So my question today is twofold, both parts sprung from Death and Taxes' recent world-first Viscidus kill.

The first part, alluded to in the title, is how necessary is Engineering in the serious WoW endgame? It was brought to my attention that Death & Taxes relied heavily upon a raid full of engineers in order to secure their Viscidus kill. For guilds looking to be the absolute best, is having (preferably Goblin) engineering be as much of a requirement as talent speccing for a PvE build, such as Restoration Druids? I've always thought so from day one. And if this is true, is this necessarily a design problem, or simply another potential for serious raiding to be taken to the more hardcore?

Second part of the question is regarding the design and implementation of optional bosses. As I've mentioned in earlier threads I was very pleased that Blizzard has incorporated the idea of difficult, optional bosses into their instances. Assuming all the unintended bugs with the encounter are fixed (such as ostensibly shaman loot dropping for an Alliance guild), is Viscidus simply too difficult for the iLvl loot he drops? Should an optional, heavily gear-dependent boss that (without all the planned Nature resist itemization entirely implemented, mind you) requires as much effort as (or more than) the Twin Emperors, drop comparable rewards? I guess what I'm wondering is if the loot from difficult optional bosses should be on the same scale as the 'main' bosses of a zone, or if they should be tuned by a different scale on account of their being optional bosses who exist more for the extra challenge than for superior loot. Should guilds feel that these difficult optional bosses should be required kills (to get all the best loot available in the zone each clear), or should they be little added bonus for guilds who eventually become equipped and experienced enough to handle them?

If the risk vs reward of an optional boss is completely out of whack, he'll be forgotten and ignored once there's enough content to keep guilds busy without him. There's no excuse for the kind of loot DnT got, it just reeks of poor itemization.

Is that the SLIME BOSS? I heard he dropped SLIME armor.

BTW true story, whoever told you that, was wrong. Our group composition wasn't biased in favor of any particular tradeskill set. Classes on the other hand...

Look at Jindo. He definitely was more difficult than Hakkar pre-ZG changes. Now maybe it's a tossup. He was hard because he was optional, yet at the same time he dropped some of the best loot in the zone (especially for casters). Jindo was an optional boss done right. If Viscidus is going to drop loot at the ilvl of Princess Huhuran, then he needs to be toned down. Or, more likely, they need to up the ilvl of his drops to say 82, but still retune/fix him, etc. I don't have much experience with the fight, to be honest. We haven't really bothered trying much.

I think it's cool that he drops 2 more bindings for you, but if he wants to drop Princess Huhuran level loot, then he should be that difficulty level.

Ouro has the same issues as Viscidus. It is plagued by a myriad of bugs, and encourages a ranged-DPS oriented raid. But Ouro is even worse because he may in fact be nearly unbeatable with how he's tuned at the moment :P.

My mistake then. Somewhere (probably on IRC) I heard that the whole raid group had specced engineering to wtfnuke the slimes to pieces. And then it led to a discussion where Furor started talking about how he can't believe that anyone could NOT be specced engineering and consider themselves hardcore endgame and how he was glad that a boss such as Viscidus puts that to the test. In any case, whether true or not the fact that this was suggested at all brings to light that engineering does give a pretty big advantage in the form of hefty AoE damage consumables and other handy gadgets like extra resist gear (shadow/flame/ice reflectors), and tons of useful PvP stuff (mind control/rocket helm, disco rays, etc). It seems to me that leaving out Engineering on an endgame spec really limits your strategic options for any encounter, much in the same way a druid without Innervate or Nature's Swiftness is limited. Is this tradeskill something worth appreciating and perhaps worth requiring more often in the endgame, should encounters be built with a potential raid full of Engineers in mind, or is the use of Engineering as a seriously useful endgame tradeskill a design mistake?


This assumption is what I'm questioning. Rather than just stating it as unquestionable fact or unsubstantiated opinion, in the context of overall game and dungeon design, can we argue that this the necessary and only case?

