Thebeat

I always liked the idea of a boss room that has a sort of blackout and you have to know where to position and whatnot by sounds. Maybe his tail would make a whooshing sound so you'd know where the back is. His different spells would be very distinct. You'd hear a crackling sound if he was casting a fire spell. Maybe unrealistic but I think it might be fun especially seeing a boss turn out the lights in his room.

 

Hrungnir

Personally I think a mini-five man encounter could be fun.

Every group in the raid gets teleported to a mini-dungeon that they have to beat within 5 minutes, or within 1 minute of each other, with a miniboss at the end, or something, completely independent of each other. Make the mobs in it CCable, stunable, kiteable etc so you can do it with non-standard groups if people play well. When you succeed or die you respawn in the boss fight chamber, with the boss's abilities determined by which groups managed to kill their miniboss.

Dunno, seems like it'd provide interesting opportunities for different gameplay, as well as encouraging more hybrids in the raid to handle tanking or healing the different spots.

I'd also like to see more things like the class quests that really encourage a specific skill style with the class - something along the lines of the old Hunter epic bow quest, the Benediction quest, or the druid flight form quest could be pretty cool.

Something like the arena event in the dungeon set 2 quest where the enemy AI is more pvpish could be interesting as well.

 

Zephro

Shade of Aran is a great fight because it breaks all the usual rules of a boss fight. There's no aggro to worry about* and the boss is not fully controllable in the way a lot of raid bosses are. But I'm not sure what you could really add to an Aran-style fight to make it sufficiently different. I suppose you could give him different abilities to replace Flame Wreath, Blizzard and Super Arcane Explosion, but you wouldn't really be changing the essence of the fight at all.

You're right that the chaos and the need for quick thinking is what makes it so fun, though. So perhaps one idea would be to explore the possibilities offered by the Zul'Farrak stair event. You could intersperse waves of minor elite mobs with, say, three random bosses with abilities chosen from a list of, say, nine (so rather like the Underbog Colossuses or the Anibusath Defenders), with a big boss at the end of it.


*OK, so technically he has an aggro table, but he almost never uses it

 

◊ Vectivus

Solarian, give or take on the fuzzy details.

Randomization aside, this sounds strangely like Mt. Hyjal.



All things being equal, I do think Blizzard has done a respectable job of using a broad spectrum of concepts in their boss fights, and has designed a lot of unique and enjoyable encounters.

 

lightstrike

I'd love that as well! Maybe instead of gravity, a boss that floods the whole room, and the raid would have to kill him, or un-flood the room before players' breath runs out. The breath would probably have to be a de-buff that would kill you after it expired. It could not be the normal game breath, as that can be extended with elixirs and the warlock buff. There would be randomly spawning oxygen bubbles, that players would have to swim into, to restore their breath, which technically would be just reseting their breath de-buff timer; toxic bubbles would also spawn that contaminate the water slowly, reducing the duration of the breath buff, and the spawn rate of oxygen bubbles, effectively putting pressure on the raid, similar to an enrage timer. To increase the difficulty, the toxic bubbles could stay, making sure that players swimming to the oxygen bubbles would have to dodge them, and once again, increasing the difficulty over time...

 

◊ Vectivus

This would be a berserk timer by any other name, methinks.

I have a funny feeling this would also get the Prince Malchezzar "WTF LUCK FIGHT" treatment.

 

Dancing Wu Li Master

Part of what I liked about Aran is that it felt like fighting a Mage. I wouldn't be surprised if several other Kara bosses were intentionally designed to represent certain classes (Moroes being a Rogue+others, Maiden being a Pally, Illhoof being a warlock).

There was a joke post about a 40-man raid vs a warlock. The thing I liked most about it is that the fight actually worked as a boss, once you toned down the joke portions. You had elements like split damage amongst targets, LoS-ing spells, an enrage timer in Curse of Doom that felt "realistic", etc.

It's not hard to find on google, and it's worth a read.

