what you're saying - and assuming all of it is accurate - it sounds reasonable to ask for some tweaks to make Normal a bit more approachable (if not by much, to keep with the intent of the server) and make Heroic more challenging than the current Normal.
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Member
It's in the 2nd post, lmk what you think of the proposed changes.
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Moderator
I don't know what the current values feel like while playing, your tweaks mean nothing in a vacuum.
If developers take interest in this suggestion they will be the ones experimenting with adjustments anyway.
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Member
Good suggestion. I believe it would be better for the realm and more enjoyable for new players if some normal bosses were nerfed (DBS hello) and heroic bosses buffed (more rewarding)
And I completely agree about heroic bosses being a joke on Lordaeron. Some enrage timers are way too long. Or boss hp too low.
The only ok heroic bosses are BPC / Valithria and PP maybe (if it wasn't broken as it is today where HOP / invulnerabilities on green target completely bugs out green ooze and it is being abused a lot by guilds atm)
LOD is fine but enrage timer should be reduced by like 1 minute imo at least if not more. Currently it allows for a lot of mistakes. It's not a progressing realm anymore where you do LOD with 5k8 gs average lol now everyone is 6k4.
Normal boss are hard yeah I agree, you rarely see a pug with an average of 5k5 gs killing DBS for example even with knowledge of tactics.
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Forum Veteran
This doesn't exactly sound right to me, it's close, but I see it bit differently. ICC normal should be balanced around having previous raid tier's items on most slots. Majority should be 232-245 ilvl, and a few items above or below that.
In retail, people went to ICC mostly equipping their T9 sets (232-245 on average, up to 258) and other loot they gained from ToC (232/245 mostly), with some equipment from Ulduar. They didn't go to progress ICC after farming FoS/PoS/HoR for 219-232 ilvl gear which is more towards Ulduar, T8, equivalent on average. Lordaeron is tuned to be harder and without the 30% buff, so for me it sounds bit odd that you're going for T10 content when you're largely skipping T9 raid content to narrow the gap in ilvl. So I'd say the average player that goes through FoS/PoS/HoR grind, buys their 232 ilvl 4-piece T9, 1 or 2 x 245 ilvl EoT items is (a bit) below the expected average ilvl to enter ICC. I don't think it should be balanced around that gear in mind.
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