valeea

Hello EJ-community,

in the past few months, especially after the progress guilds' race through the Black Temple, many people regret the lack of really new ideas in the bossencounters in terms of mechanics that are used. In this post I want to list the different mechanics that are currently used frequently, give an overview of the mechanics each TBC 25-man raidboss uses and encourage you to think about new basic mechanics that you would use if you were in charge of designing new encounters.

Nearly every boss needs to be tanked by either a feral/warrior or by a ranged damagedealer, where mostly a warlock proves to be the best choice. Sometimes an encounter requires more than one tank (Hydross) or switches between phases so that you have to bring both ranged and melee tank. Additionally, every boss needs to be damaged in order to be killed. These 2 elements are present since Onyxia and Molten Core (warlock tanking was introduced with the twins, iirc) and probably will be in the future, too. When looking at the encounter mechanics, I dont want to specify what tanking role needs to be fulfilled. The following abilities and mechanics are used very frequently, how many of them come to use in one encounter depends on the difficulty of this boss.

Adds
We all know them. There are basically 3 different types of adds:
1 - Adds which have to be focused down one by one (called "Adds 1" in the following. E.g.: Hydross, Lurker, Vashj)
2 - Adds which are killed with massive AE damage (called "Adds 2" inthe following. E.g.: Tidewalker, Solarian)
3 - Boss adds which have to be dealt with separately (called "Adds 3" in the following. E.g.: Karathress, Illidari council)

Area Effect Damage (AE)
AE damage is used very often and again we face some different types:
1 - AE which hits only one or some targets at a time, but requires preventive positioning to not affect normally unaffected players (called "AE pp" in the following. E.g.: Najentus' needle spinde, Hydross' watertombs.)
2 - AE which "contaminates" a certain area of the map and therefor requires reactive positioning to not be affected (called "AE rp1" in the following. E.g.: Azgalors rain of fire, Wintherchills death & decay, Al'Ars flamepatches)
3 - AE which is shot at one or more players and requires relative recavtive positioning of these player(s) and/or the other players to not affect the latter (called "AE rp2" in the following. E.g.: Solarians new mark, Kaz'Rogals manaburn bomb, Vashjs static charge).
4 - AE damage that is either completely unavoidable (Netherspites shadow aura) or is avoidable but accepted in some cases (Lurkers whirl for melees, Voidreavers pounding). Calles "AE U" in the following.

Curses, magical debuffs etc.(AE)
Nothing specific in this category. Sometimes the debuffs are very bad (Archimonde, Gorefiend), sometimes they are only annoying (Hydross' vile sludge). Only curable debuffs are listed as "debuff", because you can't do anything against non-curable debuffs anyway, despite healing them (Vashjs static charge) or coping with their restrictive nature (Hydross' vile sludge, Anetherons -heal). Also listed "interesting" debuffs which demand a special action or reaction in order to handle them (e.g. Azgalors doom).

Miscellaneous
A category that houses all the things we call "creative":
-Items (e.g.: Vashjs tainted cores, Kaels legendary weapons)
-Enviromental Triggers: A classic staple of arcade boss battles. (Ossirian's crystals, Magtheridon's cubes or Hydross's cleansing beams)
-Class-Dependant Effects: Stuff that changes based on your raid composition. Nefarian's class calls, Hex Lord's Soul Drains, and even Archimonde's differently colored soul charges fall into this subcategory.
-Piloting: Certain encounters require players to directly control NPCs with predetermined abilities. Examples: Razorgore, Razuvious, Faerlina, Gorefiend.

Single target damage
This causes one single non-tank player to unavaoidably take massive DPS for either a limited ammount of time (Winterchills icebolt) or until the player dies (Naj'entus' impaling spine). Called "STDPS" in the following.


In the following I want to give an overview over the raidbosses in SSC, TK, Hyjal and BT and try to categorize their abilitys with my given schema.

