Warlords of Dreanor Screenshots and Incoming Garrosh Nerfs

Blizzard have released a few bits of information for those of us still awaiting Warlords of Dreanor news. The good part is the screenshots above which where released on Twitter by Alex Afrasiabi, Creative Director of World of Warcraft.

The desert looking screenshot is described as "Gorgrond, Iron Horde looming in the background. Work in Progress."  Whilst the other screenshot is tagged as "A sleepy Talador. Work In Progress."

For players hoping for news of a release date for the expansion you are out of luck. We do however have some changes to Siege of Orgrimmar incoming, specifically for the Heroic 10 man Garrosh encounter.

Following on from minor changes to Galakras and Thok on 10 man and flex difficulty settings and adjustments made to the heroic 10 man versions of Siegecrafter Blackfuse and Paragons of the Klaxxi some 10 man heroic Garrosh nerfs are incoming.

You head to the blue post for the full list of changes and the reasons behind them (The Garrosh details are posted separately on page 3 of the thread) but the highlights are below.

Garrosh - In 10 man Heroic only we are slightly reducing Garrosh's health in all phases (by roughly 5%).

We are reducing the health of Minions of Y'Shaarj (by roughly 10%).

We are increasing the clump size required to trigger an Iron Star in the final Heroic-only phase of the fight from 3 to 4.

Watcher has stressed that Blizzard do not like making changes but feel these are needed.

Why did you wait this long to make these changes?

We're very conservative when it comes to reducing the difficulty of a Heroic final boss, since the entire point of such encounters is to represent the pinnacle of raiding challenge. For most of the initial months of the patch, the sample size of players killing Garrosh on each difficulty was too small to draw meaningful conclusions about the relative difficulty on 10 vs. 25, but now we've reached a point where it's clear that there's a problem, so we're taking the above actions.

 

Thanks Blizz, way to nerf the only hard fight left in the game...

Sorry, we do wish we'd gotten the tuning right in the first place. 10-Heroic Garrosh will still be plenty hard -- this is just bringing the encounter in line with its 25-player counterpart.

 

- Watcher, World of Warcraft Game Designer

The changes will take place in the upcoming patch, 5.4.7.