Patch 3.3

[Jayce]

According to a co-worker, there is a blue post stating that it's a bug and unintended.

[Soulflame]

The only blue post I've seen linked so far is on the bug report forum, and it wasn't so much an acknowledgment of a bug as it was a "hi we read this".

As for disc, you could always swap to holy.   

Really though, if this is intended, I feel bad for disc.  It was neat seeing the fight made easier by a good disc priest.  I recall one night where we wiped for over an hour, until our disc logged on.  I pretty much shouted "OH THANK GOD" and as it happened, one of our players just happened to have a disconnect that took him offline for the rest of the night.

Pretty much oneshot it with the disc in the raid.

It's also reported that Blood Nova is hitting melee, when it used to only target ranged.

On the flip side, Marked players don't grant him blood power anymore, and they take less damage.  So now it very much is more of a "can you keep lots of players who are taking damage at once" fight.  Except without the use of shields.

[Rendakor]

I knew there was something wrong with Saurfang last night! His blood points were going through the roof, the shield bug explains it.

Speaking of bugged encounters, has anyone else had problems in HoR since the patch? Whenever we tried actually going in front of him (aka not doing the glitch) he cast Fury of Frostmourne at about the 2nd wave and one shot the whole group. Happened twice before we just glitched him and stayed far behind. 

Edit: The new glitch involves staying in the room rather than up on the little ledge.

[K9]

The change to Saurfang is annoying, but not game breaking on 10 at least. We went with our usual 6 DPS 2 healer (1 disc) setup and killed him with 2 marks up. It's a little rougher, but by now people should be more competent at killing blood beasts and doing flat out more DPS so it balances out a bit.

Finally killed Rotface, having everyone spread more and cleansing earler helps, since the oozes do less damage than the debuff. It's one of those fights where if it goes smooth it goes very smooth, but if it goes rotten it fails fast.

Also had the Frost Giant boss; if you get him make sure to huddle so eveyone is within 8m of someone else (preferably more), still 1 shot him with some brezzes and 4 dead at the end, hey ho 5 extra frost emblems. Had a try on Valthiria, the free EoF before her was nice, and the fight itself looks very doable. It's a really fun fight.

[Merusk]

Yeah, someone in our raid was searching the forums between wipes/ resets and discovered a post where someone mentioned the ROTFH change.  We tested it the next attempt and discovered, sure enough it was true.  Fight was much smoother that way, IMO, just a lot more intense on the healers.. who had complained they got bored doing it the other way.

Do you mean Mark of the Fallen Champion?

Yes, that.  Something stuck it in my head as Rune of the Fallen Hero. 

[Fabricated]

Oh yeah, Ensidia just ate a 3 day suspension and got their achievements/loot rolled back for exploiting the Arthas encounter.

One of their lead raiders quit and wrote a hilarious letter, then cut/pasted an edited copy of Furor/Tigole/whatever's original EQ rant.

"FUCKIN NOOB SCRUBS AND BLIZZ WITH THEIR STUPID EASY CONTENT bLARGH CASUALS" *cheats to make an encounter easier*

[Musashi]

Took our healers one attempt on saurfang to figure it out.  We were cheezing it before and letting fuckers die.  Probably a little more strain on the healers now, but as far as a dps perspective it's the same damn thing.

[kildorn]

Man, that seems less "they sploited!" as much as "we were stupid and tried to reuse a damage type to trigger events that we forgot players could deal if they wanted to"

[Lakov_Sanite]

Man, that seems less "they sploited!" as much as "we were stupid and tried to reuse a damage type to trigger events that we forgot players could deal if they wanted to"

Not really. The platforms were never supposed to come back up so damaging them more wouldn't work.  The only real issue is how dumb they were to NOT expect this result.  Even if their rogue was using siege bombs in good faith, the moment they saw the platforms coming back and the valkyrs being unable to pull people off the ledges they should have known it was a bug.  At that point the should have at least tried to get a gm to give them a go-ahead as they would well know that developers were watching their kill.

Really, how stupid are you, being one of the number one kills, going for world first arthas to not think everything you do is going to be under a microscope? Yes it was poor coding on blizzards part but that doesn't excuse blatantly exploiting a bug.  That's exactly what it is too, an exploit. Not necessarily the same as hacking or cheating but it's exploiting a bad game mechanic for gain. 

