Gratulation to Elysium but disappointed of Lucrezia

[HorseBoots]

It's kinda cute reading all these 'it's not legit posts' when I'm pretty sure you've all done the above strat which was never intended either.

Grats to those who have all cleared A4S and screw all those 'it's not legit' whiners who are probably still stuck on Faust.

There's a pretty big difference between exploiting the game engine and exploiting server net-code. The divebomb pit was exploiting a fault with the effective range on Twintania's targeting. Line of Sighting Rafflesia was exploiting the way her pull and consume targeted the player (Which was pretty much just an invisible pizza slice you walked through.) T2 enrage method was exploiting a bad enrage mechanic.

So what's the difference between these exploits and A4S Sac method?

All of these exploits were created due to oversights in the programming of the mechanic, by an actual person.

I've been playing MMOs in a hardcore fashion for over 8+ years now. Not once have I ever discovered a mechanic to a fight where a player is expected to take a major hit after reaching 0 HP and had someone call that "working as intended." This goes way beyond "Outsmarting the game programmer."

[JayCommon]

I've been playing MMOs in a hardcore fashion for over 8+ years now. Not once have I ever discovered a mechanic to a fight where a player is expected to take a major hit after reaching 0 HP and had someone call that "working as intended." This goes way beyond "Outsmarting the game programmer."

You can even cut the "MMO" nonsense completely out of that statement and it should still be true for any online game regardless of platform. To actually defend this as the legitimate way the developers intended people to deal with this mechanic is downright ludicrous. I can't believe that anyone in their right mind would actually defend this as the "intended" way...

However, the problem with this thread in general (other than the fact of it's obvious trolling intents) is that both groups are technically right. Both of these statements are equally true:

1) Using server delay tricks based on the tick timer was not the intended way the developers of this content wanted people to complete the mechanics. If it was, I would be astonished to say the least.
2) Yoshi has already congratulated both Elysium and Lucrezia for completing the final turn of Alex Savage.

So, what can we take from this?

Regardless of whether or not this was an intended way to deal with the mechanic, it has been publicly acknowledged by the lead developer of the game as a quality win. SE has the battle log data for these fights, they would have known how both groups beat this boss before any videos were ever posted. He never would have given credit to these groups if they felt this was against their ToS. Players using this to their advantage may be considered exploiting, but it's impossible for the OP to try and dis-credit anyone's clear when the creator of this game credited them already. Hence, all the sodium and sugar references.

Yeah...I feel like SE will just make sure raid animations that apply damage aren't long and take whatever measures they can in the future to make sure this cheese isn't possible again. Turn 2 Enrage has been brought up multiple times from this thread, along with your other two references. Those should be the sole representative as to learning what may happen here, imo. Turn 2 was not "fixed", but how many hard enrages have we been able to live through since BCoB? The Twin pit wasn't "fixed", but how many non-circular arenas (my god I know!!! A1 is a rectangle....) with different elevation have we fought in since BCoB? LoS'ing Rafflesia wasn't "fixed", but Savage SCoB was dropped and you were specifically not able to cheese Devour in that way any longer. Line of Sighting any type of mechanic in a raid since then has not been possible, either (nothing comes to mind anyway, correct me if I'm wrong).

So there really isn't much point in the two sides bickering over trivialities. Yoshi said Congrats! That's really all that matters. I would put money on this never happening again in a raid setting, though.


And people wonder why there are so many DPS checks in this game. If someone finds a way to cheese a DPS check, you can get rid of them forever!!

[Atmora]

What I don't think a lot if people get is that almost any good player is capable of and will utilize slide casting to avoid damage while dpsing, as well as count the server ticks to walk in and out of aoe without harm, these both work on the same principle as was used in the sac strat and we can't exactly ban what is considered vital knowledge already for raiding.

