WoW has it's share of gimmick fights. I'm not a huge fan of that terminology because it is used as a kind of absolute description when in reality there is a spectrum or a sliding scale. Every encounter has mechanics that force you to play differently for that boss. Sometimes, however, these mechanics so deeply change how you are playing that you feel like you are playing a little mini-game rather than playing WoW.
Obviously vehicles fights are like this because you literally are playing a mini-game, but every other fight falls somewhere on the spectrum. I would describe Chimaeron as a very gimmicky fight, at least for healers. And the mini-game that it asks healers to play? Wrath of the Lich King!
Outside of the feud phase, Chimaeron is a return to the days when people had three health states - full, almost dead and dead. Added to that is the fact that every healer can return someone from almost dead to "full" in less than 1.5 seconds. Inside the feud phase Chimaeron is a massive AoE damage fest. It's Wrath of the Lich King healing split into two parts.
Heroic Chimaeron adds a third Wrath era healing mechanic to the mix - the dire necessity of a Discipline priest. When healing is impossible and everyone is constantly taking damage, Power Word: Shield is the only thing that can save an attempt from a particular kind of relatively minor mistake.
Chimaeron is not a great fight. I think gimmick fights rarely are. The problem with them is that usually heavily favour one class or another. Bringing a Blood Death Knight to Vezax allowed our guild to get the realm first hardmode kill despite being a 10-player guild. A party of one shaman, one holy priest, one hunter and seven holy paladins could have won the heroic Valrithia encounter in under 15 seconds - before any adds could even come into play.
Similarly, because self healing isn't really "priced" for dps classes - that is, some do it for free in amounts significant to Chimaeron and others don't - some dps classes are greatly superior to other for this fight. Saving a healer nearly 6000 mana every time you get spit on is a huge asset for early kills.
But despite not liking gimmick fights, I think Chimaeron was worth making. Gimmick fights are bad because they usually don't work out well. But if the developers never tried crazy ideas just because those ideas rarely work out then the game would be a lot more boring. For that reason, I think Chimaeron deserves a pass.
Showing posts with label bad encounter design. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bad encounter design. Show all posts
Friday, March 11, 2011
Friday, February 25, 2011
10 / 25 Player Differences
For most heroic bosses, it seems that 10-player is currently harder than 25-player. Interestingly, the two bosses where it is clearly much harder on 25-player both have chain lightning abilities.
Which brings us to the obvious question of what abilities actually make fights harder for one size of raid than the other. Here is a quick compilation of things that the developers should be keeping in mind when balancing the next round of raid encounters for 10 and 25 players.
Spread Out
When there are more people, there is less room for each person to stand. This is pretty obvious, but it doesn't seem to translate into ability balancing. If a chain lightning jumps 8 yards on both 10 and 25 player mode then it is pretty easy to stand in appropriate positions to avoid jumps on 10 and quite difficult on 25. Since chain lightning often does more damage with each jump, 25-player makes it is very harsh mechanic.
Solution: Vary the jump distance for 10 and 25 player. With a shorter jump distance on 25 player or a longer distance on 10 the mechanic won't favour one size or the other.
Melee Hate
A typical 10 player raid might bring two melee characters, while a typical 25 player raid may have five. Many melee hate mechanics much more difficulty with more melee characters. Think of Kel'Thuzad's Frost Blast. In 10-player, there was no need for more than one person to get hit by it at a time. In 25-player, brining more than three melee meant it was always possible.
Solution: Significantly reassess melee hate - this needs to be done anywway.
Limited Access Abilities
This is a wide range of different abilities that are only available to certain classes and specs. I'm not talking about the fact that it's harder to get all the buffs you need when player with 10 people than it is with 25 people. I'm talking about interrupts, damage reduction cooldowns, Leap of Faith, AoE slows and other abilities that make boss fights much easier. In a 10-player raid, you may have no AoE slow, making the fester blood part of Cho'gall extraordinarily difficult. On 25-player you should have four or five interrupters available to stop a mob that needs to be interrupted regulary, in 10 you might have just one or two. The less specs that can use an ability, and the more uesfull the ability, the more likely it is than 25's have the edge.
Solution: Consider which abilities have a strong influence on the ease of the encounter and whether those are widely available or open only to a few specs. Especially do this with Hand of Protection.
Adds
In 25 player you have a pretty easy option for a third tank, in 10-player a third tank is not very viable for the majority of fights. Putting in a large number of adds to be tanked dramatically shifts the difficulty from 25-player to 10-player.
Solution: Vary the number of adds, not just the add health, between the difficulties.
There are plenty of other asymmetric abilities between 10 and 25 player. Most 10-player encounters still feel like afterthoughts based almost precisely after the 25 player version but with lower numbers. Blizzard still has a way to go in terms of understanding 10 player raiding and the same mechanics feel so different when there are different numbers of players up against them.
Which brings us to the obvious question of what abilities actually make fights harder for one size of raid than the other. Here is a quick compilation of things that the developers should be keeping in mind when balancing the next round of raid encounters for 10 and 25 players.
Spread Out
When there are more people, there is less room for each person to stand. This is pretty obvious, but it doesn't seem to translate into ability balancing. If a chain lightning jumps 8 yards on both 10 and 25 player mode then it is pretty easy to stand in appropriate positions to avoid jumps on 10 and quite difficult on 25. Since chain lightning often does more damage with each jump, 25-player makes it is very harsh mechanic.
Solution: Vary the jump distance for 10 and 25 player. With a shorter jump distance on 25 player or a longer distance on 10 the mechanic won't favour one size or the other.
Melee Hate
A typical 10 player raid might bring two melee characters, while a typical 25 player raid may have five. Many melee hate mechanics much more difficulty with more melee characters. Think of Kel'Thuzad's Frost Blast. In 10-player, there was no need for more than one person to get hit by it at a time. In 25-player, brining more than three melee meant it was always possible.
Solution: Significantly reassess melee hate - this needs to be done anywway.
Limited Access Abilities
This is a wide range of different abilities that are only available to certain classes and specs. I'm not talking about the fact that it's harder to get all the buffs you need when player with 10 people than it is with 25 people. I'm talking about interrupts, damage reduction cooldowns, Leap of Faith, AoE slows and other abilities that make boss fights much easier. In a 10-player raid, you may have no AoE slow, making the fester blood part of Cho'gall extraordinarily difficult. On 25-player you should have four or five interrupters available to stop a mob that needs to be interrupted regulary, in 10 you might have just one or two. The less specs that can use an ability, and the more uesfull the ability, the more likely it is than 25's have the edge.
Solution: Consider which abilities have a strong influence on the ease of the encounter and whether those are widely available or open only to a few specs. Especially do this with Hand of Protection.