I think that's a real understatement. It feels like it lumps too many disparate ideas together, especially when these tend to define some of the most enjoyable and memorable aspects of boss fights.

 

drats

My idea for a boss fight would be a variation on tank n spank. You have a boss that's tanked by an NPC. The NPC can't be healed, and you can't pull aggro off of him, so it's like a built in enrage timer. The boss also has an enormous amount of hitpoints. You damage the boss by tossing around an item that gives the boss a stacking debuff. The debuff increases the damage done to him and would max out around 20 or so, causing 2000% extra damage. So the goal would be to keep passing the item around so the boss keeps full debuffs up, while doing enough damage to kill him before the NPC is killed.

 

• constantius

Your idea has some merit, but given a usual raid, you have the 9 useless people passing the "potato" while the dps classes kill the mob.

6 healers, 3 tanks ... passing a potato ... while the 16 dps nuke the target. Sounds a lot like Shade of Akama, except the 9 people are offtanking Defenders while the 16 dps nuke the Shade, and Akama puts up a stacking debuff.

 

Psilux

This is actually a great idea, and very doable ala end boss of Scholomance (Dark Master Gandling).

He teleports you randomly to other segments in the instance, and you have to fight your way out. Also similar to Heigan the Unclean in Naxx. Overall, really fun.

 

• constantius

Except how do you make sure that the 5 people teleported aren't, say ... 5 healers? Or 5 dps and no healer?

The issue with Heigan was always if you got teleported and didn't have an instant cast dps with you (warrior, hunter, mage), you better hope the healer with you (if you got one) was good, or the entire 3-person party got rocked.

It was very VERY RNG dependent. If you had a priest with you, PW:S and Renew would mostly get you through the tunnel, just running like mad. If you had a hunter, it was easy mode ... arcane shot, occasionally pause a second for a multi, and the eyestalks dropped like candy. But if you had 2 paladins and a holy priest ... you basically had to try to brute-force it, and it failed more often than not.

And that, combined with lag-o-rific phase changes, was the enrage timer. Lose too many people, and eventually you wipe. And that wasn't "fun". Good idea for an encounter, maybe, but the implementation was far too dependent on RNG + Lag.

 

Mode

-Adds share a threat table. E.g. If you generate 10 threat vs Add 1, you generate 10 threat vs ALL of the adds.

-A boss that never attacks you. The entire encounter revolves around dealing with his adds while trying to burn the boss down. The amount of adds steadily increases as the fight goes on - Essentially, an enrage timer.

-A multi-boss fight where the bosses are hostile to the players and each other.

-The boss causes hallucinations that render it impossible to tell friend from foe. All of the enemies AND players look identical and can be targeted with both heals and attacks. All mass-target buffs and debuffs afflict all targets equally.

 

Jaete

Some good ideas here, in addition to those good ideas that are already in the game.

What's been bothering me the most is not the actual mechanics in the fights, but rather all the stuff that is (or in many cases isn't but should be) around the fights. There's too few quests, too little plot. That area could definitely use some polish IMO.

A few random ideas. Say there's a fortress of some sort, with a courtyard, a few buildings, some towers. There's a boss or two in the yard, more in the buildings and towers, but instead of sitting around on top of the tallest tower, the main boss wanders around the area. So when you first arrive in the instance you need to learn the route the main boss takes and avoid them, or you get splattered. You can do the different subareas in any order you like, some bosses of course are harder than others. When you finally beat the instance, it will then be easy for you to just intercept and take out the main boss as you get to know their route so well, and you can also freely (or at least freerly than nowadays) choose which other bosses you want to go for. Many instances already in game have optional bosses, but the whole wandering around thing I haven't seen yet.

Also, some thrash packs could call for reinforcements except if stunned/polyed/etc; if you're über enough you can beat the reinforcements too, but when you're just starting you need to be more careful. I just dislike it when the next mob pack is in plain sight but they don't aggro or even notice while you're killing their friends. (How about actually making them aggro, but not move or do anything until you're in range? So you can't drink, res etc before the next pack. Of course not all packs should be this way.)

