Saturday 25 April 2009

Can we get some adds with a little less whirlwind

Rounding up and AoEing trash in instances and raids isn't a massive problem for rogues these days, no cooldown on Fan of Knives and a couple of slow daggers means we can easily keep up with mages and warlocks.

However there is a certain ability that warriors are fond of in PvP that several trash mobs are also keen to use. I'm talking about Whirlwind, something that will kill me 9 times out of 10, and quite frankly it's getting on my nerves.

I'm not talking about remove the ability, that would be unnecessary, but can we stop giving it to trash mobs that the tank expects to round up and be burned down at the same time.

Reasons are this:
  1. When doing single target dps, Quartz will show me when whirlwind is being cast and I can run the heck away.
  2. When mobs are being tanked away from each other, a mob spinning around is a good indication that it's performing whirlwind.
Problem when 4 mobs are grouped up on top of each other, and the marked skull doesn't whirlwind chances are the rogue is going to die.

This came to light the other night when we were attacking the military wing in Naxx. Our melee DPS included me and 2 death knights and unless I got lucky with evasion or the healers were on the ball I died on nearly every trash pull compared to the plate wearers who laughed it off. This slows the raid while I'm rezzed and buff up and quite frankly annoys the bejesus out of me. In the end I resorted to try and train ranged skills and this isn't fun.

I mention this now because of the Razorscale fight in Ulduar which has Iron Dwarf adds during the air phase and the highest priority one to kill does a, guess what, whirlwind attack. At least this one we should be able to run away from, but that still limits dps on a fight that relies on killing things quickly.

This is probably a personal moan, and I expect QQ comments should anyone choose to do so. But when raid trash is designed to be rounded up and killed en mass it seems slightly unfair that classes with low armor that need to stand in the middle (I'm including Arcane mages in this) can be killed very quickly because one guy decides to spin around with his big sword.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

You're right that, in a typical AoE trash pull having several whirlwinding mobs is unfriendly to the melee DPS. It's not a good idea. That said, there are ways to adjust to these situations and sometimes Blizzard wants to make us adapt more to the encounter.

Razorscale, for instance. On my 10 man modes, the whirlwind damage doesn't seem to cause any problems. On heroic mode, it's well known that the whirlwind is ugly - and these mobs are tanked away from the rest, with ranged dps taking them out. It is slower that way, but effective.

End result is, Blizzard has used many mechanics that require melee dps to stand back and twirl their thumbs and it's unlikely to change now. In a given circumstance it is always easier to change your actions than to convince others to.

havelock1982 said...

I found myself eating the dust quite some times especially during heroic halls of Lightning.

I got the impression that disarm works fairly well against whirlwind, maybe someone could validate/ falsificate this?

Morane said...

My main is an enhancement shaman so I get to chew on the whirlwind quite often. In the military quarter I've had three mobs whirlwind at the same time. In that case I was dead so fast that at first I thought I pulled aggro.

For these pulls I've started hanging back and just blowing off some chain lightning and lava bursts.

What bugs me about the melee AOE effects (there are others besides whirlwind) is that there's no equivalent effect that impacts the ranged classes.

@havelock1982

The problem I have is that if it's not the targetted mob that's casting whirlwind then it's virtually impossible to pick it up before I'm dead.