Okay, so you have no idea what’s actually happening. Thanks for clarifying. And on your behalf, a big shout of thanks to the better players who have been handling the affix for you.
That’s not at all an accurate summary of what happened. You insisted, twice, that cleave is enough and it shouldn’t be focused. Even if your account of your experience is right (which I doubt), your advice is wrong. There is no significant benefit to cleaving it and a penalty for failing. You lose nothing to change focus for a few seconds and eliminate the risk entirely.
In almost every circumstance the correct play is for everyone to focus, but I have no doubt you’re going to stubbornly insist you’re right in spite of the facts.
You’re assuming my intention. My intention was never to say “never focus.” There’s obviously more nuance to things.
There’s no reason to focus either in a large majority of situations. Unless you’re playing around its timer, it usually pops up mid trash pack. If you think you need to focus it down when people are popping off with their short burst CDs, I don’t know what to tell you. About the only time I would say focus it down would be if it happens to pop towards the end of a trash pack, and instead of dragging it up to the next pack (thereby losing dps), you might as well just focus it down.
I still dont think ANY random proc affix should work at all on boss encounters.
Its fine during trash, but if it ever procs for boss encounters, then, at minimum it needs to be on a carefully considered, deterministic point (like an ordinary boss mechanic), because bosses usually lack the flexibility trash naturally has.
Either that or disable them during bosses altogether.
I’ve been watching it buff mobs all week, so what’s more likely than all of my groups have had weaker dps than all of your groups is that better players in your groups have been doing the affix for you.
You swap to it because while it’s active it’s applying a stacking DR the entire time. It’s also got 1 hp and a shield so specs with execute and shield breaking mechanics benefit immensely from hitting it. Obviously if you have really efficient cleave you keep doing AoE but your single target rotational abilities / target if you’re a melee should all be going into it the entire time it’s active. Not to mention tanks should swap their focus to it to keep DPS from pulling aggro.
If you actively lose large amounts of DPS from target swapping, such as fire mage, then you can neglect it a bit. But someone else has to pick up that slack.
Thats the S1 behaviour.
It does not apply anything in S2 until it expires. Once it does, the DR and dmg buff will be applied to the boss proportionally to the hp it had when it expired.
I guess this was to make it somewhat less annoying in boss encounters, but it clearly failed to achieve that.
In Rookery it sucks so much, they had to disable the punishment on the last boss.
In ToP on Xav, it likes to spawn during the banter spawn, making either a guaranteed wipe or a guaranteed buff.
Even if I ignore the unfun interactions this affix has with any boss encounter that has an actual dps check mechanic or divides the group, the rest of the Xal’atath affixes are grossly easier than this one.
While I was writing the previous sentence I thought about what a joy this affix would be in De Other Side on Mueh’zala’s second phase…