It has been nerfed drastically, but it was mostly an indirect nerf.
vDSA was designed for much weaker characters with no cp, and even when they boosted it to cp160, mechanics are still the same.
Nowadays people have access to better equipment and all tactics are available on the internet.

Same can be said about vMA, but DSA is significantly older.
Its considered "hard" because most of this game's content is insanely easy and of course its exremely hard compared to questing and normal dungeons where you can just light attack your way to the victory.

idk wrote: »

Technically and literally vDSA has been buffed in a major way. It was designed for vet 14 level characters. Before they upgraded it to CP 160 last year it could easily be cleared by 4 DPS with one going tank for a few fights.

However, with all the changes made to the game, including the obvious level we are probably stronger due to the CP as the previous poster mentioned. However, since we are also more experienced with it and developed different means to handle the mobs we have overcome much of the obstacles we used to face making it more challenging to determine how much we have been buffed over the original challenge.

Its also worth mentioning that at release you only had a limited amount of "lives". Once theyre gone, you cannot rez and cannot progress further.
It was a major issue for my first runs. Once we barely made it to the last stage, but then we ran out of rezzes and had to restart...
Now "lives" are reworked as "vitality bonus" so trials are much less punishing for beginners.

Stinkyremy wrote: »

Where I meant harder I meant more adds, more health of the adds/bosses, more damage ect.
The videos I have seen looks exactly the same.

Yes spawns and mechanics are the same. Some of monster abilities are tweaked (for example, daedroths can shoot those cc circles), but it wasnt DSA-specific.
There was time when it was vr14 (cp140) while max level for players was vr16 (cp160) and because of that DSA used to be super easy during that period. Then it was upscaled to vr16, but still it seems easier than it used to be back in vr14 era because players have more defense (from cps) and damage and also because wasting vitality bonus doesnt block your progression.

vDSA was tweaked only in 2016 when it was rescaled.

When it was released, it was tuned for the power level at that time. Back then, combat was very, very different. No CP, far fewer viable skills, a dearth of viable gear, etc.

With the subsequent power creep--CP system, higher max level, better combat system, etc., vDSA became a joke--we'd run it with no healer, no tank, etc.

It was then rescaled in 2016: damage and health levels were drastically increased, and pre-killing portals was no longer a thing. This restored much of vDSA's original difficulty.

So, no, vDSA was never nerfed. It was left behind in the dust with the combat changes in the early years of the game, and then rejuvenated. It hasn't been changed since (the changes to the Daedroths and Clannfears were game-wide changes and not specific to vDSA).

I would prefer that they were not quite so hands-off with vDSA and actually spend some time making some fixes. Long-standing bugs like the Eclipse that will not render on stage 7 are still there after all these years (that invisible Eclipse bug--particularly bad for someone like me who mains ranged DPS--was the primary the reason why I wrote the vDSA notifications for Raid Notifier, but why should we need an addon to work around buggy cues?).