Blizzard, what were you thinking?

I started the weekend with grand ideas of getting valor capped this weekend on at least one character.

But I have a problem that pops up every few winters that involves excruciating pain in my right hand. Friday night I couldn’t even turn a page in a book without wincing.

So there went that plan.

I did log in for the continuation of our Wednesday night raid and we picked up on the not-so-pushover Lootship 2.0.

Why, Blizzard, why?

We have spent years busting people over the head for standing in the bad and now you build an entire encounter that REQUIRES we stand in the bad.

Now, with as much as we’ve bitched about people doing such a wonderful job of standing in the bad, you would think that this would be the perfect encounter.

I mean, people are just magnets for bad, right?

Not quite.

The problem is not that people *stand* in the bad.

Wait. What?

The problem is that people don’t *move* out of the bad.

Bad is usually targeted to a player’s location.

All sorts of poison puddles, fire patches, puke bombs, random charges, ground bubbling up, ceiling caving in, etc., it all comes to where the player is standing.

However, in this encounter the bad is randomly spawned and almost never in a convenient location.

In most encounters, given the choice between staying put (taking a bad thing to the face) or moving (and not taking a bad thing to the face), the deciding factor actually has nothing to do with the outcome.

Whether it’s laziness or failure to recognize the importance of the situation, the choice to remain stationary is the easier one.

That’s assuming that the player is aware of the bad hurtling towards their position.

Mostly, I think players aren’t even registering that there is a reason to move (as their health bar plummets).

So you take a generic encounter in which a player must move out of fire to avoid damage.

They have proven apt at staying put and burning to a crisp.

Now given an encounter in which they must be aware of the fire and MOVE to it, they stay put and the ship blows up.

I was briefly worried that this encounter (particularly on the raid finder version) would encourage people to stand in the fire in other encounters.

My fears were unfounded.

The people that will not move out of fire are not likely to move in to it.

The people that move out of fire are mostly capable of moving in to it when appropriate. (I’m sure I’m not the only one that gets a bit twitchy about it.)

There really isn’t a change at all.