Adds
In 25 player you have a pretty easy option for a third tank, in 10-player a third tank is not very viable for the majority of fights. Putting in a large number of adds to be tanked dramatically shifts the difficulty from 25-player to 10-player.
Solution: Vary the number of adds, not just the add health, between the difficulties.
There are plenty of other asymmetric abilities between 10 and 25 player. Most 10-player encounters still feel like afterthoughts based almost precisely after the 25 player version but with lower numbers. Blizzard still has a way to go in terms of understanding 10 player raiding and the same mechanics feel so different when there are different numbers of players up against them.
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Heroic Dungeon "Nerfs"
I am a little bit late to the party in terms of weighing in the heroic dungeon changes. Many other bloggers have made the point that they like hard things and don't want everything to get dumbed down to Wrath levels. At least one post says almost the same thing I'm about to say, but like everyone else on the internet, I assume I am a unique snowflake and have my own valuable take on things.
I don't want to go through the changes line by line the way Righteous Orbs did, since I think if you want that you can just read that post. I want to say a few general things about changes, though, and why I like the thrust of these changes in general.
It's important when a change comes to not get too caught up in how things are now. Changes are changes because there was a way it was before the change. If there isn't they are new things rather than changes. But we tend to get too caught up in how things were and don't pay enough attention to how things should have been in the first place. Changes that change things so that they are how they should have been in the first place are good changes, even if we kind of liked something about the bad state things were in.
Many of the "nerfs" to these encounters seem a lot more like bug fixes. While they may not always deal with literal bugs in the code, they are correcting what we may call bugs in the design.
First of all, there are many changes to the visual effects of boss abilities to make it easier to distinguish what they are doing. Being able to distinguish what the boss is actually doing does make encounters easier, but it is also how things should be in the first place. A boss that dropped invisible fires would be harder than a boss that dropped visible fires. A boss that dropped fires that appeared to have a radius of 4 yards but really had a radius of 10 yards would be harder than a boss who dropped fires that looked as big as they are. A boss that requires you to hit your "G" key (regardless of what you have it bound to) at 1:30 into the fight to avoid dying without giving any indication that this is what you had to do would be harder than a boss that did not have this requirement or that put up a raid warning telling you you had to do it. But in each case the former is a pretty bad way to make a boss hard1. If the boss is going to drop fire, the visual effect should line up with the game effect of the fire. If you want to make it harder, do so by making the fire do more damage, or giving me less time to get out of it, not by not letting me know where it is or what I am supposed to do.
Second there are changes to bosses that seemed overly sensitive to group composition. I agree with the principle but not the form of many of these changes. There should not be a boss that requires two beast CCs to beat, or one that requires interrupts more than once every 10 seconds, or one that requires two snare effects. Bosses should be beatable by a tank, a healer and three dps in ilvl 329 gear with good play.2 The specifics of how Beauty, Ashbury and Erudax were nerfed didn't deal with the issue appropriately, though. Beauty went from being nearly impossible with only one beast CC and fine with two to being fine with one beast CC and really, really easy with two. A better solution would be to make the pups a lot less threatening, give them less health, and make Beauty herself more powerful. Ashbury could have simply healed for less with Mend Rotten Flesh, perhaps 10% instead of 25% of his health. That way interrupts would have been good but not required. The Faceless Corruptors are now still pretty hard to deal with if they are not slowed but even easier if they are slowed. They should have had their movement reduced more dramatically and been given an immunity to, or at least a severe resistance to anything that would slow them. Maybe reduce the duration of slowing effects on them by 75% or 80%.
Third there are changes that don't really make the encounter easier, but people call them nerfs anyway. Foe Reaper 5000 does take a long time because you are down a dps. Making it a little shorter doesn't really make the fight much easier to master, just a little less boring after you have mastered it. Slabhide spending little time on the ground was a key factor in allowing us to beat him more than a minute and a half after our tank died. If he'd spent more time on the ground then shadow priest tanking would have been unsuccessful. Grand Vizier Ertan may have less health, but that's just to compensate for the fact that you'll actually have to pay attention to his mechanics now.
Of course the patch has undeniable nerfs in it, but I agree with most of them. Setesh seemed significantly harder than his compatriots on the second floor of the Halls of Origin for PuGs. A little more time to avoid Corborus and Ozruk's sudden death attacks is welcome as those are real PuG killers. A reduction in damage from the Naz'jar Tempest Witches sounds like a great idea, as does the reduction in damage from trash in Throne of the Tides.
And when looking at the "nerfs" it's important to notice that some bosses were made harder, and rightly so. Ptah, Asaad, Walden and Anraphet were all real pushovers - I doubt the changes to them will even go far enough towards making them harder, but we'll see.
So what don't I like? In addition to the specifics of the composition sensitive boss changes I mentioned above, there are a couple of boss nerfs that I simply don't understand. Specifically, I don't understand why Valiona was nerfed in the Drahga Shadowburner encounter. No one is supposed to be getting hit by that ability anyway, and the challenge in that encounter is dealing with adds properly, so the change makes little difference. I also don't see why Throngus' impale shouldn't still be a stun. I know people don't like their healer getting impaled, but if you play that fight right he just doesn't do that much damage. I really don't understand the Ozumat nerf in the Neptulon encounter either - but maybe it's just that Prayer of Healing is very good for that part of the fight.
There are also a few things that I find it hard to believe they didn't nerf. I feel comfortable calling Springvale the hardest boss in any heroic, and I think he could stand to have his melee damage reduced, even if only a little. Also, they reduced the damage of Gilgoblin Hunter's Poisoned Spear attack "slightly." Rather than "slightly" that should probably say, "by half," and there should be a similar note regarding the aquamages and their tsunami. Having a pack with eight enemies, each of which has a 40k attack is a little bit much. Generally how that pull goes is the tank pops a cooldown while running in, we start AoEing and just before we kill them four aquamages tsunami at once killing the tank and any melee, then we clean them up. Chained tanking CDs for the duration shouldn't be the norm for trash pulls, and, more importantly, should be sufficient to avoid one-shots if you can actually pull it off.
I also wouldn't have minded seeing a few other changes:
Blackrock Caverns
Corla in BRC should have her haste aura removed and her attack speed and damage increased so that she does roughly double the damage she does now in the end. This would make the fight easier when her friends evolve and not trivial if they don't.
Halls of Origination
Veil of Sky should be made more powerful and undispelable while Astral Rain should be reduced if it is left for the third ability on Isiset - the damage seems fine at both the first and second thirds of the fight, but appears to be multiplied by about 10 if you leave it as her last ability. The rain does nearly twice as much, hits all five people instead of just two, and lasts seemingly forever. Simply affecting everyone with no damage or duration increase would have been fine.
