Page 1 of 2
1
2
LastLast
  1. #1

    Megaera - is it a "waste" of a really good concept?

    Hiya,

    I'm here to ask if you guys agree or disagree with the notion that Megaera was what I'd call a "wasted" concept or "missed opportunity" to put it more plainly; I feel like we waited quite a while for a "traditional" hydra boss (that is, not like WoW's usual bi-pedal multi-headed creatures) as they appear in a lot of action games (the best example I can think of in recent years is the first God of War - that is quite a respectable hydra) to appear in WoW and Megaera just didn't quite deliver.

    For me personally, I had really hoped for it to be a bit more involved (kind of like Magmaw of BWD but on a larger, more numerous scale) with the combating of the heads and their natural threat as enormous, fanged serpent heads. I suppose the elemental bit is interesting but I just feel like there are plenty of elemental-based bosses in the game that throw stuff on the ground or put out conical areas of doom that most or all of your raid need avoid.

    I'd kind of envisioned the fight being more like you're in a nearly identical area (still cavernous) but fully-surrounded by water so that the heads could pop up at more varied spots and part of the fight would be placing your raid accordingly and having to do a little bit of Magmaw-esque environmental work to actually bring the heads down and execute them - perhaps via first using one trigger to bring them down and then another trigger to drop a stalactite on them to kill them or some such - maybe you'd have these barrels of gunpowder someone would have to drop and then DPS players would need to activate them - that would weaken the head and drop it - then you'd have some area of the wall that would need X damage done to it in a limited window (this area is perhaps normally not able to be targeted) which then causes the rocks/whathaveyou to kill the head.

    The idea that the main body is "hidden" and many kills of its heads would result in its death is cool - maybe an addition for heroic would be that on top of taming the growing number of heads, you'd have to have DPS players and tanks working together to also destroy a huge formation somewhere that would, by the end of the fight, bring down an enormous rockslide or huge spikey rock that would impale the main body and kill it.

    I'm not sure - I may be off my rocker here because I'm very partial to huge boss encounters (the aforementioned hydra and almost any other God of War boss, bosses in Rift and FFXI, the Dragon God of Demon's Souls is one of my all-time favorites) and I realize SOME ideas that work in other MMOs and certainly in action games are not applicable here but I think WoW does something many other games do not do when it does have fights like Magmaw and the like where you use environmental triggers to actually kill a boss - I just feel like it's been almost 9 years and I've killed a LOT of powerful people/creatures/otherworldly things by just throwing ice and death at it and hitting it with some kind of steel - I really like when they add another factor to killing the bosses or give you something to control other than your standard rotation.

    Thoughts on alternative hydra bosses? FWIW, I also really liked Northrend Beasts and how you had to get Icehowl to run into a wall - that was a lot of fun too.
    Signature dunked by a lame MMO Champ robot.

  2. #2
    Wasn't Madness essentially the same thing?

  3. #3
    High Overlord Soth's Avatar
    10+ Year Old Account
    Join Date
    Jul 2009
    Location
    Lightninghoof - US
    Posts
    108
    Each time I make it to Megaera, I secretly hope I die. One of the most boring and repetitive bosses in recent memory.
    Lightninghoof - US : @WoWNivan

  4. #4
    Not really a waste because it got the job done.

    It's not like they can't implement more of a Disney's Hurcules style fight (which is what I get from your suggestion) in the future.
    "So my advice is to argue based on the reasons stated, not try to make up or guess at reasons and argue those."
    Greg Street, Riot Developer - 12:50 PM - 25 May 2015

  5. #5
    Quote Originally Posted by Roflifier View Post
    Not really a waste because it got the job done.

    It's not like they can't implement more of a Disney's Hurcules style fight (which is what I get from your suggestion) in the future.
    See, my suggestion is more like God of War's hydra meets this boss - still with the cavern and the underwater and not a walking creature (which the Hercules one was) of any kind - I just like the environmental style and since Megaera was in a cavern the stalactite idea just sounded the most plausible.

    The reason I refer to it as a "waste" is that the concept is now more or less "used up" since they're not really much for using similar boss archetypes in more than one go.

    As for Madness - I suppose it was also another platform-tentacle-serpentine-type-thing fight but I guess I liked it a little better since you also eventually beat the tar out of Deathwing's head (which was HUGE) and you'd spent the prior fight on his body doing horrible things to it.
    Signature dunked by a lame MMO Champ robot.

  6. #6
    madness of deathwing is like the same thing.. minus stalagmites... the simple fact is if megara was anywhere complicated in lfr.. no1 would kill it.

  7. #7
    not only is the boss too tedious, it's too damned dark to even see much of what's going on apart from the spell effects

  8. #8
    Megaera really was a let down. On normal the fight is a complete mindless joke. On Heroic it is just over the top with annoying factors(speaking from 10 man exp), but again it isn't hard. I really think they dropped the ball on this fight. I think if they wanted to go with the elemental heads that's fine, but make me have to use the debuff from frost to kill fire and vice versa.

    I would rather have seen, when you kill a head two more show up and thus doubling the effect on the head you are working on. I think all four heads should have been active and certain ones be able to be tanked by dps. It would have been much more fun having to deal with actual mechanics than random debuffs that are just annoyances.

  9. #9
    Deleted
    Quote Originally Posted by Olrox View Post
    maybe you'd have these barrels of gunpowder someone would have to drop and then DPS players would need to activate them - that would weaken the head and drop it - then you'd have some area of the wall that would need X damage done to it in a limited window (this area is perhaps normally not able to be targeted) which then causes the rocks/whathaveyou to kill the head.
    One spine of deathwing was enough!

    "Position add and dps i down until it explodes, releasing an area not normally targetable which then needs to dpsed very quickly"
    Last edited by mmocf1f1b25833; 2013-07-29 at 12:00 PM.

