Dark Animus

[Libertarian]

Who did this on ptr 10,25, heroic whatever? I found this fight to be the worst, most gimmicky fight ever created (especially on heroic) and is probably worse than Spine. Not to mention on heroic, you WILL have groups that use 4-5 tanks and 8+ healers. Hell you could probably even use 8 tanks with the way the boss works, without a loss to overall dps because of vengeance ... I mean why not? So which inevitably will create a huge imbalance between 10 and 25.

[Deleted]

whats the difference from normal to heroic mode here?

[Libertarian]

whats the difference from normal to heroic mode here?

I think this post from the feed back sums up the fight. This post is directed toward Heroic, but can be applied to 10N and 25N especially.

Not being of the whiny kind, and there's not many fights I hate, but already this fight is.... Honestly, I wonder who conceived it and thought this would be remotely interesting.

It's an obscure fight, and considering that's the best thing I can say about it, I guess that pretty much illustrates my opinion.

But I won't leave it at simple whine, let me actually try to put into words my difficulties with this fight. As I said, it's obscure. Everything is. It's chaos, and there's no way to put any order in it but to stumble and fumble your way through it and pray to the gods that your tank doesn't randomly get gibbed or that one of your dps is not suddenly standing half a yard to close to another add. And through all that, you really have no idea what is happening, like I have time to think about anima or anything at this point. I now remember in normal there was something chasing you, possibly this was also the case in heroic but if it was, and call me a bad player, I didn't have time to notice.

Anyway, going a bit more into details: it's really unclear what a safe distance is to 'tank' one golem from another and prevent you getting gibbed. Add to this the considerable damage adds do (lone or not), and pet classes are just highly favoured to not only reduce raid damage but to preserve mobility. Add to that that there's basically SO many adds going on and everyone has their own corner, it's just near impossible to keep any kind of oversight. I'm somewhat reminded of Conclave of Winds, where we'd jokingly ask "so how's group 1 doing?!" "group 1's doing fine, and how's group 2?!" Sure, it's not that bad, but considering there's about four million adds and a huge !@# boss (of which we're unsure if it's intended to spawn so soon at all), with tons of damage and deaths seeming completely random and untracable, most of us honestly had no idea what was going on most of the time.

Aside from that, as I mentioned, the damage is plain ridiculous, even if we were succeeding to do it in a seemingly correct way. The damage in no form or way matches what is said in journal, making deaths completely unpredictable, random, and the entire fight an excruciating and frustrating experience - BOTH on normal and now also on heroic. And honestly, if this stays like this, people will just stack hunters and warlocks (which is pretty much already a given if the damage output from lone adds stays this high) and depending on the enrage even four healers will be a requirement just to deal with the spike damage (like empress).

Now we haven't even been able to see the rest of the fight, but at this point I just wish I weren't a warlock so I would be sure I'd be sat the moment this goes live. For the first time, we just gave up. I just hope this boss lies in a VERY distant future in 5.2.

Apologies for the harsh criticism.

The boss starts at 50 anima, he can empower golem in heroic which basically requires a 3rd or 4th tank in 10 man, the interrupt jolt was hitting for 450-500k, the ring is almost impossible for any tank except monk or warrior to get out of, the ring does fire damage while the person is in it. The boss starting at 50 anima basically means you have to execute a cheesy strat or have tanks holding things / kiting which is going to favor 25 man. There is also very limited room.

In normal you have 10? and 25 little adds that have to be tanked by each raid member. Which makes it extremely hard for healers to keep agro on an add and heal at the same time. You could inadvertently use multiple tanks because they hit harder when more are around (250% as, 250% more dmg), giving the tanks more vengeance IE: melee dps tanking 1, and 4-8 tanks tanking 2 each freeing up healers. Also at this point hunters and warlocks can pet tank the adds, and tank a second.

If you don't understand the basic mechanic here it is: you have small, medium, big and boss. The small adds activate first and when killed their anima transfers to the nearest enemy. And so on. The idea, from my understanding, is to activate the boss with as little anima as possible because his attacks become stronger and stronger.

There's really no way to describe the fight until you actually do it.

[Moshots]

Its not as bad as you put it but its definitly gimmicky. Id say 2 in 10 man 3-4 tanks in 25 man

Add to this the considerable damage adds do (lone or not)

what damage? when there lone in 10 man heroic testing I was able to keep myself fully topped with a rejouv on myself. healing it on my resto druid. and as long as you have a good set kill order any healer can easily hold agro with a dot moonfire/flame shock or a few atonements/denounces/melee's on there add.