Shadowfang Keep
Baron Silverlane could have used a buff of some kind. Lord Godfrey should have the damage of his cursed bullets dot reduced and his other damage increased to make the fight less dependent on whether you have a curse remover. I don't mean that a curse remover shouldn't be helpful, but he should be beatable in reasonable gear without one in the group.
Throne of the Tides
Mindbender Ghur'sha should make your allies more threatening when he controls them, take control more often, and do something when he's flying around by himself.
1. I could actually imagine invisible fires having a place in some boss fight at some time, but it doesn't seem likely, and the other two examples are right out.
2. Giving paladins tanks an interrupt will also help with this.
I don't want to go through the changes line by line the way Righteous Orbs did, since I think if you want that you can just read that post. I want to say a few general things about changes, though, and why I like the thrust of these changes in general.
It's important when a change comes to not get too caught up in how things are now. Changes are changes because there was a way it was before the change. If there isn't they are new things rather than changes. But we tend to get too caught up in how things were and don't pay enough attention to how things should have been in the first place. Changes that change things so that they are how they should have been in the first place are good changes, even if we kind of liked something about the bad state things were in.
Many of the "nerfs" to these encounters seem a lot more like bug fixes. While they may not always deal with literal bugs in the code, they are correcting what we may call bugs in the design.
First of all, there are many changes to the visual effects of boss abilities to make it easier to distinguish what they are doing. Being able to distinguish what the boss is actually doing does make encounters easier, but it is also how things should be in the first place. A boss that dropped invisible fires would be harder than a boss that dropped visible fires. A boss that dropped fires that appeared to have a radius of 4 yards but really had a radius of 10 yards would be harder than a boss who dropped fires that looked as big as they are. A boss that requires you to hit your "G" key (regardless of what you have it bound to) at 1:30 into the fight to avoid dying without giving any indication that this is what you had to do would be harder than a boss that did not have this requirement or that put up a raid warning telling you you had to do it. But in each case the former is a pretty bad way to make a boss hard1. If the boss is going to drop fire, the visual effect should line up with the game effect of the fire. If you want to make it harder, do so by making the fire do more damage, or giving me less time to get out of it, not by not letting me know where it is or what I am supposed to do.
Second there are changes to bosses that seemed overly sensitive to group composition. I agree with the principle but not the form of many of these changes. There should not be a boss that requires two beast CCs to beat, or one that requires interrupts more than once every 10 seconds, or one that requires two snare effects. Bosses should be beatable by a tank, a healer and three dps in ilvl 329 gear with good play.2 The specifics of how Beauty, Ashbury and Erudax were nerfed didn't deal with the issue appropriately, though. Beauty went from being nearly impossible with only one beast CC and fine with two to being fine with one beast CC and really, really easy with two. A better solution would be to make the pups a lot less threatening, give them less health, and make Beauty herself more powerful. Ashbury could have simply healed for less with Mend Rotten Flesh, perhaps 10% instead of 25% of his health. That way interrupts would have been good but not required. The Faceless Corruptors are now still pretty hard to deal with if they are not slowed but even easier if they are slowed. They should have had their movement reduced more dramatically and been given an immunity to, or at least a severe resistance to anything that would slow them. Maybe reduce the duration of slowing effects on them by 75% or 80%.
Third there are changes that don't really make the encounter easier, but people call them nerfs anyway. Foe Reaper 5000 does take a long time because you are down a dps. Making it a little shorter doesn't really make the fight much easier to master, just a little less boring after you have mastered it. Slabhide spending little time on the ground was a key factor in allowing us to beat him more than a minute and a half after our tank died. If he'd spent more time on the ground then shadow priest tanking would have been unsuccessful. Grand Vizier Ertan may have less health, but that's just to compensate for the fact that you'll actually have to pay attention to his mechanics now.
Of course the patch has undeniable nerfs in it, but I agree with most of them. Setesh seemed significantly harder than his compatriots on the second floor of the Halls of Origin for PuGs. A little more time to avoid Corborus and Ozruk's sudden death attacks is welcome as those are real PuG killers. A reduction in damage from the Naz'jar Tempest Witches sounds like a great idea, as does the reduction in damage from trash in Throne of the Tides.
And when looking at the "nerfs" it's important to notice that some bosses were made harder, and rightly so. Ptah, Asaad, Walden and Anraphet were all real pushovers - I doubt the changes to them will even go far enough towards making them harder, but we'll see.
So what don't I like? In addition to the specifics of the composition sensitive boss changes I mentioned above, there are a couple of boss nerfs that I simply don't understand. Specifically, I don't understand why Valiona was nerfed in the Drahga Shadowburner encounter. No one is supposed to be getting hit by that ability anyway, and the challenge in that encounter is dealing with adds properly, so the change makes little difference. I also don't see why Throngus' impale shouldn't still be a stun. I know people don't like their healer getting impaled, but if you play that fight right he just doesn't do that much damage. I really don't understand the Ozumat nerf in the Neptulon encounter either - but maybe it's just that Prayer of Healing is very good for that part of the fight.
There are also a few things that I find it hard to believe they didn't nerf. I feel comfortable calling Springvale the hardest boss in any heroic, and I think he could stand to have his melee damage reduced, even if only a little. Also, they reduced the damage of Gilgoblin Hunter's Poisoned Spear attack "slightly." Rather than "slightly" that should probably say, "by half," and there should be a similar note regarding the aquamages and their tsunami. Having a pack with eight enemies, each of which has a 40k attack is a little bit much. Generally how that pull goes is the tank pops a cooldown while running in, we start AoEing and just before we kill them four aquamages tsunami at once killing the tank and any melee, then we clean them up. Chained tanking CDs for the duration shouldn't be the norm for trash pulls, and, more importantly, should be sufficient to avoid one-shots if you can actually pull it off.
I also wouldn't have minded seeing a few other changes:
Blackrock Caverns
Corla in BRC should have her haste aura removed and her attack speed and damage increased so that she does roughly double the damage she does now in the end. This would make the fight easier when her friends evolve and not trivial if they don't.
Halls of Origination
Veil of Sky should be made more powerful and undispelable while Astral Rain should be reduced if it is left for the third ability on Isiset - the damage seems fine at both the first and second thirds of the fight, but appears to be multiplied by about 10 if you leave it as her last ability. The rain does nearly twice as much, hits all five people instead of just two, and lasts seemingly forever. Simply affecting everyone with no damage or duration increase would have been fine.
Shadowfang Keep
Baron Silverlane could have used a buff of some kind. Lord Godfrey should have the damage of his cursed bullets dot reduced and his other damage increased to make the fight less dependent on whether you have a curse remover. I don't mean that a curse remover shouldn't be helpful, but he should be beatable in reasonable gear without one in the group.
