So this is something that I am definitely curious about. Out of all the bosses from Vanilla, Viscidus definitely comes off as the oddest of them all. That oddity also makes him one of the most difficult as well. I would love to pick at the mind that designed the fight. Simple questions like:
- What influenced the creation of this Boss Fight?
- Did you expect it to be as difficult as it is or what strategy was in mind for it?
- Knowing how difficult the boss was, had it ever been considered for adjustments?
The encounter just stands out so much even with the other unique experiments they applied with AQ40. So I am sure there is a good story with this one.
I’d bet a million dollars you won’t find the original encounter designers on the wow forums 15 years later. But I’m sure we, the forum community, can come up with logical answers for these questions.
Experimentation. AQ40 is the bridge between clueless raid design and modern raid design. They had the opportunity to try something new, and they went with it. Clearly the experiment didn’t work, because they never made a boss similar to it again. (Unless you count Ko’ragh in Highmaul during WoD…a boss that required equal amounts of magical and melee damage)
As an optional boss, difficulty probably wasn’t considered when designing the boss. They figured players could skip it if it was too difficult for them. And the intended strategy is pretty clear. Freeze, shatter, kill, repeat. And players still do that.
Adjustments WERE made to the encounter, just not inside the raid itself. Guilds were struggling with nature resist fights so much, that blizzard felt the need to add extra nature resist patterns to the game several months later
1 Like