Seriously offensive to who? These forums have had curse words since long before this thread... and given the fight I don't think the multiple people cursing it are out of line, but hey, whatever.
The sapphiron comparison is completely unfair. Sapphirons "5 on one side" frostbolt could be negated to strategy as praetorian said. As sebudai already mentioned, there isn't another fight in the game with the same level of lotto that is also coupled to being unforgiving. At this point though its been beaten to death so we should probably move on with comparisons to other fights.
Who cares if every fight in the game prior to this one was like this - its a dumb design! You simply should not be able to die if you do everything correctly - and if they intend you to die in extreme cases, it shouldn't lead to almost a guaranteed wipe.
This fight is more like azgalor with dooms, only when the doom goes off he also wipes the raid 25% of the time. You're sure to win if you keep trying!
I was hoping the doomfire changes would make the fight more consistent, yet somehow they made it less so... strange.
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).
Obviously anecdotal evidence isn't conclusive proof that this is what it does, but I can't come up with any other plausible explanation. It doesn't take much avoidance for it to drop off though -- three dodges in a row will do it, and that's hardly a rare occurrence.
I think what shawn wanted to say is that the fight and everything it involves just feels a lot like sapphiron. You don't have any trash, you can wipe in seconds or after 9 minutes and it wouldn't matter because the mechanics of the encounter stay the same all fight long.
Of course, sapphiron was a lot less random and a lot more forgiving (still one of the most unforgiving encounters pre - TBC) than archimonde is.
So much depends on a single person, not just because anyone could screw himself, but the enitre raid with one unnecessery action. There are so many encounter you can go in and someone who plays like 200% can easily overshade a shitty half-heartened 50% gameplay, that's ok. You pull archi, 20 seconds after pull someone's dead and you could do absolutly nothing to save him and the raid wipes, no chance to recover or whatsoever. And it does not matter if someone dies at 95% in a fire or at 15%. You might have just gotten good luck, or bad luck.
Same with sapphi. You could do so well untill 10% and in a key situation ONE guy might have missed a decurse. Sapphi heals himself, more people die. Chainreaction -> wipe.
It's kinda hard to explain, since the elements are a lot differend...just the feeling...reminded a lot of us on Sapphiron.
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.
This is a little off-topic from the Archimonde fight as a whole, but I'm a firm believer that hard 10 minute enrages are poor design. They serve their purpose so you don't stack healers, but other than that they make little sense. If a boss can one shot your whole raid with one ability, why doesn't he just do it when you engage him? Mechanics like Gruul's Grow, timed overlapping phases like Kael, and Vashj's sporebats make a lot more sense to me and are a more elegant solution than dropping an arbitrary 10 minute timer on a fight.
The berserk in this fight should be the 10% mechanic - if that is broken, that doesn't mean fix it by adding a hard berserk.
Make it 20% if they need it to be reasonably hard. We generally are on pace for 7-8 minute kills, but you can get doomfire that prevent melee for attacking for literally more than half the fight. That shouldn't mean you wipe suddenly - there are already enough situational deaths.
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).
Avoidance streak. It definitely makes you immune but the mechanic to prevent that on tanks is fairly stupid with avoidance circumventing it here and there.
Honestly, I really really enjoy the fight. Even after a hair-tearing-out number of wipes, I still enjoy the mechanics of every single pull. Fire is definitely avoidable with good movement and judicious use of your PVP trinket, at least early in the fight, and even late in the fight with good movement and awareness it should be the exception rather than the rule. I've always been a fan of fights that destabilize towards the end -- it's so much more exciting that way. :-)
As far as things I'd change, there are only three:
- Remove Soul Charge. Far too often it ends up causing a wipe due to a single death.
- Increase the length of the fight somewhat.
- Make the fear not affect whoever has aggro to minimize FW advantages.
The second change is really only because if they did the first, it would make the fight far too easy. The real problem, as others have said, is that a single death often causes another with Soul Charge, and the whole thing quickly snowballs into a wipe. IMO the fires are fine, the fearing is fine, the airbursting is fine, and the gripping is fine. Yeah, you're going to get combos sometimes that cause someone to die and there isn't much you could have done about it. But people die on bossfights all the time, so that's not a huge deal so long as it doesn't overtly hose the whole raid.