Throne of the Tides
Mindbender Ghur'sha should make your allies more threatening when he controls them, take control more often, and do something when he's flying around by himself.
1. I could actually imagine invisible fires having a place in some boss fight at some time, but it doesn't seem likely, and the other two examples are right out.
2. Giving paladins tanks an interrupt will also help with this.
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
Berserk Timers
Berserk timers are now as brutally overused as untauntability was in Burning Crusade. There are virtually no bosses in Wrath that do not have a berserk timer. Berserk timers are an awkward kludge, and ideally the game shouldn't have them at all.
What's wrong with berserk timers?
First of all, they are "immersion breaking." No matter how much you play the game as a game I think this matters. Boss abilities fit a theme of the boss and demonstrate the power of the creature you are fighting. Calling meteors from the sky, freezing us in ice, summoning minions and good old fashioned breathing fire are all things that powerful creatures do. Suddenly becoming unbeatable if you fight them for exactly six minutes, on the other hand, is really out of the blue.
Second, berserk timers are often put in just for the sake of it. My guild tried to take on 25-player Beasts of Northrend with 14 people, both for gear and to see if we could do it. After a couple hours of trying we finally managed to get to the end of the fight and lost to the 15-minute berserk timer. It is far from clear what purpose that timer is serving other than to stop us from having fun. Fighting 25-player encounters with 14 people is generally not the best way to get loot. Similarly, a Death Knight managed to solo Sartharion, and the greatest difficulty to overcome was that he only had 15 minutes to do it. Sartherion's berserk timer didn't stop us from beating him with 4 people in appropriate gear, so it is serving no purpose but to limit the fun of people doing strange things.
Third, when berserk timers are actually setting the difficulty of the fight, they limit the raid's ability to play through mistakes. This is especially true in 10-player raids. If a fight requires 2 tanks and 3 healers, then losing 1 dps means losing 15-20% of your damage. If the berserk timer is the limiter that is making the fight challenging, then this is an unrecoverable loss, and the moment someone dies you might as well just wipe and start over. Even if someone dies 75% of the way through the fight, if you were only on pace to make the berserk timer by a few seconds, this can be an unrecoverable position. Playing through mistakes and making the best of bad situations is something the game should encourage, not discourage.
Once upon a time, Berserk timers were a good solution to a problem. The problem was that if you brought a tank and 39 healers to an encounter, then you would win for sure1. A time limit on how long you have to win gives dps a place in competitive content. Without them, you eventually die.
Berserk timers do solve that problem, but there are lots of other ways to solve that problem, and very few modern bosses need berserk timers to make dps matter. If the boss summons adds then either you need enough dps to kill the adds before the next ones come, or you need enough dps to kill the boss before there are too many adds to tank. Stacking buffs or debuffs that make the boss more and more dangerous as the fight goes on serve the same purpose as enrage timers, but don't break immersion, and give a little more leeway to play exceptionally and scrape some extra seconds out if you need them. Rotface summons oozes faster and faster as the fight goes on. On Blood Queen you will eventually run out of bite targets and get mind controlled. Heroic Northrend Beasts releases extra bosses on a timer. Heroic Anub'arak only gives you six frost patches to work with, so the third burrow is basically automatically fatal.
I'd like to see them do away with enrage timers entirely. It's totally fine for Firefighter - after all, we hit the big red button - and maybe for certain other circumstances where there is an in game reason that the fight would be a limited time only. But making bosses do 500% more damage after a certain number of minutes is a crutch for encounter designers, is an awkward kludge solution to an old problem, makes no sense within the game world, and rarely makes the game better.
1. I realize this is a bit of an overstatement, many fights would have required more than one tank, and beating fights with nothing but tanks and healers would have taken forever. There was a real concern, though, that encounters could be trivialized by overloading on healers.
What's wrong with berserk timers?
First of all, they are "immersion breaking." No matter how much you play the game as a game I think this matters. Boss abilities fit a theme of the boss and demonstrate the power of the creature you are fighting. Calling meteors from the sky, freezing us in ice, summoning minions and good old fashioned breathing fire are all things that powerful creatures do. Suddenly becoming unbeatable if you fight them for exactly six minutes, on the other hand, is really out of the blue.
Second, berserk timers are often put in just for the sake of it. My guild tried to take on 25-player Beasts of Northrend with 14 people, both for gear and to see if we could do it. After a couple hours of trying we finally managed to get to the end of the fight and lost to the 15-minute berserk timer. It is far from clear what purpose that timer is serving other than to stop us from having fun. Fighting 25-player encounters with 14 people is generally not the best way to get loot. Similarly, a Death Knight managed to solo Sartharion, and the greatest difficulty to overcome was that he only had 15 minutes to do it. Sartherion's berserk timer didn't stop us from beating him with 4 people in appropriate gear, so it is serving no purpose but to limit the fun of people doing strange things.
Third, when berserk timers are actually setting the difficulty of the fight, they limit the raid's ability to play through mistakes. This is especially true in 10-player raids. If a fight requires 2 tanks and 3 healers, then losing 1 dps means losing 15-20% of your damage. If the berserk timer is the limiter that is making the fight challenging, then this is an unrecoverable loss, and the moment someone dies you might as well just wipe and start over. Even if someone dies 75% of the way through the fight, if you were only on pace to make the berserk timer by a few seconds, this can be an unrecoverable position. Playing through mistakes and making the best of bad situations is something the game should encourage, not discourage.
Once upon a time, Berserk timers were a good solution to a problem. The problem was that if you brought a tank and 39 healers to an encounter, then you would win for sure1. A time limit on how long you have to win gives dps a place in competitive content. Without them, you eventually die.
Berserk timers do solve that problem, but there are lots of other ways to solve that problem, and very few modern bosses need berserk timers to make dps matter. If the boss summons adds then either you need enough dps to kill the adds before the next ones come, or you need enough dps to kill the boss before there are too many adds to tank. Stacking buffs or debuffs that make the boss more and more dangerous as the fight goes on serve the same purpose as enrage timers, but don't break immersion, and give a little more leeway to play exceptionally and scrape some extra seconds out if you need them. Rotface summons oozes faster and faster as the fight goes on. On Blood Queen you will eventually run out of bite targets and get mind controlled. Heroic Northrend Beasts releases extra bosses on a timer. Heroic Anub'arak only gives you six frost patches to work with, so the third burrow is basically automatically fatal.
