Why was C'thun pre-nerf "Impossible"?

[Herecius]

I find it very, very interesting how many of you are such experts on CTHUN fight prenerf... Would be really funny to find out how many of you actually are some "wotlk made raiders" who havent been in any raid at all even in TBC, let alone in vanilla.

I unashamedly volunteer myself as one of those types (well, almost, not quite - I did raid some in TBC), but most of my knowledge comes from anecdotal evidence of players that have been at it for longer than me.

I am endlessly amused by people that think less of others simply because others haven't played as long.

[Neelix]

I find it very, very interesting how many of you are such experts on CTHUN fight prenerf... Would be really funny to find out how many of you actually are some "wotlk made raiders" who havent been in any raid at all even in TBC, let alone in vanilla.

Active since 2004 brah.

[kyraka]

a flask was mandatory in all old raids from day one on (hi molten core). flasks were much more powerful than today, giving you around +150 spellpower

Can I have the +150sp flask? Can I have it now? Pretty please....

[unillenium]

Maths isn't reality. Maths is a totally perfect set of measurements but at any scale we can understand things, almost nothing is as perfect as maths itself. And that includes reality. Maths is basically a toolset and understanding the toolset, it does not equate to reality.

In the World of Warcraft mathematics has to be taken hand-in-hand with random probability and other factors.

For example one time I joined a ToGC25 pug (and unfortunately some of the players sucked.)

We had pretty much barely enough dps to hit enrage. The tanks were good at threat though and easily held #1 and #2 threat on Icehowl. Some nub failed at charge and both tanks were promptly devoured by icehowl, (although the OT lasted longer because of popping every cooldown imaginable) along with one of the top DPSes.

So here we were, icehowl togc25, not enough dps alive to beat enrage, no tanks, very close to enrage.

I popped distracting shot on him and on his way over to me was able to climb to the top of the threat meter. I hit deterrence. After deterrence finished I got a couple of lucky dodges out which was enough time for readiness to come off of cooldown and I gave it another deterrence. There was mere seconds left until enrage at this point. As luck would have it it was frost breath time, overlapping massive crash. Massive crash finished just a second before enrage, preventing a raid wide splat. The raid didn't fail at charge this time and was just barely able to burn him down before staggered daze ended.

Mathematics meet my friend dynamics.

[Doctor Professor]

I popped distracting shot on him and on his way over to me was able to climb to the top of the threat meter. I hit deterrence. After deterrence finished I got a couple of lucky dodges out which was enough time for readiness to come off of cooldown and I gave it another deterrence. There was mere seconds left until enrage at this point. As luck would have it it was frost breath time, overlapping massive crash. Massive crash finished just a second before enrage, preventing a raid wide splat. The raid didn't fail at charge this time and was just barely able to burn him down before staggered daze ended.

Mathematics meet my friend dynamics.

You must be the first hunter ever to taunt and deterrence and enraged boss... wait what? Usso taunta.

[DocQuantum]

[Snip long quote about ToGC25 near-wipe save]

Mathematics meet my friend dynamics.

/facepalm.

That's a perfect example of someone not really understanding. The story, while entertaining, was not example of "math =/= reality." It was an example of the model (we barely have enough DPS) not reflecting reality. The underlying math still works: pure math = reality. It's just our impure theoretical models deviating from reality that make it look fishy.

Look into the history of physics 1880 - 1920 or so: it's a great example of the whole debate. Late 1800s, folks thought we'd "solved" physics, aside from a few small bits that didn't work out; they thought that once we figured out what the little trick, we'd "win the game." One of those bits turned into relativity; another turned into quantum mechanics. The math was fine; it was the model that was flawed.

[Zelven]

Kill him. If all of the above conditions were met, that is ALL of the above, it was possible to kill C'thun pre hotfix. Every single bug you mentioned had a chance of occurring. If the stars aligned twice over, in other words, you had all possible buffs and replenishment, zero tentacles spawned inside (it's possible), zero big tentacles spawned in unreachable areas (it's possible), beams did not gib half the raid (bug/byproduct of having no 'walled' tentacles - it's possible).

Three very unlikely, but possible scenarios. It was possible to kill C'Thun pre hotfix.

Going through my head, going through my memories of classic, and I cannot recall any form of Replenishment being found in Classic times. I don't get why certain people think any form of Replenishment existed. The best there could've been was Mana Spring...and that was party only.
There was no Vampiric Touch from Shadow Priests returning mana to party members. VT was a BC skill. This seems to be something Thaurr didn't realize with his post.

