Tuesday, February 02, 2010

Dreamwalker

So Valithria Dreamwalker is now active in Icecrown Citadel. It's an interesting boss, where the healers have to heal the dragon up to full health, while the rest of the raid deals with adds trying to prevent this.

It's a pretty good fight, but there's one aspect of the fight that I do not like.

Every so often, Dreamwalker will create portals to a dream world. In the dream world are little orbs that you can touch and it will give you a stacking buff that increases your healing by 10% per stack.

It's possible to carry your stack from portal to portal, but the timing is exceptionally tight. If you are capable of carrying stacks, your healing gets massively magnified. If you're not, or have high latency, your healing is greatly hurt.

The timing is way too tight for the potential gain. If healers are meant to carry the stack from portal to portal, the timing should be slightly longer. Alternatively the penalty could be less severe, maybe losing a stack per second instead of all of them at once. If healers are not meant to carry stacks, the timer should be lower, so the stacks drop off before you enter the portal.

Basically, if Patricia is a little bit better than Daisy, Patricia should do a little more damage or healing than Daisy. You shouldn't have a situation where Patricia can all of a sudden do twice as much damage or healing as Daisy. Small differences in skill should not translate into very large differences in effectiveness.

7 comments:

  1. It's funny that skill, once more, is linked to low network latency.

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  2. I'm not sure I agree. Critical thresholds are part of the game, for example DPS requirements. If your DPSers are just a little bit slack, you can wipe instead of win. The specific encounter may be overtuned, but I don't see a systemic problem.

    Kring has a damn good point tho :(

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  3. Welcome to the world of the Arcane Mage. Arcane Mages cast Arcane Blast partially to do damage, but mostly in order to build up 4 stacks of a short-lived buff that increases damage from other arcane spells (usually we choose Arcane Missiles). If you fail to use the buff in time (say because you are getting out of the fire, or your target dies halfway through casting and you have to retarget), you lose not one stack, but all of it. This is just a part of WoW life, and we deal with it. We sure as hell don't go crying on our blogs about it!

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  4. You're the only DD who keeps the "buff" on yourself and can transfer it to another mob if adds spawn or one gets invulnerable. Don't whine about one of the best mechanics. :-)

    Just imagine your buff would be built up on the mob. Like shadow weaving for priests or shadow embrace/Immolate for locks or combat points for rogue/cats or stormstrike for shamans or the DK things. And probably more.

    You're about the only class who can transfer the buff from one to another mob without ramp-up time. :-)

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  5. Shadow Weaving is a self buff in WotLK... my fault. :-(

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  6. It's not even that at all. Healers shouldn't be taking EVERY single portal, thus they will never keep their stacks of the debuff. We killed it last night with healers taking 3 portals total spaced out over the entire fight evenly. There is no need to try to keep up the stacks at all, when you have that many healers trying to take over every portal teh raid will get overrun.

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  7. I raid from Australia, so clearly latency is something that I am used to.

    We couldn't get a kill on this last night (cause we had 6 heals instead of the 9 we've had literally every other night), but we DID master keeping stacks up.

    Make sure that you time it so you hit an orb just before you leave the phased part. In other words DON'T swim back to the front etc. If you get one in the last few seconds of the phased part and in the first few seconds of the next phasing you won't lose your stack.

    As for not taking the portals - the buff is a massive regen and healing buff. Keep some healers outside but send your pallies in. With 17 stacks of the buff I was criting holy lights well over 45k

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