Originally Posted by
Gasparde
I should lead with admitting that I haven't played the fight at all nor really seen anything about it as I took a break from WoW for the first time in like 10 years this expansion. But many of your points can be applied to many encounters and not just Azshara in general.
Dunno about the Deathwing thing, but I'd agree with the sentiment. Either make it few rather meaningful adds or like literal armies of meaningless adds, anything else usually just feels off for lore-heavy encounters. Like, one could understand someone like Xavius unleashing millions of nightmare creatures at you, one understands Helya throwing tons of undead minions at you, but it's really hard to come up with a reason for someone like Jaina to just have 2 random ass no-ability bodyguards next to her - and I suppose it's the same for Azshara. Azshara wasn't really an army-boss kinda person in the lore, we don't have any really established named underlings for her... so unless they introduced some throughout Nazjatar there's really no reason for her to have minions as a main focus of the fight.
Personally I also detest those fucking 15 minute fights with long stretches of nothing happening and then hell breaking loose towards the end... but sadly, Blizzard insists on having those fights pretty much every other tier. I mean, Jaina was rather bland for like 7 minutes with like exactly 2 points of something happening that could wipe your raid up until that point... and then last phase hit and she had to die in like a minute and you had to get lucky or you'd wipe. Ghuun too was pretty boring and repetitive throughout the whole encounter and then P3 was just burning and praying to the RNG gods for good boil spawns. Argus? Boring and eventless for 8 minutes and then last phase 1 mistake meant a wipe.
But that being sad, I despise the opposite extreme even more. Shit like Kiljeaden where like anyone making a mistake throughout the whole fight is basically a wipe... Ghuun where everyone has to do the mechanic just right or it's a wipe... Helya where one person sleeping means wipe...
I never particularly liked the Guldan fight, never thought it to be anything special... but I can see how people like it since it's neither everything just starting to burn after 10 minutes of snoozing nor is it a constant threat of anyone fucking up once resulting in an instant wipe. But when it comes to endbosses we just rarely get that type of encounter whereas snooze -> burn or 1 mistake -> wipe seems to be the only options like 8 out of 10 times.
That's just like almost impossible. Even mechanics like Mekkatorque were trivialized by WAs. WAs can just do so stupidly much these days it's incredible. For them to do anything about that they'd basically just have to prohibit WA and/or certain boss mods altogether. People just know too much and coders can just make too much work. Blizzard can't focus on the possibilities of WAs when designing encounters, that's just an unwinnable uphill battle. We'll sometimes just get fights where the method people come up with some silly WAs that no one could've ever foreseen and I think it's just not fair expecting Blizzard to account for all of that. Sometimes a god WA just shows up... and we just have to live with it I suppose. Can't really blame for Blizzard designing shit like Archimonde and not foreseeing the ridiculously... ridiculous WAs some guilds came up with.
I mean... that's really just an argument for no RNG in a fight when you boil it down to its essence. That's like Mekkatorque knocking people up before doing his crush down thing - some classes just can't deal with that and it's pretty shit... but in those cases you have stuff like lifegrip or levitate or slowfall or whatever. Dunno if that works for Azshara in particular, but if there's ANYTHING that can be done to keep people from dying to that mechanic... then it's really no different to tons of other mechanics we've got in the past and it's something I actually enjoy in a mythic encounter... you know, teamwork and using the whole raid's toolkit and all that.
Meh. It's basically a berserk timer / softenrage that makes it so people don't bring in 10 undergeared healers because they have all the time in the world. Also, it's probably not Blizzard designing this to be a wipe cause. Like, just like the whole Water Elemental thing on Jaina was never designed to be what it eventually boiled down to. It's a combination of bad tuning, testing and, again, the community just coming up with things that you just can't possibly foresee because your raid testing / design team simply isn't 25 method players / analysts. Like, again, I haven't personally done Azshara, but on Ghuun our later pulls had us basically call a wipe if we didn't manage to make the perfect cut before a specific boil / burst / stack reset overlap - not because it was undoable otherwise, but because it was just easier that way and there was no point in actually learning the difficult overlaps. Blizzard just can absolutely not account for that.
That's not on Blizzard. They most certainly haven't designed Azshara with everyone wearing '-40 ilvl but hey, socket!' gear in mind. The counter argument would be... stop wearing random ass low level gear for a 5% raid damage increase if the boss can be done without it. I dunno how tough the enrage timer is or how hard certain dps checks are, but looking at wcl kill times there's anything from 9 to 12 minute kills. This is really just another case of how is Blizzard supposed to know that people would rather lower their health to skip certain mechanics / breakpoints? Your argument basically boils down to stop designing mechanics that deal heavy damage in an encounter that 'encourages' you to play it with 1 healer. Like, I'm pretty sure Star Augur was never designed to be a 2 healer fight... but it kinda just happened due to the community doing community things and due to Blizzard simply being unable to 100% perfectly tune the hardest content in the game while still running a tightly knit release schedule.