This is just the thing: "passing lockouts" often means that the person giving one to a team won't raid with them, only gives the lock with the intent to help, then goes to their merry way. Which is, from now on, impossible. I can see you starting to type, and I agree that at one hand, when progging, it's important to learn the smaller bosses, too - on the other hand, when a team has only 1-2 raid nights a week, it can be a huge help to them to receive a lock for the boss they haven't defeated yet, as that gives them more time to practice on that one. You can argue that someone "just" have to hit a lock for their team. If you can do that, cudos. Many people are not able to, that is why they relied on locks from other people. Btw, we tried it out just out of curiosity: even if the leader gets dropped in the midst of an ongoing boss fight, the phase changes immediately.

Hi! Excuse me, but this is one of the worst solutions I've seen in the last few years, and there were a few. -__- We were going for Sisters prog. My friend set the phase to NiM, I got the lead because of the lockout. I checked: it was set to NiM. We went in. I needed to quit the group for a few minutes; they say as soon as I left, leadership went back to my friend, and a message appeared to the group that the phase changed to Vet. (It didn't even wait for another person to join.) As we were already half-way through the mobs, and there didn't seem to be any difference in them, we went to the boss. The mechanics seemed to be the same, but we couldn't shoot anything with the beam. After a bit of "What the heck?!", somebody noticed that the Nexus really turned to it's HM version. Yes, we came out and reset the phase. I think I'm not surprising anyone: we were not happy. At all. So. Even if it will happen only when the Leader leaves: what if they disconnect or bug out? Do we need to restart the phase, possibly making a timed impossible? What if we want to change characters? What if we'd like a pug run? Should we re-check and possibly reset the phase after every change of people? Again: I'm sorry to say this, but this was clearly not thought through; you just went with the first "solution" that seemed quick without requiring any mentionable effort. Anyway, how can a group that's already inside (more than one of them had locks, too) not have an "active phase"? Or, on that thought: wasn't mine on "NiM" when I rejoined...? If someone wants to join, they can't even set their preferred difficulty before joining. Why is it not the group that's already in the phase that's preferred when setting the difficulty? Why a random newcomer? I can't wait to check R-4 HM out again, where it's a standard tact for teams to Alt+F4 before Kanoth, because if not, you can't see the Vertical/Horizontal lines on you.

I'm still trying to find the logic behind your actions. What I understand: you probably don't want Ranged specs to be viable for some NiM and R-4 HM bosses. But. We have Pyro PT, Concentration Sentinel and a few other melee classes/specs that are really overkill. So you nerf AP PT, instead of first buffing the classes which are underperforming for ages? Why? Seriously: NiM raiders are getting burned out of constant R-4 (because nothing else drops 340 rating gear, and no incentive to do anything else - it's literally impossible to get a NiM pug together on Fleet, and minimal chance to get an HM pug team with experienced players if it's not EV/KP). People who don't have teams for R-4 have *nothing* to do besides Tech Frag farm to get some money, because everyone interested has already farmed 330 from Nefra in 7.0. Now you intend to nerf the number of viable classes, too? You "repaired" every bug that actually helped players, and left everything that hinders us in the game untouched. There are more and more game-breaking bugs after every update you make. You even made random players beta-test the Launcher, and I still haven't heard of giving the lost game time back to the unfortunate ones involved. The lag is getting unbearable in some places which wasn't the case on 6.0. Isn't that more important than nerfing a few classes that are still viable? Also, these are not the most OP ones. Why these two? Shouldn't your priority be to make the game enjoyable and full of players again, instead of giving nerfs to randomly chosen classes? Have you even checked how many players are playing with each classes/specs on anything HM+? Wait, I know the answer. No. Because if you had, your first priority would be to bring the underperforming ones up to be good enough so more players would pick them up (again), not to spoil the game for the ones playing Lightning and AP, too. More and more Ranged players are re-rolling to Melee nowdays, because a good player *can* stay on the boss with them, and there is only so many bosses when you absolutely need a Ranged. It's just not worth playing them in most cases. Lightning is performing allright now, so it gets a nerf. Is that really balance? After the cathastrophe called 7.0, when gamers started to flee the game because you scaled everything for 340 already (without the gear even being available) and the limbo of 7.1 (where there is only one thing incentivized), please make positive changes, not negative ones. Give us reasons to play more classes, not reasons to stop playing even more. And please, *please*, repair the bugs and re-check the math on bosses before you touch the classes.

That is it exactly. [Disclaimer: I'm a Sorc healer main. My team is not the best, not the worst: we continued to go for NiMs in 7.0, managing to kill most "pre-bosses", even got some end bosses - most of them are alive and well, though. The game still feels like the bones of itself.] It's not that Operative is OP. For NiM, it is *not*. It's that the other two classes are not good enough. That one skill heals 8 people, on each one just as much as the Sorc's biggest single (or double) big heal on one (or two) player(s). And what gives salt to the wound: they even nerfed the *Sorc* Resurgence spread (which was a badly thought-out skill to begin with), as being too OP for an AoE. No comment. (Yeah, PVP balance. Riiiiiiiiiiiiiight...) (I'm not good on Merc, so I'm leaving that part to the people who have finished playing Merc heals recently because they didn't enjoy it anymore.) Did they give it back at least in stronger single-target heals? *No.* The other two classes have almost nothing to compensate. Playing one of the two "lesser" healing classes feels like watching a great Arsenal playing next to an average Fury Mara: hopeless. (Another example of "great" scaling. The nerf BW is planning on most classes is just ridiculous.) You can sacrifice a kidney and a lung, and you' still feel you're underperforming in comparision, getting carried by your team. And I say it as one who progged a few NiMs with two Sorc heals on team in the expansion when most people said the class wasn't even viable. Well, "not viable" for some last bosses never felt this close to being true. And it's not only healer classes. It's not even the question of "there are always meta classes". In 7.0, it's like there are 3-6 specs that were *made* to handle NiM level, and many which were just left in the game because taking them out would cause an uproar. I can already hear top-level players laughing on the whole thing: "stop whining, get good and learn this and that classes. If you don't enjoy playing those, just search for a new game, or be satisfied with HM." Since people are still doing sale runs in 7.0, which means they must be able to 7-man Ops, I have to admit: there must be truth in it. On the other hand: if there are only a handful of classes/specs good enough for endgame, that is just bad design. If the game is scaled to be satisfying only to the best 20 players on every server, it's bad design. Okay, technically, Mara and PT were OP for at least the last few expansions, boring as this status quo is, we all could have learnt them by now. (Don't mention the nerfs/buffs, I've heard players laughing out loud reading about those plans. I'll check the Parsely leaderboards with great curiousity in 7.1.) The devs probably didn't have the time and resources to do proper scaling, but this expansion felt like torture, with 2/3 of the content (and raider playerbase) suddenly snatched away. On kills I didn't even feel satisfaction, just "if we'd like to play this and that classes, we could have this on farm already." I actually feel dumb for not planning on unsubbing because of all this ( I just love this game too much, even in this state), and in 7.1, wearing 340 will provide the missing few thousand heals/dps, so balancing it doesn't matter *that* much - then again, being able to do something, vs being able to do something with one hand while tabbing out every 10 seconds and chatting with people just because of using another class is pretty much unfair. After the relatively balanced 6.0, the unfinished state this expansion stands out even more.

Either that, or maybe just turn it into a Flashpoint? Or at least put it into Groupfinder, so it wouldn't be so hard to find people to do it?