Define 'all possible buffs,' considering that I'd find being able to have blessings as well as totems would make that fight killable prior to the hotfix; however, Classic, you had to choose based on your faction.

"It's possible" kinda gets thrown out the window when so many factors are tossed in with a probability value of near 0. When it's that improbable, you call it impossible. I'm sure one day pigs will evolve wings and start flying or a Mother in Law's house will freeze spontaneously; however improbable to the point of almost certainly never happening within one's lifetime, it's still "possible."

[Madarame]

i killed cthun in classic server third or fourth, it was pretty hard. lot of consumables. best encounter sofar.

didn't nihilum ( i think they had another name that time, cant remember clearly) somehow terrainexploited to get faster to cthun and then got suspended?


€ ok it wasnt nihilum but overrated: http://www.gamespot.com/news/6160983...s&subj=6160983

[PuntaGorda]

There was no replenishment in vanilla. No vampiric touch for shadow priests. Shadow priest wasn't a viable class anyway. Mana pots, tuber roots, and dark runes were your only mana battery and you chugged them on cooldown. Nobody killed C'Thun pre-nerf, and people did try everything, including soulstones on the whole raid. Flasking the whole raid was a somewhat reasonable thing to do at that point already anyway, yeah it wasn't common but people have done it before it didn't come as much a surprise. It would come as a surprise if people flasked the raid for Rag or something like that, you could make fun of them for that, but yeah if it's bleeding edge like C'Thun or Twin Emps (at the time) only the idiots who'll never see it anyway would question you.

Even without the bugs the encounter was impossible just from sheer numbers perspective. Eventually the tentacles overwhelmed you in phase two because you couldn't kill them fast enough. Now post-nerf C'Thun wasn't exactly a walk in the park either, I'd still say it's up there with the hardest encounters in vanilla, post-nerf it's still certainly the hardest before Naxx. We haven't made it to something harder in Naxx at 60 - we were at Gothik, Gluth, and the second plague guy who I'll admit we never even pulled. You still had to field 40 people none of whom could make mistakes in phase one and survive the transition and have at least one good burn in phase two. The realm transfers had only just come out, people would only transfer for the absolute top guilds like DnT. It was very very hard back then to field 40 good raiders; upto really Twin Emps, you never needed to field a majority of good players. In MC you really only needed like 5 good players and the rest were filler. BWL bumped that up to maybe 10. With C'Thun you can pull off maybe two people dying in phase one; if five people are dead it's a wipe the only reason to continue is for practice but it is costing you mana pots tubers and everything.

[Deleted]

as far as im sure, i tried c'thun alot in vanilla, never killed him though, XT 25 man hardmode was mathmatically impossible before it was fixed, i think C'thun was like that ( and various bugs involving tentacles )

Edit: consumables were very important in vanilla, along with buffs from outside raid etc, like the UBRS fire resist buff for raggy

[Deleted]

rofl, obviously you have not the slightest clue. did you start with wow in 2009?! a flask was mandatory in all old raids from day one on (hi molten core). flasks were much more powerful than today, giving you around +150 spellpower when i recall correctly, while your gear gave you only maybe +300 or something like that.

don't make up "facts" and try to sell them to people that are even newer to the game, trying to make yourself look like a "veteran" while talking BS.

I'm sorry, but no, this is wrong. Flasks were not "mandatory" and never were. In vanilla they cost 50g each when an average player farmed about 25g per hour, and they did NOT persist through death. If you were using flasks for every single wipe of a progress night in molten core, you were eBaying. Most guilds, including top guilds, didn't use flasks at all, and I'm not aware of any guild that flasked for every single attempt especially when 90% of wipes were a result of not having the execution down, rather than not doing enough damage, or not having enough HP.

Also, from memory, didn't the first Yogg0 kills come during a seasonal event that gave players crit buffs that weren't factored into the calculation? Seems bizarre to suggest that maths and science isn't robust enough to model the outcome of a world of warcraft encounter, given that what humanity has achieved using maths and science. Which includes tuning a world of warcraft encounter, as it happens.

[Madarame]

flasks persisting through death were introduced in patch 1.7 - this was after BWL and before AQ

flasks were mandatory, so were resistance potions in AQ

[Banaghran]

[Snip long quote about ToGC25 near-wipe save]


/facepalm.

