Evalara

This would be a stronger argument if player population was evenly distributed across classes, and if even half the people playing a heal-capable class knew how to cast those spells in a sensible manner (much less wanted to).


At any rate I would submit the trash leading up to Zereketh as an infinitely worse "encounter" than Skyriss. A half-second's worth of error in pulling should not be a guaranteed wipe in a 5man. Also the double robot pull makes me grind my teeth just thinking about it.

 

Ngita

I killed Blackheart successfully 11 times, from the very first time when I went in their 2 days after 70 and 41 Ret.

On the 12th time Rogue,Shaman and Mage took me down in 6 seconds according to the combat log on the 1st MC, that was with 10k armor,9k stam.

He does indeed get harder as your gear gets better. Despite that I do indeed enjoy Blackheart the inciter.

But in general what makes an encounter unfun, Too much random elements, in combination with trash and or long Graveyard runs. Nothing like sitting in Auto run dwelling on what you and others did wrong for the next 10 mins after a wipe to get the gander up.

 

Aloaya

My god do I hate that trash. EVERY FUCKING TIME we've gone, I've wiped us on it. Otherwise perfect, flawless runs. WIPE. I drew the patterns once, and I wish I had a scanner. The one dog who's only out of your blind spot when he's close enough to the door to aggro if you're in the doorway is really the crowning glory. Otherwise, Arcatraz is an interesting instance, full of fewer, bigger trash. It really feels like a jailbreak in a high-security prison.

 

• Cluey

Please read what you typed before hitting the Submit Reply button, there is a Preview Post button for a reason.

I think I changed/added the right words while reading it.

 

Miriam

This thread reminds me of a pug run that I did to Arcatraz (needed the rep...). Warrior/mage/rogue/oomkin and myself as the only healer. The oomkin never shifted out to heal (the warrior had more healing done), so I pretty much carried the group through the instance. While doing the last boss, the oomkin dies twice and then starts whining "goddammit am I lowest priority in the healing or what". Well, let's just say that the things I said to her weren't pretty. And hell yeah, of course the oomkin was lowest priority in my healing, I was busy enough spam healing the useful people. Luckily we got the boss down, only the warrior left alive with something like 5% health. PuGs can be allright skillwise, but there's always some random idiot that I run into an argument with.

 

Copernicus

I'm not a fan of heroic Nethermancer Septhera. I haven't tried the Hunter/ranged-pull method yet, which bypasses the annoyance of the fire elementals. It's an unfun encounter because of the randomness and bugginess (maybe) of it- the elementals resetting back to their old targets after being taunted and sometimes having to wipe to reset the encounter due to a bad elemental pull.

Illhoof is also not fun, but that might be because I'm on AE duty and run low on mana. It does seem like an encounter that is very depenent on class-makeup. It also is a wierd fight because it's long, has a ton of stuff going on, but is also very boring. Despite the fact that I'm doing three different things on the encounter (breaking the sacrifice, AEing the imps, DPSing Illhoof) I'm also bored on the fight. I guess that's tied into the mana conservation from earlier, since I need to save mana for AEing and burst DPS on the sacrificial victim. I guess what makes it an unfun encounter is that there's four different things going on (Illhoof, imps, sacrifice, and the big imp) and people are only interacting with two of them signifigantly during the encounter... but all four things are right next to each other in a small cramped room.

 

Friedrich

Omor the Unscarred's Treacherous Aura fails. Grounding Totem is immune.

And yes, this works on heroic.

 

Zyrxil

I think any encounter that truly makes you pissed at the Boss is "Unfun". I hate Blackheart the Inciter. Not because he makes your entire party lose control, or because he likes to drain healer mana with Holy Nova/Consecrate, or even because he blows Prep and Cloak of Shadows immediately, yet Cloak of Shadows doesn't break me free.

No, I hate him because of his laugh. Fuck you Blackheart, you're like the awful ganker that attacks me while I'm farming, who spams /laugh /spit macros even as I am pounding your face into the ground.

