From another thread, I read that a Blizzard CM stated they had run out of 40 man raid encounter ideas, prompting me to post this asking for your ideas on new raid encounters.

Be as detailed (below) or generic (Nefarion with 360 shadowflame which spawns Chromags on player death) as you want (with lore or not as well), but I'd like to hear what other have dreamed up.

I'll start.

25-man encounter with two distinct phases/sections.

Section 1:
The raid enters a large room with 9 doors, each labeled for 1 class. Each member (1 by 1)must enter their respective door and complete a gauntlet type event which is unique to each class. (I'd have to type far too much to describe each gauntlet and I do not know some classes well enough to have a good idea of what it could be.)

As each member of the class completes their gauntlet it is incrementally harder for the next member of that class to complete. (This discourages raid stacking and builds in strategy as to which spec/players are best for the particular gauntlet.)

Section 2:
Section 1 is tuned such that you can reasonably expect to get 9-18 people through the gauntlet fairly easily, but getting 20+ would be difficult initially and those that fail to get through can be generally mocked by their friends.

Now in section 2, there is a raid gauntlet which is simply a battle of attrition. Pretty much every style of damage (AoE, AoE Volleys, exploding mushrooms, flame throwers, RoF, Blizzards, etc..) is happening to the raid through the room. The raid must out-live the boss who is channeling all their energy (and hp) into these damage types.

Each damage type can be mitigated however in some way. Some damage types can be toggled off for X seconds by ranged dps from the raid. Other types are disarmed, others can be avoided with raid movement, other straight dps'd down.

If at least 1 person lives, the event can be one and the raid can rejoice. Obviously it would need far more though put into but it is different than anything we have seen before and these are the types of ideas I am curious in,

Unique ideas promoting class balance, raid coordination, individual skill, etc. Thanks.

I've never really sat down and thought about an entire encounter, but there are definately some things missing from Blizzard's encounters, or at least, I haven't seen anything of it.

That is, terrain changes and movement. Moving platforms, a rotating room, etc. I'd love to see these sorts of things in an encounter, it requires alot of attention to be able to jump from platform A to B, or keep moving with the spinning-thing so the death-wheel doesn't hit the raid, etc.

That, and I always loved classes doing things that are not always designed for. Like Maulgar having a mage tank or I recall somewhere in an EJ thread if a boss isn't tanked by a druid he ones shots the player and yells "I'M LOOKING FOR A BEAR".

One epic fight might involve slaying a series of shadows of former bosses - similar to what you might have found in some old nes console games - as some form of prelude to a final boss (as a separate encounter). Obviously, not all having 5 million HP, but something unique where you fight multiple bosses simultaneously, or something along these lines. Almost infinite possibilities Pretty crappy summary there, but its enough that people know what I mean.

If they could ever work on the AI of computer controlled players, it would be neat to have an event which is just like PVP... Everyone in the raid is cloned and controlled by computers. Would be really amazing and attract a lot of the pvpers that aren't interested in pve atm.

Buuut, until that day I'll watch myself get mc'd and shoot at someone in the raid (as a rogue.)

Role Reversal!

A huge undead boss, that gives everyone sans the main tank a debuff that swaps their faction (Boss & mobs = green, MT = red) and reverses damage/healing. That means, healing spells do damage, attacks and skills heal. The tank stands in a certain spot to both not get the debuff, and autotaunt boss (think Netherspite red beam)

MT himself has a buff that gives him x10 max hp, so we're looking at a tank with 200,000 HP. The boss himself does about 10k dps on the tank, spawns adds which also lock on to the tank and do ~3k dps each.

So, how does the fight go? DPS has to unload on the tank and match the amount of DPS the boss does... 200k hp is a pretty safe buffer that it becomes more of a tug-of-war than wack-a-mole cast/cancelling.

Healers have to split up the 'dps' between making sure adds die, and slowly whittling at the boss. Mana efficiency, of course, becomes a key to the fight.

This could be an awesome gear check with a twist. Pure numbers and theorycrafting, minimal execution.

Said boss could have some defining abilities, of course, to not make it a snoozefest. A periodic strike that takes %current hp, or randomly selected phases every 10%, or... or a rage bar! The more damage healers do to him in a short period of time, the more abilities he can spam on the tank. I don't believe I've ever seen a mob with a rage bar so far.

Yea, personally I'd love to see some kind of Gnomeregan battleground with all the moving platforms and whatnot. wooo. In my best hopes I had envisaged that the Eye would have these kinds of encounters, though. Obviously not. The major problem is that it would be horribly unfriendly to melee unless there was some gimmick added to make them useful (lots of magic-resist adds, for example.)

