[PTR Raid report - Mount Hyjal]: Ominous - Arms Warrior PoV

[Cooties-cc]

Mechanics comments on trash mobs

Ghouls - Cannibalize doesn't seem to be working for the most part still. They have gotten low, with a corpse nearby, but haven't seen any actually cast the spell. Recent patch said something changed with that, but have to wait and see.

Crypt Fiend - Don't really do anything, so fine.

Shadowy Necromancer - Cast wise seem pretty fine, but I think have massive issues with moving if LoS/interrupted. They only seem to move to a player if they initially are dragged via LoS. However if they pause to start casting, and can't complete the cast, they never once reposition. Not fully sure if blizzlike, but seems if they are taunted and LoS and just sit there, or interrupted and just sit there, that seems very wrong. (edit: further direct testing, they seem more or less fine to drag. Idk if they were tinkered with or not, but last raid they were working to drag LoS/follow) Haven't tested the MC stuff recently cause afraid to soft lock wave timers like demons enslaving.

Abomination - All good.

Banshee - Seems alright, though think suffers from LoS following issues as well.

Gargoyle - All good.

Frost Wyrm - All good.

Giant Infernal - All good, but haven't retested enslaving them, which broke wave timers.

Fel Stalker - All good.

Tuning comments on trash mobs

Currently for what purpose they serve in the raid, I think they take too long to kill. We timed an avg kill cycle to get through 8 waves after wiping a few times on Azgalor, and found even with moderate focus and decent comp, 8 waves takes around 20-23 minutes, give or take. While Azgalor is the "hardest" of waves just by comp (the 6 necro/banshee one is worst afaik), that's still around an hour or so just to do only trash in a raid.

If you take recent boss kill times cumulatively, you're looking at 20-25 minutes total for boss kill times. Raid times overall stand around 2 hours to 1.5 hours in total. That means trash is taking between ~74-80% of the total time spent in Hyjal. Even if waves were nerfed to take around 10 minutes per boss, you're still looking at 40 minutes of pure trash clearing, and assuming no wipes to do them all over again. Though still with 10 minutes clears even, that's taking upwards of 60% of the raids time.

Once the issues with the above trash mobs scripting are basically fixed to an acceptable level (they sorta are in current state tbh), I think trash should be nerfed down to only take around ~45 seconds per wave. That gives about 6 minutes total between bosses, and would cut the raid down to 40-50 minutes. This would allow [most] guilds to add another raid(s) to the main raid days, since I would assume most like to raid for between 2-4 hours, depending on level of guild. At least for our raid day, we would very much like to add TK or SSC back into the main raid day fold, but so far Hyjal is just a massive time eater.

Mechanics comments on Rage Winterchill

Frost Nova - Getting a fix, so have to see how it plays out, but wasn't an issue before.

Frost Armor - Fine

Icebolt - Still getting some double casts.

Death and Decay - Fine

Enrage - Haven't hit it yet

Tuning comments on Rage Winterchill

The only ability that really needs to get checked on tuning for now is Icebolt. Even with a pvp trinket and healer padding, it's pushing a little too much damage to be realistic. To give an example, here is a screenshot of the LP logs from last run :

In the span of 1 second ingame, I died to icebolt. As an arms warrior, I have around 11.5k hp. The initial hit (7,724) and the 1st tick (3,928) was 11,652 damage. This is a bit too much damage to reasonably react to. Just checking TBCC vids, which have nearly the same HP pools (arms not so much extra surv in wotlk than TBC), the bolts tend to do 1/2 total HP, and take on avg 2 ticks to kill. This is an extra second of reaction time for healers, or anything, to react to remove/heal the damage.

If possible, I'd suggest leaving the initial damage of the spell, but reel back the tick dmg to the more normal value of 2.5k or so. it leaves it still very dangerous if you're low in hp, but reasonable reaction times to negate it if full.

Mechanics comments on Anetheron

Carrion Swarm - It appears to be alright, but I really don't know how to track width increase via distance traveled. Can only assume it's fine.

Sleep - Still hits the tank sometimes. Ticket is still open, so assume it's known.

Vampiric Aura - This one seems funky. Going by LP logs, our last kill he did around 444k melee damage, but only received 385k in healing to himself. Even with -50% healing from spells/poisons, he should have healed himself for around 667k, since vamp aura heals for 3x the melee damage done. Also checking the timeline of when vamp aura healed him, there are gaps in the recording oddly.

Not sure the issue. Perhaps also somehow getting the player's -healing debuff?

Inferno - Works fine, and mob seems to be working itself

Berserk - Yet to hit it

Tuning comments on Anetheron

Not really much to say on this fight if positioning is done decently with decent comp. Often highest dps results of the raid from being a basic tank and spank fight with -healing issues as the main danger. Could check into the vamp aura being an actual issue, or just LP recording things oddly, however won't really make or break the fight, just make it longer if he gets more self healing.

Mechanics comments on Kaz'rogal

Cleave - Seems ok, tanks haven't had issues afaik

War Stomp - Fine

Mark of Kaz'rogal - Seemingly works ok

Tuning comments on Kaz'rogal

I don't think tuning is really needed here at all. Fight feels fine in length and mana conservation requirements. This is from an arms war pov, but we don't have many if any ppl blow up on the fight. There is quite enough utility and items to sustain it, but this also doesn't mean it needs to be buffed either.

Mechanics comments on Azgalor

Cleave - Seems ok

Rain of Fire - Works as intended afaik, as with dot afterwards

Howl of Azgalor - Silence works. Hpal aura also works to reduce it

Doom - Works, as does the Doomguard cycling its abilities afaik

Tuning comments on Azgalor

Unquenchable Flames dot seems a tiny bit high. It can be reduced with resistances, but too much resistance gear and you become a bit weaker. Ideally you shouldn't need anything outside a pala fire aura / sham totem. That being said, the RoF damage I think has been reading around ~2k damage, which is done every 2 seconds within the radius. As well as the dot afterwards has been hitting for around ~2k avg per tick, which ticks 5 times in total, per second.

