No seriously, it was double HS, Shield slam, and a shield bash all parried - and one of them had a windfury - the other was goa'ed - the same event twice, no shadow fiend, no pets... just my own parries, with 40 or so skill rating to boot. Its basically instagib if he hits back. I even got a screenshot of part of the log. We know better than to allow "pets" in front of the boss.

We ended up getting to the point where most of the late attempts doomfire wasn't an issue - but then the McRandom shit would hit us and basically spell doom. It was basically throwing yourself at the encounter X times, and see if one of them works out well - not "okay lets execute better". I honestly don't see how we can improve our strat. How does someone prevent being air bursted into a doomfire? (especially melee).

Basically strats are "spread out, adapat and avoid doomfire." We even had the "clump with a shaman, mage, and healer group". We tried the "these two people will help you get to the well to remove doomfire" strat. All of them are basically about equal, because none of them address issues of randomness. At least before when you were in a 180, you could assign 1-2 druids to "catch" the air burst + grip, but with doomfires being all over its less realistic to have mid-air catchers right where they need to be.

I don't think this fight is at all what the devs intended. I'm pretty sure they've never even played this fight on a real server either. The whole tears of the goddess part of the encounter is the most laughably simple part of it. We had maybe 1 crater all night due to someone's keys not being bound. What we did wipe to was people being feared, doomfires spawning DURING their fear, and then having the fear run them through the doomfire... fear dispellers are either busy or too far, and its over in seriously 2 seconds (doomfire spawning while the fear is up is ridiculous). Or the melee get gripped, air bursted, and land IN a doomfire. Tank gets instagibbed... Priest dies somehow and its over. That shit is just stupid.

Yeah the fight is "repeatable", and yes we've improved a bit - but we could've killed it on our first pull or our 50th, and luck would've been the largest determining factor. We ONE-SHOT every boss this week in Hyjal, BT to reliquary, TK25 - yet archimonde on our second kill is nearing 30 or more pulls. I'd love for the devs to join a raid and see this shit in action, especially being at 12% with no mistakes and being instagibbed because of some ridiculous timer. Like I said though, its highly unlikely this encounter will be retuned; they tend to let showstoppers remain on the "end" bosses.

Any encounter where you can do everything right, and still die, is dumb. Especially when there are many ways for that to happen here. Randomness should be parts of the encounter, but they should not BE the encounter. I hate this fight now, it is absolute ass... (I used to like it less than a week ago).

It is not by the way. On our second kill we had 5 people alive when he reached 10% and after 30 seconds or so the whisps finished him off.

Not to go against your frustration but isn't this more about removing the parry mechanic than the use of fear on a boss?
I understand being aggravated over the combination of the 2 but going as far as saying Blizzard isn't allowed to equip a boss with fear ever again seems a bit exaggerated.

Maybe I'm biased being a shaman and feeling useful thanks to class specific abilities (tremor).
Still Archimonde fears and there are ways to deal with it. This parry stuff seems more problematic to me.

On our second kill we had the MT die at 12% and zerged him to 10%. There were only 3 people alive (including myself :P ) so half of the raid released and was on its way back to the instance. We managed to get him to 8% before the 1min was over. And then he simply died
From 8% to 0% in 1 sec. Conclusion: There is no DPS check at 10%, the fight is over :>
The funny part was that most of the people had already released and didnt get any Rep.

It is definetly possible to avoid 99% of the deaths but its just way to random. I dont see any learning curve when trying him, ist just a try-after-try until you get lucky and kill him. Its just annoying to have hours of trys after having killed him 3 times already...

Beat me by 2min :[

Well, its more of the random nature of the fear, he could fear at anytime after 30 seconds, I suppose I should have been more specific. Short cast time + random = fun.

This parrying issue does seem very severe and breaking, you are correct about that as well.

The fear issue is much higher than the other issues, although if it were to be made as a 3 second fear I don't think anyone would have any issues. The fact it's 1.0 seconds which means it's shorter than a GCD means that the tank has to save cooldown for switch+zerk once ~25 seconds have gone after the fear. Due to the fear having no maximum cooldown (apparently - we've gone for at least 60 seconds without a fear which is ridiculous) it means that threat generation is absolutely gimp because all you can use is HS and shield block.

The parry mechanic is just stupid in general really. I can understand "a" parry increasing attack speed, but having chain-parries continuously affecting weapon speed to the point where it can practically instagib your MT with JUST default attacks is stupid.

Just experienced another absolutely delightful occurance to add to the already horrific list that seems to be growing in this thread.

Random Melee A gets feared, runs forward (tremor takes one second to tick if the shaman's really good) and Archimonde bursts him. A goes wheeeee. Alright, you might say. That's perfectly reasonable.

But! Because he ran forward, the burst's AoE effect catches the MT as well, sending him flying ~100m upwards and back. The MT moves faster than Archimonde's run speed, which leaves Archimonde with nothing in melee range. He fingers, raid dies, lulz are had by all. :P

Our MT got bursted several times. We never ever had a wipe because of that, seriously.

He gets thrown against the mountains, keeps tankin' archimonde and pulls him back in place.

Some really offensive postings here. You might want to read your angry words again before posting them.

A 10 minute enrage in that fight is absolutely okay IMO. It's straight forward tank 'n' spank though with a lot of movement for the raid. No adds whatsoever which could prevent your damage dealers from killing him faster. Sure, more healers are nice when his punts go really badly or several people catch fire. Though the fight is about avoiding such situations and stacking healers is just a workaround for not proper execution.