[Duelle]

Yeah...I feel like SE will just make sure raid animations that apply damage aren't long and take whatever measures they can in the future to make sure this cheese isn't possible again. Turn 2 Enrage has been brought up multiple times from this thread, along with your other two references. Those should be the sole representative as to learning what may happen here, imo. Turn 2 was not "fixed", but how many hard enrages have we been able to live through since BCoB? The Twin pit wasn't "fixed", but how many non-circular arenas (my god I know!!! A1 is a rectangle....) with different elevation have we fought in since BCoB? LoS'ing Rafflesia wasn't "fixed", but Savage SCoB was dropped and you were specifically not able to cheese Devour in that way any longer. Line of Sighting any type of mechanic in a raid since then has not been possible, either (nothing comes to mind anyway, correct me if I'm wrong).

So there really isn't much point in the two sides bickering over trivialities. Yoshi said Congrats! That's really all that matters. I would put money on this never happening again in a raid setting, though.

Unsurprisingly, inaction has set a terrible precedent. By that logic, the group that got world first on heroic Lich King for using the grenade exploit should have been left alone instead of taken to task for exploiting their way to a world first. That doesn't promote a healthy raiding environment, since it becomes less about execution of mechanics and more about what exploits or weaknesses in the programming/netcode can be found to give you an edge. That's NOT a good thing.

[JayCommon]

Unsurprisingly, inaction has set a terrible precedent. By that logic, the group that got world first on heroic Lich King for using the grenade exploit should have been left alone instead of taken to task for exploiting their way to a world first. That doesn't promote a healthy raiding environment, since it becomes less about execution of mechanics and more about what exploits or weaknesses in the programming/netcode can be found to give you an edge. That's NOT a good thing.

I completely and 100% agree with you. I didn't set the precedents, I only know how to observe. I am a realist. The paragraph you quoted of mine isn't necessarily what I want to have happen, it's what 2+ years of playing this game has caused me to deduce will happen. And 70+ responses of people bickering back and forth over something that is obviously not going to be changed is utterly pointless. This thread was nothing more than troll bait and, also unsurprisingly, a hefty number of people on this site sunk their teeth in (admittedly, myself included).

I never played WoW longer than a trial demo so the extent of your grenade exploit reference falls on deaf ears. I know that when teams blatantly broke Twintania in early days, those teams got banned(?...punished if not but I think the ban was permanent?) and they completely took the fight out of the game for weeks to fix the exploit. This didn't happen in A4N. Why it didn't happen is irrelevant. The inaction you speak of has a history in this game, as I outlined in my quoted post. That's really all I was getting at.

Pretty soon our raid DPS checks will be measured in decimals, so if you had to itch your nose randomly and clipped .3 seconds off a GCD then you fail the check. I don't mind DPS checks, but this game goes far overboard with them and it seems like they do it because it's the only damn thing people can't break without outright cheating. That's extremely discouraging...

[Kuwagami]

Pretty soon our raid DPS checks will be measured in decimals, so if you had to itch your nose randomly and clipped .3 seconds off a GCD then you fail the check. I don't mind DPS checks, but this game goes far overboard with them and it seems like they do it because it's the only damn thing people can't break without outright cheating. That's extremely discouraging...

that's already what is happening in savage actually. most of the people in this game will never be able to clear it (as it's still relevant. Ofc new ilevel tiers will ease the dps check) simply because they can't break the "90% of your maximum theoretical dps" wall that you MUST break in order to beat A3S, let alone A4S.

I don't know what happened to the sweet words yoshida told us (fights tuned to be doable without any dps from the healers), but they trashed it all with 3.0.

[LeeraSorlan]

I don't know what happened to the sweet words yoshida told us (fights tuned to be doable without any dps from the healers), but they trashed it all with 3.0.

Im pretty sure he said something about how the raid designers didnt tune coil with healer dps in mind and that he was surprised how it impacted coil.Thus he said alex would be tuned with healer dps as a thing

[Duelle]

I never played WoW longer than a trial demo so the extent of your grenade exploit reference falls on deaf ears. I know that when teams blatantly broke Twintania in early days, those teams got banned(?...punished if not but I think the ban was permanent?) and they completely took the fight out of the game for weeks to fix the exploit. This didn't happen in A4N. Why it didn't happen is irrelevant. The inaction you speak of has a history in this game, as I outlined in my quoted post. That's really all I was getting at.