Serpentshrine Cavern
Hydross: Adds 1/2, AE pp
Lurker: Adds 1, AE rp1 (spout), AE rp2 (geyser), AE U (whirl)
Tidewalker: Adds 2, AE U (earthquake), AE U (Watery graves, no real "AE" in the tightest sense)
Karathress: Adds 3, AE U (totem, waterbolt-AE)
Leotheras: Adds 1, AE rp1 (whirl), AE pp (chaos blast)
Vashj: Adds 1, AE rp2 (static charge), AE rp1 (sporebat poison clouds), AE U (forked lightning), Misc. - Items

Tempest Keep
Al'Ar: Adds 1, AE rp1 (flamepatches), AE pp (meteor)
Void Reaver: AE pp (orbs), AE U (pounding)
Solarian: Adds 2, AE U, AE rp2
Kael'Thas: Adds 3, Adds 1/2 (weapons), (debuff, mindcontrol: not curable in the tightest sense, but counterable via sheep), AE pp (netherbeam), AE rp1 (phoenixes & flamestrike), Misc. - items

Hyjal
Rage Winterchill: STDPS, AE rp1(death & decay), AE pp (frostnova, not really completely avoidable for all but one player, but spreading out loweres its effect)
Anetheron: Adds 1, AE pp (same positioning procedure as with Winterchills FN, not preventable for ALL)
Kaz'Rogal: AE pp/rp2 (explosion after manaburn)
Azgalor: AE rp1, debuff=>Adds 1
Archimonde: AE pp/rp1/rp2 (doomfire), AE pp (airburst), debuff, Misc. - item, class specific soulcharge

Black Temple
Naj'Entus: STDPS (impaling spine), item (impaling spine), AE pp (needle spine), AE U (tidal shield)
Supremus: AE rp1 (blue fire), AE rp1 (volcanoes)
Akama: Adds 1, AE rp1 (elementalists rain of fire)
Gorefiend: AE U (shadowbolt clouds), debuff (incinerate), debuff=>Misc. - piloting=>Adds 1/2

Although I'm informed about the missing 5 encounters in BT I do not want to comment them in the same way, because my guild did not yet progress any further.

The question now is: Which new principles could one add to make bossfights more interesting again instead of combinating the features I listed above. I invite you to discuss this and I'm curious which ideas you have!

Greets,
valeea

PS: Please correct me if you think I missed something or did not properly interpret something within the list of the bosses. I'd also be happy if Illidan killers could complete my scheme for the last 5 bosses. I will update my original post then.

 

Cob-

I would design an Illidan-esque encounter, but instead of blue eye beams.. he would shoot rainbow eye beams.

 

• Icetro

Edit your post and take out the signature before Kaubel comes back from his daily bear wrestling trip, lest ye feel his wrath.

Edit- In an attempt to be constructive, I would like to see another C'thun-esque fight. Lots of things to control all at once with the threat of a "You Lose" mechanic hanging over your head (not a berserk timer, for once!).

 

Senex

I'd make "Items" into a subcategory of "Miscellaneous". Other subcategories would include:

-Enviromental Triggers: A classic staple of arcade boss battles. Think Ossirian's crystals, Magtheridon's cubes or Hydross's cleansing beams.
-Class-Dependant Effects: Stuff that changes based on your raid composition. Nefarian's class calls, Hex Lord's Soul Drains, and even Archimonde's differently colored soul charges fall into this subcategory.
-Piloting: Certain encounters require players to directly control NPCs with predetermined abilities. Examples: Razorgore, Razuvious, Faerlina, Gorefiend.

 

valeea

Thank you for the contribution, I adopted your formulation and changed the category "items" to "miscellaneous" according to your idea.

 

Tyrian

Archimondes soul charges should be in two categories, one is the 'class dependant' effect. But the nature of soul charge mechanics , which directly affects the entire playstyle of the encounter and odds are to beat it: is worth another category - because every death has an effect on every boss - some to varying degrees - and its a important part of boss encounter design.

I think you should make two more categories for something like 'Effect deaths have on the encounter'

On a boss like Loatheb, deaths mean you might not have enough dps to kill it before enrage - but you still will live for a while. On a boss like Vashj phase 2, deaths 'weaken' your raid which is spread very thinly to begin with and might not wipe you right away and you might recover or slowly wipe over the next few minutes. On bosses like supremus, your death probably means very little. On bosses like Archimonde - a death just straight out has the highest chance to ruin your attempt and wipe you within seconds.

The way player deaths interact with the encounter is extremely important to their design. One fights like Teron/Vaelastrasz, its part of the encounter and you need it to beat the boss and on other fights its the complete opposite, to a varying degree.

