How I personally would have designed the Madness of Deathwing fight

[TheNightAngel]

12 platforms around the maelstrom. 4 right by deathwing. DW in the Middle. 6 islands in front, 6 in back. 4 phase fight

SPECIAL MECHANICS:
1. The 4 Dragon Aspects and Thrall aid you in your fight. Each giving a buff and special ability. (you get an extra action bar somewhere on the screen)

Thrall
Passive Bonus: Windwalk
Allows you to jump between the platforms.

Mechanic: Air Cannon (30 second CD)
Allows you to jump to the platform directly across the one you are standing on

Kalecgos
Passive Bonus: Brilliance
Increases all damage by 30% and range of damage spells by X% (however much it would take so that DPS can hit stuff on both of their adjacent platforms). The Range buff is not present in 25 man modes.

Mechanic: Brilliance (3 min CD)
Filled with the power of the moon, restoring 30% mana to the player, or 30% health for non-casters.

Ysera
Passive Bonus: Emerald Touch
Increases all healing by 30% and range of healing spells by X% (however much it would take so that heals can heal stuff on 5 platforms around them). The Range buff is nerfed in 25 mans to only adjacent platforms

Mechanic: Emerald Dispersion (50 second CD)
Disperse into the Emerald dream for 4 seconds, reducing all damage taken to 0, but silencing you for 4 seconds. Lasts 4 seconds.

Nozdormu
Passive Bonus: Time Warp
Haste increased by 30%

Mechanic: Slipstream (1 Charge)
Puts a bubble on the player for 8 seconds. If the player dies during these 8 seconds, they are revived with 30% health and mana.

Alexstrasza
Passive Bonus: Life-binder's Gift
Increased health total by 30%

Mechanic: Brood Call (1 charge).
Happens automatically at the beginning of phase 2. Summons and mounts a red drake.

PHASE 1: By My Power I Will Destroy You All
(7 abilities, really chaotic phase)

Deathwing's two forearms grab onto two of the platforms. They must be tanked, as they do heavy melee damage. They have 3 abilities.
1. Molten Tentacle: Will spawn form the fingers, and just damage the tank. Fairly simple, they can be killed.
2. Whenever they are not tanked, they will began using the ability swipe, which does moderate AoE damage in a random cone.
3: Slam: In conjunction with the ability Engulfing Magma, they will be picked into the air, and slam down on a random platform, then return to their normal platform. On the slammed platform, a Elementium Tentacle will spawn, that deals damage to anyone on that platform.
(note: the arms other than an annoyance don't do anything to Deathwing's health. Hence, they cannot be damaged past 50% health)

Engulfing Magma: Every 2 minutes, Deathwing will face a random direction and do a frontal cone ability similar to Valiona's. If on one of the 6 ranged platforms affected, massive AoE is dealt that will pretty much kill you. Engulfing Magma does not affect the melee platforms.

Elementium Meteor: 6 meteors are spawned and move towards random platforms. No more than 2 melee platforms will ever be targeted by this. Once they reach their intended platforms, they do 500K AoE damage to any player on said

platform.

Magma Pulse: If any platform in 10 man ever has more than 3 players on it, or 5 on 25 man, Deathwing will cast Magma pulse. Magma pulse does 1,000,000 on 10 man, 2,500,000 on 25 man, unavoidable AoE to all players on said platform, split evenly among affected players.

Cataclysm: Does 15,000,000 damage to all players. Cast every minute. 4 second cast time

Death to my Enemies: every X period of time, Deathwing will open his mouth as in preparation for a massive attack. No other abilities are used in conjunction with this one. 4 orbs will spawn that are damageable, a Green, a red, a brown, and a blue one. After X seconds, any orb left unkilled will flash towards its corresponding aspects, dealing 25% of the aspects total health to them.

Pillar of Rage: Every minute, a fire pillar will spawn on a ranged platform, destroying it. Every third Pillar of Rage will also destroy a melee platform.

Volcanic fallout: Every X seconds, happens often, slight AoE damage is dealt to the raid.


Important note: If an aspect reaches 25% health, they will retreat from the battle until the final phase. Until the final phase, their buff and mechanic will be lost.

Idea of this phase: Each person is responsible for themselves, expected to be able to use the special mechanics and be aware to dodge stuff, as a lot of it is insta-kill. This is a very, very, punishing phase. Dps have priority, orbs for ranged dps incredibly important. Not buffs you want to lose.

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At 60% health, there is a transition phase to phase 2. Deathwing will cast "Anger of the Maelstrom", a 10 or so second cast. The water around Deathwing, all of it, turns red, and at the end of the cast flood all remaining platforms. At this point, the players mount their red drakes.

