After about an hour and a half we killed it with 8 transferred and 2 premade characters, we tried a range of tactics, starting off with similar cc styles to Priestess Delrissa in MGT which generally failed horribly due to the amount of dispels the enemies had available. So we decided that as the room was quite large, and comments from blizzard staff talking about the reduction in cc requirements we thought that there must be a more general way that it can be done with a wide variety of groups.

The tactic which beat the boss was to draw the melee accross the room from the healers, while a mage cced the rest of the group as we took the melee to the alliance shield behind us and quickly burn them down. Then we had the rogue switch to the tree while we chain cced and interrupted the priest and killed the 2nd melee. At this point the encounter was much more stable and we only killed the druid sheerely because he was lowest due to the rogues attacks.

Overall we enjoyed it and it was different to the general raid style of largely tank and spank oriented and required us to think differently and most of all develop a tactic on the spot using the group compositions from ours and the bosses group.

sorry forgot to include: 10 man normal

I was in the same group as Alexisfire (difficulty: 10 man normal).

I support everything in his post, and I'd like to add that we thought the encounter was well balanced. We found that the bulk of the challenge was in devising a workable strategy, whereas actually executing it was pretty straightforward. Now that using AoE is impractical, it is reasonably challenging.

The Champions had sufficient dispel to make the typical trash-pack tactic of CCing all but one totally unworkable. I presume this is by design, and it seems to be working well.

I expect that having a random group of Champions will keep the encounter fresh, and favour players who have developed a general and flexible strategy over those who have tailored their strategy to the particular combination of player and NPC classes.

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Q u o t e:
If we want to do Arenas, we'll go there, don't shove this crap on our faces in PvE instances, thanks.

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Sir, I respectfully disagree with this sentiment.
We found that the encounter was unique and interesting, a welcome break from the tank/spank mold. The fight was chaotic, but on our successful attempt, it was controlled chaos. Everyone needed to be on their toes and exercise a degree of independant thought, rather than the usual tedium of mechanically following a rigid tactic.


PS: Thanks to Wipefree, Ayin and Inseeda for helping us beat this encounter, well played guys :)

Done in 25 heroic.

Didn't try the normal version, so can only compare to last time, apparently the only differences seem to be twice the hp, -75% AE damage received (I guess this applies to normal as well?), a warlock and immune to taunt.

I think it's somewhat funny that the last bit of tanking control (taunt) was taken away for the heroic version, completing the absolute chaos in this fight, it's like the hardmode wasn't about better play but just about higher numbers and gear.

And conclusively, we failed horribly most of the time, yet the killing attempt was like "huh, it's over?". What I'm trying to say is that with this kind of approach you cannot design challenging encounters, this encounter is not plannable, it's some weird half controlled zerg, it's not particularly fun and more frustrating than motivating.

The attempt to put PvP into PvE (the motivation to do this in the first place is questionable at best) failed and here's why:
It's not PvP because the other side still are not players, they may be the only mobs in the game with class categories, they may have PvP DRs on CCs and all their skills may be available to players, but they still have a hundred times the hp, can 2 shot a clothy and they still do not act coordinated, which is everything that PvP (Arena) is about.

On the other hand, the raid made a conscious choice NOT to play PvP, they have all their gear/talents/playstyle focused on the PvE side of the game (you know, little stamina, high dps for instance) and they may not be too delighted to have to change their whole game for one encounter, you did consider that, right?

So, I guess it's too late to redesign this encounter, but since you're asking for feedback, here's some constructive stuff:
The whole thing starts pretty hard and with complete chaos, but once you've taken care of 2 or 3 key figures it's pretty much over unless you suffered huge losses. The berserk timer ensures that you will actually not go afk while the rest is being killed, but it doesn't really make it harder unless you took too long for the start.
What about giving them extra abilities or some kind of enrage?
You could also remove the DR and just make them immune to CC when a certain amount has died, with the dispellers being immune to all CC from the start, then you could put some more emphasis on single mobs as well.

Also, If you want to make this a PvP fight, how about including some events where the enemy heroes actually act together? You know something to pay attention to, like the hunter putting a mark on some raid member and you have to protect him.. anything that forces the raid to react.

The melee mobs are somewhat strange, they can be tanked in a way, but not reliably since they will switch target at some point no matter what you do, yet you can't just let them run around either, they hit too hard for that.
So how about you make up your mind, either they are tankable and their damage challenges tanks, or they are not tankable and you are supposed to kite/CC them. Currently playing this as a tank is just extremely annoying and frustrating.

The mobs can still be separated from the raid and even though they may do some weird targetting and sometimes shuffle a bit while switching targets, they often won't go back. If this is intended you might want to fix their behavior, if it's not intended (likely) then you might want to polish your chaos a bit, some people might be able to control it and we definitely can't have that.