Must the difficulty of an encounter -absolutely- and -always- scale in the same exact way with the quantity and quality of loot received? Let's suppose that aside from obvious bugs everything is 'working as intended' with Viscidus regarding his difficulty level and loot iLvl, putting his current difficulty at or above the Twin Emperors and his loot equal with Huhuran. Does this have to be seen as an undeniable error in design?

I think that what Blizzard is doing with Viscidus as an 'optional boss' (we'll find out over the next few months if it was intended or successful) is shifting the risk/reward distribution to something other than linear, in order to give guilds a greater dynamic range of encounters upon which to test themselves without throwing the competitive balance of gear too far out of whack. The designers are stuck in between a rock and a hard place: we know that they don't want the uberguilds to get too far ahead of the more casual endgame guilds with itemization, but they want to give the trailblazers enough challenges to keep them consistently engaged.

So they put in additional encounters, but with a much steeper risk/reward curve compared to the normal progression. I see this as rewarding more significant accomplishments with extra loot each week. This is exactly what I was calling for months ago about one possible implementation of an "optional timesink", where you had the option to get MORE of the same quality loot (and therefore need to farm the instance a shorter number of times) by killing a HARDER (not a second equal-difficulty) boss. So you have the option of either spending an extra week farming AQ up to Huhuran a second time, or you could kill the more difficult Viscidus now and save yourself a week to get the same loots.

If these optional bosses were itemized at the same risk/reward curve as the original "progression" bosses, they wouldn't be a challenging way to increase your loot intake - they would be more or less required stops for any capable guild. If you're farming progression boss X with iLvl85 loot, then there's no reason you shouldn't be farming optional boss Y with iLvl85 loot also, to maximize your weekly intake.

So, while I agree that the quality of loot on Viscidus is shockingly poor compared to other non-optional bosses of his difficulty, I don't see this as a necessary design flaw. And even if the risk/reward is perceived as completely out of whack now, does that necessarily mean it will remain the case forever, particularly as more nature resist gradually becomes available?

Chalon: First, if Nature Resist is not the issue with the encounter, what about the complaints about a NR-dependent boss dropping nature resist loot?

Second, what do you think about the argument I made in my post? That killing Viscidus should not be tuned as though you're killing a risk/reward clone of Huhuran, but that the greater reward for killing the optional, more difficult Viscidus is in not having to wait another week to get another set of Huhuran loot?

If many guilds' time is better spent elsewhere, fair enough, that's what defines him as an optional boss. His mere presence does not detract from your guild's progression, aside from wishes that he was another plain-old farmable boss. But I can guarantee you he will still be killed and attempted by a good number of high-end guilds, simply because his loot is there for the taking now and you don't have to wait another week or so to obtain it. This is the 'option' I'm talking about which makes me like this type of dungeon design.

If you do not have Engineering you're gimp. There are no tradeskills that make up in useless bop shittery what you can do with Engineering. Even if you want that bop crap you can just get it made and switch back to Eng. Is it neccesary to raid? No, not yet.

Maybe you need to throw bombs into Dodong...C'thun's mouth. :cthulhu:

But he has so many :(

"Risk/Reward" is an odd phrase in the context of RPG's, since there's no actual risk. "Time/Reward" is a lot more accurate in most cases; "Difficulty/Reward" is occasionally justifiable.

Nefarian drops higher ilvl loot than Razorgore. The only difference between the two is that guilds start getting their weekly Razorgore epics a few weeks earlier (and the gap will only shorten as the months go by). This has everything to do with placement in the zone, and little to do with the fact that Nefarian is harder (is he? I think we've wiped more on Razorgore than on Nefarian, since our respective first kills).

This idea of rewarding challenges with loot can only go so far, because you have to design content with the idea in mind that it will be beaten (and probably sooner than you think). Putting Viscidus in the game as a way of getting a second set of Huhuran-quality loot each week simply means that raid progression has to be designed around guilds getting two sets of Huhuran-quailty loot each week, and doesn't really change much else.