[Fordel]

Poopsocking guild uses exploits early and often, news at 11? 

[K9]

If it hadn't been them, it would have been someone else I'm sure. I'm still staggered by the number of people who care though.

[Simond]

Actually, one of the usual "Close but no cigar" guilds figured out the same exploit and went "Well, we'd better not use this or we'll get banned". 

[Ingmar]

It probably wasn't deliberate exploiting at least at first - very top end rogues pretty frequently use engineering bombs as part of their normal rotation these days.

[Fordel]

All they have to do is release the video of their kill and that would clearly show if it was just a rogue squeezing extra DPS or not.


I find it *very* hard to believe that they don't have a video or five of their world first Lich King kill.

[Ingmar]

Yeah certainly seems like something you could discover and go 'oh HEY lets do that on purpose'. On the other hand it might not be obvious exactly what is causing it to bug out.

[Musashi]

It's pretty obvious if something bugs out.  They've always banned people for this.  They might have gotten away with it if it bugged and they stopped.  But short of that and you get banned, and it's always been that way.  Donno who these guys are, but you've got to know that if you're competing for firsts, you're going to be put under the microscope.  How they can be mad at a 72hr ban is beyond me.  I've seen entire guilds perma-banned for not much more (AQ wall hax).  I know they may not have known what was doing it, but you're supposed to put in a ticket.  But if you just power through an obviously bugged encounter and then accept the accolades, you've got to expect the hammer.

[Ingmar]

It's pretty obvious if something bugs out. 

Sure, its obvious 'hey the floor is bugging out'. What may not be obvious is which one of the random things that 25 different people are doing is *causing* it to bug out, or if it is just a problem with the instance server or what. My thinking is given that Blizzard actually banned them they probably had some evidence that the guild knew what they were doing and they were doing it on purpose, but it isn't hard for me to imagine a situation where the players couldn't really tell what was causing the bug to happen.

[Sheepherder]

It's probably a safe bet that they did something ingame or which Warden would pick up which indicated an intent to bug the encounter.

[Musashi]

It's hard for me to imagine that they though a platform that was supposed to stay disappeared reappeared and people stopped falling to their deaths was an encounter working as intended.  They knew.  They just figured that they wouldn't get caught.  They did.

As far as them not knowing what caused it, sure I can imagine that.  I think they probably knew.  But it's possible they didn't.  It's still a ban if you gain loot through an exploit.  Always has been.  And it's sometimes been permanent.

[Ingmar]

When it happens without intent and the people in question put in a bug report, my understanding is that it isn't a ban, they just remove the loot. Obviously some of those elements were missing this time, though.

[Lakov_Sanite]

Also this guild already killed the lich king in 10man prior to their 25kill.  They knew the mechanics and they knew something was wrong when a whole phase of the fight was nullified.

[Simond]

From Kungen (Ensidia person):

But when the bug happened on one of our wipes then we noticed that the Val'kyrs dropped people off on the platform again. So when the bug would accur again there wasn't any reason for us to damage them since they would drop people on the platform again.

"Yeah, we knew it was a bug and yeah we knew it broke the encounter"

[Musashi]

When it happens without intent and the people in question put in a bug report, my understanding is that it isn't a ban, they just remove the loot. Obviously some of those elements were missing this time, though.

Oh yea, if they would have reported themselves, I doubt they would be banned right now.  But the thing is, I'm pretty sure the QA team reviews all first kills on new content.  So if they didn't report it they guaranteed themselves a ban.

[Lakov_Sanite]

Also I bet just going


/yell "hey gm's this encounter looks bugged, should we keep going?"

would have yielded a reply cause you know they were being watched.  In fact I have 0 sympathy for the stupidity of them thinking they weren't.

[WindupAtheist]

Havoc in the ultra-poopsock world. I love it. I wonder if the prince will have them beheaded.

[Lantyssa]

Orf wif 'ere 'eads!

[Lightstalker]

Meh.  I have no sympathy for the "evil exploiters shouldn't have been evil, or exploiters," chorus.  Like demanding the river flow uphill, that.  Petulantly stamp your foot more, please. 

