The very first video game I ever owned was NHL ’96 for the Super Nintendo.
The goalies, being controlled by the AI, auto-tracked the puck, and would do their damndest to stop goals. Problem is, by creating a custom character, you can create a character that can move faster than the goalies. Thus, you could simply grab the puck, skate straight at the goalie, then curve a little to the left or right, and shoot. Because your character moves faster than the goalie, it is literally impossible for that goalie to move fast enough to stop the shot.
This resulted in hilarious games where I could score once every ten seconds, if not more.
Point is, I wasn’t playing the game within the rules laid out by the game. I was, in fact, playing against the game itself, abusing and exploiting the rules to crush the crap out of it.
Hands up, who’s played D&D? Alright, hands up, who’s intentionally exploited the rules, or even the GM, for personal gain?
The difference between playing a game, and playing against a game is a distinction that is nearly completely lost on long-time gamers. Beating the game on its own terms, and beating it by bending or outright breaking its rules are really the same thing, aren’t they? Either jump through the hoops the developer made for you, or make your own hoops and jump through those instead.
How many examples of this in WoW can you think of off the top of your head? I can think of a few.
How about that change where, in order for a warlock’s soulstone to be active, the warlock has to be present for said boss fight? This was done precisely in reaction to Ensidia filling a raid with warlocks to gain extra spellstones to resurrect fallen DPS.
To say nothing of the fact that Blizzard had to restrict active soulstones to warlocks in the same raid for the same reason.
Or how about when Blizzard had to introduce cooldowns on vehicle construction in Wintergrasp to stop a single person from grabbing rank 3 then spamming siege engines?
Or how about the death of wall climbing?
Or, or or…
I could go on but this is really about one shotting heroic faction champions.
Yeah, I said one shot. By far the easiest fight in there on heroic. Well, 10 man at least. God, I hate 25 man so much.
Anyway.
Here’s the thread outlining the ultimate strategy of face rolling awesome. Basically, the thread is this:
The cause of the misunderstanding that Faction Champions have no threat is the fact that their threat is not the result of damage taken or healing sensed. It is calculated by different rules than any other encounter in the game.
These are those rules.
To summarize:
Melee DPS Faction Champions calculate their threat based on an additive combination of 3 factors. Each of the three appear to share equal priority for determining target, and the threat list constantly updates.
These factors are ARMOR, PROXIMITY, and HEALTH DEFICIT.Ranged DPS Faction Champions function on very similar lines to melee DPS Faction Champions, with one difference. Instead of Armor Value being part of their threat calculation, they instead compare Resistance to their school of magic.
RESISTANCE + PROXIMITY + HEALTH DEFICIT = THREAT
Healers heal based on a very easily recognizable principle. They place priority on their healing targets based on the lowest absolute hp among friendly targets.
And boy oh boy, when you know the rules, there is no end to how hard you can twist those to your will.
The fight went from the “complete and utter clusterfuck” we had last week where sometimes if we were really really lucky we’d score one kill before we all died, to something that amounted to little more than a tank and spank.
It was seriously that easy.
We had two tanks. A prot warrior with 0 spell resistance in every school, and a prot paladin who started the fight at 50% health, with the healers expressly forbidden to heal him above that percentage. As low health as possible, just not dead. Everyone else gets their spell resistance and armor as high as they can get it. Cloth wearers had to use armor pots and everything.
(I personally had 215 universal spell resistance and slightly over 6k armor. That’s the closest I get to being a tank.)
Naturally, everyone stays as far away from everything as possible, but especially the melee. The holy paladin healed the prot paladin, of course, due to the higher armor value.
Result being that the caster generally attacked the prot warrior, and the melee generally sat on the invincible prot paladin, while we burned down targets one by one, and largely ignored CC because we didn’t need any.
That’s right.
Didn’t need CC on bloody FACTION CHAMPIONS.
I, for one, can’t wait to show my guild this post! Not that we have issues with it, currently, but it sounds like it could be so much easier without all the CC.
Thanks, Euri!
Does getting the D&D GM drunk to increase likelihood of phat lootz count as exploitation?
I’d say yes. Yes it does.
But does that stop any of us from doing it? ^_^
Not even sort of.
I gotta admit here that I actively optimize my D&D characters in such a way that a Warmage can become a Rainbow Servant at 1st level or that my Rogue (whom I currently play) will have a +18 B.A.B. at 20th level with 12d6 sneak attack. And I’m not even that good at it.
Thing is I ENJOY coming up with characters both brutally effective and fun to play.
As for your faction champs shenanigans, that is just that shenanigans. And I approve.
Its really tempting to simply write this off as faction champs being a poorly designed and poorly thought out encounter.
Ultimately it comes down to the difference between PvP (which faction champs isn’t really but attempts to approximate) and PvE (which faction champs is but attempts to differentiate itself from).
In PvE the best idea is to figure out what abilities do what and when and to figure out a strategy best designed to deal with that. Which means for a fight like faction champs, figuring out the AI and determining how to beat it. Its hard not to do this when the big prizes are awarded for no wipes and no deaths.
