Comments on: Gimmicky raids, and what is to be done with old content?

By: Duzra

Duzra — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 08:22:52 +0000

I know this is probably a dead thread by now, but I thought I would toss in my two cents. WHY I QUIT PLAYING WOW….raiding.
First let’s take a look back. Forgive my dungeon/raid names, it has been a while, but I should get them close.
Questing, anyone can do it, it is simple, nice, and straight to the point. This did remain true in cataclysm.
Dungeons, little more complex. If you look at the Icecrown dungeons the bosses all had little tricks. Like one or two things you need to know to stay alive. Example: Forgemaster Garfrost. You had to hide from his ice blast and watch your stacks of debuffs. Under geared this was important, but over geared you could still kill him quickly, even if someone died. I remember all dying except a dps and healer when he was at 25% hp. We still killed him because we were over geared. Point being dungeons are strategy, but eventually you can get good enough gear to farm them and help others learn without 20 failed attempts. For the most part this was true in Cata as well, some got trickier or gimmicky, but typically 4/5 bosses could be geared past their tricks and gimmicks.
On to Raids. Icecrown Citadel is my best example, talking 25 man. Mobs were easy, just took time, but remained relatively simply. IE be careful not to pull too many and skill beats them. Then the first boss, Marrowgar. Some gimmicks, but without some wouldn’t the game just be boring. You had to be aware, know the fight, but could easily figure it out in a couple attempts, kill bone spikes, stay out of fire, watch debuffs. Fights got progressively more intense, but remained true to the fact that they were more forgiving the better geared and skilled you were. Ending with the Lich King. This fight was great. Yes, he had tons of gimmicks, but he was the main boss of this expansion and should not be easy. But they were all do able and STILL got easier to combat with gear and skill. IE kill adds before they drop someone off the side.
RAIDING CATA: Every fight became the Lich King. It was rare to catch a break and have a boss with two gimmicks that you can just relax your mind on. Fights no longer could be improved with gear simply because you spent the ENTIRE time fighting his gimmicks first and tossing dps on the boss in their short down time.
Raiding used to be fight the boss and deal with tricks and gimmicks. Cata became know the gimmicks and then kill the boss. The Lich King is my prime example because a good PUG could still get a fair ways into ICC, while most Lich King kills were reserved for a dedicated group, or guilds. And that is great! It let everyone in and gave them a fair shot while getting increasingly more difficult as you progressed through ICC, thus strengthening guild play whilst not punishing PUGers. Cata on the other hand destroyed this. No one wanted a PUGer that hadn’t done it already because they didn’t Know the gimmick. Reasoning? I could keep ANY, yeah I said it ANY geared for entrance, that means not over geared but just ready to progress to this raid, PUG group alive in ICC by explaining a fight in under five minutes. One wipe is expected so they can see the actual gimmick, but from then on….solid. Cata killed this because you could not explain the fights fast and successfully because there were just too damn many gimmicks and everyone had the potential to wipe the group.
I know there are others out there who too believe they could keep any properly geared group alive in ICC at least to fester and rot. Can you say the same about Cata? No, groups fell apart because no one wants to wipe 10 times without downing a boss outside of guild learning runs. This turned the dreaded gear check into a pissing contest. It was no longer ok to prove yourself worthy to try by having the best possible gear prior to a certain raid and having killed every single boss in the game prior to said raid. You simply had to have done it before.
To prove my point. Explain Marrowgar, the first boss in ICC
Tanks, you need to stick together as damage is split over all in front of his slice. Thus dps stay behind him. He will cast bone spike on random people, these spikes do damage over time and prevent the impaled person from doing anything, dps should immediately switch to these until all are gone. Lastly he occasionally enters a whirlwind phase where he is not tankable and does damage to all near him, stay away from him and continue dps if possible, but stay alive is priority as he comes out of this phase on his own. Also, throughout the fight, blue flames appear on the ground, they do high damage stay out of them. Rinse and repeat. Overview, tanks need to stack and pick up Marrowgar after whirlwind and face him away. Healers, tanks will take a lot of damage along with anyone impaled. Dps, stay behind him and don’t stand in fire and do kill bone spikes.
Phew, kind of a mouthful, but not even two minutes for a pretty in depth overview of the fight. My challenge to you is to explain Morchok in 160 words or less as in depth as I just did Marrowgar. I am choosing him because he is the first boss of the last released raid in cata, just as marrow was for wraith. I will even give you a link to him that failed to do so in a timely manner. If anyone can do this, and do it successfully I will come back to wow.
http://www.wowwiki.com/Morchok

By: cleo

cleo — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 03:37:33 +0000

If fights don’t have gimmicks then what else can blizzard do to make fights different? If there was nothing to “learn” then every fight would just be the same recycled crap with a steeper dps/healing requirement.

