Siege of Orgrimmar in Patch 6.0

by JR Cook - 10 years ago     show comments

As we already know, patch 6.0 will bring the Warlords of Draenor raiding system changes to the Siege of Orgrimmar. This means that the instance will be available with flexible normal and heroic modes and a fixed-size 20-player mythic mode. Class changes and the stat squish will also be in effect.

What we don’t know is how or if the encounters will change to fit the new raiding paradigm. In the most recent raiding blog, Blizzard wrote:

The raid as a whole will be retuned for the new numbers and scaling size—overall, it should prove no more difficult than it is currently, and will likely be easier in many places.

The thing is, it’s not only numbers that are changing. Many abilities are being removed or fundamentally altered, especially raid cooldowns and utility abilities – for example, those raids without a Holy Paladin won’t have access to Devotion Aura, while any strategies that revolved around Demonic Gateway will need to be changed.

Let’s also not forget that caster movement is being heavily nerfed. SoO was probably one of the most movement-heavy raiding zones we’ve ever seen, especially encounters like Thok and Siegecrafter.

I would argue that numbers changes will be sufficient to compensate for most ability and mobility tweaks in the new normal and heroic difficulties, but mythic is another matter. The tuning in these encounters is some of the best Blizzard has ever achieved. Will this difficulty see additional nerfs, or even full-on mechanics changes to compensate for the lower caster mobility and lack of cooldown stacking (forcing Thok to high stacks might no longer be possible, for example)? Or, on the other hand, will the fights stay the same to force us to get used to the new paradigm – a trial by fire?

What do you think, readers?