You wouldn’t know. Mythic CN introduces new or altered mechanics. Which changes the strategy and how class abilities are utilized. For example, Warlock portals are commonly used in raids.
Again you are assuming a lack of participation in mythic raids precludes a lack of knowledge of mythic gameplay. There is no shortage of valuable resources for learning every aspect of mythic mechanics and how to defeat them.
As for your example of demon gate being used, again I point out its used to defeat a gimmick mechanic added in for the sake of making the fight more difficult rather than being a logical addition to he boss abilities.
In your eyes every mechanic is a “gimmick”. You just want sponges and pinata bosses it seems. You want raid comps and class abilities to matter, but not when it’s used to combat a boss mechanic.
Incorrect. I want boss fights like Onyxia where mechanics in the fight are actually relative and logical to the boss and fight. Not just gimmicks tossed in randomly to scale difficulty.
I don’t see a different from Onyxia’s mechanics and Huntsman. All of the Huntsman’s abilities make sense, same goes for Sludgefist, Kael, Shriek, ect. It’s not just random abilities. It’s just your subjective opinion that Onyxia not a “gimmick” while everything else is.
My opinion is quite objective, not subjective. That said… lets explain horizontal discs bouncing around a room that stun players? Bottles of anima falling out of the sky randomly (and to scale it let’s make TWO fall instead on higher difficulty level).
How are these two examples anything BUT gimmicky?
Did you read what you wrote. You apparently don’t know what subjective or objective means.
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Can you elaborate more on this? TBC was the expansion I took off of PvE, for the most part. I did Gruul’s once then my guild imploded and I never did it again 
Other, specific examples of fights that you felt required specific class mechanics to over come might help in order to better understand what you mean.
I ask because I’m having a hard time understanding where you’re coming from. I know what you mean about the puzzle aspect of the game (which again, I super love), but I’m having trouble understanding the difference between creatively using class mechanics to succeed (which has existed throughout WoW and continues to this day) and what you’re talking about.
Something else I would suggest is maybe consider other classes. I think Warlock has some utility in terms of being able to use that gateway effectively, but that’s about it. Try playing either a Monk (any spec) or a Druid (Balance or Resto). Both of those classes have a tooooon of utility and while they don’t shine as much in raids, you really feel like your class matters in smaller scale dungeon content.
I mained WW Monk for all of BfA and the sheer utility I brought to the group was a ton of fun to play with. Ditto on my SL Resto Druid (that I also play as Balance sometimes). Really shines on some affixes like Necrotic or Prideful. It’s a lot of fun to use my mechanics creatively to help my group succeed.
I’m still not sure if I’m understanding you correctly, but I suspect what you’re looking for is in the game, just maybe not as much for a Warlock. Even though a Warlock adds a lot to a group with Gateway, other classes might be more to what you’re after?
*Edit:
This, for example. Can you elaborate on this? Onyxia is one of the simplest boss fights in the game and at no point is any one class going to make or break the fight if they’re missing. In fact, in Vanilla Classic, it as 5-manned by a team of players in pre-BIS.
Either you misunderstand what I write or you are unaware of the contextual definition of objective vs subjective.
But please, for the sake of the discussion let’s keep to the intent of the post.
Explain your opinion of how the two examples above are not gimmicky. We can re-visit Inerva and talk about random globes appearing in triangular patterns that must have random players remove them with lines of anima that for some reason are attached to them. How is this not gimmicky?
How do any of these compare logically speaking to avoiding the flight path of Onyxia while she breathes fire, avoiding being knocked in to her eggs and hatching them, avoiding cracks in the solid floor where flames will erupt?
These mechanics relate logically to the boss and to the environment we are fighting her in. How do the examples above do the same?
See my last response to Sosarl.
I’ve mained DK, DH, Druid (from launch to Wrath, and most recently Warlock). It’s not an issue related to a specific class. It’s about the idea of inserting mechanics that do not in any way relate logically to the either the boss or the event itself, rather being some random mechanic tossed in to scale difficulty.
Shriekwing is a bat and uses sonar to find his prey. The disks represent sound waves that tell him the location of anyone caught. Otherwise he is pretty much blind.
Inerva gains the abilities of the 4 adds you kill before the encounter.
Sludgefist uses the pillars in the room.
I fail to understand how these are “random” and out of nowhere abilities that are just gimmicks.
Discussion progress! Excellent! Let’s continue.
Soundwaves that bounce around the room and stun players. Borderline to me but okay. And the other examples?
All the bosses in CN uses things that are “logical”. The story might suck on introducing them or explaining it, but individually the bosses and their abilities are all tied to who and what they are.
Without further elucidation on why you feel they relate we will just have to agree to disagree.
My point of this topic is not to push an agenda. I want to see other’s ideas on how these seemingly random mechanics relate to the boss. To me, most of them seem like random additions to the fights to scale the difficulty regardless of whether they belong logically.
Random bottles of anima falling from the ceiling during Inerva is totally farcical to me.
