Complexity Limit gave up on N’Zoth progression last night despite having a lead in World of Warcraft’s Race to World First following the implementation of a hotfix that complicated the fight, making it nearly impossible.
As Limit started progression on the boss, the fight had many issues to inconsistent spawns for a “Thought Harvester” add to the boss. After realizing that the spawn times and actions of the add were problematic, Blizzard asked Limit to advise them on how best to manage this issue by changing the add.
At first, the randomly-spawning adds cast their important marque ability “Harvest Thoughts” when they came in contact with anything, including things that weren’t players, like a Warlock teleportation gate or a Shaman’s totem.
“Clearly that’s not intended,” Limit GM Maximum said. “We talked to them about it. They acknowledged it.”
Since the cast required that they be immobile, Limit was losing a lot of time wiping on pulls because the enemies were acting in unintended ways by stopping to cast a spell that needed to be addressed by the raid even though they were far from the raid.
Once Limit and Blizzard came together to discuss how to best make the fight work in a way that made sense, Limit’s suggestion was to make it so that the Harvesters ignored things like totems and other non-player entities on the battlefield.
But much to the disapproval of Limit’s raiding team, Blizzard instead made a change that allowed the adds to move while casting “Harvest Thoughts.” While soaking the Harvest Thoughts ability is something that’s required in the fight, the challenge is soaking it with the appropriate number of players.
This change made it nearly impossible for many players like tanks to get out of the cast’s range, something they often need to do. As one might expect, Limit’s GM Maximum, who’s regularly open about his thoughts regarding the raid and Blizzard, wasn’t pleased.
“The tanks get out of the immunity now because they buffed their speed,” he said. “They just did it. Making the fight bullshit so now we have to do splits.”
At time of writing, Limit’s best pull was 49.5 percent health on the boss after 146 attempts. Method has gotten the boss to 66 percent health after 101 wipes.
