1. #1

    Some thoughts on Melee, Blackhand, and Demolition

    So the consensus is that melee (other than [eg]incontrol feinting rogues) are pretty awful, mostly owing to the P1 damage. Of that, most of the damage comes in the form of demolition. So much so that Midwinter mentioned they don't want to bring melee to this fight, and their DK complained about survivability. On the other hand... the Demolition ability doesn't do damage if it doesn't hit you. Again, the consensus is you're eventually going to get hit, but that's not technically true.

    One thing I noticed in pulls on HC is that there's a huge variance in how hard it is avoid any damage from Demolition. Some pulls it seems impossible--you just take a ton of damage. Other pulls, I'd go into P2 with no more than 1 or 2 hits overall. The key factor was the spread of Demolition: when it spawned in a broad half-circle around the whole area you can safely DPS Blackhand, you're kind of screwed, and have to resort to triage to take the least damage, selectively taking demolitions to stand in as opposed to soaking a bunch at once.

    It occurred to me this fight could be a lot easier for melee if melee could perfectly stack on each other when Demolitions go out, then sidestepping as new ones appear, but remaining mostly tight and stacked. The upside to this is when a bunch of demolitions spawn at once, they'd all spawn in the same spot rather than taking up a huge amount of real estate. The downside is if you do screw up, you're no longer taking some damage, but way too much, and should really just gquit from life.

    Thoughts on approaching the fight like this? Has anyone tried this in a systematic way? Are mythic guilds already doing this and it just doesn't matter, the damage is still too much? I am actually just retarded?

  2. #2
    No...

    It's the massive demolition that hurts

  3. #3
    Yeah, I suspect that such a tactic could possibly do more harm than good, considering that demolitions do damage to you no matter whether you are standing in the void zone or not. I am not sure if it is known as to what the scaling / damage ramp-up is currently, but it is clear that spreading it out makes it more likely that fewer people will take the maximum amount of output. Consider it a "it's time for raid heal cooldown" part of the fight, should be able to muscle through easily on heroic.

    By the way, even though melee are "awful" (fully agree in general), they end up serving to split the amount of demolitions that would otherwise be clustered all over the range, also it is rather important to have them around to soak the smashes in P2.
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  4. #4
    The fact that they made this fight most beneficial for range dps is pretty lame. As a melee dps class it's hard to get into a pug Heroic Blackhand cause you need to have any of the three factors: AoTC (which in my opinion should remove), Be a range class (looking at you hunters and boomkins), and don't fail at mechanics. Even if you do manage to dodge every single demolition like Dorfie said "it's the massive demolition that hurts".

  5. #5
    Deleted
    I'm a rogue so I'm comfy for that fight I guess, difficult to balance between melee and ranged and honestly with the ilvl boost it will be doable with more melee when the 'normal' guilds reach it. The best thing I believe they could have done is increase the damage of the large demolition piles by a decent amount but also massively increase the reduction that distance gives, that rewards better play and ensure that even melee can be brought even if a second or two of downtime is required to minimise damage.

  6. #6
    Melee aren't bad just because of p1 survivability. That's a problem for sure, but just one facet of it. It's also that if you want to do a circle kiting strat with the ranged in the middle in p2, which is a good, reliable strat, melee DPS uptime in p2 is terrible, and melee boss uptime in p3 is pretty bad as well, though that is somewhat class specific.

    You also benefit from large numbers of ranged with some p2 and p3 mechanics. For instance the soldiers upstairs in p2 shoot a random ranged, and more ranged = more targets which means less damage on each person and an easier job for healers. In p3, marked for death prefers ranged targets, more ranged = more targets which means it takes longer before you get double MfD stacks on the same person, and so on. It's not just a matter of melee being bad for X mechanic, it's that ranged are preferable and there's no incentive for melee to be part of your comp aside from Smash soaking in p3.

    Demolitions also do damage do you whether or not you get hit in p1, they just do more if they hit you. It's something like 30k from a direct hit from a small demo and 15k if it lands right next to you. Same basic mechanic as the massive demolitions, just less than 10% of the damage.

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