 

Opioid

My dream fight involves a very large animal that isn't evil to begin with but has been infected and is doing a lot of damage and needs to be stopped (a giant hippopotamus trashing Zangarmarsh is the first idea that comes to mind - it is infected by infernal parasites) How about a boss that pukes up these fire gremlins it has inside of it every 10%, its like a channelled puke but they increase by a power of 2 for every second you let him keep puking without interrupting (the puke can only be interrupted by an arcane shot from a survival hunter followed by a crusader strike by the way, thus incorporating some woefully underused class/specs into the raid game!)

Anyhow the fire gremlins take the aspect of whatever AOE damage they take, now this is where it gets interesting, they are immune to that damage school and get special powers based on it: arcane attuned gremlins spin in place, firing arcane missiles, but they can be jumped over; ice gremlins summon frost wolves that attempt to kill the party in the following order: mages, shaman, warlocks, druids, then everyone else randomly; shadow gremlins are the most unique part of the encounter by far, I think, though, because of what I've come up for them:

Shadow gremlins deal damage but only take damage based on what blessings they have (that's right, the main paladin role in this fight is to BLESS the ENEMY to make it vulnerable!) but on the downside, the shadow gremlins, although open to damage now, get the extra powers of the blessing as well. To take physical damage, you have to blessing of might them, to take fire damage, you have to blessing of freedom them, and so on. It would be a unique fight for pretty much *every* guild in the WoW endgame as the blessings would be based on your own unique composition of DPS.

After a ton of fire gremlins have been killed, I don't know, lets say 64 or 65 to be safe, the boss explodes and the 8 Master Gremlins that have been feasting on his innards come out to do damage to you. These Master Gremlins all attune like before, but they do it in rolling synch, i.e. they shift every 8 seconds but it is staggered so its like a synchronized ripple effect. Once the first Master Gremlin dies, whatever school he was at the time of death is locked in as the "Kill" school: you have to kill all the other gremlins only when they attune to that school, or they HOT to 100% in 6-8 seconds.

To add a bit of the Zul'Aman time trial thing that seems to be a resounding success, you can SEE the loot they are gonna drop. The Master Gremlins whole loot table of 10 or 12 items is split up amongst them, and you only get the loot from the one you kill last when his powers have waned (the others detonate and the molten fire consumes what they had.) Now you see the Gremlins toss the items back and forth every so often to give it the hint of suspense - it isn't just left to the RNG entirely, alleviating the most common complaint of raiders, but you have to be very good to get exactly what you want and pick that gremlin to be the last one you kill that night.

All in all, in terms of lore, uniqueness, and challenge, without resorting to enrage timers or those old stupid cliches, I think I have brainstormed a pretty intriguing encounter.

 

Arzhakon

There are some other elements which frequently appear in boss encounters:
- AoE fear, such as Magmadar, Archimonde, Nightbane and Lord Sanguinar
- Mind Control, such as Lucifron's adds, Prophet Skeram, Kael'Thas and Kel'Thuzad
- Aggro reset between different phases, which usually requires some timing with hots and dots to avoid taking aggro: e.g. Hydross and Leotheras

 

snape

I submit to you that there is a 4th type of add on some encounters - and those are adds that are either unkillable, kitable, or controllable indefinitely in the encounter (or at least shouldn't be killed in the general strategy until the boss is dead).

Examples: Gluth, Razuvious, Razorgore [to an extent]

I can't think of this add type in any TBC Raid Boss - we should see a revisit. Gluth was very clever this way.

 

◊ Vectivus

I think your current depiction of boss encounters woefully under-represents the variety of encounters in the game.

For example, describe Vaelstrasz or The Four Horsemen using that model.

Hell, describe Garr with that model.

Invariably, you have left a number of mechanics out.

(And for argument's sake, Hunters and Mages have also tanked - either that, or you've seen a very impressive strategy for High King Maulgar that the rest of us would be very interested in.)

Overall, I think I understand what you're getting at - it would be very nice to see some new combinations and permutations of the various elements that Blizzard incorporates into their raid encounters.

Let's give them credit where credit is due, though, for coming up with a pretty reasonable spectrum to date.