I'd like to see them do away with enrage timers entirely. It's totally fine for Firefighter - after all, we hit the big red button - and maybe for certain other circumstances where there is an in game reason that the fight would be a limited time only. But making bosses do 500% more damage after a certain number of minutes is a crutch for encounter designers, is an awkward kludge solution to an old problem, makes no sense within the game world, and rarely makes the game better.
1. I realize this is a bit of an overstatement, many fights would have required more than one tank, and beating fights with nothing but tanks and healers would have taken forever. There was a real concern, though, that encounters could be trivialized by overloading on healers.
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
Paying Attention
If you read some recent developer comments about the game, you find out some strange things. It seems that it is impossible to heal through bosses with priests and shamans since paladin and druids AoE heals are so much more powerful. It seems that until recently most tanks were getting two-shotted because bears were so ridiculously tough that when the bosses hit hard enough to threaten bears, they hit way too hard for the other tanks.
What's interesting to me about this is that they balanced the bosses this way. They balanced the bosses around the broken tank and the broken healers. How could this possibly happen without simultaneously noticing that the tank and healers in question were dramatically overpowered?
Obviously at this point they have noticed the problems and they are figuring out how they are going to fix them. Despite that, I worry that the developers do too much of their balancing by tweaking numbers up and down based on experience and not enough of it based on math. There is definitely room for both things - no matter how good you are at creating models of situations, boss fights are extremely complex. Models and math can only get you so far and you have to dive in at some point and see how it works and whether it can be beaten with real raids. But some rudimentary math well before you got to the point would give you things like maximum theoretical healer AoE throughput and how long they can afford to keep that up in level 359 gear. It can give you things like the health of a bear tank versus a warrior tank, the size of Savage Defense shields and the frequency that the bear puts them up.
What's interesting to me about this is that they balanced the bosses this way. They balanced the bosses around the broken tank and the broken healers. How could this possibly happen without simultaneously noticing that the tank and healers in question were dramatically overpowered?
Obviously at this point they have noticed the problems and they are figuring out how they are going to fix them. Despite that, I worry that the developers do too much of their balancing by tweaking numbers up and down based on experience and not enough of it based on math. There is definitely room for both things - no matter how good you are at creating models of situations, boss fights are extremely complex. Models and math can only get you so far and you have to dive in at some point and see how it works and whether it can be beaten with real raids. But some rudimentary math well before you got to the point would give you things like maximum theoretical healer AoE throughput and how long they can afford to keep that up in level 359 gear. It can give you things like the health of a bear tank versus a warrior tank, the size of Savage Defense shields and the frequency that the bear puts them up.
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Lucifron
Alright, so this isn't at the top of anyone's list of bugs to fix, but my blog is called "What's Wrong with WoW" and this is something that's wrong with WoW. It's also rather amusing.
What happens when a Death Knight gets Lucifron's Curse? In part, exactly what you'd expect. Your ability cost double runes or runic power. And then a few things you wouldn't expect. For one, you don't generate runic power anymore. I've tried to think out the logic on this and my best guess is that when it tries to give you runic power it notices it's giving you 20 and then things that that means the ability costs 20 so it makes it cost 20 more, subtracting 20 from the 20 you were supposed to get and giving you zero. Just speculation, but it makes some sense.
More sense than the next bit anyway: If all your non-blood runes are death runes, and you use an ability that uses both your blood runes, your death runes immediately refresh. Then, after you use them the first time, instead of refilling two at a time as they should, all four refill at the same time. The result is that you get to alternate two death strikes per Heart Strike. This behaviour is just plan bizarre, and doesn't seem to have any reason behind it.
On to paladins. What happens when you use an ability that costs holy power? Well, it uses two of your three holy power, presumably because with costs doubled it can't use three. It tries to use one, uses two, then can't use another one. But the ability you use hits as though three holy power were used. Apparently when you use a holy power ability, it checks how much holy power you have first to see how powerful the ability should be, then it spends the holy power - apparently one at a time. How much you spend doesn't matter, how much you had matters.
I should really bring a balance druid down to Lucifron and see if something crazy happens with eclipse.
What happens when a Death Knight gets Lucifron's Curse? In part, exactly what you'd expect. Your ability cost double runes or runic power. And then a few things you wouldn't expect. For one, you don't generate runic power anymore. I've tried to think out the logic on this and my best guess is that when it tries to give you runic power it notices it's giving you 20 and then things that that means the ability costs 20 so it makes it cost 20 more, subtracting 20 from the 20 you were supposed to get and giving you zero. Just speculation, but it makes some sense.
More sense than the next bit anyway: If all your non-blood runes are death runes, and you use an ability that uses both your blood runes, your death runes immediately refresh. Then, after you use them the first time, instead of refilling two at a time as they should, all four refill at the same time. The result is that you get to alternate two death strikes per Heart Strike. This behaviour is just plan bizarre, and doesn't seem to have any reason behind it.
On to paladins. What happens when you use an ability that costs holy power? Well, it uses two of your three holy power, presumably because with costs doubled it can't use three. It tries to use one, uses two, then can't use another one. But the ability you use hits as though three holy power were used. Apparently when you use a holy power ability, it checks how much holy power you have first to see how powerful the ability should be, then it spends the holy power - apparently one at a time. How much you spend doesn't matter, how much you had matters.
I should really bring a balance druid down to Lucifron and see if something crazy happens with eclipse.
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
The Last Throes of Limited Attempts
Well, we know that limited attempts for bosses is going away and it considered to be a failed experiment in a kind of nanny state to keep the most hardcore players from playing too much. I was very happy about this when I read it and largely decided I could put my hatred of limited attempts behind me.
But limited attempts are taking their final revenge on my guild. Instead of simply saving our instance from week to week in order to keep working on heroic Lich King, we have to clear out the tired bosses we've already killed dozens of times just to reset that counter. So even now I am going to spend about 30% of my raiding time each week just dealing with the limited attempts mechanic. I know it's going away soon, but not soon enough.
But limited attempts are taking their final revenge on my guild. Instead of simply saving our instance from week to week in order to keep working on heroic Lich King, we have to clear out the tired bosses we've already killed dozens of times just to reset that counter. So even now I am going to spend about 30% of my raiding time each week just dealing with the limited attempts mechanic. I know it's going away soon, but not soon enough.
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
10-man Heroic
We've been at a 30% buff for a while now and still no guilds have killed heroic Lich King on 10-player without having 25-player gear. It's not time to throw in the towel yet, but at this point I feel like I can say that 10-player raids in Wrath were a great but failed attempt at providing an alternative for players who prefer the smaller raid size.
There is a good chance that Blizzard developers actually agree with a great deal of the criticisms I have to 10-player raiding in Wrath. They are, after all, significantly changing the paradigm for Cataclysm to eliminate the gear gap and prevent people from running raids of both sizes every week.