Checking the average run speed of a player, it comes to 7yd/s without mods. Everyone should be using at least +8% speed to boots, which brings it up to 7.56yd/s. This means to exit a 20yd RoF if you were unlucky to get centered on it, takes 2.64 seconds to exit (2.85s w/o boot chant). This means at most you take 1 tick of RoF damage, and at worst due to reflexes, 2 ticks. This brings most players near the center of the RoF to 2-4k dmg taken. Then exiting the RoF, the UF dot kicks in. On avg of 2k dmg per tick, over 5 seconds, that adds another 10k in damages. So on avg you can expect to take between 12-14k damage in total from getting near centered in a RoF.

Not to say this isn't impossible to overcome, as clearly guilds have killed the boss. However, reasonable tuning would suggest this is a tad high, especially for classes with already lower HP pools. There is also the issue that spell casts can go off at the same time, in that a RoF can strike the mdps group and a silence follows right after. If the player doesn't have self healing of some kind, or was given a hot/bubble prior to silence, it's a good chance that player is dead.

If changing the tuning, I would say leave the RoF damage as it stands, since damage taken to reaction time is reasonable, however, lower the dot damage some. It's not exactly a spell in which you can skillfully avoid, like Kael's flamestrike ability. Punishment for instant casts on you don't feel very fair/balanced. This would also go to say the doomguard HP could also be slightly lowered, but this is only in circumstance of doing the fight while ignoring them. If killing them, the HP is more or less "ok".

Mechanics comments on Archimonde

Fear - Works fine

Air Burst - Works fine, but Fears can be jointly cast while midair (don't think has been fixed)

Grip of the Legion - Works fine.

Finger of Death - Works, but is extremely finicky about updating no player in melee range. We have had random insta deaths with tanks only being a fraction away from a boss after a fear cast.

Doomfire - Has been nothing but problems from day 1. So far, recent patches should fix dot damage and it stacking as a dot. However the main issue I still see is that it can go under the boss right from the cast. This is very detrimental to mdps and changes the whole aspect of the fight for them.

Soul Charges - Now working correctly with any death, as well as updating correct class colors.

Enrage - HAVE seen this actually, and does work as intended. Rip kill attempt.

Perimeter enrage - Very wrong spacing of enrage in correlation to distance to tree/water on map. Is known by staff, but this cuts down usable room for the fight by a ton, and if a tank is knocked towards that area, it's just a wipe.

Melee damage - Is known to be a bit too high, as well as mobs/bosses recently found to have wrong swing timers, so this may just need to get checked after updates.

Tuning comments on Archimonde

The Air Burst + Fear combo is known, and think is being worked on, so that's fine. Finger of death should probably be re-evaluated on how quickly it checks for melee not in range before casting. Doomfire has gotten so much redone, it'd make Michael Jackson blush. If it can get its pathing to just not zoom right through boss on cast, mdps could breath easier in the fight.

I think once Doomfire is really nailed down, the boss isn't too crazy in total terms. Fixing the radius on water could help with spacing as well, letting players widen the usable room to deal with mechanics. I would say now that Soul Charges do fully work on deaths, that the damage they do could be re-evaluated. We noticed prior to the fix, it would take more upwards of 5-6 consistent deaths to snowball out of control. After the fix, 3 deaths generally snowballed us into a solid wipe. This also depends on what class died.

Overall comments on raid mechanics

I'm thinking most the major mechanical side of things are nearing a decent overall % done. If using github tickets as an example, only ~10ish are up atm about Hyjal, while ~45ish are closed (and probably fixed). That's a good turn around. The remaining things that are often brought up seem to be quite hard to fix, like Doomfire. It should be known complex issues are nearly always last to be fixed.

Give a rating out of 10 for the state of the mechanics in the raid

8

Overall comments on tuning

Anetheron and Kaz'rogal were examples of good tuned bosses from the start, even with fixes. They are quite doable, and aren't unreasonably hard. They are also a little more simple overall in the raid comparative to other bosses. Scaled, probably sit around an 8 in tuning perspective.

Rage Winterchill tuning is decent, but could be worked on to make much more enjoyable. Icebolt is the crux I think, and if tuned a little less dot dmg, could be a reasonably engaging fight. I would still expect a few deaths here, but not a ton. Tune wise atm, probably sits around a good 7.

Azgalor was the soft wall for most guilds from what I could gather. Not due to execution, but overall just a nasty fight to deal with. The RoF dmg + dot combined with silences and dealing with ROIDED doomwalkers, just makes the fight a little more than reasonably difficult. The dot damage is ultimately I think the biggest issue to deal with in the raid. Lowering that alone would increase favorable tuning. For now, it seems the cheese strat of luring over to Tyrande is being taken over doing normally, just due to tuning annoyances. Overall probably near the 6 range.

Lastly the big guy, Archimonde. Overall tbh a rather fun fight, as there's a bit going on without being overbearing. The only overbearing part is how unforgiving and punishing a few mistakes can be in the fight. Any deaths feel like a dice roll into a wipe. Doomfires nearly spawning onto mdps feels awful, and to a point we now have to run away a long time before each cast, since if we take even 3 ticks we basically die, which is a wipe. I think if DF pathing can be fixed as said above, and tuning lowered on some key spells (probably Soul Charges now), it would make the fight more enjoyable overall without feeling like a push over. For now, 1 death just feels like it's a wipe incoming. Overall about a 5.

Give a rating out of 10 for the state of the tuning in the raid

7