Unintended changes

*Again something I originally posted in MMO-Champion, which is why it slightly repeats what I said in my previous entry.*

 

Unfortunate as it is we don't really have any crystal orb which tells us how Blizzard intended us to kill the bosses. We still are, whether we like it or not, in a way the forefront of beta testing of these bosses, regardless of if it's done on assigned beta realms or not. When you compete for a first kill, you don't really have the luxury of thinking "oh gosh this boss seems imbalanced, I guess we should make a ticket about it, disband the raid and come again tomorrow to see if it's been changed." You're right when you point out how the bosses have been changed, I can give you a quick overview of a few bosses.

 

Halfus: Atonement healing was used by many guilds in killing the boss. While the boss is relatively easy and unimportant, the way Atonement healed past the Mortal Strike debuff was clearly bugged, however the method was available to everyone and it was so commonly used it hardly mattered. It's a good example of a ability or a talent working in a way that was understandably hard for the boss developers to foresee.

 

Valiona & Theralion: Many guilds used Grounding Totems or Guardian Spirits to avoid the Blackouts, former of which was later changed by Blizzard to not work. This is slightly on the borderline of using class skills, but it's effectively something Blizzard overlooked and guilds used in order to remain competitive against other guilds who could just as well have been using them.

 

Ascendant Council: Here we got loads of shit on us for being "stackers", even the boss was downright impossible without a ranged DPS heavy raid. How awkward it was when nobody cried for injustice when the issue with melee DPS was fixed right after our kill, making the boss kill more obtainable to guilds who hadn't been able to fill their raid with ranged DPS.

 

Cho'gall: In here, our Corrupting Adherent kite was fixed a while after our kill, and the Prayer of Mending healing used by some guilds a while after that. Again, the matter is quite clear if you look at it from our point of view: Why on earth would you try to kill adds that are designed to die by themselves? So we used a tactic that revolved around this insight, but alas, it did get changed.

 

Sinestra: The only thing they changed after our kill were the flames around the eggs in p1, which was a rather minor change. Again when there's such a minor issue, you can't really except us to lay down and wait for it to maybe get fixed in a few hours or days when other guilds are rallying against us for the kill. We killed the boss the way she was, and had the twilight flames been there they wouldn't exactly have made the boss last for several days longer against us.

 

Al'akir: Another boss to be nerfed after the first kills. Undoubtedly some people will somewhy think of the use of Slipstreams as some form of exploiting, but pre-nerf that felt like the only reasonable way to kill the boss. Having people sit in the "audience" also made the boss' enrage timer quite difficult, so it was a double-edged blade in a sense. Post-nerf the p1 is ridiculously easy compared to the previous versions, and when you have your whole raid in the fray from the pull, the enrage timer becomes trivial. There was also a "fun" bug about Al'akir that isn't too well known: When you entered p3, the boss became permanently bugged in a manner that he would completely stop casting Lightning Strikes in p1. This made the boss extremely easy, but it was still quite obviously bugged. So in order to get a "clean" kill, we had to disband the raid and wait 30 minutes 3 times following p3 or enrage wipes to "un-bug" the boss (GM's couldn't help with this), effectively wasting a lot of valuable time when any guild could have been closing in on the kill.

 

Nefarian: It's a shame the Rip (and funnily enough, Bane of Doom, even that wasn't even very good) got nerfed, but again it's not something that was entirely predictable. When a boss is killed, rivaling top guilds are extremely swift in scouting everything from raid compositions to awkward talent choices in order to have an idea what kind of strategy was being used, and our strategy was fairly obvious from our raid comp. I'm fairly sure Blizzard didn't want all the early kills of Nefarian be done with many fluffy little cats, which is why they proceeded to nerf it. It was quite funny following these forums fill with misinformed posters pointing fingers to wherever they could reach, because we were perfectly aware that the boss was not bugged in any way and we hadn't used any illicit methods to circumvent any boss abilities. We invented a strategy and committed several days to it, and it did net us a kill. As unique as the strategy was with it's ups and downs, the boss was still hard to kill, which was probably perfectly intended. I've never doubted that our kill was completely legit, as well as Method's kill, even the boss had been changed in between.

 

Oh and, just because so many people like to use the "fat crits, cannot be legit" -argument in this, I'll just try to give you an idea on how it works. Just think of your biggest crit or fattest DoT tick with your best ability with all your cooldowns blown into it, and then multiply that by 22.5. This works on every nuke and DoT in the game, excluding Deep Freeze, Rip and Bane of Doom, but the damage multiplier cannot be extended past the original DoT duration.

 

Exploiting isn't really a matter of opinion, and as much as some of you would've liked to see us banned, we had clear enough conscience to know none were coming our way. The only time I ever felt like we might have been doing something exploitative in this expansion was when we kited the Magmaw adds around towards the ODS room, but this tactic somehow became commonly accepted and used like a perfectly normal boss kill tactic. I'll give you a fun fact: Blizzard hadn't ever foreseen the use of the famous "Spirit Soak" -tactic for H-LK, and one could say it hadn't been intended, even it was practically the only way to kill the boss with 0% and 5% zone buffs and soon became the common tactic used by most guilds. It just happens to be so that guilds under the pressure of the race for a first kill tend to think more out-of-the-box than the developers who designed the boss that seemed nearly impossible at the first glance.