Teron Gorefiend. How I have learned to loathe thee…
I’m all for a challenge, I really am. If you look at my list of Top 5 Five Man Boss Fights, you’ll see I have a preference for challenging fights. I like to have to work to succeed. Honestly, I do.
But Teron Gorefiend? This encounter is just flat out frustrating, and not necessarily because it is honestly challenging.
For the uninitiated, I’ll give a brief rundown of how this encounter works. Basically, a random raid member is targeted with a debuff called Shadow of Death every 30 seconds. The affected player will die in 55 seconds, and when he dies four shadowy constructs will spawn around him. The affected player will also become a ghost when they die that has special abilities controlled through the pet bar. The Shadowy Constructs that spawn CANNOT be harmed by live players, only by the ghost. You must kill all four before they reach the raid. The Shadowy Constructs can and will wipe the raid should too many of them make it there.
In a nutshell, if you can’t kill your constructs in time, there is a VERY GOOD chance the whole raid will wipe.
Now, killing your constructs before they get to the raid is not impossible, but it can be quite hard. You have to be quick and you have to be able to target the four constructs efficiently.
Basically how it pans out is that some people have a fairly easy time doing it, while others find it nearly impossible. If you play a lot of First Person Shooters, this event would probably be cake for you. The problem is, people who play WoW aren’t necessarily the types that play First Person Shooters. There will undoubtedly be at least a couple people in the raid that just can’t get the job done. You’ll find yourself hoping that Player X does not get the debuff.
This is bad for raiding. Raiding is already fairly stressful, what with gear requirements and learning all the different and difficult encounters. Raiders already have a tendency to single people out for under-performing. The last thing we need is an encounter that makes it blatantly obvious.
The Teron Gorefiend fight does just that. It can drive a wedge into the raid as frustration sets in. "Why can’t Hunter X kill his stupid constructs?" It can very easily devolve into a bout of finger pointing and hurt feelings. I can’t imagine how many guilds have been driven apart by this one stupid fight.
If you’re lucky, you raid with good people who won’t point fingers and understand that this encounter is just plain stupid.
And I am telling you that it is.
As a disclaimer, this is not sour grapes. I can and have successfully killed my constructs when given the opportunity. I had trouble my first try, but after that I started to get the hang of it and am no longer intimidated.
My problem with it is that WoW is not a first person shooter, nor a twitch game. If I wanted that kind of challenge, I’d be playing Call of Duty 4. I play WoW because I DON’T like twitch based challenges. I had my fill of those in the old NES and SNES days. (And, in the interest in full disclosure, I was damn good in my day. People all around feared me when I selected Ryu in Super Street Fighter. Hell, I even mastered Zangief just to embarrass my friends!)
I feel bad for the people that have never played twitch games, and might not be equipped to handle the speed and targeting necessary to get the job done. Hell, I know quite a few people who never played anything prior to World of Warcraft.
In a way it’s like the Magtheridon fight. Sure, that necessitates quick reflexes and clicking the cubes at just the right time, but you have control over who should click the cubes. In the Teron fight, it is completely and utterly random.
Boo.
So maybe you convinced your wife to give WoW a try. And as wives are wont to do, she rolled a healer. Over time, she grew into a fantastic and reliable raid healer, and you invite her without hesitation to the raids. But then you get to Teron, and she has to become a DPSer with abilities she’s never seen before. And to top it all off, if she fails, the raid dies.
That is just plain idiotic. How did Blizz come up with this stupid encounter anyway? I have a theory.
One day, a dev was getting a root canal. While he was getting this painful and tedious procedure, he also had to do his taxes at the same time, as it was April 15th. So he thought to himself:
What could be worse than this? If only I could come up with a boss fight that is the equivalent of this hell I have subjected myself to!
And so Teron Gorefiend and his Shadowy Constructs were born. The WoW equivalent of a root canal and doing your taxes rolled into one.
Yeah, that’s fun.
Entries (RSS)
No one likes being “that guy” unfortunately. Our guild has several players like that who seem to be able to excel in one role but not at others. If there was a way for me to end up with the task of blowing up the mobs, I’d gladly do it everytime. I enjoy encounters like this because I’ve always been a twitch player. It’s not for everyone, no. But Blizzard does have to make BT as potentially challenging as possible. This is one way for them to do that with a boss that tests everyone’s ability to move and take action on the fly.
Anyway, if anyone’s having difficulty, try this macro:
/targetenemy
/cast Spirit Lance
/cast Spirit Lance
/cast Spirit Lance
Once you chain, just spam it. It will circle to all enemies, and as the spell has no gcd, it will apply the debuffs quickly. I personally don’t use the macro but a few of my guildies do. How it works is that it targets an enemy, hits ‘em with a Lance. And then when you hit it again, it’d target the next one and hit that mob with a lance. Just keep using it and it should go around in circles.
However, watch the GCD timer on the screen. It might not work properly if you press it too fast. Wait for it to recycle and reload.
