This week's Thursday I had a look at DF nightmare with my guild. and it turned out that Draxus had received quite a random buff. Based on several videos of the encounter, the Guardians of the Fortress used to have 226k health pre-2.8, so I would have expected them to have just under 200k health after the buff removal. However, it seems they now have over 300k health instead.

I think the health was around 325k, so e.g. the 7th wave with two subteroths and two guardians would require about 15k raid dps to clear in time (750k damage over 50 seconds). Sure, it's certainly doable, but clearly this is not intended.

Not sure about the Guardian's, but there was some other change in this boss fight:

• New add waves now automatically spawn after 45 seconds when the previous adds are not killed enough (down from 55 seconds)
  

This makes the fight more challenging since you basically have 10 seconds less per phase, especially when you had trouble in the fight before. Another guild on my server discovered this first, and we were able to confirm it in our run.

The boss is still killable, but not easier as advertised now that the nightmare power buff is gone.

That's not quite true though, at least not for the 8th wave. I checked the times in the chat log, and the wave was exactly 50 seconds long. Of course, that's still less than the intended 55 seconds. (I'm assuming that you're referring to a bug, since I couldn't find any reference to a duration reduction in any patch notes.)

Anyway, I wish I had taken a screenshot of the health to substantiate my claim, but there is no way we'd have trouble killing them in time if they had just shaved five seconds off the wave length.

Yeah, sadly we only had time for like 3 pulls, and it was only on the last pull that I looked at their health and thought "wait, that can't be right." The dps requirement is still manageable so it's not like it makes Draxus unkillable, but it's a fairly annoying "feature".

Anyway, glad to see someone else has seen this too, means I wasn't just imagining it. ^^

That's not quite true though, at least not for the 8th wave. I checked the times in the chat log, and the wave was exactly 50 seconds long. Of course, that's still less than the intended 55 seconds. (I'm assuming that you're referring to a bug, since I couldn't find any reference to a duration reduction in any patch notes.)

 

Anyway, I wish I had taken a screenshot of the health to substantiate my claim, but there is no way we'd have trouble killing them in time if they had just shaved five seconds off the wave length.

I looked at my video closely again, and you are right, it is 50 seconds now, not 45. But I was also watching an older video, and there the time was also 50 seconds. I suppose the guide from the PTS is just wrong and the time has always been 50 seconds.

Also, I can confirm the increased HP: Guardians now have 346k HP, but had 226k HP before 2.8. This is definitely a buff. We had to leave one Guardian alive throughout the following phase and let the tanks handle them; in the final phase, Draxus even went enrage for a few seconds because the Guardians took so long to die.

Well, the increase in the Guardian's HPs would certainly explain why my guild wiped the first three times we got to Phase 7 after Nightmare Power was turned off. We thought were were just being too casual about the whole fight since it had been adjusted downwards. Once we turned on the DPS afterburners for Phase 7 we did clear, but it was still tight (i.e. the second Subteroth died one second into the start of Phase 8).

There seems to have been several HP adjustments made to adds in the nightmare DF fights, both up and down. The ranged Elite (D-15) droid in the Corruptor Zero fight had approximately 50K HP removed, while his D-13 melee counterpart remains at 56K.

In the most technical sense, the Developers did say,

...the health of the bosses in NiM Dread Fortress being left at Nightmare values after the removal of Nightmare Power was intentional

so if adds are not considered to be "bosses," then their HP could be adjusted up, down or stay the same.

Though, as well, they also said,

The removal of Nightmare Power does still lower the damage dealt by the bosses.

and we can clearly see that add damage has been reduced.

I think, to be fair, the term "bosses" is pretty generic and people use it interchangeably to refer to both an actual boss (e.g. Gate Commander Draxus) as well and an entire fight (e.g. the entirety of the Draxus encounter.)

The patch note/Developer response for turning Nightmare Power off should probably have been written in a slightly more descriptive way, such as "Nightmare Power in The Dread Fortress operation has been turned off, resulting in a reduction to enemy damage output in boss encounters as well as adjustments to the hit points of enemies." That would cover everything.

It is interesting that the difficult part of nightmare Draxus has shifted from Phase 5 to Phase 7 now.

I didn't actually realize the Guardians had gone up until yesterday. When we stomped through it last week, I assumed that our DPS were just having an off-day. We did kill the Guardians before the phase pushed, but it was way closer than it had ever been before nightmare power was removed.

Clearing it yesterday with a different group, we ended up needing to pull the guardians together and mash them with two focus knights and a tactics vanguard (as well as putting one healer on full-time DPS for that phase) in order to get past it. I mean, it's a rather neat gimmick in what is otherwise now a very easy fight, but definitely a bug.

Tait, while you're at it, you might want to mention to the designers that the Grob'thok lava isn't killing the adds (because of the high HP and now-nerfed damage), which makes that fight very hard to clear for groups that don't run a lot of AoE.

No patch notes on this one?

/me swats the dev team with a newspaper