The raids in WoW Shadowlands have been buffed, even though Blizzard only refers to it as a “display correction.” What’s going on?
The season 4 of WoW: Shadowlands has just started, but almost all the content of the new season is causing problems. Previously, there was massive criticism of the “Mythic+” dungeons, which have a strange scaling and often a lot of one-shot mechanics. Now the raids have come into focus and Blizzard had to make adjustments. Many bosses are now significantly harder.
What was the problem? The “Fated” raids turned out to be much too easy. Players sometimes plow through the bosses in just a few minutes—even on heroic difficulty, some bosses don’t survive two minutes, even though they were supposed to be a bit harder due to the Fated affixes. They simply had too few health points.
Additionally, there was a bug that caused players’ abilities to do significantly more damage than intended. Some hunters report that their shots suddenly dealt 32,000 damage, causing bosses to melt away.
Blizzard became aware of the bug relatively early and promised to work on a solution.
What has Blizzard done now? In the Mythic version of Castle Nathria—and thus currently in the “Fated” version—the health points of the bosses have been increased by a whopping 15%. It is relatively rare that Blizzard makes such a drastic upward adjustment to raids after the fact.
However, it is allegedly just a display correction, and the actual health points are said to have not changed at all – at least that’s what Blizzard said in the official WoW forum. Many players doubt this and are unhappy with the changes because Blizzard had reset ongoing raid instances with the hotfix, throwing many players out of the raid, which then had to start over from scratch.
How did this error occur? The fact that the bosses had far too little health is an error that probably should have been caught during the testing phase. Perhaps Blizzard simply underestimated how much the power of characters has changed in recent patches or did not test rigorously enough. After all, season 4 is just an “experimental” season, which didn’t receive as many resources so that they could continue to work fully on Dragonflight.
What do you think of these buffs? Are they justified and sensible? Or should the raid have been left so easy to keep it fair?
