What Makes a Boss "Hard"?
Posted 04/04/08 at 3:31 PM by Hanos
Since Sunwell's release there has been a lot of talk about exactly how "Hard" the bosses in Sunwell are for various guilds. Which got me thinking, what makes a WoW Raid Encounter truly "Hard".
First off you have to take a look at historical encounters that were considered "Hard" at the time, and then try to determine why they were viewed that way.
Early Raiding:
-MC was considered hard my 95% of the player base, the "Hard" part was getting 40 people of the right classes (healers) to show up and pay attention for 3-4 hours. If you did that, bosses simply fell over with a minimal amount of coordination.
-Magmadar was our first introduction to "Don't stand in the fire"
-Ragnaros was also considered hard, until people realized that it was just a DPS Race, and you wouldn't win a fight of attrition.
-BWL people started to learn that occasionally healers had to move, tanks had to trade off, and pulling aggro could wipe the raid. We also got our first taste of enrage timers, and more of the raid taking damage
I could go on for pages about what we have learned from each boss and zone, but the fact of the matter is that after 3 years of raiding, not only are the MC basics assumed, by we have a much higher base level of knowledge about how to deal with bosses, what to expect, how to work out strategies etc.
Of all the fights in the game, the only ones that I would view as truly being "Hard", are the ones that take a high level of strategy and execution, where once you got the strategy it was simply an issue of could you implement the plan, could you adjust to changes, and could you go 5, 10, 15 mins without someone fucking up (Pre-TBC you could even absorb a few of those).
So are I have spent significant time on all of the Sunwell bosses (Felmyst should have died last night), and none of them are truly "hard", Felmyst has by far the most strategy involved, but that is almost 100% before the pull, once we worked that out and made it through the first transition it was kind of like "That's it?".
-Kalecgos is going to press your healers, and your ability to adapt based on who gets portals, but after the 4th portal it is just a follow the rotation, don't be stupid, don't die, collect the loot. Once you get past the communication and gear check, it really isn't hard.
-Brutallus is a straight up gear and raid stacking check. Do you have a gear, and can you stack a raid, if so, can your healers keep people up, can your tanks manage taunts and cooldowns, and can you DPS hit their buttons fast enough. Again not hard, and my response when he died was "Cool time to watch the Felmyst sequence" as opposed to "Wow, great job", it simply isn't hard.
-Felmyst is Sapp and Heigan, can you stand in the right spots, can you move with the group, and can you perform basic survival for 10 mins, if so, collect loots.
So, what do you think make a fight "Hard"?
-Obviously tuning it to require near perfect execution, is one step, aka Brutallus, you can execute everything and you still have to have great DPS.
-Raid wide coordination otherwise known as "Idiot Check" is the classic hard boss mechanism
-Gear Checks, for the first time this one isn't a huge issue, we have had so long to farm that you no longer have a gear gap between the D&T's of the world and the guild that killed Illidan 3-4 months ago, everyone is decked out to meet any straight up gear check they can apply
-Profession Stacking - Drums, Drums, Drums, how many people can you convince to drop their profession and level LWing for the good of the raid?
WoW isn't hard, getting 25 people on the same page and getting them to execute a strategy, while dealing with shitty computers, RL distractions, lapses in judgement, etc. is what makes WoW hard.
First off you have to take a look at historical encounters that were considered "Hard" at the time, and then try to determine why they were viewed that way.
Early Raiding:
-MC was considered hard my 95% of the player base, the "Hard" part was getting 40 people of the right classes (healers) to show up and pay attention for 3-4 hours. If you did that, bosses simply fell over with a minimal amount of coordination.
-Magmadar was our first introduction to "Don't stand in the fire"
-Ragnaros was also considered hard, until people realized that it was just a DPS Race, and you wouldn't win a fight of attrition.
-BWL people started to learn that occasionally healers had to move, tanks had to trade off, and pulling aggro could wipe the raid. We also got our first taste of enrage timers, and more of the raid taking damage
I could go on for pages about what we have learned from each boss and zone, but the fact of the matter is that after 3 years of raiding, not only are the MC basics assumed, by we have a much higher base level of knowledge about how to deal with bosses, what to expect, how to work out strategies etc.
Of all the fights in the game, the only ones that I would view as truly being "Hard", are the ones that take a high level of strategy and execution, where once you got the strategy it was simply an issue of could you implement the plan, could you adjust to changes, and could you go 5, 10, 15 mins without someone fucking up (Pre-TBC you could even absorb a few of those).
