Encounter Design and Environments

Community General Discussion
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So Ion has made a interview where he talks about the issue with weak auras/addons and how they intend to claw back functionality from addons.

This is GREAT news. the article is here https://www.wowhead.com/news/certain-addon-functionalities-likely-being-clawed-back-in-raids-ion-hazzikostas-354471#comments

However one line got me really worried.

“like slippy, slippy floors” and Sennarth as boss encounter exemples…

I hated Sennarth because as DH, splippery floor with the requirement as a class to dash around was a MISERABLE experience. I hated it with burning passion.

I also did not enjoy at ALL bosses with push back mecaniques that required specific classes, no priest or evokers to help them and a perfect rotation of movement speed, evoker CDs etc.

Please for the love of GOD, do not go the road of “less make them lose character control” or “lets make xyz do knock backs or slippery floor”: It is not fun and it is not a fun design and not fun encounters.

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Please note that Blizzard does not truly test environments, as per the lead environment designer.

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I despised Sennarth with the fury of a thousand supernovae.

“Let’s make a fight where you can’t control where your character is or where it’s going!”

I also found his whole line of thinking to be insane. “Addons are forcing us to do certain things!” No, Ion, nobody forced you to make a fight like Ovinax, where 8 randomly selected people all had to do the same perfect thing and only had seconds to do it, while perfectly coordinating with the other 7 people, and if there was the slightest error, the entire encounter was a wipe with no possible recovery.

YOU did that.

Nobody forced you.

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you can add to that the hard requirement to have 2 blood DK (this makes me mad) or a DK and a DH, and 2-3 mobs to interrupt and any missed interrupt meant a wipe.

and Ion complains about addon.

Stop requiring a silly complexe coordination like ovynax egg breaking.
Stop with the multitude of raid wipe mecaniques. 1 -2 is fine. having 7-10 people responsible for a wipe is not fun at all.

As a guild we lost a LOT of friends after WTOLK raiding changed to be a bit harder, we co no longer carry the 4-5 stragglers. then things went crescendo to today where a descent hunter we cannot keep because he struggles in 1 type of encouter that you will undoubtedly bring back.

It is strange raid design.

I am all for killing all weak aura that could read boss debuffs and raid debuffs (other than ourselves) that you kill in raid addon communication, but for the love of this game, dial down the difficulty hard and stop making bosses for the top 2 guilds in mind bosses that you invariably nerf for the rest of the mortals, bosses that will be IMPOSSIBLE for most guilds if left as is and played without the weak aura packs.

Ion, let me break down the current mythic raiding scene required stuff for many guilds, some are just mine

1: paying for raidbot to be able to sim gear and optimise your character.
2: using google sheets (viserio) for healing cooldown management, otherwise healing cant manage.
3: using google sheet (visio) for raid assignement because every other raid boss require one assignement or another.
4: install MRT because we use both MRT note (requirement by weak auras) and use MRT reminders to set up reminders for raid and self.
5: use warcraftlog to check on performance and issues.
6: use a weak aura pack to deal with 3 and 4
7: use a weak aura for CC coordination exported by 3 into MRT
8: use weak aura packs for your class that you modify to suit you in order to squeeze as much damage as possible and meet the silly dps requirement of mythic raiding.
9: For the raid leader, pay for discord boost in order to have ok voice.
10: paying for backup teamspeak VM in case discord is kaput.
11: bigwigs or DBM boss mod
12: details boss mod to check whats is going on.
13: one person in the raid to log raid into warcraftlogs.
14: a couple of people recording the raid trys in order to be able to check replays when things go wrong or details does not give a clear indication of what happened

with all this, raiders need to farm gold, farm mythic+, check logs, prep fights in advance and guilds leaders need to do all the above and maintain players moral and recruit and ensure the continuity of a guild…

Reading everything I wrote, I am realising how mad all this is. I should just quit I think.

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