Raid design lessons for Blizzard from mythic Azshara

[Wilfire]

General structure of the encounter
-It feels bad when half of the encounter is spent fighting adds instead of the boss. Madness of Deathwing was poorly received because of it. Azshara is not much better with the entirety of P1 and P3 (that's half the fight) being spent fighting adds. P2 is not much better with the only real threat being the race to bring Azshara into P3 before the indomitable spawns. Azshara herself only ever feels like a threat in P4. Lore-heavy bosses should have their encounters be all about themselves rather than no-name adds.

-If you insist on having adds, at least make them stand out in some way. Both Aethanel and Cyranus feel like generic mobs you would fight during a quest in Arathi Highlands rather than a part of a lore-heavy end boss.

-The fight is too long and exhausting. And the difficult part doesn't even start until you're halfway into P3. Either spread out the difficulty more evenly over the phases or condense the fight so that it's not a marathon. Having to reprogress through the snoozefest that P1 and P2 are in order to reach the hard part feels bad.

-Stop designing mechanics that are trivialized by WeakAuras. It feels like the difficult part was supposed to be decree and ward management but instead it's entirely trivial and you made all the difficulty come from bad RNG-y spear / beckon / burst overlaps in P3.

-Stop including forced movement mechanics until you fix pathing AI. Or better yet, stop including forced movement mechanics entirely. Period. It's atrocious when your character starts moving in weird, unpredictable ways and running into death zones.

-Stop including mechanics that everyone wants to skip. If a mechanic is so bad that not meeting the dps check to skip it is considered a wipe, you know you've got yourself a bad mechanic that should be removed.

-Mechanics that decrease your HP by a large % for the duration of the fight are shit, especially in tiers where you don't have a lot of stamina because of Benthic trash.

P1
-To reiterate my previous point: give us someone notable to fight. Maybe Nar'jira. Anyone is better than some edgy no-names.

-Stop it with the visual clutter. Holy fuck. I don't have perfect sight but arcane orb / lightning orb overlaps make me feel visually impaired. Make abilities look distinct with clear demarcation lines so that you know when you're safe and when you're not. Same applies to Divide and Conquer beam spawn line being invisible when it's running through the ward in the middle.

-The phase should end when you bring a boss to a % percent or kill the adds. Wiping because you killed the adds too fast and got another set of orbs / another beckon is dumb.

P2
-Not much to say. This phase is completely unremarkable. Fighting Azshara shouldn't feel like you're hitting a target dummy for a solid two minutes.

P3
-Myrmidon's spear throw should project a straight line so that you can line it with the sirens. Wiping because you missed the throw by 1 degree is dumb.

P4
-This phase surprisingly feels like a good bursty finish to the encounter. Azshara actually becomes a real, tangible threat and there's a lot of mechanics going on to keep you on your toes. Unlike in P2, fighting Azshara won't make you fall asleep.

In general, end bosses should feel like you're fighting the boss rather than a bunch of adds and there should be a strong theme going on throughout the fight. The Lich King and Cata Ragnaros are both good examples of enjoyable end bosses. Azshara just feels like a cluttered mess of abilities and adds, none of which are memorable.

Feel free to post your own thoughts about the Azshara encounter!

[Popastique]

General structure of the encounter
-It feels bad when half of the encounter is spent fighting adds instead of the boss. Madness of Deathwing was poorly received because of it. Azshara is not much better with the entirety of P1 and P3 (that's half the fight) being spent fighting adds. P2 is not much better with the only real threat being the race to bring Azshara into P3 before the indomitable spawns. Azshara herself only ever feels like a threat in P4. Lore-heavy bosses should have their encounters be all about themselves rather than no-name adds.

-If you insist on having adds, at least make them stand out in some way. Both Aethanel and Cyranus feel like generic mobs you would fight during a quest in Arathi Highlands rather than a part of a lore-heavy end boss.

-The fight is too long and exhausting. And the difficult part doesn't even start until you're halfway into P3. Either spread out the difficulty more evenly over the phases or condense the fight so that it's not a marathon. Having to reprogress through the snoozefest that P1 and P2 are in order to reach the hard part feels bad.

-Stop designing mechanics that are trivialized by WeakAuras. It feels like the difficult part was supposed to be decree and ward management but instead it's entirely trivial and you made all the difficulty come from bad RNG-y spear / beckon / burst overlaps in P3.

-Stop including forced movement mechanics until you fix pathing AI. Or better yet, stop including forced movement mechanics entirely. Period. It's atrocious when your character starts moving in weird, unpredictable ways and running into death zones.

