A situation has been ruining groups in World of Warcraft for months. It would be very easy to fix, if one wanted to.
A single misstep can determine in World of Warcraft whether one can complete a dungeon within the given time frame, or if four group members are a bit annoyed about why one did not avoid the boss’s ability and has wasted everyone’s time.
An unpleasant situation, in which everyone has likely been at least once, but one surely does not want to experience multiple times.
Even more frustrating when one cannot clearly recognize boss abilities as such, because clear boundaries are missing. An annoyance that Blizzard actually fixed – but then deviated from in Midnight.
Swirly effects are good, frontals are a disaster
What is the problem? While World of Warcraft already uses quite clear visual effects to indicate the impact of circular boss abilities (the so-called “swirlies”) in many areas, this is not the case with another type of ability, the “frontals”. These are mostly cone-shaped attacks that originate from the face of the boss (the “front”, hence the name).
These abilities often do not have clearly recognizable animations that represent the hit area. The display is without sharp edges, making it difficult to determine whether one is already safe or about to get hit by the flame breath.
What abilities are affected? The colleagues from wowhead have listed a number of abilities where the issue occurs particularly drastically and which have likely destroyed more than one group:
- Lightedict and Voidedict at the raid boss Belo’ren (March on Quel’danas).
- Terrifying breath at Vael’gor and Ezzorak (The Voidspire).
- Lucifarn’s beacon from Persistent Reflection (Nexus Point Xenas).
- The light beams at Araknath (Sky Needle).
- Fire breath at Twilight Ember (Tower of the Windrunner).
What is the solution? The solution to the problem is surprisingly simple, as Blizzard had already introduced it in “The War Within”. At that time, the community complained that it was often not clear where abilities actually hit, and whether one’s character was safe. As a consequence, in the last seasons of the previous expansion, great care was taken to ensure that all abilities had clear glowing boundaries. Something that was explicitly praised by the community.
Why this is no longer the case in Midnight, one can only speculate. However, it is possible that a different team worked on Midnight – and even very likely. Because in several interviews, it has already been confirmed that different teams are working on several expansions. Therefore, it seems plausible that not all insights from one expansion automatically carry over to the next.
Cortyn says: Honestly, I find it quite curious that such an obvious design flaw has been present in the game for over 3 months and has not been adjusted in the first updates. After all, it was the developers’ declared goal that abilities should be visually recognizable, so that these frustrating moments, where one believes to evade an ability only to be hit directly, do not occur anymore.
Especially in an era of World of Warcraft, where “Mythic+” is a core pillar of the endgame, and a single mistake of this kind can already lead to the failure of the dungeon, such a problem should be fixed quickly. Therefore, I can only hope that the developers will address this issue by patch 12.1 – because in the upcoming update 12.0.7 it has not yet been fixed.
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