Second, in terms of the difficulty of tuning things, nerfing an encounter that already has been defeated by many, many guilds is something that's much trickier than nerfing something that seems impossible. Where do you draw the line? Also, they doubtless have a larger-scale retuning in the works to go along with rumored consumables changes -- do they want to arbitrarily change Gruul/Mag and then change them again? Also, how much good would nerfing just those two fights do? If a guild can't muster the DPS to kill Gruul, how do you think they're going to fare on Hydross? If they can't motivate themselves to work on Gruul, how are they going to feel about the SSC trash? It'd just move the brick wall a yard back. I guess it'd be something, but I can understand the decision not to make piecemeal changes that don't really get to the larger issues.
The Vashj change however is also very reactive and may have unintended side affects. What if suddenly tweaking Vashj's adds makes heroic coilfang nagas easier/harder?
I do agree that its a tricky decision, and I am ok with them saying "ok guys wait till 2.1.0 for Gruul changes, we are overhauling a lot of stuff and want to test it all". I am NOT ok with them saying "DnT and Nihilum are stuck on Vashj, we better fix it for them right now." Even if the fix is just changing 1 line of code/data, developers should not be futzing around like that for an issue that is not game-breaking or urgent.
Vashj too hard or untuned? Too bad, wait for the 2.1.0 patch like the rest of us and the fix can go in there.
Heh, yeah those 3 Lair Brute pulls are stupid. Tune raid zone trash for how the raid will look when you engage the fucking boss you're clearing too? We keep 4 tanks in the raid/outside of zone so we don't wipe to the 3 Lair Brute pulls and generally just clear faster. But we sure as hell don't bring 4 tanks to Gruul.
The Vashj change however is also very reactive and may have unintended side affects. What if suddenly tweaking Vashj's adds makes heroic coilfang nagas easier/harder?
What...? Yeah, and what if hotfixing the Lurker Below makes the auction house eat everyone's items? Kind of silly.
I do agree that its a tricky decision, and I am ok with them saying "ok guys wait till 2.1.0 for Gruul changes, we are overhauling a lot of stuff and want to test it all". I am NOT ok with them saying "DnT and Nihilum are stuck on Vashj, we better fix it for them right now." Even if the fix is just changing 1 line of code/data, developers should not be futzing around like that for an issue that is not game-breaking or urgent.
Vashj too hard or untuned? Too bad, wait for the 2.1.0 patch like the rest of us and the fix can go in there.
I disagree with this. This change certainly doesn't benefit me, but any argument that changes that can be hotfixed in, should not be, out of some notion of "fairness," strikes me as nothing more than sour grapes. Face it, the front-runner guilds are beta-testing this content. No players have ever seen it before, and the devs have never had a chance to watch players attempt it the way they did with Gruul on the PTR. Of course the raid team is going to be looking closely at those guilds' attempts, because it's their first and only chance for direct player feedback on how their encounters are playing out in practice. They clearly saw an issue, and it was one that could be fixed quickly and easily, so they did it.
All bugs should be fixed. All imbalances should be corrected. If anything, argue that they should be hotfixing more (assuming a hotfix is an option for a given bug), not that they should be doing less.
To be fair, the Vashk change is also important - she's half of the keying needed for Mount Hyjal. A "quick fix" could leave her incredibly easy to kill for the next two weeks, granting a fwe guilds much faster access to content than envisioned.
Whilst I'm definitely not hopping on the band wagon of "Blizzard caters to uber guilds", I do think that they should just be putting *all* the raid changes in the same patch. I agree that they can't just tweak Gruul right now because of consumeable changes and overall power concerns, but the same also holds for Vashj, and hot fixing an issue on her does send out a very bad signal to the community about what is important and what isn't.
It doesn't help that I think a vast number of people across the game are curently holding their breath about 2.1 - it's now reached the stage where people are considering it a miracle patch, that will fix all issues. (Consumeables, raiding drops, mob difficulty, druid itemisation, holy priests - where does the list end?). It's incredibly ambitious for a patch even if you completely ignore the Black Temple. Even just updating their "Under Development" page with a short list of changes would help manage expectations at this point, and stop people panicking about why some things are fixed in hot patches and some aren't.
