Selection of target for raid boss abilities is broken/unfair

Gameplay Dungeons, Raids and Scenarios
1

The game appears to strongly prefer to target ranged dps/healers over melee with certain raid boss abilities. This creates an unfair/unfun situation when there are only a couple of ranged in the raid as they can and will get targeted repeatedly.

Is the code assuming a certain ratio of ranged vs dps? If so, it needs to be better about boundary conditions. You know we all aren’t in Limit or Echoes right? Some guilds have to take what they can get as far as players/classes go and that can result in a raid like what I was in the other night.

We killed Heroic Sire but our raid was really unbalanced in that, out of a raid of 18 people, we only had 4 ranged. We had a warlock (myself), a boomkin, a resto druid and a holy priest. Our other healers were holy paladins and so the game considers them melee.

The result? I was constantly selected by the boss for abilities. On the kill, out of 7 waves of fatal finesse casts, he targeted me all 7 times (which meant for two different periods I had 2 stacks - I thankfully missed getting 3 stacked by one second). I took 365k of unavoidable damage just from fatal finesse.

If I look at all the wipes + kill I see that for Night Hunter I was targeted 15 times. The boomkin got 8, the resto druid 13 and the holy priest 8. The melee averaged 2.75 with a high of 5. Night Hunter was targeting me 5 times more often than the average dps character in our raid.

We’d love to recruit more ranged into raid but it doesn’t seem to be happening. Quite frankly, I’m being incentivized to switch to a melee for my main and let it be someone else’s problem. It feels like a bit of vicious circle you’ve created. If people find they have more fun playing melee (perhaps in part because of effects like this) then you have less ranged, causing them to eat that mechanic more often which is even less fun, causing more to switch and so on and so forth.

If the game is really supposed to be “bring the player not the class” then you REALLY need to be careful deciding to make abilities favor targeting ranged and how you implement it. And right now the implementation sucks when you’re one of just a few ranged in a raid.

2

You could’ve saved yourself a whole headache and thread by not deliberately sabotaging your own raid at the composition level.

If this thread was a complaint about Mythic SLG, I’d be on board.

3

Oh, I guess we just shouldn’t have raided at all then, is that it? Its not like we were sitting people; that was who was available that night. I guess the next time our comp doesn’t look great I should just tell everyone “nope, cancel the raid. the game can’t be played with that much melee”

EDIT: and to be clear, its not that I wouldn’t expect some negative side effects from being that melee heavy. it made killing the cabalists on the platforms more of an issue; that’s to be expected. It should make for denser clusters of the fire pools created when cabalists die (the ones that can launch you off the edge) because so many people are close to each other. Might make dealing with Ravage harder for same reason.

But, “you shouldn’t stack melee because it means a couple of people are going to get dump trucked by the boss spamming the same effin casts on them over and over while pretty much ignoring all those melee dps” should not be one of them.

4

A lot of mechanics priority ranged because melee complain if they have to run out of range to do said mechanics.

There are also mechanics that will target 1 melee and 1 ranged by default, such as innerva beams.

1 Like
5

Between Wracking Pain, mobile melee, and warlock gates, you can redo your strategy to be more like Mythic to take out the Cabalists and aligning your DPS/kill times with Hand of Destruction to more easily clear them.

But yes, historically, for at least a decade, there’s mechanics that will always pick ranged first. If there’s only a single deadly overlap for this, you can call for an external.

Alternately, you can PUG a couple ranged and ask for AotC.

6

7

shhh… don’t let the melee-only players see this thread. they don’t think we have to do any mechanics at all!