-Stop including mechanics that everyone wants to skip. If a mechanic is so bad that not meeting the dps check to skip it is considered a wipe, you know you've got yourself a bad mechanic that should be removed.

-Mechanics that decrease your HP by a large % for the duration of the fight are shit, especially in tiers where you don't have a lot of stamina because of Benthic trash.

P1
-To reiterate my previous point: give us someone notable to fight. Maybe Nar'jira. Anyone is better than some edgy no-names.

-Stop it with the visual clutter. Holy fuck. I don't have perfect sight but arcane orb / lightning orb overlaps make me feel visually impaired. Make abilities look distinct with clear demarcation lines so that you know when you're safe and when you're not. Same applies to Divide and Conquer beam spawn line being invisible when it's running through the ward in the middle.

-The phase should end when you bring a boss to a % percent or kill the adds. Wiping because you killed the adds too fast and got another set of orbs / another beckon is dumb.

P2
-Not much to say. This phase is completely unremarkable. Fighting Azshara shouldn't feel like you're hitting a target dummy for a solid two minutes.

P3
-Myrmidon's spear throw should project a straight line so that you can line it with the sirens. Wiping because you missed the throw by 1 degree is dumb.

P4
-This phase surprisingly feels like a good bursty finish to the encounter. Azshara actually becomes a real, tangible threat and there's a lot of mechanics going on to keep you on your toes. Unlike in P2, fighting Azshara won't make you fall asleep.

In general, end bosses should feel like you're fighting the boss rather than a bunch of adds and there should be a strong theme going on throughout the fight. The Lich King and Cata Ragnaros are both good examples of enjoyable end bosses. Azshara just feels like a cluttered mess of abilities and adds, none of which are memorable.

Feel free to post your own thoughts about the Azshara encounter!

The adds should have some lore behind them, introduced during main campaign. More of endgame boss present during the last encounter would be better.
Almost any mechanic will be trivialized using weakauras nowadays, even so - it takes quite some skill to write those weakauras and some skill to actually play according to them. But i am eager to see some mechanics that can't be tracked by weakauras, though i don't think that will happen any time soon.
There is no RNG whatsoever during P3. Pathing AI works like a charm here, when you get MC'ed - it is pretty easy to determine which path your character is going to take. If that is what you mean by *pathing AI* of course.
Skip mechanics on Azshara? Which ones?
-% hp is not shit at all, that's what makes you play careful and makes P3 and P4 mechanics dangerous. If you die to that mechanic - means you didn't take any defensive precautions and should rethink your strategy.

P1 Arcane orb/lightning orb overlaps are pretty easy to spot, even though i admit you need to pay attention to do so. Divide and Conquer beam is easy to spot - unless you activate 1st person camera and are staring at the ward in the middle.
I agree, the timing on orbs and beckons is a bit off which forces you either to stop DPS or push the adds and deal with annoying beckons or orbs.

P3
Had no problem with it even once, from what i've seen - he shoots it straight at the person, and you just have to be either between siren and the myrmidon, or behind the siren - it goes straight.

[KaPe]

Lesson number one is:

Stop designing boss fights where Line of Sight is the prime component. As a healer, it's unbelievebly frustrating to constantly see "cannot reach" message whenever I try to cast some spell. Can't reach a tank, because they have to hide the boss behind a pillar and run around. Can't go too far, or I'll die to Missiles. Can't dispel, because I didn't move far enough. Can't heal someone, because they're currently LoSing Vulnerability and are a bit too far. Oh, and console is a wall that reaches up to the ceiling and can mess up ground spells.

Fuck. This.

Number two:

Stop designing fight that can be two healed. Just don't. Not only there is very little to heal in there outside of tank damage/spear explosions, the 50% health debuff on nearly entire raid means that all heals are twice as effective. And absorbs are even more so. Not only this means benching half of your healing roster, it means that Blizz is sucking off Paladins and Discs even more so than usual. At least they're nerfing Schism' interraction with essences/trinkets to curb their damage somewhat, but still.

Give me another Orgozoa, where there's actual healing to be done and even five people can have something to do. And it better not be "there's four debuff, so you need four healers... totally cannot be handled by Warlocks/Shadow Priests, nope".

It's a horrible fight, where most difficulty comes from terrible design and frustrating LoS, rather than genuinely interesting mechanics. And fuck P1 too, with generic trash mobs that only waste your time.

