Rotten Bug

In my last blog entry I talked about the change made to Rotface. I wanted to make my response to the change made its own blog entry, rather than bury it at the end of the long blog I had just made on our first night in the Plagueworks.
Let me reprint the change again here.
The changes made to Rotface were an effort to fix a bug that fell through the cracks in development and testing. The previous iteration of Rotface in 10 player difficulty used (and still uses) the same timer as the 25 player difficulty version when dispersing its Mutated Infection ability.
What this means, plainly, is that a disproportionate number of people were being put out of the fight near the 30% mark in 10 player (by a large percentage) versus 25 player, making the entire fight much more difficult than intended.
Obviously if you severely outgeared the fight, none of this mattered to you. The HP change will have no effect on your 10 player clears. You will, in fact, still kill Rotface.
http://blue.mmo-champion.com/12/22418863610-rotface-nerfed.html
We don't severally out gear the fight and we did not, in fact, kill Rotface. We fought him AFTER the change was made and about 20% life is when he started to bug out. But we killed Festergut rather easily. I believe by the way the fight is designed that Festergut was meant to be the DPS check with his hard enrage timer.
With the way Rotface works now, he has a soft enrage, but only on the 10 man version. He’s a stiffer DPS check than Festergut now.
Basically instead of fixing the error, the Developers simply reduced his hit points so that there is a less likely chance you'll see it. It's sweeping the error under the rug, a band-aid fix, and I feel it's a poor choice on the part of the development team. Rotface is still bugged; they are just hoping fewer groups will see the bug by reducing his hit point pool.
My main concern is that the Developers will not fix Rotface and hope this band-aid will be sufficient. Based on our experiences last night, it won't be. I feel like we've got a skilled and geared 10 man group. We had the server 3rd kill on Yogg. We just missed Heroic Anub by less than 1%. We know what we're doing. I feel like we got the fight down, and we would have had the kill if not for this bug. I think that if our group struggled, other groups like ours (skilled, geared 10 man guilds) will struggle with this boss as well.
Now, there might be 100 reasons they went with this solution. Maybe it was going to take longer to truly fix him and they wanted a quick solution out so groups didn't get road blocked on a bugged boss. Maybe the fix requires a patch. I don't know. I hope they fix him soon. He needs to be fixed, not band-aided, fixed.

Comments

Rohan said…
He has the same soft enrage in 25-mans. That's what was wrecking us. Our DPS wasn't high enough so we kept going into the multiple infections phase.

However, infections in 10-man cause you to lose a greater percentage of your dps. Each infected DPS is 20% of your damage in 10-man, while only 6% of a 25-man raid.

They're just adjusting the HP such that the soft enrage hits later in 10-mans. So you only lose 40% of your dps for say the last 10%, instead of the last 30%. 25-mans are more likely to lose 12% of their dps for the entire 30%.
Tim said…
That was my thought, as well. It may be able to hot fix the number of hit points, but may require a patch to change the frequency of injections. I obviously have no idea.

It does seem like this was the easy fix, rather than the correct one.

We only gave him 3 shots or so on patch day, and we did not get him down, after easily getting the "DPS check" down. I am curious to see how we do post nerf.
apokteino said…
I still have to disagree with you. Maybe it isn't "tuned" quite like the 25 man, but the fight is still fairly simple. I want the good old days of Sunwell back where we wiped for a month straight, 20 hours a week on KJ and ENJOYED the fact it was a difficult boss. I hate stuff my guild can faceroll on the first couple attempts.

I understand that your argument is that the 10 man should be equally tuned to the 25. Yeah, it should be but honestly 25 man still seemed more difficult to me (even before his 10 man health "fix"). IMO wipe a little before asking that the mechanics be made easier. I haven't raided for real since Ulduar came out a year ago! ='(
Unknown said…
We got him down last night after 5 or 6 attempts. It gets crazy in the last 30%, we were consistently getting him to 1700K hp when the injection/number of oozes started overwhelming us (wiping us at around 1200K or so), but seemed like on the try where we downed him, our coordination was pretty good. The group was doing 5.5k or so dps (top 2 or 3 folks) and we had our normal prot tank kiting oozes. I'm a holy pally and in the last part (under 10%) i just blew cooldowns and spammed HL on everyone. I don't think we lost but maybe one person on the attempt. We had three Pallys in the group which probably helped given bubbles and lay on hands..
Honors Code said…
Apo,

Sunwell isn't coming back, the Developers have made it clear. I would have no issue if the Boss was hard because it had been designed Hard. I have an issue to wiping to a BUG.
apokteino said…
Fair enough. I'm simply saying I want harder fights... and if bugs make the fight seem harder, I'm all for it! =P

I'm hoping hardmodes prove to be a little more challenging. The thing is with these stupid limited attempts for each encounter, blizz can only make the fight so hard. If you give people an unlimited number of attempts the fight can be tuned to make it a lot more difficult.

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