Let's be brutally honest here - we're all *hoping* for big changes, but if you actually read what has been posted from tigole, so far we don't exactly have much to go on at all.
What...? Yeah, and what if hotfixing the Lurker Below makes the auction house eat everyone's items? Kind of silly.
Or Firemaw spell reflecting? Sorry, I couldn't resist.
But yeah, I agree with you--more hotfixes are a good thing! Also I think there's a huge difference between something that is clearly killable (Gruul, Mag, etc.) and something that is fundamentally flawed (I'm assuming Lady Vashj was in this state to receive the hotfix).
Nerfing a boss that is already killable with heavy consumable use, without changing the consumables too, is more potentially problematic than nerfing a boss that is unkillable with heavy consumable use.
Generally Blizzard is pretty conservative about this stuff. Remember C'Thun?
We really don't have enough information at this point, so all I can do is (yes, I'm a hypocrite) speculate. What I know is that DnT and Nihilum both set Vashj aside and spent the end of their timer in TK, after less than a week, and this hotfix was handed down, after less than a week. I have to imagine that it really was well beyond the realm of possibility (do you really think Nihilum/DnT would have stopped working on Vashj with the world-first in sight otherwise?), and the devs watched some attempts and said, "Wow, oops, we fucked up."
"Too hard" or "too easy" are fuzzy grey areas and hard to discern. "Impossible" is black and white.
Second, in terms of the difficulty of tuning things, nerfing an encounter that already has been defeated by many, many guilds is something that's much trickier than nerfing something that seems impossible. Where do you draw the line? Also, they doubtless have a larger-scale retuning in the works to go along with rumored consumables changes -- do they want to arbitrarily change Gruul/Mag and then change them again? Also, how much good would nerfing just those two fights do? If a guild can't muster the DPS to kill Gruul, how do you think they're going to fare on Hydross? If they can't motivate themselves to work on Gruul, how are they going to feel about the SSC trash? It'd just move the brick wall a yard back. I guess it'd be something, but I can understand the decision not to make piecemeal changes that don't really get to the larger issues.
Well, I agree that tuning/nerfing Gruul is a much more delicate proposition than changes to Lady Vashj, but I still think doing Lady Vashj with a hotfix without addressing Gruul is a bad idea.
Fundamentally, as we've even seen on this forum, it's bad PR. People see Blizzard making changes to encounters that only a couple guilds have access to while they're utterly frustrated with encounters like Gruul, and rightfully are annoyed with Blizzard's priorities. IMO it's worth making changes to Gruul now, hotfix-style, even if they're conservative and will continue to be adjusted, just to give people a reason to continue throwing themselves at him.
Releasing the Black Temple in 2.1 when the vast majority of the raiding guilds, even fairly hardcore ones, haven't set foot in TK and are just starting SC is the same thing. There's no reason to release it, other than to prevent -- maybe -- the absolute top-end guilds from having to wait on new content. And on the downside, all the other not-quite-absolute-top-end guilds that want to be competitive just feel like they're falling further and further behind. IMO the fact that there's always new raiding content ready and waiting in-game is bad, in a way, because it doesn't let any guilds catch up with the DnT and Nihilums. There are a lot of guilds that want to be competitive with them, even though in truth they probably won't be. But as long as it's one continuous content race, they're never going to feel like they have a shot at it. However, if the content wass doled out such that it was split into periodic new content races every few months, with a bunch of guilds ready and waiting for the content, it becomes more interesting and competitive for all of them.
As far as moving the brick wall back, I think that's absolutely needed, because right now for guilds that are clearing Karazhan/Maulgar in a day or two and then running into Gruul, there's a whole lot of thumb-twiddling going on. If you don't have enough people for SC, or you're trying to get that last group attuned with extremely sub-optimal Gruul groups but don't want want to risk the morale hit of burning 2 hours of flasks/pots without a kill, there's just not a whole lot to do at this point. If most raiding guilds had Kara/Maulgar&Gruul/SC to clear at this point, at least they'd be busy. Right now there's both too much content available and not enough accessible, which on top of the beaten dead horse of consumable usage, is supremely frustrating. It's a big tease.