Blizzard is touchy about terrain deformation because it would probably require major expansion of their movement/collision coding. I could see there being an encounter where a boss does a cool terrain deformation shockwave, and then.... if someone jumps during it you get stuck in the ground or something. The requisite changes would probably only be included in a new expansion.. if we're lucky.

Hah, I recall reading that on the R+D forums, never here though.. but hey, I'm new.

I'm not so much a fan of the openly-gimmicky encounters like Raz and Maulgar. While it can be fun in small quantities, it also evidences a lack of creativity on Blizzard's part, that they can't think of new, innovative encounters based on the existing mechanics.

Yea, this is one fight I'd love to see... just a straight-up 25v25 match.

Another general thing which I think would be neat would be a fight where players actually have to fight eachother. I imagined something like a Vampire boss that would take control of players and turn your own team hostile, and then stack a DoT on you.... and the only way to live through the DoT would be to attack your own team to steal their life. Of course, there would have to be some mechanism to avoid just having a few sacrificial lambs to get drained from... maybe there would be diminishing returns from attacking one player or maybe you could only attack certain players with a "tasty blood" debuff that's randomly applied. It'd be fun!

Also, I think it'd be neat to have more Jin'do-like encounters where you randomly have your raid split up and only each team can fulfill a certain role.

I guess the main thing I'd like to see are more encounters that don't become (too) formulaic... having random elements tends to make things luck-based (oh noes!), but the relationship between randomness and luck can be diminished through wise implementation (eg. random Mind Controls... but never on the MT, plz.)

From the ingame sound files, the Shiva boss in BT has some kind of Taunt mechanic. Maybe it'd work something like that, without requiring the huge changes to enemy AI.

One I've had in mind for a while is heavily 'inspired' by an encounter I read about absolutely years ago. It probably lends itself better to a 10 man event than a 25 but anyway:

End of the zone, atop a tower/cathedral/whatever. A sacrifice is taking place to revive 5 all powerful magi. The first phase involves trying to rescue as many captives held for sacrifice as possible while also under assault from a horde of fanatics. The fanatics have to be held off ideally as any that are killed inside the sacrificial area add to the power of the sacrifice, as do any player deaths. After a certain amount of time, the sacrificial area erupts and anniliates anything still inside and the ritualists conducting the ceremony attack. At this point, you can kill everything with impunity as the ritual's over.

Once the cultists are mopped up, one of three outcomes occur.

i) Too many people died in the sacrificial zone, the 5 magi revive at full strength and make Kazzak in Supreme Mode look like Mary Poppins. Go straight to Graveyard, do not pass Go, do not collect shiny purples unless you're amazing badasses of the Hakkar-with-aspects disposition.

ii) The 'normal' outcome - with very few sacrifices to power their return, they revive as far weaker versions of themselves so the fight is on! Each magi representing a different school of magic and requiring their own specific method to be defeated. Kill them, save the world, count your gold, relax.

iii) The 'exceptional' outcome - there wasn't enough people sacrificed, the ritual implodes with a cute little pfft. However (and this is the bit I liked the most about the original story) the very first of the magi that you encountered at the start of it all gets his hooks in and manages to manifest himself through you. The more time he has to establish himself in reality, the stronger he becomes - so a magical Gruul in effect - thus he needs to be killed before he starts thowing out 20k arcane bolts and the like. This would be the ultimate way to beat the encounter and so provide the best reward as he alone is designed to be far tougher than with his 4 comrades. If your group wasn't quite up to it yet, or just fancied a change, you have the other option in the meantime.

And yes, if anyone else is familiar with all this, I'd definitely say it should retain the wonderful cheese option to stop the lone magi within the first 5 seconds but for a substantially lesser reward than the other variations, naturally!

Obviously this could never be used but something that had a similar degree of variation in it would be very welcome, though the problem is balancing the rewards so that all versions of the kill are worthwhile and viable.

While this sounds fun, an encounter like these absolutely sucks for non dps specced raid members. I remember healers getting overwhelmed at Jindo because i couldnt kill shades fast enough. It's not very much fun to know you caused the wipe without there being anything you can do about it.

Raid encounters.

I'm a big fan of story-driven encounters myself, the only one that really pops to mind right now if Nef, where the mechanics are kind of subsumbed by the personality of the boss and the enviroment you fight him in.

Wouldn't it be cool if you had an instance which is essentially one big scrap?

Example:

You must help your faction besiege a Burning Legion stronghold, the stronghold is impossibly huge and scary looking. We will not settle for any wall less impressive than the black gates from the LotR movies.

Phase 1: You need to support steamtanks and footmen through waves of winged Demons dropping down from the battlements, this would involve several different elements:

1) The footmen can handle themselves fairly well vs. the demons, and outnumber them allow them to gang up and kill plenty of them. However there are caster demons that do AoE damage which will kill the footmen in the end, these demons need to be specifically targetted by the players, who are like the Hero units of an RTS in this case.

