AggroChat Game Club

Failure to Random

Last night was our second night of raiding in Blackrock Foundry, and our second night of attempts on Oregorger.  This boss has become the pinnacle of everything I love and hate about Blizzard raid encounter design.  The thing I love is the fact that it is a really inventive fight that lets us play pacman as we gobble up crates of ore throughout the arena before Oregorger can get to them.  What I hate about it is the fact that there are some serious RNG elements to the fight.  After our first night of attempts the raid lead and others poured over the logs, and did some serious research finally finding a video showing how the process worked.  In theory Oregorger will always choose to go a direction where there a boxes  So the theory goes that if you clear boxes in a certain order he will favor a specific path over others.  The problem in practice is even then… there is still a large amount of RNG into the encounter as to which specific direction he will turn and charge.

You can watch the video we stumbled onto purporting to have the solution.  The problem is no matter how many times we watched the video, no closely we aspired to follow the golden path…  something went wrong.  It is moments like this that I get frustrated since really I have no clue what is going wrong.  If we can ever figure out the magic behind the box phase we will down this fight because we are now doing the first phase flawlessly, or what appears to be flawlessly.  Largely this has always been one of the problems with World of Warcraft raid design.  They tend to view “random” as a positive thing, and to some extent I get it…  but don’t make these random occurrences raid wipes.  The Oregorger encounter is long enough as it is… to have a single mechanic take out half of your raid.  I guess I find myself preferring the Final Fantasy XIV raid design ethic of extremely difficult… but follows a predictable pattern.  That way when you fail you know it is because you didn’t do something…  not because the random element decided to screw you over this try.

Hans and Franz

When we took our break half way through the raid, we opted to switch gears and shift to the Hans and Franz encounter.  The mob names are Hans’gar and Franzok, and I find it absolutely hilarious that they a reference a skit that came out when I was in elementary school…  and large swaths of our raid was not even alive when it was a “thing”.  But I am told apparently there is a State Farm commercial bringing the characters back… so I guess it makes sense.  The encounter is in a room filled with conveyor belts with thin strips between them that don’t move.  At the start of the fight the belts are off, but when it enters the environmental damage phase they turn on making it harder to avoid the obstacles.  The first phase is avoiding the “pop tarts” as they have become referred to by the raid… which are these molten metal slabs that come into the room.  The second phase of the environmental damage is avoiding the metal stampers, that come down from the ceiling in a certain pattern.  There seemed to be four turns of a specific pattern before the encounter picked a new pattern.  Granted it could potentially pick the same pattern twice in a row for eight turns.

There was also a tank swap mechanic happening, but as DPS I never quite grasped what was actually occurring.  There was a point in the fight where a specific tank in the rotation needed to have an external damage cooldown cast on him while being slammed to the ground.  The rest of the fight was simply avoiding damage that could be avoided, and pouring damage into the boss during the few times when they were standing still.  This meant that you wanted to make sure you blew your dps cooldowns and took your second potion during one of the windows where you could stand on the non-moving sections and pour damage in.  Everything about this fight is like a better designed Oregorger, and what I mean by that is… there is still a fun quirky mechanic, there is still an element of randomness…  but the randomness is predictable and something you can adjust for quickly.  I will admit on the first pull seeing everything play out felt like madness, but it was simply to adjust after that to match the pattern in play.  As a result we downed Hans and Frans last night and I managed to pick up two more drops…  one of which again I won’t be using.

AggroChat Game Club

I figure at this point… the statute of limitations on the podcast we announced our first AggroChat Game Club title.  As a result I am going to talk about it today for anyone who happens to read my blog…  but not listen to our podcast.  One of the ideas we kicked around for awhile was to have a single title that all of us played during the course of a month.  Then during the last show of that month we dive into the  game completely with no concern about spoilers.  The idea is for us to talk everything about that game, what we liked, what we didn’t like and how we felt about the major plot points.  During Episode 41, we deliberated about a long list of games and finally decided to go with a consensus title for the very first one.  As such we chose Citizens of Earth by Atlus, and over the course of this month all five of the AggroChat members are going to be playing it.  To make things even more interesting… this is a title that is available on Steam, 3DS and Vita and in actuality we have folks playing each of these versions.

What I want from you… is to play along with us!  I thought it would be fun if we also collected some of the best comments sent into us by listeners to the podcast that are also playing.  So pick up the game on whatever platform you choose, play the game, and then send in your comments.  We will try and pick out several of the comments we receive about the game and mention them while recording our podcast.  The show in which we are recording is February 28th, so please try and have the comments to us by the 26th to make sure we have time to read them.  Each of us are already knee deep in the game, and I look forward to this little experiment.  For those wondering… all of the titles mentioned during AggroChat #41 that did not receive a “hard veto”, are still technically in play.  We are sorting out how this club will work from this point on, but more than likely we will be round robin picking future titles from that same list.  Hopefully you will join in the fun, and don’t forget to let us know what you think.

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