As usual with WoW patches, patch 2.4.2 includes a couple of wild bugs. My personal favorites(and by favorites I mean I absolutely hate them) are the bugs(changes?) to the Archimonde encounter.Now, this may just be "Onyxia Deep Breaths moar" syndrome, but the official Dungeons and Raids forum has some pretty substantial(mostly anecdotal) evidence to the contrary. What are these bugs? Well, it seems Archimonde's Doom Fires are spawning on top of the melee and immediately chasing them, rather than travelling out towards the ranged first. Seeing as this fight is generally carried entirely by the melee DPS, that changes the fight quite a bit. The second change/bug is that... your main tank can now be Air Bursted! Hooray! That isn't annoying at all! Sarcasm is sweet!
Archimonde certainly isn't the most difficult encounter in WoW and it is still able to be beaten even now, but I personally hated this encounter with all of my heart and soul to begin with. This doesn't help much. Admittedly, I haven't seen these bugs/changes in action personally yet, but I do not ever want to see them, either. Have I mentioned I hate Archimonde?
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
5-14-2008 @ 12:45PM
Adam Holisky said...
First. And let me say as the meat shield that has to tank Archimonde kill after horrible kill, I am having a lot of "nerd rage" over having to deal with Air Burst now.
How do they possibly expect me to hold aggro? What's going to happen to the raid when I get Air Burst and he goes and melts the face of the top 10 dps before I land?
Air Bursting the tank is something you learn not to do on day one of Archimonde attempts.
See. Nerd rage.
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5-14-2008 @ 1:34PM
Badger said...
== NERDRAGE!! ==
I'll spare you the rest of the script.
5-14-2008 @ 4:38PM
Allison Robert said...
Agreed.
I respec to resto and typically join the melee group to keep the tank and melee healed at all times (not inclusive of Air Burst, obviously), and being in melee range was already dodgy enough. There used to be a total melee safe spot (no Doomfires, no nothin') before....I want to say patch 2.3? Then you started seeing Doomfire in melee range a lot more (we wiped over and over to melee getting complete encircled by Doomfires with nowhere to run if one looped back to us - even better if you get Air Burst right afterwards).....and now this.
This is already an ugly, luck-influenced (I would hesitate well before saying luck-based, but it sure plays a role) encounter that can be real hell to get new raiders through. I can't begin to imagine what it's going to be like if melee is getting Doomfired all the time, because that is HELL to heal through on melee that aren't rogues with CloS up.
We've survived *one* Air Burst on the tank when one of our melee got too close. Not an experience I care to repeat.
Ooph. My guild's hitting Hyjal probably Thursday or so, we'll see how it goes.
5-15-2008 @ 4:54AM
Foxlit said...
For what it's worth, we have had melee air burst the MT prior to the patch (careless, but happens), and that was not a tragic disaster you make it out to be - Archimonde simply chases the tank, and, assuming your healers are competent and your tank knows what to do with those Tears, it's entirely recoverable (minor positioning run-around aside).
Fear on the tank shouldn't really be an issue either; fear ward prevents it in most situations. Fear on the healers running to adjust position? Bring more shamans.
5-14-2008 @ 1:10PM
Aikiwoce said...
I saw these changes last night. While it doesn't make the fight impossible, it definitely adds a new level of difficulty.
The Doomfires had a minimum turning radius before, and you could "juke" them while running away to lose them. Now they can do a complete 180 on top of itself. Most fires now spawn, and turn on melee/tanks.
We didn't have any tank air bursting or air burst + fear, but I'm sure it's there.
I also think they increased the cd on archimonde's fear, as the DBM timer wasn't anywhere close.
I guess they wanted to tune this fight around 1-2 melee dps it seems. Go Blizz!
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5-14-2008 @ 1:15PM
Chris said...
I just thought of a new nickname that I'd like to start propagating when talking about PvE'ers and their gear: "Scripted Epics". No wonder you guys hate PvP so much; every encounter is different.
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5-14-2008 @ 1:21PM
Tridus said...
Yeah, nothing quite like win trading for epics to show off "skill", right?
5-14-2008 @ 1:25PM
Chris said...
Original. Very original.
5-14-2008 @ 1:36PM
Matt said...
And what's original about "scripted epics"? Go back to your l337 1600 rated arena team.
5-14-2008 @ 1:35PM
Badger said...
Nice work dragging a completely irrelevant (not to mention stupid) topic of discussion into a thread on software glitches.
5-14-2008 @ 1:23PM
Tridus said...
For some reason I just can't comprehend (as a software developer myself), Blizzard patches always have all kinds of undocumented/unintended consequences. This is hopefully one of those times.
If they actually intended to change the fight like this... wow. This is already one of the worst fights in the game due to how bloody random it is. More of that gives me a good reason to want to fire the encounter designer out of a cannon.
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5-14-2008 @ 1:27PM
Nathan Jessup said...
Yea... definitely watched our melee get smoked a couple of times last night. As if this fight wasn't enough of a pain.
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5-14-2008 @ 1:54PM
Xin said...
it the fight is doable then it's not a bug, stop whining and relearn the fight
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5-14-2008 @ 2:10PM
Tridus said...
Relearn what? When the tank gets targetted for airburst, there's nothing to learn. Its not like the tank can avoid an airburst targetted on himself. You just hope he's wedged up against something so he can't go flying, because if he does is a wipe as soon as Archi chases the tank, is out of melee range, and Finger of Death's someone.
This is not balance tweaking, the fight is fundamentally broken.
5-14-2008 @ 2:12PM
Xin said...
omg stop whining!@!!
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5-14-2008 @ 2:21PM
Lori said...
Are these people complaining about difficulty the same hardcore raiders that complain about the game being made too easy for casuals?
5-14-2008 @ 2:54PM
Argent said...
probably n9ot, since most true hardcore raiders will most likely have dropped hyjal by now in favor of more time in sunwell.
these changes pretty just fuck people coming through now after the attunement reqs have been lifted.
5-14-2008 @ 2:51PM
kdeselms said...
Are the people making smartass comments about this discussion anywhere near progressed enough into the game that they'd be affected by this news item? Stop trolling news posts that have nothing to do with you.
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5-14-2008 @ 2:58PM
Carl Q. said...
The topic is interesting, but the comments are absolute fail.
This is not about pvp, don't bring pvp into this.
This is not about casual-vs-hardcore.
This is about a bugged encounter, just as Void Reaver has been a bugged encounter before.
It's still doable. It's not exactly "harder", it's just way more random. You could one-shot him if your lucky or wipe the whole night if your not.
This event was already one of the most random of the game, it just got worse. My guild farms Illidan, we are working on Kalecgos, however some unlucky nites we spend a few hours on Archi...
So im not looking forward to it
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5-14-2008 @ 4:05PM
Sydera said...
My guild hasn't quite gotten to Archimonde yet--we're only up to Azgalor. I'm not looking forward to it being even harder than promised!
We're hardly your most elite raiders, and I don't think any of us have ever whined about badge gear or pvp epics for casuals. In fact, we're grateful for it, it lets us get new recruits more reliably.
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