In fact, trying to separate different groups based on skill is what Blizz doesn't want. Everything goes a lot easier for them if most people get to about the same level of gear in about the same timeframe, and the best guilds have few methods to get anything beyond that. Anything which seriously rewards people for being too good creates some positive feedback that can really cause trouble. Really, the whole challenge for them is keeping the top people interested while everyone else catches up to a point where they're ready for new content. Extremely hard optional bosses whose rewards are insignificant in the grand scheme of things are a great way to do that.

Of course, what really makes him "optional?" You're no more required to kill anyone else each week than you are Viscidus. What actually sets him apart is the disproportion between his difficulty and loot--he represents the rapidly diminishing returns for people who are very good. They get to up their farm rate a few weeks earlier than everyone else does.

This is the picture at the high end--Blizz wants everyone to be as flat as possible, can safely assume most bosses are being killed once a week. For a short digression into lower-level, time investment can become a factor (time investment is not a factor at the highend, since somebody will always be investing enough time to do as much as can be done every lockout). This is what you have to beat into the heads of the "casual epics" people: they're not going to get a "hard" 5-man dungeon that drops epics, but they could get a way to sink a lot of hours into 5-man content for epic rewards (Field Duty). A 5-man dungeon that dropped BWL-quality epics would have to be on a 40-day lockout in order to not mess up the influx of items to the playerbase.

ZG is a nice example of how this all works in practice. You could have predicted the quality of ZG loot almost entirely by knowing that it's a 20-man zone with a 3-day lockout (the fact that it's more for 60's in blues than 60's in greens probably would have helped out as well). Why should anything else matter? Should Jin'do's difficulty have affected his loot table in any way? Not really--if he'd been harder and his loot had been BWL-quality or so, you would have an annoying item progression issue. Vescidus is similar--no matter how hard he is, you have to consider how he fits into the progression, and not put loot on him that will be hard to work around later on.

I agreed with their rant and the tone of it.

This is not a serious, life or death industry. It's a game, and a game played for fun. The fun of playing the game is overcoming challenges which leads to improving your character, which in turn leads to overcoming greater challenges.

In a sense, everything is progression. I'm sure some people play to "own" people in pvp, but I pay no regard to them. For an uberguild, defeating the biggest challenge ahead of others is what drives them forward. Overcoming those challenging and doing it better than other people on the world stage is what keeps them coming back.

But, like I said, it's about progress. When you beat a new boss, you want to improve your raid group and your guild to be ready for the next challenge. You want to feel like you're ahead for the next fight, and the one after that. When a very hard, very untested boss is downed and it drops something confusing, or just not very good ... You're not impressed. And when your emotion is picked up by thirty nine other people, you aren't going to react well. You're going to say things that come not only from your own personal feeling of being let down and led on, but the amplification of going through a mob of people.

That item was crappy. Hell the amount of gold he dropped was crappy. It's like someone discovering an ancient ruin of untold beauty, digging for weeks to tear out a treasure chest, carefully cracking it open to discover a pile of petrified dogshit. And if you're not happy, why the fuck shouldn't you react with scorn? And since it's just a game, say what you want. Maybe you'll feel better for wasting your time.

Raid progression and itemization in this game are getting more and more fucked up. Apparently when they said there will be no more resist fights they met there will be but you won't be able to get the gear for them.

i have no access to Thott/Alla or the D+T guild site at the moment so i don't know what the slimed one dropped, although i doubt i'm going out on a limb by saying he probably dropped +40 NR bracers or boots. Something the current difficulty of vescidious needs to drop items equivalent to C'thun or Nefarian to be brutally honest, and almost certainly shoudl not reward a raid that wears high NR equipment against him with the same gear but in epic quality. If anything he should drop some exciting items, not necesserily god powerful daggers for rogues or a legendry sword, but maybe a trinket for each class, kind of like BWL but focusing more on other aspects of that class, for example, a trinket giving a full rage refresh for a warrior but with a 5-10 minute CD. Not only would such an tiem be worthy of the boss' current difficulty and time requirements for a kill, but it definately makes him a unique challenge if he only drops loot like that with maybe a few Armaments or NR pieces thrown in. Maybe (god forbid) a quest item like Nef/Ony/Ossiran (and presumably C'thun).

