There seems to be a very nasty interaction/overlap between a tentacle’s Slam and Putrid Waters, which instantly ticks for heavy damage. I have been one-shot by this combination due to bad luck killing me in less than a single cooldown with no time to react.
Suggestion: adjust timings/boss logic so initial tick + slam do not occur in the same cooldown.
Suggestion: Putrid Waters should not deal damage on the first tick, or initial tick damage should be reduced.
These would prevent a very large spike of damage which can occur due to RNG from killing players before they can react or otherwise pot/pop defensives.
There are timers for these things from Bigwigs (Littlewigs for dungeons) and most likely DBM (don’t use it personally so can’t promise for sure) so you can see what overlaps are coming and plan accordingly with defensive usage etc.
You have not addressed any of the particular complaints, you’ve said “get good” for a player being effectively instant killed due to a 5M random unavoidable damage spike within 200ms.
Overlapping abilities like this are considered bad design and should never occur, Blizzard have already fixed one instance in Vaults. The point of this post is to call attention to one they have overlooked.
Abilities with a strong DOT component rarely do heavy damage on the initial tick to give a player a chance to react. For instance, the bomb DOT on Telash Greywing was removed on the first tick due to this. Putrid Waters is an unavoidable very heavy RNG instant damage effect.
The Slam/Putrid Waters overlap is controlled by the time spent per platform which is effectively impossible for players to control precisely.
This combination is RNG since Putrid Waters is a random target, and until the hotfix Slam did far more damage to cloth classes because it was reduced by armor.
Defensives may already be on cooldown due to the need to reduce damage throughout the fight. As an example, I’ve often had to use Ice Block as a de facto dispel because the group struggles to dispel 2 players at once, and then use barriers to mitigate damage. And even then, such high damage can be within a single GCD. Alter Time essentially can’t be used because Putrid Waters is RNG instead of a known upcoming hit. Ice Block/Greater Invis can’t be pre-emptively used because it’s random and may not hit. This just leaves the barrier spells as the only pre-emptive defence, which were already on cooldown to mitigate previous unavoidable damage.
This effectively creates a random one-shot combo which prevents both the individual player and healer from reacting. 200ms or so to react to a random occurrence is not a reasonable difficulty level for the game. In the example I had last night, with superhuman reflexes I could have potted, which would have meant having to react in literally the blink of an eye to getting hit by random damage, looking at my health and instantly working out Slam will be lethal, making the decision to pot, hitting the hotkey to do so, and doing all this within about 150ms when you include latency.
I said if you get timers you can prepare for it. That doesn’t mean it’s less deadly but you have a better chance of surviving anything if you’re prepared for it and can pop defensives accordingly instead of just being caught off-guard.
Siege is brutal right now on higher keys which is why you need to go in as prepared as you can be.
No sane player is going to pre-emptively waste a major 5 minute CD on something which may not hit them, only to get slapped next time when it actually does hit them.
You can toss out a relatively low cooldown spell predictively such as barriers safely. You can use a major cooldown on something you know will hit, I use Ice Block and Alter Time etc regularly to block / mitigate major hits. But no one is going to use a major cooldown for something which might not hit, especially when you are going to actually need it at some point.
And even the errors in timings from addons mean this is effectively impossible, because they are not accurate down to the level of hundreds of ms.
I’m not sure why this is hard to understand: you can be effectively instant killed due to unavoidable damage and boss ability overlap within a fraction of a second outside of player control while using all defensives based on the best knowledge possible of the game world at that time.
Which is a problem. It’s bad design. Blizzard have fixed these things previously, and this has been introduced due to a change in the fight mechanics this season.