Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Which boss fight makes you feel the most useful?


I got thinking the other day about which boss fight makes me feel the most useful as a hunter. Useful in the sense that my performance during the fight has a really direct impact on the outcome. Perhaps this is because as a ranged DPS class it's generally my job to deliver MQoSDDPS and avoid any effects (cave in, shatter, spout etc) and that doesn't necessarily make me feel particularly crucial. Every boss fight is a team effort though that's for sure and as you progress the requirements for every single member of the raid to be on top of their game certainly increase.

So the boss that makes me feel the most useful? I'd definitely have to say Nightbane. Perhaps there are different strategies out there but the one my raid(s) has always used is where the hunter misdirects to the tank at the start of the fight and then again at the beginning of each phase. This means that I need to make sure I'm in position and ready to MD on time and have avoided getting killed by the mid phase skeleton guys while still contributing to taking them down. Nightbane is also a fight where I find that I have to really carefully watch my threat as it builds very quickly and generally if at any point the tank loses aggro on the big nasty dragon what inevitably follows is a wipe. Once we've successfully downed Nightbane I always have a real feeling of satisfaction from a job done well - more so than any other boss fight I can think of. Some of them like Netherspite or Gruul for instance I just feel happy to have stayed alive and been able to do lots of damage dealing.

The awesome screenshot above was taken by Emelin and shows our main tank Mogri bravely facing off against Nightbane with a few unfortunate corpses scattered about. I'm pleased to say I wasn't one of them! We think the golden beams shooting at Mogri are most likely Prayer of Mending doing its thing. Yay healers! /cheer.

So which boss fight makes you feel the most useful?

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

As a resto shaman, I can think of a few fights that I feel very useful, but none of them compares to Void Reaver in SSC.

See - Void Reaver does this pounding thing, where everyone in melee range takes about 3.5K damage over 3 seconds. And he does this pretty regularly. But! As a resto shaman, I essentially make melee damage a gimmick. Run in, drop totems, stand under the bugger and cast a moderately high rank of chain heal on anything I can reach.

Because we're all bunched up, I can pretty much keep all the non-tank melee and myself alive for the entire fight, not to mention passing around the glorious Windfury and completely avoiding his Balls of Doom. It's fun!

Amava said...

Being a Hunter who has only cleared Kara up through Shade of Aran, my exposure is somewhat limited, but I love a Hunter's ability to deliver the noise to Curator.

When looking over the WWS reports from our Curator fights, you can see that I'm able to switch between Curator and Astral Flares nearly instantaneously, and because of how fast a Beast Master fires, I don't lose any precious seconds having to cancel a spell and start casting another one. Any class can switch targets quickly using the magic targeting macro, but Hunters can seamlessly switch with no interruption to DPS output.

Anonymous said...

Well as a tank I'm of course useful in any fight that I'm tanking... however, Friday when we went into TK and tried A'lar... That was an awesome tank fight.

Just before was Void Reaver... and really it was boring as a tank. Stand in one place, spam skills, if the rest of the raid does their job, we win. That's how a lot are.

But not A'lar. Tanks have to move around, work together, be in the right spots at the right time and pay attention to the position of A'lar or else... either we die (Quills) or the raid dies (Flame Buffet).

So, as a bare tank, this is my favorite fight so far... and we haven't even won it yet! But I sure did feel like I did a great job when we got to phase two this past weekend. We'll get him next time.

Jezrael said...

Oooh yes good choice Zoble that's got to be one of the most challenging fights for tanks I've seen yet. I too was very pleased that we got him that far - I'm sure we'll get him next time!