Going through SSC recently and making my own observations, as well watching the recent video posted by DnT, and reading general complaints people have been making, I've been wondering about the following.

Are a lot of the issues (ignoring obvious, stupid, bugs, and bad encounter design) we're seeing in SSC due to the following design basis?:

Encounters are designed and tested around around a specific strategy (and that strategy only - due to time constraints?). And we, the players, are expected to work out this "golden strategy" and then use it to defeat the encounters.

Things that give rise to this thinking:

Lurker Below. DnT says he's not that buggy, and perhaps he's not.. if you do it with a specific strategy: boiling the water. Are the bugs coming from issues due to those who attempt the encounter with another strategy?

Tidewalker and his adding trash. It seems that the trash on one side of him will despawn when you pull him, depending which side you pull him from. But when you clear from one side, then pull from the other you get the wrong pack despawning. Is this also a fault of people not taking the encounter the 'expected' way?

Trash in general. There are pipes in and out of the water in many locations, and different trash respawn timers for different areas. Is the "main walkway" trash meant to be tied to nothing and on a 45min timer, while the 'side' trash is tied to bosses and on an hour and a half? Are we meant to be using the pipes in and out of the water to skip trash - making the fast respawn trash serve a different purpose?

In general it just seems SSC especially has been designed with a specific way to tackling it, one different to the way most guilds are used to. Granted, there are many problem with bugs and other things also, but are some of the more annoying aspects - the tidewalker bugs, the lurker bugs, the trash generally - due to the design and testing expecting an approach raid guilds are not using yet?

Is this a good thing? Should we have encounters designed that are only doable one way, even if we get all the bugs cleared up? Should Blizzard place rigid expectations on the way we tackle these things?

Mag seems to be a good example of this. It is so rigid that there is basically only one way to do it. Yet it works well - most people enjoy it. Maulgar is also fairly rigid, but it does allow you some flexibility in how you choose to do it. It also works well. Gruul is a different case, it has general rules, rules that dictate more success for some methods, but it does not force them in the same way (have dps - spread out - keep tank up: it's up to you to work out the best way for your guild to do that).

So generally we might think this is a good thing for bosses, but does it also work when it's applied to the instance as a whole - clearing paths, trash abilities, etc?

It seems that it's a nice idea, but most guilds are set in their ways, or members, and end up forcing through these things the "hard way" before taking the time to learn and master the expected ones.

The last raid boss I experienced where a wide variety of working strategies were employed was Razorgore the Untamed. Every boss afterwards seem to fall within stricter confines when it comes to strategy. I enjoyed trying out different strategies when learning Razorgore. Nowadays, we come to a boss and cite "the strategy," and go from there. Variation in this case comes from execution, not from planning.

I for one miss encounters that can be approached in multiple ways. Sure, some of the later encounters in WoW Classic gave us limited choices. Twin Emperors, for example, were viable with either 2 Warriors and 2 Warlocks or 2 Warriors alone. Even Netherspite offers a choice in whether or not to DPS during the banished phases.

However, as far as TBC 25 mans go, there is the one single strategy that works, and the rest that do not work. Look at Maulgar, for example: fun as the encounter may be, the strategy is basically carved in stone.

4H allows for significant variation in strategy.

Off the top of my head...
BWL: Chromag (positions/movement), Nef (P1/P3).
AQ40: Fankriss, Twins to a slight degree.
Naxx: Patch (offtank quantity + healing methods), Gluth (dealing with adds), Thaddius (2 or 4 spot rotation), Gothik (tank/cc on live), 4HM.
Kara: Moroes (add control), Illhoof.
Gruuls: Maulger (Shaman/Warlock control).


Theres not that much with only one specific tactic thats the only viable option, its just that they become alot less 'significant' the more advanced the mechanics of the fight get (with exceptions).

Ouro comes to mind as an example of a boss that hardly anyone really did the "intended" way, if there even was one. There were so many ways of manipulating Sand Blast on that fight, who knows what they really wanted us to do with it?