Now don't get me wrong its not my favorite fight this tier its really gimmicky. but its basically just a fight you cannot carry retards. I highly doubt any raid group that has any coordination will have a issue with this fight and if you do have a issue just bench the downie who is whiping you and move on. Its really a good fight for testing out trials lol if they fail this you know there pretty bad at anything with coordination and can weed out bad players really fast.

[Libertarian]

Its not as bad as you put it but its definitly gimmicky. Id say 2 in 10 man 3-4 tanks in 25 man


what damage? when there lone in 10 man heroic testing I was able to keep myself fully topped with a rejouv on myself. healing it on my resto druid. and as long as you have a good set kill order any healer can easily hold agro with a dot moonfire/flame shock or a few atonements/denounces/melee's on there add.

Now don't get me wrong its not my favorite fight this tier its really gimmicky. but its basically just a fight you cannot carry retards. I highly doubt any raid group that has any coordination will have a issue with this fight and if you do have a issue just bench the downie who is whiping you and move on. Its really a good fight for testing out trials lol if they fail this you know there pretty bad at anything with coordination and can weed out bad players really fast.

I don't agree with you. When a large or massive anima golem is empowered you will need someone to tank it because your tanks will most likely have to tank swap on the boss. Plus you will most likely need a 3rd tank to effective get past the first part.

[Cirque]

Its not as bad as you put it but its definitly gimmicky. Id say 2 in 10 man 3-4 tanks in 25 man


what damage? when there lone in 10 man heroic testing I was able to keep myself fully topped with a rejouv on myself. healing it on my resto druid. and as long as you have a good set kill order any healer can easily hold agro with a dot moonfire/flame shock or a few atonements/denounces/melee's on there add.

Now don't get me wrong its not my favorite fight this tier its really gimmicky. but its basically just a fight you cannot carry retards. I highly doubt any raid group that has any coordination will have a issue with this fight and if you do have a issue just bench the downie who is whiping you and move on. Its really a good fight for testing out trials lol if they fail this you know there pretty bad at anything with coordination and can weed out bad players really fast.

Is it so hard to attempt to be respectful? Keeping yourself up is not hard as a healer (I'm proud you were able to do that!), keeping the entire raid up with not enough pet classes, and when tank's are pretty much getting twoshot however, may be a challenge that will rely more on RNG than actual skill, add to that everything else that's going on and this fight is just the synonym of frustration and gimmick. "Downie"? Really?

[xfreeder]

Its not as bad as you put it but its definitly gimmicky. Id say 2 in 10 man 3-4 tanks in 25 man


what damage? when there lone in 10 man heroic testing I was able to keep myself fully topped with a rejouv on myself. healing it on my resto druid. and as long as you have a good set kill order any healer can easily hold agro with a dot moonfire/flame shock or a few atonements/denounces/melee's on there add.

Now don't get me wrong its not my favorite fight this tier its really gimmicky. but its basically just a fight you cannot carry retards. I highly doubt any raid group that has any coordination will have a issue with this fight and if you do have a issue just bench the downie who is whiping you and move on. Its really a good fight for testing out trials lol if they fail this you know there pretty bad at anything with coordination and can weed out bad players really fast.

Well i saw the midwinter stream yesterday and they seem pretty clueless how to handle the adds and the really intense dmg and i think they are a pretty good at coordination and don't carry retards and downies(thats how you call player that are not so good as you at this specific computergame right?). So either this boss is badly overtuned @ 25er or you're guild is much much better than WR #275.

[Zonex]

I agree with Moine, there are very few fights that test individual skill and raid precision. This is one of those fights, the mechanics are simple, and easily handled if you have players who are able to exercise control.

You mention the fight being tough to heal because of the all the damage going out, it really isn't, if a rejuv can keep a leather class topped off, 2 HoTs can keep a clothie topped off. If you think that's hard for healers, then you can just relieve them of their "add tanking" duties. In 10 man, you have 2 tanks, and possibly 2 healers, tanks can tank 2 of these mobs, that frees up your healers. In 25man, you take 6 healers and 3 tanks; 3 tanks take 2 adds, and if you have an entire set of 16 DPS classes with NO pets, then and only then will you have your healers tank, even then its a non issue.

The Empower Golem, is a heroic mechanic, of course you wont be able to deal with it in your PTR tries, if you did, it would make for a joke of a boss.

