world-bosses
Latest
Breakfast Topic: Who could be a new world boss in Cataclysm?
One thing that was missing from the Wrath expansion, conspicuously or not, was a world boss on par with those such as Kazzak and the Emerald Dragons. For better or for worse, Blizzard completely removed them from the game, reserving the massive figures towering over the landscape for instanced quests or dungeons. Blizzard touched a bit on why they've not used world bosses in Wrath in the recent Twitter developer chat. They observed that there are issues with the bosses that have prevented them from feeling comfortable making more world bosses, such as issues with groups racing to bosses, or the ability of people outside raid groups to deliberately mess up boss attempts. On the other side of the coin, though, they did imply that they like world bosses, and will probably implement more in Cataclysm if and when they can find a satisfactory work-around for the problems.
Flying mounts and world bosses
Recently, a lot of guilds have been having some problems with Doom Lord Kazzak. Not on the actual fight, which isn't that difficult. Instead, players (of the same or opposing faction) have been flying above Kazzak, getting killed from his AOE shadowbolt and healing him, effectively griefing the raid. A forum thread from a few months ago brings up possible solutions to this problem. Generally, if you're on a PVP server, this isn't considered griefing because you can kill the other faction before they get in range. But on flying mounts, this is a bit tougher. Someone suggested staging a raid on Honor Hold/Thrallmar to distract possible attackers before you attempt, which is a nice idea. You can also send up shadow priests or mages to POM/pyro them before the fight, or just kill them until they have ridiculously long rez timers. If you're doing this on a PVE server -- or doing it to someone of the same faction on any server -- that's considered griefing and is reportable. Other people suggest that Blizzard solve this problem through game mechanics. For example, they could make Kazzak's AOE shadowbolt target only members of the raid who engaged him, or have only deaths in that raid heal him. But this sort of ruins the idea of world bosses, where you could theoretically get everyone on an entire server to come take down the boss (or fail to take it down, as was evidenced when Highlord Kruul visited Azeroth.) How do you think this problem should be solved?