It has been fairly clear from the beginning that designers were designing 25-player bosses, and then just nerfing some numbers to get the 10-player version. Sartharion plus three drakes was our early proof of this. With the limited staff available to handle the multiple drakes at the same time, the 10-player version was widely recognized as being harder, person for person and gear for gear than the 25-player version. Were it not for the viability of rushes, that would still remain a fight that a relatively small number of players had beaten even with today's gear. In order to beat that fight we were forced to gear up in 25-player content. To my knowledge no one ever won in 10-player gear.
In Ulduar encounter design got better, but the 10-player version of encounters had several glaring problems. Often the solution to a 10-player predicament was to remove a troublesome mechanic altogether. Impacts of other mechanics on groups of different sizes, such as the mind control ability of Guardians of Yogg-Saron weren't even considered.
Ulduar was still a masterpiece, and it was great that they reduced the gap between 10-player and 25-player gear, but ToC brought that gap back. Moreover, the ToC trinkets were itemized so differently that the 25-player versions were great and the 10-player versions were universally terrible. While 25-player players were using on 245 and one 258 trinket, most 10-player players were using one 219 and one 200 trinket, because even the 245 10-player trinket wasn't worth equipping.
The trinket problems continued into ICC. With only one new trinket for each type, and those trinkets being unique between the heroic and non-heroic version, 10-player raiders got to upgrade only one trinket slot, while 25-player raiders got to upgrade both, often with very substantial upgrades. 25-player raiders also got Shadowmourne and are still benefiting from Val'anyr. 10-player raiders, on the other hand, can find noticeable holes in the gear offered to them, such as (at least at the time of release) there being no wand without hit in ICC. In ToC 10-player raiders could only upgrade their 219 cloaks (or 226 cloaks from 25-player Kel'Thuzad who we needed to kill to beat Sarth +3) completing a successful tribute run. No other cloaks were in the dungeon at all.
All the while 10-player guilds have to contend with a great deal of difficulty in recruiting because of the perception (and frankly, the reality) that they are second class raiding guilds. Attempts to recruit the best players were hamstrung from the beginning because most players would rather play at the difficulty level that gives the best loot. With 25-player normal giving the same loot at 10-player heroic, which is comparatively very hard, there is little incentive to join a guild dedicated to 10-player raiding.
25-player guilds got to trivialize 10-player content by overgearing it and having lots of extra practice at it. The limited attempts system ensured that they would take that time practicing as well. Probably more importantly, a 25-player guild attempting to get 10-player kills can bring in extreme raid compositions that are ideal for the encounter. 10-player guilds may only have one member of any given class, or none at all. 25-player guilds will almost always have two of each class and often three. If one class shines on a particular encounter, they will always be able to bring them. Imagine the poor 10-player guild who makes it all the way to heroic LK without a priest and then finds themselves at a desperate disadvantage due to having no shields for Infest.
All of this, however, brings me back to the Lich King. I don't know whether my guild will beat him or not. It may be we just need a hundred or two more attempts to get the fight down, but it may be that we are simply not up to the challenge. I don't doubt that this is our fault; there are probably many different groups of 10 people in the world who could beat the lich king on heroic with our characters. But none of them actually play 10-player exclusively. 10-player heroic Lich King has been, up to this point, nothing but a source of higher level weapons for guilds working on 25-player Lich King. The next few months will determine whether he ever becomes anything more than that.
Part of it is that I'm just disappointed that we haven't been able to win. Part of it is that I wish I was better at playing and I could stop making mistakes that are costing us attempts. But there is definitely a part of me that feels like being 14th in the world should mean we are good enough to take things down, and at the very least 1st in the world should.
Ultimately, for 10-player raiders, the final boss of the expansion was balanced to be out of reach. He is not out of reach for a theoretical raid, but he is out of reach for the people who are actually playing the game. I hope that someone can prove me wrong before 4.0 hits or he is nerfed (and I would love it if that someone is me) but at this point I would probably be willing to put even money against it.
There is a good chance that Blizzard developers actually agree with a great deal of the criticisms I have to 10-player raiding in Wrath. They are, after all, significantly changing the paradigm for Cataclysm to eliminate the gear gap and prevent people from running raids of both sizes every week.
It has been fairly clear from the beginning that designers were designing 25-player bosses, and then just nerfing some numbers to get the 10-player version. Sartharion plus three drakes was our early proof of this. With the limited staff available to handle the multiple drakes at the same time, the 10-player version was widely recognized as being harder, person for person and gear for gear than the 25-player version. Were it not for the viability of rushes, that would still remain a fight that a relatively small number of players had beaten even with today's gear. In order to beat that fight we were forced to gear up in 25-player content. To my knowledge no one ever won in 10-player gear.
In Ulduar encounter design got better, but the 10-player version of encounters had several glaring problems. Often the solution to a 10-player predicament was to remove a troublesome mechanic altogether. Impacts of other mechanics on groups of different sizes, such as the mind control ability of Guardians of Yogg-Saron weren't even considered.
Ulduar was still a masterpiece, and it was great that they reduced the gap between 10-player and 25-player gear, but ToC brought that gap back. Moreover, the ToC trinkets were itemized so differently that the 25-player versions were great and the 10-player versions were universally terrible. While 25-player players were using on 245 and one 258 trinket, most 10-player players were using one 219 and one 200 trinket, because even the 245 10-player trinket wasn't worth equipping.
The trinket problems continued into ICC. With only one new trinket for each type, and those trinkets being unique between the heroic and non-heroic version, 10-player raiders got to upgrade only one trinket slot, while 25-player raiders got to upgrade both, often with very substantial upgrades. 25-player raiders also got Shadowmourne and are still benefiting from Val'anyr. 10-player raiders, on the other hand, can find noticeable holes in the gear offered to them, such as (at least at the time of release) there being no wand without hit in ICC. In ToC 10-player raiders could only upgrade their 219 cloaks (or 226 cloaks from 25-player Kel'Thuzad who we needed to kill to beat Sarth +3) completing a successful tribute run. No other cloaks were in the dungeon at all.
All the while 10-player guilds have to contend with a great deal of difficulty in recruiting because of the perception (and frankly, the reality) that they are second class raiding guilds. Attempts to recruit the best players were hamstrung from the beginning because most players would rather play at the difficulty level that gives the best loot. With 25-player normal giving the same loot at 10-player heroic, which is comparatively very hard, there is little incentive to join a guild dedicated to 10-player raiding.