 

alienangel

I actually like both Nethermancer Sepethera and Blackheart the Inciter. Yes, I've had runs where we wipe repeatedly on these bosses, but they're still a nice bit of randomness in otherwise very predictable instances. And no, I don't mean I like doing Nethermancer by kiting stuff away up Panthelon's walkway, I think she's fine done in her own room. And there's all kinds of fun minigames you can do to try to save waste while MC'd, like trying to have a freezing trap on your healer to prevent him spamming mana, taking off your bow, switching to tree form, etc.

Well I haven't actually had any new trash unlocked for me yet by the impossible entry-level encounters, so the trash complaint was more or less at the forefront of my QQ queue anyway - clearing Moroes/Aran/Netherspite trash multiple times wasn't any less infuriating than clearing Gruul/Magtheridon trash multiple times (actually it was worse since the latter two are at least right at the instance portal).

 

Hozz

lol@Hellfire Warders. Not only are the 4 pulls on a 1 hour respawn, they are irritating AND drop nothing. Whoever is responsible for those pulls needs a good punch in the balls and a stern talking-to.

 

Quasar

Why do I think this is going to turn into the exact opposite of the "what makes raid encounters fun" thread which featured prominently the common belief that random chance and loss of control make for unfun encounters?

Prince Malchezaar - Love the encounter, and while you can sort of deal with the randomness, you can't always. Infernals WILL end up randomly dropping in the worst possible places on some of your runs, and it is pretty frustrating.

Blackheart - Fun encounter in theory, but not so fun when someone gets instagibbed by a gangbang of the others, or everyone loses their cooldowns, etc. I rarely ever wiped to him, but it makes you feel helpless more than anything, praying that random chance doesn't screw you.

etc.

JUICE! Aww I'm sorry. Did... did anyone want some juice?

 

◊ zeidrich

I hate heroic o'mrogg.

Screw him in the eye.

Seriously. I can't figure out his aggro table, I can't taunt him, I can't regain aggro after I lose it. Sometimes he stays on me for 3-4 shouts. Sometimes he leaves me and I can't get him back after the first. He hits like a fricken truck. He snares me. He runs fast. I hate him.

 

◊ zeidrich

I like prince. I think that after a few kills even when a few infernals drop in the worst possible locations you can still manage it if you have a fairly good idea of where to go. The only time it gets really frustrating is when the infernal drops in the worst location right before an enfeeble so you get the choice of being instagibbed by inferno, or being instagibbed by shadow nova.

 

◊ Penguin

We were chain-running Shadow Labs last night with:
Prot war
MS war -me
Shadowpriest
holy preist
enhanc shammy.

I'd just recently picked up Despair off of R&J, and on the first MC took out the holy priest in about 2 hits. After that, I'd use Outfitter hotkeys to disarm myself just before the MC, which worked really, really well.

 

Njial

Thanks man. That was written at about 6am for me at the end of an all night study session. I'm lucky it came out at all :p

Duty is heavier than a mountain, Death is lighter than a feather.

 

Jayde

Nethermancer Septhera is probably my most hated heroic 5-man boss in the entire game. I never minded the elementals as much as her totally BS agg-wiping abilities, of which she has two. Even if you handle the knockback, you can still have a tank get Dragon's Breathed then have her run at hyperspeed to some healer or kiter nearby (as you can't all stand at range given the nature of the fight) and gank them before you can dispel or get aggro back.

The idea of the elementals is kinda cool.. giving the same boss a random de-aggro knockback and a disorient on top of the elementals is just very un-fun to me. :P

 

HaklePrime

I fully agree with anyone loathing this encounter as well.

My primary reason for disliking, from a tank perspective, is the fact that, even if you resist Dragon's Breath, she still goes tearing after her second on threat. That has to be the most poorly implemented function of a mob ability I've seen to date.

Apparantly the de-aggro through resisted moves is shared by all moves with a deaggro component? That seems unfair and just flat out stupid to me.

 

Davidson

Most likely the deaggro mechanic is never actually cast on the player, but is a side effect of the spell being cast, which applies to the caster. So even if the dragons breath hit no one, someone would probably lose a static threat value. Might be something else entirely though, just what seems to be happening from my experience.

