The Weekly Marmot -- AVR & Encounter Design

[Ciderhelm]

[Doomtroll]

Avr also provided a much better way of making strategies for new bosses. Rather than saying something like "5 yards around the edge of the pointy thing on the floor over there, you guys see what I mean?" you would just draw a circle around it. It wouldnt even need to stay on during the fights, it just made things so much easier to explain. And I certainly dont look forward to throwing smoke flares around once again...

About AvrE.. I agree with most of what you said, and there are only a couple of times where DBM doesnt tell you everything you need to know. AvrE might be too much, and I can see why Blizz is removing it..

[Malitia]

http://www.tankspot.com/showthread.p...Putricide-Hard

"Players with Plague Sickness are easily visible by the green disease aura that surrounds them."

[Aliena]

And a big ole icon on your raid frames if you have them configured properly!

[Pf0llz0r]

I would like to see another version of AVR (or something similar to it) sometime in the future that let you "paint" out strategies and such before boss fights (which will be disabled once u enter combat), kinda like Doomtroll said.

AVRE is kinda the ultimate retard addon tbh, the stuff it does is easily detected anyway and you dont need an addon telling you "this place is no good, go here instead"
BUT some things where quite usefull tho, For example on sindragosa the circle under you get under your player when get targeted by her iceblock thingy shows both the splash-radius and a timer to tell when it will hit.

I can understand why blizz want to remove this addon but painting possibilitys of AVR could still be very usefull (either an addon or as an future feature which is implemented in the game)

Just show me the cooldown on boss-abilities (read DBM) and Im a happy lock

badly written but at work so cant spend that much time checking my grammar/spelling

[Scyla]

http://www.tankspot.com/showthread.p...Putricide-Hard

"Players with Plague Sickness are easily visible by the green disease aura that surrounds them."

Owned?

Well the effect is not quite as visible as it could be and I find it easier to look at the raidframe (I'm using sRaidFrames, but I guess you can handle it with grid and the corner indicators or something like that I guess) to tell to whom I can pass the plague and announce it on teamspeak.

Again you need external addons to manage this and I don't know how well you can see it in the normal raidframe.

And Lore you are right, the problem is the way Blizzard designs encounters and that goes as far back as Molten Core with the masses of dispells you have to handle over to some kind of threatmeter for Vael (that was ktm if my mind serves me correctly; and yes I know you can handle it without, I also did that) and classcalltimers for Nefarian so that hunters can act the whole fight (again can be done by a stopwatch witch is again an external tool; and quite annoying for the player who is designated for the job).

The bosses made huge leaps in terms of difficulty from classic via BC to WotLK and though did the Standard UI but it never get to a level where it was not sufficant for the encoutners.

Maybe you can handle most of the situations as a damagedealer or a tank with the standard UI but as a heal it can be an nightmare (I'm assuming this because the times when I used the WoWs own UI are over by far) and I guess fights like Anub heroic can't be done by players who use the standard frames.
But even if you can raid sucessfully the standard interface the arrangement of the frames ist terrible and widespread with info displayed to huge that you don't need and info to small that is very important.

So... to wrap things up:

Do you need addons to raid successfully? Yes!
Do Blizzard designs bosses with the knowledge that players use addons? Yes!
Does AVR-E went to far? Definitely yes!
Does Blizzard rethink their interface and boss encounters? They have to!

And it is a shame that AVE (not the encounter part of the addon) is going away because it was (as I pointed out in the AVR news thread) some kind of next level stuff.

[Norfolk]

I definitely agree with what you said. We have been able to kill bosses before without AVRE so it is merely an inconvenience to have it disabled by Blizzard. However it did show to me personally a lot of things in a very convenient way. I have to say by being a melee class there is always something annoying with the camera angle. No matter how far you zoom out I personally can't really find a comfortable distance. Too far and either there is a chandelier or longboat in front of it (yeah a frigging longboat in UP) or for mobs with small hitboxes I end standing too far away to hit them (minor inconvenience again which can be remedied by strutting around a bit). Too close and I can't see anything when everything starting from bandages causes an animation the equivalent of a Hydrogen bomb explosion.

This resulted ultimately in me toning down almost all the visual effects to minimum in order to maintain a clear visibility and greater situational awereness. Not exactly what I had in mind when I upgraded my computer tbh...

AVRE did show a lot of minor things that were a bit uncertain sometimes. For example on Rotface (an easy encounter I give you that) We did not know that the exploding goo picks the location of players when it STARTS to cast instead of finishing it. We used to group up once it started casting. AVRE showed a flaw in this by clearly informing that the danger areas were determined as soon as cast starts rather than when the Big Ooze finishes the cast. We switched to grouping up right before slime stack hits 5.

On Festergut the spore radius is much easier to read and you can spread out a bit more to avoid the malleable goos thrown by PP. Still this was more of a problem with the flashy animations covering the green impact point than the spore radius.