Anyways, I hope that wasn't too hardcore-vs-casual, because that's not how it was intended. Given the state of the raiding game I just really think Blizzard -- even though I'm sure making good changes -- is making some serious missteps in deciding what they address and how they spin the presentation of their priorities.
Note : This is information compiled by a EU-realms MVP poster, and is in no way official. It's simply a summary of what has been said in various blue posts.
I dont think a change to Gruul is tough or asking too much. Nerf his HP, problem solved. If they make changes to consumables at some point down the road it affects everything, not just Gruul.
Is Gruul supposed to be an entry level 25 man? If he is, he isnt currently. Fix that Blizzard. From my perspective as a member of a guild that downed Cthun and got halfway through Naxx before the pre-expansion malaise hit us, its two months into the expansion and the only entry level 25 man stuff I see is Maulgar. One fight.
Releasing the Black Temple in 2.1 when the vast majority of the raiding guilds, even fairly hardcore ones, haven't set foot in TK and are just starting SC is the same thing. There's no reason to release it, other than to prevent -- maybe -- the absolute top-end guilds from having to wait on new content.
The reason to release it is that it's done. It was slated for inclusion in the retail release, and was pushed back a bit to polish it. When you have something that's almost complete but needs polish, you don't set it aside for months. As I said in the other thread, BT in 2.1 is just finishing the content that was once promised for release.
Anyways, I hope that wasn't too hardcore-vs-casual, because that's not how it was intended. Given the state of the raiding game I just really think Blizzard -- even though I'm sure making good changes -- is making some serious missteps in deciding what they address and how they spin the presentation of their priorities.
I agree, but at a certain point you just have to throw your hands up and accept the bad with the good. Blizzard sucks at keeping open channels of communication with its players and at speaking with a clear and consistent voice. As a result, when Tigole or Kalgan or the like post something somewhere on the forums (BTW, there's a new sticky about 2.1 cleave changes in R&D!), it gets frantically copied and reposted everywhere. Remember the debacle in the now-locked Raiding Endgame thread where a half-dozen posters pasted Tigole's post on the issue, one page after another? It shouldn't be that way. I'd love to see really comprehensive posts laying out their understanding (or lack thereof) of the current problems with the endgame, and more concrete indications of what's being done to address those problems. Obviously I understand that Blizzard can't commit to promising features X, Y, and Z until they are finalized, coded, and tested, or they will piss people off. But there's a middle ground that isn't being used.
But, like I said, that's just par for the course for Blizzard. Great games, bad communication. And it's a package deal.
That is just unbelievable to me. 3 or 4 guilds are currently on Vashj, and they are hotfixing her ASAP. Dozens, if not hundreds, of guilds aren't good enough to kill Gruul at the moment and that isn't being fixed till 2.1.0. And DnT/Curse have only been on Vashj less than week, whereas we've been bashing our heads on Gruul for 4+ weeks now.
If this is your opinion that bleeding edge content should be ignored I'm curious why are you on this forum instead of the Blizzard forums.
Originally Posted by spronk
Yes, yes I understand tweaking Gruul (and Magtheridon) is perhaps more delicate than Vashj, but hell, they can easily drop his hp 25% on the server (no client changes) and that would allow a LOT more guilds to progress. I truly don't understand Blizzard's priorities anymore.
Dropping his HP by 25% would be the absolute worst change they could do to him. The fight needs length or its a joke and the fake patch notes really has suggested one of the better solutions where instead of adjusting Gruul's life you adjust the damage he does or adjust the damage increase of Growth. This would mean you can last longer into the fight without your tank getting 1 shot. Much better instead of saying well if the random number generator favors you then only have 1 shatter total to deal with.
A lot of people seem to miss out on seeing how some of the early fights were tuned like Nightbane were really good indicators to bosses like Hydross and good tests to how ready you were for them.