Given the other mechanics of the fight, the last 10% thing seems kind of pointless. Presumably it's a check to make sure that you still have enough people standing, but unless you happen to hit it mid-wipe I can't imagine not having the dps for it, and if you lose more than a couple people earlier in the fight it's basically a guaranteed wipe. As someone pointed out in our raid last night, it IS a good way to finally unleash your rage at Archimonde for wiping you so much, though. :-)
For those getting airbursted into doomfires -- you can control where you land somewhat based on when you use your tear. The tear lowers your vertical movement speed but not your lateral, so it seemed to me that you could use it earlier to glide more, or later to "stick the landing".
Oh, and for those folks that got the lovely grip+airburst combo, our druid officer was actually sporting some rocket boots to jet out and save them. It was pretty sweet.
This is a little off-topic from the Archimonde fight as a whole, but I'm a firm believer that hard 10 minute enrages are poor design. They serve their purpose so you don't stack healers, but other than that they make little sense. If a boss can one shot your whole raid with one ability, why doesn't he just do it when you engage him? Mechanics like Gruul's Grow, timed overlapping phases like Kael, and Vashj's sporebats make a lot more sense to me and are a more elegant solution than dropping an arbitrary 10 minute timer on a fight.
While a 10 minute enrage might not be as elegant or interesting as Gruul's grows, it serves the same purpose. If Al'ar didn't have an enrage timer in phase 2, you could take him down with 2 tanks and a couple healers on Al'ar, a tank and a healer on the adds, and a few dpsers (enough to take down the adds between meteors). It would take you forever and eventually you'd get overrun with adds, but you could kinda do it. Now, if any birds you had up exploded after a certain amount of time, caused AoE damage, and didn't take health off Al'ar, I guess that would be more elegant, but it really serves the same purpose.
As far as things I'd change, there are only three:
- Remove Soul Charge. Far too often it ends up causing a wipe due to a single death.
- Increase the length of the fight somewhat.
- Make the fear not affect whoever has aggro to minimize FW advantages.
I think Soul Charge needs to stay. It makes the fight very different, because having someone die is really bad, and has an immediate effect. How many fights end up dragging out forever because a bunch of people die, and then you either limp along to a 20 minute long Lurker or hit an enrage timer? The problem isn't so much that a person dying is a likely wipe, it's that his abilities can interact in ways that make that first death really likely regardless of execution.
And I agree, FW is absurd on this fight. We force our only dwarf to stay out of shadow form for it
Mon centre cède, ma droite recule, situation excellente, j'attaque.
I think Soul Charge needs to stay. It makes the fight very different, because having someone die is really bad, and has an immediate effect.
I really, really dislike the different versions of Soul Charge. Depending on the class that dies, you're either fine or you wipe. It also makes the fight absolutely maddening to learn, and contributes to a lot of finger pointing and frustration. I'm not so sure it needs to be removed entirely, but I never much hate the 3 different versions. The holy priest bug is also wonderful.
The fight would be hard but a lot more manageable with some small changes to his cooldowns. It's dumb to have a fight require your tank to stop generating meaningful threat and wait for a fear for 30+ seconds, and pray he doesn't blink at the wrong time on top of that. Doomfire also seems like a perfect mechanic for them to change in every patch for the rest of eternity, too.
Of course, sapphiron was a lot less random and a lot more forgiving (still one of the most unforgiving encounters pre - TBC) than archimonde is.
I think it was he came in starting with saying "Some really offensive postings here. You might want to read your angry words again before posting them." then saying what you just said, which I personally disagree with every part of. Sapphiron once you got to do it right was barely random at all, even with all the blocks on one side, someone dieing meant they did something wrong. Not having a curse cured meant someone did something wrong.
And you could have more deaths in sapphiron if you moved groups around than you could in say Gothik, where a rogue dies to a DK and dead side is overrun, or a tank gets feared when he shouldn't, or the paladin kiting dies on Gluth, Gluth eats and it's over, or invisible void zones, or a tank dies for whatever reason, if your rez isn't up soon it's done. Sapphiron just had a lot of excuses for deaths that weren't "I was dumb" so people blamed it on being random, and then you lost 5 people to one ice block and wiped. If one or two people died you were probably fine. (For reference, we killed Sapphiron with 35 once because we couldn't make a solid 8th group and rather than strech too thin, we just went with 35, went fine, and since there are no mechanics of someone dies, this happens, it's essentially like having 5 people die.)