That's a perfect example of someone not really understanding. The story, while entertaining, was not example of "math =/= reality." It was an example of the model (we barely have enough DPS) not reflecting reality. The underlying math still works: pure math = reality. It's just our impure theoretical models deviating from reality that make it look fishy.

Look into the history of physics 1880 - 1920 or so: it's a great example of the whole debate. Late 1800s, folks thought we'd "solved" physics, aside from a few small bits that didn't work out; they thought that once we figured out what the little trick, we'd "win the game." One of those bits turned into relativity; another turned into quantum mechanics. The math was fine; it was the model that was flawed.

...as far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.

Albert Einstein

[unillenium]

[Snip long quote about ToGC25 near-wipe save]


/facepalm.

That's a perfect example of someone not really understanding. The story, while entertaining, was not example of "math =/= reality." It was an example of the model (we barely have enough DPS) not reflecting reality. The underlying math still works: pure math = reality. It's just our impure theoretical models deviating from reality that make it look fishy.

Look into the history of physics 1880 - 1920 or so: it's a great example of the whole debate. Late 1800s, folks thought we'd "solved" physics, aside from a few small bits that didn't work out; they thought that once we figured out what the little trick, we'd "win the game." One of those bits turned into relativity; another turned into quantum mechanics. The math was fine; it was the model that was flawed.

Funny you should mention quantum mechanics in a conversation about mathematics. Considering that uncertainty is part of the quantum mechanics model.
But anyways:

.| <--- 99.9% probability
|. <--- 00.1% probability

Let's run a simulation
|. WTF
.| as predicted
.| hah I told you so.
|. odd...
|. unlikely...

Certainty requires a sample size large enough to satisfy the law of averages (one could argue that no such sample exists.)
So mathematics applied to reality is mainly statistics and probability.

Naturally mathematics can be used to quantify probability, HOWEVER the exact probabilities can't be known, even with a predictable computer algorithm generating random numbers, due to the fact that an infinite sample size is not available (or possible). By all means you can achieve an extremely accurate sample from a very small number of samples, I'm not denying that either.

As far as a boss kill being mathematically possible or not in WoW there is obviously a large black and white area of certainty, but there is a tiny but still extremely significant factor of uncertainty.

So I would argue that you can only really calculate a boss fight down to the last 5-10% and after that point you are just rubbing Buddha's belly, due to that which is not only unknown, but that which CAN'T be known.

So I'll give you that Math =/= Reality is an incorrect blanket statement, but semantics aside what is meant in such a statement is that ABSOLUTE Mathematics =/= all of Reality, which is a true statement.

[Deleted]

Nope, sorry, flasks were not mandatory from day 1, and were very rarely used at all throughout MC and BWL. They weren't mandatory after they buffed them to persist through death, either. The very first time we raid flasked was for very rare situations in naxx. Loatheb and 4HM once we had execution sorted, from memory.

Like I said, if you and your entire 40 man guild were chugging flasks alongside all the other potions (which stacked with flasks back then) and consumables for every wipe you had in a progress night in BWL, your memory is failing you, everyone in your guild was playing a minimum of 29 hours per day to sustain that activity, or you were buying gold.

[macke]

Ok, imagine Lich King. You imagining the fight? Ok good.

Now imagine the fight, let's say it's on 25 man. But instead of three val'kyrs coming down, TEN DO.

That's what C'thun pre-nerf was like.

And then you think about 40 raiders instead of 25.

[Deleted]

There was no replenishment in vanilla. No vampiric touch for shadow priests. Shadow priest wasn't a viable class anyway. Mana pots, tuber roots, and dark runes were your only mana battery and you chugged them on cooldown.

Indeed, it's really amusing to read what the "experts" are writing when talking about having shadow priests in the raid =P

Altho, we used paladins and priests to nuke down the small eye tentacles in phase2 so we could get more dps on the greater ones. Our best attempt pre-hotix was around 55%, one perfect attempt when we were able to do 2x weakened phases.

iirc Nihilum had him at 15-25% pre-hotfix.

[Ðuracell]

Skill doesn't help on an overtuned fight.

HLK25 0% Buff wants to talk to you.

[Herecius]

And then you think about 40 raiders instead of 25.

Alright, let's pretend that LK is a 40-man raid. So instead of 10 valks coming down, 20 do.

[Irony]

HLK25 0% Buff wants to talk to you.

Full 277s and doing the fight 20 times wants to talk with you.
Any other stupid comments you wanna make?
Before C'thun fixed it was impossible to kill all the tentacles, dps c'thun and not go oom.