Not being able to shrink drachnid illusion more than once, you used to be able to do it three times to make it "normal/small" size. I will personally oversee they all going to hell for this one, and I know people. He talks to me.
From a magician perspective, in no particular order... 1. Beams during ROF, which has already been documented 2. Green pet pulling, where using a low level pet could single pull any mob to the group/raid 3. Arcane whisper during I think EOK, where casting it on any mob single pulled that mob to the group 4. Rains were IIRC nerfed in their crit rate, forgot when 5. I remember I think during Underfoot necros casted some beno spell that healed the group. It got to a point where raid caster groups would be perma healed by having a necromancer in the group. 6. I think during COTF pets were made weaker tanks, although I think they were way too OP tanking wise then. There was a fun pet tanking thread then, although IMHO pets could still tank fine after that "nerf". You just could not /pet attack and AFK anymore That is what I could think of, for now. Maybe not OMG all time top three nerfs, but they were big at the time
Mortal coil nerf for SKs really sucked. No more swarm pulling. That was a blast. I understand the nerf, but it was fun.
This is the top of the list for me too. All hybrid discs that were created prior to the nerf were certainly designed knowing that the duration of the disc was going to be affected by the AA. Now after the nerf, and to this day we have all these old discs that last half as long as they used to and there has never been a new AA line to at least give us some of that time back, even if its only 25% or something instead of 100%. There are a ton of old discs that have never been upgraded to extend out their duration a little bit if there was clearly no plan to do a blanket disc duration extension aa. A warrior can easily keep 100% uptime on various defensive discs. Before the nerf a paladin could keep like 80% uptime, after the nerf there is substaintial time that I have no defensive discs available.
Bard Aria getting nerfed to no longer guarantee a 100% chance to double/triple attack. That was a big nerf to melee dps. I think that was during The Broken Mirror expansion.
Kelin Lubrigous Lament (First AE Mezz song, no target limit) adding a secondary resist, rendering the song useless. Mobs gained 2 resist chances, which they often resisted. Bard AE mezz became extremely unreliable.
Giving Cazic Thule a moss-covered twig and watching him wreck people. I believe the twig was primary/secondary then as well
Lots of classics here. I'll have to think about the old times since some would fall under exploit fixes rather than nerfs. (like the MGB reset exploit) I do have memories of the absurd trinity of Cleric Ward + Enc Mana Flare + Druid Reptile back in DoDH. That was such a fun way to grind exp as a raid-geared cleric with some friends. Swarm pull like crazy, as long as you didn't pull so many that they could collectively one round you, you wouldn't die and the damage was nuts. When the team realised how ridiculous things like that was, first they nerfed Mana Flare proccing off of procs in general (defensive, offensive and weapon based). That was a sad time. Reptile and by extension SK's rune skin had no strike limits for a time after then, but with people swam pulling like crazy, they eventually grossly nerfed Reptile and Skin to the point they were almost unusable outside of minimal targets. I can't say how much they were revised over the years, but I see now how Ward has a proc count limit of 120. This does seem like a fair compromise since it's not fading immediately in swarms and lasts long enough that you aren't having to chain cast over and over.
For Wizards primarily, though the Twincast one affected others as did the Wildmagic one. Manaburn (Repeatedly) Twincast (Seeds of Destruction). Instant nukes (The Serpent's Spine). Wildmagic (Seeds of Destruction). OG Beam kiting (Secrets of Faydwer). There are dozens of smaller ones, but those are the bigger ones I remember.
Not one of the more widely known things, but one I remember well. Early 2000’s the sellback price on compound bows was based on the vendor price of cams. At the time, however, a tinker could make cams at around a quarter that price through tinkering. It was possible to make Darkwood Conpound Bow (cheapest string) with tinkered cams and sell back to the bowyer vendor for a small profit.
Headshot has been nerfed a bunch of times over the course of 15 years or so, probably not the biggest nerf but more of marathon nerf hehe
I only know of a few berserker nerfs. Secrets of Faydwer - The "Flurry Nerf". Berserker AAs had progressed such that they had a ~90% chance to flurry upon a successful triple attack (with the proper AAs, buffs). After the dust settled, it was around a 10% reduction of swings in the group setting. Secrets of Faydwer (?) - Epic 1.5/2.0 Clicky Nerf. The crit rate boost from the epic click is pretty darn nice. Even better is that for a number of years, the buff would (by design) continually re-proc itself. This played well with the berserker mentality of "must keep slaughtering!". Well, eventually the devs said that the re-proc nature of the buff and a a 3-minute refresh on the click itself was a bit overpowering and they changed it to have a flat duration. They also recognized the gameplay value of "keeping the buff up", so they added a straight damage proc discipline with the same mechanic. We still get upgrades to that line, but there's another more powerful ability on the same timer that most berserker use instead. Reign of Fear - 2-hander "nerf". Less a nerf and more of a conscious stagnation, berserker-usable raid 2-handers progressed very little in ratio as compared to the prior expansion simple because of how berserker multiplicative effects work. In fact, this is a consideration for every expansion now-- "How will berserkers blow this up?"
i think during cotf pets were tanking way to good. was seeing reports of some raid encounters being better tanked by a mage pet. tanks cry louder then anyone else so they nerfed the absolute hell out of pet defenses. even if tanks have been op as hell for many years now. at the time as a casual max level mage with all pet aas maxed i went from surviving a bad pull with 5 dark blues not easy but not really at risk of dieing unless i tried to leave the hole fight to my pet. after the nerf same pet same aas same focus 2 mobs was a more challenging fight then 5 befor it. even 1 mob i would see some dangerous hp dips.
For a while you could give pets cleric-summoned hammers. It was quite atrocious. Or delicious, depending on whether or not you like mage pets obliterating mobs in ridiculous fashion. For a while, clerics had an AA that would strike down the undead with a pretty big nuke and refreshed every few minutes. They took away our very small cookie. /sadface. For a while, cleric fade was fast and effective, with a perfectly reasonable refresh time so that it could not be abused. Cleric dots used to stack. The argument goes that the new dots since the nerf are more damage than all the old ones wouldve been combined, but the problem with that is that mob hitpoints have outpaced that damage exponentially. Around SoF era, i could load up all my dots and root rot an undead mob like a shaman and it would die in a couple minutes or a few cycles of all my dots. Killing a dark blue right now with my one dot would take approximately 6 months of in game time.
Some have been mentioned already (bard quad kiting, shakerpaging, nerf to spell casting reinforcement and charmed pets) Nerf to bard dicho was also fairly large. From a selfish pally point of view, the nerf to Ward of Tunare and the beta to live nerf of Silent Piety. With Ward of Tunare you used to be able to pull heaps of low hitting mobs and 1 hard hitting mob and not require a healer. It even worked on raids (Redfang & Colossus of Skylance for example). Silent Piety was a self DI on beta and changed to it's current state on live. The reason given at the time was that they only wanted clerics to have DI abilities. One expansion later it was given to Druids and Shaman (second life)