For more variations on this you could have, say, blind mole people packs who however are not deaf; different skills you use could produce different amounts of sound, a warrior shouting could lead them away at a crucial moment, etc. Fire mage making too much crackling noises? That means aggro. Or you could have sniper type mobs with an 80 yard aggro range, whom you could either counter-snipe (with quiet spells, and no guns, there's mole people around!), or try to lure out in the open. And so on.

On boss fights, how about this. The main boss is this huge badass dragon/elemental/whatever, and the fight is very very difficult. Your raid wipes over and over, yet making slow progress, but the fight gets harder and harder until it seems to become literally impossible to continue... yet you do, and little by little you whittle the boss down to, say, 62%. Exhausted, you make one more try... 59%, then everybody's dead. Then the boss speaks. (S)he says it was quite unexpected of you puny mortals etc to come this far and that you've done far better than they thought anyone here could ever hope to do - so the boss sees now that their plans can't succeed (yeah you just killed most of that big ass army including all the higher-ups), so, "I'll take off back to the [whatever], here's this chest of loot."

And, why not make this the "secondary" dungeon, and make the main dungeon's mobs actually hostile (according to the lore) to these guys, while they're all bad guys to the player of course. Then the badass boss described could in the end give the raid some item to use against their rivals, a bit like the Ony cloak but less random. Say, Arthas has some of his officers defect somehow and form their own faction, and even tho the players can't even kill Arthas' former second-in-command, at least they can impress them enough to get a legendary napalm thrower that only works against Arthas, weakening him just enough to make it possible to hurt him.

Lots of things they could make better to be sure, and not very complex things even.

 

Vyra

This seems like it would either be fairly easy to mitigate through raid communication ("Vyra is the *mob type* to the far left of the entrance door and needs a heal") and prearranged signals ("all raid members jump to mark your positions") or pretty impossible (lets say the mobs were running all over the place in a free for all). Not that it wouldn't be hilariously fun to try and coordinate, but I could see it becoming frustrating to players.

 

drats

Well I was thinking more along the lines of each person can only generate one debuff on the boss, so you'd need to pass it through the whole raid (20 different people) to get the full stack. Maybe it would work better if you also got a buff, like the Thaddius polarities, which made it so you had to have a buff in order to damage the boss at all. Ideally healers could dot/nuke the boss as well as heal, but I didn't really give much thought to how the raid would take damage.

 

Thailog

You don't realize how difficult it is to design a boss fight that would be unique and different as well as playable and fun until you sit down and really think about it.

As a healer, I've always wondered how a fight would be if the dps had to heal, and the healers and tanks had to dps. My supposition would be to have a fight similar to Chess where each player picks an avatar, but subject to the limitation of the instance. I can tell you that I would so love to yell at one of our mages on vent "Keep me alive, noob!"

 

snape

Barring it being so drop dead easy, I liked the concept of the "Chest of the Seven" encounter very very much and would like to see something like that in a 25-man. It's "Kaelthas-esque" (kinda like Phase 1), but let's crank up the difficulty a bit.

 

Wendell

This is a fantastic idea. You could have to come up with creative ways to get them to beat on each other instead of you (maybe make them close to untankable, with a stacking debuff or similar). Then finish off the last one standing - which you could only do since the other bosses softened him up. The raid would have to spread out DPS so that one of the bosses did not go down prematurely or lose aggro, yet fast enough that they don't all figure out what you are doing and turn on you.

 

Chirality

I really liked the Nefarian phase 1 and Razorgore phase 1 fights... and to a lesser extent Noth the Plaguebringer. Sort of similar to the "mini-groups fighting on their own" idea.

There's always a point though where "convoluted and bizarre boss fights" are simply not fun compared to "simple tank-and-spanks". Netherspite, for example. Most people hate him, though I think a 25-man Netherspite would be kinda cool, depending on how it was implemented.