Archimonde even though from my point of view as a tank with FW isn't hard, it's still annoying when you hear "wow I just got gripped and feared into a newly spawned doomfire" or something is just annoying.
Oh yeah, I forgot about that one. I especially love getting bursted and clicking Tear... only to land in the end of a Doomfire off in the middle of nowhere - then immediately feared further away from anyone that could help. As a resto Druid I can generally make it through those situations, but there are a lot of classes that just get boned no stuff like that.
I don't think Soul Charge needs to be removed, but a change would certainly be nice. Perhaps just a scale-back of the effects. Say, drop the damage down to 3000 instead of 4500. Perhaps a 4s silence instead of 6. The 50% increased damage would be fine if it were only 3k damage to the raid. I think the Soul Charge mechanic is interesting, but in the current form it is a little too punishing considering the random, unavoidable nature of some deaths.
Currently we've been able to recover from around 10% of single deaths when everything goes right, and I think those little tweaks might bring that up over 50%
Obviously anecdotal evidence isn't conclusive proof that this is what it does, but I can't come up with any other plausible explanation. It doesn't take much avoidance for it to drop off though -- three dodges in a row will do it, and that's hardly a rare occurrence.
yeah, in the time frame that I actually took damage from Saberlash. I have never been ported. However, a string of dodge/miss/parry resulting the debuff's wearing off will cause the offtank to be ported.
With that in mind it is still best to go in high avoidance and armor, since it is already extremely healing intensive fight already.
We've survived plenty of single Soul Charges. You know when it happens, top off your raid, put hots on the tank and if nothing bad happens the same second, you can very much survive it. Removing that ability from the fight and being able to CR people or just going on with 20 players would trivialize this fight up to making it easier then the 4th boss.
Very bad idea imho, I was kinda disappointed that Archimonde wasn't harder then it currently is. Same problem with Illidian though. Last boss should not topple over 2-4 days after guilds reach it.
True, as long as it's the just the DoT soul charge, it's not too bad. The silence one is pretty brutal though, especially if someone gets gripped.
I just really hate the tendency for soul charge to snowball, especially in a fight where deaths can be all-but-unavoidable. I'd personally rather they beef up the fire avoidance/endurance/decursing/air bursting/fearing portions of the fight, because those are the parts that feel really active and what I enjoy most about the fight.
I think the single best change they could make is nerfing the Soul Charge to be less painful, even by 25% or so. The reason the fight is painful is the combination of random, uncounterable situations that kill you combined with the fact that people dying usually means a wipe. If they simple nerfed the part where you wipe whenever someone dies then you could get through it with a lot more reliability.
I'd much rather see it become more possible to execute well and not die to random crap in the first place than nerfing Soul Charge. If having one person die meant a probable wipe, that adds a real edge to the encounter and means all 25 have to pull their weight and be aware - problem now being it's just entirely too likely that people are going to have situations where they are going to end up taking Grip ticks, or Doomfires. And if (when?) that happens to the same person twice, they are probably out of cooldowns, and they die.
Mon centre cède, ma droite recule, situation excellente, j'attaque.
Soul Charge IS the interesting mechanic in the fight though, removing it is just a bandaid fix. Kills would come fast, easy, and one shot every week, but people would still die to random events that are outside of their own control.
Most of it could be solved also with pretty simple coding. Elune's Grace could remove curses/make you immune to Doomfire for 5 seconds, which would easily counteract burst gibs/floating into fire, and allow some more interactivity for people on the ground.
Bam, 90% of the unavoidable deaths are removed, while barely changing the rest of the fight considering the CD and nature of air bursts.
They could easily flat remove parry, and force fears to go off in the 40-45 second range as well,
the second part which is just an annoyance more than a raid wipe.
Sapphiron was not an "unforgiving" fight, our first kill we limped by with 20 people up for the last 20%. Even the Four Horsemen really only needed a select few people to play well. Gothik, Thaddius, and Loatheb were far more taxing as a raid leader imo as far as individual performance monitoring/fucking over the rest of the guild (Loatheb just the first kill). On all 3 of those fights the only thing that could remotely compare to the complete idiocy of what goes on during Archimonde sometimes is Thaddius during a lag night though.
