Double whammy for priests inc.

[lamaros]

That sounds awesome, but you are forgetting the basic tension between making fights more random and what the players want.  The players want to have a fight that, while difficult, if perfectly executed by the players can be eventually beaten EVERY TIME.  If you design a system where random chance occassionally steps in and will kill even the best prepared players-- well, players don't like that.

Who's to say that just because it's mor random it still can't be beaten every time by good players? The difference is they just have to good at working together and working out strategies on the fly, not just good at reading some internet site and trying to copy them.

Something does not have to be predictable to be beatable.

[Strazos]

It'd be nice if Blizzard would just grow some balls and say, "Cry sum more, nubs." Seriously, at this point, the factthat you can practically have half your raid (at least) sleep through encounters is silly.

[caladein]

It'd be nice if Blizzard would just grow some balls and say, "Cry sum more, nubs." Seriously, at this point, the factthat you can practically have half your raid (at least) sleep through encounters is silly.

In MC? Sure. Depending on how overgeared you are, then a decent chunk of BWL that can also be true. AQ20/40 and Naxx? No, not really.

[SurfD]

It'd be nice if Blizzard would just grow some balls and say, "Cry sum more, nubs." Seriously, at this point, the factthat you can practically have half your raid (at least) sleep through encounters is silly.

In MC? Sure. Depending on how overgeared you are, then a decent chunk of BWL that can also be true. AQ20/40 and Naxx? No, not really.

Totally agree there.  If you are near the top of the gear curve (BWL, AQ 40, Naxx) you can quite readily cruise controll your way through MC / ZG and most AQ 20 encounters.  Early AQ 40 encounters and some BWL encounters are probably also fairly idiot proofed by your gear level at that point also.  Naxx and later BWL / AQ encounters?  Not a chance.

About the only Naxx encounters you could remotely cruise controll through would probably be Anub, and maybe Instructor, or Grobbulous (though getting to grob requires killing Patchwerk, so meh), anything else, you pretty much need every single member of your raid functioning or you will fail.  Patchwerk, Gluth, Thaddeus, Faerlina, and Maexxna will rape you if your DPS and healers arent doing exactly what they are supposed to.  And Noth, Heigan and Loatheb are pure and total execution fights.  (no one is getting past Heigan with sloppy play).  Same goes for what I have seen of Gothik (cant comment on 4h or Saph / KT, since I have not personally seen the fights yet)

[Swede]

Why do you think reactive healing isnt spike prevention?

We basicly sat down, looked at the numbers for the bosses and decided how much healing we needed each second to overcome damage spikes.

Ie broodlord Ms'ed our tanks for 5.5k in a wost case senario. We need a tank with more than 5.5k hps in total, and need to have heals hit him for more than that each round. Spike prevention. If fankriss's packs hits for 350 dps max on tanks, we need 350 hps all the time.

And there isnt much you can do about this. Unless we know when the 5.5 hit is coming, we cant heal for less in any given round. Mana isnt really the limiting factor per see, in that that if we dont have enough mana, we cant do it. It's nothing more than a gear check.
Which is why in 96.6% of all high end encounters Bliz have tried to implement some sort of features to make healing intresting, which often means that bosses do an ae which you need to move out from in order to be able to continue casting your heal.....

[Trouble]

Spike prevention in that if you anticipate spike damage you want the tank at the highest health possible. For example, on Broodlord he doesn't just do mortal strike. He has a blast wave that hits for 2-3k and regular hits that can vary from 500-1000. Assuming your top three rank heals are for 2-3k and that you're healing with a team of 10-15 other healers, your top rank heal is simply not an appropriate heal to keep the tank topped off. An apprioriate heal for this would be between 500 and 1500 based on what most of his hits hit for.

[jpark]

Why do you think reactive healing isnt spike prevention?

I love this line.

[Fordel]

Tier 0.5 BRD arena event? It's basically a PVP fight. Not overly scripted, but rather the mobs don't have any aggro list, actively try to crowd control as much as they can, are susceptible to CC themselves, and only have 1.5x the health of a player as opposed to 10x. That encounter is infinitely replayable (the enemies you come up against are random, and the things they do are too), and I think it's the best "boss fight" in the game to date.
THAT is the direction I want them to take, at least in several boss fights.

Is the encounter *really* infinitely replayable, or is the priest mob and the shaman mob going to have the same set of actions and abilities. I'm not saying the encounter isn't more interesting then the usual tank/heal/dps stuff, but it is still just going to be plug and play abilities for the mobs. Instead of going "at 20% the dragon will AE" people go "okay, we got the priest and the gnoll, they do blah blah". The reason the encounter hasn't been totally reverse enginered yet is due to its rather annoying pre-req's to get to the point where you can actually initiate the fight (and even then you can still just hit up thottbot for a pretty detailed description of what each mob does). I guess what I'm trying to say is the encounter still isn't going to be able to be clever. I'm sure they made the script go for the squishy/healers first, but can the script handle a party if it's made up of druids/pallies/priests ? Can it overcome two mages and a lock locking down more then half the group? Can it deal with the unexpected? Again, having the variety isn't bad, but instead of a Tank/Heal/DPS fight it's a CC/Assist/FocusFire fight.

It's just a new pattern to learn, which is still fun, but it isn't the same as PvP.


As to FPS bots, no I can't say I've ever experienced bots that made me go "wow, that was smart" or as such. Then again I haven't played many of the newest FPS's out there atm so maybe one of the new ones does have really good AI that is truly clever and I am unaware :p

[Zetor]

I don't think any of us have ever said that pve encounters have the capability to be "smart"; get back to me after Skynet is launched or something. :P I just brought up the t0.5 arena fight as an example that 'randomized' fights do exist and they're fun. Of COURSE they have a limited pool of actions to draw from, and obviously crowd control rules (though they do break CC early and erratically, so the mages/locks have to keep an eye on them). It's also pretty much trivialized by t2+ gear, as the HP/damage gap between the players and the mobs is simply too large at that point in the players' favor. And yes, certain group makeups make the encounter easy (we had at least two iceblock mages most of the times we've done this, which does make it easy), but that's more of a limitation of the entire 5-man mechanic. It HAS to be beatable by any remotely viable combination of 5 people, so Blizz can't anticipate heavy crowd control when designing the encounter. Now, the chess room encounter in Karazhan (if the speculations are correct) will be another story.

(and yes, it is infinitely replayable, we've done it at least 6 times now just for fun, and got a different set of enemies every time; their targeting isn't as simple as "gank the healer" either, they usually try to CC as many people as they can via sheeps/stunlocks/traps and go for the squishies; the obvious way around it is to have a druid and pally as healers and have the druid shift / get a BOP when he gets 'assist trained'.)


-- Z.