Most of the fights people really seem to like are those in which every person is responsible for thier own survival. I would also add: if the half of the idiots in your guild die, the boss is still possible. Void Reaver statisfies the former, but not the latter (at least for my guild. A few deaths early and we can't beat the enrage timer).

 

bludwork

Another gimmicky fight would be a boss with 4 random aspects, 2 melee and 2 caster. The room he is situated in will permanently be closed off by transparent bars (like the ones in mech) and each side will have a portal.

When the encounter starts the bars will prevent raid members from running across the room forcing the 25man raid to split into 2 independent group. Every 15% he will spawn adds where he was and teleport to the other side and change from melee to caster/caster to melee aspect.

The quicker one side can kill off their adds the sooner they will go ooc to regen mana/eat etc.

 

Furious Lobster

Half of the idea of fun and innovation in raids comes from the randomness of the encounter, in my opinion. To a certain extent after world/server first guilds have defeated a boss, a generalized strategy emerges as the foundation for other guilds to follow. To make a boss fight more challenging and interesting, it would be to add a significantly higher degree of randomness to a fight.

More specifically, my mind keeps wandering back to the idea of Robert Asprin's "Dragon Poker". Its a fictional card game whose rules change according to a variety of factors such as the direction of the table, number of players, the gender of said players, what day is it, etc. While there would be a smaller number of variables it would keep a boss encounter interesting and unique to have a different strategy depending on what day you enter the instance on, the number of classes, Horde or Alliance, etc.

In this way, newer guilds to instances could experience something different than an encounter already hashed out on forum boards as well as making the dungeon crawl less boring to more experienced guilds. Perhaps another variable could be the number of times a raid has killed said boss allowing it to evolve to a new stage/level.

 

rhwei

I seem to remember someone once upon a time mentioning a sort of inverse Vael fight. You come across an ally who is down to say 30% health, and the raid is responsible for getting him back to full health. The bad guy of the instance keeps sending packs of adds into the instance (think the dragonkin packs after Vael?), but the packs can vary between different types of mobs, meaning that different strategies would need to be developed to handle each pack.

It's not terribly imaginative, but I always liked putting a lot of emphasis on the healers being responsible for winning a fight, not just preventing wipes. It would also be nice if successfully completing the fight gained you a buff later in the instance from your newly rejuvenated ally. Perhaps we heal a member of the Red Dragonflight early in Malygos' Lair, and they provide assistance against Maylgos at the final step of the instance? I think that could fit in with Blizzard's plan of Alexstrasza helping defend the mortal races against Malygos' anti-magic user crusade.

 

aureon

With the implementation of flying in the game now, I can see some amazing boss fights that feel very much like Zelda in just flying around dodging fireballs while activating certain things that weaken the boss. Chess event-esque fights like this that are not very gear dependant are often some of the most fun fights in the game.

 

Tyrian

Archimonde. And fighting him feels like fighting a warlock (struggling to keep enough control of your character/movement to be able to actually confront him)

 

Tojara

Theres really a lot they can still do if they decide to continue using a specialized item with a unique effect to encounters, like the Kael'Thas encounter.

Another type of fight I enjoy is RoS and I hope more of these types of fights make it into the game. It truly is a boss encounter that is three different bosses and must be treated so. You put nearly every player into a role that they normally don't play. Stage 1 you have non-traditional tanking classes tanking through enrages and healers DPSing or dispelling depending on if they can dispel or not.

I don't know, maybe its just me being a little bit in awe at the encounter even though we've only beaten it twice, but I truly enjoy its style more then any other in the game currently (perhaps because of what Rogues do/can do). Like Kael'Thas there are so many different ways you can approach the fight depending on your raid group and none of them are truly better then others. The enrage timer in each phase is artificial over the now traditional 'boss decides you aren't worth his time and starts one shotting everyone type of deal'.

So the boss style I think they should pursue and the one which I think lots enjoy as well is a boss fight that has a lot of what the OP listed but with a massive amount of options on how to approach the encounter.