H: Cho'gall down by Stars, and some comments

[DarkPhoenix]

Says it all really, was not the strat or execution that enabled a kill, was the extreme advantage of ferals here. Yes it is an exploit, should it be bannable? no in my opinion, these are things that better testing will show on the ptr, it is blizzards fault in my view. You can argue they used it and should be banned, however if you are one of the first guilds taking on an encounter like this of course you are going to be the ones to find these issues.

For me the humiliation of not being able to down nef without the insane feral damage is enough punishment, still a top guild dont get me wrong. Kind of embarassing tho eh

And theyve said theyve NOT been doing Nef this week. Bit hard to down a boss when youre not even doing it.

Guild im in is doing BWD tomorrow, will reflect badly on us if we dont down halfus hey?

[Ayarea]

Says it all really, was not the strat or execution that enabled a kill, was the extreme advantage of ferals here. Yes it is an exploit, should it be bannable? no in my opinion, these are things that better testing will show on the ptr, it is blizzards fault in my view. You can argue they used it and should be banned, however if you are one of the first guilds taking on an encounter like this of course you are going to be the ones to find these issues.

For me the humiliation of not being able to down nef without the insane feral damage is enough punishment, still a top guild dont get me wrong. Kind of embarassing tho eh

They didn't even attempt him this week. Went for easier farmbosses and focus on new bosskills. One of their members said it a few pages back.

Edit: gah Dark beat me to it!

[Kittahsmash]

*Going back through thread, saw this and wanted to comment on it*

<snip>someone realized that the feral druid was doing significantly better damage that ANY other class. (bug) So they brought in more feral druids, to capitalize on said bug. (exploit) <snip>

The fact that Feral cats do more damage than any other class is a bug? Sounds to me like a balance issue, not a bug issue. Otherwise by your logic, every class that does more damage than other classes, should be banned for exploitation.

The 'exploit', to dumb it down (as Paragon has done in this thread) is simple to understand...
1)Get a buff that increases the damage of your next ability by ~2000%.
2)Look through your combat logs/recount meters/WWS/WHATEVER, and see what people are consistantly doing the most damage.
3) Stack that class.
4) Spend hours fine-tuning your strategy even further
5) Finally beat boss
6) ???
7) Profit
8) Get called out on forums by some keyboard warriors/fanboys/jealous idiots about how you 'exploited' the game by doing what the encounter is designed around.

This was not an exploit. If this WAS an exploit, then everybody who beat Hodir back in Ulduar needs to be banned, because they took advantage of the buffs gained during the fight.

[Il Impiccato]

HOLD ON IMMA LET YOU FINISH BUT PARAGON IS....

Grats on the kill.

[Siph]

It's just sad that Blizzard doesn't adequately test their encounters, fails to react on most of the ptr/beta feedback regarding encounters or fails to provide a guild like Stars the opportunity to help testing at all. Regarding Atramedes, I don't get how Blizzard thinks the enrage timer is the only thing that was wrong with it. But if you are able to run out of the room in a boss fight without having the boss reset, it surely is intended?

And I don't consider bringing many of a certain class to a boss fight to use their regular abilities on that boss an exploit, it's just a complete scaling failure from the side of Blizzard. Abusing engineering bombs to remove a pivotal part from an encounter because of a clearly not intended side-effect and calling it 'not a big deal' afterwards is in my eyes an exploit. And not releasing video's or logs of a kill (not aimed at Paragon here) only raises suspicion.

And ye, it does screw up PvE rankings, but it's not like wowprogress' math-based ranking makes any real sense to begin with.

Stars acting like saints, calling out other guilds on perceived-to-be-exploits isn't very cool either.

[EndGame]

This "exploit" (which is not an exploit) would have worked with any class that has an "automatic update" ability (spriests and affliction locks). It just turns out that rip was the one that was hitting the hardest due to ferals stacking mastery. The 2000% extra damage was supposed to be a one hit wonder. Hit hard and be done. Use your hardest hitting ability.

They forgot that some classes can hit it, and then allow it to tick indefinately so long as they stay on target. It was an oversight, nothing more. People just took advantage of it.

[freelapdance]

The word exploit has various meanings and is hard to really sum it up in the context of warcraft in general. All acts would need to be looked at specifically. A very brief meaning would be "doing something that shouldnt be possible" or "removing part of the encounter that makes it easier".

- Yogg +0 by Exodus: getting adds to essentially evade therefore removing a major part of phase 3.
- LK by Ensidia: essentially remaking the platform therefore allowing the ignoring of adds.

There are various other exploits but not worth pointing out, ie- going through walls to get to yogg.

Now you have "clever use of mechanics" which I would describe as "using abilities of classes to drastically boost performance". Tricky and often borderline but I still would not call them exploits.

- "Flower power" at Hodir by Ensidia: spellstealing a buff from a mob to use vs a boss. Again borderline but very smart. You cannot really disagree that this was an "exploit"
- Random spellstealable buff for use on "Gotta go": a lot wont remember this but you could do the same and brute force this for the 5 man drake in wrath. Again, clever use of mechanics.
- Raid soulstoning by Method at Vashj: soulstoned the entire raid to vashj due to the encounter. Again clever use of mechanics and we all know what happened to soulstone/combat reses/ankhs.
- Class stacking in general (STARS at Yogg+0, Paragon at Nefarian Hard Mode): again clever use of classes. Some classes/specs perform better on incredibly tight encounters. If a guild can have that many people for whatever spec then well credit to them for that dedication.

Again you can argue either way which are exploits and which arent. I still feel that an exploit is only something that drastically changes the encounter nothing that is affected by class abilities.

[Deleted]

It is a great pity that now the race has been turned into a race of finding/using exploitations by some young top guilds. Hope old folks like us and For The Horde have shown you that one can still be competitive without exploiting the game, even in a region without beta, PTR and race/faction transfer (we don't have any goblins in the raid group), and receives the boss one day later than you.

Forget the wowprogress points. Beating an encounter with exploitation but fail to farm it after the exploitation is fixed is embarrassing, isn't it?

Let's enjoy the race, like we have done in the past 5 years

-Stars

-------------------


Just want to remind you we used 5 warlocks in the 0-yogg fight.

We have already made it very clear about our attitude on this race in the Atramedes case:

I'm not taking any sides here, but...

You sir, are bad loser. Seriously get over yourself. You got the third kill, be happy about it. Don't come here and bash other guilds for getting boss kill before you. Paragon outsmarted you, that is it.

You're the one showing bad sportsmanship here. I really don't care who gets the first kill, but what I do care is if people come bitching in the forums for nothing. Just like you did... As far as I know, taking same class over other class is not exploiting in any form.

Final word: You're just one bad loser.

[Correlia]

I used to have quite a bit of respect for STARS but a few month's back they started bitching about some other guilds beating them to H LK Asian first saying they used exploits etc etc but didn't get banned. That's when I lost all my respect for them

Grats on your world 3rd kill STARS but if you wanna down bosses with honor then don't call out other guilds because you didn't get world first k?

[Fuzzzie]

At this point I'm going to close this. It's mostly finger-pointing and hearsay.

Congrats to everyone who got kills.