Algalon the Observer in WoW

[Eric]

You guys are being silly.

They have pretty looking interfaces, that's about it.

WoW's basic UI is the same as the ones you saw there, the only difference is presentation.

The recharge bar that shows which skill is ready is the same as the normal UI that counts down the skill's cooldown, the only difference is it's in the middle of his screen and easier on his eyes instead of down at the bottom with a tiny number counting down.

Most of the boss countdowns are pretty irrelevant to the point if you throw yourself at a boss enough you pretty much know what's coming phase per phase. It might help the casual or new players a bit, but hey that makes the game more accessible. You can even see with the timer to Big Bang, they didn't bother to move until he actually does the animation/emote for the attack.

Algalon is rough because he does a lot of damage to your raid, lots of healing is needed. He does a ridiculous amount of damage to your tank(Look at the incoming damage on Kungen at the end) and requires 2 tanks with threat resetting between big bangs. You cannot lose anybody at all because he has a ridiculous DPS requirement 35 million in 6 minutes, assuming you bring 2 Tanks, 6 Healers, 17 DPS like most guilds you need everyone doing a little over 5600DPS each including the tanks, or picking up the slack for the tanks. That's not including the DPS you lose to kill the stars that float around.

So yeah Algalon requires stellar play from your trinity of raid requirements, Tanking/DPS/Healing, and you only get an hour a week to get it right. Lose a raid member it's probably over.

[Don]

Playing WoW with no UI enhancements is way harder than playing it with UI enhancement. In theory you can make up these things by just being really really good but in reality nobody is that good and if he is he's not going to be in your average guild anyway. You basically need perfect playing to make up for these UIs, which is why WoW raids are beaten on the matter of days despite people claim they're *hard*, because if you have above average overall skills + perfect playing, by definition nothing could be any harder. I guess you could have a few gear-related DPS bottlenecks, but given the wide abundance of loot in WoW the gear bottleneck doesn't last very long.

Healing is not actualy very hard in a fight where nobody can die (and people could die, they don't have nobody died achievement done) because then you just always start healing the person with the lowest health and again there are UI that tells you do that. Obviously since people did die it implies at some point you have to decide who to heal (like the tanks) over just anybody who is low on health, but even then that's not really rocket scence in light of the plethora of mods available in this game. It's just raiding 101 to have a few guys concentrate on the MT and few guys who are good at healing multiple people concentrate on other people.

[Eric]

Playing WoW with no UI enhancements is way harder than playing it with UI enhancement. In theory you can make up these things by just being really really good but in reality nobody is that good and if he is he's not going to be in your average guild anyway. You basically need perfect playing to make up for these UIs, which is why WoW raids are beaten on the matter of days despite people claim they're *hard*, because if you have above average overall skills + perfect playing, by definition nothing could be any harder. I guess you could have a few gear-related DPS bottlenecks, but given the wide abundance of loot in WoW the gear bottleneck doesn't last very long.

Healing is not actualy very hard in a fight where nobody can die (and people could die, they don't have nobody died achievement done) because then you just always start healing the person with the lowest health and again there are UI that tells you do that. Obviously since people did die it implies at some point you have to decide who to heal (like the tanks) over just anybody who is low on health, but even then that's not really rocket scence in light of the plethora of mods available in this game. It's just raiding 101 to have a few guys concentrate on the MT and few guys who are good at healing multiple people concentrate on other people.

You're talking out of your ass. -_-

I play and have raided in WoW with little to no UI enhancements, most of the timers have very little baring on your success of the encounter. Something is going to spawn, you know something is going to spawn if you wiped to it the last time. In addition most of the timers are estimations, that means they aren't 100% on the dot. The timers are more for "You better have your shit dead by this point or you're in trouble."

The gear checks are always on point, in this video they literally killed Algalon right at the end when he enraged 0 seconds left.

People -cannot- die on Algalon it puts you behind on healing/dps you need to be perfect, the death they had was the tank getting gibbed at the end, other then that they were perfect. Blizzard's built in healing UI is horrific, and there are no UIs that tell you who to heal or auto target heal for you, it lays out the raid's health bars in a pane for you to easily select who you need to heal, Blizzard's built in pane is similar, but far inferior to the point they've even acknowledge how terrible their healing UI is.

