What exactly is a typical fight with C'thun like? I don't want to know strategies (leaving aside the fact that I wouldn't know what to do with one if it landed in lap), what I'm interested in knowing is if, when you reach x% health, does he go into Phase Rape-You-Hard, and you just accept the wipe? Or is it a fight that you honestly think you can win with enough hard work and by trying new things?

I ask this because there was an event in FFXI (I still pay a little attention to the game, and my brother still plays it a lot), where the current C'thun analog of the game got taken down to 50% yesterday, after roughly 12 hours of endless Black Mages nuking the fuck out of Absolute Virtue (the mob's name) only to have it heal itself back to full, and from then on, at around 75% it would just completely restore itself.

This is the Allakhazam Thread in which you can find most of the pertinent details. This thread is frequented by more of the people involved in the bigger HNM linkshells, but it's also much more fragmented.

At this point people fairly convinced that SE got pissed about someone finally getting AV down (they had previously admitted in a press conference that their devs had made it far too strong, and that when they said they defeated it with only 30 people, they were lying and had to use cheats to do it) so a GM or two simply took control and fucked the players over.

I'm curious if this is the same case on C'thun, because I've seen screenshots of him dealing 120000 damage, however, most guilds are fairly secretive about their tactics, so most discussion on mobs like these is the top players winking and nodding at each other. In FFXI, there is only one tactic these days: form an alliance of 18 people, but bring 30-40 people (usually about 20 of them being Black Mages) and hotswap parties in and out of the alliance as necessary while mages rest and melees (literally) sleep on the sidelines. The point being that there aren't [i]tactics[/] per se, just a couple bosses where it's easier to kite the mob while black mages nuke him down (rendering all six melee classes even more useless than usual).

I just find the idea of creating a monster that is impossible to beat, simply so the devs can be "the winners" utterly reprehensible. Even though I've never seen the inside of MC, I love the fact that players come out of fights grinning like idiots and eager to go back. Whenever I watch my brother fighting the gods in sky (FFXI lingo), it just leave a sour taste in my mouth.

No, C'Thun does not have any special triggers that wipe the whole raid or heal himself to full or anything incredibly stupid such as that. And Onyxia can deep breath people for 12,000 damage when they're in the tunnel to her lair too you know. None of the fights in WoW are as incredibly stupid as the ones in FFXI's endgame, nor is C'Thun a fight as you describe Absolute Virtue. It wasn't created so the devs could laugh at us.

I don't feel comfortable saying more than that however.

That's perfect. That's exactly what I was interested in. Like I said, I don't want strategies, and what you guys have figured out is yours to distribute as you see fit. I just remembered seeing a picture of C'thun hitting someone for 12000 and wondering if Blizzard had decided that since they can't win against their player base being reasonable, then maybe they'd cheat and make something impossible to beat. SE, clearly, thought otherwise. I thnk it may just be a flaw they've carried over from their various console RPGs; if you can't beat a boss now all you really need is...BIGGER NUMBERS! Go hit a million more orcs and whatever you were having trouble with is trivialized.

Edit: I didn't know that the 12000 damage came from being in a tunnel. I thought it was just C'thun-damage, business-as-usual.

Not so much. C'thun does not one shot you in any unavoidable manner.

No, that's not what C'thun is.

Also the damage shots where he deals that much are some sort of anti-zerg script or something. It's not the REAL C'thun output.

The fight isn't cheesy in that aspect.

The problem with C'thun's tune right now is the same problem with ragnaros 1.0. People are incurring massive random environmental damage, and it's killing them before anyone can hope to react.

Gaint Claw Tentacle?

Mages and their 2k max hp. :rolleyes:

Not technically a one-shot unless you're already injured or it knocks you into some other source of damage.

But yeah, phase 2 needs some tuning.

Hmm, I dunno, I also like it when Cthun eats me, and I get mind flayed on the way down.

Or Cthun eats me and a gaint claw spawns ontop of me, and then proceeds to hit me, so I die in the middle of the air in his stomach.

Or when I get spit out of cthun... into a Claw.

Or when you watch the people attacking an Eye get a claw spawned on top of them...

And then the eye kills everyone because 'no one' is 2 words, retard can touch it because of the claw.