Gorefiend, RoS, and Bloodboil and the three big humps in BT and most guilds spent significant amounts of time working on them.
Good luck and good hunting!
I havent tried this fight yet but I love the sound of it
What would be the point of Black Temple if it didnt tax each player individually? You always get players hiding in the mass, not pulling their weight. Fights like this pull those players out into the open. I know people hate to have their weaknesses exposed, but if those weaknesses are holding back your guild, then they need to be addressed, assuming you’re in a progression guild. If you’re in a casual guild where everyone’s allowed to make the same mistakes over and over…. then you’re lucky to see BT at all.
There’s plenty of ways to get better at a skill you’re missing. If you care that much about running BT, and you’re a healer as you suggest… well, you just need to spend time doing something else to prepare youself. Too often I see players who want to raid harder content but dont want to make any effort. Why should I carry those players on my back? BT wouldnt be the challenge it is, if at some point, each player didnt have to step up to the plate. You have gear checks in raids: fights like these are skill checks for each and every player. If you’re guild cant get through it, you either need to change your players around, or forget about progression. I think thats perfectly fair. BT isnt for everyone. If it was, it woudn’t mean much.
Hopefully, the 10man instances will address a lot of these issues, enabling players with less committment or interest in hardcore raiding to see all of the content.
@Matt
I’ll pass that macro along to the alliance, see if anyone can get any use out of it. We made 17 attempts on Saturday, and we did get him down to as low as 8%. I’m sure we will get it done eventually.
@John
It’s not the fact that it IS challenging that bothers me, it’s the type of challenge. Essentially it boils down to a FPS minigame, and I don’t want FPS in my MMO. Don’t you think Call of Duty players would go nuts if one of the requirements to winning a deathmatch was a game of chess at the end? WoW is a game about strategy and planning, not twitch skills. Sure, it requires a degree of twitch skills, but everyone in our raid has show sufficient skills in that area to take down the content before Teron. Why does he change the rules so much?
There’s also a nice flash game to demonstrate the Teron fight: http://www.ferox-horde.de/feroxtgs2/
@Nailor
Yes, we do have that link posted on the alliance website, and people have been practicing. The simulator gives you an idea of what to expect, but it surely is no replacement! We should be back on Teron next Saturday (we alternate our T6 raids…MH one week, BT the next), I think we’ll take him down this time.
@PTD
Yeah, it sure is no replacement
We’re on our track heading towards Teron and have cleared the first three bosses in BT already. I’ll post some comments regarding the flash game as soon as I utterly fail with my druid there
Yeah, I’ve been having the same problem. (http://musingsofaraider.wordpress.com/2008/09/05/dear-diary-i-met-the-bogeyman-last-night/)
I’ve never been a twitch player. In fact, I’m one of those people you mention who has never played any other games but WoW. My other game? Diner Dash.
<— not a twitch player.
I really really really hate the constructs. And I’ve felt really guilty when I don’t down them and cause a wipe. I know that the trend towards personal responsibility continues in BT and beyond, and that scares the crap out of me when I can’t do something that is supposedly so simple, as some of my guildies have said.
I’ll have to try out the macro that Matticus posted.
Thanks for this post – I’d never thought of the encounter compared to FPS games, and it makes me feel a bit better that perhaps my lack of experience with those is why I’m having problems; it’s not that I just suck!
i actually don’t find this fight too challenging and my guild mastered it way back
but i can see where the problem lies. it’s only important that the very first person to get the debuff is not totally messing it up. because you stay a ghost a good while longer than you need to kill your own constructs. so the first person can help kill the second wave, and so on.
and i wouldn’t rely on the ice-lance thing alone – first use the aoe bolts, then the aoe shackle, and then press tab – fire lance – tab – lance – tab – lance,…. this way you can kill your constructs just fine. and if there’s a second player in “ghost-form”. he can just hit the aoe spells right after you did, and the constructs are nearly dead halfway to the raid
no problem really.
i personally like the way blizzard is going with boss encounters becoming more demanding of ALL ppl in a raid. i hated it when we took 40 ppl to Molten Core, and half of them could be afk, stupid, eating, or whatever and we still killed everything. i really enjoy 25 person raids, and even more 10, where every single one knows what to do, and you notice nearly every mistake.
now that may sound hard on those casual players out there. but i think you don’t have to be brilliant, or very talented, or used to shooters to sucessfully play your class in WoW. just read the guides before you enter new encounters, and do your best. ask if anything is unclear, and tell right away if you made a mistake. don’t be too shy to ask for help
I guess the idea was to add uncertainty to the encounter. Once you’ve mastered an encounter it becomes fairly trivial to complete it — unless there is some unpredictable element.
The biggest question is – should you be stressed in a game you’re suppose to playing for fun? Challenged absolutely, but if its stressful somewhere someone lost the point of making a game in the first place. Not an uncommon criticism for WOW.