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)
In essence something like a Hero Siege?
But I agree that kind of thing could be quite fun (or very annoying) depending how its done, a larger scale version of the Hyjal events.
Hyjal was too staged in this, its just 1 wave followed by a short break then another wave... all mostly coming from the same spot.
If they incorporated this into several points of entry it could be quite challenging, fall back points are also good especially if they are player controlled.
You start off with a moderately large city/town to defend, mainly along the walls (siege weapons used...) and the gates.. but you can also fight outside it if you dare.
The next fall back point is the castle (note this is within the city but not a single building, more like the inner city) which involves urban fighting outside in the invaded city and the tighter siege.
Finally you have the keep which is close to what we all know and love, you have flying units able to invade from above it, the front door to defend, and the basement which happens to have been broken into.. leaving you vulnerable from the inside.
This provides you with a nice setting to start things off, you can then have the normal waves that we all love and hate... with the added element of sub-waves... where 2 out of 6 location/attacks are sent off which you have to adapt to on the spot and scout for etc...
This kind of thing is really hard to balance and factor well however and would end up failing quite badly, not to mention the bosses would tend to have to be quite weak to allow for the siege to continue else it would have to stop for the boss and give you him alone to worry about, even if you only need one small task force to deal with some small attacks every now and then it would lessen the boss somewhat.
Its just a nice idea that can never really be pulled off well... you have all the normal problems (loot, rep etc) if things are too far off, too many waves... cut down to too few eventually, making it trivial, the bosses then being too easy because the waves are weaker and he was based on them being there...
I really like the idea of the "Hero Siege." It actually sounds like a raid version of Alterac Valley, and if implemented correctly it could succeed where AV failed. Most of what I remember AV as being was Alliance and Horde players avoiding each other in an attempt to speed-kill the general. A raid version of this could work because the opposition finally become targets due to them wanting to kill you rather than racing to the other side.
As far as loot is concerned, would it be better if all the loot was backloaded until you defeated the final boss? Since the instance would most probably be flowing and dynamic, I would think that it could be seen as one huge battle rather than several smaller encounters of fight-and-rest.
Yeah, something like Hero Siege I could definitely see coming in WotLK, when siege weapons will be introduced into battlefields. I don't think they'll be able to resist putting siege weapons into raids.
I'd like to see fights not emphasize gearing for stamina/resists/whatnot.
On the subject of switching up what people are doing - while I agree with the sentiment that it'd be nice to give healers something to do besides frenziedly trying to keep a tank alive, I think it's the wrong way to go to try and switch DPS to be healing and healers to be DPS - if we wanted to fulfill those raid functions, we'd have rolled those characters. Rather, we should give them an encounter that changes the way they do what they normally do.
For instance: imagine that the raid is fighting a powerful necromancer in the middle of some ancient battleground. The necromancer begins casting rays of energy into the field and raising bodies to do his bidding. Now, you have two options: you can bring DPS to bear on the bodies, bringing them back to zero... Or you can heal the bodies, trying to fill them with more 'positive life energy' than necromancer energies. Doing the latter will give you an ally in the fight.
This lets you choose whether you want to DPS the necromancer himself, which may be painful because he has some kind of damage reflection shield and thus require healers to focus on DPS, or use his minions against him, and tank and kill any minions that he manages to control. There's no reason fights have to have only one solution, after all.
Something like the totems on the Druid epic mount quest event could be quite interesting for healers...
The other thing is that they have incorporated in TBC is moving tanking to be more among the whole raid, even Gurtogg moves this onto a random of anyone..
They could work out methods to allow healers to become tanks on certain encounters, or perhaps giving a 'healing check' in short bursts.
Illidan P2 has the potential for this but falls short, im talking about something that makes you go "thank god we survived that" with exaltation, several times on a fight. Sadly I cant think of anything which has really inspired that, perhaps Maexxna came closest, oh and Kael's Pyroblasts.
Other things which could be interesting for healing is perhaps having thresholds... well there's two ways to branch off that come to mind..
The first is where if someone heals his target *marked person* for more than a certain amount he goes off on a rampage, so you have to rotate healers on his target and move the roles about so no one healer does this, throw in some raid damage and/or add tanks and this would become quite an interesting spanner for healers to work with. (- visual debuff on the player displaying their amount healed 'groups', in say 4 ranks, green->yellow->orange->red debuffs, or simply a mark system like 4HM).
The other is where he would have a phase (lasting say 60 seconds) where every 10 seconds the person who healed his target most in that time becomes his new focus... so he will run through 4-6 healers in a chain.
Both of these kind of things can be controlled by the players.. the latter can be somewhat left randomly or controlled without a huge difference...
Ideas:
Giant machines. With multiple targettable parts each having special abilties. I loved those fights in Final Fantasy games. You could often choose between killing everything or just ignoring the adds. This was done both very poorly and very successful though... seems hard to balance.
Fight-specific commands, in the forms of items or pets. Already used in some ways (Shartuul, Teron's ghosts, tainted cores) but still a very rare element, I'd like to see it used more.
Set of 5 different 5 man fights at the same time with cycling required (along the lines of 4 horseman).
Random unique fight idea:
You'd start of with a limited amount of people (say, 12) getting teleported to the main boss chamber. Periodically, someone gets a survivable but hard-to-coordinate thing used on him (like both versions of Sacrifice at the same time - teleport and spawn add as in AQ20, teleport and damage as in Illhoof).
If you are geared exactly right this should be barely survivable. Think a channeled debuff that does 2.5k DPS which is increased by 500 every 2 seconds until add X with 50k HP dies - you need amazing healing, amazing DPS or good healing and DPS.
Any time someone survives this OR when anyone in the boss chamber dies for any reason a new person gets ported in. Upon any form of death, you get ported outside the chamber even if you have a soulstone (can't get a bonus player by combatressing/soulstone inside the boss chamber).
What this means is that if you are doing the fight overgeared or perfectly you'd have a ever increasing amount of people in the boss chamber, making it easier and faster. Otherwise you stay at the normal, balanced amount of 12 until your reinforcements are gone (duration of this depends on the chosen Sacrifice timer).
Of course there's RNG issues, to fix this you could have some kind of critical ritual going on requiring 3 or so players. If this ritual is active the players in the boss chamber get holy immunity. Allow a few seconds of "dropout" so players can react to who gets ported (like how shaman totem twisting works right now). Have the boss spam a high damage unavoidable holy AoE spell every 10 seconds.
The players outside the boss chamber who aren't channeling would be doing something useful - like a Chess Event thingy to give a minor +damage buff to the players in the boss chamber, nothing critical but still useful.
This kind of boss would be ideal for attunement, especially if considered "optional" and easily reachable. Think of a place like Nightbane with the back door being always open.
I'd like some Plane of Mischief-esque encounters, that turn things a bit upside down with lunacy. Kara touched on it briefly, and it made for some entertaining learning attempts.
Examples:
Boss applies a debuff to everyone in zone saying some variant of "Heals damage the player", similar to Nefarian priest yell. At certain times friendly NPCs of the stupid variety show up to do various dumb things like help heal the tank (An Ogre Healer says, "I help heel yoo!"), cast massive pyroblasts with insane aggro modifiers on the boss which will pull him out of position and wipe the raid, etc. Healers must heal these NPCs to kill them before they do their dirty work.
Result: Healers now "DPS adds".
The boss could be a channeled summon by a crazed, but friendly caster, who obviously has the same healing=damage debuff as everyone else.
Result: Healers now "DPS the boss" while adds are down.
Crystals are placed around the area that apply a heal on the boss's target whenever they are hit, for whatever amount they were hit. These have limited hp, meaning you can't just spam dps them, or you will end up overhealing the tank and running out of crystals before the encounter ends. Big hit damage moves and cooldowns must be timed to counteract big hits on the tank.
Result: DPS now "Heal the tank". Add more boss units to create multiple tanks to heal if coordinating 15dps in this way on a single target gets hard.
Add in a mechanic to make you choose unoriginal tanks and something for normal tanks to do, and you have an encounter that uses mechanics that are in the basic sense familiar, you've just switched everyone's roles around.
Hell to balance and design to make sure all classes are viable? Sure. Change of pace? Definitely.
I would enjoy more Hyjal type instances, if blizz just gives you a damn save point after trash. The idea of Hyjal was fun, trash packs that you had no control over (besides spawning them sooner) but going through ten waves of trash per boss attempt gets old by about the third time you do it.
Blizz has always seemed to enjoy the use of survival maps in their RTS games. They could create that style of gameplay and make it fairly enjoyable.
For instance:
The raid zones into a city, walls, buildings, npcs, etc. You talk to some Hero in the city commanding the forces, to start the event. Upon starting the event, waves of mobs would spawn in a random pattern, with a good distance between them and the city. Lookout towers along the walls would have useable Spyglasses, which you could use to locate incoming waves. At which point someone in the raid group talks to one of the half a dozen squad leaders, and sends his squadron out to whatever side to assist the raid in repelling the wave.
Would be something like, a hunter being in the northern lookout tower spots in the distance skeletal cavalry coming from the north (due to easily spottable horse banner or some such). They let the raid know cavalry is coming from the north, and the raid leader assigns squad of spearmen to the north gate. The strategy for cavalry would involve the spearmen having a small aura (15-20 yards) that would strip the horsemen of a "Reckless Charge" buff that ups their damage by 500% on their first attack. Basic war strats such as horses mowing through arches/swordsmen but getting messed up by planted spears.
Then the lookout at the southern side spots a wave of Gargoyles and Frost Wyrms (add in whatever theme instance is) coming. The raid finishes off the previous wave and sends archers to the south. So on and so forth till boss.
The same scenario could be done in a more frantic struggle with quick waves coming in, followed by a boss and several more waves. Where you either end up tanking the boss with a tank and healer crew, and using the raid to free up npcs to help fend off further waves and dps the boss. To force npc involvement, you could make the fight Cerebrate like, in that you do nill for damage, until a special group of npcs or hero attacks the boss weakening him and allowing normal damage (Dark templars). Thus, you have to plow through trash to get the npcs to the boss, since all npcs are relatively stupid and will rush into oblivion at a moments notice (1% life tauren in Hyjal chasing abominations/infernals).
I would prefer more a ordering of units than random npc interaction. Since it was always great in Hyjal to try and kite an abomination being chain stunned by 6 tauren to the front of the town and then having the reset when it dies rather than assist on the rest of the wave.
I think the mirror raid idea would just turn out to be a pain in the ass. A raid vs npc raid encounter would be way too random and uncontrollable. The mob raid would have to do pathetic damage in order to prevent a single person taking an unhealable 100k damage. And the fight could be over extremely quick if you kill squishies, or if your healers get 20 man focus fire. Unless the mob raid has extremely gimped dps (like 500 damage shadowbolts) a 20 man FF will decimate whoever is targetted.
It would be a hectic fight, but really extremely difficult to pull off without making a fight beyond frustrating.
From my experiences though, the fights that probably caused me to want to stop playing the game, were Archimonde, Sapphiron, Thaddius, and Gothikk. Archimonde is horrible simply due to soul charges, great idea, but one death usually cascades the raid to death. Any dc will most likely cause a raid wipe. Sapphiron was annoying simply because ice blocks were such a random positioning, nothing better than half your raid dying because only one icebolt got fired to a side of the raid. Thaddius was an amazing fight, enjoyable, unique, but any connection problems in the raid equals a wipe unless lucky and great healing. Gothikk was just a douche. Splitting the raid is a cool idea, relying on a dozen priests to log on and balancing both sides of the raid was horrendous. Good fight design, but annoying as hell.
Pretty much an enjoyable fight has to have a unique and exciting feel to it, without any uncontrollable factors. I know alot of fights where I did not feel any happiness killing the boss, I felt only hatred for the fight. Pre-nerf Hydross for example... what could possibly be more fun than tanks being one shotted due to crushing blows, which are completely unavoidable due to it being elemental damage? I dont know, perhaps Gruul throwing 8 people to the exact same spot on a Ground stomp. Randomness makes for rough, annoying, crappy fights that no one wants to do more than necessary. Eliminating randomness is a huge issue with most fight ideas, so when designing one you have to figure out what fluke of bad luck can happen to wipe the raid? Bad luck happens, but any fight designed around the raid having good luck should be disregarded immediatly. In that regard, even amazing fights like Heigann were badly done. Nothing better than all of your disease cleansers being ported at the same time.
Sapphiron was annoying simply because ice blocks were such a random positioning, nothing better than half your raid dying because only one icebolt got fired to a side of the raid.
Sorry, but I had to nitpick - the fact you allowed yourself to be wiped by such an easy to counter RNG. Rather then using the whole room to spread out, use half of it and spread out in a semi-circle.
Back on topic, more constant movement bosses like Heigan please.
Oh and more Kel'Thuzad style 40% "enrages" please. Kill the boss before he kills you never ceases to be exciting.
. Archimonde is horrible simply due to soul charges, great idea, but one death usually cascades the raid to death.
Thats why I love the fight.. most of the time that soul charge death is player (or strategy) fault. Of course, people will say 'it was bad luck' and 'theres nothing I could have done to survive...' but in most cases - they (or the strategy) is at fault.
For every person that says Archimonde is a horribly designed, stupid encounter - theres just as many who rate it as a very fun, immersive and genuinely enjoyable one.
I really do hope they make more similar encounters to that: similar in the whole 'your survival is what really matters here' theme. Even a fight like shade of aran felt similar, until the water elementals - its never really a dps race - its just surviving long enough to dps him down. Archimonde just took it to a new level.
One of my personal favourite fights was Razuvious. Why? Because Razvuious was an encounter that made HEALERS (well priest speficially, x2) tank the boss. Sure, they had to use mind control and basically had taunt and shield wall, but hey, it was a cool concept.
Another thing I liked was Nefarian's Corrupted healing. Really, I think a lot can be developed from that.
I would love to see an encounter where Direct Damage spells did heals to people in your raid and Direct Heals did damage to certain beasties. -- But, I think this concept should be used either for multiple encounters or be broken down a bit more.
As mentioend above, if there was a pure HPS fight, guilds might stack one healing class.
I'd like to see the encounter using specific types of heals for specific beasties. Something like Undeads are attacking and the only thing that damages then are Holy Based heals (which really isn't a far stretch, the mobs in Scholomance were immune to everything but Melee and Holy damage).
So now, we have Paladins and Priests for this encounter that can nuke the undead. And I think that gives enough variation. As an added touch, Priest' Holy Nova could be used as an arcane explosion -- but not required or even necessary, just something potentially useful for a strategy.
I say, design the encounter to ideally have 4-5 paladin/priests (because, I also assume for an encounter like this, guilds bringing shadow priests might have them come out).
Now, while the priest/paladins are off dealing with that. There's still a fight to be fought, Shamans and Druids will be responsible for healing the raid and tanks. The tank(s) and Nature healers are off "holding off" some sort of central boss that does massive damage, but takes very little damage. (I'd love to see this guy do a Bleed that does more damage than 3x Lifebloom/Rejuvenate too =p ).
While both of those above mentioned are going on, there's a new element and caveat. A scavenger hunt for the DPS classes! While everything is going on. Preferibly, a scavenger hunt broken up into 3 or 4 sections in which people cannot move through once the encounter starts (or after a brief timer). (I am not sure if I am articulating this well... but lets say we're looking at some sort of Square or Circle around the boss, there would be maze-like sections to the North, South, East and West. People positioned in any of those "directions" cannot go to another direction).
Now, there's an extra tidbit. To get the "scavenger items", dps will have to destroy little containers holding various items that "cure" the boss. (Sort of like the webbed guys in Terokkar, where you have to destroy the web to free the guys).
I think in general, the encounter would fit in Northrend with some sort of undead area. A central boss that is not necessairly evil or bad, just corrupted. We must tank him and hold him off while not killing him. The "adds" which he summons are also good people who were also corrupted and we must use Light (Holy) magic to cure them (thus Paladin/Priests on adds). While this is going on, everyone else in the raid must find items to cure said boss.
I would like to see more tanking effecting decisions made in boss encounters and overall tank skill design. Spell reflect is nice example what could be done in order to enchance tanking activity. I dont mean that Paladin/Druid/Warrior should be divided to certain encounters, more of giving more tools for them to use and effect the tanking process. Mini shieldwall kind of damage mitigations, giving tanks more options how to help out the healing process at certain situations and such. This kind of area isnt touched much in current tanking design, but I bet it could be pretty interesting direction to go.
Lets take KaelThas as example and hes pyroblast. Multiply that kind of skills by 5, and give them different effects what tanks need to rotate trough or plan tactic how they spend their miniature ohshit buttons in order to make healing as easy as possible and hopefully make succesfull kill. Currently only really hard decision between kill/wipe for warriors is shield wall, and thats it. Good warriors can evaluate the situation and smooth out the end of combat by properly timed SW, and hence propably give healers small time to gain next mana potion cooldown. Similiar can be said for Paladin Improved Lay on Hands, I like using it to try secure some kills in conjuction with Super Mana potion.
This kind of tools could be pretty refreshing addition to regular tanking routines, and hopefully could make tanking more interesting than some fights are where you basicly just drag the boss from place A to place B. Sure those are attempts to generate feeling of something to do, but the actual tanking toolset could be changed to promote smart playing. Combine it with boss design that gives tanks decisions to make and we could have a more full time tanks around.
I would like to see more tanking effecting decisions made in boss encounters and overall tank skill design. Spell reflect is nice example what could be done in order to enchance tanking activity.
Let's just make sure I understand what you're saying. You want raids to be more dependent on the skill of 2 or 3 people out of 25 than they are now?
Jesus don't want me in a sunbeam
Sunbeams are always made on me
Don't expect me to cry, for all the reasons I'm gonna die
Don't ever ask your kick of me.
disclaimer: I haven't had time to read this thread in full, sorry if this was already mentioned.
For a long time, ever since around Naxx lvl, I had been hoping for a fight where healers DPS and DPSers heal. This mainly stemmed from me missing my old holy priest (I was playing a hunter during naxx). The basic idea is that healing spells in the encounter would do damage to a boss, and damaging spells would heal something, be it NPC's or the raid. An example implementation:
"The cage" idea was my first. Think Thaddius style graphics in the room. A boss is inside a decent size cage, and the tank walks in this cage on the pull. Inside the cage are two of those Thaddius style lightning coils: one attaches itself to the boss, one to the tank. Outside the cage, where the rest of the raid is, are two engineering-style target-able things. Control panel, whatever, but they are target-able things:
- one is the boss panel that gets healed by healers, which in turn damages the boss, and
- one is a tank panel that dps classes do damage to to heal the tank.
In order to balance the dps healing on tank, there could be some sort of aura in the cage, increasing HP to the tank, but the boss hits for a very large amount. So instead of spike style traditonal healing, its more of a "you need X-amount of panel dps" over a set period... with zero panel dps the tank would go from 100% to dead in ~20 seconds, or a lot of dps could slowly get him back up to a higher percent. So you could monitor the tanks life, and add/drop panel dps on the fly within the attempt if more/less is needed.
Obviously the raid cant just stand there dpsing/healing those targets... outside the cage there could be any form of adds or phases going on. Razergore/Gothik/Gluth style adds (giving all classes something to do, if not dps/healing the panels), or maybe even a Heigan-like dance with some other unique aspect thrown in. Overall I reckon only around 5 healers "damaging" the boss, and around 7 dps "healing" the tank. To keep it this way, a minimum healing/dps would need to be required to keep the adds under control.
Or instead of panels, it could be really trippy and simply have an aura that changes your spells (including tooltips) that simply makes them dmg/heal swap. funky.
PS: oh yeah, AoE fear, mind control, hard bezerk, whirlwinds, FA couches/fountains, parrys, etc all need to be included somewhere :P
Let's just make sure I understand what you're saying. You want raids to be more dependent on the skill of 2 or 3 people out of 25 than they are now?
No no no, not at all. I would like to see all of the tanking classes have more "Tank defining skills" what they all have that they can use at certain situations. So that they would have more buttons to push and decisions to make in tactical level how they fight the boss. Not just refreshing Holy shield or Shield block in defensive meaning. They are "protection" specced anyway, it could be good way to create more active role on the protective part so that not everything was about static avoidance and armor mitigation or stamina.
I really like encounters like hakkar and Jin'do where you use a bosses ability against himself.
Another idea that I think could be fun would be an encounter where dying doesn't end combat. Perhaps something like Gothik's living and dead sides, but for player characters. Or imagine an insanely buffed bloodlord where tanks would have to die somewhat regularly, and you had to kill him before he dinged too many times and became unkillable.
My thoughts are more about staging. When you look at theater pieces of highest quality, like Shakespeare, that keeps touching people for centuries there is one aspect missing here.It's the change between building up tension, the climax and humour/relaxation.
Tension for too long makes everyone tired and bored.
So a well staged boss fight should include phases of relaxation or call it tank and spank and after some time start the tension again.
Hildegard Sprigglespruxx - Wissenschaftlerin am Institut für Pfuschkunde
I would definitely lobby for a Hero-Seige style boss encounter/suppression room. It comes to the point where bosses and trash nowadays are far too mechanical. Regardless of whether you are in Mechanar or Black Temple, trash always has that same feeling to it, as do many of the bosses.
Consider this: a Hero-Seige style encounter which incorporates both Sapphiron's Iceblock gimmick with Cannon Master Willey cannons. Basically a live Warzone where the raid is forced to split into 5man teams, kill adds, and operate seige cannons to break apart the shields surrounding the boss, while hiding behind debris to avoid his massive periodic aoe spell. Once your seige takes down his shields you can dps him but only for a short time before the shields/adds/aoe start up again.
Basically alot of the most well-designed fights in WoW have come with the raid being under pressure to move in, perform your job (typically dpsing adds), and then rush back out into perfect position before the Boss's X factor kills your raid.
I'd like to see some sort of siege event as well. A 10-men raid is in a castle and under siege from the north, and there are five reinforcement armies available from South, West, East, Above and Below.
The objective is to defend the Castle long enough for reinforcements to arrive, then with the help of the five external armies, blitz out to the main camp and storm the enemy general.
Phase one: the raid must force a breach from the starting position to the "crossroads": an open field with one path leading south to the Jungle (Troll army), one path east to the Desert (Nomadic Human army), one path west to the Forest (Night Elven army), one path above to some cloud citadel (Sha'tari Skyguard army), and the last path deep underground (Goblin sapper army).
Phase 2: From there the raid must find a way to hold their ground, while five scouts/diplomats are given the order to travel in each direction, gain the trust and rally the reinforcements.
The underground tunnels are better for rogues (stealth, sap, disarm traps, pickpocket for badges or lockpicking stuff...) the desert place is better for hunters (tracking nomads with eagle eye and avoiding patrols/beast mobs without cover), the jungle place is suited for shamans (water walking, clever use of totems), and the forest place would be for druids (stealth, human tracking, travel form and/or flying around trees). The skyguard part, lastly, would require - maybe? - someone reverred/exalted with the skyguards, evading aerial patrols.
Repelling the assault for the remaining 5-men would have healers keep injured NPCs alive (think "triage" or "the balance of light and shadow"), tanks keep "weak" enemies from getting past the door, ranged DPS channel some AOE and get headshots from behind fortifications, and melee dps getting minibosses and siege weapons down until:
Phase 3: reinforcements arrive, each with a target - think of it as a "global assist train" - have each army assault their battlefront in turn, with the crucial back-up of the raid until the enemy runs away.
Phase 4: pursue the enemy back into its camp, take prisonners, and subdue the "evil" warchief. The raid gets reputation and loot based on how many prisoners they managed to capture in this phase - and it would be much easier to take prisonners with 5 armies
As far as game mechanics are concerned, the key would be of course phase 2, the "defend the castle" part. It would be, by essence, making use of creature pathing by having ranged dps cover melee dps, by raking up aggro on mobs from above: the mobs wouldn't have any choice but to try and path through the Main Door guarded by the Tank, leaving melee dps unscathed and free to go destroy catapults and enemy cursers. Tanks intercept the squishies as they try to get past - with a few "get out of jail" cards (portcullis, bridges, cannons...) to allow them to bandage or heal up from time to time.
Healers are on their own, they must keep the defending population together from the harm of arrow volleys, catapults, and -of course- enemy casters and their plagues.
That kind of fight would have tanks protect ranged dps from the zerging mobs, ranged dps protect melee dps by snapping their proximity aggro, melee dps protect healers and fortifications by taking care of weapons of mass destruction, and healers keeping the population alive - while 5 other guys each needs to race through content as fast as possible and use class utility abilities that are seldom seen in raiding action.
I'd like to see some type of multi mob encounter (lets say 4) that if mobs get close together (or get to specific places at same times) they either do more damage, special abilities or best yet they merge into a new powerful combined mob until you can do something to split them apart again.
I'd like to see some type of multi mob encounter (lets say 4) that if mobs get close together (or get to specific places at same times) they either do more damage, special abilities or best yet they merge into a new powerful combined mob until you can do something to split them apart again.
Right. So, multiple mobs that have to be tanked apart from each other. Well, that only appplies to High King Maulgar's adds, Magtheridon trash, Magtheridon channelers, the elves banishing Leotheras, Fathom Lord Karathress's adds and Vashj's adds. And I'm not even out of SSC yet...
OK, combining into one larger mob would be a new mechanic, but the idea of "keep these things apart from each other" is hardly new.
"Keep them on top of one another" would be significantly more interesting, especially if they occasionally have a "drop agro and go bust a cap in random warlock" mechanic. Illidan's fireguards are something similar to this idea.
'War' is too small a word for what I'm fighting. Like a candle in front of the whole burning Sun. Now, I am not going to die today. I have other projects, and other options.
Right. So, multiple mobs that have to be tanked apart from each other. Well, that only appplies to High King Maulgar's adds, Magtheridon trash, Magtheridon channelers, the elves banishing Leotheras, Fathom Lord Karathress's adds and Vashj's adds. And I'm not even out of SSC yet...
OK, combining into one larger mob would be a new mechanic, but the idea of "keep these things apart from each other" is hardly new.
Well true, but I thought it would be implicit in that the agro on most of the mobs wouldn't be easy enough to just move them apart like that, otherwise it is just Illidari Council/Karathress again. Lets say for the 4 mobs their agro is like this.
1) 1 mob can be tanked normally in place.
2) 1 Is like Vashj striders, can't be tanked but can be kited.
3) 1 is like Theladred, randomly follows people
4) 1 has a new form of agro positioning (maybe follows top healing agro), or maybe doesn't even have an agro list, maybe a mob that moves through the room in a predetermined path. (but can be slowed/hamstrung/etc to be able to control somewhat how the mob is positioned)
However Song, none of the mobs you talk about do anything special if not tanked apart. I think Twin Emps did stuff different if they were close together, but I don't think I've seen that mechanic again recently. Hmm, I guess Flames of Azzinoth in the Illidan encounter have sort of a requirement like that. Sure some of what you listed you don't want to tank together since some have aoe damage (like mage in maulgur) but I would like to have mobs that do an emote to another one and then they do a special attack between the 2.
I suppose a lot of what I said is similar in ways to Kael Phase 3, with you having a ranged mob to tank, Theladred and 2 other mobs who you are tanking, but I've never found that phase to be that hard. It is just too controllable imo, since the only danger in the fight is having the Capernian tank gazed. Both Sanguinar and Telonicus tanks can easily move away from Theladred if gazed, and with the the staff buff, even moving from Cap isn't a huge deal.
I too often on that fight see people not aware of Theladred, just doing their stuff and when they get it run away. It is very controllable like I said before, but its hardly necessary at times to even control it. You just react and run. But from going to 3 mobile mobs from 1, and having to deal with actual positioning in a more serious way, I think it could be fun. Of course a lot of difficulty to learn as well.
I would like to see the game spawn an exact copy of your raid with a smart AI. The NPC's would be smart enough to focus fire your healers and immune to taunts so you cant force them all onto a tank. Pretty much like a 25v25 PvP encounter.
Its self tuning since they have the exact same gear as you do. A reasonable AI would be adaptive based on what is done to it. You would tune it by playing it against itself to get a starting behavior. Then as the players defeat it, it would once again play against itself with the one side using the strat the players did. This would enable it find a counter strat. Thus the next time you try to use your formula you lose badly. You would have to be constantly adapting to beat it instead of using the same old strat.
What is needed is not more mechanisms but smarter AI's.
This is an idea that's been kicking around in my head for a while now. I'd like to see a fight that includes a random Mind Control effect, with a twist. Give the affected player control over their character, except they have now 'switched sides'. Apply a debuff during the duration of the MC which deals <x%> of your max HP in damage, such that you cannot survive without some form of healing. Finally, have the MC apply an effect which heals you for <x%> of the damage or healing you perform.
This way, when you get controlled, you have to either heal the boss or DPS your raid in order to survive. Perhaps, to increase requirements and difficulty, you can have your max HP, Healing Done and Damage Done increased by the effect as well. You can also have the boss control multiple targets, though there would need to be something to prevent a healer from healing one of the other controlled targets if this were the case.
Another variation on this concept might be a form of 'death penalty'. Make it so that once a player dies, they are given control of an essentially unkillable NPC. This NPC applies a buff to the boss that heals him for <X%>, unless the NPC maintains <y> DPS. So, every time the raid loses a player, that player has to start actively DPSing an off tank, or the boss will quickly start regenerating. Lose too many players and they will either wipe you or full-heal the boss.
The biggest downside I see to these mechanics would be people like me. I'd get it, knowing who I'm supposed to attack to maximize raid success, but damned if I wouldn't just nuke that annoyingly bad hunter for a good laugh.
10/26/07, 6:58 PM
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