Dropping his HP by 25% would be the absolute worst change they could do to him. The fight needs length or its a joke and the fake patch notes really has suggested one of the better solutions where instead of adjusting Gruul's life you adjust the damage he does or adjust the damage increase of Growth. This would mean you can last longer into the fight without your tank getting 1 shot. Much better instead of saying well if the random number generator favors you then only have 1 shatter total to deal with.
Right. Drop his HP by 25%, and will people stop stacking shadow priests and warlocks and using mass consumables? No. Only the guilds that already kill him will say "Yay, we can stop spending so much gold now," but for those learning the fight, all it'll do is allow gold to substitute for skill. Currently on Gruul, you need consumables AND execution (or luck if he bugs out, but let's ignore that). If they just nerf his HP, you'll need consumables (or uniformly superb gear and a somewhat stacked raid) OR execution. Brute-force kills where you lose 1/3 of your raid to the first two shatters but burn him down anyway because he has fewer hp wouldn't be a positive addition to the game.
Oh, btw if you want to complain about something. I would say why aren't people complaining how Blizzard is bundling all their eggs into one basket and not several content patches over time.
Edit: Also if you think Shatter is fundamentally flawed then reducing his HP doesn't address this. Imagine Heigan if instead of the pattern being fixed it was instead like Simon Says where you watch Heigan blink around then have to remember where to move to. Alright well this would be beatable but I can see a lot of guilds having trouble then lets say its tuned so in theory you have to go through 3 phases. Would the correct solution be too fix the dance or reduce his HP?
The reason to release it is that it's done. It was slated for inclusion in the retail release, and was pushed back a bit to polish it. When you have something that's almost complete but needs polish, you don't set it aside for months. As I said in the other thread, BT in 2.1 is just finishing the content that was once promised for release.
True, and I work in game development so I definitely understand how much lead time there is in developing and releasing something. But they could absolutely sit on Black Temple for now and continue to tune and polish it while they wait for guilds to get to a point where they're waiting and salivating for it. And it's not like Blizzard has a great track record of tuning/testing their new instances upon release -- they could certainly keep it in QA for another patch or two and release it fully tested and tuned. In fact, it may be more work to release it pre-consumables-changes and then have to re-tune it after those changes.
I remember how excited we were when AQ and Naxx were released, because we were ready and hungry for them. I looked forward to those content patches for for weeks, and was damn near giddy going into those instances for the first time. Contrast that with the release of BT, which elicits a spectrum of responses that range from "I guess that'll be nice when we get to it" to "dammit why aren't they focusing on where I'm stuck right now".
But, like I said, that's just par for the course for Blizzard. Great games, bad communication. And it's a package deal.
Yep, sadly, it's true. But at least we can post here and hope that Blizzard's reading and trying to do a better job. Like with those likely fake 2.1 patch notes, I can hold out hope.
All bugs should be fixed. All imbalances should be corrected. If anything, argue that they should be hotfixing more (assuming a hotfix is an option for a given bug), not that they should be doing less.
All bugs should (theoretically) be fixed. However, anyone who has worked a day in the software industry knows that there are priorities of bugs. Much of the time they are categorized by number of people affected and if there is a work around or not.
Apparently blizzard (engineers) consider workarounds (consumables) to be more than enough to warrant not hot-fixing Gruul even though the impact on their user base is much much larger. They are also looking at Vash and noticing something that makes the encounter impossible (no workaround) even with every consumable in the game.
However, fixing a bug without a workaround may not be the best solution if it affects a small enough part of the userbase compared to the other bugs that are more visible. The decision on what to fix first should not be made by engineers it really needs to be made by the customer relations / management type of people. (this post is coming from an engineer) This hotfix looks to be engineer driven and not management driven. Engineers can't stand to leave some bug without a workaround out there even if there is something that they really should be working on more. (2.1.0).
When they nerf Gruul the people who were stuck on him will then be stuck on Hydross anyway.
The consumable issue needs to be done to allow for the proper tuning of content to the point where it is more progressional than it is atm.