Or when your in his stomach and a Claw spawns and kills you (which is so fucking confusing to even think about)

Remember, BLIZZARD TESTED THIS ENCOUNTER EXTENSIVLY WITH AN ALL STAR INTERNAL TEAM!!!!

Edit- And its 4k life :P

Edit 2 - Yes, I am a retard. Sorry -_-

Haha, this is a fun bug, but it's 100% attributable to something you did, and I know what. :ph34r:

And yes, a couple of weeks of C'Thun will produce a litany of "wtf you won't believe how I died this time" stories.

More like go go ice block.

Yea, at this point I'm going to start Fraps'ing every C'Thun attempt and make a highlight comedy reel for release after the fight has been publicly explained in depth by someone looking to achieve internet stardom with the still-in-MC guilds on R&D.

Yeah, I was seriously considering posting a 6-second excerpt of a fraps from last night, but I don't have the patience to edit the video to remove leet infoz first. Anyone who watched it probably remembers the part I mean: Running, ruptured way up into the architecture, behind a column high up in the room. Get my bearings, heal myself once. Then die instantly. "WTF?" Pan camera around, and see a Giant Claw inside the wall looming over my corpse.

Didnt use it because I figured I would of gotten a heal after the first one. Wishful thinking it seems.

Although, we do have a druid who has some strage affixation with Red Lights.

Exactly. I get annoyed when people complain about how MC is so bland and easy. No shit, after the first raid dungeon has been raided for 15 months, and many of us are old EQ raiders, it's incredibly bland and boring. But Nagafen and Vox weren't exactly amazingly strategic fights either. MC is a fantastic instance for teaching people new to raiding what to do. A lot of my guildies were ex-quakers with no MMO experience when we started, and MC actually managed to turn them into mentally capable raiders. If we had been thrown straight into Razorgore and Vaelastrasz (amazing, but complex encounters) right at the start, a ton of would-be raiding guilds would just fold at the doorstep.

MC is raiding 101 with amazing loot drop rate. It was the absolute perfect initial raiding zone.

Yeah that was pretty awesome. :)

I enjoyed being ruptured into midair, then being chosen as the person to be swallowed and dying due to the fact I was in midair when I got slurped.

Someone should post a clip of c'thun eating people, though. That alone is worth the price of admission.

Same here. Rupture + mindflay = great vantage point to watch the rest of the fight from.

Dead on. Phase 1 is always enjoyable, in spite of (and really because of) the random elements included in that part. It is well designed, well implemented, and works very well in practice. Phase 2 always feels like it should be fun, could be fun; but getting repeatedly boned by some of the random "features" in that part of the fight really sucks the joy out of it at times.

The whole of phase 2 is amazing, but the first time I saw that animation I was majorly wow'ed. It really feels epic. Hell of an adrenaline rush to be standing there in the middle of all this craziness and see a friend gobbled up just feet from you. Awesome fight, overall.

lol Zellyn that thread crashed our forums :(

I got triple mind flayed once. That was a pretty quick death, even though I'd just downed a shadow protection potion.

I die in boring ways. :(

I'm curious as to how you feel as a guild that moved from the FFXI HNM scene to WoW raiding. Do you prefer one over the other? I ask because the most HNM stuff I ever did was Hakutaku, Xolotl and some early-Tiamat wipe-patrol (75 WHM), and the most WoW raiding I've done is wiping to Rajaxx in AQ20 :unsure:

Aside from that, all I know I've garnered from watching some sky gods/kings fights over by brother's shoulder and read about stuff from some people in Kupo/Paradise Oblivion.

Zellyn: WoW raiding is imensely more rewarding than FFXI raiding. FFXI had virtually no progression; when you gear up in FFXI the only gain from it is the ability to kill the same mob faster so you can gear up the rest of your guild. There has been very little addition to the HNM list for FFXI, and what has been added has been poorly implemented. Look at AV, a mob that takes 3+ months of farming pop items just to spawn - not to mention the mob hasn't been playtested and has been given every single OH SHIT ability known to the game (not to mention the HNMs that drop the pop items have terrible loot pools). In WoW you kill boss A so you can kill boss B. In FFXI you kill boss A so you can kill boss A faster. As of right now BG is only on Broodlord, but WoW has been so much more fun and rewarding than anything I have ever encountered in FFXI, stick with WoW :P. Sorry to go offtopic ^^;