The major one is that he would keep a threat table during his entire fight, but was untauntable and untargetable. Meaning tanks had all of 8 seconds to overcome like 15 minutes of healing aggro. It never really worked out until he was to clear his table upon pull.
Also, that poster skipped chromaggus, who was vastly overtuned on purpose for a few days. rumor has it one guild found a bugged spot where 2 or 3 mages were able to stand without him noticing somehow. 3 1/2 hours of frostbolts later, they had a corpse but instead of a loot table, they got a visit from the GM. Nefarian literally wasn’t finished yet. Can’t verify this one, but it sounds like something blizz might do.
On the thread topic, IIRC there were actually 2 patches nerfing cthun. The first was the bugfix that stopped things like untargetable tentacles and random nukes the raid had no answer for, the second was more related to tuning that was prompted by Ions oft-quoted post(note how this post makes no mention of any bugs).
It’s notable that Ion never said the overall numbers were impossible, but the randomness on the targets and conflicting responses required by the mechanics made it it an unreasonable ask even of bleeding edge raiders on the hardest fight in current content.
The key is, he said it wasn’t possible (without proving ever that it’s actually impossible). He pointed out how the mechanics of the fight make it so that (for the first time ever) your DPS have to split their damage across multiple targets while managing their positioning.
MC and BWL are basically “DPS stands in 1 spot and spams their damage rotation” for almost every fight. AQ40 ups raid difficulty to “Your dps have to move while doing damage and prioritize targets. Where they stand and how they move matters”.
Meeting those requirements is very different from just having the encounter not work properly.
The devs could make the encounter harder just by making adds spawn more frequently…do more dmg…or have more hp.
They should frankly make it so that when you zone into a raid instance, it wipes all your world buffs instantly. That would increase.the difficulty for a lot of guilds without needing to even change the boss. They could make him ever harder by just increasing the spawns/values on his abilities too.
Can’t prove a negative. It is literally impossible to prove beyond all doubt that there wasn’t some jank strat mixed with a stroke of luck available to them that would allow a kill. That doesn’t mean the fight was released in an appropriate state.
Also, “manage your positioning” is just as vague and useless as your “he didn’t prove it impossible” point. This isn’t the movement meta of MoP: Many classes lose a lot of damage while playing whack-a-mole, and this is a fight that punishes stacking harshly while requiring that certain adds die very quickly, so it’s quite likely that some stacking occurs.
Your point being?
Why would they do this? If you want your own raids harder, just ask everyone not to world buff.
Myself, personally?
I’d see it backfiring in a bad way.
We’d be stuck with the broken encounter for a while, and it would not take but a few bouts of him bugging out to totally wear out the patience of everyone and turn into a bad publicity scene.
If they wanted to poke it up on the PTR, that would be one thing, you dont have to be there.
When the guy bugs out for the 4th time in a row, you just walk away and head back to the normal game.
Not exactly overflowing with details, but here is what i can find for AQ changes until the end of vanilla
1.9.0
The Gates of Ahn'Qiraj
The Gates of Ahn'Qiraj will house two massive, unique dungeons -- the Ruins of Ahn'Qiraj, a 20-man raid dungeon, and the Temple of Ahn'Qiraj, a 40-man raid dungeon. As players delve deeper into the mysteries of Ahn'Qiraj, they will discover revelations of the Silithid infestation and their shadowy masters, the Qiraji. Players will have to complete a world event of massive proportions before they can open the Gates of Ahn'Qiraj on their realm.
1.9.3 anyone have details for this patch?
Raid & Dungeons
Various bugs have been rectified in the Ahn'Qiraj dungeons.
1.10.0 last patch that seemingly addresses bugs?
The Plague effect from Anubisath Defenders and Anubisath Sentinel's is no longer amplified by +damage gear.
Spawn of Fankriss will now enrage if not dealt with in a timely manner.
Fixed a bug that was causing Battleguard Sartura's low-health enrage to have very little effect.
Removed the stacking acid from the Flesh Tentacles in the C'thun encounter.
Digestive Acid now increases its effect over time during the C'thun encounter.
Fixed a bug that could allow for the Digestive Acid debuff to be removed.
Lowered the amount of knockback dealt by Giant Tentacles.
Tentacles should no longer spawn on players who have just been knocked back by a previous tentacle.
1.11.0
* If the Twin Emperors have been defeated, Arygos will teleport players to their lair.
* If Ouro has been defeated, Arygos will teleport players to the chamber where the dragons are being held prisoner.
* Arygos will not teleport players that are in combat.
1.12.0
Ahn'Qiraj
Lieutenant General Andorov's Aura of Command should no longer generate threat. This will hopefully prevent him from pulling aggro on the entire wave, leading to his untimely death.
Hive'Zara Hatchlings can now swim.
Egg Explosion will no longer burn charges from spells such as Lightning Shield.
It should no longer be possible for Emperor Vek'lor and Vek'nilash to Unbalancing Strike or Arcane Burst immediately after a teleport.
There’s a difference between not showing your work and not doing the math. The average forum poster stops reading the second they see more than three numbers and two operations. So he summarized his work for the masses. You can choose to believe that he did the math or not. Personally, I’m inclined to believe he did the math.
If by “media” you mean Wowhead, Icy Veins, Polygon, and various assorted streamers/YouTubers, then sure. But they cover every little thing anyway. If you mean an actual news organization, I think you’ve no-lifed this game to the point that your perspective has gone completely out of whack.
I don’t think the fixes that enabled the kill were even properly logged. I did a quick bit of searching, and found a forum post that has the ring of truth to it:
Now, Nihilum’s world first date is easy to find, it’s 25APR2006, but Google failed to dig up any patch or hotfix notes dated then. However, several of the abilites that were killing raids were most definitely bugs, whose fixes aren’t in your posted patches, and it’s an old shame of blizzards that they were let stand that long:
-A tentacle spawning under a player could sometimes throw him straight up. The fall damage would be invariably lethal and most classes had no way out of this.
-Tentacles spawning in the stomach were bad enough, but at least they were technically reachable. Even so, being able to deal with those ones would be blind luck at best as it’d depend on who gets eaten.
-Tentacles in the walls were something to which the raid had no possible answer, and ~750 dps per wall tentacle is not something the healers can reasonably keep up with that long.
-Finally, while this one could be dealt with a lot more easily by the prepared, he was really supposed to let you start the encounter. A no cast time eye beam as you entered through that tiny doorway was…problematic. I’ve seen some state that it was a bug, but I personally think it was just another in a long list of poor design choices.
Now, as far as I can find, these bugs were fixed at the same time as actual nerfs applied, mostly flat number adjustments to health and damage. Thus, no one really got a chance to try him with just the bugfixes.
Yea i came up blank, and only the one very generic patch note also that just says fixed various bugs.
Oh lord, LOL, don’t remind me.
“Ok guys, now let’s SPROING um nevermind”
I do not know, to be honest.
I just know the end result was “Yea guys, im down”
I don’t know, i wish we had more detailed notes.
I mean i would think the programming team at least had much better notes internally, but then again, undocumented changes was never an unheard of thing.
Myself, i fell like there was a patch, after a patch, like very quickly after.
but i may be remembering wrong.
Kind of like when they quick patched out the script join AV as raid, i dont think that is in any of the official patch notes?
Does it even show up as an actual patch number even?