Forcing healers in pure healing equipment to DPS is hardly an acceptable solution though. They had to build in holy / nature weaknesses to work around that. What they could do is porting pure DPS (hunter WL mage rogue) classes to seperate rooms like Scholo GM did where they'd have to kill something within a time limit.

Once you've attuned everyone to SSC, there really is no need to go Nightbane apart from the loot. But hey, we've been doing it for the loot with alts now for a while

The question about bosses being optional or not really depends on why you're going to an instance. The final boss would be malchezaar, dropping the highest loot and such. If that's your goal, almost all bosses there are optional

However, if your goal is equipping your raid, there's not a single optional boss in the entire instance unless you really don't need a single drop from it.

I bet 95% of all raids skip the "random animal boss" even if they go there to gear themselves up.

He did say "unless you don't need a single drop from it," which is likely the reason no one does the animal boss. :P

I don't even consider these bosses, more like trash with a guaranteed junk epic.

Take MC as the extreme opposite. If any boss there had been optional, you could tell by the number of times it was killed on spoiler sites alone because for months guilds that had Nef down only went there for one reason: Ragnaros loot. If exalted Hydraxian Waterlords would have allowed players to summon him, the only other boss that would have died is probably Gehennas for two Nexus crystals.
However, a guild still on Vael would still clear the entire zone to gear up. No one would really consider these bosses optional for their goal.

I'd argue that the first "soft berserk" you encounter is from Ragnaros. Nothing is preventing you from killing him in three or four or five spawns of the Sons of Flame ... except that you almost certainly won't survive the third one (and many newer groups won't survive the second). To be honest, I *hate* hard berserks - I realize that they are put in place in some encounters to ensure that the fight is done the way it's supposed to be done (i.e. the ranged berserk on Patchwerk to prevent kiting). It's always felt gimmicky to me, though that Hakkar decides that after 10 minutes he's had enough, rather than just wiping the raid to begin with. *shrugs* It comes down to gameplay vs. realism at some point, though, and I'm obviously not complaining that gameplay wins.

The basic point, though, is that effective time-limits have been around for a while.

Pfff, it could be "fight me without your toys" - stops you burning trinkets or long cooldowns. Just a straight check on what your baseline DPS is. If he doesn't target you? Bully for you, you managed not to get tested this time round. Better make sure you're up to scratch in case you're the one being tested next time though.

The point is to invent a mechanism to intelligently test the output of DPS classes on an individual basis, rather than the main test coming in the form of an enrage timer - "your raidwide DPS wasn't enough to kill me in 10 minutes, so RAARGH I KEEL YOU!"

The enrage could be masked in various ways.

Magtheridon: Like somebody allready mentioned, the cubes could break/run out of power
Hydross: He could do an emote where his body becomes unstable by all the phase shifting and he starts to spawn both nature and frost adds +marks(now that is a bezerk timer tbh, would be an awsome sight)
Void reaver: When you engage him he starts to charge a nuke and the fight is no longer killing him but preventing him from blowing up the whole room after 10minutes (at 10minutes the nuke is charged and he uses it, doing ticks of 10.000 damage every 5 seconds)
Netherspite: He calls for more nether portals, and it gets harder and harder to keep up(from 3 to 10 portals in 1 minute)

Do you think people would not recognize these as enrages?
IMHO Enrages should make the fight a lot harder, not "LOL you die!"

Soft enrages like 4H imho are the way to go

I am not stating they are good sollutions but at least they take away the "lol 10minutes PEWPEW" we see now.

Give the poor blob some credit, he drops Scarab Brooch.

My little note on enrage timers:

I personally love the timers given to Kael and Vashj. They dont "feel" like an enrage timer, yet they put a realistic limit on how long you can continue the encounter.

Alar's (bugged) one shot charge was also a unique enrage timer. Not a set "you die now", but a "you better kill me soon, cause you wont have many people left in a few minutes".

I'm hoping there are a lot more of these soon to come.

PS: I still believe the best 'enrage timer' in the game was C'thun. It wasnt actually a timer... just that you need a constant set level of damage in order to continue in the fight. Tentacles need to die, people need to be alive. "Kill the adds before we get overwhelmed" is not an enrage timer that all bosses can share though... if every single boss had adds it would get a little boring.

