Amber Shaper Un'Sok HC Zerg

[Deleted]

Making him stay at 1hp until the monstrosity is killed would be a nice (and easy?) hotfix.

[Raiju]

Except you couldn't do that. The lightning still had to travel through every single person, requiring intense usage of raid cooldowns and healing as everyone's taking lightning ticks.

That's exactly how some of the first fights were done. The lightning instead of jumping 1 by one just jumped through the entire raid at once, I guess due to precise positioning. The damage was irrelevant because there was only 2 ticks (1 because of lag) - By positioning correctly you skipped the phase as it was over the instant the add died.

Why does it matter? Is it not an exploit because it's not a top-end guild doing it?

It's more it is unlikely to get changed and banned for if it isn't a top guild doing it - in this sort of scenario at least. Other exploits are treated more harshly.

I never said I agreed with using that tactic. And I've always thought it was stupid they didn't fix it.

But that is exactly what is happening here, albeit with a boss mechanic involved. Honestly Zor'lok just seems to be masochistic. Anyway to take more damage than intended and he'll find it.

We never did that, no. We just spread out and healed till it died :s.

I guess your guild didn't struggle on magmaw at all given it was a fairly easy hc boss - but it was the go-to HC tactic for pretty much every guild past a certain point. To the person who said you still had to content with mechanics - I say "lol". If you made it to 25% in the first place you would make your kill with that tactic. Simple as. You skip the hardest part of the fight, since that shadow damage was huge compared to the fire raid damage throughout before.

[Ashvael]

Making him stay at 1hp until the monstrosity is killed would be a nice (and easy?) hotfix.

They did exactly this. It's fixed.

[Deleted]

I just watched Method's stream, and apparently he can't get below 1 hp during the transition.

[MrExcelion]

Bleeding edge guilds have been using a variation of this strat for weeks, so I find it odd that it gets hotfixed after the D&R post. (WoW D&R). Or maybe it was the MMO-C frontpage thing, since they read fansites lol.

[Deleted]

Bleeding edge guilds have been using a variation of this strat for weeks, so I find it odd that it gets hotfixed after the D&R post. (WoW D&R). Or maybe it was the MMO-C frontpage thing, since they read fansites lol.

struggling to realise how you can have a variation of killing the boss in the first phase. I thought it was a he dies in the first phase or he doesn't affair. Perhaps my simple my cannot comprehend it.

[Deleted]

struggling to realise how you can have a variation of killing the boss in the first phase. I thought it was a he dies in the first phase or he doesn't affair. Perhaps my simple my cannot comprehend it.

It's that almost all of the top guilds (method etc) have used a tactic where they wait for the same thing to happend, to burst down more then intended (70%). The only difference after that is that this guild and the other are better at bursting/stacks it higher. It's otherwise exactly the same thing happening.

The only true way to solve it is probably to make him stay at 1 hp until the big add is dead, but even then you skip whole phase 3 and all teh new mechanics, which can be considered cheating too.

[Kanadei]

They did exactly this. It's fixed.

Can someone confirm this? Also would this be worth doing for normal?

Just to be clear, I'm specifically asking if it will make the fight easier - you don't need to tell me it's "easy enough already".

[fangless]

but even then you skip whole phase 3 and all teh new mechanics, which can be considered cheating too.

With how many stacks you can put on the boss in P2, P3 largely is skipped anyhow. Most kills don't even see the slimes chase people, or barely do just as the boss dies :P

It only gets easier with more gear too.

[Gondlem]

There's no way this is an exploit. Exploiting means using an unintended method to trivialize the difficulty of an encounter. This isn't trivial, and they're only using the abilities present in the fight. Evade bugging, wall jumping, rebuilding the platform, tanking Gara'jal outside his room - these are exploits because they go outside the intended structure of the encounter to make the mechanics not function. Killing the boss really fast using normal abilities is not an exploit, it's a clever strat. The door strat on twin valks wasn't an exploit either for the same reason, all you did was find a normal spot inside the room to tank the boss that was safe from orbs. They fixed this because obviously they want you to do all three phases, but that doesn't make it an exploit. Blizzard's track record with bans suggests they agree with this definition.

Secondly, nobody has been using a "variation" on this strat. There's generally two strats that 25 man guilds used for heroic, either you got stacks up on the boss during p1 and used two construct people in p2 to keep the stack rolling on both the boss and the add so he had high stacks going into the final phase, or you stopped DPS towards the end of p2 and stacked the debuff on the boss before transitioning, since doing p3 with no boss stacks wasn't really viable. You could also push the boss hard with hero during scalpel but not kill him. Just because they involve a high debuff stack or a short p3 doesn't make them the same as this strat, because you still did all three phases instead of killing him in p1. I'm sure other guilds have been using this exact strat recently, but not for the early kills.

Anyway, this is still a pretty good approach to the fight even after the change, since it makes p3 a non-event if he's at 1% and you don't have to roll the double stack or save pools that way, you can just do a normal p2 with minimal amber up which is a good deal easier than having a high amber, high pool count and just have the boss die right as p3 begins.

[Shimitsu]

I don't think you can get him to 1% now because you can't cut down to 1 healer and still live through the monstrocity. Not being able to cut down to 1 healer means the enrage is an issue if you screw around in p1 for too long. At most you'll do what everyone was doing already: burn off about 15% during his cast on the transition.

[eschatological]

Exploiting means using an unintended method to trivialize the difficulty of an encounter.

It is unintended for the boss to take 100% damage below 70% health.

