I’ve gotten a fair amount of feedback regarding my post on this boss fight. Some people agreed with me that that fight is just plain wrong, others enjoyed the challenge and found it reasonable.
One of the arguments was that this is the Black Temple, which at one time was the very last and presumably toughest 25 man raid in the game. I can see that argument, I really can. I can understand the necessity to make the Black Temple difficult.
It’s not the difficulty that gets me.
It’s the way that this type of encounter doesn’t make sense in the broader game environment.
World of Warcraft is a tactical game. Not a shooter. Not a twitchy adventure game. WoW is a game of numbers and strategy.
Think about some other difficult encounters in the game.
To take down the Lurker in SSC, for instance, you have to learn how to avoid the spout, and how to deal with the adds. To do so you need a strategy, not a fast ping time.
To take down Hydross, you need to manage the phase changes from Poison to Frost. This has nothing to do with how fast you can click your mouse.
The encounter that closest resembles the Teron fight comes in the form of Leotheras the Blind. Individual raid members MUST be able to defeat their inner demons. But even this event is NOT about twitch, it’s about proper gearing and proper strategy. Prot warriors might need to have some DPS gear. Healers have to know which offensive spells do the most damage.
Teron, on the other hand, is all about twitch and targeting. Blizzard may has well have put you in first person mode with a gun and cross-hairs. You can’t gear for it. The strategy for taking down the constructs is simple at best.
So why is there First Person shooting in my tactical role playing game?
Would Mario fans be miffed if the last stage of the game required you to ditch your platforming skills in lieu of a jimmied together strategy RPG mini game?
Would GTA fans lose it if progression in the game depended on building a base and deploying troops strategy game style?
The answer to the last two questions is yes. So why are we so accepting of the FPS injection in WoW?
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There are tons of aspects in this game that involve reaction time and responding accordingly. And as a healer, reaction time and how fast you can click your mouse is very much a part of this game. From Mages decursing during the old Kazzak fight, to Gruul cave-ins, to clicking your Tears on Archimonde to adjusting positioning on Felmyst, how fast you can react is built-in to these encounters. Teron Gorefiend, like you said, is independent of your gear level, so showing you have the reaction time in order to kill constructs doesn’t seem like a far-fetched request for the fight.
Whoa, a Mario MMORPG? Where do I sign up?
But I do understand that there’s a fine line in Boss Design that separates tried-and-true mechanics and novelty. It’s my opinion that no matter where a particular boss lies on that design spectrum, you really need some sort of novel mechanic, otherwise you won’t be able to distinguish it from any other tank-and-spank. At least if it’s an extreme DPS race like Brutallus, then there’s some excitement for that sort of thing. Otherwise, how are you really going to distinguish one from the other?
At the end of the day, TGF will go down in WoW history as that “EFFING BOSS WITH THE CONSTRUCTS OMFG”
@Drotara
Absolutely. But there is a big, big difference between the jobs you listed and construct duty. It is much, much easier to click on raid frames or inventory items or macros than on moving targets. The people who are best at construct duty, in my experience, are DPSers and tanks. The worst? Healers. We rarely have to target anything other than a raid frame!
@Krizz
True, boss fights do need to mix it up occasionally. I suppose I just disagree with HOW it was mixed up. It just seems out of place.
I agree with you, absolutely.
Granted, I’m not sure how much of my agreeing is due to my current griping about the fight, but I agree nonetheless
@PTD:
As I promised to you in the previous post, I’d report to you as soon as we encounter the Teron.
Tonight we got our first try there, with me as the single tree in raid. I also won the first time with the mini game and I really liked the minigame. However, I managed to nuke them down and actually liked the game.
During the whole Teron only few got to the raid towards the end of the fight and we managed to down Teron Gorefiend despite the few constructs. And we got First Kill on the very first try on the Teron Oneshot
Well: I like the variety of boss fights, and I dont think blizzard have broken a sacred genre contract designing a fight like this. There’s nothing in terms & conditions that states Blizzard’s committment to design boss encounters according to a well defined set of rules. It’s implied by a genre of course, but you’re using that as the crux of your argument which I dont think is fair. Given that some people one shot this boss first time (see above) I think your guild should uplevel your game
This, btw, is the same comment I made last time
… And I do LOVE your blog.
We could (and do!) complain about certain pain in the butt heroics that noone ever does. Sure, we all prefer some content over other content. But for a non-optional raid boss, I think you just suck it up marine! Blizzard are always learning about what works and doesnt work, and I think you should allow more leeway for their creative process.
@Nailor
Bah, humbug! Grats!
@John
I suppose a large amount of my ire is due to 17 attempts in one night with no success. Ack, that’s a lot of tries! We will prevail eventually, I am sure. I just may not be there, as I am temporarily putting T6 on hold to focus on trying to get the Bear Mount in ZA. We’ll see how that goes!
Lol! thanks for the honesty. I know the feeling. We wiped 20 times on Vashj over 2 nights before we got it. And when we did kill her, the execution was almost perfect. Nobody’s gear had changed and Vashj had not been nerfed. I felt in that case at least, it had eveything to do with 25 people being on their game, and very little to do with how well or badly designed the fight is. You could argue that the mechanism of passing tainted cores from one player to another was nothing you’d prepared for, and you’d be correct. But god dammit, that is what the fight is all about. Its almost silly! Attack rotations, gear, dps, hps, tps stats & strats to the roof make no difference if 25 people cant coordinate themselves to pass those tainted cores around. And its unpredictable, so the only strategy that works is to pay attention and think fast, communicate well and all those other non-virtual strengths.
I was rather surprised by this whole experience, because it seems like a lot of the endgame is based around these simple little mini-games that you have to learn, as a group, as a one-off for that boss. That’s what I see as part of Blizzard’s creativity with bosses. Its always different, some are more fun than others of course, and it provides longetivity to endgame content. That’s why I was making such hard comments…. (and I TOTALLY understand how it feels to wipe over + over on some damn tricky boss)