2) The tanks do massive amounts of damage, but are slow, eventually flying demons will sometimes drop behind footmen lines and will attack the tanks which cannot fight in close quarters. Stopping this can be done either by engaging the demons on the ground or having ranged classes defend the tanks by standing on them and blasting the demons.

3) The survival of the footmen and tanks is critical in destroying the -massive- gates of the fortress, the footmen will pick up battering rams, ladders and in some cases take a defensive position near the tanks, tanks will pewpew the gates.

Phase 2: The siege of the walls underway, the amount of demons descending will either drop sharply, or simply stop (limited demon spawns would be best, nobody likes endless spawns). While the army attempts to breach the defenses they are under fire from turrets and such (not -really-, there is no timer for the army to be shot to pieces, it's just a story element that an NPC will tell you about.)

The raidgroup now needs scale the battlements in a specific segment and fight their way to the turrets and destroy the forces manning them. Ideally each turret has a mini boss commander that needs to be killed in a more or less conventional tank-spank manner, and each will drop a nice item. Ideally, each commander has a small gimmick to keep things interesting. The trick here will be that the raid needs to be split, and that the commanders have anti-zerg mechanics. Too many players, and they will detonate the ammo in their turret in a suicide action.

Phase 3: The big bad evil guy

After completing phase two, the walls are swarmed by friendly troops and the gates are blown wide, there is a short mini-phase destroying the remaining defenders with the friendly troops backing you...about three minutes to rebuff, drink, res etc. and then.

A really, really, BADASS demon comes out of the inner sanctum. And he has friends.

The badass demon must be attacked by players, but his buddies can be handled by the troops, provided you protected them well in the first phase. If you do not have enough troops and tanks they will gain the upper hand and begin dsirupting your boss attempt.

Ideally, one add loose should be a salvagable try, two a VERY difficult effort and three should be certain doom. You should be able to mitigate this by sending a small number of players to assist troops in trouble.

That's just a short outline, but it's the kind of scripted action i really enjoy.

The easy solution would be for each attack to life-steal a set amount. Therefore healers and tanks would not be overly gimped and die from this mechanic. It would also prevent the encounter from becoming harder once you outgear it (sorry guys, I accidentally killed the priest again).

mmmm flash of light dps

Do you have a link to this statement?

I'm still an advocate of an instance that splits your party into two. I.E, a 10man that requires two groups of 5 to be in completely different zones to each other, and fight it as two 5-mans. Something like Blackrock Spire, in the bridged parts, you could look down/across/up and see the other 5 mid-combat in the distance.

The problem might be that one group of 5 would progress too fast for the other 5, but you could find ways around that. No details yet, but it might be a touch interesting to see an encounter where one party is fighting a boss, and the others are fighting through swathes of mobs on the floor below.

I'd like to see more open ended encounters which don't depend on using strategy X. So something like defending a keep against waves of invaders, with the ability to use stuff like catapults and burning oil.

I'd like to see a raid version of a bombing run! Maybe instance-only flying mounts like the AQ40 bugs, with some flying dogfights or somesuch.

I'd like a raid (or 5 man) encounter where everyone turns into a corehound.

I'd like to see an encounter where the rogues, mages, and druids can use stealth/invisibility.

DAOC had a few interesting mechanics in some of the Trials of Atlantis fights that have yet, to my knowledge, to be used in WoW.

My favorites were variations on a theme of type/amount of damage taken by the Boss. In the first flavor, the Boss can only take X hits before he has a brief enrage. 100 melee strikes, DoT ticks, spells landed, whatever--when the 100th unit of damage hits the Boss, it does some special attack, effect, or enrage then resets the timer. This would definitely require a change in tactics. Rogues never using SnD, Affliction Locks not using DoTs, Fury Warriors dusting off 2Hs, Hunters having to intentionally change their timing to mess up Auto Shots... you get the idea.

The second variation is where a Boss can take only X amount of certain types of damage before an enrage happens. You reach X amount of Shadow Damage, bad thing happens. You reach X amount of melee damage, bad thing happens. And so on. This would encourage Raid balance or at least balance in a sense that each part of the Raid would need to be able to balance the DPS of another part. If the Boss went immune to X damage type after a certain amount of it, then I can see fights ending with everyone healing and yelling at the lone Hunter to finish off the Boss while the few surviving melee tried to use their range attacks to help. It wouldn't have to be an immunity to the damage type. It could be that when the Boss has taken X amount of Shadow damage he enrages and 1 shots 2 people who have done Shadow damage to him, then resets. Boss takes X amount of melee damage, he 1 shots 2 melee damage folks and resets.