What I as healer hate about enrage timers is that even if I do my very best as a healer with 'super mega imba optimal healing' it's still a wipe since at the end it's not a matter of my mana but rather the time it takes to cast my heals. This is ofcource a counter to bring alot of healers fights. But it's still sad when it's not your play nor your gear, but the time it takes to cast heals that matters.

Enrage timers are a good concept by Blizzard because they force you to adhere to a semi-standard group comp. If we didn't have them, think how many raids would just run healer-heavy groups and slowly wand the content to death!

But I agree with some of the above posters that enrages nowadays are too bland. Not having enough DPS at the 10 minute mark shouldn't be a guarenteed wipe. That kind of stigma will often demoralize a raid when you're "behind" on DPS. I can tell you first hand that it's frustrating as hell to hear "pick it up guys, we're 2% behind" when no one has died and everyone has decently high mana-pools.

In TBC? Not very many.

All the healers in the world can't prevent hard-hitting bosses from eventually lucking out and getting a couple of stupidly hard hits back-to-back. It comes down to what was said above -- it's not about how long you can heal, but your HPS. Sometimes, HPS isn't enough to balance the hits.

A good example of this, just off the top of my head, is Maulgar. Once in a while he lands his Arcing Smash at the same time as his Whirlwind, and hits a regular melee crit too ... all in under a second. 15-18k dmg, in a second, completely unpredictable (aside from knowing that the specials are incoming). The solution is just to stack enough stamina to take those hits.

But as you progress, the hits get harder and harder. Once in a while, you're going to get a 25% resist on Hydross at 4 stacks (or 5, if you're holding him in nature a little longer), and your tank is going to spike *hard*.

The only way to beat the odds on random crap like this is to run with a balanced raid. The people who would cheese stuff by bringing 10 healers are just putting themselves in misery by forcing the fight to go longer and longer, and giving themselves more and more chances for that 1% OH CRAP moment to happen.

Running Hydross back across the line at 50% doesn't make the fight easier on the healers ... or anyone. Assuming he had no static enrage timer, so you basically could fight him as long as you wanted.

Tank healing on Hydross isn't particularly hard, unless you're running well past 250%. At 100%, we rarely see spikes, and when we do, they're not for enough to worry about with 3-4 healers covering it.

But if you swapped him back at 50%, ya, you'd never have a high level Ice Tomb ... but you'd also have under 15 seconds of dps per phase. Even assuming 15 dps who can burst 900 dps each for 15 seconds, that's 14 transitions to get him down, assuming you got him down 55 seconds at that same high-level dps in the first minute.

14 transitions, each of which is lasting just under a minute.

And every single time you switch, you have to worry about dps pulling him back across the line, or tanks not picking up the adds quite quickly enough and losing a healer, or the 2nd MT screwing up his threat moves ... over and over.

You're welcome to try that fight. I'd much MUCH rather deal with the higher level tank healing (and DoTs / Ice Tombs) than leave 14 full transitions (probably more, because few raids can actually put out 13-14k dps consistently over a long time period) to chance.

My argument is basically ... the shorter the fight, and the fewer repetitions you force your raid to go through, the less chance you have of screwing up and wiping.

Think of C'Thun. Why would you care about getting him into Phase 2 fast? Phase 1 is nice and simple, right? DPS the big thing in the middle, eat some green beams, and dodge a big slow red thing moving around the room.

Wrong. Every single time you had a Dark Glare was a chance for someone to screw it up. And every single green beam was a chance for some retard to chain 3 or 4 other people and wipe the raid. So you pushed dps as hard as you could in Phase 1, so you could get to the relative breathing-room Phase 2.

I believe this is the issue. Our guild hasn't killed a boss in Black Temple, we've only gotten the "chess events" of tier 5 down: Lurker and Void.

One of the reasons for this is that we have a "faux hardcore" guild who maintains a casual playstyle. We're sitting at around 60% attendance on average and shuffling players around. Occasionally not able to make attempts because certain people we've specifically geared up or who are specced one way or another don't show. This adds up to spreading out gear. We have our core 15 that are at 100%, and the other 10 are in the revolving door.

The nostalgia you're referring to is trying to diminish what EQ accomplished: keeping lower tier guilds *interested in progression* while the ubers finished contents months before. Part of this capital I immersion was the fact that the content was competitive. As a guild moved forward *ON YOUR SERVER* you felt the progression loosen for yourself as other options became available. Never mind that borg awareness of what some guild in scandinavia has done, locality was a bigger deal. Hey! Guild_X made it into time, we'll be getting to hit elementals with more frequency!

