As I mentioned in a previous post, there has been much hand-wringing over what is now being termed as “the dance” in WoW raiding. From what I can tell, “dancing” refers to more twitchy, agility-based boss encounters that require being quick on your feet and moving in required ways at required times during the fight.
Leading the charge in this current complaint is Gevlon, the WoW blog scene’s favorite libertarian, and his post today is all about why the dance is inaccessable and wrong. Now, just to be clear, I haven’t done Firelands but I have at least seen if not killed every boss and mode that came before it, as well as watched videos of the Firelands fights and spoken with others who have done it themselves. I do not see how movement-based boss encounters are a new thing, and I do not understand how this would limit a player’s access to raids moreso than previous dependence on gear or output.
Are movement-based boss fights anything new? Gevlon thinks so: “While “fire on the ground” existed since Vanilla, it was straightforward and non-obtrusive.” Non-obtrusive fire! His argument is that previous raid bosses had elements that required movement, but they were straight-forward. I think an example of this that everyone would agree on is the fel infernals that dropped during the Prince Malchezaar fight in Karazhan. The infernals dropped out of the sky at a somewhat random pace onto a somewhat random location, but once they landed the damage could be easily avoided.
However, there are many, many examples of chaotic environmental damage before Cataclysm. This is hardly a new phenomenon. Archimonde had doomfires sweeping around the raid (not to mention the twitch mechanic of clicking Tears when tossed in the air). Felmyst’s air phase required some pretty fast and tricky movement, and anyone who failed would become mind controlled and have to be killed. Mother Shahraz in Black Temple had very little movement for tanks, but at random moments three players would be teleported and had to run like hell or they’d pretty much drop dead and take someone else with them. Heigan (in Vanilla and WotLK) is famous for being the “Dance Fight”, but Thaddius is an even better example of bosses that require moving correctly for success. (I’m purposefully not mentioning hard modes, but these mechanics have always been extremely popular there, like dodging fire on Mimiron or rotating the plague debuff for Putricide.)
“Move fast and smart” boss mechanics are nothing new.
But, for the sake of argument, let’s be kind and say that while this has always been around, it’s more prevalent in Firelands than ever before. Would this in fact be more limiting to casual raid accessability than previous tiers? Gevlon certainly thinks so, going so far as to say that “Brutallus was more casual friendly than Alysrazor.” The reason given for this is that output based bosses like Brutallus allow a completely new person the opportunity to succeed their first time in the fight due to work done outside of the raid (collecting gear and practicing rotations, basically).
Would someone brand new to the zone be able to survive and contribute to a Brutallus kill? To be fair, Brutallus was the pinnacle of DPS race bosses in his day but even he had a movement/awareness component from the Burn debuff that could be spread to surrounding players. I don’t think it’s at all reasonable to assume that a raider who has a problem with movement and twitch play would easily be able to note if they or someone around them had Burn and quickly move appropriately.
It’s also worth noting that the only way to contribute to Brutallus as DPS was to have top-of-the-line raid gear from previous encounters, which was hardly casual friendly back in TBC days. I think everyone who played WoW then and now would agree that it’s much easier to gear up a character now, whether they think that’s a good thing or not.
This is all hypothetical though, so again for the sake of argument let’s pretend that there are more movement requirements in Firelands bosses, and someone new to the fight is more likely to die the first time they see a current fight than they would in the bad old days. My response to that is: so what? The expectation here seems to be that someone completely new to a boss should be able to walk into the fight and ace it 100% of the time. A newbie died the first time they saw a fight? Oh no! A brand new tank had to try a few times before they mastered the movement associated with a boss? What?! That’s 10 minutes of my life I’ll never get back!
Why should a player expect to be awesome at a fight they’ve never seen? Grinding badges for gear until your fingers fall off is acceptable raid behavior, but actually practising the fight is, apparently, not.
Movement and fire “dancing” is not new to Cataclysm. Not having to move is not the final absolute arbiter over whether a new raider survives a fight or not. And even if it was — I don’t really see why it’s a problem. Chill out, take a deep breath, let the new guy learn the fight, and move it, move it.
