One shot, One Kill

This may end up being a bit of a rant, but personally, I feel Blizzard went a little overboard with the insta-gib enemies in this expansion. The boss fights and elites didn't feel like a "challenge" to kill so much as they felt like they were a total luck of the draw due to the over-abundance of  "Boss targets random player with this ability and they get hit in the face with the flying fecal of festering fate, doing five bazillion dmg. You cannot live through this attack." Now, I know I'm being exaggerated, but come on. Look at some of the world-boss abilities throughout the Pandaria expansion. Galleon, the weakest of the world-bosses does an ability called Stomp. 250k dmg to all players within 100 yards (which is all players within range to engage.) A lot of fresh 90's don't have that much HP and thus makes the WEAKEST world boss, an insta-gib to the primary players that can benefit from killing him. And I'm sure we all remember fighting Oondasta, right? The big bastard of a T-rex on the Isle of Giants that was originally designed to be SO GODDAMN DIFFICULT that the common strategy was "Okay guys, we're just gonna continually zergrush him from the graveyard and hope we can kill him before the diminishing returns from ghostrunning stop us."  I'm serious, that's no joke. The most common strategy for Oondasta when it was first introduced was to zerg rush the hell outta this dino and pray to the wow gods your raid was big enough to kill it before everyone was in rez-limbo from ghost walking too often. And this often led to Oondasta defeating the ENTIRE server by crashing it because of how many players ended up as multiple skeleton corpses.

It almost looks like ICC's floor pattern!

And it's not just the world bosses. The raid bosses of the Mists of Pandaria expansion tend to employ the kill-you-immediately tactic quite often. Now, that's not saying -all- bosses do. Some of the Pandarian encounters are really fun and employ some very fun and interesting raid mechanics. Bosses like Gara'Jal in MSV who employs the Cross Over ability which makes for an interesting twist on a boss fight without being an immediate, irreversible death to the player. Or the Tsulong encounter in ToES that employs the Day/Night mechanics that make the entire raid work for the kill. So there are quite a few fun and interesting encounters in Pandaria that don't fit the insta-gib collection.

I'm still waiting on ol' Hogger to become a Raid Boss!

But, as I said, there are a lot of bosses (especially in Siege of Ogrimmar) that the insta-gib is a go-to mechanic for. General Nazgrim has one when he calls his reinforcements and the Kor'Kron Assassins come out to stab you in the back for 460-540k damage. This one-shot's most cloth or leather DPS and healers. Thok the Bloodthirsty's ability which he fixates one player is an insta-gib as well if you happen to get in front of him. There are plenty more but I think we all get the idea. Now, I understand that these abilities are avoidable and manageable. If they weren't no-one would ever raid against these bosses because they'd just one-shot everyone and the boss would be unbeatable. I just feel that some of the developers and designers got a wee bit lazy on the mechanics of some of these fights by using instant death as a primary design for a lot of abilities rather than a fun, unexpected or even unique encounter mechanic.

How I imagine Raid developer meetings work.

I'm not going to pretend that I know anything about developing or creating a MMORPG or any game for that matter. But I've played them for over a decade now and I'm fairly certain I speak for the majority when I say that a raid or boss mechanic that instantly kills you, isn't fun to work with or around. You ultimately feel like your slamming your head against a brick wall until eventually your skull wins through broken and bleeding and you managed to down the boss. I think I'm through with ranting over this. As always I'm open to discussion on any and all topics. What's your opinion on the mechanics behind Blizzard's raid bosses? Drop by my twitter and let me know what you think, or leave a note on the blog. I'm always eager to hear from other players! You can find my raid team dealing with these mechanics and more Friday and Saturday nights at 11pm EST on my twitch channel and I'll write again soon!

Suffer Well
~V