On normal mode, Midwinter's strategy (small -> large -> massive -> Animus) is a sound way to do it. It makes it so the damage intake of the tanks spike when 8 larges are up and never after there after. Each tank taking the a group or Large adds should pop CDs, nothing else just as much on the fight. Come to the Massives, and you get 1 tank tanking each, whilst the rest of the raid kill off their small adds (again HoTable damage). The strat MW used, was kill one Massive, make it activate the Animus, and proceed to just SWITCH tanks every time its required (i.e. animus tank, takes massive golem, golem tank takes animus). The the Ring youre so worried about, yes it is damaging, but it is damage done to a tank, we have handled high damage abilities to tanks before. Most tanks has a MV speed increasing ability; Monk (Roll), Warrior (Charge/Intercept), Paladin (Speed of Light), Feral (Stampeding Roar), Dk (None, but the way Death strike works.. it shouldn't really matter, plus they have a plethora of CDs, its 1 MAYBE 2 ticks of high Fire Damage).

So yes, it is an execution fight, it serves to barricade uncoordinated raid groups. There doesn't need to be a reason like "it's a barricade because later bosses need more coordination", the simple fact is it is a coordination fight (and not a numbers fight - on Normal), and to kill it and progress, the guild has to sync up properly.

Also I don't know how close you were watching the MW stream, but many of the reasons people wiped were because they were doing stupid stuff, like Fade (justified), Mirror Images (mistake), DCs (and not being able to tank the add there after), Multi Dotting (fixed after). These are stupid reasons to wipe, and they fixed these after addressing it. The majority of the stream was spent outside the instance because the instance locked people out. However, MW did start talking about a change in strat later on, but never got to test it so..

[Moshots]

Well i saw the midwinter stream yesterday and they seem pretty clueless how to handle the adds and the really intense dmg and i think they are a pretty good at coordination and don't carry retards and downies(thats how you call player that are not so good as you at this specific computergame right?). So either this boss is badly overtuned @ 25er or you're guild is much much better than WR #275.

Yes and Yes First off I was testing with another guild in 10 heroic that is within the top 10 US (friends of mine). 2nd off its not overtuned in the damage. Midwinter couldn't figure out what constructs they were supposed to animate first and on top of that as a earlier posted eluded to dps were doing stupid stuff like threat drops that lead to whipes. And were arguing and shit about how to handle over vent I was watching sloots stream too. In 10 man its a bit more straightforward but the boss starts with 53 energy on heroic 10 so you have the 2nd ability to start so less coordination more damage going out. the issue with this fight is EVERY guild has someone that is really dumb especially 25's the Currently top 10 guild I was testing with was a guild I was in at one point and when I was there we had 2-3 dps on the roster that were there ONLY cause they could hit buttons they had no brains or ability to move out of shit and required more bres's than anyone else on our roster but also were 3/5 of our top 5 dps on ultraxion style cock blocks and that is what makes this fight stupidly hard on 25. I stick with my earlier post. This is a good fight to weed out trials on.

---------- Post added 2013-02-23 at 10:43 PM ----------

Is it so hard to attempt to be respectful? Keeping yourself up is not hard as a healer (I'm proud you were able to do that!), keeping the entire raid up with not enough pet classes, and when tank's are pretty much getting twoshot however, may be a challenge that will rely more on RNG than actual skill, add to that everything else that's going on and this fight is just the synonym of frustration and gimmick. "Downie"? Really?

figured id reply to this too. Tanks learn to use CD's? On 10 heroic we had no problem 3 healing keeping up everyone. I was solo healing on boss+1 add tank. at start of fight and keeping him up wasn't hard as long as we cycled a cd on him (ironbark,personals,PS 1 per ball) and making sure to save Natures swiftness for it if he dipped. The other tank with the 2 adds to start had 2 healers on him and the damage on him was really high ill admit from the spiking I saw on my frames. But its 15-25 second of high damage on him at start. Our lowest attempt was probably close to 3 min. and that was with 45 min of testing. If we hadn't started late we probably would have been close to killing it.

[ZakAtack]

I don't know if obscure is the right word to use, it just sounds like a very different fight from what's been seen in general. So many fights have very typical mechanics these days as a result of this being the fifteenth tier; there are only so many diverse encounters that can be thought up. So many fights boil down to don't stand in this, stack now, spread now, taunt swap, kill the adds then focus boss, etc. But this fight is very very different and has high personal responsibility. Kind of like Elegon and the sparks. If you ran 10m and were trying to carry a very bad DPS, you were going to struggle because you couldn't just magically make up for one person's inability to kill enough spark waves. It sounds like if you've got players that don't listen and pay attention to where they're standing and don't keep their own add aggro'd, you're going to have trouble here.

Of course, there's still probably tuning adjustments left to be done to the fight, as well as getting bugs out. And I think it's a pretty late fight in the tier, somewhere in the second half. So it's not like it's the entry boss.

