What's wrong with this picture?

This is getting pretty stupid.

[Further thoughts below, here.]

Resist over 300 should make the attack heal you imo

You really have to wonder if this is seeing any testing at all. Eyebeams and Giant Claw Tentacles in the stomach? Giant Claw Tentacles spawning on top of each other?

It's very disappointing.

C'thun is so much of a bad ass that he will impale himself with his own fleshy tentacles just to destroy you.

Oh, it is seeing testing. Guess who is doing it? ;)

Agreed 100%. I hate the corncob staff graphics, too.

See, the thing is, we thought they fixed these type of bugs in the fight a long time ago.

I don't see how they could intentionally leave so many bugs in phase 2.

You need to hide under the bridge!

Behold, the future of MMORPGs!

The problem with difficult fights and Blizzard's track record is that the moment they DO manage to make a challenging or unique fight, nobody will ever be bothered to beat it. The majority of the raiding community will be so shellshocked from every single new encounter in the entire game being massively bugged at release, that they'll just start to expect everything to be broken and impossible from the outset and wait for them to patch it down to a realistic level before wasting time on it past initial inspection.

Oh...

What kind of prick builds and gives a kid a battery operated toy for Christmas and neglects the batteries? Imagine this poor kid messing with the thing for weeks and trying to figure out what's meant to be fun about it. Imagine when he finally figures out that you either never meant for it to work in the first place (you heartless asshole), or were just too genuinely stupid to realize it wasn't functioning properly after the first day. At least if you'd owned up at day-1, the kid could have gone outside and played with a stick or something while you were getting the toy into an actual, functional state.

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It's incredibly annoying to have to question whether or not a boss is even working before you can begin to formulate strategies on how to beat it. Especially so, considering the customer service for the game are mostly unable to make comments on whether or not something is indeed broken. I just want a sticky on offical R&D forums that reads "Boned up boss of the week." and contains information on which bosses we should currently be waiting on fixes for.

I'm not worried about GM's tipping people off with answers to "Is this bugged?" They're never around, anyway. Here's a simulated conversation with one, since real conversations are the stuff of myth and legends:

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I can't wait to spend 2 weeks on the first boss in Naxxramas, only to have him completely bug out at 10% or something and have Blizzard admit 2 weeks later that "Yeah...there are massive and amazing problems with this content we've been internally testing for the past several months that we somehow missed due to being completely blind... Sorry. Working on it."

Of course, when Nax goes in, I'll first have to build up my next bank-hogging resist set, anyway. That gear won't be readily available until after the instance has been in the game for at least 3 months, so I don't guess I should be in a huge hurry for the bosses themselves to be done, after all.

No, because then they would surely remove such ill-gotten epics from shamelessly exploited content and maybe even issue 5-day bans to people for...wait a minute.

Quick! Let's go "kite C'thun to Vael's room"!

Ok, so does this mean I was right?
Square-Enix, and apparently Blizzard too.

Hah, people have managed to kill Absolute Virtue. Wanna know how? They got him stuck in a wall through which players can attack AV, but which removes his ability to retaliate (titanic AoEs like Meteor excluded).

They aren't cockblocks just like Plane of Earth, noooo not at all

GMs will almost never have access to the kind of information you're talking about. Even if they consulted a bug database, it wouldn't show up because it's not something that gets reported very often anyway. Even if it did, I bet 99% of GMs wouldn't be able to grasp the mechanics to a point where they were able to properly document and report it. You could explain "tentacles spawning in stomach -- is this intended?" and the GM would thank you for the report, apologize for not knowing, and write "Seethun not working" in their report.

The best bet to communicate with devs about fixing raid content is having recognized players make regular posts on the R&D forums. It doesn't need to be a sticky. The devs are smart. They know who's at the forefront and would probably read threads by those posters.

Basically, in my view, I can deal with the fact that the Blizzard testers are not going to be as good a "raiding guild" as top player groups. I can understand that sometimes they will need to overtune a fight to make sure it isn't too easy, and then tweak it downward to make it doable.

My complaint is simply that Blizzard hasn't actually changed a damn thing. They've "fixed" absolutely minor aspects of the fight that don't touch at all on why the fight is broken. And in the process, they break other things. The fight hasn't been getting any easier, and arguably in some ways right now it's a harder fight than what we first encountered back in 1.9.

Every patch, we see some tidbit in patch notes or we see that some C'Thun ability MPQ entries were changed, and we have to reinvent the wheel, retrying everything to see if he hasn't been changed.

I think that right now the situation is disrespectful of the playerbase. People are wasting dozens of hours of their lives on this thing, and players are burning out because of it. It's like giving a Rubik's Cube to someone who has a fanatic determination to solve any puzzle presented to him, without mentioning that a few of the stickers are in the wrong place and it's actually unsolveable. It borders on cruel. And as a raid leader, I fucking hate motivating people week after week, "Alright guys, they definitely made some changes to him this time, let's go check him out and finally get this done!" and having it turn out to be a colossal waste of everyone's time.

No boss has ever been this bad. Untauntable drakes became tauntable after 3 weeks. Ignite-every-30-sec Chromaggus was changed after 4 weeks. I suppose Ragnaros technically took 2 months from when Afterlife first spawned him in mid-February, but so few guilds were even up to Ragnaros I can understand if Blizzard didn't have much evidence from which to draw conclusions regarding needed tuning. Blah.

It's obviously not just a cockblock right now. It may well be one, but there's just no way that that's the only thing going on.

