Anyone in a raiding guild knows exactly what "farm status" means. Generally, a group of raiders spend time learning an encounter, press buttons in the right order, and collect loot. I say generally because every now and then Blizzard designs a boss who defies their general design rules. This is the case with Prince Malchezaar in Karazhan.

Our 3rd week and kill took us 12 attempts due purely to bad luck with infernals. Everyone has seen the fight well over 50 times now. What was Blizzard thinking here? Why design an encounter which throws elements like infernals into the equation? It's so incredibly frustrating to break through 30% and be totally boxed in, only to hear on Vent:

"Son of a.. right on top of us.."

I don't think I've ever seen another fight more poorly designed than this one is. Hell, even Vaelastrasz's randomness with healers can be compensated for. But these infernal spawns are really out of people's control, to a large extent. There's only so much you can do with movement.

And it's enough.

Infernals drop every ~30 seconds. If you aren't in a wide-open space, at 65% or so, have the tank move Prince to the largest open space currently available. That guarantees lots of wiggle room even if you get as unlucky as possible after 60%. By the time it's mathematically possible for you to be truly hemmed in, he should be below 30%, and you can relocate again if needed. You really don't want to have everyone run across the area when he's in phase 2 (though you can, with shield wall, or some extremely pro healing), but otherwise it's no big deal.

Prince is a well-designed fight, and tons of people one-shot him every week despite "bad luck." Sorry.

Edit: Furthermore, some element of randomness can be a welcome element -- it requires players to adapt and think on the fly, which is what keeps PvE content fresh and fun. If the infernals dropped in a fixed pattern every time, the fight would be tedious, and it'd just be a new take on Heigan Phase 1.

You're aware your tank can drag him through the Infernal hellfire to get to a safe spot yes? We had to take him through one when we got boxed in at the start of phase two. Ok so its not fun, and you certainly dont want to be risking it at any point other than just after a Shadow Nova, but its doable. If you are wiping 12 times to it, I suggest that you plan a route for where to move if a infernal lands on you to prevent the occurances of getting boxed in as much as possible.

On our last kill we had an Infernal land on top of the MT and melee right at the start of phase two and [edit] I lie, apparently it was at the end of phase two, not the start of phase 3[/edit]. Its not really a problem to deal with providing you start moving to a sensible position once you see the fireball dropping. If you're getting backed into a corner 12 times in a row, then you need to change your strategy for moving him. Theres only 4 or 5 infernals up at once. To get trapped more than one deep, you would have to be ultra unlucky, or not have planned your route correctly.

Premptive movement, even if you arnt yet "boxed in" at 65% is a pretty good idea. Maybe start in the back right corner and move to the back middle at that point. I think some adjustment is probably in order given that most people who are working on the seeming randomness of Prince just came from Aran, a pure execution fight.

We had a bad night on prince last night but it was mostly of our own doing. It is possible to get screwed but it is also possible to win with a man down.

Also as most people have likely noticed karazhan on farm is really not that bad of a time commitment. We were at prince after around 3.5-4 hours and miraculously our tank had not eaten a single death yet. To have one encounter that poses a challenge is not too much to ask.

http://img228.imageshack.us/img228/1...ge00001fn9.jpg


Sometimes there just ain't enough room in the world.

Default partyframes?

Yea I'm going to have to disagree with the OP, I mean besides the occasional bug the Prince is a very well designed encounter, and its the kind of bad luck that you can mostly control. There are many, many encounters where luck has a much larger impact than in this one.

Without using a similiar positioning to elendrils, I find the fight's learning curve to have a high degree of variance, which I dislike.

Once the fight is on farm, there are probably very few infernal sets that are crippling, although there are many which can be very difficult and require a very fast cohesive response.

As the raid leader responsible for teaching the fight (I beat it in beta, a long time back now, and have been going through the learning curve over and over with different groups, so I feel confident saying I am familiar with it) to new people and always going with the newer group, I find the degree of randomness in the difficulty to be an irritant during the learning phase.

That said, I don't feel nearly as bad about karazhan as I do about gruul.

(This is literally what goes through my head every time I think about gruul)
Double his hp when we potted him into the ground indeed. Why this time the buff instead of the nerf bat. Every other time you've reached for the nerf bat, but this time crazy buff guy won and you buff the mob and not nerf the ridiculous t5 or better stats through consumables?

/headesk

Prince I just sigh a bit and know there's going to be the deaths to "unfortunate infernals for a new crew". Eventually it's farm and everyone thinks it's easy.

Anyone in wow doing a study on how people learn? Lots of source material here.

Elendril, there's an Infernal that can land right where the totems are in that screenshot. Your position isn't safe. It's a good spot because there's only a couple infernals that can screw things up, but it's not 100% safe.

Myself and our raid considers prince to be one of the easiest encounters in the entire zone (and for the best loot!). It really just seems like a tank gear check to me. Hungarfen on heroic in underbog is very similar to prince in terms of execution and both are easily, reliably, reproducable kills. Maybe if you have some people who are bad about pinning themselves in they can go practice Hungarfen until they don't get hit by spores anymore.