Felt like I had to get this guy framed.

Thanks! Vanilla Ashbringer lore is a bit questionable as it is with changes that came later, but we felt it was really important to build around what existed in vanilla and make it work with that original lore rather than try to work in later concepts and characters to make vanilla "fit" better.

This is awesome, Jesse! I love Dark Sun! <3

Being honest, unlikely we'll do xfers between SoD and other versions of WoW. We made thousands of new items, spells, and other game data that doesn't exist in other versions and porting that over would be messy at best, game breaking at worst. Never say never, but no plans for now.

Glad you liked it!

Mini bosses do not affect the loot at all.

hahaha for real

FFXI was my first MMO love, so there are no words for how happy this card makes me. Chef's kiss.

But we are watching it, very carefully. Caldoran is still hard (but NOT impossible) for groups that aren't running 25+. Luckily, its very easy to recruit right now if you want a few more people help get over the hill. So again, before we pull that trigger, we are taking a measured approach.

Being honest, when we think its needed and not before. We aren't sure its needed yet. We are looking at raiding data and week over week the raiding population is increasing rather than decreasing. So we need to be careful to respect the progression of groups working through it before we nerf more.

Honestly I'm disinclined to go much deeper on my opinions as a dev. It's just going to end up on wowhead/reddit and fuel anger for someone. I'll just say, the two guilds I run with that average 21-25 people per raid are 5/8 and we are having a lot of fun. That's my experience and YMMV.

I could see a few more adjustments in the coming weeks, but we don't want to be too hasty and overnerf it.

Its going extremely well. Started out hard but now that the first 5 bosses are very surmountable for most decently organized and balanced groups and set bonuses are coming online, we'll see some serious power spikes which will help even more. It's still going to require prog for most groups.

Don't get me wrong, I'm pretty excited to get home and play Oblivion Remastered tonight, but dang I'm devastated it wasn't Morrowind (aka the best elder scrolls game).

The dungeon thing never really got past the idea phase. I think we knew pretty early that we didn't want to do that and our hearts weren't in it, which is ultimately why we pivoted to making it a raid. I think that was the right choice. Way more work, but the right choice.

Yeah it was a kerfuffle. We meant to bundle the first round of fixes with the second because we were afraid people would think that was all the changes, but I didn't properly line that up with our community team, hence the blue post at 9pm to clear it up. my bad.

... but that crowd is a fraction of a fraction of the playerbase. We can't exclusively design for them any more than we can exclusively design for the bottom % either. I'm looking forward to going in with my midcore guilds this week and making good satisfying progress (but still not full clearing).

To your point though, we do want to hold the line and keep a challenge. This is sort of the pinnacle of raiding in SoD and it wouldn't feel right if we nerfed it to the point where you could walk over it, and today's nerfs still are not that. If you cleared it week 1, yes it will be easier now...

But trying to manage some expectations, If you were killing HM2-3 naxx only for two months, then SE will still be a really tough challenge for you and you may need to change things up. If you were clearing HM4 consistently, it hopefully feels like a more natural progression from HM4 Saph and KT now.

But it's a super fair complaint that the guilds that are doing it in the "right" way feel really crappy watching other guilds just take 30-40 and kill it while they are still just trying to gear up to prep for the harder challenges later. Not entirely fixable without REALLY heavy nerfs, but fair.