There are more variations you could add to this but that's the general idea.

Curse you for ruining the idea.

Health: 2500000
Damage: 2000-3000 on plate
Attack Speed: About 1.5 seconds.

Phase 1: Basic Tank and Spank fight except boss has a Wing Buffet like ability that reduces threat on MT once every 20 seconds.
Phase 2: Begins at 80% HP. The boss gains one of the following abilities.
AOE Knockback - 50 yard radius. Knocks back approximately 10 yards. Used in Tandem with Wing Buffet.
Sunder Armor - Reduces MTs armor by 5%. Stacks 5 times. Used every 5 seconds.
Phase 3: Begins at 60%. Maintains same abilities as Phases 1 and 2 but gains one of the following abilities.
Blast Wave - A wave of flame radiates outward from the caster, damaging all enemies caught within the blast for 600 Fire damage, and Dazing them for 6 sec. Occurs in Tandem with Wing Buffet.
Fiery Claws - 25% of the Bosses Melee Attacks become fire damage and apply a DoT that ticks for 500 damage every 3 seconds. Does not stack.
Phase 4: Begins at 40%. Maintains same abilities as Phases 1, 2 and 3 but gains one of the following.
Meteor Storm - Calls down a meteor shower on a spot with a radius of 10 yards. Stuns all who are in it and deals 4000 damage over 5 seconds. Will not target the MT but if someone is too close to the MT when it occurs, the MT will be affected by it. Used 2 seconds after each wing buffet.
Curse of Flame- Deals 500 damage to each player and increases fire damage taken by 100%. Can be removed by Remove Lesser Curse. Lasts for 10 seconds. Casts every 15 seconds.
Phase 5: Begins at 20%. Maintains same abilities as Phases 1, 2, 3 and 4 but also gains one of the following.
Conflagaration - Targets 5 random raid members (Not MT) and sets them aflame, inflicting 2000 Fire damage over 5 sec. and sending it into a state of panic. While the target is affected, the flames periodically scorch its nearby allies for 500 damage as well. Occurs 3 seconds after each Wing buffet.
Flame Breath - Will target a random raid member and perform a 180° arc of 2000 Fire Damage. Occurs 7 seconds after each Wing Buffet.

Lastly, the boss resets all threat to 0 on all raid members except the highest 2 at the beginning of each phase.

The wing buffet will be sufficient enough to keep any one person from going balls to the wall but not so bad as to prevent a raid from doing 20% damage in each phase.

Imo you can't beat an encounter like Cursecallers from Inktu'ta in EQ.

6 Cursecallers positioned around the room, they hit for 1 damage and cause a root periodically and an AE slow.

When you engage the cursecallers 6 cursebearers spawn and move slowly towards 6 predefined targets picked from your raid. If they touch you they deathtouch you dead and go for someone else. Also as the fight goes on they increase in speed until you evenutally get touched. So it becomes a DPS race from all classes while dodging the bearers as they chase you.

Not really an end game encounter but a good "easy" fight to put in, once leaernt it's fast and fun, but learning it and getting dps up with individual skill is pretty hard, added in with some roots and no warning except an emote on a target change.

Plus it does the best thing, stops the healers having to heal every fight and chain pot, gives everyone a run around and a bit of fun, never got dull.

I actually think alot of the GoD+ encounters in EQ were perfect for where the top raid guilds are today, gimmicks that were not too harsh while requiring everyone to do their jobs...but, once you have them they become farmable with relative ease.

I could go on but I won't, if people want to see some interesting ideas check out Stonemites encounter, Zum'muram Takarish (Txevu end boss) and most of Tacvi's bosses. Throw in trials in MPG(especially forsights and tactics) and you could add alot more encounters.

I've always wanted to see an optional boss (or group of bosses) with very low HP, very low damage output, and exceptional AI. As in: attacks cloth, reactively interrupts spellcasts, CCs the raid and heals itself, etc. It would resemble PvP more than anything else. Unlikely, I know, and not balanced for a raid in raiding gear, but it would be interesting nonetheless.

Healing should be needed, respeccing back and forth for a single encounter is not fun !

Not exactly a "new" encounter idea, but I'd love to see a raid version of the Harbinger Skyriss event, in which old raid bosses are revisited. There's some really amazing and fun fights in the pre-expansion game which would be great fun to do again without having to drudge through old instances. A number of Naxxramas bosses, Nefarian, a couple AQ bosses (C'thun especially, he's such an amazing fight which is nearly inaccessible these days)... all fun things I'd like to see again. A presentation in a gauntlet format would be interesting, though a Mega Man-style thing in which you walk through teleporter doors to individual boss rooms could also be neat.