If Then Else Or

KIN Raiders released their video of the world first Heroic Madness of Deathwing kill today, and it made me want to revisit my favorite progression raiding video ever. So here’s Paragon’s H25 Lich King kill.

Comparing the two videos, Paragon obviously has better editing (the fancy into) and the advantage of english voiceovers / translations, but I also think the LK fight has the advantage of inherent movement. Watching the 25m raid run in circles while yelling about aura mastery is a lot more exciting than watching them wail on deathwing’s left arm. Additionally, the adds in the first phase of the lich king fight had to be handled through a mechanic, while all of the deathwing adds need to be dpsed. Additionally, the LK fight has three distinct phases while the Madness of Deathwing has two, and the second is only at 20% and includes an ‘ignore everything, dps the boss’ finish.

It’d almost make me buy into the ‘Warcraft has the B team now’ story people like to rage about, except that the Ragnaros fight was more than crazy enough. There’s also the ‘the bosses were killed too fast’ whine, but when you look at the facts, pretty much every ungated boss ever went down quickly. The only way to stop that is with ridiculous gear requirements that’d make the fight impossible for players who aren’t at the pro level. As a sidenote, gating allows for players to gear up more relative to attempts, which is why the ungated bosses in Cata required more attempts than H-LK.

Now, here’s a guide video to the last boss in the Eternity Vault. (You knew this was going to loop around to Star Wars: the Old Republic eventually, right?) This is on the normal difficulty which is about LFR equivalent. I don’t want to spoil the fight, so I’ll do a very general comparison and you should stop reading now if you don’t even want that, but… Three defined phases, inherent movement, plus about five other mechanics.

When I saw players going against the first boss of EV in normal, it looked pretty boring. Same for the second guy, though when I was watching a stream of that fight more recently, it seemed like there were some new adds (or else the stream was on hard instead of normal). However, looking at the normal version of the Soa fight (the swtor video I just linked), I think I may have started worrying too soon. Slap an extra hard/nightmare mechanic or two in there, add some epic music, and this will be fun.