[Malefic]

Lesson number one is:

Stop designing boss fights where Line of Sight is the prime component. As a healer, it's unbelievebly frustrating to constantly see "cannot reach" message whenever I try to cast some spell. Can't reach a tank, because they have to hide the boss behind a pillar and run around. Can't go too far, or I'll die to Missiles. Can't dispel, because I didn't move far enough. Can't heal someone, because they're currently LoSing Vulnerability and are a bit too far. Oh, and console is a wall that reaches up to the ceiling and can mess up ground spells.

That is entirely on you and/or your raid.

Outside of circumstances where someone will need to, for some reason run further LoS than normal, it's entirely possible to position your raid so that healers are able to always heal every single player when they are line of sighting Arcane Missiles. The only frustration I would imagine is potentially as a Disc Priest since your healing is part reliant on DPSing a target, I guess currently Paladin falls in to that category too.

In terms of being able to cast on friendly targets though it's entirely possible to have positions co-ordinated as a healer that you're in line of sight of all players when they're in line of sight of the boss or not.

[horbindr]

i like the part where as a tank you spent 50% of p2 and 3 hiding.

[KaPe]

That is entirely on you and/or your raid.

Outside of circumstances where someone will need to, for some reason run further LoS than normal, it's entirely possible to position your raid so that healers are able to always heal every single player when they are line of sighting Arcane Missiles. The only frustration I would imagine is potentially as a Disc Priest since your healing is part reliant on DPSing a target, I guess currently Paladin falls in to that category too.

In terms of being able to cast on friendly targets though it's entirely possible to have positions co-ordinated as a healer that you're in line of sight of all players when they're in line of sight of the boss or not.

I fail to see how this really changes anything. Obviously I'm not constantly having people LoS me - if that happened, I'd never go past P1. This doesn't mean things aren't frustrating, because LoS is not an obvious mechanic in the game. You can't immediately tell that player X is out of LoS. You can't quickly tell that the boss cannot be reached from your position.

It all adds up to make an encounter where more time is spent fighting the room, rather than the boss. Plus it's just silly around the console - "we are totally safe from a devastating area attack while hiding behind three foot tall computer".

i like the part where as a tank you spent 50% of p2 and 3 hiding.

It's especially immersive when 10 feet tall Tauren is *totally hidden* behind 3 feet tall console. Azshara should get glasses by the next time we meet her.

[TyrianFC]

Azshara is a great fight, I really like it. Thematically shes playing with us the whole time (decrees, beckons, divide and conquer, forcing us to LOS dance to various stuff etc) which fits her character buildup thru 8.2.

I wouldn't want too many other heavily LOS-based fights, but its fine to experience one like this now and then.

The biggest problem with Azshara fight is that Method initially was progging it with 2 healers. And while guilds now use 3, the fact that it *could* be done with 2 since initial release as silly. There should be no 2-healable fights in 20 man raids during progression.

[Tojara]

Is this the same guy who gets triggered anytime there are adds in an encounter, or the encounter takes place in a 'boring' circular or square room?

Using your logic the very encounter you're giving high praise to (Lich King) is a boring boss. Why? In P1 your objective is dispelling a debuff or having it jump properly to nameless 'mobs', P2 is dodging puddles while killing nameless Valkyr that are trying to kill you, while P3 has you kill ghosts that kamikaze into your raid.

I get having differing opinions on the internet, but saying that adds make encounters automatically bad is pretty asinine.

I didn't find Azshara visually confusing at all, to each their own though. I'll agree with weak auras trivializing mechanics completely, but it takes quite a bit of work for people to make these weak auras work and at the same time, people bitch and complain when they make encounters that can't be tracked by weak auras (remember Cenarius roots in Legion?). An arrow denoting where spears went would have been nice, but that's about my only criticism.

Phases are often progressive with end bosses to which they end in a 'race' like feeling. Azshara does this well, while P2 is more of an introduction to her mechanics so that have you're familiar with them in P3 when they add another layer onto mechanics.

Was it my favorite last boss? No. Personally I'm not a fan of LoS mechanics and it's one of the least enjoyable bosses from a tanking perspective, as tanks have to deal with dropping debuffs for far longer than DPS/Healers do. I can certainly see this being a major criticism. Despite all of that, I'll take this boss over Jaina with her atrocious P1 spell queuing in addition to many other RNG aspects or mechanics that are simply ignored.

[rebecca191]

Lesson number one is:

Stop designing boss fights where Line of Sight is the prime component. As a healer, it's unbelievebly frustrating to constantly see "cannot reach" message whenever I try to cast some spell. Can't reach a tank, because they have to hide the boss behind a pillar and run around. Can't go too far, or I'll die to Missiles. Can't dispel, because I didn't move far enough. Can't heal someone, because they're currently LoSing Vulnerability and are a bit too far. Oh, and console is a wall that reaches up to the ceiling and can mess up ground spells.