25-player guilds got to trivialize 10-player content by overgearing it and having lots of extra practice at it. The limited attempts system ensured that they would take that time practicing as well. Probably more importantly, a 25-player guild attempting to get 10-player kills can bring in extreme raid compositions that are ideal for the encounter. 10-player guilds may only have one member of any given class, or none at all. 25-player guilds will almost always have two of each class and often three. If one class shines on a particular encounter, they will always be able to bring them. Imagine the poor 10-player guild who makes it all the way to heroic LK without a priest and then finds themselves at a desperate disadvantage due to having no shields for Infest.
All of this, however, brings me back to the Lich King. I don't know whether my guild will beat him or not. It may be we just need a hundred or two more attempts to get the fight down, but it may be that we are simply not up to the challenge. I don't doubt that this is our fault; there are probably many different groups of 10 people in the world who could beat the lich king on heroic with our characters. But none of them actually play 10-player exclusively. 10-player heroic Lich King has been, up to this point, nothing but a source of higher level weapons for guilds working on 25-player Lich King. The next few months will determine whether he ever becomes anything more than that.
Part of it is that I'm just disappointed that we haven't been able to win. Part of it is that I wish I was better at playing and I could stop making mistakes that are costing us attempts. But there is definitely a part of me that feels like being 14th in the world should mean we are good enough to take things down, and at the very least 1st in the world should.
Ultimately, for 10-player raiders, the final boss of the expansion was balanced to be out of reach. He is not out of reach for a theoretical raid, but he is out of reach for the people who are actually playing the game. I hope that someone can prove me wrong before 4.0 hits or he is nerfed (and I would love it if that someone is me) but at this point I would probably be willing to put even money against it.
Friday, June 4, 2010
Near Misses: Bosses that could have been great
I was looking at a list of the best bosses in Wrath of the Lich King today. I expect that since we are in pre-expansion season people will be compiling lots of lists of their favourite and least favourite parts of this expansion. There were some very good bosses in the expansion as well as some pretty mediocre ones, but I don't want to dwell on the good or the bad. Instead, when I looked at the list, I found myself thinking about the bosses that could have, or should have, been great but that weren't. I don't want to force anything in this list that doesn't belong, so I've only got four of them, but that's not to say I necessarily got them all. There are plenty of fights that didn't work out, but these are the fights where them not working out is a significant let down.
Ignis the Furnace Master: It might be a bit of an exaggeration to suggest that this fight could have been great but it at least could have been pretty good. It turned out, though, that the easiest way to win was to completely ignore the fight mechanics, have your tank stand in the water and tank the boss and all the adds, and just kill him before you got enough adds to be a problem. When we were doing this fight the "right" way it seemed pretty interesting. When we decided not to bother with all the fancy stuff and just burn him out it became a simple tank and spank. To fix this they really needed to make shattering the golems a more important part of the fight. Rather than shattering golems purely for the sake of getting golems off your back, if golem shatters actually advanced your cause in terms of winning the fight (for example, shattered golems drop an item that can be used to do massive damage to Ignis) then people would do this fight by shattering golems and we'd get a fairly good fight.
Twin Val'kyr: Importing Ikaruga to an MMO was a great idea, but unfortunately I feel like it just didn't work. Ultimately our successful strategy was for most of the raid to spend most of the time standing in a pile right behind the boss. It was a tank and spank where every 90 seconds there was a 50% chance they had to do something other than keep attacking. For the healers playing goalie with the white orbs it was a little more interesting, but it was still mostly just spamming raid heals. I truly wish this fight would have been awesome, but the black and white switching mechanic was kind of clumsy and the clumsiness of it meant that they didn't make you switch very much. This fight would need quite a significant redesign to live up to its promise, but a starting point would be to find a good technical way to let us switch colours on the fly. That would have opened a world of possibilities of encounter design they had to ignore.
Sindragosa: This fight seems like a lot of fun and is in many ways well executed, but it has two rather awful problems. The first is Chilled to the Bone, the mechanic that punishes auto-attacking characters. She punishes casters as well with Unchained Magic, but no matter how many casters you bring, she only punishes one of them. Each caster past the first is a full time dpser. Each auto-attacker, no matter how many you bring, is affected by Chilled to the Bone. That means stacking melee is bad. But much worse than this is the way the debuff is applied. The faster you attack the faster you get stacks, so rogues barely get to play. If you look at the top dps on World of Logs, rogues are very visibly absent from Sindragosa's charts. There hasn't been a fight in recent memory that so badly punished a particular class.
The second reason this fight didn't work out is because the initial phase of the fight is long and relatively easy and then it becomes very hard. After a few tries to get the hang of it, you rapidly get into a mode where you spend the majority of your boss fighting time doing boring stuff you have proved you can do dozens of times and a small minority of your time actually practicing the part you need to beat.
Why do I say Sindragosa was close to being a great fight? They could have made this fight a lot more fun to learn by doing a few simple things. Rearrange the Chilled to the Bone mechanic to make it apply more evenly to all auto-attacking dps. Reduce her health, enrage timer, and the length of ground phases, but leave the transition point to the end phase at the same amount of health. Basically by tweaking just a few numbers this fight could have been great instead of boring and frustrating (especially for our rogue who we refused to bring while we were trying to get our first kill).
Anub'arak: This fight is the grandfather of disappointments. Basically I think this fight is brilliantly designed and really unique but that it is effectively spoiled by three things, and also harmed by a missed opportunity on the developers' part.
The first is the limited attempt mechanic and the fact that you basically only got one attempt per week. This is really the fault of limited attempts not of Anub, but Anub had the misfortune of being the final boss of the one attempt instance, and that will forever mar my memory of this fight.
The second is the fact that a 50% healing debuff was mandatory for this fight. There are three classes that can provide this debuff (and warriors can't do it while tanking, which they might need to do), so in 25-player this was presumably never a problem. In 10-player it could be a big problem. This wasn't a case where it was really hard to win or one class was over-emphasized. When we attempted this fight without a mortal strike debuff we simply weren't doing any damage to Anub once the swarm was out. We'd hurt him, but he'd heal back up while we were killing adds. You may be nuts if your raid without the 13% spell damage debuff, but it isn't literally mandatory for any fight. This requirement was way out of line.
The third fatal flaw with this encounter is the need for a shield tank. Since the damage multiplier applied by the adds applied *after* blocking effects, a well geared block tank could take no damage at all while tanking them, where a similarly geared bear or death knight would be taking nearly 14k dps. We had the good fortune to be using a paladin and a warrior for our main tanks though ToC, but if we had been using a DK and a druid as we were in Naxx we basically wouldn't have been able to win.
