The last raid boss in WoW: Midnight is so tough that the pros are desperately building addons before Blizzard can ban them.
With the Midnight expansion of World of Warcraft, Blizzard has started a fight – the fight against interface addons. Strong features like WeakAuras should no longer exist. The goal: WoW should only provide everything you need to play successfully in its basic setup. Cosmetic adjustments still exist, but gameplay advantages have been banned.
But now the professional guilds realize: You can’t do without these addons. Not because the players are too weak, but because the final boss is so incredibly tough that you have almost no chance without addons.
Which fight requires addons? The final boss fight is “Dawn of Midnight”, the fight against the dark Naaru L’ura at the Sunwell. While the fight is still quite simple on normal difficulty, it becomes infinitely more complicated on heroic and mythical. So complicated that the professional guilds create their own addons to somehow solve the fight.
Mechanics are so challenging that failure is guaranteed
Which mechanics are the problem? Essentially, there are two mechanics that demand too much from the pros: There is a phase where you have to remember the sequence of briefly appearing symbols. Subsequently, characters are marked with these symbols and must line up in the correct order to be touched by a beam in succession.
On normal and heroic, this is still quite simple. However, at mythical difficulty, you only see part of the symbols. So it may happen that someone only sees the sequence of the 3rd and 5th symbol, while another player sees the 1st and 4th symbol. Since each symbol only lights up for about 1.5 seconds, you must coordinate extremely quickly with the entire group to figure out the sequence.
No wonder that the professional guilds have already developed an addon here, where they can enter the sequence to make it visible to everyone.
The second mechanic concerns the three matrices that L’ura summons in the fight. These rotate around the boss and each need to be interrupted 5 times, with a spell that has only 1.5 seconds of casting time. After one spell is interrupted, the next spell begins immediately. If even one of these spells goes through, it is highly likely to result in an immediate wipe.
The matrices continuously rotate around the boss and with the limited number of interrupts, that means: Absolutely everyone must perform their kick at exactly the right moment.
Both mentioned mechanics would be fine on their own. If one could fully focus on the respective mechanic, it would probably still be playable by the whole group just barely.
The problem, however, is that these complicated mechanics do not exist in a vacuum. Because while solving them, you also have to deal maximum damage and avoid other mechanics – which are lethal with the slightest mistake.
That is so much mental work that it is nearly impossible to manage simultaneously, at least not over a long period repeatedly. But that is exactly what is required in a World First Race, that you try on the same boss over and over again for many hours.
What is Blizzard doing? The developers at Blizzard keep rolling out small hotfixes to further restrict addon functionalities. So parts of the addon solutions of the professional guilds are already not working anymore. At the same time, however, it seems they have also realized that the mechanics were simply unsolvable otherwise. Because Blizzard has also ensured that the matrices are now part of the boss unit frames – allowing them to be targeted more easily, either directly in the interface or with macros.
Cortyn says: Honestly, I am quite surprised by the fight against L’ura on mythical difficulty. Because here it seems that Blizzard has deviated from all the principles they had previously established. Mechanics are clearly designed in such a way that it is virtually impossible to react correctly without specialized interface addons. While you can still solve the issue of remembering the runes with (very fast and very precise) communication, this is fundamentally impossible with the “Elimination” attack.
It is a bit of a shame that in the first “Race to World First” in Midnight, it ultimately comes back to a large extent to who can create a good addon that simplifies the mechanics. But honestly, one must say: Without such addons, these mechanics are not realistically and reliably playable. They are far above the target difficulty.
Another problem concerns the tanks in World of Warcraft, as they are simply too weak. But Blizzard has already announced improvements: As of Wednesday, most tanks are supposed to be stronger again and should not fall over so easily.
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