Yeah, I know there's a Gruul thread. I think this issue is significant enough that it deserves its own.

Last night, we had a heartbreaking 1% wipe on Gruul. Today, we came back for the kill, only to find out . . . you can no longer use Invulnerability Potions, Divine Shield, Ice Block, or anything else to mitigate the damage from Gruul's Shatter. My opinion, derived from several days' worth of attempts without pots, as well as correspondence with members of other high-end guilds, is that this change renders him unkillable. We brought a flasked, potted, and stacked raid of our best players, and each attempt was an exercise in futility. Unless there's some bizarre element of the fight that several guilds are missing, he's just not doable.

Here's what I want to know.

(1) Was this change intended? A GM indicated that it was an "unintended issue we are looking into", but I am reluctant to believe that such a specific change to the encounter was unintended.
(2) If the fight is staying this way . . . what now? Karazhan is easy. Gruul and Magtheridon seem to be brick walls. Where are we supposed to go to progress? Not since the C'thun fiasco has the endgame seemed quite as intimidating (impossible?) as it does now.

I do like the fact that they are changing him so it doesn't require a level 70 raid to go farm a 45 potion for 2 +hours a day just to kill him. How ever changing using pots after several guilds have downed him and not changing shatter is retarded. That being said , They can do this 2 ways.

1: Reduce shatter damange

2: Reduce the range that shatter hits a party member

Right now with the randomness of the encounter , it's just too easy to die on a bad knockback with out having your "oh shit" button aka limited invul pots. Even with them this encouner was very very hard , changing this just makes him near impossible.

Honnestly, this fight sucks. It's soooo based on luck it's not even funny. They need to modify the knockback or the shatter dmg or something. Even if some guilds kill him in its current state (which I doubt), it won't change the fact that you may have to try 5, 10 or 20 times to find _the_ pull where you are lucky. It sucks.

Well the shatter timer is really strange and some kill videos you will notice they kill him with only 2 shatters total etc.

This fight was very hard already. It definitely needs tuning if this change stays in.

It's kinda funny in all actuality. Lots of fights have been luck based in the past, but nothing like this one. Many fights were thrown one way or another if you had Luck_A instead of Unluck_B. This fight is pretty much just reliant on the luck however. Learn the mechanic of what you need to be doing, and then wipe until every puzzle piece falls right into place, 4-6 times on the same attempt. The "ohshit" button used to be savior to this encounter, now it just needs a retune.

Yeah something about this fight just isn't "fun". I'm not sure what it is. Perhaps its just more of the same, when everything in karazhan seems far more interesting and generally rewarding. Its a shame he's not an "option." Cause we'd never bother. I'm sure he's still killable though...

The potion thing needed to be done, but, the encounter might need a subsequent adjustment. As praetorian said earlier, once we have to do him, we will... whatever, I'm whining and I know it. I just wish something cool was the first major hurdle in 25 mans (the ogre council was impressive for instance). Maybe i'm just on an island and way off base here.

It isn't fun because you have absolutely nothing to learn. For me at least, the fun part of raids is to progress with my guildmates, to feel that we are improving on an encounter, ect..
Even on loatheb, you could improve the spores rotation, optimize healing rotation, ... On gruul there is nothing. All the strategy is : try to move far from your teammates after a fully random kb, take all dps consumables you can and dps zerg. It's just absolutely stupid. You can do 10, 15, 20 trys during a night with 0 progress just because of bad knockbacks.

You hit the nail on the head. There's nothing interesting about randomness. In my mind, the best fix right now would be to increase the amount of time allowed to spread out. If it's designed to be conquered via communication, which I believe it is, do it that way. Make us go to open spots on the map after a random knockback, not get killed where we're thrown kind of deal.

Makes me wish we had done Gruul yesterday. The only forseeable change I could see them making is lowering his life to account for the fact that several people are almost guaranteed deaths now each fight.

A lot of posts (in general) make it sound like Gruul is unkillable now, and he surely isn't. However, having no workaround for some bad luck makes it not so awesome (although the use of Invul pots was a pretty ridiculous anyways workaround, thanks for another Loltheb). The suggestion of lengthening the time before 100% speed reduction is probably the best fix to the randomness. Like stated earlier, lowering the HP would just allow for less time / chance at bad luck, but not really require any skill over the actual mechanic.

