I work as a game designer (nothing remotely related to MMO's) and I rave about Naxx to my guildmates pretty often. Nearly every fight evinces a unique design idea. Grobbulus is great, by the way.

So what does Loatheb have? Start with Corrupted Mind. Awesome idea. Next, you have to prevent the raid from stacking healers to overcome a raw numerical requirement. So make it a DPS race. That's nothing new--it's Patchwerk.

Now you can almost see where this is going. You have a fight where the DPS can't get heals because of already existing mechanics, and you want them to die after a fixed amount of time. It tidies up an encounter idea with some neat design (Fungal Bloom isn't really relevent--you could have thrown that into any fight that needed to have a little more "going on").

But then what happens? It's not this guy's fault that consumables exist in the game. It's true, though, that there's little he could have done about it. Maybe he realized at some point that Corrupted Mind wasn't such an awesome idea after all, because in the context of the rest of WoW (which has consumables), it runs into a conceptual problem. By reducing spell-based healing to a miniscule amount, the aggregate effect of consumables, which have remained constant, becomes overwhelmingly important.


So what does he do, when there's maybe a week before he has to have his content locked down for the PTR, and he has this fight to deal with. You obviously can't balance it for a raid without potions and just leave it at that. Basically:
1) Have Loatheb hang a "no potions" sign on his door.
2) Scrap the Doom idea and give him a vicious Berserk.

1 is horribly unpalatable. There's no way to hide that in flavor, and it's not even great for design. It ruins a certain feeling that consumables have always had, as relible aid for players. Once they break a barrier by taking them away from us for a certain fight, they've lost something.
2 just leaves you with a phenomenally boring fight. Expensive or not, the potions are at least something that the players have to do during Loatheb, a fight already lacking in real action of any kind. It would barely have been worth putting into the zone (especially with Patchwerk already existing).

What would you have done if this fell into your lap?

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Remember a long time ago (maybe during BWL) when you said in a similar discussion that Blizz could never make a healer run out of mana? That's not literally what's going on at Loatheb, but I think the parallel is clear (and I'm out of time here, so I won't spell it out at the moment).

How the game has changed since then.

The main flaw of Loatheb is that it requires Shadow Protection Potions, not that it requires potions.

Sapphiron tests healer mana quite a bit but instead of Shadow, dirt-cheap Frost pots makes the fight a lot more palatable.

It's not just the shadow prot pots, it's all the other crap like fort pots, health regen pots, stamina food, etc...etc...that really make it a pain. I'd honestly rather just have it be a stacking debuff that each time lowers your total health by like 10% or something until it outright kills you. Just have Loatheb proc a cure or something on the MT, or hell, Blizzard is so fond of forcing shield wall rotations and the like might as well just make it so that if you get down to the 6th or 7th AE suddenly every swing becomes a potential insta-gib and really puts pressure on your healers.

The problem there is that potions take a considerable amount of money out of the economy indirectly by using up farmable materials. What would be the use of Herbalism/Alchemy if the potions weren't useful?

A variation on that would be to have Loatheb himself drop ~80 pots. This would require you to farm extensively while learning the counter but once on farm status, significantly reduce the gold invested per clear.

Difference of opinion then. If the theme is self-preservation then they had to know people would use shadow prot pots, in which case the serious drain on your guild bank or the mental state of your guild farmers is intended. So a magical chest that keeps refilling itself kinda beats the point.

Another alternative would be to make it non-magical damage doing a 30~40ish% of your total health in damage each AE. Eliminates the need for shadow pots and all the +hp gimics. In fact, you'd end up going out of your way to find gear with the lowest amount of +stamina on it. That way bandages/health pots and whatnot heal a greater % of your total health.

Anyways...

As others have stated though, the best idea would be to simply redesign the whole potion idea. Personally, I'd with they'd make them more like enchants. Basically potions are not consumed when used. They simply have slightly longer re-use timers and you can only have one potion, one elixer and one flask effect on you at any given time (similar to only having one boot, one wrist, one helm, etc...enchant at any given time.)

Consumables just remind me way too much of EverQuest AA's, just they're AA's that decay. And this makes me want to murder innocent kittens.

I liked the way they did the chromaggus sands. You could either have a full chromaggus again with clickable's dropping right from the trash, or a partial one with ingredients for a special craftable clickable dropping. You could even go as far as for the mobs to simply drop Shadow Oil. Instead of drops from mobs, you could have 'basins' or other repositories in the area before Loatheb that provide this. I think the plagued forest area is exceptionally suited for something like this.

This seemingly fixes so many issues there must be something terrible about it I overlooked.

In the original version of the fight that we saw on the PTR, Loatheb started casting Doom right away, and it was every 25 seconds. The Spores also spawned in random locations, from the four corner grates.

How about this, in the vein of the above suggestion:
1) Fungal Bloom makes you immune to shadow damage.
2) Fungal Bloom lasts 45sec instead of 90sec.
3) Spores spawn every 5sec instead of every 12sec, but spawn from the four corner grates in a rotating pattern.
4) Loatheb starts casting Impending Doom at 0:30 instead of 2:00.

Thoughts?

I agree with this. It's frustrating for me as a raid leader, too, because I've had very good players tell me that they simply can't raid anymore because while they love raiding, they don't have the time to spend hours every week covering repair costs, restocking consumables, etc. I can relate. I am very fortunate in that I was the first person on the server who could make dark iron stuff, dreamscale BPs, lionheart helm, and among the first for stronghold gauntlets. I'm a dragonscale/armorsmith with basically every plan, and people send me tells all the time to make stuff for them. That pretty much single-handedly subsidizes my raiding. I work probably 60-65 hours a week, and I simply wouldn't be able to sustain Naxx raiding if not for crafting income (or IGE -- but I wouldn't touch IGE, stubborn pride notwithstanding, with the guild bank assets sitting in my account). On a regular basis these days, we have people asking for loans so they can use a repair bot when one goes down. We're probably going to have to take a full week off from raiding at this point just so everyone can have some time to farm.

That's really not fun, is it? I mean, I understand how you need moneysinks, and I understand how you need to keep professions relevant, and so forth. You need repair costs taking money out of the economy, etc. But does anyone find running around picking dreamfoil "fun"? Does any healer find satyrs for demonic runes every week, like clockwork, an enjoyable pastime? In other games you lose experience when you die, and death during raiding or learning a new boss would mean you'd have to spend time out exp'ing again or else you'd de-level. That doesn't sound like fun, and it isn't, so the WoW specifically avoided that mechanic. But how is mandatory farming after or before every serious raid any different?

Sounds like it would be very, very easy.

Hmm, probably. Under the above, you could speed up Impending Doom significantly and make it affect all players but the tank, so that missing a spore basically becomes a death sentence.

And maybe make the spores spawn slightly less frequently over time, with that being the eventual limiting factor that wipes you?