[Don]

The UI is a crutch for those who have no skill but it doesn't change the fact that virtually everyone raids with those because nobody has perfect skills. You can pretend everyone is supposed to just have an intrinsic grasp on what add X is supposed to spawn or when boss Y is going use special ability Z but the fact is most people don't have this grasp and when you have something that pops in big letter like "ABILITY X IS ABOUT TO HAPPEN" that allows anybody who is at least above average to play as if they're perfect.

Virtually every MMORPG the guys at the top will always tell you that this is harder than it looks. It is always exactly as easy as it looks. That's why people used to really hate people releasing WoW videos since you can see absolutely everything you need to do to win an encounter if you've some idea of how MMORPG raids in general work. Really MMORPG raids have not evolved very much for the last 5 or so years. They may have bigger numbers or newer graphics but the basic idea has never changed. This is why WoW relies heavily on positional movement (which cannot be automated) and DPS checks (which cannot be duplicated by watching or UI).

I suppose you can say it's an accomplishment for find enough DPS who never miss a GCD for 6 minutes to do enough DPS to win, but then you might as well dealing with an action game if your success of winning depends on having people who react fast enough to not lose any DPS to lag. And no I don't got enough skills to not lose DPS to lag. I don't think how good you're at a MMORPG should be determined by how you can always squeeze in an action every 1.5 second without fail. RPGs are not supposed to be about pressing buttons really fast or really precisely, but in the case of WoW it is.

On the healing issue it's basically like first they designed raids that can be healed by real humans, and then real humans beat it too easily especially with some minor UI enhancement. To compensate they ended up designign raids that cannot be healed by real humans and you MUST have an UI telling you who to heal. The damage intake in WoW raids simply exceeds the limitation of human reaction, which is why healers must have mods that help them digest that information. But again you get into a case of perfect vs perfect. Because you got perfect UI helping out that essentially makes everybody who is decent at healing now perfect, so raids expect perfect healing too but it's really not that hard to heal perfectly with the right tools. Of course it totally sucks if you're not using those tools but then playing a healer in WoW is basically a stupid thing to do anyway unless you really enjoy that kind of role.

[Flip]

Is that really the music and Algalons voice that is played? Pretty intense. I liked.

[Don]

The one thing I always thought interesting about Blizzard voice acting is they usually have guys who sound pretty cool but if you do some research you'd find out they're all voiced by random grunt_programmer_02 or the janitor, yet it sounds professional!

[Shellie]

One thing I do like about games like WOW vs LOTRO is that you can take more liberties with content and make lots of fun things. I remember back when I played AC, there was the fabled TARDIS that would appear randomly but extremely rarely. They also had towels drop off mud golems for Douglas Adam's birthday.

LOTRO has to pretty much stick closely to the LOTR restrictions. I have seen a couple things that are throwbacks to other things, but not much at all.

[SineSwiper]

Is that really the music and Algalons voice that is played? Pretty intense. I liked.

I'm guessing the music is added in, but the voice is in-game.

People -cannot- die on Algalon it puts you behind on healing/dps you need to be perfect, the death they had was the tank getting gibbed at the end, other then that they were perfect. Blizzard's built in healing UI is horrific, and there are no UIs that tell you who to heal or auto target heal for you, it lays out the raid's health bars in a pane for you to easily select who you need to heal, Blizzard's built in pane is similar, but far inferior to the point they've even acknowledge how terrible their healing UI is.

Did you not even see the video? People DID die in that run. There was a bunch of deaths because some morons didn't hit the black hole in time. Hell, they were talking about how terrible that run was, but they still beat him.

Again, it's hard, but it's still not as challenging as a non-AOL MMO. Just look at that walkthrough for the Watcher. Much more complex than Algalon, which, again, only took 6 tries to defeat.

[Don]

Complexity alone doesn't make a harder raid. They said Algalon isn't very complex on purpose because it already has the stupid 1 hour per week deal. If it was a complex fight that took 100 hours to learn, then it'd never be beaten in a useful time since that translates to 2 years and then his drop would've been obselete given WoW's loot model.

