Thaddius and Heigan not good enough?

I think that was the point of his joke.

Thaddius, Heigan, Noth, etc.

They're all new and interesting mechanics for November 2006, and while they'll be 'old hat' for the established raiders, for an incredibly large number of players, they'll still be new and interesting - something they've only read about or seen in videos, and that they now get to experience firsthand.

One jump isn't a "jumping game", and running back and forth isn't DDR. I'm talking complex, random movement.

Picture 5 tiles spanning a chasm with lava in the bottom. One player in the raid has to jump their way across the chasm to pull a lever once every 20 seconds to trigger a vulernability.

Oh, and the tiles move all over. Think Mario Brothers.

And/or trampolines like in the Nagrand Egg quest that one player has to navigate.

Many of us asked for a new Patchwek, not a gearcheck. There are enough of them in the game already, hell the game is in fact built on gearchecks. Aren't we arguing that Najentus will be a gearcheck for the new guilds? I also disagree with the general opinion that patchwerk was "the" gearcheck. Loatheb, or even Thaddius were harder for us to meet the dps requirements.

At Patchwek, pressing the same 2 buttons for 7 minutes was somehow more fun than it looked at first; and yes, I'd love a new iteration of that.

That sounds terribly fun for anyone with an older computer that they play WoW on. For us, Lurker is the true hardest boss in T5 content. Limit that to only requiring a certain number of people in the raid to have fast computers, maybe, and it could be fun.

To be fair, there is old, and then there is old. How old a computer are you talking about? WoW is a pretty unique game in that old computers ran it well at release, so three years later, old must be very old indeed. If anything, Heigan and Thaddius encounters are problematic because of latency and server performance (hello 3am raids, hello aussie players); client performance is a non-concern at this point in time, even a 5 year old laptop can get a decent framerate out of WoW.

Having a fight like this earlier would be a decent idea too. Or something to allow people to actually TEST rotations rather than needing to theorycraft them up. Kinda off topic here, but a lot of people in more "casual" guilds have problems with maximizing whatever their cycles are mainly from not wanting to wade through lots of theorycraft. Something like targetting dummies or whatever (a la Dr. Boom) would be nice for people to test things on.

I think that would be a terrible idea. While I agree it is always good to come up with new mechanics for a boss encounter, if I wanted to play an action game I would play an action game. For an old example of how poorly this can be implimented see, e.g., Ultima 7 to Ultima 8... and yes, I just dated myself.

Of course it could be implemented badly. That was my point.

I've consistently been impressed with the level of totally beatable and yet agonizing mechanics Blizzard has come up with. People complain about Blizzard not being innovative with BC. They have been. From Chess Event to Bloodboil, they've consistently come up with great ideas, and I'm sure they'll find more.

That said, in a miracle world with no lag, ONE fight like this would be damn fun - at least for me.

It would be fun for the few, agonizing for the most and completely undoable for the rest.

I for one would love to dispense with the "click the cube" mechanic so prevalent on BC fights. Magtheridon, Archimonde, Gorefiend, Kael'thas...all of these are fights where a single player not on the ball can wipe a raid. It's frustrating to see "Shadow of Death: Terribaddruidhealer1" and know that you'll wipe at 10% because they can't hit simple buttons. It's frustrating to hear excuses like "I pressed Soulshatter instead of Tears of the Goddess" and see Soul Charge wipe a 20th attempt in a row.

Maybe I'm just being nostalgic, but I miss the days when losing half the raid to Deep Breath just meant you had trimmed the fat. The flip side, of course, is that in a 40-man raid there was a LOT of fat that needed trimming.

As a side note: Tacitus, thank you for alerting me, via your signature, that RA3 is coming out!

I agree and disagree with you.

The problem with Teron is two fold:

- it's a mechanic you cannot practice outside of a player-created flash game that you might go months without seeing, and
- it can wipe the raid with pretty much zero way to recover from it.

Archimonde, however? A soul charge is very managable by the rest of your raid if they play well.

I would like to see a bigger focus on "god this REALLY sucks" mechanics that are still, theoretically at least, recoverable from. A single error wiping the raid by a random raid member doesn't make for as much fun as "god it sucks that you screwed up, but we all played great and overcame it / and we really need to be better at handling when that happens, because it *will* happen."


