Ra-den limited attempts

So much for surprises. :(

Yes, that is currently the plan.

A few comments on our thinking. First off, I've seen some people quoting a 2010 WoW Dev Twitter chat where we said "Limited Attempts didn't really work out" as one of the WotLK retrospective points. That was true as they were generally utilized in that expansion. In the very same dev chat, we also said "If we do limited attempts again it would probably be limited to optional bosses like Algalon."

Well, guess which boss Ra-den is probably most like?

The actual Algalon approach (or really, if you want to be accurate, the Vaelastrasz v1.0 approach) is not one we're likely to repeat. It definitely adds quite a bit of tension, but a narrow time window ends up being more about frantic racing back to the zone, rebuffing, and rushing to pull again, since it's hard to justify time spent strategizing while the clock is ticking. But even worse, a lengthy disconnect or some sort of server issue can completely ruin the entire week's effort. Having your main tank suffer a power outage 10 minutes into your hour on Algalon was not a happy time.

Now, as for actual limited attempts, aside from using them a bit too widely in Lich King (including on Normal modes in Icecrown Citadel), they also largely failed to accomplish their objective of focusing guilds on quality, rather than quantity, of learning attempts and progression. As many people recall, the cutting-edge guilds that were progressing in ToGC or Heroic ICC would commonly learn mechanics, practice execution, and refine strategies on their lesser-geared alts (and/or on Normal mode), before stepping up to risk precious Heroic attempts. That clearly wasn't the intended experience, and just added a layer of nuisance to the whole affair.

In our entire history of using limited attempts, there was only one boss where I'd say they actually worked out fairly well: Heroic Lich King. The main reason for this was that you couldn't access Heroic Lich King at all unless you defeated Putricide, Sindragosa, and Lana'thel on Heroic difficulty as well. And during the first few weeks of Heroic progression, that was beyond the means of essentially all the alt raids out there. After all, the point of running split main/alt raids is to funnel gear to the mains to maximize their effectiveness for Heroic progression, right? So by definition the alts are less geared than the mains, and if the mains can just barely, barely beat something, the alt group is going to be in for a rough time.

As a result, I don't believe we ever saw a single true alt Heroic Lich King progression raid. Similarly, I don't think we're going to see alt raids on Ra-den. The number 30 is also large enough that while one accidental pull or disconnect is of course still going to sting, it isn't crippling.

I'd also really like to emphasize that Ra-den is a true bonus boss. Lei Shen is the final boss of Throne of Thunder, just as Yogg-Saron was the final boss of Ulduar. Lei Shen offers an epic challenge, and should feel like the pinnacle of the zone as a whole. Ra-den is your reward if you manage to beat the zone on its hardest difficulty -- he's a bonus level. And sometimes the rules are a bit different on those.

Thanks for the ongoing discussion -- the feedback is appreciated. A few brief points/responses to the general direction of the discussion:

This system isn't set in stone. Our intent is to release a well-tuned encounter that doesn't have significant bugs. If the first guilds get there, and it turns out that despite our best efforts, we've failed in that goal (a la Sinestra), we'll turn off the attempt limit, and that will be that. (I mean major bugs -- if there's something small, we'll wait until the weekly reset and fix it for everyone.) There's no scenario in which the first guilds to get there waste their attempts trying to kill something that's broken; we won't let that happen.

When I say that Ra-den is a "bonus boss" I'm not saying he's optional. Of course I know there's no such thing as an optional boss in progression, and people are very much going to count him as part of the progression race. But if you think back to Algalon, he actually wasn't that complicated, or that hard. Firefighter, Freya with 3 Keepers, or Yogg-1 required you to learn and coordinate far more than Algalon. Algalon literally had three mechanics to deal with for the entire fight, and in practice most guilds killed him in around 3 hours or a couple dozen attempts. It's just that they were tuned tightly numbers-wise, and the one-hour weekly limit turned what would have otherwise been a single night of progression into three or four weeks. Heroic Lei Shen is a harder and more complex fight than Ra-den, and I'm not going to claim otherwise. Ra-den is just different; he's a bit of a mystery, and something we haven't tried in a while.

Regarding alts: To engage Heroic Lei Shen, you must have killed 11/12 bosses on Heroic in that lockout. To engage Ra-den, you must have killed Heroic Lei Shen in that lockout. I'm incredibly skeptical that anyone is going to manage that with multiple alt clears in parallel, both due to gear disparity and because doing so would mean forfeiting much of the ability to optimize raid composition for progression on the hardest fights.

Finally, we'll see what we can do to minimize the quality-of-life issues here. I can't promise this will be doable until we've implemented it, but we'll try to make sure that very short attempts don't count (accidental bodypulls and such), and that we make an exception to the usual rules and reset shaman Reincarnation at the start of each Ra-den pull.

16/02/2013 18:50Posted by Gathic

Well, could you explain this statement, please?

Sure. It's literally the first full paragraph of my first post in this thread. It's a fun example of taking language out of context. (We went on to say specifically that if we ever did use limited attempts again, we'd try it on a Heroic-only Algalon-style boss.)

http://wow.joystiq.com/2010/02/26/wow-developer-twitter-chat-transcript-sorted-by-category/#patch335