Yea I have read similar comments about GM discussions.

Ultimately the GM's didnt design the encounter - nor are they the ones who really would know whether something is should be deemed a exploit, in terms of encounter design. Standing on a log, or on a hillside (without really knowing how it affects the fight) might not be seen as a obvious exploit to a GM or passer by - but passing this information along to the Encounter Designer could potentially result in a very different answer.

(To me) its glaringly obvious that stumphump/mountaineer are 'unintended'. In terms of Game mechanics, they might not be considered exploits by GM's - but in terms of the spirit of the encounters' design, it could be considered an exploit by the Designers, regardless of what any GM has said. Personally, I think that blizzard designers are so busy with 2.4, Wotlk etc to worry about devoting any resources to this matter - or it wouldve been fixed a few patches ago.

Nobody has to use exploit methods. If a person wants to cheapen the experience they can until they are told they can't (or forced to), but you always have a choice...can always say no if it doesn't sit right with you.

Well, if you needed over two weeks just two bring him under 70%, several dozen hours of raiding... then is just something very wrong with your strategy.
We needed about 80 serious trys, not counting the pull -> tank's death or slackers dying before first fear. So, that's over 30 hours of wiping without counting breaks, waiting for disconnected people and so on. You really did it with 110% devotation and not just running three times against a wall and struggled?

There are some ways to easily hit the enrage timer (eg. stay and die together as a assigned group, melee stay out of raid and are replaced with more healers or stay over 100 yards away, noone is dealing any damage and just heal the maintank).
If you don't manage this, you should have to talk to your movement crippled players and solve the problems rather than using exploits like abusing mountains or the water to avoid doomfire.

If you just can feel, that you are going to exploit something, why do you hold on that road? Killing chromaggus while abusing los to a critical amount (who remembers the drama?) or killing him while los'ing only the breaths felt completly differnt for every one of us.

Just imagine you could do teron without becoming a ghost with just using di/soulstones or something like this. Wouldn't it be a completly different battle? Or bloodboil with no felrage phase and/or aggro reduce.

Sorry, didn't really explain our schedule. Tues/Wed/Thurs/Sat 6-10pm. two days in Hyjal, two in BT, first night would be rage-azgalor, and 30-60 minutes on Archimonde. Next day was all Archimonde. 2nd week we had better time on first 4, so more time for Archimonde. Wednesday we were sketchy on attendance, (0 mages, 1 feral+1 resto druid), so we went to BT instead, and stopped going to Archimonde for a couple weeks. This Saturday, we didnt have a good raid for RoS, so we went to Archimonde. My point with this is, we got a number of hours of attempts (although with a changing lineup of raiders, so we would have 2-3 new people on each night). We didn't try it for 30 minutes and decide it was too hard, and we didnt spend 30 hours getting him to 70%. In between (probably about 8 hours of solid attempts) there we decided it was worth more of our time at the time to focus on getting some progress in on BT.

Anyhow, did you read my post? I came here confessing to my sin, and suggesting that other's not use the mountain strategy, as it cheapens the encounter, not looking for a critique on what I can't change at this point (although I hope we go back to using the 4 corners strat in the future).

I understand that you wasn't trying him for two weeks constantly. But if you are looking for further progress in bt, there will allways be an officer who is trying to convince to take the easy way without that much trouble.

We have a huge rooster (about 50 raiders, no core group) and had several replacements during our progressing on archimonde, slowing us down a lot. If you want it badly, you can do it. But it will take a lot of time and you will have to only do the farm bosses in bt and no progress raids there until your problem is solved.

I didn't want to critisize you that badly, just wanted to point out that it may take a lot of time to kill him. Some guilds with smaller rooster and with excellent players will kill him in half of the time, but the real problem of that special fight is that every raider in your group have to understand what's the goal (surviving) and when they have gotten it you can really start progressing. Everything else is luck.
We needed about two more month after our first kill until we had reliable first oder second try kills. No other fight should give you that much trouble besides illidan.