I hate to say it but I agree. I really am looking forwards to having damage meters and doing that fight each week to see what I can get out of it without random elements . It's also longer than Teron so can't be as easily cheesed with bloodlust.

I also enjoyed the Kalecgos fight and I love how involved the fight is and how it requires you to adapt as you go, but Brutalis does have his charm.

A T6 geared guild shouldn't have too much trouble on Kazzak, even if he heals 30-50% you still probably have the DPS to burn him. We killed DLK and DW one night when the instance servers went down and were griefed and he healed a good 30% during the second enrage and we still burned him down. He's only got something like 1.5m HP so it isn't too much of an issue if you're overgeared for it. I don't see a T4-T5 guild doing it though with griefers around.

Yeah I'll take a look tonight.

EDIT: Checked as of today after patch it remains unchanged. So basically only decent for enh shamans still.

But Naxx is making a comeback for WoW 3.0 so you can have your pie and eat it too!

They just pushed out a new PTR patch, after skimming through the notes, I didn't find anything new, anyone did?

I had to add more RAM to my computer and install XP to be able to play WoW. The only reason it had such a low amount of RAM and was still running ME is that it was a continual upgrade job; it got upgrades when they were needed, basically. The processor and video card were not absolutely minimal, but the RAM always has been.

I lagged in Molten Core. I lagged to hell in the suppression room, although Razorgore was always playable until near the end of Phase 1 (where I mainly just tried to stay alive). In BC I very rarely had issues, and they were almost always in Shattrath - Hydross was a problem until I turned off the range detector. I can't imagine what trying Heigan would have been like on my rig, but requiring fairly precise movements has never been a good thing for me (in any PC game, really). I'll echo the sentiment about Lurker, where I'd have to guess when to jump to make it up, and it rarely worked. I loved getting Ice Block for free because I could just Block through the first Spout, hope and pray that he only does one before the first wave of adds, sheep my add, then stay in the water the rest of the fight. It certainly was better DPS than continually trying to jump off.

If the graphics are kept to a minimum (ahem, no huge freaking lava spurts), and there is a decent amount of leeway between being toast and being safe, I wouldn't mind. Spout was fine for me because I could always see it coming and even if I was a mote too slow, I might only get hit once and survive. Heroic Mechano-Lord Capacitus, with the Thaddius-like charges, was perfectly fine as well since there wasn't "instant death". Void Zones are generally fine as long as you can survive one tick (I died to a one or two on Netherspite taking 30+ stacks of blue beam, but that comes with the territory). Running away from the raid with a bomb effect has worked well for Blizzard. So had separating people in multiple areas. Requiring people to play Massive Multi-player Mario Brothers is just not acceptable. Blizzard has made plenty of movement-oriented fights that haven't been like platform games, and hopefully they can continue doing so without requiring us to do some stupid dance.

is there a standalone ptr patch I could download? I always get some crappy "could not properly apply the patch" message.


*edit* a standalone ptr patch for the current build, date 2/14

I can't really see how allowing half the raid to be retarded and die and still being able to kill the boss would be possible in anything past entrance level raiding. It would simply be too damn easy for guilds who can field a raid of semi-competent players.

Our first Archimonde kill, we had 3 people die. The soul charges can be deadly if they're chained together, but if you keep your cool, you can overcome each soul charge as it comes.

So yes, i also agree soul charge is very managable. as long as you dont panic when it happens.

Looks like they made an invisible wall between blood elf starting zone and sunwell isle. You can't swim there anymore, so no more lvl 1 chars lying around!

I'm not saying that Soul Charges aren't managable--wipes caused by Soul Charges should only happen if multiple people screw up simultaneously. So perhaps Archimonde isn't really a great example for the point I'm trying to make.

What I'm saying is that I profoundly dislike fight mechanics where single deaths or screw-ups lead to irrecoverable wipes...Think Magtheridon where a cube clicker clicks twice: at the gear level of actually being interested in Magtheridon, you can't recover from that. Teron Gorefiend is the best example, and as someone pointed out earlier the problems with Teron are that you (a) can't practice it and (b) can't mitigate it. Like Kyth said, I want to be able to pull out come-from-behind wins.