The change makes it far from unkillable, just makes it cost more. We hadn't been using any invuln pots at all on any of the progress attempts and just used them on the actual kill pulls and consistently got to sub20% with 3-4 deaths usually without any non raid buffs at all. People just need to realize it requires complete raid stacking and all out consumables much more than the "random luck" being used as an excuse.

I wonder how many raid encounters in the expansion will just be problems you throw gold at. It strikes me as an incredible lack of imagination to come up with encounters which just require slamming every pot with a beneficial effect on you, then going out and getting world buffs. I mean I like Alchemy as a profession in that it opens up a lot of options for players and the buffs are nice, but honestly I've played other mmos which weren't so consumable-centric and had plenty of fun not having to farm tons of potions or just dumping a fat wad of gold into them because I'm not a better/smarter/more adaptable player by having more gold, I just don't spend it on retarded stuff.

So you want a scripted fight, with set variables...over a fight that has randomness that makes it feel a bit more..."real"?

Look at Karazhan encounters, look at High King. Those are well designed, based on skill and play and less consumables and gear. Granted, they are much easier encounters, but it is a good example.

No, dumb luck fights are like when you played (if you played) D&D and on a critical failure of an attack roll you critically fail and ram your sword into your eye because your DM is a sadistic fellow.

One of the things I like about many fights is mobs have to choose when they use certain abilities so its not exact and timed, it requires you to be able to react to a changing scenario and not just hit your buttons at the exact timing you need to. The Gruul fight is an example of pure dumb luck and its time to wipe, that isn't fun. The game decides you lose, not because you could've really done something about it, you just lose. There is nothing to learn in those situations.

You could say that about any mob in the game. Bad luck always has a chance do you in (especially when you're talking about damage on your tank), but good luck shouldn't throw the fight completely.

Luck can go both ways. Gruul is just there to pay us all back for getting that rare quest drop off the first mob. Shame on all of us.

Something we've been discussing (in our guild), and something I touched on in the previous Gruul thread - is the issue of HP, and doubling. Now, taking crits out of the equation (which may not be entirely feasible) - but it seems like this fight can be somewhat viewed as a gear check. While fighting Aran, we noticed the chance of success is hugely increased if your raid members have 9-10k+ HP, anything below 8k just doesn't cut it anymore - gone are the days of complete +damage or +healing stacking.

Could it be the case, that if everyone in the raid has 11k+ HP, with sturdy classes on more like 12-13k+ HP, that this fight becomes *significantly* easier? You can simply pair up on the shatter - and expect to take in the range of 7-8k damage from 1 player, but be sufficient distance from everyone else to take almost none from them. This solves a problem of spacing, as suddenly, you are only looking to find 12-13 zones for people to space out in - which leaves huge distances between them.

Provided you have the DPS output in the raid, and the efficiency of DPS nailed, maybe titans are a better option for people given the recent hotfix.

So what you're saying is that when you out gear the zone the fight becomes trivial? Well, yeah, I'm sure it would, but who would want to run the instance then?

No, i'm saying maybe people need to re-evaluate their choice of gear - I certainly know a lot of our guys are still set in the pre-BC mentality off looking at items, and purely rating them on the damage/healing given. There already exists items in game (from pre-Gruul), to push stats to these levels. My mage has a full damage set, and a stamina based set for encounters now. In stamina set, i'm pushing around 700 dmg (low, granted) - but with good hit, and crit - and 10k+ raid buffed - stick food and a flask on me, i'd be around 12k, and there are still some uprades i can take.

I wouldn't say using pvp gear, some kara loot - and some 5 man loot is 'outgearing' Gruul.

Well, I assumed that people in the raid are wearing stam heavy gear. That's just common sense given the encounter. You could prob see everyone get another 1k if they picked up all the lvl 70 blues/epics but I don't think that would give a dramatic performance increase. Flasking 25 people to beat an encounter isn't really appealing to me, either.