What were they thinking?

I don’t actually rant a lot about random single mechanics, but this irks me every day when I do dailies in Korthia (in WoW 9.1).

So there’s this NPC, Popo, who is running across a third of the map, in (I think) 3 places a few very easy mobs spawn, then at the final destination a Rare is spawned from a portal. First of all, this whole thing has upsides and downsides. Upside: You see Popo spawn and move on the map, so you know “aha, a Rare at destination X in 1 or 2 minutes”, that’s fine. Just that most of the people (me included) ignore Popo on the way, so there’s always one or two poor souls who kill the mobs on the way, the rest is finishing up what they are doing or simply waiting at the portal. Lazy.

But that’s not the point. The mob that spawns, Wild Worldcracker, has a few boring abilities and one really annoying one. It does some sort of scream that will silence you for a full 20 seconds. And for a few weeks I was thinking “what a stupid mechanic”, you can’t kick it, I think you can knock the mob away or stun to interrupt it, but not 100% sure about the stun. So it’s always a little “am I lucky or will stand there for 20 seconds, doing nothing. Who thinks this is a fun mechanic?”.

At some point I went to Wowhead to look it up. I’m quoting the top-rated comment here:

If you just got CC’ed and can’t cast or attack, you must find a feared reflection of yourself (like the Kul’tharok soul separation mechanic in the Theater of Pain dungeon). The reflection is static (it does not move like the dungeon mechanic). Of course, with a lot of people around the mob on the first days of the patch, it’s harder to see the reflection.

Has this encounter designer EVER done a World Boss in WoW before thinking up something so stupid? For ranged, it’s some sort of amount of people with spell effects and looking for a grey? shade on grey ground in Korthia, maybe it’s doable.

For the melee it’s… a de-facto invisible shade in a huge ball of spell effects and 20-40 people in one ball around the boss. This is not a 20 man raid with coordinated people, this is a rare spawn, not even a world boss. It’s full nuke until it’s dead. Everyone hitting every button that lights up the surrounding.

Since I read this comment I’ve been trying to find my shade. A few days ago I seem to have run into it by chance because my silence was broken after 3s, on all the other occasions since looking for it, I have not seen it a single time. Yes, I do play Melee.

Yes, it’s nitpicking, but it’s the single most stupid thing I’ve seen in Korthia so far.

It’s Blaugust again and this is post number 5.