Use an actual concept for this fight, just putting 10 mobs there because the game has 10 classes and giving them the corresponding abilities is not a concept, that's just sad. Your average "I haz encounter idea!" forum poster can come up with something better.
I mean think about it, somebody posts a forum thread "I have like this cool idea about an encounter, you just put 10 mobs there, one for each class and then they'll use abilities of that class.. AWESOME HUH?".
Give every mob a specific meaning in the encounter and every player (not just healers) a job to do beyond "kill the one in the dress first". If that means that you have to change/remove/add some of the abilities to fit the encounter, so be it, throwing this at us and observing what we can come up with so you can surprise yourself is not a good idea.

All that said, I dread this fight for live, I just don't think you'll be able to turn this awful concept around and in my opinion this is one big step in the wrong direction of creative encounter design and it's definitely not a step forward.

^ hello Jory from Last Resort ;) say hi to nerv for me? He was legendary back in the blackout days!!

Ok, but seriously, i think that chaos is not the way to go. The less you can control the enemies, the less strategy i think there is and the more it becomes about having the correct raid and gear setup. Having a small amount of control on the enemies, but also needing a backup is quite a good idea because it means they can hit as hard as they do, so will kill people if theyre allowed to but is avoidable.

I dont know how this affected the 25 heroic encounter and how chaotic and hard to control they were, but as we relied in several pickups for the 10 man we didnt have time to try it on 10 heroic or any of the 25s. The way we ended up doing it was relatively stable, having the melee pulled away by the tank while they were slowed whenever needed. Then having other people controlling the healers as to stop them reaching the melee target we were dpsing.

I beleive there is more to it and it is more carefully balanced than it may appear, but i like the idea of having a hunter mark a target or something similar and having to defend him in the heroic versions. Maybe having the enemies sort of arguing who to nuke before settling on a target would bring a funny element and mean that it wasnt about constantly protecting a player.

Killed 25 player heroic version as well and I agree with most of what was said above.
An encounter like this will never really be the same as pvp because of bad AI, mobs with 3 million hp etc. So I don't really see the point of it.
The melee mobs could easily be taken out of the picture because there's a way to semi tank them. As someone else said, if you don't "tank" them they hit way too hard to deal with, but if you do it just feels like you're abusing the AI to win instead of dealing with it like you would in real pvp.
Once we found out how to do this it just came down to killing some healers and once that was done it got extremely boring while we burned down the remaining mobs one by one.
We didn't see if there's an enrage timer but if there is one you should only run into it by losing a lot of people at the start (as there is no way to lose anyone later in).
So the encounter might as well end once you get 3 mobs down and at least 20 people are alive. Save us the boring last part, it just feels like a giant pack of trash mobs with way too much hp.
Judging by the time it took us to get this down for what is supposed to be a tier 9 hard mode encounter, it's also still way too easy, especially considering the gear upgrades we will get in 3.2 that will trivialize it even more.
However, the only correct way to make this harder is greatly improving the AI so it's not just 10 individual mobs that can be controlled by 1 person each. I doubt that's going to happen though, so I guess the only other solution will be increasing their damage so raids will get more unavoidable RNG deaths at the start (this isn't fun).

To make this interesting at all I think the following changes should happen:
-Make them do something interesting once you get healers/dispellers down. Having 4 mobs that just randomly attack people without any risk of killing them, and 3 offtanked outside the raid is boring.
-Change the melee mob AI so you can't just tank them away from everyone and only bother with them once you killed everything else. Then reduce their damage so they don't oneshot clothies all the time but make it threatening enough so you have to at least root/snare them to keep them away from healers.
-Mobs should protect each other, for example the rogue could stun/blind the person that keeps interrupting his healer, instead of just shadowstepping around randomly and blinding whatever happens to be in range.
-Make the mobs work together a bit more, but reduce their damage. Currently the damage they do has to be quite high because individually none of the mobs would be threat to anyone if they did less. This results in some unavoidable deaths if too many of them happen to target the same player by chance, but for the majority of the time it means noone is at risk of dying. If they were more coordinated and actually worked together (assisting), their damage could go down as well. Then it comes down to reacting to what they are doing, which could be fun. In the current version you don't need to react to anything, you just pray you don't get killed by random targeting/crits for 2 minutes and then win.

Oh btw the heroic version dropped a normal mode set token, probably not intended.

There is no trinket for Hunters in loot list :((

Please change expertise rating in Victor's Call/Vengeance of the Forsaken to something else, so hunters can use that

Victor's Call
Epic
Binds when picked up
Unique: Victor's Call (1)
Miscellaneous
Trinket
Requires Level 80
Item Level 232
Equip: Increases your expertise rating by 83.
Use: Each time you strike an enemy, you gain 215 attack power. Stacks up to 5 times. Entire effect lasts 20 sec.