…is what the “intended” way to do Firemaw and Chromaggus is? Both of these bosses, the raid hides behind walls, abusing LoS to avoid certain boss mechanics. Is this how Blizzard intended for the bosses to work? It just seems weird because this tactic of LoS’ing boss mechanics isn’t really used anywhere else in vanilla.
For Firemaw, did Blizzard just intend for the whole raid to have 315 fire resist and hope that your stacks don’t get too high?
And for Chromaggus, how was the entire raid supposed to survive getting hit by every breath? Some of them are just insanely deadly for non-tanks, like the one that puts a 1-minute fire damage DoT on you that ticks for like 1000 every 3 seconds.
I’m just curious if Blizzard intended for players to use LoS to avoid these mechanics, because it seems impossible / improbable without doing so.
There’s a lot of boss mechanics in Vanilla that require you to either LoS or out range the boss to avoid dying.
Arugal in SFK (LoS or out range his shadow bolts)
Arcanist Doan in SM (LoS or out range his Arcane Explosion)
Princess in Mara (LoS or out range her Boulder)
Hakkar in ZG (corrupted blood and mind control won’t hit healers or ranged dps if not in LoS of Hakkar)
Trash before CThun (LoS or out range the fear)
Firemaw (LoS the buffet)
Chromagus (LoS the breath)
Etc etc. there’s a LOT of bosses and even just plain trash and open world mobs that cast abilities you can LoS or out range. Not to mention every single spell a player, and ALMOST every single spell a boss can cast, can be LoS’d or out ranged.
I would like to think that firemaw and chromagus were designed to be fought the same way they’re fought now and/or stack fire resistance (as many people did in 2005) for firemaw. You have to remember that most guilds in 2005 that downed ragnaros would regularly hit the Sons of Ragnaros phase. So many guilds had a ton of fire resistance gear for that kind of fight.
LoS was a popular mechanic used in EQ as well against certain bosses. Nagafen was 45 minutes of people running in the room and then back out when low health. EQ was kind of the predecessor to this game with a lot of the early game mechanics.
Please tell how you know what their intention was when they designed the mechanics? You can out range or LoS any of those mechanics, and every single one of those bosses has cubbies built into the wall near where they’re at that allows for you to hide from sight.
If you look at the casters in UBRS that can be MC’d and used to give a fire resistance buff Blizzard was on record during vanilla saying if they didn’t want this tactic to be used for MC and BWL then they wouldn’t have given a mob so close to both raids the ability to buff players. Clever use of game mechanics. If they didn’t intend for people to LoS boss abilities then they wouldn’t have put a hole in the wall next to the bosses spawn location, and they dang sure wouldn’t have made half the bosses abilities be subject to LoS while the other half were based only on range (chromagus breath vs debuffs)
Without some concrete proof I’ll just take your words as nothing but your own bad opinion. opinion.
BWL was out for quite some time. Its more than likely the devs wanted that to be the case especially since the debuffs worked in a way to make sure you died in the breaths in some instances. Same for Firemaw. Taking all the stacks would kill your raid the Using LOS was a way to stop it.
These are simple design ideas and can be seen in the creation of the fighting areas really. Why did Firemaw Pat aaaaaaaaaaaallllllllllllll the way down to where he did? Well for you to use that as a way to drop stacks. There were a lot of breaks for Chromag for the same
Always keep in mind the Arena you design your encounters in is one of the basic ideas of Game design.
We’ll do it again on Razuvious for his shout. People specifically tried doing this for Visc but his bolts were made to ignore LoS and have insane range so that people were forced to deal with them.
Had it been “unintended” it likely would have been patched around the same time that Broodlord was patched to not be kitable to Vael’s room.
Yeah this is a good one here, OP. Razuvious’ shout is designed to be LoS because it will one-shot all mana users who don’t LoS it, and it just can’t be outranged quickly or reliably. It’s why Razuvious’ room has railings built where they are; the room is designed around the boss encounter.
Old Firemaw vids from 2005 show all DPS LoSing him, just with a lot more fire resist. Still, even at 315 fire resist you will have to LoS because your raid DPS will be too low to avoid getting stacks.
A lot of standard mob packs in 5-mans are also intended to be pulled via LOS, the mob density is set up in such a way to be very dangerous if you just charge in.
Now the specific LOS spots in BWL fights are pretty awkwardly placed and pretty immersion-breaking, but then again the whole instance is really bare bones and not very creatively designed.
I remember, on Kil’jaeden my raid leader said the reason the metheor does 5k dmg instead of one-shotting you, is because while you’re not supposed to be hit by it, it’s better than Darkness 1k Truths hit.
the layout of Chromagus room, with the perfect corners sort of indicate it was intended to hide. What’s the intended strat for Sapphiron? are you supposed to resist the frostbomb?
I definitely think that while maybe not specifically intended, the goal was to encourage players to find ways to defeat bosses.
I don’t think their idea was as simple as A+B=C. I think they gave a boss mechanics and then expected the players to adapt. Like someone else said, LoS was a big thing in EQ, which was a big motivator behind many of the developers of WoW. I definitely don’t think they hadn’t considered it.
the genius of a lot of blizzard’s design is due to their lack of worry about what the players would do. they just made cool content and said “ok have fun”
It makes sense that it was intended for these abilities to be affected by LoS. Back in the old days Flamegor’s fire nova (whenever he frenzied) was able to be avoided by LoS but that was eventually changed. If Firemaw and Chromaggus were left untouched that would mean the way their abilities work was intended.