Paragon downs Heroic LK 25

[Cephius]

I don't have a problem with that, it's more creative thinking than an exploit. Blizzard has never said adjusting buffs mid-fight was somehow against the rules. The fact they used it to best a game mechanic is irrelevant, if we're allowed to buff/cancel buff/rebuff during any fight, then you can't cry foul when it's used as a strategy. I see this as no different than popping frost resist flasks or something.

It's certainly a lot "cleaner" than having the platform rebuilt and basically nullifying one of his entire phases. That guy is right though, why do these top EU guilds always have something fishy going on with their world firsts

[Jodwahh]

Because europeans can't be trusted! Trust me on this, I'm european.



Whut

[Plow]

I don't have a problem with that, it's more creative thinking than an exploit. Blizzard has never said adjusting buffs mid-fight was somehow against the rules. The fact they used it to best a game mechanic is irrelevant, if we're allowed to buff/cancel buff/rebuff during any fight, then you can't cry foul when it's used as a strategy. I see this as no different than popping frost resist flasks or something.

It's certainly a lot "cleaner" than having the platform rebuilt and basically nullifying one of his entire phases. That guy is right though, why do these top EU guilds always have something fishy going on with their world firsts

My conclusion is that I dunno if they did it or not, but if they did, fuck em.


It's not exactly creative thinking.

Here's what you have:

An ability which hits everyone in the raid for X amount of damage. Said ability leaves a dot.

Said dot multiplies over time, becoming fatal if not handled immediately.

Said dot is removed by players reaching 90% of their total health.

The usage of removing HP buffs in order to reach 90% without actually requiring any healing.

Further, the usage of buff scrolls, which were *NOT* intended to save mana, but to be used when the proper buff is not available, but used *EN MASSE* purely for the sake of preventing the mana usage that would be required to pull off this strategy otherwise.

Without the buff scrolls, this would not be possible, as you'd be draining FAR too much mana rebuffing everything every time infest comes.


To be quite honest... it's a whole lot more blatant than the rebuilding exploit. At least with the rebuilding thing, they had to kind of stumble across it, and it could legitimately occur through someone just happening to use the bombs (I leveled engi finally on my mage, I'd be stupid *not* to be using them on LK).


If they did this, they specifically set it up, and used unintended side-effects of certain mechanics to... dun dun dun...

Do exactly what Ensidia did... eliminate one of the biggest challenges in the fight through cheese methods. Thus allowing them to take the entire first *TWO* phases much more lightly, and even change their raid comp to allow them to beat the enrage.


Anyway, in before buff scrolls can't be used in combat anymore.


Meh, as someone that will never touch LK heroic (even on 10 man probably, I think I'm done with WoW permanently now), I'm just giving a non-butthurt neutral point of view here. I dunno if they did it or not, but if they did, I certainly don't see it as an acceptable form of "Creative use of game mechanics." If they didn't, more power to em!

[[Cookies]]

The evidence of Paragon's exploits is a single screenshot with the buff timer at 59 mins when the LK doesn't even use Infest in p3 (correct me if I'm wrong). Paragon exploiting this (if it even works, I can't test it myself) is unlikely at best. If they had, I expect they'd be banned by now. But I guess we'll see when they release their video.

[Norellicus]

Because it's not like someone could have died and they rebuffed them after raise, nooo

Not picking on you of course Cookies, it's just funny logic.

[Arvin]

all that shit isn't an exploit lol

[Shenmue]

Once the 10% buff kicks in most guilds will have everything down. I wonder if there is an achievement for Heroic LK with no buff.

[Eversor]

I dont know if I am not reading into this enough but here is how I am taking it....

You take dmg for each buff you have on when the move is used. So they remove their buffs for the move, and reapply using scrolls instead in order to dodge the dmg you take from the move and to conserve the mp to reapply the buffs.

I really dont see how this is an exploit compared to the saronite bomb thing. I chalk this up to a good strategy to get around a major issue. Compared to using bombs to "damage" the floor so that it doesnt fall, I just dont see the comparison.

Then again, I try to avoid all 10/25 man stuff as I know thats the slippery slope that will have me in a schedule to play, rather than whenever the fuck I want to.

[Jodwahh]

If not then there should be.