Finally, this fight was a missed opportunity. The developers decided in ToC to drop the concept of multi-step hardmodes. In the future we won't have a fight like Yogg, Sartharion or Flame Leviathan, where you get to choose how hard a hardmode you want to do. It will just be hard or easy. Anub was a great chance for a multi-step hardmode. His hardmode was harder in three very different ways that could have been separated out: 1) Frost Patches don't respawn, 2) Adds spawn during the swarm phase and get shadow strike and 3) Swarm deals 20% instead of 10% health per second. I love multi-step hardmodes and the opportunity to practice at one level before moving on to the next. I have to assume they were abandoned because it was felt they took too much developer time, but it's a real shame. Especially on a fight where it would have been so easy to implement one.
And what about Anub's problems? All are extremely simple to solve. Get rid of the concept of limited attempts, reduce the healing of his swarm by half and make him immune to healing reduction effects (at least on 10-player), and change the way the stacking debuff works from the adds so that there isn't a 14k dps difference in the damage taken by shield and non-shield tanks.
I can't really blame them for trying limited attempts once to see how it worked out1, but the other two are so glaring as to seem unforgivable. This fight should be something I remember with awe the same way I think of KT, Yogg and Lich King. Instead it just seems like a nuisance.
1. I can't forgive them for using limited attempts again in ICC. It was terrible, terrible, terrible.
Ignis the Furnace Master: It might be a bit of an exaggeration to suggest that this fight could have been great but it at least could have been pretty good. It turned out, though, that the easiest way to win was to completely ignore the fight mechanics, have your tank stand in the water and tank the boss and all the adds, and just kill him before you got enough adds to be a problem. When we were doing this fight the "right" way it seemed pretty interesting. When we decided not to bother with all the fancy stuff and just burn him out it became a simple tank and spank. To fix this they really needed to make shattering the golems a more important part of the fight. Rather than shattering golems purely for the sake of getting golems off your back, if golem shatters actually advanced your cause in terms of winning the fight (for example, shattered golems drop an item that can be used to do massive damage to Ignis) then people would do this fight by shattering golems and we'd get a fairly good fight.
Twin Val'kyr: Importing Ikaruga to an MMO was a great idea, but unfortunately I feel like it just didn't work. Ultimately our successful strategy was for most of the raid to spend most of the time standing in a pile right behind the boss. It was a tank and spank where every 90 seconds there was a 50% chance they had to do something other than keep attacking. For the healers playing goalie with the white orbs it was a little more interesting, but it was still mostly just spamming raid heals. I truly wish this fight would have been awesome, but the black and white switching mechanic was kind of clumsy and the clumsiness of it meant that they didn't make you switch very much. This fight would need quite a significant redesign to live up to its promise, but a starting point would be to find a good technical way to let us switch colours on the fly. That would have opened a world of possibilities of encounter design they had to ignore.
Sindragosa: This fight seems like a lot of fun and is in many ways well executed, but it has two rather awful problems. The first is Chilled to the Bone, the mechanic that punishes auto-attacking characters. She punishes casters as well with Unchained Magic, but no matter how many casters you bring, she only punishes one of them. Each caster past the first is a full time dpser. Each auto-attacker, no matter how many you bring, is affected by Chilled to the Bone. That means stacking melee is bad. But much worse than this is the way the debuff is applied. The faster you attack the faster you get stacks, so rogues barely get to play. If you look at the top dps on World of Logs, rogues are very visibly absent from Sindragosa's charts. There hasn't been a fight in recent memory that so badly punished a particular class.
The second reason this fight didn't work out is because the initial phase of the fight is long and relatively easy and then it becomes very hard. After a few tries to get the hang of it, you rapidly get into a mode where you spend the majority of your boss fighting time doing boring stuff you have proved you can do dozens of times and a small minority of your time actually practicing the part you need to beat.
Why do I say Sindragosa was close to being a great fight? They could have made this fight a lot more fun to learn by doing a few simple things. Rearrange the Chilled to the Bone mechanic to make it apply more evenly to all auto-attacking dps. Reduce her health, enrage timer, and the length of ground phases, but leave the transition point to the end phase at the same amount of health. Basically by tweaking just a few numbers this fight could have been great instead of boring and frustrating (especially for our rogue who we refused to bring while we were trying to get our first kill).
Anub'arak: This fight is the grandfather of disappointments. Basically I think this fight is brilliantly designed and really unique but that it is effectively spoiled by three things, and also harmed by a missed opportunity on the developers' part.
The first is the limited attempt mechanic and the fact that you basically only got one attempt per week. This is really the fault of limited attempts not of Anub, but Anub had the misfortune of being the final boss of the one attempt instance, and that will forever mar my memory of this fight.
The second is the fact that a 50% healing debuff was mandatory for this fight. There are three classes that can provide this debuff (and warriors can't do it while tanking, which they might need to do), so in 25-player this was presumably never a problem. In 10-player it could be a big problem. This wasn't a case where it was really hard to win or one class was over-emphasized. When we attempted this fight without a mortal strike debuff we simply weren't doing any damage to Anub once the swarm was out. We'd hurt him, but he'd heal back up while we were killing adds. You may be nuts if your raid without the 13% spell damage debuff, but it isn't literally mandatory for any fight. This requirement was way out of line.
The third fatal flaw with this encounter is the need for a shield tank. Since the damage multiplier applied by the adds applied *after* blocking effects, a well geared block tank could take no damage at all while tanking them, where a similarly geared bear or death knight would be taking nearly 14k dps. We had the good fortune to be using a paladin and a warrior for our main tanks though ToC, but if we had been using a DK and a druid as we were in Naxx we basically wouldn't have been able to win.
Finally, this fight was a missed opportunity. The developers decided in ToC to drop the concept of multi-step hardmodes. In the future we won't have a fight like Yogg, Sartharion or Flame Leviathan, where you get to choose how hard a hardmode you want to do. It will just be hard or easy. Anub was a great chance for a multi-step hardmode. His hardmode was harder in three very different ways that could have been separated out: 1) Frost Patches don't respawn, 2) Adds spawn during the swarm phase and get shadow strike and 3) Swarm deals 20% instead of 10% health per second. I love multi-step hardmodes and the opportunity to practice at one level before moving on to the next. I have to assume they were abandoned because it was felt they took too much developer time, but it's a real shame. Especially on a fight where it would have been so easy to implement one.
And what about Anub's problems? All are extremely simple to solve. Get rid of the concept of limited attempts, reduce the healing of his swarm by half and make him immune to healing reduction effects (at least on 10-player), and change the way the stacking debuff works from the adds so that there isn't a 14k dps difference in the damage taken by shield and non-shield tanks.
I can't really blame them for trying limited attempts once to see how it worked out1, but the other two are so glaring as to seem unforgivable. This fight should be something I remember with awe the same way I think of KT, Yogg and Lich King. Instead it just seems like a nuisance.
1. I can't forgive them for using limited attempts again in ICC. It was terrible, terrible, terrible.
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