Looking at the Halion fight I can already feel that Blizz has tried to make the ability animations much clearer than before. Everything you need to be aware of is in plain sight. They have improved animations before. Remember Sartharion void zones being red? They were almost impossible to see sometimes in the melee pile.

I sometimes envy the overall view the ranged people get. :P

Overall AVRE helped in many gimmicky abilities to simplify them all into "danger here" with rather good visuals. If an ability has 8 lines of text and lots of conditionals in the sentence it is hard to react to it when you get it the first time. Usually you will just die while reading the description. Of course this is all about learning new bosses. After a while you will know these abilities by heart anyway.

Shame to see the addon go, but we will no doubt manage without it as well. Hopefully Blizzard will make more specific animations and clear visual clues on what is happening in the future. Halion seems like a very good example of what the future will bring.

[Kiezer]

I wouldn't say everyone thinks you're bad a Putricide now, probably just allowing enough time to see a message and pause the movie in time to read it all before it ends

[Holyprincess]

Having never used AVR i cant miss it, but the planing and drawing part would help leaps and bounds to explain what i need my raiders to do. I shut off DBM for old content i dont need it for i like to "listen" to the bosses see if i can do it the old way having never been a raider pre-BC. I dont want my hand held by the game, and the raid leader, yet as a tank i need to know everything going on with out wasting time. Avr the drawing part needs to be aloud in or come back in some form, but not go as far as to hold your hand though the whole fight.

[Knighterrant81]

Lore, I can see where you're coming with Heroic Putricide, but healers have already been dealing with this kind of problem for a long time.

Make your raid frame show who has the plague debuff. Then run to someone who's little box doesn't have the debuff. Can't find the person on the game screen once you've selected their raid frame? Turn on nameplates, and get an addon like tidyplates and set it up to light up like a roman candle on your target.

We have the same problem with this on BQL. Some people just have a really hard time tracking down people who aren't bitten. But former healers turned shadowpriests like me never have a problem. I know exactly who has been bitten and who hasn't, and I can quickly and easily find the person who I want to bite on the game floor. (This is made even easier because my warlock buddy and I always trade bites on the same location on the floor). I've only ever been MC'd once or twice on this fight, and that is usually when someone stealth bites my target when my debuff's low.

Don't lament AVR. Get Grid or some other raid frame addon and set it up to show debuffs.

I suppose Blizzard could build this stuff into the base game so you don't need addons for it though. Sort of like how on NRB you could easily see who has poison or a burning bile debuff - they're either green or on fire!

[Aberen]

It will be said 100 times I'm sure...AVR was bad, but had good ideas in it. Drawing tactics in realworld prefight, good, staying through the whole encounter, hand holding. Visual range circle, good, colored with a countdown timer, hand holding.

I don't mind AVR being broken.

Can I get a perma 5yd range circle pls.

[Scyla]

...
Can I get a perma 5yd range circle pls.

Well, you can get a range circle on the minimap. I'm using Chincilla Minimap and it has this feature. I'm using it for my healing priest so I can see in which direction I have to move when someone is out of range. The downsides are that you have to zoom in so that you cant get a good look on the range and the direction arrow for your char often is in the way especially when the range for the circle is very small (~5 yards).
So not optimal for small distances but maybe an addon author can do something with the minimap but I'm not sure if it is possible to draw something on the minimap with patch 3.3.5.

[Ajire]

Our guild debated at one point whether we we should start to use AVR or not. We chose not to, partly because we expected blizz to pull the plug on it, but more because we felt people need to learn watch out for the encounter mechanics and learn to deal with them - in fact, that is the whole point of having fun - or feeling miserable - with raiding.

And I didn't find it particular easy to use anyway.

[Amamaeth]

Avr also provided a much better way of making strategies for new bosses. Rather than saying something like "5 yards around the edge of the pointy thing on the floor over there, you guys see what I mean?" you would just draw a circle around it. It wouldnt even need to stay on during the fights, it just made things so much easier to explain. And I certainly dont look forward to throwing smoke flares around once again...

About AvrE.. I agree with most of what you said, and there are only a couple of times where DBM doesnt tell you everything you need to know. AvrE might be too much, and I can see why Blizz is removing it..

^This pretty much. I never used AVR or AVRE, but when I heard about it (pretty much the same day they announced it's death) I was looking forward to using it, in a raid leader perspective, to quickly go over raid strategies without too much confusion on raid positioning.

[Coro]

I agree with most everyone else. I am a raid/guild leader and I encouraged a lot of my guildies and friends to get this addon, specifically for the pre-fight explanations. I have a couple of "those guys" that just can't seem to understand my directions as I explain positioning on the boss. Obviously, it gets hard to run around and show where to stand.

