TO THE GROUND, BABY!
I like your articles Squishei, really insightful, you know your stuff.As for nerfs, I think they over did it a bit. My guild haven't killed her yet, but its a progressive fight which takes time to sort out everything, nothing was really overtuned or hard. Oh well, it was expected, after full Hall of Fame and 3 months into raid, at least we can be done with her sooner.
Currently hitting like 10-20% variably on Azshara and hoped to have her down last week but we had a sick tank and wobbly attendance on our other nights.Seeing these nerfs is almost as gutting to us as it is to her, can't help but feel they went overboard - even the 10% to the mistresses in P3 would have felt huge, nerfing the wards AND overload drain in P4 seems like massive overkill - we've usually wiped in P4 due to missing soaks as people get to grips with the phase, if those changes are in place we'd be able to kill her despite multiple people missing soaks entirely.I understand bringing in some nerfs as the tier progresses and the HOF fills up, but this and the Jaina nerf seem overkill, completely killing the final phase of the fight. If they're going to make so big a nerf, I wish they'd hold on until a little later and roll it out more gradually, maybe the non-ward nerfs first with the ward ones coming later. The raiding I hated most was Cataclysm where you'd have steady flat-% nerfs coming in each week and have to race against them, I thought Blizzard had been pretty good with more targeted nerfs lately, but these end boss nerfs are too big and too quick for my tastes.
@Squishei where did you get the info from the current ward power and drain rate? Cause it's completely wrong.On Mythic, ancient wards have 1800 power. Wards of Power have 3000 power.One player stack soaks/charges it with 30 power.How did you come up with 960 power and 16 per stack ?(Titanic Machinations is something completely different... which also has a tooltip error cause azshara drains wards by 28 per second as seen here)https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/191860201610149888/635903824602857477/unknown.pngOn the image you can see the wards power during a pull, and how many its current power changes when a player soaks it.This info is retrieved from C_UIWidgetManager.GetZoneControlVisualizationInfo(2043).zoneEntries
After further investigation I can conclude that all the numbers from Blizzard and tooltips are based on wards having only 1000 power. This is the value you get if you print the command in my previous post.However, once combat starts the wards maximum power increases from 1000 -> 1800Let's do some quick maths.Based on what I've found during combat is: wards have 1800 power. Azshara drains them for 28 per second. This is 1.6% per second.If a ward would have a maximum power of only 1000, and azshara drains it for 16 per second, that would end up as 1.555555555% per second. Or 1.6% To conclude: tooltip values and blue posts are "incorrect" because the maximum amount of power a ward can contain changes once you start the encounter.