(RANT) Vehicular Combat in Raiding
Accomplishment.
Elation.
Fulfillment.
None of these apply to defeating a raid encounter in which vehicular combat is a major component.
Alright, to an extent perhaps accomplishment can, but not so much at besting the encounter as just getting through it to move forward.
In a questline, or even in PVP, vehicular combat fits. It works. It is understood, and it feels fun and engaging. To trivialize raid content by utilizing vehicles, where the skills and abilities we have developed over time are useless, makes “besting” the content feel shallow and unrewarding.
Obviously the Malygos encounter is the object of my ire, but we already know Ulduar will employ some form of vehicular combat as well (note, I have refused to read up on any encounters, as I am one of those stubborn individuals that actually likes to learn the encounters for myself).
After defeating Malygos I was happy that our guild adjusted its strategy to accommodate a less-than-optimal group composition. I was happy that I earned my “Champion of the Frozen Wastes” title. I was happy to have finally been able to turn in the quest from the focusing iris.
But I do not feel any real sense of accomplishment from that fight. It wasn’t my beloved druid that actually made a difference, or my ability to play my character in any way. It was a stock dragon that anyone in any gear, provided they made it to that phase, could have completed. That, my friends, is not a rewarding PVE encounter.
I want to say more, but honestly at this point I’m prone to obscenities, and while I’m not opposed to posting my unfiltered thoughts I sincerely doubt most would want to read them.
In short, I have no interest in seeing the Eye ever again. It is not a fun encounter, and does not feel rewarding. Naturally I’ll go back anyway, because there is some loot that I would like to have a shot at obtaining. My only hope is that this trend does not continue.
Couldn’t agree more. To be honest a lot of people in our guild seem to feel the same way, and some of them don’t even want to set foot in the place to get the items they want. We’ve only killed Malygos once, got the achievement for it, and had to cancel or convert the Malygos raids to 10man ever since.
Amen to that. Vehicular combat was interesting, and even a little fun, while leveling up in Northrend. Several quests involved some form of it. But when I enter a raid dungeon, I expect to have my skills tested as a , not my ability to memorize a handful of new, foreign skills on buttons I can’t rearrange, while inhabiting a slow, clunky “vehicle”. And the Malygos fight is just plain backwards. Why not put the crappy, brain dead monkey vehicle phase at the beginning, and the difficult and actually rewarding phases, directly leading to his defeat, at the end?
I don’t think the fight would work if it started with the vehicular phase. I think, for this fight at least, Blizzard want to give players something new and unexpected. Something they had never seen before. In a sense, they succeeded. Certainly there’s never been a raid encounter quite like this one. While I agree that it can be quite frustrating to deal with, I also think there’s a lot to be said for the encounter.
From a lore point of view I absolutely love the fact that the red dragonflight comes to your raid’s rescue. While they could have simply scripted the final phase, I think they felt that would cheapen the fight. Honestly my biggest complaint is the lack of loot, since Malygos’ loot table is fairly small, especially for a raid boss. But they also deliberately didn’t put any tier drops in this one, and made the loot table small, I think, for that very reason: they expected that while the novelty might impress people initially, they’d grow irritated and tired of the encounter pretty quickly, especially if you had to farm it for drops.
All-in-all I prefer to take it for what it was meant to be: a challenging alteration from the normal way things work, but not something you really need to do over and over again. Still I will say the sense of joy and relief when we finally downed him was more than worth the pain of the struggle. If anything, the difficulty only made the final victory that much sweeter. Still I’m not looking forward to doing it week-in and week-out, unless we can manage to down him in one shot each time. But I guess we’ll see how that goes.