Heroic Icecrown: Day 13

Been a while since my last update, but we've been in the groove lately and it feels great!

While it's actually been a few days now, it's worth mentioning we finally took on Valithria and overall, I think it's one of the more enjoyable Heroic encounters in the zone. It provided that much needed and definitive learning curve where the first half dozen attempts seemed near impossible but slowly everything came together as we all realized what little tweaks and improvements we could make. I also like the subtle but impactful changes Blizzard implemented into the Heroic version, especially the mana drain from Frostbolt Volley. That change alone required a complete overall of our tactics and raid makeup from the Normal, going from one tank, four healers, five somewhat-bored DPS to two tanks, one physical DPS team and one caster DPS team, and three healers total.

While I consider myself a fairly strong tank with high situational awareness, in spite of my best efforts I was unable to manage all the adds in the Heroic version of this fight and we'd always have issue with Archmage spawns that would, unlike Zombies or Aboms, be apt to ignore me after an initial pickup and proceed to smack our Rogue in the face... hard.

The next issue was our overall DPS on adds was severely lacking, and we really had to focus our DPS to each squeak out every little drop that we could to keep up with the spawns, which led to the eventual dual DPS team setup, as trying to have our melee DPS especially run back and forth across the room wasted far more DPS than just allowing them to stick to one side and concentrate on always attacking something.

Then of course came the real crux of the fight -- the Valithria healers themselves. Like the rest of us, they struggled for a while, and we tried all kinds of various raid makeups to both maximize their own healing as well as our raid DPS outside. I must also say, that what I love about this game and especially the dual spec system is that it leads to the inevitable surprise when your normally Elemental DPS Shaman tries dragon healing on this fight and absolutely dominates the charts after the requisite practice runs. Add on the fact that our Ret Paladin has had to be a primary healer virtually full-time now and also blew the doors off and it's a great feeling to know you're playing with such diversely talented people!

In any event, great fight as it provides just enough chaos to be fun without feeling completely out of control in terms of success -- if you fuck up, you lose; if not, you'll probably be victorious.

Fast forward a couple days, and having skipped a raid night due to holiday, we were facing the final couple bosses remaining on our third and final raid night, so we decided to give the All You Can Eat achievement a try before moving on to Lich King so as not to waste his loot for the week.

I would say this Sindragosa achievement was by far the most difficult achievement in ICC (though we have yet to try Neck-Deep in Vile considering the heavy reliance on ranged DPS we just don't have access to), with the only thing that comes even close being Dances with Oozes. However, in terms of man hours and required strategizing, All You Can Eat definitely took the greatest effort. Still, we came up with a pretty solid strategy, mostly courtesy of our resident Death Knight, and while we spent many many wipes making various mistakes, eventually we got into the groove and eventually dropped her.

Having said all that, I probably won't be the first to say that as a general raid encounter, Sindragosa really tries to push the boundary between "fun" and "aneurysm inducing banality". As a tank I really don't have to worry about it, but I can still understand the issues, and the developer who thought Unchained Magic and Chilled to the Bone were interesting and dynamic raid encounter abilities should be poked in the eye with a sharp pencil. I may be armchairing here, but here's a Raid Design Tip: Much like the bitching about Mind Control effects in PVP, abilities that prevent the player from participating in his normal play are the opposite of fun -- they're downright fucking annoying and aggravating.

I suspect the intention of these abilities was to provide a feedback loop for players: You deal damage to kill said dragon, but careful, don't do too much too quickly or you go splat! Therefore, we have created a challenging balance so players must deal enough damage to defeat said dragon before Berserk, but cannot deal so much damage they kill themselves! BRILLIANT!

In reality, the Berserk timer is not tuned to be even remotely challenging on Normal (and initial impressions from a handful of attempts says the same may hold true in Heroic) even while the majority of casters who receive Unchained Magic simply stop performing actions altogether. That isn't interesting or challenging in the least -- it's boring and trivial and sometimes downright excruciating.

If Blizzard truly wanted to create that balancing act (rather than the current incarnation where casters do almost nothing unless they happen to be a class that can self-cooldown frequently thus ignoring the feedback damage), then at least tie it to the rest of the fight mechanics in a meaningful way. For example, how about when a player is afflicted by a Frost Block, any player that attacks said block receives a stacking DoT thereby creating your feedback loop, so the raid may need a rotation or a handful of players to only deal a certain amount each rather than blindly focus it down. Likewise to add healers into the mix, allow Frost Block targeted players to be healed while blocked but also take damage (perhaps mirrored from the damage the rest of the raid takes from said stacking DoT), and when a healer heals the blocked target, they get a stacking debuff that lowers healing output temporarily.

Now we've suddenly removed the "do nothing" gayness of the current mechanic and added an interesting dynamic. DPS must form a rotation on Frost Block killing because one person attacking too long builds up an unhealable DoT on the DPS and the Block target, so a rotation must be established so multiple DPS are each doing a bit of the damage. As more DPS build up DoTs, the healing on the Block target must be increased, which makes healers also need to rotate healing or otherwise mitigate the -healing debuff from healing the Block target.

This is just an off the wall idea, but the point is simple: Any mechanic where the absolute best solution is to stop performing actions is far from fun or interesting. Players want to do something, even if it means something abnormal from their usual role/rotation.

In any event, that is way off topic, but suffice to say while I found the Sindragosa achievement interesting to work out, some parts of that fight in particular stand out as exceedingly short-sighted.

We also took on Been Waiting a Long Time for This on The Lich King, which turned out to be much, much easier and on par with some of the simpler achievements we've seen in ICC (i.e. Boned, Flu Shot Shortage, I'm on a Boat). Really the minor changes required for the first phase were so trivial that it barely delays the rest of the fight and therefore doesn't even come close to pushing the Berserk timer.

Last night we also revisited Heroic Putricide for the second time after spending a good 7 or 8 attempts on him a week or two prior and not really getting much beyond the first transition. However, we worked out some methodology for dealing with Necrotic Plague and handling the transitional dual-ooze spawns and on our first attempt we found ourselves well into Phase 3 though 3 DPS were dead. Three tries later, he was dead.

All in all it was quite underwhelming after such buildup and expectations, and makes me a little disappointed we didn't spend more time on him when we first got around to him after dropping Heroic Festergut/Rotface but instead focused on Bloodwing and Frostwing. Still one of my favorite fights and Heroic adds some interesting and dangerous mechanics, but they weren't as overwhelmingly difficult to master as we first believed. Still, glad to have it down for sure!

In any event, we're a few steps closer to a new drake, and next up we'll be really diving into Heroic Sindragosa!