[Arvin]

If anybody thinks this is an exploit and they should be banned, then 95% of the raiding population should be banned for utilizing the DBM utility to automatically click off fort and commanding when you get into phase 3 anub'arak (25togc). same logic, they just don't have an add-on doing it for them.

[aurik]

I dont know if I am not reading into this enough but here is how I am taking it....

You take dmg for each buff you have on when the move is used. So they remove their buffs for the move, and reapply using scrolls instead in order to dodge the dmg you take from the move and to conserve the mp to reapply the buffs.

Nah, that's not it.

The main issue to this fight is that the enrage timer is very unforgiving. You also pretty much require 2 tanks. So, once you have only 2 tanks, the only way to crank up the DPS is to drop healers for DPS.

The ability does a static amount of shadow damage, and then applies a shadow bleed which does increasing damage and can only be remedied by bringing the player above 90% health. Now, there's 2 ways to do this: you can raise his current health until it exceeds 90%, or you can lower his maximum health until his current health is above 90%.

Bringing all 25 players' life up becomes almost impossible as you drop healers, especially since he hits like a truck so you need dedicated healers on the tank. The alternative, lowering the players maximum health, can actually be done with no healer intervention (and in fact, off the GCD entirely) with a single button press.

Using massive amounts of runescrolls / drums / etc just eliminates the mana cost which is actually not that big of a deal. Recasting GotW is like 1k mana, and you only need to do it every ~30 seconds, probably less than 20 times total per fight when you consider there's no infest in the transitions or in the vile spirit phase--some moonkins already use GotW in their rotation to proc Omen of Doom.

[aurik]

If anybody thinks this is an exploit and they should be banned, then 95% of the raiding population should be banned for utilizing the DBM utility to automatically click off fort and commanding when you get into phase 3 anub'arak (25togc). same logic, they just don't have an add-on doing it for them.

Writing an addon to do this would be pretty trivial!

(It's still not an "exploit", just taking advantage of blizzard's short-sightedness...it's not any different in impact to using disc priest shield spam to negate 95% of infest applications in normal LK10/25)

[Tulun]

yeah it sort of is... decent guilds will probably be downing most of ICC heroic by 15-20%, and hardcore-ish guilds will be farming LK by then.

Pugs will probably be clearing a decent amount of heroic icc25man by 30% (I know some pugs do heroic 10/25man airship battle on my server atm)

I like what Blizzard does.. but I don't get this. Leave a boss be. If people want to kill him later at 85 or whatever, let em do that.

Don't make it pussy easy because some people can't beat it... if it requires a 5% buff for the best guilds to beat it, leave it at that (and at 0, if it was really basically impossible, than sure slightly readjust it...).

Oh well, I guess.

[Cephius]

Yeah, again, I'm just not seeing how this is an exploit. It's a clever way of making it so you don't have to heal infest. It's a lot different than finding out you can rebuild a platform after it's destroyed (something clearly not supposed to happen) and using that advantage to get a world first.

Again, if clicking off buffs and reapplying when convenient is against the ToS then all of us are guilty of it. I guess me clicking off Righteous Fury after a tank swap on Festergut so I don't re-grab aggro is an exploit too? I understand it's not the same, but still, where is the line drawn exactly?

[Eversor]

Nah, that's not it.

The main issue to this fight is that the enrage timer is very unforgiving. You also pretty much require 2 tanks. So, once you have only 2 tanks, the only way to crank up the DPS is to drop healers for DPS.

The ability does a static amount of shadow damage, and then applies a shadow bleed which does increasing damage and can only be remedied by bringing the player above 90% health. Now, there's 2 ways to do this: you can raise his current health until it exceeds 90%, or you can lower his maximum health until his current health is above 90%.

Bringing all 25 players' life up becomes almost impossible as you drop healers, especially since he hits like a truck so you need dedicated healers on the tank. The alternative, lowering the players maximum health, can actually be done with no healer intervention (and in fact, off the GCD entirely) with a single button press.

Using massive amounts of runescrolls / drums / etc just eliminates the mana cost which is actually not that big of a deal. Recasting GotW is like 1k mana, and you only need to do it every ~30 seconds, probably less than 20 times total per fight when you consider there's no infest in the transitions or in the vile spirit phase--some moonkins already use GotW in their rotation to proc Omen of Doom.