Herding Cats is the blog of Liore, known in the real world as Jessica Cook. She writes mostly about MMOs and RPGs, and believes in 
The discussion surrounding this reminds me of one of the posts made over at the Pink Pigtail Inn before it shut down. It detailed hr experiences with her raid group, and how she learned that, as an older player, she could no longer contribute to the raid group anymore. Not due to gear or rotation or anything, but because her reflexes simply were not good enough to keep up with the dance mechanics.
Now, this is by no means a solid argument against dance mechanics, and I don’t intend it to be. I’m not against dance mechanics at all. I just think that in terms of design Blizzard seems to have the idea that knowing the dance of the fight should be far more important than gear level. And that this design choice will make raiding more accessible.
Dance mechanics are cool. But overdo them, and it not only makes the work the players do to get gear matter less, but also makes fights last relatively the same amount of time regardless of how geared you are. This is a matter of opinion, but if I overgear a raid boss, I want it to be easy, not be just as difficult as when I was first going up against him because I lagged for a second and got caught in the slime wave.
That’s a good point about wanting farm content that you overgear to be easy. I admit as a career healer that the easier bosses get the less fun they are to heal, so perhaps I’m a bit of a masochist in that respect. ;)
If I want to play a platform game I’ll pick up an Xbox instead of paying Blizzard a subscription. MMO’s come out of the RPG’s of yesteryear which have never been “twitch”. The key to creating a game that can appeal to a wide diversity of age groups and dexterity skill is to make the game rely on intelligent decisions rather than split decisions based on hand/eye coordination. Increasingly this game is a platform game arranged around an optimal rotation of 3-4 abilities and nothing else.
Hey, if someone wants to make an MMO where intelligent decisions are king I will play the heck out of it. However, in my opinion raiding as DPS has pretty much always been about quick and smart movement combined with an optimal rotation of 3-4 different abilities. This is nothing new!
I’ve been raiding since vanilla, and all I can say is that it’s a myth that raiding nowadays is all about dancing, and never was before.
Let’s have a look at Black Temple from BC, the expansion that people always hark back to as the good old days:
Najentus was a dps race, sure, but with the added requirement to save your comrades who were spiked, and then pop NJ’s healing shield once it was up. In our 25 man raids there were always people who failed at this, every single time. I can still hear the raid leader calling out – “Throw the spike! Someone throw the goddam spike!” as Najentus’s shield healed him up to full.
Supremus – if you didn’t move away from the volcano spawns quickly, you died. Two ticks was all it took to kill you. That’s pretty twichy I think you will agree.
Teron Gorefiend – learn the new vehicle controls in all of 6 seconds or your raid wipes. Nice.
Gurtogg Bloodboil: Quoting Wow Insider from 2008 – “This fight depends heavily on two elements: output and execution. Your raid needs to be able to deal with some strenuous healing and threat requirements, as well as co-ordinated movement, so while learning you need to bring along players that can actually perform as well as multitask.”
Illidari Council: To quote one commenter on Wowhead “This is the mother of all ‘Don’t stand in @#$%!’ fights”
Nuff said.
Me on Najentus: “Throw it throw it throwit throwitthrowitthrowit!”
And yes, honestly I found Gorefiend to be the most painful mechanic of them all. If “that guy” got ghosted too early in the fight it was a definite wipe.
Cataclysm fights, themselves, aren’t that different. The player base has changed and the server/client coding seems to have changed, as well.
Hardcore gamers have the attention span of a gnat, most have moved on from WoW. I probably spent 50-60 hours learning Nef or Vashj the first time around. Finding 24 other folks with the patience to learn that kind of fight is no longer possible. That isn’t necessarily bad; it’s just a matter of coding to your clientele.
Somewhere along the line, “stay out of bad stuff” seems to have moved from running on the client to running on the server. This changes the mechanic from reaction time and awareness to latency and the quality of your connection. The network bandwidth and latency required to raid has increased significantly since vanilla. That’s fair enough for a leading edge game; but would seem to be counterproductive for one that is declining.
“Somewhere along the line, “stay out of bad stuff” seems to have moved from running on the client to running on the server.”
Ahhhhh, now that’s the most interesting comment yet about this stuff! I can see how that could make a difference. (Hope the UC is doing well, Idie!!)