20% nerf to T12 normal & heroic incoming

Well huh.

Seems a little early for this, doesn’t it? The obvious conclusion is that patch 4.3 is coming in faster than we think for a patch that hasn’t showed up on the PTR at all yet. Even with the buff to legendary staff quest item drop rates, I’m not sure we’ll manage to finish one before T13 lands. And we’ve been clearing Firelands steadily. Can’t imagine what a 10-person raid who’s behind us must be feeling about their staff chances.

Seems a little early to me as a raider as well. We’ve just started digging into hard mode encounters. A couple of weeks of normal mode clears to gear up (painfully slowly in the 10s) and then our first one down fairly easily. We start work on Majordomo tonight, because our raid leader read the strats for it and got interested. Seems doable. I guess we have one week to do it before the accomplishment feels so much less interesting. I am somewhat surprised, though, because T12 normal felt fairly easy for us. Even Ragnaros went down without the kind of work we had to put into something like Yogg-Saron or Lich King.

Overall Blizzard appears to have completely screwed the pooch on pacing content release in Cataclysm. Seven long agonizing tedious months of punishing T11 interrupt fests, no nerfing, only retuning of encounters that were literally impossible as released. Several long months of running two 5-person instances over and over and over and over for badges. A new raid for three months and then nerfs to all modes. 4.3 is supposed to be the last raid of Cataclysm, but the expansion isn’t yet a year old. Let’s assume it gets released in early December, at the one-year mark. When is the next as-yet-unannounced expansion? A year from then? Will we have a whole year of T13 in a repeat of the ICC thing?

On the plus side, we’re clearing T12 in a raid night and a half… so long as we spend the first night mostly working on a new heroic. New content soon is going to be good because otherwise I’m not going to have enough to keep my raiders busy.