It is skipping 2 out of 3 of the phases in the fight, both of them being harder phases than the first, trivializing the difficulty. Moan all you want about the timing needed, but it's literally a case of your DPS hitting escape, not cleaving when they kill adds, and your tank having some good RNG when it comes to crits.

It is an exploit, but imo, not really a bannable one because it's due to poor design by Blizz (or more like a flaw - they want creative strats like timing scalpels to allow for a little bit of a burn, and not a straight out immune bubble), and not by bugging out the encounter.

Exploiting has a much broader definition than bugging a fight out.

[Deleted]

It is unintended for the boss to take 100% damage below 70% health.

It is skipping 2 out of 3 of the phases in the fight, both of them being harder phases than the first, trivializing the difficulty. Moan all you want about the timing needed, but it's literally a case of your DPS hitting escape, not cleaving when they kill adds, and your tank having some good RNG when it comes to crits.

It is an exploit, but imo, not really a bannable one because it's due to poor design by Blizz (or more like a flaw - they want creative strats like timing scalpels to allow for a little bit of a burn, and not a straight out immune bubble), and not by bugging out the encounter.

Exploiting has a much broader definition than bugging a fight out.

So pushing him a few % under 70% like 65% is still a exploit? If you follow that logic it is, and there are soo many guilds who did that, it's by far the most common thing to do when P1 ends.

[Reyzzz]

So pushing him a few % under 70% like 65% is still a exploit? If you follow that logic it is, and there are soo many guilds who did that, it's by far the most common thing to do when P1 ends.

No, the exploit is to skip phase 2 and 3.

[Gondlem]

Exploiting has a much broader definition than bugging a fight out.

I know that people on this forum believe that, but I don't, and I don't think Blizzard does either as nobody has ever been banned for an exploit that didn't fit the definition I gave above. To put it another way, using the abilities your class has in a creative way will never be something you can be banned for unless the situation is absurdly extreme, like spellstealing a buff that allows you to one shot a current tier raid boss and using it to farm gear or something. Blizzard takes action when an someone uses an unintended and unusual method to trivialize an encounter, generally by causing mechanics to not work. Like tanking Gara'jal outside, rebuilding the platform on LK, evade bugging and wall jumping etc.

This is basically waiting until a certain part of the fight and then doing as much DPS as possible. There is no way Blizzard sees that as an exploit, it's just an unintended strat. In fact I would argue that the fight was designed so you could burn him a bit extra if you wanted during the transition, and if the DPS check was tuned tightly it could even have been required for first kills on heroic. People just did more damage than expected so Blizzard changed the fight so you can't kill him outright in that transition. How can you say that it is acceptable to DPS the boss say 10% during the transition but not to DPS the boss 70%? You're doing the exact same thing, just better.

Not an exploit at all.

[Nakkí]

Wild strategy. I'm almost sorry now that we've used a more traditional approach for so long.
If we'd still be progressing on this, I would definitely like to try this for the lulz!

[Dranged]

It doesn't matter the slightest what any of you think on this matter since it's not you who decide what is intended or not, or what is an exploit or not; it's Blizzard.

And even using originally unintended methods to simplify mechanics is something that Blizzard has let slide many times. The Breadth of Frost on Rag HC p4 comes to mind. Blizzard stated long after progression had ended that they never intended for raids to be able to stack 3 groups at the same time inside the Breadth without triggering a geyser - the intended mechanic was instead to rotate groups to reset the stacks, which would probably have made it impossible to heal that phase with only 3-4 healers which was what guilds were using. Still Blizzard decided not to hotfix this for some reason.

[Raiju]

I know that people on this forum believe that, but I don't, and I don't think Blizzard does either as nobody has ever been banned for an exploit that didn't fit the definition I gave above. To put it another way, using the abilities your class has in a creative way will never be something you can be banned for unless the situation is absurdly extreme, like spellstealing a buff that allows you to one shot a current tier raid boss and using it to farm gear or something. Blizzard takes action when an someone uses an unintended and unusual method to trivialize an encounter, generally by causing mechanics to not work. Like tanking Gara'jal outside, rebuilding the platform on LK, evade bugging and wall jumping etc.

This is basically waiting until a certain part of the fight and then doing as much DPS as possible. There is no way Blizzard sees that as an exploit, it's just an unintended strat. In fact I would argue that the fight was designed so you could burn him a bit extra if you wanted during the transition, and if the DPS check was tuned tightly it could even have been required for first kills on heroic. People just did more damage than expected so Blizzard changed the fight so you can't kill him outright in that transition. How can you say that it is acceptable to DPS the boss say 10% during the transition but not to DPS the boss 70%? You're doing the exact same thing, just better.

Not an exploit at all.

Short answer: Yes loads of people have been banned for non-raid exploits. Just because you don't keep up with that news doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

I don't keep up with football, but there are still random guys running around playing their games with 100000's watching.

[Gondlem]

Short answer: Yes loads of people have been banned for non-raid exploits. Just because you don't keep up with that news doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

I don't keep up with football, but there are still random guys running around playing their games with 100000's watching.

Of course people get banned for things outside of raiding all the time. We're talking about what sorts of boss kills are considered exploits here, not whether or not some guy gets banned for botting fishing or whatever.

[Raiju]

Exploiting means using an unintended method to trivialize the difficulty of an encounter.

So what you're saying is (EXCLUDING OTHER EXPLOITS SUDDENLY) that exploits in boss fights are exploits? really? well gee, thanks. I was confused.