Bugs in Dragon Soul

Something that has contributed in my decision to stop playing World of Warcraft after Mists of Pandaria comes out is the buggy nature of the fights in current content. It seems to me (and I could be wrong) that Dragon Soul was released with a ridiculous amount of bugs, many of which mean that if such a bug occurs, it will be nearly impossible for most raid groups to complete the encounter. The bugs do not, of course, have a 100% chance to occur, but if they do…

Warlord Zon’ozz

The Void of the Unmaking’s bouncing mechanic is totally screwy, at least on heroic mode. Ignoring the fact that it often caroms off unpredictably (which, I will grant, may be part of the challenge), sometimes it just never moves at all after a bounce.

Seriously. What is up with that?

Hagara the Stormbinder

Not only is Focused Assault screwy as hell (it will eat a Hand of Sacrifice in the span of 2 seconds if you place it on the tank before Focused Assault starts casting, despite Hand of Sacrifice not absorbing the amount of damage it should) but the lightning mechanic is effed up. Seriously. It chains to pets and totems and is generally spazzy. While you may not notice it normally, that shit is buggy when you try to do the achievement. We tried to do the achievement on 25-man normal (no pets or totems!) and failed something like four or five times. This was the defining reason why: the lightning was selectively jumping to people.

In this clip, you see lightning going through and not going from the bear (Jaymz) to the shadow priest (Srsbusiness). It’s as though the lightning is sentient and is thinking “Pfft, I don’t FEEL like connecting with that individual.” On the PREVIOUS attempt, we’d had them in opposite spots and Jay had to run up to Srs to “pick up” the lightning, but not even that worked here. You also see the lightning stay on a death knight (Division/Chronis) even after he backs out of the 10y range where it was skipping to him directly. We ended up doing the achievement on 10-man, which is ridiculous when you’re a 25-man raiding guild.

Warmaster Blackhorn

On Heroic Warmaster Blackhorn, you have a new mechanic. It’s called Deck Fire. Deck Fire is everywhere. Except, that’s not exactly how the encounter is supposed to go. The fire is not supposed to continue to spawn into Phase 2 and it’s not supposed to cover the entire deck of the ship. While we were learning this fight, we didn’t know that. We thought it was just RNG that determined fire mechanics and crap like that. But no.

If you launch the ship from the top of Wyrmrest, then swap it to normal, then wait five minutes, then swap it back to heroic (there is a 5m timer on difficulty changes), you no longer have insane amounts of fire. Fire acts the way it is supposed to. It despawns when it gets water poured on it. It doesn’t spawn into phase 2. It actually makes the transition to phase 2 really, really easy if you don’t have to deal with crazy fire.

The important part of the “fix” is to make sure you launch the boat FIRST. Do not reset the difficulty before launching the boat. You’ll end up with fire all over the damn deck again. You do only need to do this once per night of attempts (and not before every attempt) at least. And at least there’s a way to fix this fire! But it’s ridiculous that one has to do this “reset” in the first place in order to make sure the encounter goes as it should.

Spine of Deathwing

There are three issues with the Spine encounter that I’ve seen. The first two have to do with the cut scene at the start.

1) Sometimes while the cut scene is loading, people will disconnect. This is similar to the cut scene in Throne of the Tides where people will sometimes randomly disconnect. Usually, the Spine one is limited to the first attempt (so basically, the game will crash while the cut scene is loading). I believe that your toon will parachute down on to Spine as normal and you will be there when you log back in.

2) Also related to the cut scene, if you hit Escape to skip the cut scene too quickly (before it actually has begun to load), guess what? You’re stuck on the boat, unable to move. How do you solve this? You relog. Once you relog, you will land on Spine and will be able to continue the fight as normal.

3) The other major issue I’ve seen on Spine is people not being secured to the spine via Grasping Tendrils and flying off Deathwing’s back. DBM will usually tell you if someone’s missing their Grasping Tendrils buff, but I’ve seen many people get flung off the back while their name is not in that list. This could be a problem with DBM and other mods or it could be a problem with fitting 25 people + various pets in one teeny, tiny spot on Deathwing’s back. I’ve never been unexpectedly thrown off (except that time when we killed a Corruption and a new one popped up in the hole in which we were standing) so I’m unsure, but the number of people I’ve seen thrown off who don’t NORMALLY get thrown off indicates to me that there’s a potential problem with the mechanic.