So are I have spent significant time on all of the Sunwell bosses (Felmyst should have died last night), and none of them are truly "hard", Felmyst has by far the most strategy involved, but that is almost 100% before the pull, once we worked that out and made it through the first transition it was kind of like "That's it?".
-Kalecgos is going to press your healers, and your ability to adapt based on who gets portals, but after the 4th portal it is just a follow the rotation, don't be stupid, don't die, collect the loot. Once you get past the communication and gear check, it really isn't hard.
-Brutallus is a straight up gear and raid stacking check. Do you have a gear, and can you stack a raid, if so, can your healers keep people up, can your tanks manage taunts and cooldowns, and can you DPS hit their buttons fast enough. Again not hard, and my response when he died was "Cool time to watch the Felmyst sequence" as opposed to "Wow, great job", it simply isn't hard.
-Felmyst is Sapp and Heigan, can you stand in the right spots, can you move with the group, and can you perform basic survival for 10 mins, if so, collect loots.
So, what do you think make a fight "Hard"?
-Obviously tuning it to require near perfect execution, is one step, aka Brutallus, you can execute everything and you still have to have great DPS.
-Raid wide coordination otherwise known as "Idiot Check" is the classic hard boss mechanism
-Gear Checks, for the first time this one isn't a huge issue, we have had so long to farm that you no longer have a gear gap between the D&T's of the world and the guild that killed Illidan 3-4 months ago, everyone is decked out to meet any straight up gear check they can apply
-Profession Stacking - Drums, Drums, Drums, how many people can you convince to drop their profession and level LWing for the good of the raid?
WoW isn't hard, getting 25 people on the same page and getting them to execute a strategy, while dealing with shitty computers, RL distractions, lapses in judgement, etc. is what makes WoW hard.
Total Comments 10
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To be fair, 90% of fights pre-TBC were "don't die" and you would get through. The first fights not to be like that were in Naxx, as far as I can remember. Sure, there was a very very small caveat that you were doing something (healing, dpsing, tanking) rather than _just_ not dying, but nothing was particularly challenging in actual execution terms. I'd agree that the majority is the logistics of raiding rather than the difficulty of fights that actually makes things hard though (and cutting it down to 25 man certainly helped with that end, especially towards tuning limits).
What would you consider the hardest raid boss you've ever encountered so far? Personally pre-nerf gruul, mag and al'ar were probably the most challenging that I've experienced. I lack a very small amount of experience though never having done Gothik/4hmen/Saph/Kel pre-TBC. |
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That's just it, the hardest fights are the ones that require the most planning and coordination. The more you break up the coordination, the harder it gets. Aka if the entire raid has to move, it is pretty easy (Heigan), if part of the raid has to move one way while another moves in another direction it is a little harder (Thaddius), if you have to have 4+ groups all doing something different, that is what separates the boys from the men (Gothik, 4H, etc.)
The hardest fights in TBC: -Pre-Nerf Gruul - 25 people have to think and act on their own, with potential for bad luck. -Pre-Nerf Mother -Illidari Council - 25 people have to worry about not standing in the fire, have to watch out for Envenom etc. Not hard, but a raid wide idiot check. -Kalecgos - Back to the 4H idea of more moving parts makes it harder, with the Gothik element of spiltting up the raid, and the added element of the split is constantly changing. You have to run a 4 group rotation with a separate tank rotation, everyone has to watch their health etc. -Felmyst - Raid wide movement, 5 separate groups in phase 1, raid group dancing in phase 2, etc. All of this is planning and execution, which I don't consider "skill" in the classic sense. If I had to CC 2 mobs at the same time, while DPSing a third, through managing kick, gouge, blind, Kidney Shot, Vanish/Cheap Shot, Evasion, Sprint, etc. that would be a test of skill, and we know how well most people do at those (look at the number of people with Skybreaker's Whips (who didn't cheese it with a Paladin or a Riding Crop) or high rated arena teams that aren't simply OP combinations. Right now the reason very little in WoW is truly "Hard" is because the mechanics are so easy, there is very little that requires split second reaction time and decision making, and most of that is limited to tanks (Use CD or don't use CD, when to taunt on Brutallus etc., and Healers Heal A or Heal B, Use NS or don't use NS, LoH or keep spamming, assist or don't assist etc.) |
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I read this, and I agree with it pretty much entirely (as much as I can, that is, with my lack of experience in sunwell, or even past the first bit of SSC (Twisting Nether sucks so badly). I was not really possessed to post a comment, I had nothing to add, but I do have an inquiry to make which occurred to me moments ago in my half-hearted search for a new server.