What I remember moreso is theres always some people who will stand together and say "Its not an exploit, its just clever use of game mechanics" - regardless of how painfully obvious it might be.

I spent a fair afternoon playing around in hyjal a few weeks ago and watching doomfire, as I mentioned there - the mountain positioning doesn't remove the fire from the fight, it simply increases the path time for the fire to your ranged, such that they are far less likely to be hit. In turn it increases the hits per airburst and potentially forces your tank to stand in doomfire.

SC kills him week in week out with a fine "stand in the field, don't burn to death" strategy, but the people saying "mountaineering is an exploit" strike me as having never actually seen a real exploit. I won't comment on blizzard's intent, I'll simply mention that I spent enough time convincing myself that the fire could climb the hill (no matter others anecdotal experiences) to feel confident that the benefit to positioning near a mountain was purely hypotenal, not exploitive.

If you're taking 80+ attempts to kill him, something is fundamentally wrong with your raiders or your strategy. Either they fail at recognizing the burning fire or you have failed at properly assigning them to tasks. I certainly can see how a change in positioning would force a reordering of assignments and could fix issues that had not been acknowledged, but I don't believe the line of "it's a totally different fight". Spend a few hours in your empty hyjal with a paladin buddy and watch how doomfire will happily climb the walls. It certainly takes longer to reach you than it does at max range on the ground, but not by more than a second or two.

This is like saying "Tanking prince at the doorway didnt remove infernals from the fight". No, it doesnt remove it - but drastically changes the fight mechanics. Its easy to say in passing, 'it simply increases the path time" - but thats a huge and important part of the fight altered greatly. The infernal could still land on the tank, but who are we kidding... it obviously wasnt intended.

People draw two different ways to define what they call 'exploit' generally

- Obvious game mechanics expoit. Example would be flying above the ground or something stupidly obvious like that.
- Encounter exploits which go against the spirit of the intended encounter design. This is more what the prince/infernal, heigan/safespot, archimonde/log/mountain one fall more into. People might consider them 'Creative' etc - they might not necessarily be blatent game exploits like flying, but that doesnt mean its not exploiting the intended way the designers wanted you to experience the encounter.

The authoritative answer, of course, would have to come from the designers - but Im sure they have better things to do (Like making WOLTK, Sunwell) than bother themself with a meeting discussing the merits of the log/mountain in Archimondes room.

I don't know what mountain positioning you used, but what I saw, was that on our kill, a grand total of 2 doomfires, the whole attempt went around. The vast majority of the doomfires consisted of 24 patches of fire stacked on top of eachother at the base of the mountains. Just because they can go around on rare occasion doesn't mean that they will. If you are using this logic to convince yourself that this "strat" is completely legit, you are delusional. With the mountain strat, people can go afk during the fight, and still profit. I left in the middle to take a piss, and then at low % I alt tabbed out of the game to check forums/dkp. In normal Archimonde, this will result in a wipe. With the mountain "strat", it doesn't matter. The mountain strategy takes the individual human element out of the fight to such a degree that it is embarrassing to me watching it. This fight goes from a complex movement oriented fight where all 25 people have to pay attention, to a tank sitting in the trees, some healers healing him, and 15 of those little bird toys bobbing their heads up and down on your [insert spell/shot here] key. That is really all that the fight comes down to. One decurser can handle all of the decursing, a few healers can handle the tank, and you don't even have to fucking use your tears to survive the airbursts.

Are you seriously saying that this strat is legit?

So this may be my first post on these boards (been lurking here forever).

I'd have to say the single most important advice I can give to any guild still working on this asshole is patience!
We killed Archimonde last night for the first time (attempt #73 which seems around average) with zero deaths.

Our biggest issues were (prior to the death) brain-farting and cratering and being too embarassed to call out if you got doomfired. Honestly, if there's a couple of people that are doomfired it's not the end of the world. A couple of hots and they're fine. Once I stressed to players to avoid the fires but call out if you get them things went much smoother (especially from a healer's perspective).

