Vashj seems broken

WoW Classic Wrath of the Lich King Classic Discussion
1

So my guild had some roster issues as a result of the recent waves of unsubs. We are able to get through the first 5 bosses in SSC in one 3-hour night. On Vashj, the first two phases are easy and a little boring, the adds die quickly and the tainted cores are not hard to manage at all. Phase 3 transition is clean.

But then the first MC hits, and 2-3 people die instantly, from full health. This pattern continues, every time Vashj casts Mind Control, 2-3 people instantly die. The MC targets sometimes respond to taunts, sometimes they just ignore tanks, sometimes they just auto-attack tanks. Sometimes casts can be interrupted, sometimes interrupts are ignored.

As a shadow priest, if I get MCed, the AI will burn my entire mana bar healing the boss. Without dropping Shadowform! That means somebody had to write some special code to not drop shadowform, but bomb (inefficient) heals on the boss, and consume my actual mana bar while not in control of my character.

Our tanks say that after 50 attempts they still don’t understand the behavior of the MC players. Occasionally multiple casters will all blow instant cast spells on the tank, putting them in range to die to the shock blast.

This boss seems broken. Did the QA testers even do their job? Is this fight just bugged or do the MC units actually have predictable behavior?

Oh, and before you say “But if you don’t like it go play LFR in retail!!!11!!1!1!!1” like the sophisticated thinkers that respond to such threads on this forum. The question is if the developers did QA on this boss. This is not asking for nerfs, this is a question.

It seems, from developer QA and Deep Dive at Blizzcon 2021, that the developers just picked some old data from a specific patch and used automated scripts to convert that data to be compatible with an upgraded game engine. They seem inconsistent, for some bosses (such as Muru) they nerf the boss by removing spell pushback. So the developers are making some conscience decisions about which patch data to use.

The question then, is, once the patch has been selected, was the encounter actually QA tested?

Consider the following development strategy:

  1. Randomly generate a fight.
  2. Fix only the showstopper bugs.
  3. If the boss is too easy, nothing happens.
  4. If the boss is too hard, you wait 6 months then nerf it into the ground.

Note that no design or QA needs to actually occur with this development strategy. If the developer was not following this strategy, how would we know?

4 Likes
2

It’s not really broken it’s just very hectic and RNG.

Lots of individual responsibility

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3

Persuasion

Charmed.
Unstoppable.
Increased damage dealt by 999%.
Increased healing done by 200%.
Increased movement speed by 200%.
20 seconds remaining

Fight is working as intended, you can use consumables like nightmare seeds to survive P3 longer.

2 Likes
4

I looked through some of your logs, mind controls aren’t killing people.

Standing in poison and not spreading out for static shock is what’s killing everyone. A couple deaths from Shoot which sometimes happens if your tank is moving the boss around.

But yeah, don’t stand in poison and spread out.

10 Likes
5

From personal experience it’s either lack of healing which leads to people being 1 shot by the poison.

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We got 2 holy priests without casting CoH and getting out healed badly by 2 druids
Tank needs to taunt her before she gets released so she doesn’t one shot people
People taking more than 1 tick of poison
Static charge people aren’t getting healed enough
No one is using survival consumables

Tell your raiders to come prepared or don’t come at all

2 Likes
7

You will basically always get hit with 2 ticks of poison.

The initial hit and then 1 tick of standing In it.

That’s around 6k damage, if not topped off asap and another spore bat throws poison at you you’re dead.

What’s funny is it you look at my last kill of Vashj which was Wed, I actually got targeted by 2 sporebats and it basically 1 shot me from full health.

I died as Vashj died tho.

8

Here are the facts that people like you tend to deny.

  1. Your guild has poor leadership. They don’t teach their raiders how to improve or have any idea what the raiders are doing wrong.
  2. Your guild has lazy players who just want to come along for the ride and don’t fully understand their role in the group.
4 Likes
9

It counts as 1 in the logs

[Environment] [Toxic Spores] [player]Tick 3466

Oh so you got trolled by 2 puddles that overlapped? That’s hilarious. I mean bad for you…but hilarious

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Yeah two different spore bats hit me at the exact same time.

11

goblin land mines and thornlings really make a difference in that respect

1 Like
12

The fact that Thornlings work on the encounter seems like a bug

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13

why? Lots of bosses have little tricks you can use to make these go a bit smoother. They act as additional targets

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Yeah we had them down I just got really unlucky

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15

I hear that this boss caused many guilds to quit playing back in 2007…

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16

Not really, most hadnt reached the point of Vashj progression before it was nerfed 4 months into TBC. What caused the most quitting in TBC was the giant content chasm between BT/MH and SWP, which resulted in very stale content farming

17

im sorry, but looking at your logs I am quite convinced this is a not having any idea how the fight works issue. You have the tank getting insta killed by shockblast on multiple attempts. You have coilfang elites meleeing large chunks of people. You have 9 deaths to toxic spores in one attempt. Every attempt the boss kills someone going into p3 so there’s a lack of communication on starting the phase. Healers are letting people die to forked lightning so there isn’t proper assignments. People are pulling the boss who have no business being up on the platform to begin with.

Your very best attempt? People dying to toxic spores and tank getting killed by shockblast. Your second best attempt you wiped because your tank died to toxic spores despite them being a paladin and no entangle being out - along with 6 other people dying to it.

Your top 3 deaths yesterday was toxic spores at 74, melee 56, shoot 56. These aren’t random things that aren’t within your control. These are entirely avoidable unless you get rng’d into roots which looking through the logs it is rarely entangle causing the toxic spore deaths. First thing your guild should do is acquire: https://tbc.wowhead.com/item=18297/thornling-seed . The spore bats will target these for toxic spore so if everyone drops one out of the way equidistant from one another you will find toxic spores will be far less stress. Mind you they will taunt the boss so these thornlings should not be dropped anywhere near the centre. Drop them down the stairs as the phase starts or at a convenient time, just not near the boss.

The fight is difficult, its not broken. You just think its broken because you don’t want to learn from your mistakes. So you’re setting up mental barricades on improving which then makes the process of killing her worse. She’s a hard fight and most deaths can be explained - though there are occasions where bad RNG happens. Your death logs are not bad RNG it’s just people being dumb,

10 Likes
18

Ya i generally give people a small benefit of the doubt when crying ‘bug’ because there have been a lot of bugs, many go unnoticed for a while, fixes take too long when identified, & many have been misinterpreted as not bugs (e.g. Vashj doesnt randomly use ‘shoot’, it was MC threat wipes causing it, yet they listed it as ‘not a bug’).

But this is not one of those times.

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This is selection bias. This data has no meaning without context into distribution of the damage in these and other effects not mentioned here. As a thought experiment, imagine that the MC targets ran around casting Prince’s Enfeeble on people. It would never kill anyone, and only leave them with 1 HP. But it is the reason they are dying.

1 Like
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Except I was looking through the singular attempts watching the amount of people eating multiple ticks and dying. You can’t sit here and say its selection bias when there’s so many people dying to it. Go and look through the logs yourself. It is entirely because people aren’t moving out of toxic spores. People aren’t randomly dying as you put it, the logs literally say what is happening.

I also find it amusing that you completely ignored every other issue I said. It’s just evident you are difficulty aversive and would rather the fight be free rather than clear a hard fight. I find the LFR example you gave quite apropos because it’s some heavy projecting on your part.

2 Likes