I don’t know if it was Tom Chilton, or Jeffrey Kaplan, or J. Allen Brack, or any other developer.  I know many feel the urge to strangle whoever changed the Archimonde event at Caverns of Time: Mount Hyjal. It is a feeling many share: … The anguish. The frustration. The swept morale. The tank gets feared or chased by two, even three doomfires.  The raid … three doomfires going all around you, with fear is a very frustrating thing. Getting soul charge and immediately blown away is certain death. So many factors in this fight, and such a intense nigh impossible fight after patch 2.4.2 and the so called “hotfix”. The community in general thinks: “Don’t fix it if it’s not broken”.  That is a truth.

Before patch 2.4.2 the fight was hard to master, but it was epic. All you had to do was avoid the doomfire, and dispell, and keep the tank at full health. Now, after patch 2.4.2 and the hotfix, it is total chaos. Last week, we wiped, and wiped, and wiped.  At the seventh wipe I heard something I had rarely or never heard before from the Guild leaders: Yelling. Lot of frustration. Sure, we had new recruits. Some have never faced Archimonde before. That’s a factor there. We had defeated him three or four times already, and had him on farm mode at this point. Until the dreadful patch and the hotfix. I still think Archimonde needs some thorough tune up. Those doomfires run amok on the melee, and a feared tank running away from the healers is a very bad scenario. I don’t recall the tank was feared before patch 2.4.2. I might be wrong, but I don’t recall having to chase the tank 70 yards away to heal him.

I don’t know if it is a conspiracy. I don’t know if someone at Blizzard has been grinning at the prank. What I do know is that for some reason guilds are disbanding or frustrated. One of our fury warriors was down to 9 silver after the night’s repairs. As a Holy Paladin, with two Tier 6 and Tier 5 I paid over 60g repairs. I don’t know if it was mere coincidence that Death and Taxes Guild disbanded the same week Archimonde was buffed up insanely … but I know the frustration of guilds attempting to re-learn the event.  Last night, just few hours ago, my guild tried to defeat Archimonde from 7pm-11pm.  I think we wiped around twelve times.  There was something different this time around. We had a resolve. Our leaders did not yell on Ventrilo.  They were determined to take that bast—- umm, that boss down, shrugging off the nigh impossible stakes imposed in this reinvention of the wheel or … unresolved bug. I had even asked one of the leaders on private message to please not do Archimonde until Blizzard fixed the event—after we wiped some eight times.  I said it was a morale downer the way the boss event was now.  We would be wiping around 48-53%.

The raid leader said we would try two more times, and give up—it was almost 11pm and people needs to go sleep to work next day at their real life jobs. We were crushed. Frustrating.

Now we had one last chance before calling it quits for the night. To our surprise we kept fighting with all our guts, healing the dispellers and the shamans—those are our main engines for survivability. I have no clue what happened … we got Elune’s blessing and all players got shielded up. Archimonde was now at 10% health.  Archimonde went down. It boosted everyone’s morale. Do we want to do it again the way the fight is? I doubt we want to go through that again permanently.  I know many Blizzard folks visit Blizzplanet. If you are reading this, please listen to the community.  Archimonde’s doomfires are not working properly.  It should chase people outward, not surround and choke people with two or three doomfires—specially the tank.

Update: I have gotten feedback from some fans about the rant. I apologize for using the news to send a message across, but I know from many sources that many Blizzard folks visit Blizzplanet and will listen. They have told me themselves. A fan just provided me a report posted on the official WoW Forums five days ago:

“We just implemented a hotfix for all realms that makes Archimonde’s doomfires no longer be able to move right through him after they spawn. Their movement should now be much more consistent with the previous patch’s behavior, and melee should have a bit easier time dodging the doomfires as a result of the change. There have been other reports of odd behavior in the encounter since the 2.4.2 patch, but this is the only problem we’ve been able to verify locally. We’ll continue to monitor reports of unusual behavior in this encounter, and investigate further as needed.

We also hotfixed a bug in the Eredar Twins encounter that prevent a Hunter’s Feign Death ability from working if Lady Sacrolash was alive.” (5-14-08)

Daelo
Lead Encounter Designer

Thanks, Unknow @ EU Dranor