 

• sordee

Having never wiped on Blackheart yet, I thoroughly enjoy this fight every time.
Thus the 10% chance that this could happen doesn't really worry me.

That being said, I think I'll start equipping my arena set for runs of this fight.

 

Yaltus

My experience with Nethermancer is this: elementals on tank, probably screwed; elementals on anyone/everyone else, fun encounter. If the elementals aren't on the tank, she can tank backed against the wall, dealing with the knockback that way, and then only really needing to chase after a dragon's breathe. If they simply made it so that the elementals never targetted Nethermancer's aggro target when they spawn, I'd probably always enjoy that encounter.

Harbinger Skyriss - I love the entire event. When you get the Sulfuron as the second boss, the entire progression of the encounter is cool- you get some random imp thing, then a MC boss, then a BWL boss, finally an AQ40 boss. It just makes sense that the most dangerous creatures you've encountered in the raid game progression are locked away in a Naaru prison vessel.

Heroic Mechano-Lord Capacitus - definitely fun encounter. The Polarity Shift is one of the neatest mechanics in the game for me, and adding the bombs on top of it makes the fight a fun mobility, controlled-chaos kind of thing.

Not fun - Heroic Pandemonius. Fight is a pure tank resist check. It might normally be possibly to burn him down and spam heal the tank, except for the melee/spell shield and the knockback shadow bolt volley. The fight on normal wasn't so bad, but heroic is pretty trash.

 

Amera

In general its the trash that is way less fun and problematic, whether in raids or heroics. In raids you have the respawn, but in Heroics you can have trash that is just obscenenly difficult without certain classes. Just as an example, a warlock can trivialize the trash in many zones like Furnace or even Mechanar, or even a boss (first SV boss).

In some ways this can make it fun to come up with new and out-of-the-box methods of dealing with trash, like kiting or weird pulls or whatever, so it isn't all bad.

 

• Fric

Agreed, Heroic Omor with all casters is stupid too. Spawn time on the mana burn mobs is outrageous.

 

• Snowy

I really agree with this. I am the type of person who likes a challenge, and we sure found it when I was running heroic SV on my mage.

Group comp was warrior, paladin, rogue and 2 frost mages... yes, you can see where this is going, the water elementals with the Hydromancer. What we finally came up with was having the other mage kite one of the water elementals all the way to the door to Kalithresh, then invis'ing and coming back. That gave us enough time to kill the other and stabilize the fight before the other elemental came back.

Never have done Heroic Blood Furnace with a lock, and while those last few annihilator packs are death, there's many ways of kiting them while you work on the other.

For Nethermancer Septherea, if you have a priest or pally, they can dispel the disorient affect from her Dragon's Breath. Otherwise you just have to really be on your feet, most classes have a way to buy a little bit of time. I don't know, I was able to take 2 hits from her while running to the tank. Put on some stam gear.

For Harbinger Skyriss, you NEED a secondary healer, but so what? I can perform that role by DPS'ing while staying out of shadowform for example. On heroic, I would just switch to full healing gear. Non-resto shamans can easily do the same. I don't mind fights at all that have a loose template such as "tank, 2 DPS'ers, primary healer, secondary healer." You have many ways you can fill those slots. On the other hand Omor the Unscarred is unfun because there should be a sign above the hallway to his room that reads "Hi. You are a dumbass if you bring melee to me."

Paladin: Pyla
Mage: Pylah

 

• Snowy

This shouldn't even be an issue with all casters -- he has such low HP that you can have him dead before more than 2 felhounds even get out.

Paladin: Pyla
Mage: Pylah

 

Zraknul

When you resist it, switching targets is stupid. However with the drop agro, the paladin taunt works pretty darn well here. Paladin tanking or healing the tank the ranged taunt really helps out.

The only thing I dislike about mech is they can't get that stupid door working properly. Wiping to trash can cause it to stay shut, wiping to a boss can cause it to stay shut, losing party members to the boss can make it stay shut. Almost had some people lose a badge, and lost making void crystals because both people that could rez died on the last boss and the door stayed closed after everything on that level was killed, but we had a warlock and 2 people up to by pass it.