That said I find it hard to say something is so hard that other people can't beat it but your group of guys can do it in 5 hours. This is a RPG not a fighting game or FPS, and even there I doubt the very best player in these games can pick up a new game/encounter and master it in 5 hours. If you look at Blizzard's philsophy, the tough fights like Entropius or Algalon basically requires you to do DPS at a rate where you lose nearly 0 DPS to lag or reaction time. One GCD is 1.5 second, and let's say your reaction time costs you 0.2s and lag costs you 0.1s, then you're losing (1.5/1. or 1/6th of your DPS, which is definitely enough to cause you to lose a strict DPS check. I assume Eyeshield 21 didn't make up the stuff about how human reaction time limit is 0.11s so yeah I guess it's hard to find a bunch of people who have the best reaction time for human beings to do the DPS you need to win. But then again the question is that do you still have a RPG or do you just have some kind of action game. Not that action games are bad, but to excel at the very best RPG you got to have superhuman reflexes?

[Eric]

Did you not even see the video? People DID die in that run. There was a bunch of deaths because some morons didn't hit the black hole in time. Hell, they were talking about how terrible that run was, but they still beat him.

Again, it's hard, but it's still not as challenging as a non-AOL MMO. Just look at that walkthrough for the Watcher. Much more complex than Algalon, which, again, only took 6 tries to defeat.

They used Battle Rezs to get those people up, you need to keep somebody above to eat the big bang or he wipes the raid.

I saw the Watcher video, it looks a lot like C'Thun or The Lurker Below, it's nothing special are particularly complex imo.

It took them 7 weeks, they did not pull Algalon 6 times in that period, my guild pulled Algalon last night and got a good 10-12 attempts in.

[Don]

MMORPG raids are nothing special to begin with. From a design point of view there is nothing added to the MMORPG raids since say Overlord Mata Muram 5 years ago in EQ to now, beyond the ability to create environimental damage.

I know devs for MMORPG all like to pretend this is hard work but what they do can be done with a formula in an ad-lib style. I'm sure you can describe every WoW raid as a combination of 3 raids in the past. Not saying that's somehow bad, but MMORPG raids have ran out of creativity about 5 years ago. The only hard part is either coming up with the playing hour, or find a bunch of guys with the same reaction time as Agon of Eyeshield 21.

[Flip]

What the hell is a raid? A group of people doing a quest? When did that word lose all meaning?... i get confused and i dont like it.

[Don]

What the hell is a raid? A group of people doing a quest? When did that word lose all meaning?... i get confused and i dont like it.

Raid generally refers to anything that requires more than 1 group of people, where 1 group is your standard game unit, usually 5 or 6.

[Don]

Here's a good example of a hard raid that's meaningless. Triality is the best guild in EQ, and while it's impossible to compare skill level across games there's no reason to believe the average guy in there is worse than say the average guy in Ensidia. It took Triality something like 200 hours to beat the original version of Commodus, which is a very simple raid, except Commodus spawned 10 adds every minute forever until the zone crashed for having too many adds.

You're supposed to crowd control his adds, and it looks like 3 skilled players could hold an infinte number of those guys forever (the adds are not supposed to be the hard part). But when the adds pile up to 100 you start having lag affecting your ability to CC them, and when it hits 200+ the zone stability goes down the drains and you'll generally lose simply due to the zone crashing. So how do you beat this? You kill the adds that you're not supposed to as they spawn to prevent them from crashing the zone, which makes this fight practically impossible. It took the highest DPS combination EQ has ever seen to have enough DPS to overpower the rate the adds come in, and the rest of the fight isn't actually very hard.

Now in the case of EQ Triality just recruited everyone who have a 7 year+ account (you get bonus to damage for playing that long, don't even ask) and probably bought people the mana potions (which are insanely overpowered) from the collectable card game to sustain the DPS needed to kill these adds. I think they might have even paid for server transfers for the best DPS guys in EQ to come to their guild. It's basically the same as the old days of WoW where you need to buy gold from gold farmers to keep your whole raid flasked, except the money involved here is a lot more.

So you're the best raid force in EQ or something else because you're willing to spend more money than any other guild? Clearly they're the best at doing something, by the fact that they were the only guild to have beaten the original incarnation of Commodus, but was it because they're the best at the game or because they were the only one willing to spend say $1000 to beat the encounter? It's probably some of both and either way that's not something people look up to. When you say soandso is the best at a RPG you don't think this is because the guy spend $1000 for a better setup, or that he has reflexes that is normally only found in manga. You'd like to believe that being good at RPG should mean being good while starting on an even ground, and I don't think being good because a game rewards superhuman reflexes means anything at all.