So, we killed him last night, shortly before Tigole made his post finally responding to the LoS trickery employed by every guild to have killed him since his breaths were added. I just wish that he had posted earlier. Obviously, if the post had come before, or even during, our kill, we'd have called it off. But, really, the post should have come last week. After initial kills by EC and NA, and then DE, probably 50% of the traffic on the Raid & Dungeons forum was about the use of LoS to avoid Chromaggus's breath while meleeing him, and the legitimacy of such a tactic. There's no possible way that the raid devs were not aware of the situation. In the face of that, what did we get? A post about Chromaggus that didn't touch on this crucial issue in the slightest. I understand that internal workings may take longer to percolate than some of us realize, but even so, all it would have taken was something along the lines of "We are aware that the legitimacy of the recent Chromaggus kills has been brought into question by some -- we are investigating and will elaborate once we are able." Why couldn't something like that have been posted?

When people were exploiting fear to bypass the unintentionally impassable (sound familiar?) gate in Vael's room in the earliest days of BWL, barely 12 hours later there was a blue post calling it an exploit and all GMs were told to port anyone they saw inside out of the zone. When people kited Firemaw to kill him, they hotfixed him within 2 days to make him faster and immune to CoEx. When people killed him in Vael's room using the ramps for LoS, they made him leash on the stairs. When people were using LoS to force Vael to BA certain people, Blizzard made BA ignore LoS. When people discovered that the Collectronic module from the UBRS quest would pop Razorgore eggs, it was changed within 24 hours.

When three guilds trivialized the Chromaggus encounter by using LoS to avoid his most dangerous abilities, nothing was done. Nothing was said. Not for seven full days, during which a debate raged on the forums, dominating all other subjects of discussion, and finally ended with a whimper, as a hesitant consensus formed among defenders and opponents of the LoS tactic alike: Please, Blizzard, let us know.

Instead, we were left with silence.

As anyone who followed R&D last week knows, I was one of the most vocal opponents of what I saw as a clear LoS exploit. I spent days arguing, waiting for vindication. And on the other side, guilds claimed to have GM permission, rightly noted that it's not my game and that Blizzard, not I, is the arbiter of what is allowed and what is not. Blizzard's silence was deafening. Once NA's explicit strategy was fully publicized, more and more guilds began to openly employ it. None were proud of what they were doing and all hoped for a change to the fight, but more and more guilds did it, and time passed with no reaction or any official word that the tactic violated any rules. I still felt that it should be against the rules. But as all the posters said, I'm not a dev, and my opinion doesn't count for much. After a full week, I posted here and here that I was giving Blizzard one more day to say something and then assuming it was allowed. We weren't the only guild to reach that conclusion.

No, we were never "supposed to" use a strategy like this. That was obvious. It wasn't intended. But there are a lot of unintended things in the game that aren't exploits and that Blizzard allows until it gets around to fixing them. All the guilds that cheesed their way around 2 of Ragnaros's 3 defining abilities when they killed him for 4+ weeks (i.e., every guild in the game) weren't killing him the way Blizzard intended him to be fought. But it wasn't something they considered against their rules, either, or, if they did, they never said as much.

After a week of waiting and watching and continuing to beat our heads against the impossible Chromaggus the "right" way, we grudgingly concluded that LoS on Chromaggus was being handled like WoR on Ragnaros, and we went ahead with our cheesy kill.

The raid content in WoW is fun and challenging, and I think we're all enjoying ourselves. But at the high-end, the raiding game is not purely Player vs. Environment. We are also inevitably competing against other guilds, on our own server, and across the world, to be among the first to overcome the new challenges Blizzard has to offer. Blizzard is, of course, cognizant of that. Their raid devs come from that background, and the understand the mentality. Cutting-edge raiding is a metagame unto itself, and like any game, rules and structure are required for it to be an enjoyable experience. Please, give us those rules. Enforce them. As I wrote on the Raid & Dungeon boards a couple of days ago:
The post made on Tuesday night was a start, but there should be more. Clarify the rules of the game now, in the abstract, and you'll avoid inevitable controversy and hardship down the line. Please?

In the meantime, I think that Blizzard should go through and remove the loot from all guilds that killed Chromaggus in the past 10 days or so (including, of course, ours). None of it was earned, and the guilds that had access to Chromaggus and yet refused to exploit him should not be disadvantaged.

All of that said, we're looking forward to fighting a properly tuned Chromaggus in 1.7. It should be a blast.

-Gurgthock