PHASE 2: Pesky Little Flies!

Your drakes have 5 abilities:
Firebreath: Your 1 damage ability. Obviously very easy to spam
Cauterize: Heals your drake
Taunting Roar (1 min CD): Forces Deathwing to attack you. Lasts until you die or another drake casts Taunting Roar
Life-Giver's Bond (20 sec CD): You transfer 20% of your total health to targeted player's drake
Dash (45 sec CD): Increases' movement speed by 60% for X seconds.

Deathwing during this phase attempts to rise back out of the Maelstrom and kill the aspects. Its our job to not let that happen. This phase lasts until Deathwing hits 45% health or 2 minutes have gone by.

Death to My Enemies: Yup, still happens.

Intimidate: An infinitely stacking ability cast on whatever drake has aggro. 1 stack per second, each stack increases damage taken by 4%. Stacks last 45 seconds.

Fixating Meteor: A meteor spawns and chases a player for 30 seconds. If it reaches targeted player, it explodes and does massive damage to the drake, not necessarily killing it if the drake is above 90% or so health

Rain of Fire: A constant AoE is that goes out during this phase, ticks every couple seconds for a little bit of damage. Players with high stacks of intimidate will require to spam cauterize on GCD to survive.

By my Wings You Shall Burn: Should Deathwing fully rise out of the maelstrom, he casts this. Its basically Cataclysm. To prevent Deathwing from rising up or force him back down, damage will force his back down. If not enough damage is done, game over.

You Shall Not Escape: Deathwing attacks the aspect with the highest health and deals 25% of the aspect's total health to them. Cannot be prevented.

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Idea: This phase is a lot less of a hassle then the previous 1. Its basically torment coordination while having a fixating player run the hell away. Dps just focus boss and then orbs, then boss and then orbs, etc. It is not meant to be hard to keep Deathwing from rising out of the Maelstrom, it would only happen if intimidation is not handled well and ends up forcing too many people to spam cauterize to stay alive rather than damage the boss.

After 2 minutes or once the boss hits 45% health, phase 2 commences. Here, the remaining aspects all combine together one extremele powerful attack with Thrall's dragonsoul, dealing 5% damage per Aspect to Deathwing's health total. So if your smart and have 4 alive, and hit the 45% mark, you start phase 3 at 25%!!!! Phase 2 determines how long and hard phase 3 will be.

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Phase 3 begins when Deathwing casts "You Flies Shall Not Defeat Me". Basically it kills all the red drake mount, and players hop onto the backs of the remaining aspects and can hope between aspects. During phase 3, Thrall will be attempted to create a small platform down by the maelstrom again.

During this phase only, Deathwing's hitbox increases a ton, so melee dps can damage him.

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Phase 3: On The Backs of the Aspects

Alexstrasza's Back: Player's on Alexstrasza's back will receive an additional 100K health to their health pool.
Ysera's Back: Players on Ysera's back will have their healing increased by an additional 20%
Kalecgos' Back: Players on Kalecgos' back will increase the player's main stat by 30%
Nozdormu's Back: Players on Nozdormu's back will automatically be brezzed if they die. This can only happen once
You on low health? Switch to alexstrasza's back! Almost dead and have a brez? Get to Nozzy! You a healer? Ysera is for you! Dps? Get to Kalecgos!

This is the very hard phase and the real gearcheck and player intelligence check. It will be much easier if you did the first 2 phases really well. This phase lasts until Deathwing hits 20% health.

Deathwing's Abilities:

Internal Turmoil: Deathwing is exploding from the inside out, but the players feel the effect. Very strong AoE damage that must be healed through.

I Will Have My Victory: Deathwing fixates upon an Aspect, attacking solely it. The Aspect will frantically try to escape, thinking only of itself. Players on the aspect during this time will be thrown off and die. The fixation lasts for a small period of time.

Roar of Agonizing Pain: Stuns all players for 3 seconds.

Vortex of Fire: The Maelstrom is rising, Deathwing's presence is sending it into hyperactive drive. Waves are splashing, typhoons are spawning. Vortexes of fire are spawning. 1 player on top of each aspect will be able to command its movements (under anything but fixate), to dodge all the vortexes and typhoons and all that.

Tentacles of the Old God's Corruption: A mysterious Old God has come in to try to help Deathwing, spawning massive tentacles that will do damage to players, enough paired with Turmoil that if left alone they will wipe the raid. Plus they last into phase 4, so they should be burned down.

