Dirty play?

Disclaimer: I posted the original version of this to MMO-Champion forums to Stars' thread about their heroic Cho'gall kill and their comments. Pretty wild accusations were flying around and I thought I'd post some of my views. The post was soon lost to 18 pages and a lock on the thread hence I was told to re-post it in here where it's more in place.

I'll try to be through this one time and if you'll please bear with me, you should have your questions answered. I'd like to say "grats" and my apologies for further derailing this topic (the Stars' thread), although it's the direction you've given to it yourself.

Firstly, Nefarian. I see a lot of people who are under the assumption that bringing 10 ferals suddenly made the encounter go somewhere between a "walk-in-the-park" and "piss-easy-lootfest" in difficulty. Even after hours spent over several raid days of learning the boss and trying to hone up tactics, we still spent a nice 11 hours down there the day we went to try and get that kill. There's also the popular misconception that ferals could roll a multimillion damage rip on the boss indefinitely and he'd just drop dead. The encounter itself, however, was clearly designed to give you a significant damage boost, for Nefarian, Onyxia and the Chromatic Prototypes together had a total of way over 200M HP, making it a very healthy boss indeed compared to most heroics. Not only this, but the soft enrage in P3 where he constantly spams Shadowflame Sparks making the adds uncontrollable happens only a few minutes into P3.

Now a feral druid with average gear could throw in an average of 2-3 million damage when he was lucky enough to get Dominated, depending on if he had Tiger's Fury or a mastery trinket ready. This might sound amazing, but again bear in mind the amount of HP the boss has and the fact that the feral needed to have his 5 combo points ready on the boss and be limited at often doing less than 10k DPS until he got that MC. The amount of classes able to reach seven-digit damage figures is not even nearly limited to feral druids. A fire mage could throw in a 4M combustion, I could throw in a 1,5M Curses of Doom and so on. Any class with a fat DoT or nuke could hit a million damage every time he got Dominated. We had a lot of debate if the feral druids would actually work, but overall the feral druid strategy had more pros than cons. Ferals could pop bearform and crappy feral-Tranquilities for Electrocutions, which made them overall very survivable, and their overall damage seemed to be somewhat higher, even with their nonexistent output outside of Dominions. The cons were not being able to DPS the boss much during P2, which left the boss with a lot of health in P3 facing the soft enrage mechanics, which was quite risky.

Secondly, I don't really know why everyone is suddenly portraying us as mass stackers, after we've stacked a single class once. Somebody already pointed out something about yogg-0 and affliction warlocks, so I can leave it at that. I see Ascendant Council being brought up, which is quite ridiculous. Anyone who had been there on heroic before the hotix could tell you that there was absolutely no way you could have brought any number of melee and tanks you couldn't count with the fingers of one hand and had enough DPS live long enough to actually kill the boss. When we were closing in on the kill our retpala himself said that he was being completely useless there and that we should have a hunter spec BM instead of having him in the raid. So as much as he wanted to be there killing the boss, he had to point it out himself that having him in there would just be dead weight to the raid. So overall the options we had there were to sit around and whine about the boss imbalance, or just try to take our ranged alts and see if we could kill it with the gear they had. So we overcame this design flaw and killed the boss, managed to get the attention of Blizzard so they hotfixed it a day after, and got portrayed as "stackers." Nice.

Now I'll just be talking for myself. I find it amazing how many guilds are already clearing up for themselves. Certain guilds seem to focus their energy, not on killing bosses, but instead on making so much noise about how everyone should understands that Blizzard is to be blamed for this incredible bugfest and that the winners will clearly be the biggest cheaters. Talk about bitter berries here. Out of 13 bosses, Atramedes is the only one you could really call a failure from Blizzard's end. Magmaw was a bit funny one, but it's also a bit funny how nobody thinks it's uncool to kite the adds 'round and 'round, even many of our guildmembers were downright refusing to do it until other guilds killed the boss before us like that. Valiona & Theralion also had the nice hitch that allowed a lot of guilds to completely ignore the Blackouts with some clever use of Grounding Totems and Guardian Spirits, something we had no idea how to do (someone is going to be skeptical, but you can just check the video) but to date I haven't seen a single post or a thread about someone calling these guilds exploiters for this. Atramedes is the only boss you could really call totally exploitable, Magmaw and I guess even Nefarian are/were just a bit cheesy. On the flipside, a lot more of the bosses have/had bugs or flaws that made them harder. What is different about this is the fact that these bosses (and bugs) are exactly the same for everyone. Sure it sucks ass when that Frost Beacon wipes you in Ascendant Council transition and there is nothing you can do about it, or when that Searing Totem blew that Shield on Omnotron, or when Valiona fake-breathed your raid, and Al'akir sure seems brutal but that is something every single guild has been struggling with and doesn't really make a good excuse in my eyes.

Also, someone made a very good point of us not repeating our Nefarian kill this week. We haven't even tried it yet this week, as we well know by now that our old strategies and tactics aren't going to work. It's probably still quite doable, but spending hours in re-adjusting our setup and tactics for a kill we already have when Sinestra and Al'akir are still up is just not worth the time.

Despite their somewhat lame comments following their Cho'gall kill, I'd like to say grats to For the Horde on getting the first kill on Cho'gall. You clearly beat us to that one and did a great job. I'd like to already honor whomever first kills Al'akir and Sinestra, I'm sure they will have earned that glory. To Stars I don't really know what to say, other than sorry for not having any other thread to post into.