A DPS Talks About the Firelands Nerf

Hello, boys and girls. This is Arador, failmage extraordinaire, giving you a DPS-eye view of the Firelands nerf that hit yesterday. Truth be told, this makes it more of my level of raiding: Easy enough that I don’t fuck everything up. However, I’ll admit that it was too easy and even somewhat boring at times. Now remember, this is all from the standpoint of a DPS. With that said, let’s go through a quick re-cap of our guild’s FL run last night, shall we?

Trash 1: I’d love to say that the 25% nerf on almost everything made trash easy as hell… We wiped on the trash for Shannox because a certain warrior was being a tad impatient.

Shannox: I didn’t see much of a difference in this fight, to be honest. Rageface -> Riplimb -> Shannox, same as always.

Trash 2: Now, this bunch on the way to Beth’Tilac felt much easier and it went much faster than usual.

Beth’Tilac: This is when I really started to see the effects of the nerf. The adds were fuck-all easy. Spiderlings? Those went down quick as hell, same as the Spinners. We even had to halt DPS on the Drone to avoid killing it too fast. When Beth’Tilac came down, we obliterated her, though we had to kill some adds that had spawned while we were waiting for her.

Trash 3: …We wiped here, too. Twice, if I remember right.

Baleroc: This asshole was a joke, as always. We got him down long before his enrage timer was an issue. One of our tanks died, but that was the only exciting part about the fight.

Trash 4: Again, the nerf reared its head.

Rhyolith: This guy took a little longer than expected because a certain failgator needed to do something to progress in the quest chain for Dragonwrath. As always, easy.

Trash 5: Same as always, nothing big here.

Alysrazor: Holy shit. I’ve had to sit out on the last few Alys kills because I couldn’t get the tornadoes down. Now? I, much to my surprise, survived. The tornadoes have been nerfed big time, from their speed to their damage done. The babies were really easy to kill, too… Oh, hell, that sounded really bad, didn’t it? ANYWAYS. Because of the afore-mentioned failgator, we had to, I’m serious about this, completely halt all DPS on Alys for an entire phase. Once he got what he needed, we wiped out the ~5% of health Alys had left. I’m serious; the nerf turned a hard fight into a joke.

Trash 6: Holy fucking shit, we didn’t wipe on the guys before Staghelm. This is a milestone for us. I got stunned twice by the cats because I had forgotten how the pounces worked. See? I’ve earned my title of ‘failmage.’

Majordomo Staghelm: Damn. Just…. damn. We had beaten Staghelm for the first time just two nights before, so the difficulty was still fresh in our minds. After days of wipe after wipe, we got him down with… one wipe, and that was only because of a fluke. The Flame Scythes (the ’c’ is silent, dammit!) in his Scorpion form hit a lot less than they used to. Same goes for his Pounces in Cat from. People paid attention during seeds, too. All in all, Staghelm got a massive nerf and he’s practically a loot bucket now.

Trash 6.5: I say 6.5 because I had to leave after the first mob. And what a mob. In case you didn’t know, this asshole makes the lave raise on the walkway he’s on, leaving you safe patches. These huge streaks can even be a few yards apart, giving you only a couple of feet to stand on. I didn’t get to a safe patch.

Ragnaros: We're still learning this asshole.



All in all, this was a major nerf to Firelands and a huge help to many guilds. However, it also pissed off many hardcore raiders who liked the difficulty. Me? I welcome the nerf with hesitantly-open arms, hoping I’ll get that damn trinket from Ragnaros.