Thanks for the clarification. So rather than the number of buffs, they use buffs to jack their HP high and once infest hits, they drop the buffs so they go back to 90% hp and lose infest? Either way, I still wouldnt call that an exploit, but a rather ingenious plan to stop the dmg. And the use of items to get back to where they were, smart thinking.

[aurik]

At 0%, he probably would have eventually died, but not until everyone was absolutely completely kitted with 277s and a few Shadowmourne as well, and some luck with val'kyr targeting warlocks. As it was it took them 8? weeks to gear up enough kill him at 5%.

[Plow]

Yeah, again, I'm just not seeing how this is an exploit. It's a clever way of making it so you don't have to heal infest. It's a lot different than finding out you can rebuild a platform after it's destroyed (something clearly not supposed to happen) and using that advantage to get a world first.

Again, if clicking off buffs and reapplying when convenient is against the ToS then all of us are guilty of it. I guess me clicking off Righteous Fury after a tank swap on Festergut so I don't re-grab aggro is an exploit too? I understand it's not the same, but still, where is the line drawn exactly?

You don't understand the effect of infest on this fight, apparently.

This is quite possibly a *bigger* deal than the valks. The valks we know for a fact they could do.

This makes a mathematical impossibility doable.


I.E. you mathematically cannot heal 25 people to 90%+ after a big hit with a major dot ticking with 5 people. Currently, the main thing holding the highest guilds back is that they can't mathematically beat the enrage with enough healers to cover the infest.


Ensidia used bombs to allow them to ignore an aspect of the fight that really isn't an issue. They got what they deserved (bans) as a result of being stupid and lazy.

Paragon apparently used a single no-gcd button with a 2nd button on whoever had the stacks of scrolls to completely eliminate one of the biggest issues currently causing failure in this fight.


And after thinking about it a bit... the fact that they have no resto druids, which was the first thing I noticed... well, that pretty much says it all right there.

They have 1 holy priest and no resto druids in a fight that involves one of the most intense aoe healing abilities in the game, and is used every 20-30 seconds.

I'm aware that "not intended" doesn't necessarily mean exploit, but you guys are severely underestimating how huge this is, and I don't have to point out how obviously unintended it is.

[Plow]

I'll just leave it at this:

Watch how fast the kills start rolling in. That will tell us how big of a deal it is or is not.

[Cephius]

You don't understand the effect of infest on this fight, apparently.

This is quite possibly a *bigger* deal than the valks. The valks we know for a fact they could do.

This makes a mathematical impossibility doable.


I.E. you mathematically cannot heal 25 people to 90%+ after a big hit with a major dot ticking with 5 people. Currently, the main thing holding the highest guilds back is that they can't mathematically beat the enrage with enough healers to cover the infest.


Ensidia used bombs to allow them to ignore an aspect of the fight that really isn't an issue. They got what they deserved (bans) as a result of being stupid and lazy.

Paragon apparently used a single no-gcd button with a 2nd button on whoever had the stacks of scrolls to completely eliminate one of the biggest issues currently causing failure in this fight.


And after thinking about it a bit... the fact that they have no resto druids, which was the first thing I noticed... well, that pretty much says it all right there.

They have 1 holy priest and no resto druids in a fight that involves one of the most intense aoe healing abilities in the game, and is used every 20-30 seconds.

I'm aware that "not intended" doesn't necessarily mean exploit, but you guys are severely underestimating how huge this is, and I don't have to point out how obviously unintended it is.

I haven't fought Lich King, if that's what you're getting at. But I do think I understand how big of a deal it is completely. I also understand your viewpoint and agree with it, to a point. Specifically how they engineered this instead of just stumbling upon something like Ensidia did.

My point is, how is Blizzard supposed to say that clicking off buffs and using scrolls circumvents the mechanics of the game? Like I said, people click off and reapply buffs all the time. Someone mentioned how you click off stamina buffs on Anub so he can't leech as much. Again, I ask, where exactly is the line drawn?

[Plow]

Pretty much have to trust that to judgment calls by the devs, really. I think WoW's are pretty damn good with that stuff. It's not like they permabanned random people that happened to be in the instance where Ensidia got their kill at some point during the week. *coughcough* ;p