Fuck. This.

Number two:

Stop designing fight that can be two healed. Just don't. Not only there is very little to heal in there outside of tank damage/spear explosions, the 50% health debuff on nearly entire raid means that all heals are twice as effective. And absorbs are even more so. Not only this means benching half of your healing roster, it means that Blizz is sucking off Paladins and Discs even more so than usual. At least they're nerfing Schism' interraction with essences/trinkets to curb their damage somewhat, but still.

Give me another Orgozoa, where there's actual healing to be done and even five people can have something to do. And it better not be "there's four debuff, so you need four healers... totally cannot be handled by Warlocks/Shadow Priests, nope".

It's a horrible fight, where most difficulty comes from terrible design and frustrating LoS, rather than genuinely interesting mechanics. And fuck P1 too, with generic trash mobs that only waste your time.

Yeah, I don't think they should have 2-3 heal fights in the same tier as 5 heal fights. That said, I was the benched healer on this fight and I wasn't at all sad because fight is crap lol.

[Wilfire]

Using your logic the very encounter you're giving high praise to (Lich King) is a boring boss. Why? In P1 your objective is dispelling a debuff or having it jump properly to nameless 'mobs', P2 is dodging puddles while killing nameless Valkyr that are trying to kill you, while P3 has you kill ghosts that kamikaze into your raid.

Lich King's adds augment him as a threat instead of completely overriding him. On Azshara I forget that she even exists in P1 and P3. Terrible.

[KaPe]

Yeah, I don't think they should have 2-3 heal fights in the same tier as 5 heal fights. That said, I was the benched healer on this fight and I wasn't at all sad because fight is crap lol.

Not only it's two healable, but Azshara has probably the lowest healing requirment for a final tier boss in... several expansions, I guess? (maybe Xavius, but even that is debatable) The fact that her and Orgozoa are in the same tier is just amazing.

[rebecca191]

Not only it's two healable, but Azshara has probably the lowest healing requirment for a final tier boss in... several expansions, I guess? (maybe Xavius, but even that is debatable) The fact that her and Orgozoa are in the same tier is just amazing.

First boss in EP mythic requires more healing than the last, honestly.

[Gaidax]

What a bunch of bull...

OP: "Stop making fights that make me do things!"

If you want encounter with no mechanics, no adds and one big boss to tunnel - you have Classic for that.


That fight was fine on Mythic, maybe a tad too hard, just a bit. I do think they could have maybe chilled out a bit on mechanics overload, but other than that it was fine. What I like in particular is that performance throughout the fight affects last stretch, beyond the usual combat resses used, like you won't wipe if you mess up P1 brute spawn and lose some ward power there, but this is a setback that comes with costs later on.

Much better than the silliness of KJ or Avatar - you don't soak one thing - raid dies. Or Cabal for that matter where one missed interrupt resulted in wipe 8 minutes in, especially since they managed to do the very same thing better with Uunat, where missing interrupt was something you still could recover from.

Overall, I am very impressed by how tightly tuned the encounter was, especially given how complex it was. Say what you will but Blizz knows how to do raids and bosses in WoW.

[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.

General structure of the encounter
-It feels bad when half of the encounter is spent fighting adds instead of the boss. Madness of Deathwing was poorly received because of it. Azshara is not much better with the entirety of P1 and P3 (that's half the fight) being spent fighting adds. P2 is not much better with the only real threat being the race to bring Azshara into P3 before the indomitable spawns. Azshara herself only ever feels like a threat in P4. Lore-heavy bosses should have their encounters be all about themselves rather than no-name adds.

-If you insist on having adds, at least make them stand out in some way. Both Aethanel and Cyranus feel like generic mobs you would fight during a quest in Arathi Highlands rather than a part of a lore-heavy end boss.

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.

-The fight is too long and exhausting. And the difficult part doesn't even start until you're halfway into P3. Either spread out the difficulty more evenly over the phases or condense the fight so that it's not a marathon. Having to reprogress through the snoozefest that P1 and P2 are in order to reach the hard part feels bad.

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.

-Stop designing mechanics that are trivialized by WeakAuras. It feels like the difficult part was supposed to be decree and ward management but instead it's entirely trivial and you made all the difficulty come from bad RNG-y spear / beckon / burst overlaps in P3.

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.

-Stop including forced movement mechanics until you fix pathing AI. Or better yet, stop including forced movement mechanics entirely. Period. It's atrocious when your character starts moving in weird, unpredictable ways and running into death zones.

