Dragons of Nightmare world bosses are dead content, let's fix that

[Ugoboom]

There's really no dead content in vanilla, something really unique this expansion. Even with naxx on 14/15 and 15/15 farm by 3 guilds, all raids are run by them and all world bosses are farmed when they are up... Except for the green dragons

The dragons of nightmare bosses are very hard, really designed for 100 or more people to dogpile in and kill them. Here, they are sometimes attempted by 30-40 man teams, but 3 of them are so insanely hard that naxx teams really can't even secure a kill, only asdfasfdfasd is reasonable to kill by 40 BWL geared players...

And this is all for some BWL ilevel loot, but also a bunch of NR gear that is subpar compared to naxx patch NR gear. So half the time, you get useless NR gear thats only used on 1, maybe 2 bosses in aq40 and otherwise completely useless, and the other half the time you get some BWL style offpieces that the big dps classes don't really even want as they have equal or better t2 and t2.5 easily available.

So, one of two things need to be done:
A) These dragons need a big big nerf, their total HP cut by 2 or 3x times, the damage their mechanics do to the raid cut by 33% or even 50%. And the dragons have specials tied to them specfically, and these vary from easy to complete nightmare.
Taerar is easy. His doesnt need nerfs
Lethon's special is for adds to spawn that heal him for about 15000 health if they reach him. Because these adds arent AOEable and it's rather hard to kill them, we've regularly had this boss go from 75% back to 100% instantly. ANd it would happen again at 50% back to nearly 100%. This is the hardest boss and is not being killed by any raid team.
Ysondre's shades have a chance to silence people. This is absolutely brutal as many healers get silenced and tanks die, and it all cascades down. Reduce this silence duration or remove the mechanic.
Emeriss' Corruption of the Earth is a bit too brutal as it does % damage, totalling 100% of everyone's HP over 10 seconds. Cut the total down to 70 or 80% and this boss is way way way more doable.

Or, if all these nerfs are not desirable by the community, instead we can buff the loot to be Nerubian Overseer quality:
B) Drop the chance of NR gear by a third or more, so that they still exist but drop far less often, so we can, make room for new gear pieces.
New gear peices, and existing offpieces should be loot on the level of Cthun, as 40manning these bosses is pretty much as hard as Cthun is.
For example, Cthun drops
https://classic.wowhead.com/item=21585/ ... -gauntlets
and the dragons drop
https://classic.wowhead.com/item=20618/ ... onal-power
The dragon's gloves should be bumped from 27 to 40 spellpower, so that it becomes a proper sidegrade to dark storm. Right now, it's straight up a downgrade, and dark storm is a highly highly contested item and bottleneck for casters, especially for priests boomies and eles for whom this is bis by far with no alternative.
And the NR gear peices that do exist, should also get buffs to be bis NR, to be far far better than naxx patch craftables (which are ungodly good and easy to obtain). The craftables should be starter gear, and the dragon NR gear should be absolute bis for NR, alongside NR drops inside aq40.

So yeah, either nerf the bosses to be able to be cleared by a 30-40man team that's currently only progressing BWL, or make it drop proper cthun ilvl loot like the far easier Nerubian Overseer does.

And that's just one part of the fix. Due to a mechanic, the green dragons are also agonizing in practice to progress and fight. Each person gets afflicted with a 15 min debuff (16.5 min, worse case) that completely stops all raid recuperation. So a pull might be 5 minutes, a wipe happens, and it's going to be another 25 minutes until even another pull can even start. This is the main reason people do not want to do these bosses, this waiting time is agonizing. This debuff made sense when it was a thousand people on a server competing over a boss, wPVPing and all that, but here? no. It only serves to make this content more dead than it is.

The solution? When a boss leaves combat and is resetting, clear the mark debuffs of all players in the region. Bam, you still can't cheese the boss by graverunning mid pull, but a wipe doesn't have 15 minutes added to the recuperation time.

Also, there's yet ANOTHER problem with these bosses: 4 spawn at first, but none of them respawn until all 4 are killed. It's been a few months but currently the server has had Lethon chiling there, nobody daring touch that broken horribly hard boss, so no other bosses are spawning ever again. I hear that this is blizzlike, but it's pointless and no proper sized server back in the day really had this be a problem. I suggest these dragons all get their own 5-7 day respawn timer, so if guilds just really do not want to do a specific boss, they shouldn't be forced to in order to spawn the one they do want.

With these 3 things fixed, these bosses are no longer dead content, and the lv 60 world is fully alive again. Thoughts?

[Geojak]

Nerfing them so a team of 30 can clesr them sound better to me than super buffing loot.

[Andima]

Nerfing them so a team of 30 can clesr them sound better to me than super buffing loot.

agree

[Mac]

Nerfing them so a team of 30 can clesr them sound better to me than super buffing loot.

This would be a good idea.

[Ugoboom]

Looks like lotsa people agree with the nerf solution, so yeah ignore the B) suggestions and go for the A) ones. big big HP nerfs, and fixing the hostile-to-small-raids mechanics

[Fizzles]

At this point, I want these green dragons to be actual content done as it is nearing 10 months after the server first KT kill.

Nerfing the green dragons is the easiest solution on the table if the developers do not want to invest significant effort into theorycrafting the best way to buff the loot.

[Vikare]

Dragons of Nightmare are really easy already, or so they were on classic. Looking at the turtle DB, it seems that they have about 300-400k more hp here (if the DB is correct) compared to how they were there. Blizzard had them at 830,000 hp for all four. As far as mechanics are concerned: Ysondre & Taerar are cakewalks, Lethon is just flip flops and tank swaps, and Emeriss can almost entirely be negated and is otherwise a healing fight.

Their loot table is intended for pre-AQ, so BWL tier. I think much of it is already quite good, so if they were to change any of it then it ought to be minor adjustments to the really bad drops like they did for MC/BWL a week ago. Avoid power creep.

In my opinion, the simplest fix is to bring their hp in-line with Blizzard's 832,750. Nothing else should be touched. If anything, perhaps also making them force reset their shared spawn time if one is left alive too long. Since they all spawn simultaneously and the other three won't reset if one is still standing.

[Redmagejoe]

Best thing they can do is make these bosses somehow relevant to an Emerald Dream type zone / dungeon.

[Hir3]

I think one way to get people to kill them would be to make the portals connect, unlocking them for the world for a time if players down a boss. So if an Alliance team goes and kills Lethon, toons can use the portal for awhile to say, travel to the Hinterlands.

It'd be cool to see an Alliance raid jump through Duskwood, attack Ysondre, and then being so close to the Undercity, take a friendly visit to Sylvanas from the Hinterlands.