We know Ouro drops the shoulder piece equivalents for the 5 piece nozdormu sets (might not be shoulders, but i think it is), therefore definately providing a reason for guilds to spend time killing him regardless of what else he might drop although i think his table will be mor balanced despite him clearly needing a tweek to favour a more balanced raid as opposed to 20 hunters + tank and healers.

What is certainly clear, and will become more so once the entire loot table is revealed, is that the encounter either needs an item stat upgrade or a lower level difficulty. Sadly, neither of those are quick to implement, especialy as we will most likely not see another patch until 1.10

Zante

I'm not sure where people get this quote from. It was never stated there would be no resist fights ever again. On the contrary, it was openly stated that AQ would have both resist fights and non-resist fights. I have to agree with Gurgthock in that I don't understand why some people just hate resist fights in any form.

Phyra, I think a big thing you're missing is that a large complaint here is just the brokeness of the fight. If it was just a hard fight that dropped the ilvl 78 loot, people may complain some but not as much as when you get that subpar loot while fighting serious tuning issues in the fight. For example, I haven't really heard anyone complain about the ilvl of the Twin Emperor drops, even though some are slightly lower than Nefarian drops. The reason being that the fight is fun, it's fairly well tuned, is the only place to get helm pieces and it allows you to progress further in the zone.

I do agree with you that a lot of people will try and likely kill Viscidus if he stays how he currently works. But I'd bet like 90% of them wouldn't bother to kill him a second time unless the fight was retuned or the items upgraded. And at that point it's not because they aren't uber enough to kill the boss, it's just because it's a "waste of time" in the sense of how much time you're spending on your raids.

On the other hand, if someone manages to kill Ouro in his current form, they will continue killing him on a weekly basis, cause you need him for the leg pieces, thus it's "worth it."

I think you are discounting the reward concept behind raiding that drives people to continue raiding well after you've defeated everything. After killing Nefarian for 20 times, of course you're gonna go in there again because you're still progressing your raid force.

Also, gamers, especially the hardcore ones, will always trend towards the path of least resistance. If you could get Nefarian-level epics in a 5-man instance that was fairly easy to complete, how many people would stop killing Nefarian? I would venture a lot. Sure it's an extreme example, but the entire foundation for the end game is "risk and reward." I don't think it's appropriate to chuck it out of the window just because you label a fight as "optional." And I seriously doubt that is the design intent here, either. I think they intended for Viscidus to be harder than Princess by a decent amount (requiring more NR), but at the same time not more difficult than the Twin Emperors.

ah its the leg pieces :) my mistake

so yea, that would be a good solution to what you guys are talking about.

I have no problem whatsoever with resist fights.

The resist fights in MC made perfect sense to me, and worked beautifully. The extensions in BWL were great as well. I like firemaw, I like vael, I like ragnaros.

The thing is, the fire resist portion was properly itemized. Granted, it did get better as time went on, but a big part of the game and the gear you got leading into MC/BWL/Onyxia improved your fire resist. Once in MC, there was a whole, well developed portion of crafting which allowed you to further improve your fire resistance and get better FR items.

If people dislike them, fuck that. No, you don't get one set of gear. No, it's not that simple. You have to swap items and adapt gear sets to different situations. Resist fights are no different. It is a parallel path of progression, another time sink and a way to challenge people by forcing them to consider where and how to make sacrifices.

As long as they are itemized properly, resistance based fights are a great way to force decisions, create additional items and consume time.


The problem is that nature resist encounters were under itemized and under developed. They either forgot about how to design resist parallel paths as they did before or just forgot to put them in. Dreamscales are still useable only in one BoE recipe and the general nature resist gear comes from various random sources, one of which - Mara - seems like something of an afterthought.

