On Boss Design and Mechanics

I read an interesting post on the WoW forums called Lets Talk About Modern Boss Design, the first of a 3-part series focused on encounter design and how WotLK has performed in that area thus far.  I was planning on writing a post about this anyway, but last night's heroic Anub'Arak really amplified my feelings on it.

For those unfamiliar with the Anub'Arak fight on heroic, it's a 3-phase fight, with the first two running almost identically to the regular version, excepting that you are limited to 6 of the frost orbs (thus giving the fight an effective soft enrage for those first 2 phases).  The only really important difference in the first two phases is that pairs of adds spawn instead of lone ones, and the adds gain a new ability called Shadow Strike, which is essentially a 4-second-cast (hasted to 2-seconds if there are two of them close together) random target shadowstep which must either be interrupted or the raid member targeted will be instagibbed.  This isn't terrible unruly to deal with, as the adds are still stunnable (and are undead, so our prot paladin offtank can keep them shut down with Holy Wrath), there are never more than two up at a time, and they always cast Shadow Strike in unison.

Phase 3 is where my irritate begins.  Anub'Arak casts an aura called Leeching Swarm that drains 20% of each raid member's current health per second (healing Anub for 50% of the damage done) for the remainder of the fight.  This isn't so bad, as once people get down around 5k HP or so, the swarm doesn't hit hard and Anub doesn't heal much.  Anub continues to cast Penetrating Cold (which ticks for 6k on heroic), but it's not terribly difficult to heal through.  What is a problem is that the burrower adds continue to spawn.  This leaves the raid with two choices: continue tanking and killing the adds, or tank them off the ice until they borrow.

If we choose the former, we lose a minimum of 2 of our dpsers, usually 3, to keep the adds under control.  This more than doubles the amount of time necessary to kill Anub, and often results in a wipe purely because the healers just flat can't keep up the necessary output for that long.

If we choose the latter (and this is where my peeve is), the major worry is keeping up to 4 adds at a time interrupted on Shadow Strikes.  This means that the off tank needs to watch for new adds and adds unburrowing, maintain aggro on all the current ones against the massive output by the healers and splash damage by the dps, and still manage to get a Holy Wrath off within a very short cast time every time one of them tries to gib a raid member.

This falls back to the point made in the post above: unmanageable precision.  Yogg-Saron was another example of this, with 3-6 mobs up, each of which casting an AoE spell that needs to be interrupted, and unlike Anub'Arak's adds, Yogg's aren't undead for an easy Holy Wrath stun.

Blizzard has gotten far to fixed on the idea of RNG difficulty.  There's a massive different between a fight that is complex and requires precision and focus to succeed and a fight in which you simply have to get lucky to win.

In the category of the former, Vashj, Archimonde (excluding his fear), Gorefiend, Val'kyr Twins, and Mimiron are awesome examples.  They require precision and focus, demanding the highest of all or random members of the raid, but the potential for an RNG wipe is very very low.

Fights such as Faction Champions, Gormok, Freya, Anub'Arak, Yogg-Saron, and Steelbreaker are poster childs of the second category, though.  These fights either require raid members to be watching 4+ mobs simultaneously for a split-second reaction or to be able to react to incoming damage in literally the twitch level of response times.  These fights are difficult, but for all of the wrong reasons.  They are difficult because they push past the actual limit of human attention or reaction time, and thus rely as much on luck as skill.  A fight in which a raid that has had the boss on farm for months can still wipe up just because they got a bad string of RNG is a terrible fight at it's core.

This brings me to another peeve: PvP in PvE.  The Faction Champions fight makes perfect sense in ToC from a lore standpoint, and the entire instance is effectively a giant arena (don't get me started on the 'OMG the Lich King! Let's ignore him and hold a gladiatorial arena on his doorstep instead!' lore failure).  However, I'd estimate that around 80% of PvE raiders, especially progression raiders, are among the crowd that would rather leave the PvPing to the arena folk and stick with their boss fights.  Blizz, twice in two expansions, has gotten the brilliant idea to force these PvEers to PvP in their instances, though.  Back in BC, Dalrissa was one of the least popular fights of the entire expansion, and Faction Champs likely would be for WotLK if Occulus wasn't such a nightmare.

Beyond that, the fight seems to be a hybrid of the worst parts of PvP and PvE.  The mobs have PvP crowd-control limitations and have many of the abilities and effects that PvPers of those class regularly use, but they also a damage output roughly equal to a geared PvPers against a zero resilience target, the base 115% move speed of normal NPCs (actually, I believe their speed is closer to 130%), a gang mentality on dps (often resulting in instagibs of raid members, the shaman and mage being primary culprits of this), and roughly 10 times the HP of a normal player.

What this leads to is that you need more healers than normal, and those healers have to have a ridiculously quick reaction time to saving people, and they need to maintain that reaction time for the entire fight.  The shaman can walk up to someone and nuke them for 30k damage in under 1.5 seconds, the mage can do the same thing in less than a second from 30 yards away, the warrior can do a similar level of damage in AoE with Bladestorm, and the rogue can instagib a clothie through a Shadowstep before anyone even notices he moved.  These are pure RNG deaths.  We'll have weeks in which we get a nearly perfect composition for the fight and down it without any problem, and then we'll have weeks with a terrible composition that make us feel like we're slamming our face into a brick wall.

Blizzard needs to move back to the complex and precise but manageable fights, instead of making success based on RNG (especially in an instance that gives rewards for less wipes).  They also need to get rid of PvP fights in PvE.  As a dpser, if I wanted to tank, I'd have spec'd for it.  Facing a fight that I, as a dpser, need to output my maximum as well as blow every cooldown I have to stay alive if I get focused...well, it's just plain not fun, and our healers like it even less.  Challenging the raid by making them need to look out for their own survival: ok.  Challenging the raid by putting random invisible guillotines peppered about the area: not ok.

Anyway, enough ranting for me.