The bottom line is, no encounter should have an instant "you lose" button. Archimonde apparently not only has 1, but many ways in which result in "you lose".
A few nights ago, we had our off tank get punted (Yes, I know this fight doesn't require an off tank, but we don't have dps issues, so we just run with the same raid and don't swap people out). Anyway - He got gripped, knock back, and landed in fire. To make it back to the raid alive, he had to hit shield wall and last stand, and barely made it back. Any other class would of gibbed if this had happened to them.
Basically, doomfire is a fun mechanic, and can be dealth with in many ways. But the 3 key abilities here are grip / fear / air burt. If doing one of these abilities put a 6-7 cooldown on doing another one of them, the fight would be much less random. Obviously some of them can be tweaked, for instance, maybe grip only needs a 3 second cooldown on everything else. If you can't decurse someone in 3 seconds, you are too slow. Actually, you could probably bring it down to a global 4 second cooldown. After thinking about it more, it's usually 2-3 abilities within a 2-3 second window that result in death. Given small windows of time between each ability removes the "you're fucked" mechanic I think.
I guess it's already been said, but it seems to be the case in many encounters. Many abilities just need to trigger a global cooldown for mobs.
EDIT: I also like the suggestion about the tears providing much more functionality. Maybe there are 2 types of tears, and you can have both. One for featherfall, and one for decurse/remove fear. Would put the responsibility in people's hands a lot more.
I'd rather see them prevent those random situations with internal cooldowns then. Still a little balancing of the Soul charges wouldn't hurt. As was said before, some can be survived, others not so much.
I still disagree about the fear issues for tanks like I said in the BT/Hyjal thread. I don't see a reason to keep the GCD up and gimping your threat. If they nerf the fear on MT, I might just fall asleep in this fight (Teron Gorefiend comes to mind).
A druid with Fear Ward might be better, but not much, if at all. The difference in damage per swing isn't that big if you factor in blocks and pots as well. They have a lot less avoidance and also take more damage from Doomfire. Unless you have like 3+ Fear Wards in the raid, I wouldn't use it on the tank.
While theres certain situations where death is all but inevitable for someone, its safe to say most deaths/wipes aren't because of "those" situations, very few in fact. Dying is usually avoidable, but people will do one or multiple things wrong beforehand. Personally, the only aspect of the fight I think needs any change is the silencing soul charge, cut off a couple seconds on the duration of this. Perhaps make the fear less random, maybe not timed but its funny seeing a fear go off every 30 seconds then one goes off 2 minutes later, this is unfair to raids not blessed(or cursed) with having fear ward I think. This is coming from a dwarf priest. :P
This fight is definitely frustrating if you have idiots in your raid though, very VERY frustrating. I feel like we only beat this encounter when we get lucky, "saved" by the bubble you could say.
Alternately, having Grip could make you immune to being targeted with a Burst (if someone near you gets you punted, that's different) and being hit with Burst could make you immune to Grip for 6 seconds or so.
Archimonde doesn't need to use his abilities less frequently. There just need to be some constraints on how he can use them in combination.
Tweaking ability targeting is nothing new. Hell, even the original Ragnaros could only target mana users with By Fire Be Purged, because Blizzard recognized that it would be decidedly unfair for it to hit your melee or tank(s) directly given the mechanics of the fight. Same with changes to Vael to make him stop BAing offtank warriors.
Alternately, having Grip could make you immune to being targeted with a Burst (if someone near you gets you punted, that's different) and being hit with Burst could make you immune to Grip for 6 seconds or so.
Archimonde doesn't need to use his abilities less frequently. There just need to be some constraints on how he can use them in combination.
Tweaking ability targeting is nothing new. Hell, even the original Ragnaros could only target mana users with By Fire Be Purged, because Blizzard recognized that it would be decidedly unfair for it to hit your melee or tank(s) directly given the mechanics of the fight. Same with changes to Vael to make him stop BAing offtank warriors.
That would actually solve a ton of problems as well, if melee were never the targets of Air Burst.
Floating into the Doomfire only ever seemed to happen on melee because of natural back limit to the fire. I could definitely live with the increased damage as well, since it's still relatively difficult to enjoy the fight with certain doomfire spawns and air burst combos in chains.
07/16/07, 1:14 PM