If you could battle rez people who were thrown off, this wouldn’t be as huge of an issue, but to my knowledge, you can’t.

Madness of Deathwing

Do I even really need to say it?

Thrall, stop dropping people. This has happened to damn near everyone I know, in LFR, on normal and, yes, on heroic. (And no, they can’t get battle-rezzed, either.)

The From Draenor with Love comic kind of says it all: http://fromdraenor.com/?p=233

Surprisingly, I can’t think of any major issues I’ve encountered on Morchok, Yor’sahj or Ultraxion, but five of the eight encounters in Dragon Soul have some awfully buggy mechanics. Lose someone because Thrall dropped them? Yeah, too bad, you’re going to 24-man (or 9-man) Madness. ENJOY! Did the lightning skitter awkwardly through your raid group and kill someone because of an errant pet? There goes a battle rez. Hey, did that Void of the Unmaking carom strangely or, better, not at all? BOOM.

While bugs do happen to even the best coders, the fact that these bugs have not yet been addressed in the seven months since Dragon Soul has been out is, frankly, a shame, and it has absolutely contributed to my fatigue and frustration with the game.

How have these bugs affected you? Have you even seen them? Have you seen any others?

10 Replies to “Bugs in Dragon Soul”

  1. I’d prefer if these bugs were fixed, especially since they’ve been live for so long, but generally I don’t worry about them because these (mostly) interesting encounters wouldn’t exist if the developers weren’t pushing the limits of what is possible and reliable in the game engine.

  2. Just to add to the list… Morchok’s black blood phase has a tendency to randomly remove lightning shield on an ele shaman. I saw it elsewhere but I can’t remember where (Ultraxion?). But Morchok for SURE, and it’s annoying.

  3. We have never had much of a problem with being dropped on Madness, I have never experienced even on dozens of lfr Kills, perhaps 2 deaths total in months.

    But the ball? meh. We have had it sit in between the ranged and melee, we have had it hit the ranged twice a second apart, let alone radical bounce changes, just missing the ranged when their had been ample distance for it to change. We even had to call the heroic kills and still wiped on normal once because the ball was just being so stupid.

    Hagara it wil sometimes bounce through a pet, and sometimes not, we just set it up based on that it will but move to cover when it does not.

  4. Ugh, Hagara. That lightning does NOT like it. I think I’m the only one left without the achievement and the one time I was there for the tries, the lightning simply wouldn’t chain further than me no matter how I moved. I guess we’re gonna have to do 10-man to get it for me too… which makes me a bit guilty, I don’t want to drag 9 people there just to help me.

    Another bug I ran into – not game breaking, just annoying: sometimes when you exit a cut scene right at the start, the video is gone, but the voices keep playing. Ugh.

  5. I remember one night during a round of H Blackhorn attempts some of my guildies discovered that the deck fire that was spreading like crazy wasn’t actually there. You could see it, but when you would stand in it, you wouldn’t take any damage. It was weird!

    Then it also became hilarious when you would assume the fire wasn’t real, so you would stand in it and then it would end up damaging you, or when it would start off not being real and then suddenly decide that it was.

    Good times!

  6. We position the pets to chain the lightning to make the chain complete faster – not all bugs are bad ;)

  7. I don’t know how many times we’ve wiped to the neverending deck fires on H Warmaster and the lightning connection failures on H Hagara.

    One of my favorite bug I’ve found is totems get destroyed by trash before Ultraxion with their breath. The more well known Searing totem not targeting the tendon on Spine is completely frustrating since burst is so important during that fight.

    It is disheartening to see the bugs just ignored rather than fixed.

  8. Is the 1 sec fading light debuff intentional on H Ultraxion? A few guildies claim getting the debuff with only 1 second left on the timer.

    What really rubs salt in the wound with the Madness bug is that it almost always happens when going from the green platform to the blue platform. My guild always saves the blue platform got last. On our heroic madness attempts, losing a person to this bug is a guaranteed wipe on the 4th platform. After already spending 10 minutes (or close to it), having to reset and do those 10 minutes again was agonizing.

  9. The worst part about the Madness bug in my experience, as a 10-man raider, is that it was an instant wipe. Back before the nerfs, or maybe the first 5% nerf, losing a DPS basically meant there was no possible way we’d have enough to beat timers. And losing one of our two healer? Haha, yeah. And of course, losing a tank was fatal. So annoying.

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