Thursday, June 13, 2013

World of Warcraft: Brawler's Guild

One of the features they added in the first big content patch this expansion was the Brawler's Guild. This is basically a series of solo boss fights in a room under the tram between Stormwind and Ironforge. It's got a pretty neat atmosphere as an underground fight club style thing. Some of the fights I've done so far have neat twists to them, so it's a lot like I get all the things I liked about raiding with none of the bad parts!

Well, I lied. There is one bad part... Mechanics which punish melee characters. I've beaten 25 fights so far, and am stuck on fight 26. The fight is certainly interesting. It's got a boss who starts off immune to damage, and who can cast two spells. The first summons an add, the second hits for a ton of damage but can be interrupted. When you kill the add the boss becomes vulnerable to damage for a short period of time. So you need to manage interrupting the boss with alternating who you're damaging based on when the boss is immune.

Oh, and the adds have a significantly larger than normal attack range. And they melee for 175% of my max health. You can stun the adds by looking at them, ala the ghosts from Mario. But the stun takes some time before it registers. So if you're a melee character and you see the ghost spawn and you run at it to kill it, you die. Because his range is larger than yours. So instead you need to run up to a medium range and stand still. Wait for your stun to resolve. Then attack. Oh, and my interrupt is melee ranged, so if I do this I can't interrupt the big damage spell he's going to cast. The adds build up faster than you want to kill them, but you can stun them all if you can get them into a line.

All of these things are significantly easier for ranged attackers. I feel like the fight is winnable for me, if I play perfectly. But that if I was a warlock or a hunter that it would comparatively trivial. I haven't played perfectly yet, though. It doesn't help that I have a 10 minute cooldown to hit that I want to wait for. Part of me wants to wait until I get a better weapon to try this fight. Part of me wants to keep trying every 10 minutes until I win. And part of me wants to glitch the fight (sometimes you can have two people fighting two bosses and if either boss dies you both win).

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