For example, blood queen. Before AVR we had to do a little sit and talk (where in the middle someone would shout "LEEERROOYYY JEENKKINNS" naturally) as I explained positioning, but would always *somehow* create confusion. When we got AVR, I was able to draw circles and color code them to show who stands where. This cut down on a lot of frustration from miscommunications or understandings, and made my life as a raid leader a lot easier. I agree with others, it would be fantastic if I could somehow draw or mark spots that would "disappear" in combat. Or, if they would give us more flares that could be created with wotlk mats that would make me happy too.

[Eressëa]

Can't find the person on the game screen once you've selected their raid frame? Turn on nameplates, and get an addon like tidyplates and set it up to light up like a roman candle on your target.

Why didn't I think of this sooner. I even already use tidyplates, but for my dpser. I've always had trouble figuring out where individuals were in the sea of people so I usually would hit them with a penance or PoM. It's time I turn on the targeting option in Vuhdo!

[Knighterrant81]

Why didn't I think of this sooner. I even already use tidyplates, but for my dpser. I've always had trouble figuring out where individuals were in the sea of people so I usually would hit them with a penance or PoM. It's time I turn on the targeting option in Vuhdo!

Yeah I just downloaded the latest version of Tidyplates too, and it does a better job of highlighting your target now, at least, in my opinion.

[Trexokor]

I think what Lore is saying it pretty much spot on.

When it comes to Putricide itself, the little green you get around your character when you have Plague Sickness is very difficult to see, especially zoomed out. There is no animation, it's just a light green cover. As someone said earlier, Northrend Beasts had the right idea. I found myself looking at the game world to see who had Burning Bile and the acid and react that way, because it was very clearly visible at a glance.

Having to set up your Grid or other addon to see who you can pass it to and then select them and /follow or use another addon to see where they are is clunky and frankly quite stupid.

[Redox]

Lore, I can see where you're coming with Heroic Putricide, but healers have already been dealing with this kind of problem for a long time.

Make your raid frame show who has the plague debuff. Then run to someone who's little box doesn't have the debuff. Can't find the person on the game screen once you've selected their raid frame? Turn on nameplates, and get an addon like tidyplates and set it up to light up like a roman candle on your target.

We have the same problem with this on BQL. Some people just have a really hard time tracking down people who aren't bitten. But former healers turned shadowpriests like me never have a problem. I know exactly who has been bitten and who hasn't, and I can quickly and easily find the person who I want to bite on the game floor. (This is made even easier because my warlock buddy and I always trade bites on the same location on the floor). I've only ever been MC'd once or twice on this fight, and that is usually when someone stealth bites my target when my debuff's low.

Don't lament AVR. Get Grid or some other raid frame addon and set it up to show debuffs.

I'm sorry, but using grid is not an applicable replacement for an on screen queue as to who is safe to pass the plague off to. Grid may let me know that XXX is free, but that doesn't mean XXX will be easy to find. It takes to long to correlate who doesn't have the debuff and where they are standing. The other problem is there are so many things you have to look out for that if your staring at grid to see who is safe to pass it off to, you will most likely find yourself running straight into a malleable goo, or some other nonsense that the fight has you avoiding.

I only used AVRE for the disease for H Putricide, everything else was shut off because I hated all the circles and colors blocking my screen. AVRE showed one thing; blizzard is incompetent with letting players know exactly how some mechanics work, and that they really need to work harder at letting us be aware of how some things work. The other thing that needs to be addressed is making sure that these graphical queues are visible even on low settings. I've heard plenty of people in our raids complain that they didn't notice X ability because they have their graphics so low.. that was a shortcoming AVRE fixed, and is something blizzard should keep in mind when they put in there version of it.

[Dawnbreaker]

I think this had the potential to be a good video, but I think Lore missed the boat on why this mod exists and why it is being blocked by Blizzard. The real problem with the ICC encounters is that a full half of them have the "Stand X yards away from others" requirement, either a static spread (Saurfang) or a dynamic one (Sindragosa, BQL). The "obscureness" of spreading out at X yards, which people might argue is "skill", is what is making these encounters difficult. Instead of relying on a DBM/BW range box, we got a circle on the ground, which is much faster visual communication (similar to Lore's point regarding Unbound Plague and who to pass it to).

If you were to back up to Ulduar, arguably the best raid instance of the expansion, AVRe would be nearly useless. Blizzard was already providing visual cues, such as Council circles, Hodir circles, Mimiron Rocket circles. Back up to KT/Sartharion, and void zones have a circle to not stand in before they do damage. What do we have in ICC? None of those, we rely on people with /say over their heads and have to move away from malleable goo and defile. I mean, really, are people happy with the /say mechanic we have to use? That is effectively requiring DBM/BW for certain encounters, and Blizzard is making that requirement.

In short, the encounter philosophy changed such that:
1) it is dangerous to stand together, so the raid must maintain a spread of X yards (varying per encounter)
2) The "fires on the ground" have become invisible, meaning there are no visual cues that tell the raider he/she has been targeted for disaster (unless he's running a boss mod like DBM or BW, which encounter designers seem to now assume, hence mechanics like Goo/Defile).