With every World of Warcraft expansion’s release, the previous expansion becomes obsolete pretty immediately. This is true with most content progression – usually, by the end of an expansion’s lifespan, content from the beginning of its release will already be considered useless.
Such is the case with much of Battle for Azeroth, for example. As 8.3 comes to a close, everything from 8.0 forward seems trite. War Resources and all raids except Ny’alotha are practically useless, only really used for transmogrification purposes or collectibles.
By the time an expansion gets going, even the highest tier of the previous expansion’s endgame content becomes soloable. A well-geared character by the end of the current expansion is able to run through the mythic difficulties of Legion’s raids with extreme ease, not counting a few mechanics.
Blizzard has gone ahead and applied the first of these major changes to the current iteration of World of Warcraft‘s prepatch. There’s quite a bit more nerfing that needs to be done to Battle for Azeroth‘s content, so they’re getting a head start.
The primary reason for this is that the expansion’s current mechanic, Corruption, will be removed during the prepatch for Shadowlands. Corruption is responsible for the vast majority of the power that a player has in the current meta.
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In fact, the proper corruption is more important than anything else. Providing stat increases, generally-powerful damage or survivability, and even class-specific perks, having the right corruption is more important than any traditional stats.
With so much power being removed, Blizzard won’t just need to do their usual nerfs, but also nerfing the content to accord to not having the corruptions themselves. With corruptions like Twilight Devastation that does as much as 18% of the wielder’s health in a massive AoE, the removal is an enormous power loss.
In accordance with this, the nerfs are powerful. The damage of abilities in the Ny’alotha raid has been reduced by 25%, which is much more important than health. More health means it takes longer to kill, but without the damage reduction, players are at a risk of being one-shot.
Dungeons have also seen a decrease to the damage, reduced by about 13.5%, which also applies to raid tiers previous to Ny’alotha. That means the 13.5% damage reduction applies to all dungeons as well as Uldir, Battle for Dazar’alor, Crucible of Storms, and the Eternal Palace.
While there’s been no confirmation, one would assume that the health values of this content will mirror that same nerf. While Ny’alotha likely won’t be (easily) soloable right at the launch of 9.0, the increase in power that we get throughout Shadowlands is likely to have it tackled easily for transmog runs just as Antorus and Nighthold are now.