 

s[orc]ery

There should definitely be more fights which require constant movement, as they were the most fun encounters in the game pre-bc (C'thun, Heigan and Thaddius if it weren't for lag issues). I'm sure there are many movement patterns that Blizzard could replicate in a boss encounter. I also consider the random ability bosses like Shade of Aran to be very challenging and fun, making the whole raid adapt quickly to whichever spell is cast.

I was envisioning a fight where the boss is an elite Hunter mob which can't be tanked and constantly moves at 200% speed away from the raid spamming instant shots at the nearest person to him (invariably the main tank). The room would be a bit of a maze in which he has to be cornered and shackled down by mounted players with ropes in order to be DPS'd. His enrage timer would be that each shackle lasts shorter than the previous one until he can't be snared. Of course the room would have to be very large like Ossirian.

 

Senex

Ashtongue Defenders?

 

lightstrike

In addition:
Threat reduction abilities, usually a knock-back, requiring multiple tanks; Broodlord, Chromaggus, Void Reaver, Gurtogg Bloodboil, ...

 

Overhead

Anything to keep us hunters valuable like that are great.

Granted my progress isn't up with many here, but I've grown sick of enrage timers. Things like 3-man 30 minute onyxia kills are fun, and I hate the concept of forcing you to stack a dps heavy group all the time - if you want to roll with an extra 2 healers and outlast the boss, it should be an option.

I also like the concept of multiple bosses at once - and order affects the loot. That way you can work and learn an encounter, get it on farm - then continue to challenge yourselves and make it harder for greater reward. I guess the timed ZA runs are a similar concept, and a great idea.

 

Tyrian

Agreed, my three favourite encounters are: c'thun, archimonde and shade of aran. All require a good degree of movement (which you cant plan fully in advance, you dont know which way you have to move until you see a giant eye/doomfire etc)

 

anathor

The categories look good but the AOE one is not easy to understand at first and covers maybe a bit too many different abilities, and ends up being confused with the curses/debuff category at some point. The needle from Naj'entus, for example, is not an AOE. In the end I think you mixed up AoE/debuffs with their consequences (repositioning mostly).

Maybe you should merge AOE + curses/debuffs, but come up with a 2 letter code that would indicate a) if all players, only some players (random), or only players with a certain criteria (class or position), can be affected and b) if the response to being affected is just to ignore, act on it, resposition some players in the raid, reposition all raid or reposition players away from each other. But in any case it will be hard to cate for all the situations.

Another important category to add to curses/debuffs would be all the abilities than temporarily take some players out of the game, e.g. MC (leo, kael), tombs (morogrim, RWC), long/random stuns (kael), etc.

And coming back to the core of your question, I think a very high number of fights are simply a combination of tank&spank + proper positioning with some twists, or can be broken down in this way. Some fights are almost completely about tank & spank with little positioning (they get rarer and rarer in higher content, but the typically "loot bosses" like VR or RWC would qualify given where they are in content, even maybe akama where positioning is not really the key to the fight), a bit of positioning (hydross, lurker, leo, moro, solarian, supremus), strong positioning (netherspite, mag, karathress, al'ar, anetheron), only positioning (aran comes to mind, maybe gruul too). Finally some truly epic fights simply have just a lot of everything (vashj and KT are the only ones I can think of), and then there are the truly weird ones (gorefiend).

In the end from my experience there are 2 ways to make simple fight more challenging:
- increase the amount of positioning required (al'ar harder than VR)
- increase individual responsibility (gruul, mag, naj'entus, gorefiend)

To make them interesting is different, though, and here it relies more on the quality of the "twists". Gorefiend in this respect was a nice surprise. Vashj/KT had interesting features as well.

 

Senex

An unusual interpretation of this approach would be a remake of the Gothik fight, where all players start on the "living" side, and immediately respawn on the "dead" side of the fight when they get killed. As the encounter goes on, the onslaught of mobs on the "living" side would slow to a trickle, while the "dead" side would escalate to a bloodbath. Such a setup would require the raid members to gradually suicide themselves in a controllable fashion to ensure a balanced mix of healers/tanks/DPS on both sides.

 

Urraca

I'd like to see a prot warrior encounter.