On the other hand I agree that the whole encounter is too unforgiving to be considered well-balanced or fun. Trying him is like what Sapphiron used to be - go in, wipe, go again, wipe again, repair and so on... I think I never spent that much gold for repairs in such a short time.

Pretty poor comparison to Sapphiron IMO. On Archimonde, you don't have the option of going to get worldbuffs and then easily owning him with an unrefined strat and overall lack of performance.

Oh, I see. So you cannot compare any non-tBC-content with tBC-content because of world-buffs not being an option anymore? Weird argument...

Eh, Archimonde is kind of like Sapphiron without world buffs and without needing resist gear, but Sapphiron really wasn't nearly as random. You could get "bad" ice block placement, but you could adapt your strat to account for that.

The problem with Archimonde is that he really does have "you lose" scenarios, even if they're relatively unlikely. Obviously the better your execution, the more you can get away with, but there are impossible situations that the RNG can give you. People have timers, like pots, trinket, racials, etc., to get them out of bad situations, but if those situations arise repeatedly, there's really no recourse. If someone gets Burst --> Grip in midair --> Fear once knocked away from any tremor totems, if they can break the fear and pot/heal they have a chance, but if they have no way of breaking the fear, and get feared away from any decursers who might themselves be able to break the fear, that person is going to die. Or maybe they miraculously survive it once, but then it happens again. Or someone has a Fear --> Doomfire --> Burst --> Grip combo. That's pretty much always going to kill someone, and it's not always avoidable.

i think it's more the point that during sapphiron poor performing players getting "oops i wasn't behind the ice block" still could lead to a win, where similar poor performance on archimonde generally leads to a wipe

edit: and what gurgthok said, sapphiron had very few "you lose" buttons compared to archimonde, although 1 side could get all 5 ice blocks, the odds we're pretty small compared to the chance of a bad combo grip/doomfire/fear/airburst

Right, it's the combination of arbitrary deaths and how unforgiving those deaths can be. There are other fights that can do seemingly unfair things to people where they just die, but those deaths don't ordinarily screw your whole raid so badly.

At the same time, he's certainly killable, and it's always an intense fight that makes us feel good when he finally goes down. I can't imagine it not being like that every week -- if the fight doesn't change, he's still going to be a challenge two months from now. And maybe that's appropriate for a boss that drops ilvl 151 loot?

We've had plenty of sapphiron kills where an entire group died and we still killed him...

I'd love to see a raid survive 5 people dieing on archimonde within 20s.. 1 is too often enough to start a chain reaction, especially if its a priest/mage/warlock.

I remember group-healers (priests) dying and shortly after that their whole group would be dead. Or decursers would die and the the curse would heal Sapphiron more everytime while more people were dying from its additional damage. Sure you still could Soulstone and Combat Rez those people back then and make up for poor play with more buffs. But every death hurt you a lot on that fight already. I guess Archimond is like Sapphiron with a big portion of unfairness on top.

One thing they could do would be to make more use of mechanics like the "debuff" Saber Lash places on you that makes you immune to Fatal Attraction selection (so that you don't have OT teleport --> MT instagib combos). If two mechanics can interact to produce unfair deaths, then make one preclude the other.

Thats pretty much what blizzard seems to be missing from several encounters, and what has been said in this thread a bunch of times. Internal cooldowns to prevent deaths that are otherwise unpreventable, unfair or unlucky.

One fight with a doom was enough, but having statistically unpropable deaths happen because of the way certain abilities are cast and chained is not really well planned.

I wonder if more dev's besides Tigole read these forums, I think they would benefit from reading the boss specific threads that are created here.

Sapphiron "Random" deaths were not random, they are no where near what you can see on Archimonde. I personally have made it across the entire room in a sapphiron fight with terrible ice blocks (I was on the opposite side of the room from the block I made it to, not entirely at the back, but I also had about 2 seconds to spare) Now, if you didn't account for it, or your players couldn't make it far enough, yes they could die to a bad ice block drop, but they could make it too, and sometimes on Archimonde you just can't. On top of that, Sapphiron was very forgiving of having people die. I'm sure we had plenty of kills with 10 people dead.

We had a relatively easy go at him this weekend but as mentioned in this thread we stacked shaman and resto druids.

I still consider archimonde to be their worst effort for an instance boss. They get a pass for ragnaros, but this fight is no better designed than viscidus. Reading about an enrage wipe with everyone still alive should (hopefully) really discourage any similar encounters in the future.

Also as far as guild rules go I think it is fair to demand people show up with the 2 minute pvp trinket. The 5 minute one is nice but in the end the encounter is so random that eventually there will be an attempt where you need to save yourself more than once.

Also I think the best thing they could do to clean up this fight a little is to not punt targets within 10 yards. Depending on fire and punts, melee can be very effective or nearly worthless on this fight. Removing the punts within 15 yards I think will dramatically improve the encounter.

Saber lash prevents you from being FA'ed? News to me - both me and the other offtank have been FA'ed on a number of Shahraz attempts (I got ported last night while OTing - it would be interesting to see if I'd been lashed in the past 30 seconds or so or if I just had a bit of an avoidance streak).

Archimonde is definitely a RNG based fight, although it certainly gets cut down a lot if you use a strategy with people grouping up around a decurser for mid-air decurse. It also helps if you have a lot of mages+druids to spread around.