Taeme's point is perhaps the most interesting. Looking back to when MC was first released, i rememebr having access to admitedly green or blue but still good fire res gear. This was then enhanced within Molten Core with Core, Blood of the Mountain, Dark Iron and Core Leather, which when combined with Thorium Brotherhood Reputation --> Recipees, allowed people to create epic quality items that whilst admittedly only help against powerful fire users (not just in MC, we must consider Firemaw and vaelstrasz here of course), but some, for example Flarecore, gave significant boosts to other abilities. This was then offset by what most players call Tier 1, Nightslayer/Might/Prophecy etc, although of course when molten core was first released i got Bloodfang Bracers off of Magmadar :). however, since then, the instance has been fully balanced, the items in terms of upgrades for existing gear rewards progressing boss pair by boss pair (by this i mean Lucifron + magmadar as one 'group' for example, at least thats how i see it). Once the 4 'pairs' were beaten, and i dread to say this, were on 'farm status', people were left with the chalenging Majordomo and Raganros, who rewarded players with Tier 2 items that could be used for Blackwing Lair and Ahn'Qiraj to a certain extent successfully.

now look at Blackwing Lair: the only drops akin to the cores and other items such like from Molten Core is basicly Elementium Ore. All the other drops within the zone are either Tier 2 'raid PvE' pieces, equivalent weapon and miscelaneous item upgrades, and a few one offs for each armour type that exaggerated a particular aspect of their raid roll (eg Mantle of the Blackwing Cabel, which is good for any DPS caster, although in balance not as much so as say Netherwind water coolers). This itemisation was seen as a good upgrade for the experianced raiders and a worthwhile reward for the efforts and gold put into learnign the techniques required for ultimately successfully completeing these encounters. Yes, Onyxia scale cloaks can eb a pain in the neck to obtain, but given that she has a 5 day lockout, and most guilds will have been killing her for at least 3-4 months by their first Nefarian attempts, the itemisation progression for the encounter was balanced.

Now, finally, i bring myself to ahn'qiraj and ultimately Ouro, Vescidious and C'thun. Now, before i enter into the big three debate, i'll refer to comments made in the AQ itemisation thread, or as i prefer to call it the 'Anti-Feral Declamation'. In that thread, some ignorance and indeed enlightenment was shown: people quickly realised that the items dropped in Ahn'Qiraj were not all designed for raid PvE progression along the lines of MC and BWL. Most items in the 40 man zone point towards players becoming aware of how they can use all the abilities at the raid's disposal to overcome future and current encounter problems. this is most evident in the Nozdormu sets, which note are 5 pieces in total, and approximate item level slightly stronger in their point allocation than Tier 2. Yet Tier 2 is designed to equip the wearer in all locations for specific duties, these 5 piece Nozdormu sets are designed around customisation of them to allow a player to fulfil different roles maybe not now but in later encounters. Indeed, many BWL clearing guilds expected AQ to be a direct step up from tier 2 to Tier 3, which whilst in parts it is, in others it seems to me at least to be a combination of MC, Ony, BWL and outdoor raid bosses in terms of the collaberation of techniques required to defeat and complete its content. Everyone has been praising Blizzard's originality in the Twin Emperor's encounter, personally my favourite encounter currently in the game which i have experianced although closely followed by Razorgore. the loot they drop, whist not specific in definition over whether it is better for ultimately Noxtramus and onwards than Tier 2, are still excellent items that provide players with flexibility in how they enjoy the game through playing it.

