The depths of World of Warcraft have finally been improved. From now on, it should be fair – but this doesn’t suit group players at all.
The depths in The War Within should be the kind of content that appeals mainly to solo heroes, providing them with a great progression system in World of Warcraft. However, a peculiar scaling meant that some classes had no chance at all when playing solo – and enemies were often even stronger when adventuring alone. Now Blizzard has made adjustments with a hotfix, yet many are still annoyed by it.
Because the hotfix did not do what it promised.
Hotfix changes difficulty of the depths
What was the problem with the depths? The scaling of the depths was not just a bit unfair, but grossly flawed. Actually, depths were supposed to offer a similar challenge for groups as for solo characters. However, it was even the case that the number of group members often reduced the hit points of the enemies. In the single-player depths, there were tougher mobs with more hit points than in the depths visited by two or three players.
A quite absurd situation that surely was not intended.
This has changed: Last night, a hotfix was implemented that has ensured that the depths now exhibit a more reasonable difficulty level. The changes in detail are:
- A bug was fixed where bosses scaled incorrectly with multiple player characters.
- The scaling of hit points for enemies in the depths was increased when adventuring in a group.
- The damage scaling for many enemies in the depths was reduced when adventuring in a group.
- The target selection of enemies in the depths was adjusted.
- Zekvir’s influence has increased, so there is now a new enemy in the depths of level 8.
- A display error in Zekvir’s depth was fixed, where the values were not displayed correctly.
- Revives were changed to “Remaining Lives.” Each death now reduces the number (no longer when releasing the spirit). Additionally, reaching a checkpoint increases the remaining lives by +1.
In addition, players and also wowhead report that there has been another nerf to the damage dealt by enemies in solo depths. Many enemies now deal a full 20% less spell damage in the depths when you are adventuring alone.
Whether these changes are sufficient to balance the difficulties of the depths across various group sizes remains to be seen.
Why are so many complaining? The hotfix seems to have not only brought the announced changes to scaling but also introduced new bugs. Tanks report that they suddenly receive hits from normal mobs that deal a whopping 12 million damage. Absolutely overpowering, especially since even well-equipped tanks currently max out at around 10 million health. In a group consisting of 3-4 such enemies, there is essentially no chance of survival.
So the hotfix has brought new bugs, although many also report that solo depths now feel better and more rounded. Because the new problems seem not to affect all classes and group sizes – and at least in our own tests, we could not reproduce the experienced bugs, and it worked significantly better now.
Groups now indeed have a greater challenge – simply because the enemies scale correctly in their hit points, meaning you can no longer just “pull everything and blast through it.” Because the enemies survive much longer, the duration of the depths increases drastically. Groups can no longer “run through in 5 minutes.”
This is certainly not the last fix for the depths of World of Warcraft, as a lot of fine-tuning is still needed to adjust the depths to a somewhat identical difficulty for solo and group players. Some help can be a well-equipped Brann – as he often decides the outcome of victory or defeat.