As for the 'retard check', if you can get this boss to at least 50% with zero people dead, you can get him to 10% with zero people dead. Once everyone gets airblasted / feared a few times they figure it out (well, most of them do).

BTW if anyone is interested, we enforced the 2min trinket rule (had only 2 shaman in the raid last night) and we used the 4-corner method.

fearyaks,
your healer's desire is an adjustable raidframe like eg. grid where they can see all those doomfires and/or curses. Should raise the reaction reflexes. Don't abuse your vent/teamspeak and create an input overflow with calling out every doomfired person.

What really helped us was seperating the groups on different teamspeak channels and let them have some relaxing trash talks during the encounter. Having 8-12 eyes watching for exactly your spot and the first one seeing it calling out the incoming doomfire works excellent.

tasks:
- survive
(- decurse)
(- heal/dealing damage)

Don't think there's much about it. I guess everyone including Joe Casual should realise what's to do after his 5th attempt at last. But assembling this can take a looong time, especially when you are only really challenged every few attempts. Add random death (disconnects, lags, tank's death), slacker and a portion of unluck and you have a few dozen of attempts.

WoW Model Viewer

Standing in a spot the game allows you to walk to without any wall jumping is obviously not an "exploit" in any truly abusive sense, but there is a reasonably well confirmed rumor that an invisible barrier has been placed at the hill base making it imposible to even walk up the hills at all in 2.4. When I say reasonably well confirmed, a guildmate of mine zoned in on PTR before it got taken down just to look around and see.

So apparently, the development team didn't like people standing there and felt this was easily fixed with an arbitrary barrier. But it's kind of offensive to kind standing in guy's field an exploit. Lazy? Sure. Intended? Unlikely. Exploitive? I'd say no more say than beating Loatheb with 5 people at lvl 60 using the shadow priest gimmick. Archimonde is in many ways a less ridiculous fight than Loatheb was (lack of ridiculous consumables), but the somewhat unique feature of being able to make so many rapid attempts -- you can be back dying again and pulling awfully quickly -- and having nearly any individual kill your raid is doubtless what led someone to look for alternatives in the first place.

Anyway, it may well be fixed in a week.

I'm having some difficulty finding an exact explanation regarding the nature of doomfires. So far, I've realised that "some follow" "some follow than change target" "some are random". Could anybody provide a rock solid 100% accurate description of them.

My guild have been killing archimonde for a few months now, yet it always takes a few hours to kill him. We have tried 'take risks but get him down faster' and we have also tried 'take no risks but tickle the enrage timer'.

We use the strategy where we tank Archi to the right of the tree debris (looking from the back, towards the well). We split the raid into 4 groups, spread out over a 180 degree arc behind archimonde. We have no problems with the tank dying in fears or other trivial deaths like these. Our problem sources from doomfires curling around and into the melee, which are doing the majoritory of the damage.

As far as I know, we are all running from the doomfires in a linear fashion, and even moving as groups instead of individually to avoid problems with the doomfire switching targets.

Has anybody else hit a brick wall like that explained above?
Any feedback would be fantastic.

Currently there is no definitive answer to Doomfire's behaviour. Anyone that tells you otherwise is speculating. Fire bad.

Some Doomfires are always going to curl into the melee - just make sure they know to run the heck away if it looks to be happening. Consider having people call out when the melee's got to go out.

As far as constant Doomfires in the melee, well, I've seen it happen on a few attempts, but it usually means that you've got people who still think they can strafe. I know it happens a lot with us. Speaking of which, has anyone else noticed that this is the only fight where the ranged group seems to understand strafing away from things that want to hurt them? It's kind of frustrating to see people deftly sidestepping Doomfire so that they get feared along the entire length and it chains back into the melee, but utterly incapable of, say, getting out of a giant burning patch on Al'ar if they aren't on the edge.

Doomfires always head out after spawning, this is true, but after they head out they may come back again. I've seen them spawn and then head straight into the hills with absolutely no one in front of them, and have never had consistent success kiting them myself (they always seem to follow me for a while and then lose interest and head elsewhere). So what we do is tell the melee to watch and tell everyone else to call doomfires that head melee-ward, and if one wanders in there the melee gets out.