If I’m understanding correctly, you want to see more boss fights that explicitly utilize a class ability directly, like Mind Control on Instructor Razuvious?
I’m not entirely opposed to that, but there’s a pretty obvious reason Blizzard started straying away from it. People feel pretty bitter when they can’t do content just because none of the 9 other friends you raid with decided to roll a Priest. It’s one thing when you can’t do a high key without a Holy Paladin or a Fire Mage, it’s another when you can’t even bother attempting The Lich King because no one could dispel a disease in your group.
None of this really addresses what you mean when you want to get rid of “puzzle mechanics”, as though Blizzard explicitly replaced class-specific mechanics with it. I think it’s a pretty standard assumption that if a boss has mechanics then you need to follow it or you greatly risk failure. If we’re calling something as innocuous as soaking a vial “gimmicky” then we’re invalidating a massive swath of boss design existing since nearly the inception of raiding, especially if you just consider it the inverse of not standing in a void zone.
I can see why you’d call Inerva’s orbs a “puzzle mechanic”. I guess I don’t see why this is anymore puzzling than throwing Vashj’s Tainted Core, coordinating portals on Netherspite, destroying eggs on Razoregore, or kiting Buru.
I admit that I didn’t read every detail you posted, but it sounds like you’re now also dissatisfied with the integrity of guaranteeing mechanics align with story. Why the hell is a goblin boss in Maraudon? General Rajaxx just slowly watches you rip apart his army? Firemaw/Ebonroc/Flamegor literally all look like quick fillers Blizzard created to give the raid something more than 5 bosses.
I think it’s fine to want consistency, but I’m not sure the game ever tried to champion this.
I don’t want to remove them, they’ve always been an integral part of raid mechanics. I do want more reliance on raid comp and individual class abilities.
In the past there haven been limitations based on lack of a particular class ability. I agree with this. However I feel the knee-jerk reaction has reduced the reliance on class specific abilities too much in favor of random puzzle mechanics that make no logical sense in the context of the particular boss.
Of course there were issues as you described. I am not asserting that it was “better before” and we should “roll back the clock”. Only that we seem to have again had a knee jerk reaction resulting in losing aspects of gameplay that were good.
I think we would agree if approached from a different direction. I think it’s sorrowful the amount of homogeneity introduced into the game. Having so much class flavor was awesome and the fact those flavors created a real impact on success in PvE made you feel good. That created other types of bitterness when your flavor uniquely failed to address mechanics (…if only we had a Death Knight in our raid…), but I think it still was a generally healthy aspect of an RPG.
I’m not sure puzzle mechanics is a consequence of those changes, however. If anything, the community becoming increasingly competitive drives the frequency of puzzle mechanics. Blizzard can’t keep fights interesting anymore unless they really try to trip you.
Agreed, but scaling the fights with more and more puzzle mechanics rather than adding actual boss abilities that can be countered with a collective effort of class abilities seems lazy and signals a lack of creativity to me.
Is this because of time constraints placed on the development process? The inability to balance classes in such a way that they simply cant be made to “play nice” together? I completely agree with your observations regarding class balance. I guess the core of my issue is I wonder if more resources should be devoted to resolving the issues of making all specs viable with some overlapping to allow for raid progression without reliance on one particular class. I think the overuse of puzzle mechanics is covering that issue rather than solving it if that makes sense.
I personally don’t think having unique kits necessarily requires them to also design boss fights that exactly lean into those kits. I actually gain great satisfaction from completing today’s mechanics.
Of course, if you’re a Mage then cheesing a huge mechanic with Ice Block will always feel nice. But I do miss entering a raid knowing that you have [that class] in your party means you now get [these benefits] otherwise uncommonly seen.
I think I can sum up how I feel about the overuse of gimmick mechanics:
I feel I am not engaging the boss. I feel a distinct degree of separation. I’m fighting discombobulated puzzles while the boss is deleting players health. You can remove the boss from the fight completely from todays raid and it wouldn’t make a mechanical difference.
More specifically, I don’t even feel like I’m fighting Kael, and I don’t even know what I’m fighting in the Xymox fight. There is no identity built in these fights. Boss fights are no so homogenized that the mechanics don’t define who you are fighting.
I did feel that, after WotLK, that Blizzard started adapting raiding to feel like a railcar ride where you’re just progressing through a one-way tunnel with pit stops to deal with a boss weirdly standing on some pedestal in an open empty room. Bastion of Twilight is an incredible example of this. After all, we are RAIDING the enemy’s lair.
However, I feel Blizzard has done a lot more to reintroduce the mystique of raiding since Legion. That, for me, was strongly a detractor in what I felt was my “degree of separation”. Though even I will admit that raiding has become extremely robotic and some of that might just be doing it for 15+ years.
Everyone will have their own feelings of separation, however. Yours is possibly valid. Bosses are definitely borrowing from each other far more and it’s becoming less iconic to simply say “Teron Gorefiend” and everyone knows what mechanic you’re talking about.