I think to those I'd add Wizard of Oz which we've done in a lot of different orders based on what was in our raid at the time. Aran also gives you somewhat of a choice on how to do it (dps before he goes OOM or wait for it). Oh, and chess, can't forget chess! I love the encounters that force you to evaluate your group and pick the best way to go from there. Going into an encounter knowing you have to have X of this class and Y of this isn't nearly as interesting. There are usually general guidelines but having to slightly modify your strat on a weekly basis makes bosses at a lot more fun down the road.

If you could avoid the trash in SSC... wouldn't all the guilds already be doing that?

Gluth is another example of a raid boss in which multiple working strategies were employed, especially horde-side.

Edit: beaten.

Alas, I apologize for missing all the variable strategy encounters in Naxx, since my casual raiding guild never got past getting our feet wet in Naxx (Instructor down, and then the TBC slump set in). Any comment I make on Naxx encounters would have been pure hearsay, and that's why I refrained from doing so.

Along these lines, what would you guys consider to be a variation in strategy?

Gluth, for example, I wouldn't consider there to be much variation in strategy. Sure, you can have different classes kiting the adds, but it boils down to one thing. Tank the dog, kite the adds, AE when he decimates.

Chromag as well. There were multiple places you could position him, but it still boiled down to having the raid avoid the AE.

I think Fankriss definitely had variations in strategy, as in whether to offtank, fear, or kill the little adds (at least, much more variation than what class is kiting). Same with Twin Emps, as there is substantial variation in 2 warriors vs. 2 warriors and 2 warlocks tanking. Of course, the aforementioned Razorgore is probably one of the best examples of a multiple strategy encounter.

But stuff like Patchwerk (different healing/tanking strats), I don't really consider to be significantly different strategies, since it boils down to the raid using a common tactic (using offtanks to mitigate Hateful Strike). Now, if kiting Patchwerk were a legitimate strategy, then that would be a better example of a multiple strategy encounter.

Well, they could be. I honestly don't know. A 1h30 respawn that could pop on top of you would still be annoying enough to make posts about but at least it wouldn't be 45m.

I've been curious about this for a long time as well. I wonder if there are any encounters out there where the Developers envisioned it one way and the general strategy ended up being something completely different. The best candidate would probably be Razorgore, I wonder whether that fight was always envisioned as a straight up DPS race with some light CC on the Dragons, and they were surprised that kiting became the accepted strategy.

I hope some WoW raid Dev is keeping his notes for a memoir or book some day. I'd be interested to read some stories about the design process down the road.

Razorgore comes to mind. Frankly looking at the fight I don't think it was played by most or anybody as intended. Who seriously used anything but the egg gank button of Razorgore during phase one in a clean attempt? And it's interesting that one can, at MC gear level kill all orcs, yet lots (especially horde side) mass kited the legos and only killed the mages.

There certainly was variety how folks kited stuff.

I have the odd suspicion that what was intended there was CC on dragonkin, killing of all orcs, and Razorgore actually helping in the process. But I've never seen a movie that would show this.

The original poster brings up an interesting point, regarding whether or not guilds are tackling the Serpentshrine trash correctly. So far we have only killed Hydross, Morogrim, and Karathress and we basically avoid all the trash as much as possible. For Hydross we skip the packs and just kill the bog lords. For Morogrim we ninja across the water, past Lurker and at Lurker's control console we start our pulls. So for guilds just starting or considering starting Serpentshrine the trash is really not a problem for these first 3 bosses. Although for Morogrim you are on a 2 hour timer once you kill the first pack of murlocs and the same goes for the bog lords in Karathress's room. This led us to splitting our efforts between the two almost evenly, once Morogrim's room repopped we cleared to Karathress and attempted him for the remainder of the night.

As for Lurker, my assumption is that you clear the six packs surrounding him making the water become scalding hot, killing the fish. I like the idea that you can opt to either clear the trash and do him one way or do it a completely different way and skip the trash.