Edit: That they can head off following no one does not refute that they might be kitable. I've just never managed to kite them with confidence, and I consider myself a much better player and faster learner than many of the people in my raid, so I concluded that it wasn't worth trying to teach my entire raid to kite them.

Doomfires appear to switch between two modes randomly:
a) Follow a random player
b) Move in a random direction.

So when people say 'kite the doomfires' people shouldnt be under the impression that means it will follow you until it despawns. More accurately, you want to kite the doomfire efficiently away from the boss whiles its following someone (aka your window of opportunity) - and then if it moves in a random direction after that it hopefully wont matter, because it was kited far enough away that it is too far from anyone to cause any problems.

Yeah, I've operated under the theory that the doomfire has a 90 degree (or something bigger than 90 degrees, perhaps 150 degrees or so) cone from which it can select people to follow, when following it faces toward the person it is following and it will periodically pick new targets to follow, thus side strafing makes it very easy to turn the doomfire towards another one of your groups (imagine it's facing west, half way to your west group, and the person being followed dodges north, turning the doomfire north enough to pick a target in the north group, from there the doomfire is facing north-west and this places the melee and tank at archimonde within the cone of available targets, on the next target selection, one of them is randomly picked, and the doomfire has now looped back at melee.

I don't think inward turns and loops ever happen naturally, I think the doomfire always naturally travels forwards in a straight line, it only appears to curve when it randomly selects a new target and alters it's heading to face the new target. I do think it can change target selections fairly often (but doesn't always do so.)

Of course this is just the mental model I operate with, and while I've seen this fight plenty of times, I can't claim to have enough observational data to know how accurate/inaccurate this model is (particularly since as the tank, since I never experience running from the doomfires personally.) That said, I find it useful to think about doomfire like this, and certainly I think it'd be useful to refine the model, the better we can describe the characteristics of how a doomfire paths/targets the easier it will be for people learning the fight in the future.

Along these lines we found that making sure our groups stay close together dramatically reduced the risk of a doomfire curving back towards melee (I imagine because it would rapidly switch from people a bit too spread out and manage to turn itself inwards in the process.) By having each group really hug a marked person in their assigne direction we dramatically reduced the number of doomfires we see hit our melee.

Yeah, that has been my experience as well. When I see a doomfire heading towards me I don't strafe or try to do anything funny... I just turn 180 degrees and run away, usually at least until I'm outside of fear range. Most of the times it'll either be still following me or targeting some random tree stump, which is much better than having it curl and destroy the melee. It also means that I spend a lot of time on Archi just watching the scenery as I wait for doomfires to despawn - ranged DPS really just has to learn to be patient and trust the melee to kill him.

In a situation where you have 25 people fairly evenly spread out over an area any randomly chosen direction is more than likely going to point towards someone.

The nature of doomfire isn't important. The fact that no one has ever been able to 100% control doomfires given even perfect execution testifies to this. What is important is properly preparing and knowing how to react to doomfires. Melee should assume every doomfire is going to head their way and be looking for it ahead of time. Ranged should always run back to avoid a doomfire initially, not to "kite" the back but because that is the place least likely to have another doomfire in it, running to wards the side is what leads to people getting boxed in.

Yes, the nature of the doomfire is important. Simply because they arent 100% controllable doesnt mean any techniques used to help control the doomfire should be thrown out the window. Properly preparing and knowing how to react etc - is complementary to this, not mutually exclusive.

Not really - in a 4-point square setup with Archimonde in the middle... if a doomfire is at one of the four points, the rest of the raid (aka the other 3 points) is within a 90degree arc only. If it really does move in a 'random direction' frmo there , chances are it will head into the 270 degree arc area where nobody is anyway. The only real time what you said holds true (with this positioning anyway) is when the doomfire is within the square itself - which is why kiting it away in a straight line as far as possible (during the period it decides to actually follow you) is most important.