Blackwing Descent Conquered!

Last night Vox was able to finally put an end to Heroic Nefarian and the abomination that is Zombienyxia, and with that victory we can put Blackwing Descent and all of Nefarian's minions therein behind us, having defeated all progression and achievement content the zone has to offer! With BWD down, it seems an appropriate time to reflect on the zone a bit and the aspects that both succeeded fantastically and failed miserably.

Overall, I think BWD (and by extension the rest of the Tier 11) is among the best raid content we've seen since Ulduar and it makes me excited for what Firelands will offer us in 4.2. There are a fair variety of encounter types and a wide array of challenges, from the trivial (Normal Atramedes) to the unique and interesting (Chimaeron) to the goofy (Omnitron Achievement) to the downright brutal (Heroic Nefarian). While I enjoyed basically every encounter BWD had to offer, in spite of it's relative simplicity, I think Chimaeron offers the most interesting look forward to future raiding, by encorporating a clever use of fairly simple game mechanics (buffs/debuffs and health levels) to create an entirely new encounter experience we haven't seen before. I deeply hope Blizzard has learned from their Chimaeron experience and opts to continue down that path of utilizing the existing engine in very unique ways that step outside of the normal tank-gets-hit, raid-gets-DoTed, healers-keep-them-full mentality that is the norm.

While Heroic Nefarian definitely sits at the top spot of BWD in terms of difficulty and time spent, there were certainly a few other encounters that offered a fairly strong challenge, such as Heroic Omnitron and Heroic Maloriak, as well as the Keeping it in the Family achievement.

Unfortunately, now that we've defeated the zone, it feels appropriate to also point out a few flaws in the encounter design of BWD, and in general that of Cataclysm raiding we've seen thus far.

The most prominent aspect of Cata raiding that seems deeply prevalent, slightly to a fault, is the sheer volume of interrupt mechanics required in current tier content. Now I will grant that Blizzard must have also recognized this as a bit of an issue based on the post-release changes to Maloriak, Cho'gall, and Halfus (not to mention the 4.1 change to interrupt miss rates), but that didn't change the fact that at the time during early progression, these things were extremely common and unforgiving.

This isn't to say I don't understand the purpose of requiring player interrupts to some degree, as just like anything in raiding, it is a method to require player recognition and response to an event. I don't take issue with their existence, but instead with the quantity of interrupts required and the binary pass-fail nature so many of these mechanics enforce on the raid. For Heroic Maloriak, as the worst example, it is not uncommon to have 25-30 required interrupts between Arcane Storm and Release Aberrations, and for a good portion of those casts, a botched interrupt or slight delay (again, especially prior to the Arcane Storm change) would almost certainly cause a couple deaths (Storm) if not a required wipe (Aberrations). Arguably you could adjust your strategy slightly to give a fail safe for Release Aberrations casts, but especially when learning this fight and not having a great deal of gear, this can be extremely dangerous to give your add tank 6+ adds for longer than necessary.

This trend was seen in other fights as well such as Heroic Halfus, where again when learning this fight and DPS isn't super high, a requirement of 25 Shadow Nova interrupts is not uncommon, and again if gear is slightly weak, this will often lead to deaths and therefore a required wipe. Heroic Omnitron has almost the exact same scenario through Arcanotron.

In fact, I don't know the mechanics of Sinestra, but I submit that well over half the current raid content encounters require heavy interruption throughout a large portion if not the entirety of the fight, such that failure very frequently forces a wipe in 10-man simply due to an unrecoverable death taking away 10% of the raid force.

Unfortunately this is very much amplified by being a 10-man force, which often offers far fewer options when dealing with a given mechanic, such as interrupts. While the no-miss change will help to allow tanks and even healers to assist in a pinch, often the requirements of the encounter design mean these players must tend to other tasks and the frequency of interrupts in many cases (Maloriak, Omni, Halfus, Nefarian, etc.) lead to DPS being relegated to interrupt duty.

The worst aspect of this style of encounter design is that often a particular interrupt must be handled by a singular individual (or sometimes a pair), and this makes the encounter far too stressful and taxing for that individual and drains a great deal of fun. This person must focus so intently on the duty of interruption that almost all else is put on the back-burner.

Now, some may argue that requiring a DPS or two to focus on interrupts instead of just the normal avoidance of ground effects and the like is good by bringing more responsibility to DPS, but I would argue that again, the sheer binary nature of these current interrupt mechanics are far too unforgiving. Compare it to a healer, who arguably must do the same sort of action as interrupting by intently monitoring damage on the raid and reacting quickly and intelligently. While this is true in a broad sense, in truth (for the most part), this decision by the healer is much more forgiving. If I cast a heal on someone that wasn't the most ideal target at the time, my heal is still effective and I still have other players that are performing the same task that can back me up. Further, even if we all fail a decision check, often that failure can be recovered from by altering our next decision (i.e. Use an emergency heal or cooldown to save the tank after our previous mistake).

Conversely, these interrupts often don't allow for that, and instead simply run a check within a very short period of time: Did you interrupt? If yes, no benefit occurs. If no, the raid wipes. I argue this sort of mechanic, at least at the volume we see in current content, is not fun or engaging for the player(s) involved and is stressful for the entire group.

I much prefer interrupt mechanics such that we saw on Yogg Phase 1, where they were limited to a short duration/phase and while they were important, a failure did not outright mean a wipe. While the 10-man raid size and 3-platform split does make it a bitch to cover always, I think the Nefarian's End encounter did this reasonably well, by limiting interrupts to a very short period of the fight (although again, often a single miss can mean a death if not a wipe).

In any case, enough about that, because in spite of these comments, as I said BWD was a really fun zone overall and aside from a few bugs and strange design choices here and there, it's been a blast to take on and finally conquer, and I think we're all looking forward to finishing off the latter half of Tier 11 in the near future!