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.

-Stop including mechanics that everyone wants to skip. If a mechanic is so bad that not meeting the dps check to skip it is considered a wipe, you know you've got yourself a bad mechanic that should be removed.

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.

-Mechanics that decrease your HP by a large % for the duration of the fight are shit, especially in tiers where you don't have a lot of stamina because of Benthic trash.

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.

[Gaidax]

-Stop designing mechanics that are trivialized by WeakAuras. It feels like the difficult part was supposed to be decree and ward management but instead it's entirely trivial and you made all the difficulty come from bad RNG-y spear / beckon / burst overlaps in P3.

-Stop including forced movement mechanics until you fix pathing AI. Or better yet, stop including forced movement mechanics entirely. Period. It's atrocious when your character starts moving in weird, unpredictable ways and running into death zones.

-Stop including mechanics that everyone wants to skip. If a mechanic is so bad that not meeting the dps check to skip it is considered a wipe, you know you've got yourself a bad mechanic that should be removed.

-Mechanics that decrease your HP by a large % for the duration of the fight are shit, especially in tiers where you don't have a lot of stamina because of Benthic trash.

Just to reiterate - I consider all this to be a bunch of scrub ass whining, because all of these were perfectly manageable.

I mean, nonsense aside like "herpa derp, stop making mechanics that get trivialized by WeakAuras" which is like asking bloody water to not be wet, the rest of the quoted amounts to plain mechanics that are dealt with just fine.

The forced movement in that encounter is in a very predictable way, you know it's coming, you know where you need to stand to have no issues and then you have gateway/lifegrip and BoP to either deal with it or remove it outright. There is nothing unpredictable there, unless you fuck it up and simply stand in wrong position, which is a bloody classic mechanic in raids - stand in wrong spot and you may die.

Mechanic that everyone wants to skip was simply the case of how strategy everyone beelined towards fleshed out to be. Other than that there is nothing wrong with a phase having DPS check. You might as well go screech about how encounters should not have DPS checks at all.

HP decrease mechanic correlated with overall boss abilities not doing all that much damage and it worked out fine in conjunction with wards power, IMO it was a really great mechanic and well tuned one, unless you messed it up. Heck, it was actually even somewhat beautiful opt out for people who had genuine issue with it - you could have 1 person not do it to ensure their survival and still make it.

[Krille]

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.

Your entire addition to this thread is basically rendered useless by the first sentence of it. Wont read a wall of text speculating what a fight feels like based on a weird opinion piece by the OP.

[Krille]

Azshara is not my favourite fight, and it was a big step down in quality compared to Uu'nat which is basically the best fight ive progressed in years, maybe forever. Perfect pacing.

Meanwhile Azshara is slow and boring. You can reach far into p2 on first raid day there, we had 5-6 minute wipes for weeks before getting p3 under control. Thats enough for me to dislike it, p1 and p2 is too easy.

[Drub]

I don't mind something other than stabbing an oversized thing's foot the entire time everyone once in awhile lol

[Gaidax]

I don't mind something other than stabbing an oversized thing's foot the entire time everyone once in awhile lol

That's why I prefer playing ranged DD.

[Gasparde]

Your entire addition to this thread is basically rendered useless by the first sentence of it. Wont read a wall of text speculating what a fight feels like based on a weird opinion piece by the OP.

If you had finished reading the first sentence of my post you woulda realized that I didn't make a single statement about Azshara but instead the core complaints of the OP that apply to literally every single encounter in this game. You don't need first hand Naxx40 Kelthuzard experience to give your opinion on someone else's opinion of too many minions in a fight.

Im gonna go easy on you since I dont think you really thought this reply through before you posted this.
You are saying that Blizzard didnt expect people to use benthic-items while progress-raiding, that optimally boosts their damage up to 10-15%?
That players never have min-maxed everything when playing at the highest level, be that using an old trinkets/items from last raid-tiers?
That this is somehow a new thing that never occured before? Because it happens every raid-tier, ofcourse Blizzard knows this.

Its not a small indie game company we're talking about here after all.

Yes, Blizzard probably didn't consider guilds bringing 2-3 healers while at the same time bringing people with like 30k less max hp then they could/should have. You acting like Blizzard have never repeated, let alone made a mistake in the past. Shit like that constantly slips through their testing/designing. Like, it could even be the opposite, that they've deliberately designed this fight to punish people for wearing low ilvl whateverness by making it so that they just won't survive certain parts of the fight - which is a completely legitimate thing to do.