C'thun in 1.10.1 is demonstrably bugged and it is obviously so because absolutely ZERO testing was done. Previously, Eyebeams and Giant Claw Tentacles didn't happen in the stomach for an obvious, player-observable, reason. They broke the thing that prevented it in 1.10.1. At no point did anyone in Blizzard do even so much as spawn C'thun, teleport to the stomach, and see what happens.

If you're going to release "fixes" to the top mob in the game without spending even five (literally five) minutes testing the fixes, you're wasting your time; you're wasting my time; your insulting everyone who throws $15 a month at you for raiding content.

It's inexcusable. I've never been so much as tempted to quit before, but I sorely am now. If this is what we can expect from now on (excusing this with "maybe they're busy testing Nox" doesn't work because then they'll be busy testing the expansion and when that releases they'll be busy testing the lvl 65 raids, and so on, ad infinitum) then we should all start looking for other things to do with our hobby time.

The real problem I have right now is the lack of communication to the raider player base at all. Aside from the occasional comment in a private forum, no one has even gotten a "Fixing in an upcoming patch" from Blizzard yet.
With Burn-Out as high as it is, most guilds will be lucky to still have a raiding force left for Naxxramas.

the more i read threads like this one, the more I think that I made the right choice by quitting at least for a while.

The eye beam can now bounce into the stomach. Something new I have learned.

Not bounce. It can be targetted on people in the stomach, and then bounce around in there.

Before, the Digestive Acid debuff made you friendly to the "Armies of C'Thun" faction, which prevented C'Thun from spawning tentacles on you or eye tentacles from beaming you, while you were inside (unless you ice block/DS'd it off). http://www.thottbot.com/?sp=26476 When they redesigned the debuff, they somehow dropped this feature, so now you're fair game for all of C'Thun's abilities even while already inside him. It's awesome.

Yeah, I know better than to try to relay errors in raid game mechanics via GM petitions.

The problem is that it isn't even really about the current stomach tentacle stuff. Contrary to your posts on R&D on the topic, the reason C'Thun isn't beatable has absolutely nothing to do with beaming into his stomach. If Blizzard fixed that bug tonight he'd still be impossible.

Here's a rough breakdown of the evolution of the C'Thun encounter:

1.9.0 -- The original fight. Amazing, fun phase 1, with a wonderful learning curve. Everyone likes phase 1 (or at least liked it, the first 40 times). Phase 2 involved too many adds that spawn too frequently, with no discernable cap, hit too hard, have too much health, can interact in ways that cause unavoidable deaths, and generally collectively contribute to an encounter that seems balanced around a 60-man raid, not a 40-man.

[All of February and March passes with no changes to the fight.]

1.10.0 -- The small eye tentacles have their hp reduced from 3k each to 2300 each. Ok, that's nice I guess. Except in return, they are made immune to disorients (scatter shot, notably). So it's more or less a wash. None of the other factors that have made C'Thun topside stabilization/control impossible since day 1 are touched. Instead, C'Thun's stomach becomes impossibly brutal, with an unresistable rapidly stacking DoT that makes Rag v1.0 lava splashes seem pleasant. Oops?

1.10.1 -- They fix the stomach DoT to be less brutal, so that it's now fairly analogous to the 1.9.0 power level, but at the same time break the mechanism protecting you from C'Thun's attacks while inside.

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That's the extent of the tuning that has occurred in the past 2+ months. Basically, they tweaked and retweaked aspects of the fight that never really were a problem to begin with, and managed to break them in the process, while completely ignoring the elephant in the room. It's as if, in April 2005, Blizzard had looked at the Ragnaros encounter as it had previously existed, and lowered the damage caused by his melee fire DoT by 10%, and changed nothing else.

Either there's some complete gimmick that we aren't understanding ("If someone /dance's on the altar Giant Claws stop spawning"), or Blizzard genuinely doesn't understand why this fight is impossible. (Or they want it to be impossible -- but I don't think they do.)

Cap the number of giant tentacles that can be up at one time. Reduce their health. Reduce their spawn rate. Some or all of the above, and it'll be doable, albeit hard. As it stands now, it's just stupid. Imagine Nef Phase 1 if the drakonids spawned every 4 seconds instead of every 8, had 50k hp instead of 13k, and hit three times as hard. Would guilds be wiping endlessly because they need to L2P? No, it'd be impossible not because of some bug, but because the mechanics of the fight would be horribly out of tune.

Phase 1 is all about execution, but, contrary to rumor, Phase 2 really isn't buggy. It's just too hard.

Heh, I'd consider that a pretty significant bug. I seriously doubt dropping the faction component of the dot was intentional.

The glass-is-half-full viewpoint suggests that maybe the devs are perfectly aware of that, and aren't really intending C'Thun to be downed without another tier or two of gear. When Tigole first started describing AQ40 and C'Thun as far and away the hardest boss in the game, I was personally expecting him to be tuned for a level 70 raid, since the expansion details were just being announced. It doesn't seem like too much of a stretch that he really is tuned just where they would like him to be, and the gear doesn't exist to defeat him yet.

That intended difficulty doesn't really fit with the loot that's been datamined for him/Ouro, but that is pretty old data at this point. Or the loot could just be completely out of tune with the difficulty of the boss - what are the odds of that ever happening? :/

Gear wouldn't really help here. It'd have to be gear far, far superior to anything C'Thun might possibly drop. Give me a 30% raid DPS increase, and maybe.

And AQ40 was stated as more or less a lateral move from BWL, with only the end being harder. Naxxramas, forthcoming, should theoretically go far beyond the "C'Thun" level of difficulty.