Despite the feedback raid bosses became even more reliant on weakuras that manage group assignments such as dispel, interrupt, soak, spread. These third party scripts are usually clunky, buggy and only work if liquid’s developer is within 20 meters.
I remember when progressing a boss was about attuning to mechanics, not spending 100 wipes to try and get addons to work for everyone just to watch them break the next week for no reason. Having to reinstall them several times until they magically start working again.
I know, I know, thousands of guilds killed bosses like broodtwister, so maybe I just suck. Maybe my whole guild does. Maybe we didn’t donate enough on their patreon to get more stable versions.
I’m not mad, just disappointed. Echo of neltharion, smolderon and now broodtwister show a direction that’s simply unfun for a video game.
Do people like writing matrices in raid notes? Spending hours memorizing world marker locations? Following instructions from a script to the letter on where to stand, when to press your skill?
Isn’t this literally what casuals make fun of when high end content comes up in a discussion?
Am I missing something, or is it really that we just suck? I’d really like to know because the last few raid seasons have been the most depressing experience in my WoW “career” but if this is what we can expect from now on I want to at least know, so I can just move on.
I don’t like to use addons and it was one of the reasons that caused be to stop raiding. At one time I sat and shuffled through dozens of guilds in wowprogress and almost any of those required use of certain addons (those who raid mythic anyway).
I tried to play classic cataclysm, found a guild and they heavily used weakauras. Didn’t even killed all the bosses, so the whole point is moot for me.
So I kind of support you. Right now I’m playing classic and I played low M+ before, so it’s not like I’d stop playing WoW altogether over this issue, PuGs allow one to go quite far without much responsibilities. However inability to join guild raids is one of the factor that could cause me to drop WoW and that was the main reason I played this game for many years.
Yikes. Whilst i’ve never touched a mythic raid nor have any intentions to do so in my entire WoW time, you still have my sympathies.
I’ve heard this was the case from friends and fellow raiders alike who go for that extra bit of challenge and the horror stories familiar to this post is enough to keep me away from touching it with even a barge pole. I only hope the attitudes and design points change because the fun of challenges kind of loses the point when it gets like this…
Bliz makes mechanics to encourage communication / on the spot thinking, then players choose to automate the process instead. You can absolutely do ovinax without a weakaura at this point, you have enough leeway and the dps check isn’t really there any more so players / a player can dedicate more mental bandwidth to communicating people’s locations.
Ovinax is the only boss in Nerub Ar Palace that requires players to openly communicate with eachother on the fly.
If the whole raid was just like the first 4 bosses it’d be a very very boring tier.
I doubt any guild got (or will get) their first kill without weakauras by playing “as intended” and winging it.
Every guide clearly said failing to break a single egg cluster is a wipe condition, and that level of consistency cannot be achieved without addons so we saw no point in even trying. It’s too late for us, but I guess if there’s people who enjoy this it just means we are indeed too retarded for this game, which makes my decision all the more easy.
Honestly at this point I think it’s more that there’s no reason to try. The original version with the original dps check and reduced debuff duration you couldn’t handle on the fly, but now you could tell one person their job is just to list the names of the people who get the debuff during the mechanic and give them colours.
I don’t necessarily want to see blizzard just stop doing mechanics that require communication due to the community’s obsession with automation, but I do think if they want players to not feel compelled to look to automated solutions they need to design the fight understanding the additional mental bandwidth mechanics like that take to execute.
Communication being needed is fine. Binary checks like “do it perfectly or die” every time no exception is just poor design.
I’m not invested in raiding anymore having given it up a while back and maybe pugs are super active but the amount of guilds participating looks like its fallen off a cliff. These types of fights just turn people off raiding. If the overwhelming feeling is relief rather than joy at killing a boss then something is going wrong somewhere.
Is this specifically in regards to communcation mechanics or mechanics in general?
Because the boss immediately after Ovinax, Kyveza, is an extremely “Do it perfectly or die” boss and yet is one of the best fights Blizzard have designed in years.
You’re right there is more nuance to it than I was articulating.
If a boss has a signature move that is relatively straight forward that the fight revolves around a couple of times and you need to execute it perfectly or die - fine.
If you need to communicate / execute some intricate “thing”, or like Maiden of Vigilance you have to repeatedly rely on everybody to execute everything perfectly or wipe - not fine.
I guess the line becomes blurred because everything feels like its some combination of ‘communication’ and ‘mechanics’.
I realise too that what I detest may be the reason somebody else raids, but generally these marmite bosses feel like they put more people off than attracting them.
I don’t know enough about the fight to comment. But broadly speaking something on the last M boss is generally more acceptable to me than a roadblock on boss 5.
You have 8 seconds to assign 8 people to 4 marks and this happens up to 12 times in a fight. Even if you only get halfway on average and kill it in 100-200 pulls, the person will simply go insane and I doubt the assignment will be executed perfectly anyway. There’s a reason bossmods and weakauras replaced such callouts.
Communication is for tactics changes before the pull and CR callouts mid-fight. In the past it was also for recovering from a fail, but nowadays none of the characters have any utility/CDs in reserve so it’s replaced by “just wipe it”.
Mythic raids have always been about the most unforgiving mechanics and almost perfect execution.
Ovinax as a boss offers a challenge on 3 parts: Where to stand, what to interupt, when to stun.
Where to stand: The mechanic is pretty simple but you have to have all 18 people understand the spots that hit both eggs. After that you have the options:
Have a person mark the eggs and every one follows the assignment the addon puts on them when they get debuff.
Have all 8 people drop what they are doing and go in their respective eggs in the first 2 seconds. After that use the next 4 seconds for the raid leader to call on who to change (in case more than 2 people are in the same egg).
The first one is the easiest one to do and needs the less coordination and effort form the raid. That is the reason people use it.
What to interrupt: Abilities need to be interrupted because while one cast is survivable with defensives, 2 and more are a death sentence.
You can have a weak aura that automatically assigns people from the mrt note automatically.
You can assign 3 groups of 4 people to a single mob with a specific order. Then those people can join the in game voice chat (parallel to discord or TS), so they can hear only themselves. Through there they can communicate when someone interrupted so the next one knows its his time.
When to stun: This is arguably the easiest of the 3 because it is highly scripted.
You can use weak aura that shows you when to use specific spells.
You can have the raid leader call WHEN people should knockback/pull the mobs, and who/when to use their stuns when they are all together.
The fact that we use WAs most of the time, it is because it’s the easiest way compared to communicating every little thing. You can still do that, but it’s better to use that brain power elsewhere.
And keep that in mind, those bosses are the hardest challenge the game has to offer at any time. They are designed to need pretty good execution. At that level you cannot have interrupts going off without consequences (needed a defensive to be poped), or positioning not mattering.
And it’s ok to not liking that and going “that’s not for me”. The game is designed for a pretty big audience. The reason that the last bosses are that hard and then they get nerfed is because there are way better player than us playing.