N'Zoth Heroic Bugs and Design Issues

Gameplay Dungeons, Raids and Scenarios
1

After gaining AOTC week 1 I feel like I need to report some major QA issues with this boss. I don’t feel like this fight was properly thought through.

  1. If a tentacle dies on Psychus there is a chance that Psychus won’t gain the Synaptic shock debuff even if Psychus is standing right on the tentacle. We had roughly half our wipes caused by either the 1st down team or 2nd down team experiencing this issue where Psychus lost this buff even when the team executed the strategy perfectly.

  2. Paranoia. Sometimes this can target tanks who are both tanking Basher Tentacles and the paired player is actually across the room on the 1st basher or 2nd basher. The tank can’t leave the Basher or it will 1 shot a melee or cast Tumultuous. The tank gaining a paired ally didn’t happen often but the damage the tank received before dying to this was substantial before the paired person got there in time. Not sure if this is a bug or intended but it needs to be changed. Perhaps the solution is only ever having 1 basher tentacle up at one time.

  3. Anguish in down phase. The ticking damage from this seems to be to extreme per second. Some players were immediately moving out but getting hit by two ticks of anguish and dying.

  4. Anguish in last phase. Harvest thoughts can take place simultaneously when players have to drop their anguish. Obviously, this creates a conflict of mechanics forcing only the minimum of three players to soak harvest. When their anguish drops its incredibly hard to see under the harvest thoughts ability, turning a mechanic into a guessing game. We lost players to this overlap multiple times.

  5. Last phase Mindgrasp RNG looks like it can lead to wipes. At our current DPS levels Mindgraps “pulling in” forced players to run to the edge, outside of dps range of N’zoth. Where as we saw much higher overall numbers when mindgrasp pulled away from N’zoth (pulling out to the edge) because the players could attack the boss while getting into position for the pull out. This actually changes overall damage substantially in a critical dps race phase. I know its intended but just seems awkward.

Further thoughts: On heroic, I honestly think the entire team should go down in each phase and not be separate from each other and the azeroth radiance sanity restore lowered to allow the entire team to experience each phase. Rotating and coordinating two separate up and down teams while simultaneous communicating over coms in two of the hardest and most hectic phases is annoying. Forcing to send both those teams down individually also seems to benefit certain comps in this phase to make the DPS check.

This honestly made the fight feel anticlimactic compared to Legion end game raid fights. Yes, the last phase people do tend to wipe in but I honestly feel that’s due to the strange overlap of “anguish” and “harvest thoughts” more than just mechanics, which I previously stated. The hardest phases, aka team split up and down phases, come earlier and that makes this boss odd compared to what we are use to.

Hope blizzard can address these issues so more people in the game can gain AOTC.

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2

So because you found the core design of the boss too difficult in the first week you want it removed? …right. Removing the upstairs downstairs dynamic of phase 2 would be removing a core part of the fight, the communication is supposed to be a challenge, this is week 1. Deal with it.

This one is legitimately quite silly, but killing one basher before this comes in isn’t particularly challenging and should just be seen as an added dps check, even if the event of it mattering is rare.

Good. Don’t get hit by anguish, your melee should be focused on tentacles for the most part anyway, not constantly hitting the boss until 5-6 stacks, at which point there’s a massive window between two pool casts to blow up the add.

Drop pools on one side the thought harvester circle, soak it on the other. The circle is massive for a reason.

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3

I don’t think the fight should be changed to be harder. It’s already more or less in line with other end bosses.

1 - Well it’s a bug so I definitely agree that it should be fixed.

2 - You can play around this by killing bashers faster or by having dps always close enough to the tank. After first basher dies you’ll have a group going into down realm so there will only be 1 tank. No reason for dps to not follow the tank more quickly.

3 - You need to not get hit by anguish ever. You can see when the boss is casting it. Maybe it could be argued that it’s bad for melee, but the rest of the fight is pretty friendly to melee.

4 - I never ran into an overlap where I couldn’t soak the thought harvest and also move with the group out of the pools, even if it did get a bit tight

5 - Maybe true, but those kind of rng things happen on a lot of fights. It’s pretty small either way.

I like the design of having 2 different teams doing the psychus phase with slightly different mechanics.

I don’t like the boring phase 1 or the fact that phase 3 is actually incredibly easy if you get there with most players being healthy on sanity.

4

There’s some bugs on Carapace worth pointing out too.

  1. The Damage increase caused by the Tank debuff also buffs the damage from the Gaze Tentacles, my guild had a few pulls where tanks just exploded because the Mind Flays were targeting them and ticking 400k Damage per Second. You can’t even interrupt as a reaction most of the time because the tank just dies instantly.
  2. In Phase 2, sometimes if you use your Legendary Cloak while up on the side Platforms, it just does nothing and leaves you there and you die.
5

Sorry to be a stickler for details but the correct term for these areas are ovaries and fallopian tubes :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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