Will people seriously believe everything is fixed when going from Kara + Maulger --> Kara + Maulger + Gruul ?
The wall isnt gone, they just moved it around the corner.
An easy change to nerf Gruul would be making his ground slam be timed exactly. Not the +/- 45 seconds.
If it was timed people could get to the safe spots with relative ease without losing dps.
Our guild just spend two nights wiping on him. Half the time it was the OT getting agro from the MT just for a split second and the MT getting Hurtful striked. The other was from him growing to much because ranged would move to safe spots and sit there not dps for a good 30 seconds because ground slam was delayed.
The decision on what to fix first should not be made by engineers it really needs to be made by the customer relations / management type of people. (this post is coming from an engineer) This hotfix looks to be engineer driven and not management driven. Engineers can't stand to leave some bug without a workaround out there even if there is something that they really should be working on more. (2.1.0).
How much time do you think they're spending on fixing Vashj's adds?
The difficulty of Gruul and Magtheridon, the desirability of raid gear, and the place of consumables in this game are not "bugs". Bugs are issues with KT despawning. Fixing these larger issues, the ones you want addressed and the ones slated for attention in 2.10 takes time, a lot of it, and a helluva lot of testing tuning etc. Gurgthock illustrated why one easy fix (Gruul HP flat reduction) is not a good choice.
DOT and rot.
Travian: Phased Weasel, -144 | 61, Damascus.
Like with those likely fake 2.1 patch notes, I can hold out hope.
How about instead of just likely confirmed fake by the guy who's made like 5 other fake patch notes (Spybot). He revealed something about the patchnotes that pretty much gives it away.
NEW: KDM() - Now functions for Tauren Druid characters.
This was just a shoutout to Caydiem and not a nonsensical UI change.
Edit: heh btw just want to clear up this wasn't really directed to you but more to those who the patch notes really confused and then people spreading false info like Tigole accidently posted them on the forums (look in The Shit Heap if you don't know what I'm talking about).
The other was from him growing to much because ranged would move to safe spots and sit there not dps for a good 30 seconds because ground slam was delayed.
This suggests you change your strategy. I have a "safe spot" for example (simply a rock I hop on). With 36 yd range, I can stand about 2 yds in front of it and nuke Gruul. When the "Ground slam soon" warning comes up, I point my camera at the rock, hold down left mouse (camera look) and hover my finger over the right mouse button (move character in the direction of camera). As soon as ground slam begins to cast I slam down the right mouse button, which executes an instant about face of my character. I usually have plenty of time to cover the yard or so and leap to the rock.
If life has been getting crazy or Gruul is positioned farther away, I don't always make it to my safe spot. However, running and leaping at the wall during ground slam still limits my possible trajectories, and I often just get thrown against the wall anyway.
Finally, with reasonable scattering around your room almost all shatter patterns are survivable, esp if everyone is topped off (as they should be), people look where they're headed while in the air, and attentive priests get shields on those who look like they're in a bad way.
DOT and rot.
Travian: Phased Weasel, -144 | 61, Damascus.
Praetorian I understand your devil's advocacy, but to some extent, encounters like Gruul will always be what they are. This encounter has about a dozen things in common with a certain horrid encounter in AQ40 - the difference this time is its the 2nd raid encounter, and an absolute requirement for progression - if this was a random ssc boss, no one would care. You just can't fix what is already a complete failure.
There are a number of ways to fix things to tune for difficulty - which is the problem here, moreso than consumables, which is a different and yet related problem.
You can literally nerf a mob (ala HP), and make the encounter straight up easier for everyone. It would then be doable by most guilds, as it should be, and a joke to anyone who already has killed him. I mean who cares, guilds who have killed him even 4-5 times can't possibly be thinking "I can't wait to do that again!" each week.
You can make the fight more like shade of aran, or Cthun: skill based, rather than gear and consumable check.
The problem is Gruul will never be a truly skill based test unless the shatter mechanic is made to be even worse... which already is a terrible design. I think they should just nerf the shit out of him, and let people enjoy SSC, because SSC is so vastly superior to Gruul that perhaps they won't lose all their loyal raiding base if they get in there before summer.
