Something Beef said on R&D: "One theory we have had is that the acid spit may be being cast at level 630 instead of level 63, or something along those lines."



Does this mean that NR above 315 would useful? That would be interesting (although maybe not very much so--depends on whether stacking NR that high is worth it to begin with). If they did do something like this, however, it couldhave come implications for future encounters.

Alternatively, maybe she just has -resist. They have the mechanic in the game now, no reason to think they wouldn't put it on a mob. Especially on an ability like Acid Spit, which they probably don't want people resisting like Flame Buffet.

But just on that one ability? That'd be an odd mechanic. Her regular poison bolts are obviously very resistable.

The pattern of resists on Acid ticks we saw was like a handful of -25% resists, and mostly full damage, from tanks with >200 NR. It's what you'd expect to see vs. normal level 63 attacks if you only had 20 or 30 NR. I can't explain what would cause that precise pattern. If it were just spell penetration like casters have, then going from 200 to 300 NR would cause a very noticeable improvement. But in reality it doesn't... it's like going from 20 NR to 30 NR....

Still, one ability which was cast at a totally off-the-wall level would also be an odd mechanic. Do other mobs cast things at levels not at all equal to their own? Other abilities for which resists are very important, such as Flame Buffet or the green dragon breaths, behave exactly as you'd except based on the mob's level.

This probably isn't very important anyway, since lots of guilds are getting her down without thinking about it very much, but it might be some kind of insight into what they do when they specifically don't want something to be avoidable with resists (and I don't have anything better to wonder about, since we haven't gotten her yet).

I'm sure some actual data about the resist rates would get to the bottom of it pretty quickly, although I'm not sure anyone's ever going to take the trouble to collect it.

I don't buy the whole "it uses the spell level, not the mob's level for resist checks" thing.

Shadow of Ebonroc is a level 24 spell. You don't resist 75% of the Shadows with 120 resistance, or anywhere near 75% of them which debunks that theory.

There must be some other control they can apply to partially-resistable spells.

If it's actually casting it at level 630, it'd most likely be a bug due to a typo, not a new game mechanic.


What's odd about the acid spit is if they wanted to make it unresistable, they could easily do so. But instead it's resisted a small amount a very small percentage of the time, way out of line with what you'd expect from any mob. I don't see why or how they would do it like that.

I was wondering if that's what you were getting at when you chose the number 630. But it still raises the question of how an erroneous spell level could cause incorrect resists since, as far as we know, resists are determined by the level of the caster (except for a specific change in PvP which was made a few patches ago).

I don't know why they'd do it intentionally. If they wanted Acid Spit to force rotations, they could have made it unresistable. I can't think of a good use for an ability that's very slightly resistable.

Yeah -- I agree that it's odd.

But it most definitely IS resistable, but only a little bit. Nothing else works like that, and my explanation is the only one that fits all the data I've seen in combat logs.

*shrug* I'm sure it was intended to be unresistable, since otherwise the huhuran fight would be only the 30% gimmick, which wouldn't be much fun at all.

Yeah, if it is somehow a bug I hope they don't change it. I really enjoy these race and execution fights, and to see it become another gear up and win encounter would be dissapointing.

I may sound stupid here, but I thought the highest things got in pretty much all blizzard games was level 255. Let me know if I'm wrong.

No way, Archaedas in Uldaman is level 500+, Cosmos says so.

You still store them in bytes, but don't confine them to a single byte.

AMIRITE?

Actually, weren't the stat caps in D1 250?

No wonder that fucker is so hard.

2^64 - 1 == 18,446,744,073,709,551,615

Don't undersell your numbers!

I guess I'll be needing more +hit gear. :(

Arbitrary number. HP, Mana, Xp, and abilities can all be regulated outside of level increments. The only signifigance of level on a WoW mob (or PC) is if they are governed by any specific To Hit or To Cast rules based on that number.

A level 1 GM or mob in WoW could have over 9 million HP and an unresistable insta-kill level 1 innate spell, if Blizzard wanted them to, but any character in the game could easily land full-damage spells/hits on them. They could have level 60 spells as well, but they generally couldn't use spells that needed level 2+ to cast in the requirements unless it was a specifically tailored version of that spell for that character, I believe.

The level on raidmobs is generally more built around the idea of resist rates to players than mob abilities, as I've seen it. The abilities can all be coded however they need to be mostly outside of level constrictions. Abilities that call level check are probably set and then bumped around until they feel the resist rate is a good value for the encounter's intended difficulty.

That said, I still don't really understand where they were going with Huhuran. Hehe.

We just put in our first (and hopefully last) full night of work on her. My strong intuition is that the Acid Spit behavior is unintended and that the tanking situation in this fight is supposed to be just like Firemaw (with regards to Flame Buffet).

I'm not sure what I'm basing this all on, but forcing repeatable tank transitions on an untauntable mob doesn't quite feel like something they would do. You could just let the tanks die, like on Vael, but that weakens your ability to handle the second phase of the fight--it feels like a cumbersome way to design an encounter.

It's like untauntable Firemaw--you can tell what the solution was supposed to be, but you can't do anything about it (it's just a lot easier to work around in this case (especially with BoP)). The tanking challenge here was supposed to be about having enough NR to reset Acid Spit in the first half, and still being able to survive the enormous melee enrage (and guilds who needed two separate tanks for this would only be slightly worse off).

I think transitions were intended, personally. Acid Spit isn't applied often enough and doesn't last long enough to be even a slight threat if NR let you resist it the way you can resist Flame Buffet.

Untauntable Firemaw wasn't a bug. Making the drakes tauntable was a design decision made after they turned out to be too challenging for what was intended.

I think the tank transitions are intended on Huhuran. It's actually a brand new "skill" the raid has to learn, how to do tank transitions on untauntable mobs without deaggro effects. It's not hard, but it does take a few attempts to get it right. If the damage output on the raid was higher, it would be a lot harder to pull off, since dps would have to go harder. I expect that to pop up on a mob soon, which will require a lot more precise work with the aggro. Huhuran has a lot of headroom both on timing and execution of the switch.

I know it wasn't a "bug," but I would consider it a design error that they corrected. Maybe I would think of it differently if I'd ever gotten to fight the untauntable drakes, but it seems like Wing Buffet on a tauntable mob is a neat and interesting ability for a raid boss, with a simple and specific solution. It's a better fight now than if it had just been another aggro-ceiling race (you only need one of those).

It's not at all unreasonable for them to make a fight about tauntless transitions (even though Huhuran is definitely a fight "about" something else already). But Acid Spit is either:
1) Intended to behave like it is, and is just a meaningless bit of effort on their part for reasons we will never understand.
2) Supposed to be unresistable, which would make the fight barely changed from how it is now.
3) Supposed to normally resistable.

None of these is totally outlandish, but 2 seems like a much less likely bug than 3 (agree or disagree, since I'm basing this on nothing at all).

It would be a relatively useless ability if normally resistable. Your tank has to be in NR gear for the fight anyway, so it would be a gimmick problem that solved itself.