this brings me finally to the infamous 3, and i quote, "broken" encounters in the zone, C'thun stage 2, Ouro and Vescidious. Now, i have not seen what Death and Taxes recieved but i'm guessing a pair of bracers, worn boot and a slimy bone by XI's advocation of the encounter. Yes, evidently at the moment Ves is broken because he ultimately does not reward the raid group for all the effort put into completeing the encounter. however, i am 100% sure this is something Blizzard are looking into fixing, either through itemisation upgrades or tweeking the encounetr to still be a challenge but not so tantamount to suicide, although guess it will eb a mixture of the two ultimately. But such changes do not come quickly, and it is an OPTIONAL boss. As for C'thun stage 2, i am yet to get through stage one with my rogue's guild yet but already in my mind the encounter is staring up to being the best in the game, but he ultimately drops the pieces needed for the Nozdormu chests, and the best items currently in the game, so perseverance will ultimately pervail there with maybe a small fix if need be, but then people were on Nefarian for over 6 weeks before a first kill came through and C'thun is barely into his second. As for Ouro, i think people will be pleasantly surprised by what he will drop, and he is needed for the Nozdormu legs. Remember in the zone he is positioned between the TEs and C'thun, suggesting sopme of the best loot in the game will be available from him.

And finally there is only so much moaning we can do. Believe me the European boards hold similar concerns over those 3 encounters, but it is nothing that can't be fixed. The greatest quarrel i hold with Blizzard over Ahn'Qiraj is that there is no clear cut way of obtaining the necessary Nature Resistance items akin to the Fire resistance ones of MC. But then patch notes for the 1.10 test Realm "obsidian chunks for armour smiths to craft into armour available from the Cenarian Circle in Cenarian Hold". Well well, maybe there will be more reason to do AQ20 than just for Immolate Rank X

But you can't simply ignore the enormous design challenge inherent in an MMO-you have to strike the right balance between incentives and rewards to keep people playing, while simultaneously keeping content accessible and balance (in the face of varying power levels, due to said rewards). Instant gratification for everyone in the name of "fun" isn't going to get anywhere.

If their complaint was more about the untested or broken nature of the encounter, that's one thing (although probably shouldn't have been wholly unexpected). But thinking that killing some boss is suddenly going to give you incredibly good loot is always going to leave you disappointed.

Incidentally, what's with all these "not worth the time" arguments? The instance is on a lockout anyway. As I said in my post, gamers will do things if you give them the opportunity. Once a few more people have killed this guy and can do it regularly, you think they're just not going to bother getting a few extra epics each week?

The funniest part about all this was Tigole's quote that

Why are they looking any further than mechanics they've had in place for almost a year? Thorium Brotherhood stuff was a tolerable time sink that allowed you to provide FR gear for your entire guild as you progressed through content. I don't recall any threads where people bitched about FR gear being too scarce, solely because the stuff crafted through the Thorium Brotherhood was sufficient for anything in game.

It's hard to imagine, or forgive, that throughout the entire time AQ was being developed, no one thought to implement a TB-esque crafting outlet for NR gear. Hell, Blizzard seems to have a hard-on for wanting people to continue to run older instances to gain items needed for progression, why not put in the ability to transmute the stock piles of useless Fiery and Lava cores into something used in the NR? Make a couple patterns drop off bosses in ZG (or AQ-20), and voila, a large improvement to the NR itemization "problem".

Well, "time" can also mean "time required outside of the raid zone to farm consumables."

If there were an optional Huhuran Mk. II that required had twice as many HP and poison bolted after 30% twice as frequently, such that the fight was literally impossible without 14 Flasks of Petrification, yet this hypothetical boss dropped mediocre loot, would you bother? Would anyone, after the world first?

Extreme example, but if you have to blow hundreds of gold worth of consumables as a raid group, and might still fail on any given attempt if things don't go your way, that's not a worthwhile investment for a guild unless the loot justifies it. Guild banks have deep pockets, but not infinitely so.

Fair enough, but that didn't seem implied by the talk above about Viscidus. I didn't see anything about huge expenses being key to victory.

Tons of people farmed Rag weekly (for at least a few times) using over 100 GFPP's, maybe 20 each Greater Arcane and Mongoose, Elemental Sharpening stones, etc. And this was against the smaller bankrolls people had at the time (I don't know you about you, but ours was mainly built up by selling MC-related things like BoE's). I'm sure some people happily ran banks dry doing what they thought they had to do to get their epics.

So while you're point is taken with the extreme example, it is incredibly easy to underestimate how far some people (especially the sort of people with the MMO mindset) will take things.