[DetectiveJohnKimble]

Whenever a particular fight, quest, or zone goes outside the usual scope of "let me stand here and do my 6 button rotation while occasionally dodging fire," people will complain. It really becomes too complicated for some people when the game tests things that they're not comfortable with, and that's to be expected in a primarily PvE game like WoW.

[judgementofantonidas]

ten man normal

tanks pull the two small melee haste buffed adds on either side keeping them away from any other adds while healers and dps agro one each of the other adds.

tanks survive till one each of thier melee hasted adds are dead at which point a new add will become active and they pick that one up.

adds are killed one at a time as pairs die one of the next larger add becomes active and must be picked up.

dont stand in the crap that follows an individual person. that person moves away from said crap.

once the adds are dead and the dark animus engages dont stand in the one shot kill mechanic crap.

loot move to next boss.

[ZakAtack]

ten man normal

tanks pull the two small melee haste buffed adds on either side keeping them away from any other adds while healers and dps agro one each of the other adds.

tanks survive till one each of thier melee hasted adds are dead at which point a new add will become active and they pick that one up.

adds are killed one at a time as pairs die one of the next larger add becomes active and must be picked up.

dont stand in the crap that follows an individual person. that person moves away from said crap.

once the adds are dead and the dark animus engages dont stand in the one shot kill mechanic crap.

loot move to next boss.

To be fair, one of the main complaints is that apparently (again, didn't test it myself) if you move out of place so that two adds are too close and get the attack speed and damage buff, they pretty much instantly kill their target, making it very unforgiving. I think it's reasonable to at least make it a bit easier for Normal mode where the damage buff is tuned down so you have a few seconds to respond to the mistake.

Overall, everyone gets an add so it's high individual responsibility and it's not a typical fight. There's just going to be a lot of QQ, that's simply how it is.

[Libertarian]

ten man normal

tanks pull the two small melee haste buffed adds on either side keeping them away from any other adds while healers and dps agro one each of the other adds.

tanks survive till one each of thier melee hasted adds are dead at which point a new add will become active and they pick that one up.

adds are killed one at a time as pairs die one of the next larger add becomes active and must be picked up.

dont stand in the crap that follows an individual person. that person moves away from said crap.

once the adds are dead and the dark animus engages dont stand in the one shot kill mechanic crap.

loot move to next boss.

It's just so simple, when you're watching a stream.

[reflection]

It's just so simple, when you're watching a stream.

It's just like this HoF in 60 seconds movie
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YfhU6MYNiU

Basically anything in there, but it's not that easy.

[Deleted]

I wonder how this fight will be done on LFR mode

[Kralljin]

Whenever a particular fight, quest, or zone goes outside the usual scope of "let me stand here and do my 6 button rotation while occasionally dodging fire," people will complain. It really becomes too complicated for some people when the game tests things that they're not comfortable with, and that's to be expected in a primarily PvE game like WoW.

This fight is just a huge pain in the ass because it strongly favors Pet Classes, multiple Tanks (which should be able to kite) and Healers that safely keep aggro on a Mob.

On top of that, the sometimes unpredictable movement pattern of Npc's can lead to oneshot of nontanks.

Lastly, the Boss needs to be finished quickly enough before he drained enough Anima from active Golems that he reaches 100 Anima (On Heroic there was 152 Anima available).

It's not about "this Boss is different" but "This Boss favors such an unnatural Raid Setup".

[Ealyssa]

I wonder how this fight will be done on LFR mode

Unnerfed Garalon 2.0, in worst.

[Libertarian]

This fight is just a huge pain in the ass because it strongly favors Pet Classes, multiple Tanks (which should be able to kite) and Healers that safely keep aggro on a Mob.

On top of that, the sometimes unpredictable movement pattern of Npc's can lead to oneshot of nontanks.

Lastly, the Boss needs to be finished quickly enough before he drained enough Anima from active Golems that he reaches 100 Anima (On Heroic there was 152 Anima available).

It's not about "this Boss is different" but "This Boss favors such an unnatural Raid Setup".

Right and this is the point I'm making. It strongly favors bringing many tanks (more than normal 2-3) because the entire strat revolves around activating the boss, and killing the boss quickly. Wasting time on small -> medium -> large is pointless because you don't want that energy to ever get to the boss, and the small adds are not a threat when you just tank them with multiple tanks.

Basically the person who thought the random order on spirit kings, thought this would be a good fight too.

---------- Post added 2013-02-25 at 01:18 PM ----------

Unnerfed Garalon 2.0, in worst.

More like trying to do Rhyolith in LFR.