screw teron gorefiend

Earlier in the day on Sunday, one of my guildmates mentioned that since I'd expressed some interest in the Lich King beta information he was wondering if that might mean I'd reversed my decision to leave the game in September. I told him no, he was skeptical and asked "but why?", I got busy with some other stuff and didn't end up answering him.

Later that night, we get to Teron Gorefiend for the first time. The gimmick in this fight is that T-dawg will place a curse on a random player that will last 60 seconds. At the end of the 60 seconds, the player "dies" and is immediately turned into a ghost. 4 bad guy ghosts (constructs) also appear around the dead player, and they start running for the rest of your raid.

You have to try and destroy the constructs before they run up to the rest of the living players in the raid and start attacking them because the constructs are invulvnerable to all living players. As a ghost, you get some slowing spells to fight them... if you do it quick and do it right, no one in the raid will get hurt. If you fail and they make it to the raid, everyone dies and blames you.

It's tricky, but not impossible to pull off.

But here's the rub: there's no way to prepare for that part of the fight.. or to see what glitches might occur during the transition.

When you get turned into a ghost, your user interface is replaced with a new one with the ghost spells. If you are using the standard bar menu that Blizzard provides in the game, any macros that you had made are wiped out and you have to spend a few seconds trying to find the right buttons to hit on your new action bar (which is enough time for the constructs to get into the raid and start killing people). If you are using a customized bar menu mod (like Titan Panel) then this doesn't happen.

We spent 2 hours trying to figure out why some people were having problems and others weren't as the raid coordinators were using Titan Panel and trying to explain it in terms of what was working for them. Most of the folks in the raid weren't, however, so what they were telling people to do was actually causing confusion and getting us killed. When we finally got it sorted it out, we managed to drag Teron down to 30% health before we got overwhelmed, wiped, and weren't able to run back in because trash had started to respawn.

So... what's the point of this wall of text?

That a fight that we could have gotten done in an hour cost us 2, and we got nothing for our trouble. The fight was obviously designed to retard progress by presenting a challenge for the first guilds, but the flaw in the design is that now its technological glitches are tripping up newcomers and denying them anyway to find out about the glitches until it's too late.

In short, Blizzard has managed to engineer another a week of subscriptions through poor design.

And I tell you all that so I can tell you that when we figured out why people were dying, I sent a message to my friend saying simply:

"This."