Greedy Goblin

Monday, July 19, 2010

Yet to be nerfed

The series about the success-skill continues tomorrow.

Only 8 people were online last raid (damn the Summer), but we still went to practice on Halion. Well, he enrages after 8 mins on normal too:
11.15M HP over 8 mins is 23.2K raid DPS. Assuming 2 tanks = 1 DPS, it's 3.8K DPS with 3 healers and 4.64K with 4. While the first is below Festergut DPS with ICC buff, there are way too much movement around to make it possible. Until they nerf him to the ground of course, to allow "freindly heplfull gulds" to kill him. It's only matter of time before he joins the other impossible bosses.

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The PuG update: Saturdays are usually nasty for attendance, which is beyond me since people are rarely working this day so should have more time for their hobby. However the lack of LK-trying raid did not stop the 8 of us:
(of course it's 25 man, and of course we are always recrutiting)

20 comments:

Squishalot said...

"11.15M HP over 8 mins is 23.2K raid DPS. Assuming 2 tanks = 1 DPS, it's 3.8K DPS with 3 healers and 4.64K with 4. While the first is below Festergut DPS with ICC buff, there are way too much movement around to make it possible."

I'm inclined to say that that's exactly the same argument that all the naysayers said about so many other ICC bosses that you downed before the 25% buff. If it's only a movement issue that's hampering your DPS, then it's potentially combatable using non-standard tactics and build/specs, as you would know from your ICC experience.

Gevlon said...

@Squishalot: possibly. But why bother? We can spend several raids on him, or we can simply wait until Blizzard nerfs him. The point is not to show off our skills. The point is to show that this game is nerfed to the ground.

ardoRic said...

"If it's only a movement issue that's hampering your DPS, then it's potentially combatable using non-standard tactics and build/specs"

Care to elaborate on which spec/build or tactic would save people from having to move from:

* Meteor Strike
* Fiery Combustion
* Soul Consumption

Even with minimal movement, you need to move out of these effects which are cast rather frequently.

And this isn't even talking about the holding back dance at phase3.

Nah, we can't do the dps required of us for this fight under these conditions. When he gets nerfed so random pugs are able to do him, we will kill him.

Ulatekso said...

In addition, even if the DPS requirement using three healers is manageable (as another issue would be the splitting up of buffs & debuffs in P3), and the healers somehow manage to keep everyone alive, it's quite likely that healer mana won't last for the duration of the fight.

Even if it is possible, it'd require seriously awesome execution which given our 3 hours per week schedule will take quite a while to pull off. On the other hand, there's Putricide who already went down to 9% on the few attempts we had three weeks ago...

Anonymous said...

Oh yeah, they're going to nerf the optional raid dungeon two months or so before it becomes obsolete.

They never nerfed Malygos, unless you count making it next to impossible to randomly fall to your death in phase 3 a "nerf".

Gevlon said...

They never nerfed Malygos because he was oneshottable in his first version by anyone who could tell which is his left hand.

Oktrag said...

Technically, Malygos has been made easier than when he was originally released.
Patch 3.2 changed it so that the dragon's health and damage would scale with gear level making the last phase, which always the pug killer, significantly easier

Adrius said...

I dont see this boss getting nerfed anytime soon (pre 4.0). He is easy enough as it is, every pug idiot can do 4k dps (assumed some mix of badge/icc10 gear with maybe 25man wep from pug if he is a real idiot:) and it will come down to moving from the laser. They might nerf that one but I doubt it because they would get eaten alive by people who actually give a crap, I mean the boss still drops items equal to Lich King. Plus nerfing the laser would obviously not help your case.

Also they didnt nerf 3.0 content because except OS with drakes all "regular" bosses of the patch were basicly embarassed by people in TBC gear literally few hours after expansion went live. And by many more people in the same gear who just took longer leveling (incl. my guild). Malygos was sort of nerfed when his drakes started scaling with gear but then it wasnt relevant content anyway.

pippen1001 said...

tbh gevlon if you cant beat him with "normal" dpsers, take people that dont need any standing still, resto druids affli locks etc

ardoRic said...

"take people that dont need any standing still, resto druids affli locks etc"

with 8 people online, do you really think we have the luxory of making a specially tailored group?

We take who's online, not the absolutely best group.

Get us 3-4 resto druids and 5 affliction locks and we might give it a try.

But a group like that will not have the required synergy in buffs to reach better dps than they do on dummies, so it might not be worth it anyways.

Squishalot said...

See, I don't know that they're going to bother to nerf Halion. What's the benefit in it? Lore-wise, essentially, he's the Onyxia of WotLK. They'd rather people go for Arthas, I'm sure.

My point about the naysayers and the math is that despite the math that 'proved' you couldn't down Gormok, Sindy, PP or any others, you still believed that you could. What's changed? Is it just the fact that you now have a more 'real-life' number to plug into the DPS calc?

RaduKing said...

@ardoRic: I wouldn't bother answering to naysayers ;) they will always have "arguments"

Wilson said...

