C'Thun: Uberguilds reveal details...

[Hedon]

In an unprecedented move members of "very" well known guilds such as:

Elitist Jerks;
Death and Taxes;
Afterlife;
Ascent;
Immortality;

et al.

began to publicly discuss C'Thun Strategies after 1,5 month of futile attempts on said boss. Considering that this is still worldwide unbeaten content this is more than unusual.

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.a...ns&T=458457&P=2

Dares's post above basically nails it completely. I don't agree that Phase 1 needs to be toned down, honestly -- on our better days, we'd consistently get to phase 2 in about 6 minutes, with 38-39 alive (40 if we wanted to use battle rezzes), and good mana. It's fine. In theory there are unfair and unlucky ways to die in phase 1. In practice those "unlucky" things seem to happen to some people a whole lot more than others, and never happen at all to still others.

Anyway, phase 2. Basically, I don't think many people really care much about "trade secrets" anymore. I just want to see C'Thun killed, and I don't really care remotely as much as I once did if we're the first to do it. Some further insight into C'Thun phase 2:

Every 30 seconds, 8 small eye tentacles pop up, spread throughout the room. They immediately begin mind flaying a random target in the room for 750/second, unresistable. Each has 2300 hp. If all 8 don't die within a couple of seconds of spawning, people are taking some serious damage. On two separate 40-second timers, C'Thun summons two types of giant tentacles. He randomly targets players and summons the tentacles under them. Anyone with a spawn beneath them, or near that spawn, takes 3k-4k damage and goes flying across the room. Both types of tentacles melee for >1.5k on a t2-geared tank. They hurt. Giant Claws thrash, and will one-shot anyone who is not a tank. If untanked, they will burrow and reemerge beneath healers, doing that fun 3k-4k damage + knockback effect. This means a dead healer. The other type of tentacle is a Giant Eye, which repeatedly uses the same Eye Beam attack that the Eye of C'Thun uses in Phase 1. The Claws have >90k hp, and the Eyes have ~40k. There is no cap on the number of Giant Tentacles that can be alive at once. We've seen 5 Claws and 2 Eyes at the same time, which is fun, let me tell you. Throughout this all, every 10 seconds, C'Thun eats a player, teleporting them into his stomach, where they have other hazards to deal with.

Basically, over the course of every 60 second period, the encounter requires your raid to do roughly 230k damage in order to keep up with the various spawns. Now, a 40-man raid can certainly accomplish that on a single target. But when some people are in C'Thun's stomach, and the targets of that DPS are spread throughout the room, and when clustering at all (i.e., to melee burn down a specific tentacle) means that you get destroyed by a spawning tentacle or a jumping eye beam, the end result is simply impossible.

I would love for someone to prove me wrong.

Been tried. Basically, anything you might think of, it's been tried. After a couple of weeks of beating our heads against phase 2 head-on, we came to the conclusion that there had to be some gimmick because the fight was impossible otherwise. We tried basically everything, and if we didn't, I can guarantee you that one of the hundreds of other creative tacticians working on this fight across multiple continents did.

There's also a rather insightful thread on the EJ forums:

http://forums.elitistjerks.com/index.php...=6456&st=0


and a rather angry one on the DnT forums:

http://www.dtguild.com/forum/showthread.ph...55&page=1&pp=10


as well as video snippet of the EJs C'thun attempts:

http://files.filefront.com/funwithtentacle...;/fileinfo.html

[Arnulf]

http://forums.elitistjerks.com/index.php...=6456&st=0
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There are unspeakable depths I have not gazed into yet... and after reading this, I'm afraid. I'm very afraid.

[Bolty]

I can't wait to wipe to this guy, even though I know that by the time I get to see him he'll be nerfed from his current power. Blizzard's modus operandi has clearly been established; they make raid bosses insanely hard to beat at the beginning to give the uberguilds something to compete over, and as time goes on they make the encounters easier so that they're more accessible to casuals.

The whole "this is impossible" thing does sound like what everyone said about Onyxia though. Until she got beat. And I remember other things said, like "there's got to be some trick to beating her" and people theorizing about the whelp pits.

C'Thun IS endgame at the moment. You beat C'Thun, you're the bomb. So Blizzard's making it godlike to beat. Have they gone too far, making it TOO powerful? We'll see if someone can beat it before a nerf...

-Bolty

[ima_nerd]

I could swear he'd been downed. A guild on Eredor (sp?) I thought had done it and then a few hours later on my server, Frostmane, a Horde guild called Kinetic downed him. Perhaps it was just an elaborate ruse.

[Skandranon]

I could swear he'd been downed. A guild on Eredor (sp?) I thought had done it and then a few hours later on my server, Frostmane, a Horde guild called Kinetic downed him. Perhaps it was just an elaborate ruse.
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People have been posting fake "C'thun down!" messages on Raids and Dungeons every day; what you saw was most likely a small-scale derivation. It's simply impossible to get him down below low-90s in Phase 2 at the moment.

[ima_nerd]

People have been posting fake "C'thun down!" messages on Raids and Dungeons every day; what you saw was most likely a small-scale derivation.  It's simply impossible to get him down below low-90s in Phase 2 at the moment.
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Rawr, damn them. For a week, I was actually proud of the Horde on my server :(

[nobbie]

I could swear he'd been downed. A guild on Eredor (sp?) I thought had done it and then a few hours later on my server, Frostmane, a Horde guild called Kinetic downed him. Perhaps it was just an elaborate ruse.
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If you're talking about the German "Eredar" PvP server, then no, C'Thun is not yet down there. The guild that is currently working on him - Îlluminati - has not yet announced a C'Thun kill.

[oldmandennis]

At the end 6 of the EJ forum post, somebody mentions that there is a possibility that Ouro has something to do with the encounter. It seems like it would be more productive to work on him, rather then make angsty posts and fequit.