Why, if WoW is so easy (which I agree with you, and believe it is), are guilds so interested in previous raid experience. In theory any reasonably intelligent individual should be able to learn what to do in any particular fight in any specific role relatively quickly. So how is prior experience relevant? Even if people have done Boss X in Raid Y hundreds of times with one guild, they will probably have to be told what specifically to do, as I've noticed in all the guilds with whom I've run different things, they all have slight differences about them in the way they do things. Perhaps the later instance fights do not leave room for this variation, that I cannot say (Twisting Nether sucks). It's frustrating. It's like looking for a job fresh out of college. Employers want you to have experience, but you can't get any experience because everyone with whom you would acquire it wants you to have it already. What a wonderful catch-22. |
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You defined a set of criteria that makes a fight "hard" but before you did that, you preceded it with an explanation that every fight so far in the game that contains one or more of those criteria is "easy."
[e]I just noticed this - Quote:
(look at the number of people with Skybreaker's Whips (who didn't cheese it with a Paladin or a Riding Crop)
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Updated 04/09/08 at 3:25 PM by Malan |
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Dead serious about the Skybreaker's Whip, both my friend and I completed it with a Carrot on a Stick and nothing else. What good is the reward if you have to already have it to earn it? Basically I didn't want to spend 100g on a Riding Crop when I could get the Whip for free.
But saying you need the Riding Crop is like saying you need Illidan loot to kill Illidan, the Riding Crop is the equivalent of Badge Loot, it's out there for people who can't earn it the hard way. |
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Quote:
But saying you need the Riding Crop is like saying you need Illidan loot to kill Illidan, the Riding Crop is the equivalent of Badge Loot, it's out there for people who can't earn it the hard way.
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Are you saying you think the majority of raid encounters are easier then the nether drake race event? The race event is a simple follow the leader memorize the route check, I did it without any movement speed enhancements in the span of an hour. Compare that to a fight like C'thun or Archimonde or Kael'thas? I think your kidding yourself.
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How many raid encounters could you execute on your own in less than an hour if you were by yourself and didn't have to rely of 24 (or in the case of C'Thun 39) other people not to screw up?
The Riding Crop makes the Whip redundant, so what is the point of doing the quest if you already have the Riding Crop? On an individual level almost every Raid encounter is extremely easy, to the point where they would be laughed out of a single player game. Take Felmyst for a example, a boss the probably less then 100 guilds have killed. What do you have to do? You have to run away when someone near you gets encapsulate, you have to avoid the green laser and the gas, you have to avoid the breath, and you have to DPS or Heal... it is criminally easy on an individual basis, getting 24 other people to all execute at the same time is what makes it hard. What separates the great guilds from the good guilds is that they get 25 people to execute faster, with less trial and error. Think about it, if you weren't in the first wave of guilds to clear T6, you had perfect strategies for every boss, there was nothing that required split second reaction times, or perfect timing to beat, but that doesn't mean anyone went in and one shotted everything. Think about what makes raiding hard, it isn't what what we typically define as hard in a video game sense, it is far more what you would consider hard working on a group project. |
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Nothing in this game is hard (PvE), nothing.
What is hard is having players that can learn, react, make correct decisions as well as do their other assigned raid job (DPS/Heal/Threat). The things they have introduced in TBC is reaction times coupled with the ability to do more then your assigned job. You have to DPS, and move out of fire, and interrupt casts, and click on a cube, and decurse, move with your group and any number of a hundred things put into TBC content. Pre-C'Thun and Naxx you pretty much NEVER had to do more then AT MOST 2 things at once ... even the easy half of Naxx didn't require much apart from a few key people. There are many people out there that can multitask and do multiple things at once, the challenge is to find 24 others who can do it with you, at the same time each night/week, whom you actually get along with. On top of all that is the guild politics which can break up those 25 people who actually manage to all get together on the same realm and able to raid at the same time. THAT is what makes a boss hard. I swear if I could play 25 computers at the same time I would be a top 10 guild, I constantly ask myself why people can be soo bad at this game (when my guild wipes on something). Luckily for me my guild enjoys my rage rants about people who fuck up on trivial things - kind of our substitute for DKP docking for failures. |
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Nice.
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- What Makes a Boss "Hard"? (04/04/08)