  10. #10
    Ehh, when you said a missed opportunity, I was thinking more that it was a missed chance to do a hydra fight where every time you kill a head, you actually have to fight two more in its place, until at the end of the fight you're actually dpsing and fighting dozens of heads at once. Would it chaotic as all hell? Yeah, probably, but more interesting than the extra heads just popping up a mile and a half away to toss an ability at you every once in a while.

  11. #11
    I wish the body would have been represented and the boss to actually achieve greater mass throughout the fight instead of the "There's a couple heads to deal with at a time, have fun" thing we have going on.

    Currently playing Borderlands 1 remaster. Amped for Borderlands 3.
    Add me on the PSN for jolly-cooperation @ PuppetShoJustice

  12. #12
    So, it sounds like OP just REALLY liked the Magmaw fight, and wishes Megaera were a remake of that fight because Megaera looks kinda like Magmaw? :P

  13. #13
    Deleted
    i been thinking about going from 1head too 2 and on and on.

    the biggest issue i see with it are that dps/healers end up taking them, or you just have the tank tank them all. which would kinda ruin the concept, other hand if the dps/healers take heads then they cant deal that much damage else it would be insane too heal.
    so you end up with a few heads that need to be tanked, weaker ones that can be taken by non tanks.

    and then need a mechanic too kill him, either like the current megaera X amount of heads killed means it dies. or some special mechanic you need too trigger too deal damage without causing a new head too spawn (which goes towards a spine style mechanic and im not fond of that fight)

    overall, while a boring boss. they probally went with the best for how WoW raiding is setup.
    but prehaps someone can think of a better way how it could be done, while within the limitations of how raiding works.

  14. #14
    Deleted
    Mega and Durumu I absolutely loathe doing.

  15. #15
    Deleted
    Quote Originally Posted by Soth View Post
    Each time I make it to Megaera, I secretly hope I die. One of the most boring and repetitive bosses in recent memory.
    Completely agree

  16. #16
    Deleted
    What is with this magaera hate? I frigging love that fight. It just seems epic to me. There isn't a buttload of mechanics that you need to worry about for once, but it's just hard. I think the fight is cool (especially as healer), as it just fits.

  17. #17
    Quote Originally Posted by Karlzone View Post
    What is with this magaera hate? I frigging love that fight. It just seems epic to me. There isn't a buttload of mechanics that you need to worry about for once, but it's just hard. I think the fight is cool (especially as healer), as it just fits.
    I also very much like the Megaera fight, the mechanics aren't numerous but they do, for the most part, require perfect execution.

    I can also see why Blizzard didn't make Megaera a "drop stalagmites on the boss" fight.
    Considering Tortos is a "you need to kick turtles at this big turtle so it doesn't blow sand on you and kill you", Megaera would feel really, really similar to Tortos if it was a "you need to drop stalagmites on these heads to weaken/stun them".
    I would be 100x more bored if I had to fight Tortos and then Tortos V2 right afterward than I am with the current fight. Not to mention everyone just dealt with falling rocks in Tortos' fight, I don't think anyone (at least in my raid group) would be pleased with the cave environment being beaten to death in such a fashion that two of the three bosses in that "wing" deal with falling rocks.

    I can see everyone's point — Megaera was, in a way, a missed opportunity and might have even been that way if Tortos didn't exist — but Blizz couldn't put two fairly similar bosses back to back and hope people didn't complain about it being a droll and repetitive experience to grind through those two bosses.

  18. #18
    felt pretty disappointing even on heroic. I was expecting the killing of the heads on heroic to be like 25% of the boss's overall health, but the "head" phases to be much longer, like 3 minutes per phase with a better variety of mechanics. the whole stun/fire/torrent/poisonpools/etc mechanics are nice, but the fact that you can pretty much ignore them(even on heroic you dont have to actually clear any fire patches) makes the fight feel boring.

  19. #19
    I thought the fight was pretty well done for normal and heroic, only complaint is from what I read Megara was supposed to be a cloud serpent that was corrupted but it really doesn't look anything like one for starters lol. Megara gave my guild a tough time compared to many of the other bosses, only bosses we wiped on more were Lei Shen, Dark Animus, and possibly Tortos, I honestly thought a lot was going on, if you get an ice beam as certain range classes or healers, you're practically taken out of the fight and clearing up ice patches later in the fight means a lot the first couple of times you down the bosses.

  20. #20
    Warchief Szemere's Avatar
    10+ Year Old Account
    Join Date
    May 2010
    Location
    Gnomeregan
    Posts
    2,193
    The point really is, the splitting of heads was kinda done badly :/ Instead of increasing the amount of heads you fight, they gave each type of head a spell and just increased the amount of that spell thrown at you every time you killed one... Yes, visually more heads appear in the back. But you're not fighting them at all.

    If it were something along the lines of having to DPS down the main body, but having to kill off a head now and then to prevent it from getting too strong (and have it gain power over time if you don't kill it), but at the price of increasing the amount of heads... Heads are the tankable things, but it's the body that has to die in the end, and it doesn't lose HP through killing heads.
    Obviously this is a very rough concept, but it's better than "there's 3/4 types of heads, every time you kill one it switches a type out, and starts throwing a secondary spell at you, kill 7 heads and you win". Killing heads should be a bad thing right? And why do we all fight long only fight 2 heads? IDK, I agree with OP, Hydra boss is a real nice concept, but this was simply somewhat poorly executed.
    Ex-GM and Raidleader of the MoX Purple Kittens Raidteam on Twisting Nether (formerly Grim Batol), RIP, Winter 2010 - Spring 2013.
    Armory. WoWProgress. Might start streaming Soon(tm) http://twitch.tv/szem/

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •