What a cool idea. So many of us would love to casually do c'thun, or heigan, or thaddius sometime - but obviously clearing to them isnt always practicle. Having a way to visit wows most criticaly acclaimed boss encounters directly would be very nice - and using COT means it wouldnt require lore breaking/bending to do.

I like this idea (basically a variation of the hot potato idea, which has already been used in e.g. the Vashj encounter). Maybe one way to twist it again would be that the "hot potato" has to go around the raid, and a raid member has a choice to use it to apply a debuff to the boss (e.g. +5% damage taken), but it would at the same time apply a debuff to the player that would kill him 10 seconds later. Therefore after using it the player has 10 seconds to throw it to another player, who can then choose to use immediatly or to wait a bit longer. The raid would have to decide on a "suicide order", but also on the timing. Maybe add a restriction that nobody can be rezzed in the room (be it via battle rez, soulstone, etc).

I also like the 5 groups teleported to mini-instances with a time limit (maybe 10-15 minutes) to defeat some trash and a mini-boss (or maybe simply a mini-boss with a 5-minute enrage timer). Then everybody gets teleported back with full health and the boss is harder/easier depending on how many mini-bosses died. In order to determine how groups are formed there are several possibilities. The easiest would be to put group 1 in dungeon 1, group 2 in dungeon 2, etc. Or the boss could have an emote, asking people to run towards the exits, which themselves would lead to the mini-dungeon. The raid would have to work on deciding who has to run where. The first 5 persons to take a specific exit are teleported in the mini-dungeon, the others have to take another exit, and whoever is still in the room at the end of the grace period either dies or simply cannot participate in the mini-dungeon event. Another issue is that this sub-event should not happen right at the start of the fight, because then people would just wipe it if they don't have 4-5 mini-bosses down. Instead even if the mini-bosses didn't die, the boss should still be manageable. Imagine Aran who sends the raid to kill "magickal aspects" of fire (flame wreath), frost (blizzard), arcane (arcane explosion) and so on, and depending on which mini-bosses died would have these abilities or not, making the fight either trivial or tough, but in no way unbeatable.

Another related idea - because I like timed event (I like to know that BM will take 40 minutes overall, whereas any other instance can anywhere between 1 hour and forever). A simple timed event, trash + mini bosses, and one main boss. 30 minutes to do it. Each mini-boss that does down makes main boss easier in one aspect. If the raid is confident, they can go straight for the main boss, who is at full strength, and can kill it in 10 minutes. Or maybe they don't feel ready, and spend 10 or 20 minutes to try to weaken the boss, and 10 minutes on killing it. Fast paced, choices, and no matter what only 30 minutes are lost. It could work with any combination of time, mini-bosses and abilities.

I'd also like to see an instance more PvP-like, maybe a bit like AV, where the raid has various objectives and where death isn't a problem (exactly like in a BG, timed rez at nearby graveyard). The players can keep trying in a frenzy, and the more they manage to achieve (maybe within a certain timeframe), the more/better loot they get. The raid would have entire leeway to kill mini-bosses (think captains in AV) or only the main boss, or to go and capture nodes and key points, or to go and get reinforcements, etc. Maybe some objectives would give loot and some would give rep, etc.

What would be commonly regarded as say the top 5 best designed raid encounters in wow? I was reading about the game mechanics in this thread and it comes to a pretty obvious conclusion. People love encounters that have lots of movement. The top handful of bosses in the game most players seem to rate highest would be including:

- cthun
- heigan
- four horsemen
- shade of aran

The movement required is what seems to be the most 'fun' mechanic blizzard has designed in the raiding game. While this might seem off on a tangent to the original post - its still relevant - as we/blizz should try to find ways to leverage this mechanic more to incorporate into future designs.

This thread is hilarious. That being said, I'd really like to see the original poster continue to categorize and update the list to include pre-TBC 40 man raids. The very first thing I noticed was that basically all of T5 content had a plethora of adds and AoE damage, while T6 immediately started to break that mold. I think the lack of variety in T5 boss design is a large contributor to why so many guilds never set foot in it again once they are attuned.
It would be fairly interesting to see how encounter design has progressed over the years on paper rather then in my memory, as well as potentially useful for Blizzard to use to apply to future content to ensure T7 or T8 isn't another remake of T5 content.

I'd like to see more fights where stamina is important for everyone. Maybe give bosses a randomly targeted, unresistable attack that does something like 12k damage every 10 seconds or something.

This idea is not a new fight, but is simply the Caverns of Time idea a bit fleshed out.

Caverns of Time: Revisited

Basically, allow people to fight a boss they have defeated.
My personal idea is to have a device which, when used on a boss, drains the soul of the boss. When used in the new, not-entirely-liked-by-Bronze-dragons part of the CoT it allows you to fight that boss again (and does not get used up).

Limitations:
Would require copy/pasting a lot of old content into semi-new dungeons. Essentially, when fighting Ragnaros you would zone into the start of his room with Majordomo up (and the entrance of the room being the raid entrance portal.

Newly added bosses would not "have stabilized in the timestream" enough for the CoT dungeon to spawn them (they could still be drained). This limits the influx of new shiny highest-tier epics into the game if so desired.

Raid lockout of 1-3 days on the CoT dungeon (lockout is on dungeon level, not boss level - you only get to time travel every now and then). Only raid leader can initiate the event.

Bosses would still drop quest items such as the vials of eternity / Nefarion head (w00t, solving attunement issues ftw!) and should get a 5% "temporal phasing" damage bonus or whatnot (just give them something to make them a little bit harder since they're easier to get to - if all else fails just give them 5% more health).

This would allow people to go back to cool bossfights without unduly unbalancing the amount of loot influx. One could also do a 5man (heroic-boss only) version that had a 3 or 7 day CD to allow you an extra chance of acquiring loot from a particular boss.

It does make it possible for not-so-advanced guilds to get a shot at bosses higher than their current advancement - but this should not be that big a problem, since Blizzard seems to go for execution-dependent raid advancement rather than gear-dependent.
If it is a problem, make it so that you can only zone in if you have killed that boss before (but this has data retention issues, which is one thing Blizzard hates) or if you are beyond a particular level / reputation (61+ = all L60 bosses open, revered rep required to unlock Illidan, attuned to MH to fight Vashj/Kael'Thas, honored rep to fight Azrogal or w/e).

This would a) require someone to actually kill the boss and keep the Soul-o-Matic 3K around which contained that soul (Blizzard hats excessive free bag space already - what's another item to save? But sure, make it an engineering-classified item so it fits in the engineering bag) and b) allow all people to experience the previous level range raid content (those could be available without a Soul-o-Matic) and the content that they themselves have defeated.

If the idea of a Soul-O-Matic item cluttering up bags is too much, one could simply replace it with a big number of quests, one for each boss that you wish to be able to refight, and having a simple kill objective.

The raid would be limited to <whatever is the highest current limit> (25 currently) for zoning in to all events, so you could mass-zerg Prince Malcheese with 25 people instead of 10 if you so desired (or just limit this to 10 too, if that's too overpowered and EZ epix).

Even better, this could be implemented in such a way as to allow Blizzard to release "new" content in smaller spurts - 2.4 could contain Karazhan bosses and SSC, 2.5 would grant us TK and MH and 2.6 BT (hopefully 2.7 would not need to be released with Sunwell activated, but instead Sunwell is available with WotLK since everyone would be >70 soonish upon release).

The quests to unlock bosses should be available immediately - so you could unlock BT bosses even if you can't actually revisit them, and I guess it would be possible to force people to unlock a whole raid dungeon at a time instead of on a boss basis, or to do some speed clears or whatnot.

Thats sort of similiar to the KT encounter Phase 2 + 3. With the random MC you gotta use a lot of CC on them and shackles in p3. I suppose combining p1, 2 and 3 together into one phase would net something like what you're asking for.


Whilst I'd love to see this I feel they will save it for the eventual underwater instance that we all know will be coming at some point, probably the Maelstrom expansion.

I'd like to see the Chromaggus breed of mind control tried again, as well as the various drakonid afflictions from earlier in BWL.


To all of those who are calling to bring back 'C'thun' mechanics, which mechanics haven't already been?

Positional requirements with regard to your fellow raiders (Gruul, Vashj).

DPS phases and invulns, with the need to get the boss down within a certain number of invulns (Solarian, Vashj, Curator, Aran). Include also "need to complete some task to induce the vuln phase (see: Vashj)

Movement requirement with a big giant laser beam o'death coming straight at you (Lurker, Netherspite? meh, but...). Al'ar's flame patches could also probably fall into this category.

Adds that must be destroyed ASAP, lest they destroy the raid with a DPS requirement (vashj's striders are probably the closest analogue to Giant Eye Tentacles, for the small eyes, you could look at any of the varius AoE encounters in the game).

With regard to 'perpetual motion being needed'? That's not true either. We killed C'thun using the 'Force the spawn' strategy in P2 (not my choice, but it seemed to work for us, so who cares). Thus, it involved a pretty significant amount of sitting in the same place while eyes and claws spawned right on top of you, while watching carefully to be ready to move your ass if a giant eye spawned.

Anyway, back to the poijnt at hand, the original poster has a pretty good point, in that through my TBC raiding experience there have been relatively few 'New Mechanics' added (Hydross's phase shift can be looked at as twin emps teleport plus an extra 30 yards of runnin), so any encounter that can be looked at as being 'unique' doesn't turn out that way.

Essence of the Red is really the only example of a "We've never seen this before and never again" mechanic that they added to the game in a raid encounter.

The thing that made C'thun special was that they added in several relatively new mechanics at the time, in very pure, difficult, unforgiving ways. As such, it's fondly remembered as being "Holy shit, this fight is cool" looking at it sentimentally.

It's been a sort of running joke in my guild that it would be terrible if I was designing fights because I'd make them too difficult/frustrating/impossible. Like an AoE fear on P1 C'Thun (not 100% my idea), or making the MC'd people on Skeram un-CC'able, or just generally more Skitterer trash packs (loved watching the mages die because they would start AoEing as soon as they were pulled, rather than let rogues/warriors/hunters get aggro on them individually).

But besides making things harder or frustratingly impossible, there's been 2 ideas that I've had for some time, and I'd love to seem them implemented at some time.

First is basically PvE PvP. 25 (well, 40 when I first had the idea) mobs identical to the people in your raid. They have unique aggro, and assist fire like you only wish your raid could. Some times they will split DPS on squishy DPS and some healers, other times they will focus fire one healer down, other times they'll juke you out a bit, prepping to blast down a healer but will switch at the last second and destroy a warrior with Death Wish up. The healers would heal and mana drain, the casters would fear and poly. Rogues would time their stuns to maximize effectiveness. Some warriors would fear bomb the camp, others would keep an MS on the target the DPS was about to FF on, another would be sword and board shield bashing your paladins.

In the end, it would be somewhat unique every time you pulled it, and unique from week to week based on what class balance your raid has. The strats for dealing with the encounter would be so varied, it would be impossible to properly write a strategy guide, and a single video wouldn't necessarily be any insight into what you'll experience when you finally get there.

That's ideal, of course. I don't really want to consider what the coding nightmare it would be to do anything even similar to that, and tuning it would be just as much a nightmare. Would you make their HPs equal to their counterparts in the real raid? What about their damage output? Presumably they would have access to the same buffs as the raid does (consumables?), then what about dispels? If you've ever watched the mobs in BRD that cast a fortitude, the chance that they will recast it mid-fight if it's dispelled is pretty low... is that okay? But tuned properly, I think it could be a really fun and unique fight.

The second idea isn't really necessarily a boss as much as a debuff that changes the way the boss is done. Basically, I'm thinking a debuff like this "Mix-up: Your abilities seem to be malfunctioning slightly..." and the effect is to make an ability that does one thing, do something entirely different. So for rogues, Sinister Strike/Backstab now heals friendly targets, Kick is a defensive cleanse, Shiv buffs people based on what poison is in the offhand, and combo points built from healing people can be used to Eviscerate the target, which now restores your energy and their mana/rage/energy. For healers, a heal spell now does damage, a dispell/cleanse now debuffs the target, and things like PW: Shield provide a buff to players rather than absorb damage.

In other words, you go into the fight with 3 tanks, 7 healers, and 15 DPS, and the debuff turns that into 7 DPS, 8 DPS/Heal hybrids, and 10 healers. The encounter would obviously be tuned so that is appropriate for the damage done to the raid and the amount of HP the boss would have. But the fight should be difficult, not just a tank and spank but with people doing a different job. Make the tank take really spiky damage, make the boss have an spell that needs to be interrupted, but is a 1-1.5 second cast, and wipes the raid when it's missed, and make the whole thing generally unforgiving, so everyone needs to do their jobs correctly 100% of the time.

Even without those 2 fights incorporated into the game, I'm confident Blizzard has plenty of unique ideas for boss fights that we will be reasonably satisfied with Sunwell and hopefully with the raid game come WotLK.

Another thing I'd like to see is the use of more items as gimmicks, e.g. the tears and Archimonde. I would really like to see a fight with several bosses (3+ to maximise the fun aspect) and everybody in the raid has a trinket that basically replicates the effect of misdirection - so you target one of the bosses, use the trinket, and for 5 seconds all the threat you generate is counted towards the boss you targeted with the trinket. The bosses do the same, i.e. they randomly target members of the raid and misdirect their threat on them. The point of the fight being to get the bosses to fight with each other (by making them tough enough or hard-hitting enough that the raid wouldn't want to care of them on its own), all the while not drawing aggro from any (either directly as usual, or via the boss' misdirection mechanism). That would ahev the potential to be totally hectic at first, but very controlled if the players do what they have to do. No raid stacking would be possible (except stacking hunters ) and it would finally give a use to the threat reduction items that are a dime a dozen in TBC. Players would have to shift constantly between maximising and minimising their threat, even healers (who typically don't maximise their threat) or tanks (who typically don't minimise it).

Sounds like a really interesting idea, and one that would work perfectly with the new default UI threat meter if they actually intend to follow through with that.

I think the 'Interactive Environment' angle is an underused one. Buru's own eggs do most of the damage; hiding behind ice blocks keeps you safe from Sapphiron's bombs.

What about a boss where every x seconds he causes an earthquake and part of the floor breaks away and anyone standing there falls to their death -- movement and awareness to what chunk is falling. After y earthquakes theres no where to stand and the raid is dead -- a soft berserk timer.

Or perhaps a Blood Elf dandy art collector that's immune to damage. His antique furniture is immune to physical but is susceptible to fire. When it 'dies' (starts on fire) the Belf enrages (doing 100% increased damage but can now be damaged himself), iceblocks it and anyone who did damage to it, ala Rage Winterchill. The sculptures he's collected are immune to magic but susceptible to physical damage. When they're destroyed he enrages and resurrects the pieces into a golem that needs to be offtanked. Gimmicky, but I think it sounds fun.

Add Twin Emperors.

I wouldn't say those fights are always fun (in fact, quite the opposite, except for Heigan), but they are definitely well-designed.

At the bottom of my list is the Loatheb group - where you consumable/gimmick your way through or you die. Maexxna falls in this category too, due to the [dare I say it, required] use of Shield Wall. Also at the bottom is the resist gear group, although there are exceptions (I hated Huhuran but loved Sapphiron - my view on the latter would probably change if I was Horde at the time).

This actually made me wonder in the direction of whether a lot of WoW's boss fights don't always feel satisfactory since they're simply too long. Let's take Al'ar for example, I'd say the basic idea on the fight here is good; there's a fairly good variation of things to do and watch for, though phase one might perhaps be a bit too simplistic. However when you first do the fight it's simply *long*, almost too long; that counts especially for phase one. Most such things really extend to a very large amount of fights in WoW.

If we compare it to the Zelda games boss fights, we'll notice that in Zelda games boss fights are usually fairly short (And even if they're not short, they don't feel long), and don't require excessive repetition of the basic element of the fight. Generally speaking you need to repeat the basic thing the fight is about two to four times, and after that the boss will generally change what you need to do, or die; generally speaking the basic thing you need to also gets progressively harder as you damage it farther. In WoW in comparison, it's not unusual to have to repeat the same basic thing in a fight more than ten times; there's actually a lot of fights in which it's likely you'll be spending ~10 minutes doing the same thing from beginning to end. I mean, does Morogrim really require your raid to have to deal with the Murlocs 7 to 8 times in a fight? Don't we get the idea and want to do something different after the third Murloc wave?

In this way, we can really see a difference between different type of encounters as well. C'Thun is popular because of the highly distinct phases, and simply the way the fight works. It's also not a terribly long fight. Fights which are long but involve the same thing over and over (Like the Illidari Council) are generally speaking not liked by people. Actually, it makes me wonder, also in the Zelda direction of things, whether somehow weakening a boss before opening it up to attacks is also something that feels more satisfying than simply poking it with your sharp or blunt sticks and throwing magic at it.

There are a lot of good points here. In some respects, the Curator fight is actually a lot like this. You're busy holding off the adds, then he goes into the 'weak point' mode and everyone piles on him. Long fights test longevity, but longevity is boring, unless you mix it up sufficiently. Still, it's getting better than it used to be (Kael has what, 6 phases? Illidan has 6? As opposed to the Ragnaros hokey pokey).

I came up with a 'hydra' encounter a long time ago in my head, though it was more of a small-group boss than a large one. However, it could be scaled either way. Blizzard actually incorporated elements of it into the Headless Horseman fight as well as C'thun, though not completely. I don't claim authorship of those; it's just similar ideas that came about. The situation would be that there is a monstrous hydra. The thing's entire body is not actually a monster model, it'd be level geometry (think God of War 1's hydra boss). What you fight is the 'main head', with a breath weapon, and biting attacks, swinging attacks, etc.

Now, the fight starts off with just the main head. Maybe the group is on a cliff, with the hydra's huge body below, so you can only see the head. The group has to DPS down the head while somebody tanks it. After defeating the head, it drops to 1% hp and is stunned. A flap on the hydra's body opens and you can see a glowing red crystal pulsing (its heart, so to speak). The raid has X seconds to DPS the heart. After you do a certain amount of damage to it, it despawns and the flap closes. The hydra's head wakes up, and is joined by a second (possibly third) head.

Now your group has to handle two heads at once. The second head isn't quite as strong as the first, and perhaps has different abilities, so it must be tanked by someone else (maybe a hunter pet, or make it warlock tankable, or healer tankable, or something). Repeat the process (DPS down the heads to 1% to stun them) and the flap opens and the heart is visible again. The group works on the heart again.

Then for the third phase, more heads pop up. Now the group has to deal with three (or four, or five, or however many) heads. They have to handle them all, DPS them all down (maybe not at the same time), and expose the heart again. At that point, they should be sufficient to kill the hydra, and the entire hydra dies.

Each head would have different abilities, somewhat similar to Oz, Moroes or Hexlord's adds, and be 'tankable' by different classes. The encounter would be that you're killing something really, really huge, but give a more realistic feeling as to why the thing dies to your puny weapons, rather than poking his ankles for an hour with little knives.

Really, I wanted a cool encounter that didn't make me feel like I was chipping away at a stone block. In the case of the Hydra encounter above, you have a reasonable reason why you aren't *really* killing it by DPSing the heads down to 0: the thing's flippin huge, and your tiny attacks are only enough to stun it at worst. It incorporates classic heroic gameplay (strike the weak point, don't just beat on it), scales in difficulty (later fight is tougher than early fight), but it scales in a way that makes things more interesting for everyone involved, rather than a small group (cube clickers, beam tankers, etc.).

Big numbers make people feel powerful. I'm sure every warlock remembers their massive CoD crits during Evoc on Curator.

These kinds of effects help keep the fight from feeling slow as well. Your damage dealing opportunities are short, and very intense. The moment the boss is weakened, everyone burns as hard as possible, and you see considerable progress. Those are WOW moments. Not only are you fighting something powerful, you feel like a badass because you are beating the ever-loving crap out of it for 15 seconds.

Zelda keeps getting referenced, and for good reason. You see the same thing in Metroid Prime too. Seems to be a tried and true boss fight method for Nintendo.

I wonder if it would have made C'Thun even better if instead of damage reduction + normal damage weaken, it was like Curator: Huge health pool, normal damage, then 300% weaken... The end result could be the same, but the psychological difference would be significant.

These mechanics shift fights in favor of dps warriors when the 300% damage provides essentially 3x rage.

But would it significantly unbalance the fight given the short timespan of the weaken? I suppose this depends on the responsibilities while achieving the weaken state, and the duration of the weaken.

I think its fine for one class to be stronger for one boss then others. I'm pretty sure everyone has class stacked at one time or another. You need to be careful with this kind of mechanic though because you can't just average the damage over time. Players are smart. If you give 15 seconds of 300% dmg every 2 minutes, everyone is going to time their cooldowns and trinkets and really pound this phase. It's definitely cool and fun to do, but you need to be careful with it because its probably going to overwhelmingly favor certain classes.

Blizzard is really conscious of this too. On RoS the dmg reflection is a limiting factor to dps during the 2x dmg buff during deaden. I've seen plenty of warlocks kill themselves with a huge deadened crit.

This is a great thread and a lot of good ideas have been mentioned. One mechanic that keeps getting mentioned which I also wanted pre-TBC is the mirror image/PvP-PvE encounter. In a way I think blizzard satisfied this need with the Maulgar, Karathress, Council, and to a lesser extent, Moroes. These fights have a lot of organization and setup and require mini groups to deal with their boss who, for the most part, have regular class abilities. I never really got far into TBC raiding but learning the Maulgar encounter was one of my favorite moments.

I think one of the problems with introducing an encounter with PvP-like AI would be equipment. Having a raid fight where the enemy is focus-firing and intelligently targeting your force would require the use of resilience on gear. While this may not be a problem for most, it would require one of two things to happen. A) Gear with resilience would have to start dropping from PvE encounters which would blur the line between PvE and PvP back to where it was pre-TBC. B) Pure PvE'ers would have to PvP to properly gear for the encounter. I believe Blizzard's vision right now is to keep PvP and PvE separated for the most part and doing an encounter like this would be counter-intuitive to that design.


The other idea I had (which was also previously mentioned in a way) is the ability to go back and fight old raid bosses. While the suggestions I have heard all involved going to CoT and taking on a boss in that manner, my suggestion would be some sort of Gnomish Holo-training center. Take for instance this scenario: You walk into <WotLK Steamweedle Cartel Camp> and discover that they have built a Holo-training facility. You interact with the operator and find out you can for a fee (say 250g payable from guild bank) have 4 hours training on Ragnaros. You take your 25 man raid in and after a silly wipe due to over confidence, you drop rag with ease. Each member picks up their Badge of Honor x 5 and the 1 random drop is rolled for. You leave the instance and the gnomish operator congratulates you in a job well done and unlocks the next level of training for your guild: Nefarian.

The idea would be to have this as a fun instance and a somewhat casual way to gear up on badge rewards. The difficulty would be on par with entry level 25 man raids (depending on the expansion). I imagine the 1 piece of random loot being a "fun" item such as a special mount, companion, large storage bag or tabard.

This would be worth its weight in gold. I cannot tell you how many times I've started to say, "Okay guys, this is just like [Whatever] from [BWL/AQ40/Naxx]!", and by the time I'm finished my powerful explanation, half my raid group is going, "...what's Naxx?"

One thing I'd like to see is more defenses.

I mean... we all saunter into an instance and start beating up on it.

What sort of idiot permits that?

Damn it, I want massive defenses. I want active repulsion.

I want those damn lazy dwarves NW of the portal to come up to us and say, "Hey, that place is a nasty nut to crack. But.... we got this stockpile of 50k damage bombs. You know, we're going on break in 3 minutes, and nobody will be watching...."

I want to raid dive the bloody castle, blowing stuff away. Stealth groups hitting that AA cannon. An assault team landing on a cleared wall and charging a hardpoint. A small boss in there, kill him, leave. The place is weaker. The walls are cleared. (Heck, have some of those be 5 man gruul style micro-instances.)

Assault the courtyard, blow away the defenders, trash the stables, slay that mage boss.

Blow away the big boss there, the courtyard is smashed, the inner gates are down All right! Charge into the keep. Put them all to the sword. Slay the trash, loot the strongboxes, and assault the final defense at the vault, where they be doing a greater summoning, that would have killed you all. Pity you're 5 minutes early.

So it this muchly a 'kill the mob generator fight'? Well yes, but...

Hey you can even have some loot control. Assume you have 8 hardpoints. You're laying explosives into 4 of them and collapsing that wall down into the defenders. The micro bosses in there are named and have different loot tables (mage, warrior,rogue,etc bosses)