And hey, sometimes you actually could beat them to a target regardless and that was accomplishment in and of itself and kept the game interesting on a nightly basis.

Right now, the only accomplishment our guild has come remotely close to achieving is that we beat Romulo and Juliet when the big guilds on our server would groan about it being the hardest of the events. Wow.

So, what happens in our guild is we see some guild has beaten the expansion and all that is in front of us is "time spent." We have minimal interaction with guilds on our server except randomly spotting one of them near a bank with a texture we've not seen.

This is further complicated by the fact that there's very little difference between our progress and a guild that barely has beaten Gruul / Mag since the nerfs. We were close to getting it down, but again, do you think it helps your "tweeners" (not casual, not diaper-wearing hardcore) to think that if they'd only farm 2x as much constantly, they'd be farther? That if everyone had the expensive flasks and had run heroics ad nauseum we'd have gotten it done?

That's our main issue: people who for all intensive purposes believe they are hardcore, except they don't play all night 'til late, all day on weekends and definitely aren't going to waste their time with the consumables and such to be successful.

So you make the claim that folks are free to enjoy the game "at their pace" but your pacecar here is a ferrari, on some other server (or heck, maybe on ours! who knows!) in some faraway place, and we're driving our kids to kindergarten in our Golfs.

You do not address the fact that in a 40 man raid you could have 25 core people and 15 mouth-breathers and be successful. All we're seeing here is that the number has been chopped down to 25, requiring 25 non-mouth-breathers.

So yes, Black Temple is too easy. It has completely deflated the competitive spirit in the game for my guild. It leaks into PVP via people in PVE BT+ gear wrecking those in PVP gear,
and it ends with us basically feeling like we have to put in more effort than we can right now (our hours a night aren't good enough to progress any farther than someone who doesn't put in the time at all).


The real question here is how is this different than EQ, when guilds crushed others yet you didn't get loads of "Vex Thal / Time / ToV is simply too easy" posts, feedback and whining.

I really think it comes down to the competitive nature of the content, and how there was the mini-game of locally beating other guilds to non-instanced targets. This made it so it didn't matter that Uber Guild cleared Uber Dungeon: you were worried about securing the target that was relevant to you. When the game is on rails and you're basically in parallel races with other guilds, it is pretty easy to feel that you've lost and there's "no point" when you see what separated winning and losing.

People simply don't end up thrilled when the answer is we lost because we can't get around that 10 man non-100% attendance revolving door, suffer wipes and gear up slower because of it.

So, perhaps if there was more than nearly-zero interaction between same-faction guilds on our own server (oh, how exciting it is to go against an alliance guild in an arena match. reminds us they're there!) we wouldn't grovel about guilds burning through content that we'll be at in the next wave of nerfs / months and months from now.

We're enjoying the game for what it offers raid and content wise... but we also look at our pace and do not enjoy that. Unfortunately the only way to fix that is 1) nerf it more, which ends up getting more harder-core guilds done faster and makes our situation bleaker, or 2) keep up the agonizing process of trying to find 100% raiders that put up with the 50% raiders and the shuffling, until there are no more 50% raiders. Problem there is those people generally tend to head upwards, float towards those guilds that again have that "hardcore pace."

So really, we can only go at our own pace or convert to the pace that is actually rewarding: the hardcore raiding pace. You have to realize the downer it is to beat some content when it is nerfed to cater to slower paces, or the pointlessness that some people have towards wow raiding because they cannot be even remotely competitive in general, with zero semblance of competition localized on a server.

Maybe our attitude might be different if we were in the running to be the "most advanced" guild on our server. People would get their fix of some sort of accomplishment? That's probably why every realm's forum on blizzard boards has a "guild progress thread."

It just gets to a point where when half your guild is watching a youtube video to learn a boss and play catchup on progress, they don't really need to do it themselves so much...

What about:

Boss enraging? You brought too much healing but can't afford to lose any healers or else "raid dying."

"Farm more gear".

That's basicly what it comes down to. As previously posted, if you can't achieve the right DPS then your DPS is lacking the gear or the skill and the same goes for the healers. The previous statements I believe hold true for almost all the encounters. This side of the topic was discussed earlier in the thread.

Lets not ressurect long dead threads please!

Locking til the next expansion.