The Community That Cried Nerf

So, fresh furore over this rather minor comment from a blue.

The thread rapidly derailed into discussing the relative merits of and issues with some heroic boss abilities, based on this li'l snippet:

"With that said, we plan on making some changes to The Old Kingdom in the next minor patch. For instance, Elder Nadox will only get one Ahn'Kahar Guardian and Jadoga Shadowseeker will only use her Ascend ability once during their respective encounters."

And there was some angry blogging about it in various places, too.

My take on the whole afair, this apparent nerf to boss abilities? Good.

When first stepping into heroics, in my mixture of blues and greens, some of these abilities were challenging. They were interesting. They broke up the fight into palatable chunks, and did indeed help train me for some basic aspects of raiding such as target switching, not standing in fire, interrupts, and tank damage spikes. The problem is twofold. The abilities concerned are tied to the boss health bar - so the higher your party's damage output, the more frequently they occur. They also render the boss immune to damage for at least some time, often long enough for a little speech plus the time taken to target and dispose of the add, so their 'interrupt the battle' abilities scale relatively less with increased player damage than their health bar does.

So, essentially, a fight which was designed to be a fun and interesting mix of phases and adds and abilities boils down to 10% time spent tearing through the boss at a crazy rate, 88% watching boss emote whilst invulnerable, and perhaps 2% blowing up a hapless add. This is not fun. I don't care how long the boss takes, within sensible limits, as bosses aren't the bottleneck for heroic runs anyway. The pacing and feel of the encounter have been broken by our gear spiralling ever-higher in item level, replaced with pointless vexation.

Some other examples off the top of my head...
Anub'arak in AN. He barely pops up to say hello before burrowing again.
Svala Sorrowgrave in UP. With even a single geared and competant ranged DPS, the melee are basically sitting on their thumbs as she yoyos. Killing the adds for almost the entire boss fight. Yawn.
Ymiron, again in UP. His stun/fear went from a critical part of the fight (getting stunned in those AoE damage effects was troublesome, I recall), to merely a very annoying but increasingly large portion of the encounter.

Others spring to mind, but the basic point is that this kind of fight doesn't scale appropriately with gear, and thanks to frequent badge upgrades and easier access to high-level gear (both things I agree with entirely) everyone is getting gear these days and exposing the weaknesses. These abilities do not make the boss fights harder, just more irritating. They do make the fights a little longer, but really not by much compared to their sheer annoyance factor.

It could be argued that the designers should have forseen these problems with heroic bosses 'scaling' in the wrong way. Abilities on a timer, or a combination health/timer (will perform X ability every Y% health, but at most every Z seconds) are less likely to break with higher DPS. I think it is entirely reasonable that heroics become trivially easy over time, especially if there's a steady trickle of new five-man instances appropriate to the current level of gear, as long as they don't become annoying.

Yeah, the proposed fix for OK (and probably other dungeons as well, in time) is also a nerf. But really, no-one experiencing the issues with the boss spending more time floating in the air than being smacked in the face should be concerned with that. Hey, if they want to later give those same bosses more health or mitigation to artifically inflate the length of the fight to pre-fix levels, I wonder if anyone would complain?

Oculus, as an aside

I hate Oculus. It's a mess. A halting, on-again off-again mess of an instance. There is no opportunity to play here. The dungeon will not let you engage with it outside the stifling parameters expressed by disconnected platforms and your pitifully equipped drakes.

It is not fun. For a little while, it was interesting at least, but it has no depth and the space circumscribed by its mechanics does not allow for any. As a guild we decided to spice up the Nexus by kiting Anomalus and Omorok to the mage boss, and it seems to be the new standard to drag the Infinite Corrupter to Mal'ganis in CoS for the jokingly titled 'hard mode'. These instances do admit play, so if we feel like making a simple daily run more interesting you can. Oculus does not and cannot, due to simple layout issues and the horrible, horrible drakes.

My resolve weakened enough for me to run it with guildies when it popped as the daily, and lo I was rewarded with a blue drake, a rare gem and some extra badges. Great. Now I can go back to instantly dropping group every time it loads, as even the miniscule bonus of a mount I'll never use is a non-issue. Badges and gems? Pfft. Have to do a lot better than that to convince me I can't find a better way to spend fifteen minutes!