As an aside I think the recent bruhaha over SS’s was Paragon not Ensidia
The “remove soulstones when combat begins” was because of Ensidia, though the first part of having the warlocks be in the raid might not have been.
More than likely it was all the top guilds!
Ran in frost armor?
Mage Armor, actually, to keep the casters off me.
I was quite literally on the opposite end of the arena from where the melee were being tanked.
Having both armors hot-keyed to switch between them to help you de-aggro mobs is the best idea.
This hurts my brain. So what your saying is that the Paladin and the Warrior basically just have to stand there, and by a combination of Health (paladin) or resistances (warrior) the NPCs will just keep pounding away?
They can /dance and still keep full threat??
Wow. Imagine if a 5-man encounter had some bizarre threat calculation like this.
Yep.
I mean the warrior, being prot, stunlocks and interrupts and such, but yeah… not really anything exciting.
Ew, no thanks. I’ll take the clusterfuck over this any day.
Grats on the one shot though
Remember how people used to earn Respect Your Elders? Remember void-tanking Sarth 3D? Exactly the same thing. And Blizz didn’t think these tactics were okay.
An exploit of design (rather than an exploit of code, like a hack) is still an exploit, still a way of trivializing content that was unintended or unforeseen by the developers of the game. The question, then, becomes at which point clever, out-of-the-box thinking/tactics/research cross the line into exploit territory.
After all, Steve the DM can tailor encounters to your silly Pun-Pun characters (destroying metagamers was a favorite pasttime of mine, actually). And if you outthink Steve, and, say, kill all the orcs in the Cave of Doom by lighting a large bonfire at the (sole) cave mouth and asphyxiating them, then he has the option of applauding your knowledge and cunning and awarding full XP, or pulling a hand-of-God retcon to preserve his hours of preparation. Blizzard, who essentially has to play the role of DM to a bazillion PC’s, doesn’t have the same freedom. Either a tactic is okay (in which case it will be used and abused and videos will be made of it on Tankspot), or it’s not.
Learning the aggro mechanics of Faction Champs seems valid on the surface—after all, aggro mechanics are kinda important to any PvE encounter—but if the POINT of the encounter is to force the virtuoso use of CC and focus fire and whatnot … eh, I won’t be surprised if Blizz “fixes” this in the near future.
Consider Sarth 3D zergs and the Freya 3trees zergs. The former was left alone, but the latter was taken out.
We, here used loosely to define players in general, are going to find things to exploit, and exploit the crap out of them.
This strat was nearly a godsend for our little guild, as we only have one person (me) with spammable crowd control.
Haven’t heard anything from Blizz yet about “fixing” this. They might leave it alone, considering ICC is nearly out, they might not.
How would they fix it, anyway?
I’ve given it some thought. It really is hard to find a solid line between legitimate, clever tactics and exploitative tactics. Ultimately I guess it comes down to fiat. Blizz says “we want you to do X”. Players say “but how about Y instead?” Blizz says yea or nay, and hotfixes happen or don’t.
Given the number of people who seem to feel that this method of defeating FC is unfulfilling, I expect we’ll see changes. Yeah, sure, you can always say “screw that strat, let’s do it legit” but who’s going to ask that of 9 or 24 other people? Most everyone wants the gear and the badges, as quickly as possible with a minimal repair bill.
Presumably Faction Champs could be “fixed” by altering the aggro mechanics. Maybe add an element of randomness, or a few lines of code meant to simulate deft target switching, or change the weights attributed to armor/resistances. Only a fool keeps throwing attacks at a target that won’t die in PvP.
Of course, that could easily make the encounter bloody impossible, so Iunno.
I was there for the Faction Champ kill.
I must say that when the fight was over they were all dead and we were all still alive, I was a bit…unsatisfied.
I like banging my head against a wall until I figure out how to solve a boss encounter. Having the encounter handed to me was extremely anti-climactic.
I’m not sure I agree with the premise that this is an exploit any more than working within the framework of the standard tank-dps-healer threat triangle is an exploit. I mean, assume for a moment that you had absolutely no idea how threat worked, took ten such players and threw them into a raid, any encounter in the game would be this ‘insurmountable wall’ you describe.
Most gimmicky fights in the game are ‘insurmountable walls’ until someone cracks the code, then it comes down to how prepared your raiders are and how well you can execute the conventional plan. Unless your guild is full of purists than insist on going into every fight blind, you have a wealth of information on hand about every mob in the game, and the mechanism to best it.
This fight just has a different mechanism for how threat is calculated. Sure, it may remove some of the mystery and ooooh factor because now the general populace understands the sure-fire strategy, but you could argue the same for every boss that’s been ‘spoiled’ before you got to it.
That’s one way to look at it. But the whole point of FC is to BREAK that tank/dps/heals triangle. Aggro mechanics that are vastly different from the norm, coupled with intelligent-ish focused firing and healing.
If you can apply same-old same-old tactics to a fight that’s supposed to prohibit said tactics, well, it’s not very interesting, now is it?
