Kel'Thuzad's ability use on PTR

Look at the tank’s damage received/debuffs at the abomination 1:45
https://youtu.be/9-6K-IDhOdA?t=104
This is just one example of a video that shows Mortal Wound not dealing much damage at all, so Ianarian is right about private servers not being accurate.

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If Blood Tap is 200% weapon damage then it wouldn’t be 60 damage. Old comments on Blood Tap say it hits for around 1500ish.

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This is the Mortal Wound in the combat log:
spell=28467/mortal-wound
This is the Blood Tap:
spell=28470/blood-tap

Both of them are Weapon Damage - % Value: 199

Guardian of Icecrown deal increased damage over time, but Unstoppable Abomination deal fixed damage

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In the WOTLK db Blood Tap is

“Weapon Damage - %: Value: 125”

And it doesn’t hit for nothing, so I really dunno. But tanks in 2006 videos were taking tiny hits too.

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The volleys are doing weird things too with their timings.

https://classic.warcraftlogs.com/reports/LX6dAJQVnZwr8xqa#fight=78&type=casts&hostility=1&source=282&ability=28479&view=events

It’s fairly consistently 15 seconds apart, but sometimes 30 or 45 almost like he completely skips one or two and resets his timer, which has the effect of making the encounter noticeably easier.

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The question raised in threads like this one have been on our minds a lot as we’ve been testing on the PTR the last couple of months.

So let’s take a moment before Naxxramas releases tomorrow and talk about how boss abilities work in WoW Classic and Original WoW.

Why doesn’t Kel’Thuzad use abilities on strict timers?

The simple answer is, for the most part, that’s not how boss abilities work in World of Warcraft (Classic and Original). Bosses and other creatures are rarely set up to have exact timers for spells and ability usage. They often make decisions which were set up to be somewhat unpredictable. Multiple spells or abilities can be available to the boss, and they will deliberately evaluate what to do following their last spell cast.

Additionally, some bosses have abilities that share cooldowns in some way, similar to how players can’t activate two empowering on-use trinkets at the same time. This means that if a boss uses a significant ability, some of the other abilities that boss has may not be usable for a short period of time.

There are, of course, exceptions. Not all mechanics encountered in combat are being controlled by the same logic, and spells can have different shared cooldown categories, or they can be excluded from this restriction altogether.

In either case, these are typically purposeful design decisions, and the general intention was to prevent a boss from unloading all of its most impactful abilities within moments of each other. In the case of Kel’thuzad, we see it currently working correctly.

For comparison, here are a few other examples of encounters that have deliberately unpredictable ability recast timers, the result of which can become quite pronounced as combat time increases (or as combat time decreases, depending on your perspective):

  • Magmadar’s Panic Recast
  • Broodlord Lashlayer’s Blast Wave
  • Gurubashi Bat Rider’s Unstable Concoction
  • Nefarian’s Bellowing Roar

You’ve probably noticed this before with these encounters (or others), and it’s definitely accurate to say that this can and does influence the difficulty of the same encounter–at times wildly–from week to week.

In later versions of World of Warcraft, and with the continued advancement of player knowledge and skill, many foundations of encounter design changed to make randomness less of a factor in encounter difficulty. In WoW Classic however, the behavior of Original WoW has been preserved.

We hope this helps shed some light on this for you. We can’t wait to see you Naxxramas tomorrow. May your Frostbolt Volleys, Deep Breaths, and Bellowing Roars be many and eventful*.

*Or not!

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Appreciate the attention to detail, and communicating your thoughts. Thank you!

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The fact that knowledge of KTs toolkit is going to be relevant day one of release is why I stopped playing Classic.

Nothing about this is emulating the vanilla experience. We’ll probably see a 32 warrior full clear in under an hour.

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Dunno why you started playing classic then.

The boss was killed 14 years ago.

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So these things are sentient. Thank you so much for this insight. All the more reason these things must be stopped.

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Thank you for the insight, always love seeing posts like this that dive a little deeper behind the scenes!

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“reee muh vaniluh EXPERIUNZ”

Literally nothing can give you what you are asking for other than a time machine and a Men In Black styled memory eraser.

Like seriously, what exactly are you expecting out of Classic, if your complaint is “the game is bad because everyone knows the encounters” ? Blizzard cannot fix that. Because it’s not a problem.

If you want new and fresh content that nobody has ever seen before, go play retail.

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That answers questions for quite a few spells. Really enjoy the deeper looks into how things worked.

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3 cheers for the retail client also. That had to have screwed some stuff up.

Not Blizzard’s fault /shrug

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You can’t mind-wipe the population. You weren’t going to get an emulation of 12yr old you, drooling your way through content, clicking your spells and being clueless as to any of the underlying PvE concepts.

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It’s wild that we can watch videos where Kel’Thuzad is not going more than 40 seconds without casting this ability but you still wrote all that to try and explain why we shouldn’t believe our own eyes.

Minute and a half gaps are obviously not working correctly and that doesn’t mirror the classic experience. You already have groups of mages killing raid bosses with no tanks or healers, and this will only make the encounter easier. Classic is already easier now for a lot of reasons you can’t control. But you can control this one. There’s no reason to introduce yet another tuning failure into the game.

“semi-consistently”

lol.

Meaning not cast on a strict 25-second timer, but not deviating that far off it. None of these minute and a half gaps that Kaivax is saying are it working correctly.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RpqjIFbQYw

Frost Blast

6:32
7:37
8:11
8:45
11:02

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