Siege damage was another cobbled-on feature to an engine that wasn't made for it, like Vehicles, the arena, or the stupid interface limits tracking Kinetic Bombs, etc. etc.  Obvious to the user or not; when you release with insufficient test coverage you deserve the shit sandwich consequences, not your customers.  The customers already got to deal with your first offering of sandwiches, your product, the double dose is a little insulting.  These encounters are designed to be solved.  Dropping Malygos to 1hp during the P1-P2 transition also seems suspect, as does a pure burn on Sarth +3 but those are tried and true solutions to those encounters both of which trivialize entire phases of the encounter.  LOS exploitation is the expected solution in several fights while year after year WoW trains players to find the trick and win the prize (and reinforces the notion that end game bosses won't work right for the first few weeks no matter how you approach the fight).  This looks a lot like just another trick that wasn't considered in the design meetings (and why would it?  Saronite bombs have been constantly buffed since their introduction to make them relevant - why would an irrelevant class perk factor into an end-game raid boss encounter?).  Funny that I just found this thread fortelling a shitstorm of Tigole posts quoted back at him when something is big is broken in Northrend.  Literally unkillable bosses haven't been a problem for quite a while, so that's progress right? 

Suspending accounts, while continuing to collect subscription fees, is pretty low rent for a situation where a problem on the vendor side led to unexpected behavior on the customer side.  It'd be like Toyota suspending your drivers license for owning a Camry, while the bank continues to collect your monthly payment, and the moral outrage being directed at the Camry owners.  Maybe Camry owners do deserve our ire, but really, the producer should show some pride in workmanship and cop to missing this interaction internally.

[WindupAtheist]

Oh fuck off. They're not retarded, they knew exactly what they were doing and that it wasn't kosher.

[Selby]

as does a pure burn on Sarth +3

There's a big difference between gearing for a fight to burn down 5M HP in 90s and exploiting a fight mechanic that results in no one taking damage for a significant portion of the battle.  As long as the risks of dying are still there to the entire raid and within the parameters of the fight, it's likely not a problem.  Exploiting LoS issues and terrain bugs, or glitches in the encounter are different.

That being said, every time we've had a glitch on a raid boss that resulted in us not being able to kill it (stuck at 1HP) or loot something (the body vanishes, chest doesn't open), a GM has pretty much always taken the "I cannot help thee with that" road giving us their "official policy is not to interfere on heroics and raids and they can't help you if there's a problem."

[WindupAtheist]

For real, that whole "If devs were perfect there would be no bugs so it's their fault!" thing followed by some tortured analogy to real life is so fucking 1998.

[Musashi]

wat

When you get banned they stop asking for payment.  So I don't know about your whole Toyota story.  It seems, how shall I say, suspect.

It's pretty much not a philosophical discussion, bro.  If I was at the switch over at Blizzard, maybe I'd handle it differently.  But they've been consistent.  If you do dumb shit you get banned.  As noted, this was very obviously dumb shit.  People have been perma banned for not much more.  The people in guilds that are doing that content are aware of these facts, I'm sure you know.  This is you put your face on fire and it got hot.  No shit.  Furor works on this game still, afaik.  He's on raids now, I hear.  He's like the patron saint of petulant foot stampers.  He knows if you're exploiting.  He invented it.

[Merusk]

Is there some talking points post on the banned guild's website?  My guildleader was spewing the exact same shit in vent before last night's raid.

[Azuredream]

I wouldn't have banned them. To me the difference between Sarth3d burn and saronite bombs is so small that if you're going to ban one you should ban the other. Both are trivializing the encounter in an unintended manner. It's just that Blizzard on Sarth decided "oh clever players!" and on LK they said "BAN!".

Also, using 3rd party programs to remove walls in AQ is so many light years away from using an in-game mechanic to bug an encounter. That DOES deserve a ban.

[Rasix]

If your DPS rotation produces a Festivus Miracle, perhaps you should be just a little wary.   Comparing this to the 3D burn? Apples to jetpacks.  Serioulsy, do less drugs.

[Rendakor]

I still don't understand the nerdrage over OS10+3 zerg. You kill the boss before the difficult part of the fight occurs; it's no more cheating than doing any low level instance solo as a level 80.