There’s a big difference between having to execute a complex but conventional strategy and turning a formerly high-stress, never-the-same-way-twice fight into a simplistic tank-and-spank.
And the hardcore raiders say the game’s too easy now. No wonder.
When my group did this the last few weeks, I didn’t really feel unsatisfied. I just felt the same uncaring endurance that I get from having the entire instance on farm. It simply changed it from a 1 or 2 wipe run to a 0 wipe run.
I never had NHL 96 but this trick sure worked god in NHL 95 I would score 40-50 goals a game with 5 min periods
So question on the warrior tank, how did he achieve 0 resistance? Did y’all forgo the Pally auras any form of raid-wide resistance?
Correct.
No pally auras (well, devotion and conc, no resistance auras), and he clicked off MotW and Shadow Protection.
Everyone except him had the raid wide resistances.
This, this … I mean … dayum. You just took all the fun out of it. I happen to LIKE slowing and sheeping and counterspelling. :p
You can still do that if you want!
You just don’t really have to.
I forget which Hockey game it was, but it was around 96 I think. I would play as the Redwings and could score one a one timer every time, and on wrap arounds more than half of the time. I would end up scoring like 100 plus goals lol.
Fundamentally, any good DM understands that he is in a competition with his players. They want to “win” (ignoring the whole can’t win a RPG thing) and the DM wants to make the whole thing entertaining and worth doing.
Good DMs recognize this and establish rules and limits to keep the min/max crap from breaking the game. The only real difference here is that a DM gets to be proactive and the Devs have to be reactive. If a mechanic is game breaking, it gets fixed.
A tactic that requires 13 DPS that can sustain 3.5K dps while in regular movement is not game breaking. There just really aren’t that many of them, and getting to zerg stuff is the reward for that level of gear and ability.
A tactic that eliminates the primary intent of the encounter design IS game breaking, and I expect it will get addressed here soon.
“The only real difference here is that a DM gets to be proactive and the Devs have to be reactive.”
Truth.
A DM can, really, at any time say “you can’t do that” or, if they’re more inventive, throw some sort of strange mechanic or obstacle that blocks the player from being able to break the game. It is in real time, after all.
Devs really just have to throw their hands up and go “damn it!” and release a patch!
Poor guys.
Frankly what you described sound much more fun then the screaming faceplant that was FC last week.
Nibx
I like working for it. I don’t, however, like fights that we have to work on for two months solid. Working for a few weeks is worth it. After a certain period of time, it becomes no longer worth it. There’s gotta be a fine line somewhere.
We just killed FC the same way you describe, and it felt cheap as hell, especially after working for 2-3 weeks on Beasts.
I am not going to lie and say I never exploited a game
Baulders Gater *cough* Console cheats *cough* but whatever i beat the game 32454235346 times first, and it was fun to play with the mechanics!
Now on to WoW and “clever tactics” My guild was the second on the server Hordesider to do 3-d sarth 25 when that content was the content to do. Our tactic was utilizing the voidwalker tank. Call me a cheater, idc ..l.. ..l.. to the nay sayers! This is not something that was easy. We spent close to 150 wipes perfecting this inorder to achieve it. It is still my opinion that the difficutly difference was not that grandious, as it still boiled down to retardation in the raid that made / broke the fight. GTFO of the void zones and STFO of the fire walls! While this mechanic made it possible for my guild to defeat 3d sarth 25 man, it would not have taken my guild but another week TOPS to achieve the goal doing it “legit.” The bad part of this strat was when I g-kicked the retarded drunken asshat of a warlock tank, that left me with no one with the knowledge of lock tanking + the gear it took too buff the voidwalker. Therefore this strat was never replicated after the first kill.
You found a way to do faction champs by utilize some math nerd tactics, GOOD ON YOU! You deserve the kill. I may try it next week in my guild, just for shits and grins. Not that we need to, as we one shot it ever stinking week, but something new to break the routine.
Those of you that qq about people using “exploits” to ackomplish a goal, don’t cry because you either can’t do it or ackomplished the goal upon release with your ubar leet guild that drags your worthless ass though the content.
Have fun with the game and stop worrying that x guild just got the 2345801743785438901 world kill on y boss using nerd tactics!! Your ubar leet guild still got the 4th world kill. Or you suck and still havn’t killed boss x.
*casts aside the floatation device* my qq is done!
How exactly can you rule doing the fight this way an exploit? Force raids to heal tanks to full? (Hello, Anub!) Not let people drink potions, take flasks?
We stumbled into a form of this approach last night by complete luck. We beat FC Heroic the second time we pulled it, and afterward we were wondering why. People did some searching and this post (and the one on the forums) were shared today.
Were we exploiting last night? Hell no.
I didn’t really feel unsatisfied. I just felt the same uncaring endurance
Euripides wrote this post several weeks after the faction champs nerf. To anyone who fought the Champions before the nerf, the fight was a no-brainer after the patch and it had very little difficulty compared to the pre-patch mechanics.
That you had to exploit aggro mechanics post-nerf to beat the fight on easy mode, well, the joke’s on you.
wow cool ! excellent, i like it