Of course I don't know anything for sure.

How was it decided Ouro was optional? And how close are people to bagging him? There are no posts I can find about him on the R&D forum, other then a couple of people speculating that he is a part of the C'Thun kill.

From reading those threads, there are apparently trapped dragons right before C'Thun. And those dragons say something like "If you freed us before C'thun dies, we will help destroy him". I know I'd check Ouro for some item that could free them, if progress on Ouro is possible and C'thun is apparently impossible at the moment.

[lemekim]

At the end 6 of the EJ forum post, somebody mentions that there is a possibility that Ouro has something to do with the encounter.  It seems like it would be more productive to work on him, rather then make angsty posts and fequit.

Of course I don't know anything for sure.

How was it decided Ouro was optional?  And how close are people to bagging him?  There are no posts I can find about him on the R&D forum, other then a couple of people speculating that he is a part of the C'Thun kill.

From reading those threads, there are apparently trapped dragons right before C'Thun.  And those dragons say something like "If you freed us before C'thun dies, we will help destroy him".  I know I'd check Ouro for some item that could free them, if progress on Ouro is possible and C'thun is apparently impossible at the moment.
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I think Tigole (not sure who exactly) was the one who specifically stated that Ouro and some other bosses were optional.

Of course, that might not be exactly true, and there might be something on Ouro that helps with C'Thun... But there is the small problem if killing Ouro. Apparently Ouro gains Enrage of sorts at 20%, and makes short work of the Raid (something along the lines of unresistable boulders that hit for 6k). So while most people complain about C'Thun, it seems Ouro is untuned as well, which makes that suggestion fairly... useless.

[Zarathustra]

"Optional" can be misleading. The priests in ZG are "optional" in the sense that you don't NEED to kill them in order to progress through the instance. But Hakkar will be tougher for it.

[Skandranon]

Squeaky wheel gets the grease.

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.a...mp=1#post463195

In two days, the discussion has spiralled to the point where Blizzard felt they had to fix the encounter, which just shows how much "testing" they'd put into the encounter before.

[Hedon]

There was an interesting theory on how Blizzard intially tests and tunes raid content in the aforementioned EJ Thread:

Contrary to popular belief, they did have an internal testing team for BWL, and those people killed every boss save Nefarian (who was bugged on release of BWL, something about never going into phase 2). They were all given full tier2 gear for testing purposes to my knowledge. My guess is that those testers found the bosses somewhat challenging even after being given a detailed strat and good gear, so Blizzard left it at that. Their team though probably had nowhere near the experience (I know one of the testers had very little MC gear at the time he did BWL testing) or teamwork that guilds that have been raiding together for years have, and we saw Fury blow through it all in one day. Tigole was put under the gun and probably just made drastic changes to make these fights harder than they should have been just to prevent other guilds from blowing through it as well, then worked it down from there.

If AQ40 was tested using the same process, I'm assuming their testers actually did kill C'Thun and Ouro in their old forums, but then Tigole and Co turned them up that extra notch to account for the skill/coordination of long running end-game raiding guilds prior to live release.

This would explain much, what we're seeing today. The original version of C'thun was buffed by an arbitrary amount to make him a challenge to the top guilds.
Remember that during the test server period for AQ, guilds only just came up to the Twin Emps and during those testing many tweeks have been made to these encounters and these were also the encounters that worked more or less fine upon release. C'thun, Ouro and Viscidous never got the chance to receive Test Server attention and were thus only arbitrary balanced. It is up to the top guilds to finalize the balance on the live servers.

This also explains while the 20 man raid instances ZG and AQ20 had seen a relatively smooth release. They were meant not to be too difficult, and so there was no need to arbitrary buff them, to provide a challenge to the top tier gaming crowd.

[Arnulf]

I put my betting money on this as the real reason:

As someone that over the past 8 years has worked QA on over 10 shipped titles, and as a Sofware Engineer on 3 shipped titles, I can tell you from my experience that probably about 99.99% of the bugs that make it into a shipped game are found by QA; they just aren't fixed for various reasons including "it's not severe enough", "the fix is too high risk", or my personal favourite "very few people will encounter this bug (but those that do will be severely #$%&ed by it)". [...]

Direct link.

There are other interesting and somewhat contrary theories. Such as that something internal at Blizz is blocking them to do the final tweaking on Ahn'Qiraj. The whole dungeon has seen tuning and tweaking up until the Twin Emperors. Then it mysteriously stopped. Assumptions go for manpower is withdrawn to work on the expansion, or E3 is looming ahead and they (Blizz) want to complete Naxxramas in time to deliver a good show.

[nobbie]

C'Thun IS endgame at the moment.  You beat C'Thun, you're the bomb.  So Blizzard's making it godlike to beat.  Have they gone too far, making it TOO powerful?  We'll see if someone can beat it before a nerf...

It looks they've gone too far --> ;)

Ouro has been hotfixed so his Quake effects deal significantly less damage.

We have also hotfixed the following changes to the C’thun encounter in Ahn’Qiraj:

    * Lowered the hit points of both Giant Claw Tentacles and Giant Eye Tentacles.
    * Decreased the damage caused by Ground Rupture, and made the effect resistable.
    * Significantly decreased the melee damage done by Giant Eye Tentacles.

In the 1.10.1 patch, we also changed the way that C’thun identifies who is in his stomach. The faction changing debuff that was previously applied will no longer appear, but C’thun’s tentacles should not spawn in the stomach, nor should a player in the stomach be the target of C’thun’s Eye Beam.

The combination of these changes should give players more time to damage C'thun instead of dealing with tentacles, and see fewer "unavoidable, random" deaths occur due to Ground Rupture effects.