You are right in that most normal mode encounters are about performing the mechanics correctly. However the heroic modes include a combination of performing mechanics correctly WHILE doing enough dps/healing to meet the requirements of the specific encounter.

Each fight has different mechanics to learn, however the same basic wow skills of “moving around and not standing in fire” apply in every single fight, and there are obvious differences between an experienced wow player who might not know a fight, and scrubs who just continue to die in the fire no matter how many times they have attempted a fight.

By: Telwyn

Telwyn — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 08:30:45 +0000

Bit late to comment on this but I agree 100% with gimmicks going too far in Cataclysm raids. The heroics were already too gimmicky for my tastes. I also strongly agree with Dink’s comment above about classes. Blizzard seem obsessed with everything being a ‘set dance’ now. Boomkin, my main since 2007 is no fun for me anymore as gameplay is gimmicky.

By: Gimmicky fights in WoW | GamingSF

Gimmicky fights in WoW | GamingSF — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 08:24:17 +0000

[...] on catchup still after a holiday and just found this post on Spinksville about Gimmicky raid boss-fights in World of [...]

By: On Gimmicks » Type "H" For Heals

On Gimmicks » Type "H" For Heals — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 22:27:28 +0000

[...] read a few posts recently talking about so-called “gimmick fights”, and the alleged abundance [...]

By: Goodmongo

Goodmongo — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 13:59:40 +0000

Any of these preprogrammed dance scripts are a gimmick. All of them are bad. To me a fight against any mob including all boss fights should come down to three things. Mitigation for tanks, heals for healers and dps for the dps. The fights should be tuned to an increasing scale based on the entire groups throughput in each of these areas.

Too easy you say? Yes because the classes are too easy. A mage pounding two buttons is not knowing the class. They need to make dps more dependent on how well you know your classes mechanics. Remember the John F’n Madden chart for feral kitties? Do that for all classes. make it so people need to know how to maximize their dps. Then do that for heals and mitigation.

By: Delurm

Delurm — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 20:39:26 +0000

“Reading that article from malchome, he seems like a lazy player”

This is why I left WoW. The game is currently like being in a self righteous teenagers dream world – where everyone else is ‘lazy’ or ‘baddie’.

Gimmicky fights do *not* show skill. And for some people (like my wife who actually has a condition that limits her wrist movement) it will exclude them from encounters – when there really is nothing that the *gimmick* adds to the encounter.

By: Utakata

Utakata — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 16:36:03 +0000

By: Paul

Paul — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 13:56:48 +0000

The fights are fairly gimmicky too.

By: Azaael

Azaael — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 12:09:07 +0000

I do think that you’ll get several different answers for what a gimmick is in a fight.

For me, it’s actually hard to pinpoint sometimes-other times not so much(Chimaeron, Rhyolith.) I just know that I’ve felt their new encounters have either relied too much in certain gimmicks, or then just certain mechanics get overused(stack up and heal everyone quickly in a soft enrage/high damage phase!)

I do think that the difference between old and new gimmicks were the tightness of them. Now, some things like Naxx 40 were very tightly tuned(but hell, even that had a small handful of fights where a couple of deaths wouldn’t completely bone the encounter.) I think one issue that’s coming up is that Blizzard feel they need to tune these encounters to the top raiders so they don’t defeat them in the first 2 weeks(oh, wait…) IMHO, they should be tuning Normal modes to ”Average” raid guilds and Heroic modes to ”Very Solid Raid Guild” level. I don’t want to sound mean to the top 200 guilds in the world, but these are a minority of the players. (However, I DO think this is where a ‘Legendary’ difficulty level would be great-one reserved for the best of the best of the best, completely and utterly brutal, just so they get something too.)

See, I wouldn’t be complaining as much if it was like it was in the old days-with raids being reserved for the more ‘elite’ players. However, if they want to make raiding open to all, they need to tune difficulties for a wide variety of players. They can’t seem to find a sweet spot with only two difficulty levels, really. So then I guess they try to bring in gimmicks to make things more difficult in some areas. I don’t know-honestly I feel like their encounter design has gotten a bit…confusing? Like they aren’t even sure how to handle things anymore. I suppose that when a game is seven years old this can be bound to happen, though, so I can’t totally blame them. I can have trouble thinking of stuff to write more casually, I can’t imagine having to make up new stuff for encounters for years and years to keep millions of people interested.