Oh, I was simply adding to your post, not exactly trying to argue with you since I agree with you.

As far as the exploit in question, the group that got world first for heroic Lich King used saronite bombs (AKA grenades) to cause the platform in the boss room to respawn at times it wasn't supposed to (the fight had transition phases where the edges of the platform would fall off, and the grenades were used to essentially skip mechanics that involved the smaller platform). The guild that did it got a 3-day suspension, removed loot gained from the clear and revoked that guild's world first clear. More importantly, Blizzard then hotfixed the fight to disable items like grenades while they worked on a permanent fix.

The following explains it much better than I can:

During the Lich King encounter, the platform that you fight on crumbles at the edges, reducing the area in which players have to maneuver on all sides. From then on, Val'kyr mobs (3 in 25-man, 1 in 10-man) will periodically spawn, pick up members of your raid, and fly towards the edges of the platform. If the Val'kyr mobs are not killed before they reach the edge, your raid members will be dropped by the Val'kyr to their deaths. In order to buy yourself as much time as possible to kill the Val'kyr, it makes the most sense to position your raid at the center of the platform. Unfortunately, while this is occurring, the Lich King will periodically target a member of your raid and cast Defile. Defile causes a black pool to form under the feet of the target and deal shadow damage to anyone who comes in contact with it. To make it worse, every time any player touches that pool it will increase in size, and the damage dealt will increase as well. So, if your raid is stacked at the center of the platform when a Defile is cast, everyone has to scramble out quickly to avoid enlarging the pool, while continuing to DPS the Val'kyr. On top of all this, the phase is based on the Lich King's health, so you have to whittle his health down as well, or else the phase will never end.

So where does the bug come in? It's pretty simple: if players can rebuild the Frozen Throne to its original state, you will have more space to avoid the Defile. This might not seem like a big deal if you've watched the 10-man kill video from Blood Legion, but add in 15 more people and it quickly becomes a much more difficult aspect of the fight.

Another advantage to rebuilding the platform comes from the Valkyr. Ensidia has stated openly that by having the platform extension present during the phase, it was unnecessary to DPS the Val'kyr at all. See, the Val'kyr do nothing in the fight but carry players to the edge and drop them, so if the Val'kyr were just dropping raid members off over the rebuilt edge of the platform (as opposed to over a deadly drop) then this mechanic of the fight is completely trivialized. It would simply disable three of your players for a short time. This allows you to rush through the phase, focusing all your DPS on the Lich King.

As I've said earlier, by the logic of certain individuals the above is perfectly fine and acceptable. >.>;

[Subucnimorning]

It is a pretty cheesy way to avoid the mechanic, it obviously isn't intended and people comparing this to T2 avoiding rot and thinking they aren't the same are incorrect, you are avoiding a core mechanic happening. That being said it isn't THAT big of a deal, if you aren't in the guilds competing for first kill it has no effect on you. If it was a big deal SE would fix it and they haven't yet.

[Kuwagami]

Im pretty sure he said something about how the raid designers didnt tune coil with healer dps in mind and that he was surprised how it impacted coil.Thus he said alex would be tuned with healer dps as a thing

is that so ? that would explain it. Though the requirement they set up is way overdone...

That being said it isn't THAT big of a deal, if you aren't in the guilds competing for first kill it has no effect on you. If it was a big deal SE would fix it and they haven't yet.

It is. Who can say that they'll go for a "legit" (read here, doing all mechanics as they were intended to be done) run when there is an easier, cheesy way acknowledged by the devs as legit ? And even if you do, what of your group ? Will they want to go for the longer, harder option, or try the easiest one, and eventually trying a go on the hardest once they're way better geared ?

Does it matter, though?

not really. It's just a pity that just like T2 enrage was the norm, cheesing AS4 will become the expected way to do it. Those like me who would like to do it at least once "as intended" will probably never be able to do it because that cheese was found.