Ol' Grumpy's guide to outdated content and you
Hey again, boys and girls. In case you don't know (and why would you?), I'm Ol' Grumpy, that permanently irascible old codger who brought you fun times like player reeducation and instance protocols. Today, I'm here to pour the soothing balm of my words over the troubled waters stirred up by the recent news that in patch 4.2, all current non-heroic raid content is getting a 20% nerf. What exactly does this mean?
Well, it means several things.
Current heroic raid content will remain unchanged. Heroic Cho'gall, heroic Atramedes, heroic Nefarian will all be as difficult as they are now. So you won't see guilds that are 9/12 normal mode waltzing into heroic BoT and killing Sinestra the day 4.2 goes live. She's still going to be ludicrously hard.
The raids we currently have will become outdated content the day Firelands becomes available, the same way Naxx became outdated when Ulduar came out and Trial of the Crusader became outdated when ICC came out. They will no longer even reward you with valor points, and all current valor point gear will switch to being purchasable with justice points (the same points one can get for running normal 85 dungeons). This means that entry-level raiding will be obsolete, and the only people doing it will be people just starting out or a few completists.
Therefore, it is in the interest of the game to let people see this content once it becomes obsolete and move on as quickly as possible.
You can return your seat to its normal, upright position now. If anyone is telling you that this is an outrage, a slap in the face, a nod to the casuals, the ruination of the game, or the horns of the dread Armagedillo poking forth, they're wrong. And possibly a hysterical maniac who overreacts to a simple armadillo pet.
Look, to say this again: The second that patch 4.2 drops and we have Firelands and a new boss in Tol Barad's Baradin Hold, this current content becomes yesterday's news. It immediately loses its status as cutting-edge content. If anyone is struggling on it due to lack of gear, time constraints, or even an inability to complete it, that no longer matters. The content you're meant to be doing for bragging rights is over in the Firelands, folks.
Accessibility for a bunch of old content you've already been doing for months doesn't affect you at all. It's not as if it will provide anything a raider on the cutting edge of content will care about. It will provide gear that is the same ilevel as justice point purchases and justice points -- same as any normal level 85 dungeon.
Players who won't be able to raid Firelands will likely go into these raids to see them for the first time, and there's nothing wrong with that. They're a whole tier of content behind you, anyway.
Combine this with the fact that the heroic level encounters are seeing no changes at all, and you completely avoid any sort of "dumbing down" of content you did when it was hard. The hard stuff is staying hard. Frankly, some of the raid encounters were probably a bit overtuned for people coming into them in 346 blues, anyway. If you are long past normal raiding and are working on heroic Atramedes, those heroic kills you have already done are not going to be accomplished by people in a handful of epics in 4.2.
This is exactly like when all current raid content was nerfed at the end of The Burning Crusade so that people could see it before Wrath dropped. It's exactly like the scaling ICC buff that let groups progress after the hardest of the hardcore have already burned through it.
The sky is not falling.
The news is already rolling out for the upcoming WoW Patch 4.2! Preview the new Firelands raid, marvel at the new legendary staff, and get the inside scoop on new quest hubs -- plus new Tier 12 armor!