Serpentshrine may quite possibly be all about how to handle trash. A question to guilds that have up to Vash'J cleared: are any of the mobs in Serpentshrine (besides the mobs before Hydross) linked to bosses? I know Morogrim and Karathress' trash respawns after you kill them still, but do Lurker or Leotheras control any trash? It seems a bit excessive for Morogrim and Kathress' room to still respawn after they are dead. Here's to hoping Blizzard didn't intend for the trash to be like this and I'm unaware of something.

Razorgore was probably the top encounter that I can think of that had different idea's of how to complete the encounter. But with the exception of Broodlord (But maybe the gauntlet method could be included in this) all of BWL could be considered this way in that every fight was handled with large variety in execution.

I'd count Faerlina as one that had at least some strategy variation. You had the guys to pop and you could essentially choose the length of the fight. An easier fight that had to be over sooner or a fight that allowed you a bigger dps cushion but was a bit harder.

I'd also count Patchwerk as having some strategy variation, though this may be because I played as a healer at the time. You could do it with 3 offtanks, 2 offtanks, or 1. If you went with multiple offtanks on Horde, you could do it pure cast & cancel or you could use the spam Rank 1 Chain Heal strat (at the time) to reduce the overall damage coming in and make life easier for the other healers.

Or Gluth... >_< do you how how many different strategies for kiting the adds there are/were? we tried everything from warriors to shamans to mages to druids, to teams of the aforementioned... ^_~

I guess those are the only examples I can think of that change the broad pattern of the fight, but there are tons of minor variations enact.

Depends on how much you want to over-simplify things. If you want, you could say "Well it's all just button mashing anyways" and be done with it. On Gluth I saw maybe 7 different methods for kiting. We used at least 3. I would consider that quite the variable. I mean, how is fankriss any different for that matter. How is changing "how you deal with adds" any different then changing "How you kite the adds"?

The fact that you -could- kite the gluth adds in a half dozen different ways is evidence enough. If they would had wanted to 'force' a type of kiting on you they could have, either by making them immune to damage until after decimate (thereby forcing priest kiting) or adding some gimic whereby hamstring affects them permanently and is forced agro or some other mechanic.

Over-simplifying stuff is a dangerous road to go down. It's stuff like that which makes me cringe when I see people dismiss healer complaints with the overly-simple "It's all just watching a bar go up and down, yours just happens to be green instead of red."

http://www.thottbot.com/i5951

40 druid kill lives on!

This has been brought up manymany times before, not a single trash pull is linked to any boss in the zone, with the exception of the pulls leading to Hydross.

With Razorgore the plot is, kill eggs and endure p1 spawns (exit on p2, spawn cap limit), then kill him in p2, the only deviation is how you endure p1.
Patchwerk the plot is that he does HS <insert mechanics> and has a 7min enrage timer.

If you break bosses soley down into the facts there is almost always 1 mechanic you can play with in whatever magical way you want.
Fair enough on Razorgore theres lots of ways to deal with 1 mechanic of the encounter, but its still only 1 part of the fight, infact hes just like Nef in that regard.

"You are in shapeshift form."

*Rimshot*

On bugs, no he's not that buggy I know of a few bugs that are still left. One, occasionally he forgets to turn off spout at the end of spinning in a cicle and quickly wipes your raid (very rare bug btw). Two, some of the adds will sometimes just despawn. Three, if the ranged adds grab aggro on a healer out of their range they do nothing (not really a bug so much as a logic issue that if they can't get in range on something they should change to something in range so they are actually doing something).

To get scalding water it requires you clear the entire ring of trash which is all on a 45 minute trash respawn and the second the first trash pack respawns the water is back to normal. So you clear the trash then have about 15 minutes or so to fish him up and kill him. I've seen this take as long as 10 minutes for fishing him up but make note that was kinda an outlier.

The scalding water also creates fun issues with the water thats on the center platform (where as long as you weren't swimming in the water before you didn't spawn fishes but if its scalding as long as you are touching it you take damage if they changed it so you have to be swimming that would be better).


Our guild found the scalding water created more issues than it addressed plus who wants to learn a boss you have to clear all the trash for every time you want to attempt him.