If you ever did blackwing lair runs, Nefarian Would do class mechanics
Neltharion was supposed to but now it’s removed
It’s a real shame too, how did 8 classes and 40 people manage to do those unique class mechanics
But 13 classes and 20 people can’t?
I don’t remember BWL’s Nefarian class calls forcing players to attack each other. Lose control? yes, but not attacking others as this article suggests.
I assume they had a good reason for removing it. It is a shame we will not have this mechanic but it must’ve been for the good of the encounter.
Too bad. The dumbing down of the game continues
This is the second thread I have seen about this article today…and both times, I have been confused about what makes this specific mechanic more 'fun" than any other.
The boss takes control of all players using a randomly selected class and forces them to attack their party members. What is so fun about that?
To me, it sounds like an RNG nightmare that will result in multiple wipes because it is a mechanic that players have no control over other than class stacking.
That sounds like a worse version of the Mal’Ganis mechanic. lol
I’d understand the outrage if it was actually something like the Nefarian class calls, but it isn’t, so…
I never did that raid in Vanilla, so I guess I don’t fully understand what the class calls did. I am just going off the article description that says…
"This “class call” is an infamous mechanic returning from Blackwing Lair, where Nefarian used it to similar effect, causing chaos within the group if not carefully planned for. In both raids, players of the targeted class temporarily lose control, lashing out at enemies and allies alike.
Unfortunately, it seems like this ability may have been too difficult to balance across 13 different classes, as it has now been removed from the encounter journal, suggesting it may be gone entirely. Although an interesting and nostalgic gameplay mechanic, some groups had already theorized stacking classes to only deal with the easier calls, while avoiding bringing classes featuring more deadly ones.’
Looking at the description some of them were silly like…
“Neltharion takes advantage of the druid’s connection to nature, forcing them to shapeshift to a random form every 6 sec. for 30 sec.”
or
" Neltharion takes hold of the death knight’s powers of undeath, forcing them to death grip allies to their location every 6 sec. for 30 sec."
But then you have others which are going to be horrible like…
“Neltharion forces the demon hunter to erupt in a chaotic dance of blades every 6 sec. for 30 sec, causing them to inflict 83,222 Chaos damage to all creatures and players within 8 yards multiple times.”
“Neltharion corrupts the flow of arcane energies in the mage, forcing them to erupt with Wild Magic every 6 sec. for 30 sec, inflicting 83,260 Arcane damage to players and creatures in 10 yards every 0.5 sec. for 4 sec.”
" * Neltharion corrupts the monk’s essence, splitting three spirits from them that attack outside of their control, and leap to random players with Flying Spirit Kick. On death, these spirits erupt with Unleashed Darkness.
The neltharion class calls were pretty much the only mechanic in an otherwise tank and spank encounter with an aoe phase starting it. The difficulty in the encounter was getting enough people a cloak from farming a different boss. The calls amounted to “aoe this down” “go stand over there”.
Completely unpredictability and the incentive to sit the more difficult classes for calls is not fun. Oh you play an XYZ class? You get to sit for prog.
These are similar in that they shared a name and nothing else. The game has changed in almost 20 years.
Season of mastery added additional mechanics
Example: warriors
They go in berserk mode forcefully, and then in season of mastery they spawn corrupted weapons that charge and attack players
People have downed season of mastery Nefarian with mechanics that did damage to players
Why couldn’t we retail players do this is the question
How was it that 9 class additional mechanics in season of mastery, was able to have world firsts and was infact more difficult than before, not to mention classic vanilla play style is a lot different than retail
But 13 class mechanics was too much for retail?
“we retail players” eh? Lets see it.
You know well classic raid mechanics (and in reality the complete lack of them) are not even in the realm of modern WoW design. If you add some minor mechanics to something where almost nothing else was going on, youre not exactly increasing the difficulty, on top of its been a solved boss for over a decade.
See my post above about season of mastery Nefarian
Additional mechanics that DID hurt players
They did it
Why can’t retail players do it?
https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Nefarian_(tactics)
Priest: Shadow Orbs will appear that cast Mind Flay on nearby players.
Rogue: Corrupted Weapons will spawn and deal shadow damage to random players.
Warrior: Corrupted Weapons will spawn that will charge random players and cast Corrupted Slam, dealing 800 damage and stunning them for 2 seconds.
You don’t know if retail players could do it or not because it was removed before Blizz ever let players test it. This is a silly argument.
I am sure retail players could do it, but as the article points out, Blizz likely did not want to spend the effort to balance it.
But the article does bring up a great point…why would you bring a monk, mage, or DH when you could stack druids and ignore the mechanic entirely.
Max from Liquid called Blizzard and asked them to change their minds about these mechanics cause it was “too difficult” to balance
The class calls back then you had to do an emote if it was your class.
the mechanics weren’t all that interesting it was either: you get it, you run out of the raid. You get it, you can’t do anything for 30 seconds. you get it, it spawns an add.
very interesting theme but the actual mechanics were bleh
Mythic raiders can’t handle a world where cheat auras doesn’t just insta solve the mechanic for them. This also works against their methodology to class stack knowing their meta DPS class would be picked and then wipe the floor with their raid.
That sounds like a legit request after reading what the various “callings” do. The mechanic design incentives groups to bring classes that have easy abilities while avoiding others…like monks.
Oh, that could be fun.
Aight, disregard my previous statement, this actually sounds like a proper successor to the Nefarian class calls.
Big shame. Would’ve been a whacky encounter.
Stay mad. And bad.
RNG-based mechanics that have a huge impact on fight success are usually frowned upon in modern WoW because of the already complex fight mechanics. It is hard to learn a fight’s mechanics and progress if it changes every time you do it.