Think about the joy that could occur on a mob with 25 million hitpoints and thunderclaps the melee to reduce his attack and his improved defense stance reduces caster DPS. Meanwhile his sunders/devastate eat up your MTs armor.

 

Murdoch

I think encounters that require you to stay within a certain threshold could be interesting. For example:

An encounter that requires all players to do some significant amount of damage in order to not be killed. This would require healers to participate in the dps on the boss and not just heal. But if you kill a boss too fast or slow, you wipe.

An encounter where anyone above a certain threat level is auto-killed, thus preventing anyone from tanking the encounter. Obviously the boss would require not needing to be tanked per se.

An encounter that required you to move into and out of range zones periodically, as in if you're within 10 yards of the boss you die when event A happens, but if you're more than 10 yards away when B happens you die.

-----

Fights that prevent you from doing an action to yourself or another raid member that you can usually do could be cool too. For instance you can't heal yourself, or priests can't heal a particular class(es) during a phase of the encounter.

Another avenue which could be interesting is one where you are required to take control of other members of the raids for a phase of a fight. Exactly how or why is a good question, but beside the point.

Lastly, a fight where healing spells and damage spells had a reversed effect could be interesting. Imagine if mages and locks became the raid healers while the trees, priests and pallies became the dps. Cheesy, maybe, but interesting.

 

Cohren

I'd like to see a Rallos Zek type encounter where adds swarm the room while your fighting a Boss who his fairly hard and is doing some AE damage and the adds have to be feared, sheeped, MC'd, kited, and off tanked.

Getting everyone involved is what a lot of Blizzard encounters lack. Yeah sure all 9 healers might be healing on every encounter but it would mean a whole lot more if 2 of them were MCing, 2 were healing off tanks, 1 was on the kiters, mages and warlocks and 3 were on the MT instead of 6 on the MT and 3 on the rest of the raid.

 

Braque

I think the prot-paladin community might disagree with your opening assertion that "Nearly every boss needs to be tanked by either a feral/warrior or by a ranged damagedealer".

 

bludwork

I don't care what they do, they should put more fun back into boss encounters.

Some of my favorite encounters can be found in 5mans, blackheart the inciter, heroic murmur, Gruul and netherspite. Notice the lack of adds? Throw aran in there for the fun factor.

 

Derrida

I'd like to see a top end raid encounter that hijacked the gravity lapse mechanic from kael p5 and mixed it with a 5 type thaddius polarity charge. Thaddius in 3 dimensions with 5 debuffs to match would be a riot. Really, i'd like to see more use of the z-axis, i think its one of the last fresh places they can take movement heavy raiding.

 

◊ Vectivus

You likely have a different definition of fun than a number of other people.

For example, I think that (from a tanking perspective) any encounter with only one target is a drag. I don't know anyone who liked Netherspite.

Some of the best experiences in WoW for me, as a tank, were fights like Attumen (when I out-geared it and tanked them both, for kicks), Wizard of Oz (control the fight via different mob vulnerabilities), Curator (the additional damage during Evocate was just cool), Prince (just a positioning fight ), Magtheridon (coordination = win), Hydross (tank transitions have to be precise), and so on. It will vary.

I think there's a few 'styles' of fight that we haven't seen adequately represented in the post-BC raid schema - even a few gimmicks that could be recycled well. Garr's AoE purge, Majordomo's "don't kill me, kill them!", Vael's limitless resources, Nefarian's class calls, the bug trio's 'controllable' loot list, Huhuran's no-taunt-multiple-tanks, C'Thun ('nuff said), Patchwerk's all-out-DPS, the Four Horsemen... realistically, there's lots of options left.

I'm personally very excited to see what encounters the Sunwell holds, including how incredibly difficult Kil'Jaeden will need to be.

 

magnetic

1) The boss that sends random players riddles or questions and if you don't reply to him with the correct short answer in say 20 sec. you are banished for the rest of the fight.

I call this one: Stay awake in Sunday school.

2) Boss tosses a stone at a player much like a happy fun rock, but more like a pure evil death pebble. It eats things adjacent it it in your inventory until it runs out of things and explodes. Returning to the boss. The only way to stop it is to toss it to another raid member who has not had it in the past, lets say, 20 seconds.

We can call this gimmick "hawt potato." Inspired by actually playing hot pototo with my kids who found the game to be a complete gas.