How very.... anticlimactic. You set out to prove that being intimately familiar with a boss from having run him many times doesn't matter, only to find that there was a fight mechanic you weren't expecting which made the fight impossible. Doesn't really settle the matter, but it doesn't strengthen your case either. Two weeks of boasting only to throw in the towel doesn't help either.

As far as killing Sarth-25 with eight people, I really am not impressed. It was nine-manned in Naxx-10 gear almost a year-and-a-half ago. Possibly even earlier, that's just the oldest documented kill I'm familiar with.

Anonymous said...

Hmm perhaps two of each:

warrior tanks
combat rogues
hunters
enhancer shaman
paladin healer

Good physical support, melees can do damage while moving, hunters can disengage to move position. I have no clue if two blue equipped healers are enough, though.

Duskstorm said...

@Gevlon

"The point is to show that this game is nerfed to the ground."

But it seems like what this shows is that while the mechanics of the fight can be mastered by anyone, Halion (currently) does require some decent gear. Granted, I'm willing to bet that in straight ilvl 200 epics (naxx10 quality), you'd be able to take him down.

But if you kept the undergeared healers and tanks, but brought in some higher geared DPS, then your tanks would start to have threat issues, and then they'd need better gear.

I know my raid completed this fight after about 4 hours of practice, in ICC10 gear, and I'd say we had a fair amount of scrubs that night. It was tough getting everyone used to the beam mechanic, because the boss mods hadn't been updated beyond showing timers, and a lot of people don't keep an eye on their timers.

The real reason good players will always find these fights easy is that bosses have no capacity to strategize, they only have scripts they follow. So, the raid merely comes up with a script to respond to the boss' mechanics. This was pretty hard four years ago, but now that we've been doing this for so long, it's really not all that tough anymore.

Blizzard needs to make bosses strategize against us. For example, if the Lich King found that we were owning his valks, he could "decide" to cast defile on one of the melee. Professor putricide could start dropping oozes right when he spawns an add, so that the abomb would have to choose between slurping the ooze or slowing the add.

Basically, make the bosses *smarter* instead of regurgitating minor variations on the same mechanics.

Anonymous said...

Gevlon, you mentioned that you ignored spores when Undergeared downed Festergut. Can you, please, explain what you did?

Congrats for your excellent project, your work is amazing.

RaduKing said...

@Duskstorm: What you fail to understand is that even with the current nerfed content the majority of wow players haven't even killed 4 bosses in ICC10 and Blizzard will never do the game for the elite since as GS said what's the point in investing such an effort in doing some high AI content when only 1% of the wow population will ever see it. It simply isn't feasible. So please before making such suggestions take some time off and use your brain for a while...

Justisraiser said...

=cut

Why would Blizzard nerf Halion? Your gear is not preventing you from executing the mechanics, it's preventing you from meeting some very easy (in current content gear levels) damage threshold. 4.7K DPS is not exactly hard to achieve in ICC gear.

Your Undergeared guild and your PuG guild just demonstrated it's possible for any group with a moderate amount of skill to master the mechanics (for as long as 8 minutes, apparently!) You don't even need to have a full raid of moderate skill, as to my knowledge there's three distinct strategies that require only one person to have raid awareness and for everyone else to simply stack on him. In fact one of the strategies (effectively anticipating where the cutters will appear and moving preemtpively) allows for large chunks of windows for everyone to just stand there and DPS, so I'm wondering if you tried that.

If groups are failing, it's because they can't move out of the twilight cutter and they've failed to research one of the strategies to trivialize it. If Blizzard will nerf any of these mechanics, it's this, not his raw health total.

Anonymous said...

The time they killed Festergut, it was possible for a mage to ignore all spores. First exhale can be iceblocked, second can be tricked by Invisibility (or first one). Anyway, they removed the possibility to use Invisibility to bypass the exhale... my fellow mages and I learnt it the hard way.

Anonymous said...

If the only problem is movement then you can down him. It's one of the few things in the game that demonstrates skill - the ability to do high dps while also moving. Not just individual skill, but also raid positioning.

If you all stack on back leg of boss, max melee range, meteor can only go there or to tank. If it goes to raid then melee lose no dps as they travel through boss to other side, most ranged lose v little (instants while moving). If it goes tank he shifts towards the raid group (so they don't get swiped while calling it so they can shift their position (in between casts for casters). As everyone is in the same place, combustion is easy to deal with also, as long as the player moves instantly it can be dispelled fast and minimal uptime is lost. Really pushing dps in p1 sets you up for the rest of the fight.

The phase that you need the most work on will be P2, that's the phase where maximising uptime and dps will save you the most time. Obviously melee have it easy here, strafing round a boss costs almost no dps, ranged can still do decent numbers if they plan ahead and hold good positions. Using BL after the first cutter sounds like a good idea, getting out of this phase fast so your ranged can go up top is vital.

I believe a group of 10 skilled players could down this boss in blues. I'm puzzled that you don't want to - last tier unnerfed content done in blues seems to prove your point more than icc with 25% buff.