Lady Deathwhisper, how I loathe thee

The other day I ended up taking my enhancement shaman into ICC10 for a little brisk exercise. A previous week's PUG had gone pretty well, her moderate gear and a great deal more playtime recently (both mostly thanks to the new Dungeon Finder tool) were enough to put her near or at the top of recount most of the time. Satisfying. We didn't get Saurfang down, but for an alt/pugged run it went well and I was more or less happy with my performance. Plus I got new bracers from the gunship and a bunch of Frost emblems. Everything is better with loot.

This week... well, Marrowgar was the big cuddly kitten as usual (once we'd gotten past the ambush by no less than three Giant Skeletal Ninja during a trash pull). Cheap bastard didn't drop the cloak, but such is life. And then... more than two hours of wiping on Deathwhisper. And I was doing appallingly badly. We didn't even get to the second phase, and my DPS rarely crested 2k (2k! That'd be absolutely terrible even in a 5-man group for this gear level, let alone with a decent complement of raid buffs).

What went wrong? Well, there were plenty of failures really. I think the worst I saw outside of my little sphere of pew-pew was the resto druid (guildy, also the only person dealing with Curse of Torpor despite a resto shaman and mage hanging around in the group) getting locked out of dispel curse. Yeah, it's happened to me when healing on my main too - you go to remove the vicious little debuff on some random person, and just as you're cliquing them to happiness it also gets applied to you. The aforementioned other people with a curse curse removal ability let him sit there, unable to cast any heals nor remove the curse himself, for what I know feels like at least three hours when healing. In actuality, probably the fifteen seconds it took for him to be able to cleanse himself. Too damn long anyway, the other healers were behind at this point and it all went south from there.

And with me, personally, it was a litany of fail. Bad luck sometimes, stupidity at others. I was of course on add duty, managing the gamut from running up to one of the adds the tank was near but hadn't aggro'd and wailing on them until they turned and blew me up, bouncing spells off a reflective shield into my own low-health face, ankhing right into an AoE spell from the empowered adds, zooming around the back of a cleaving add and starting to DPS just in time for the tank to spin it around and kite it through me to get oneshot by said cleave... unhelpful of the tank, but I could and should have moved... it was horrible. Horrible!

Also, I'm not sure if this is a hardware issue or not, but the Lady's bright green Death and Decay is barely visible when she pops it on the raised areas where the adds spawn. I just ran in a straight line until my poor moocow stopped being green in such cases, probably taking the longest possible route through the stuff and without fail in completely the opposite direction to that the tank was dragging the adds.

Then there were the undead chaps. For those who haven't had the joy of playing with these, periodically the adds get, err, resurrected with a few new abilities. Most importantly, the caster adds now gain 99% physical damage reduction, whilst the cleaving, cow-killing melee adds have a similar near immunity to spells. As some may appreciate, this isn't much fun for a DPS spec that is primarily physical, but deals a very large chunk of damage in the form of spells.

I tried a few things. Swapping flame shock out of my shock rotation to avoid reflecting the DoT onto my face for some poor sap to dispel/heal through, and maybe improve my terrible DPS on those adds that got burned down before the flame shock DoT would run its course anyway. Dropping puppies early enough that shaman-sprint would be up in time to get on the boss between spawns. Shamanistic Rage whenever I get caught in Death and Decay or tanking the bloody Adherents. Leaving a fire elemental to help mop up physically immune adds whilst chasing the deformed fanatics. Ugh. There was more I could have done - or not done, in the case of bouncing lightning bolts and shocks off of the reflective shields - but muscle memory had largely taken over and was hammering my high priority abilities and frankly I was getting annoyed. Annoyed at myself, annoyed at the tank, annoyed at people not helping the poor tree decurse, annoyed at the rogue managing to die about the same time as me every single time... horrible.

So, yes. I don't actually like ICC much (the instance itself is beautiful, and some trash is fun. The boss fights alternate 'meh' and 'irritating' so far.) but this was the first time since Faction Champs where an encounter was making me reconsider my subscription. It's annoying to heal, but in comparison to that DPS experience... /shudder.

OK, enough ranting. Next time I go there as enhancement, I'll be better prepared. I will be a veritable monkey when it comes to clinging to the back of cleaving mobs, I will trawl the interwebs for any enhancement-specific strategies, tricks, or consoling sob stories, and I will damn well petition to be on Deathwhisper's mana shield throughout the misery of that first phase.