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The 5 worst raid encounters in Cataclysm
Last week, we covered the five best raid encounters in Cataclysm. Today, we're flipping the coin to take a look at the worst. Be it bad mechanics, fight bugs, horrible randomness, or just plain boring bosses, these are the fights with elements you never want to see again. Of course, it is uncouth to criticize without suggesting improvements, so I'm also putting on my amateur game designer hat and throwing out some other options that could've made things more entertaining. 5. Maloriak, Blackwing Descent Maloriak wasn't terrible, but the encounter had two major flaws. First, interrupts. Tier 11 was Interrupt City in general, as several classes got new interrupt abilities and Blizzard apparently wanted to make sure we were using them. However, this particular fight was notable for having two interruptable abilities, one that had to be interrupted, and one that had to not be interrupted -- but only a certain number of times. ("Three shall be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three.") While this led to some interesting voice chat during raids ("Which ability did you just interrupt?" "I don't know!"), the overall mechanic was confusing. Why not have an actual button that he runs to and presses, and your tank can choose to let in happen or not via Taunt? Second, the fight just doesn't scale well. For well-geared groups in normal difficulty, there was an eternity when you had to stop DPS before 25% and wait for him to finish releasing all his adds and start a second green phase. Meanwhile, groups in heroic difficulty got to deal with a dark phase, which featured nothing but AoE for 90 seconds. Not the most fun, since most classes have a one-button AoE rotation, and not very balanced, as classes with consistent AoE damage (aka mana users) absolutely smoked others. If they'd just have the cut the phase to 30 or 45 seconds or so, it'd have been a lot less frustrating and a good bit more balanced.