Nuke the shit from orbit, its the only way to be sure.
How much time do you think they're spending on fixing Vashj's adds?
The difficulty of Gruul and Magtheridon, the desirability of raid gear, and the place of consumables in this game are not "bugs". Bugs are issues with KT despawning. Fixing these larger issues, the ones you want addressed and the ones slated for attention in 2.10 takes time, a lot of it, and a helluva lot of testing tuning etc. Gurgthock illustrated why one easy fix (Gruul HP flat reduction) is not a good choice.
As any game/software developer will tell you (I'm a wii developer) the issue is not the code change, its the effect on the rest of the game. There have been a few times where a minor change I or someone else did (literally 1 line changes) have severely broken other parts of the game. Every time I think Blizzard is growing up in terms of software development they end up doing dumb shit like this. I do think the TBC launch was great, very well done and tested.
And yeah, in the console world everything is product management driven. My team lead assigns bug fixes to me, which are prioritized by a daily meeting between product management, QA, and dev lead. I don't get to pick and choose which bugs I want to fix, which sometimes drives me crazy since I know I made a small mistake which would be trivial to fix, but they won't let me. You can always tell the vets from the newbies though by how much time they spend in proto/coding, since once you commit your code it gets much, much harder to change it.
FWIW once Onyxia was tuned it was very much an encounter where you regularly lost people in PUGs and still managed to kill her, as long as you had competent tank/healers. My druid alt ran at least a dozen Onyxia PUGs, mostly with people in greens, and every time half or more of the raid would be dead by the time she dropped. But it was still great fun, and people who wouldn't ever step foot in Naxx/AQ40 participated and had fun. Too bad Gruul is nowhere near this level of "Onyxia style encounter".
Finally, with reasonable scattering around your room almost all shatter patterns are survivable, esp if everyone is topped off (as they should be), people look where they're headed while in the air, and attentive priests get shields on those who look like they're in a bad way.
This is what we were originally trying to do. We just don't have the player compitence level to pull it off. Our GL had to start assigning spots and calling out when people should move to their spots.
I do not exagerate when I say we don't have a skilled player base in our guild.
We have 8 to 10 exceptional players. 5 to 10 average players and the rest are just bleh.
So we work around this by micromanaging the suck. And it worked fine Pre-TBC, at least until 4h.
Which brings up all kinds problems when we finally do get into SCC and take on Hydross.
All bugs should (theoretically) be fixed. However, anyone who has worked a day in the software industry knows that there are priorities of bugs. Much of the time they are categorized by number of people affected and if there is a work around or not.
Apparently blizzard (engineers) consider workarounds (consumables) to be more than enough to warrant not hot-fixing Gruul even though the impact on their user base is much much larger. They are also looking at Vash and noticing something that makes the encounter impossible (no workaround) even with every consumable in the game.
However, fixing a bug without a workaround may not be the best solution if it affects a small enough part of the userbase compared to the other bugs that are more visible. The decision on what to fix first should not be made by engineers it really needs to be made by the customer relations / management type of people. (this post is coming from an engineer) This hotfix looks to be engineer driven and not management driven. Engineers can't stand to leave some bug without a workaround out there even if there is something that they really should be working on more. (2.1.0).
The difference is, this is a hotfix issue. Changing the hitpoints of spawns server side can be done now. I would guess they've already made whatever changes to pots, Gruul, and Mag internally, and are undergoing internal tuning. So would you rather have those engineers sitting around waiting to for QA to say what else needs to be done, or pushing out simpler, crucial hotfixes to obviously broken content? I agree, PR-wise they should probably not say anything about bleeding-edge hotfixes until they release something earlier in the same day about what they are fixing with Gruul, say. (In fact that's probably why there's a some post telling us what we already knew about cleave).
Patches =/= Hotfixes.
BTW, the other nice shout-out in the fake patchnotes is the bit about the "Spybot" schematic. Classy.
03/20/07, 11:50 AM
Similar Threads