Death to My Enemies: Still got orbs to kill!

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Honestly, this phase should be tuned to be so painful you can't last in in very long, even with the healing buffs. This is basically the real test.

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Phase 4: I. Will. Not. Be. Defeated.

Any aspect that has retreated will return, all players have full buffs. Thrall has raised a small platform on the maelstrom for players to stand on. All the raid will be stacked here.

Internal Turmoil: Still happening, your healers will be unable to get passed this very quickly.

Death to my Enemies: Should any aspect die, the buff will be permanently lost and Deathwing will become more confident, increasing his damage by 30%.

Blistering Tentacles: Tentacles spawn on the platform, doing AoE in a radius around them.

Anger of the Betrayer: Every X seconds, DW gets an infinitely stacking buff that increases damage by X% per stack.

Tentacles of the Old God's Corruption: Still trying to help Deathwing.

The phase is over once Deathwing hits 10% health. Standard burn, then its just RP.

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At 5% health, Thrall, with all the aspects (lets face it, if an aspect dies, it’s a wipe) charge up the Dragon Soul for one final attack. Some RP, and Deathwing gets killed by it. Because its RP, some fun: When Deathwing dies, his flaming body no longer contained bursts onto the raid, instantly killing everyone. Don't worry, Alexstrasza will resurrect you.




Well, I wanted Madness of Deathwing to offer a multi-phase fight each phase almost completely different and unique, and I wanted each phase to be difficult in their own way. I also wanted this fight to be really really hard, and I think I did a good job of it.


Edit: This is more tuned towards Heroic. Take out a couple abilities here and there and make things hit less harder for normal mode.

I also view the timeline like this:

Phase 1, lasts about 6 minutes
Phase 2, 1:30-2:00 minutes
Phase 3, realistically, no longer than a minute if the other two phases went well. If other phases not well, probably like 2-4 minutes.
Phase 4: Depends on dps, but probably another 2 minutes.

Its a long fight.

[Deleted]

Sounds like it would make for a pretty interesting and challenging raid encounter; possibly a bit TOO challenging, even for a heroic. How would you envision timing on one-shot-kill mechanics working? Like how long would players have to move out of stuff or jump to a different aspect/platform? For example, if you're on Alexstrasza's back and get stunned by Roar of Agonizing Pain just before Deathwing uses I Will Have My Victory, will you still be able to move to a different Aspect before you're thrown off and die?

The only ability, in fact, that I have a problem with from a thematic perspective is I Will Have My Victory, as it implies that the Aspects would ever care only about themselves. This goes against everything they've done in the series up until this point, as they wouldn't even be in the fight in the first place if they were going to try saving their own skins at the first sign of something going wrong.

[Deleted]

Sounds like you should submit your resume to blizz as encounter design

I think it looks like a fight i would love to do

[zoefschildpad]

That third phase sounds kinda epic, but I think there should be a number of debuffs or something that make you switch to a specific aspect. So you get to jump around more. make the last phase the real test, make this phase longer because it's so epic.

[cyqu]

add something you need to have run speed to boots in order to get away not die instantly when touched. not something normal but like he breaths fire and does a 360 of the area and only run speed to boots can make you out run it, aswell as a mechanic that everyone would have to jump, or face instant death.

[TheNightAngel]

Sounds like it would make for a pretty interesting and challenging raid encounter; possibly a bit TOO challenging, even for a heroic. How would you envision timing on one-shot-kill mechanics working? Like how long would players have to move out of stuff or jump to a different aspect/platform? For example, if you're on Alexstrasza's back and get stunned by Roar of Agonizing Pain just before Deathwing uses I Will Have My Victory, will you still be able to move to a different Aspect before you're thrown off and die?

The only ability, in fact, that I have a problem with from a thematic perspective is I Will Have My Victory, as it implies that the Aspects would ever care only about themselves. This goes against everything they've done in the series up until this point, as they wouldn't even be in the fight in the first place if they were going to try saving their own skins at the first sign of something going wrong.

Yah, I guess it should be changed to what Zoef said and have specific debuffs corresponding to aspects too so jumping around to get buffs / avoid specific debuffs at certain times.

I guess it could be that the two abilities never go in conjuction, or that you have 6 seconds to get off their back so it cut it in half here and there, just to spice things up. What could happen with "I Will Have My Victory" is actually him using his fore-claws or just fiery tentacles from his body to grab an aspect and shake them around...could be interesting, to free the aspect you have to kill the limbs restraining them, but the fight is already really hard.

Sorry for the necro, went out of town right after I posted this and wanted to make a reply to this guy's suggestion.