This would be interesting, and it'd give them a chance to revisit the Bug Trio "kill order modifies boss behavior" in a sensible, organic way. Bug Trio wasn't a design failure, it just used the wrong types of mechanics... a lot of annoying charges, fears, and poison volleys made it irritating as all hell, but it could easily have been fun if they had a different set of abilities.

Ultimately C'Thun stands alone as a truly brilliant, unique, and just plain awesome encounter, and I'd be very happy if they revisited or recycled that encounter, or utilized made it great (many moving parts, many different duties, decreased dependence on traditional roles, and LOL ZOMG EYE BEAM!) in future fights.

Lurker? the key difference is that C'Thun is an A->B encounter, whereas Lurker is an A->B->A-> loop encounter. You also lack the 'epic' feeling of the chamber where C'Thun is situated.

C'Thun's unique flavor came from the fact that among everything else, he had an ability that could instantly wipe out 90% of the raid (well, not that anyone's stupid enough to clump up, but the mechanic was there) and that he used it literally every three seconds. The coolness factor came from negating that destructive potential by very, very careful positioning.

I don't think there's any other single ability with that much destructive potential in the game. Even other insta-wipe mechanics like Thaddius polarity + 2-3 downies, Najentus and an undergeared raid, Soul Charges on Archimonde, etc aren't spammed nearly as much as every THREE SECONDS.

That's what made C'Thun satisfying to beat. You know that he could technically have put out literally multi-million cartloads of damage in just a few seconds, but it's all prevented by the raid, and instead he gets his ass handed to him.

I've been piecing together an idea for a 25 man raid that may be completely silly, but it's been stuck in my head so I will post it:

Basically the raid is entirely based on the movie Fantastic Voyage (1966).

You walk up a hill next to some city and see a house and a bunch of gnome doctors sitting outside. You find out there is a very sick npc (has to be someone from a peaceful race that you will actually be sympathetic to) who is infected with an incurable virus. They need help and you get a quest to bring them a bunch of bandages or something which leads to other quests, blah blah attunement. The next step is they want to experiment on you and your raid by shrinking you down to the cellular level and having you enter the body and try to fight off the virus.

Then the raid is split up (randomly?), half become red blood cells, the other half become white blood cells. There is no use for gear, it's like the Shartuul Event. You only use the 3-5 abilites on the pet hot bar. Obviously white blood cells are the ones that fight off the virus (dps), and the red blood cells replenish the body (heals). Maybe also have one person who is the anti-virus and could serve as the main tank.

Then you get to travel through the body fighting off mini bosses in the stomach, lungs, colon (lol), throat, and then the main boss is in the brain!

Wisps could be the models for red and white blood cells! And gigantic black wisps could be the virus mobs. It's nearly all in the game already!

Then the guy wakes up and rewards you with sweet epix.

As crazy as this ^^(Fantastic Voyage) idea is, I would love to run this instance. I think you are on to something pretty cool, though, in that any class can do a variety of things via a pet control.

Maybe something like a raid member gets put on a summoning area and someone else in the raid has to click an object to stop the sacrificed member from being health drained. Once clicked, the mind control could difuse, or the members could get "signals crossed" and they then control each other as pets with a limited number of abilities based on classes for a short period of time.

While I don't think taking player control away is a good thing by any means , I also have enjoyed a lot of the more atypical encounters and would love to see more variety to them in the future.

what about an end game instance where you can switch gear in combat and which has encounter which are made that you will have to do this (change roles mid fight etc) to complete them. Alternatively the ability to switch gears in combat could be as a buff to only certain classes or a buff you can get before or during a fight for only a certain number of players of any class. I think this might open up some interesting fight design possibilities.

I've always thought that the idea of tanking needs to go. The idea that a mob would focus on the one guy who's doing less damage then everyone else, and also ignoring the healers preventing him from killing this one single target... always seemed silly to me.

Instead, a mob would behave much like shade of aran. He's tossing damage all over the place, sometimes focusing on one person, sometimes on a group, just depending on his thought process, or what is ticking him off at the moment.

Each class would be buffed to able to handle aggro, either via vanishing/turning invisible, sprint away at high speeds, putting up a shield to deflect or reduce damage, etc. In watching numerous anime or other action/adventure shows, no enemy is "tanked" unless it's a 1 on 1 fight. Everyone either dodges/parries the attack, absorbs it via tough armor or a barrier, or heals up from it. The Boss himself could have as little or as much HP as you wished, and he would also make active attempts to reduce or avoid the damage you're tossing at him; such as teleporting around or putting up shields that you have to break through, etc.

I think, as long as we have tanks in the game, you'll need to artificially put in things in each boss encounter that need to be tanked, just so the tanks in your raid have something to do. I think you could get many more dynamic and interesting encounters, if you dropped the whole tanking aspect.

What I'm describing, though, is more like Diablo. Nobody tanked in that game. You just used your skills to do damage, avoid damage, and possibly heal if you had healing abilities. And before anyone gets on my case that this is WoW and not Diablo, Warcraft didn't have "tanks" per se, either. Tanks were added to this game, just because it's an MMORPG and thus, I guess you need tanks. It's an MMO rule or something, and most people can't seem to break themselves out of the holy-trinity mindset.

I do like tanking on my pally, so I'm not hating on tanks. I just think this is one MMO idea whose time is past. The vast majority of people like doing damage. Doing damage is fun. Even tanks or healers roll a dps class to relax with.

Now, imagine you do go up a Giant as a boss, in some big cave. He's got a fairly large axe he swings, which he does on players that annoy him. He tries to step on you, or even swing his axe at the cave walls and ceiling, dislodging rocks that fall down. Say he's also got a few spells that he casts, like large fireballs and lightning bolts.

Warriors and rogues are running around, doing hit and run attacks. If someone gets hit by his axe, and we're smart enough to block or parry it with their weapons, they'd go flying away and hit a wall, and need to be healed up. Faster characters could run up walls and jump, to land a slashing blow to the giant's midsection. Or perhaps use a variety of wall stepping stones to get up much higher, and jump onto the giant's shoulder when he walks by, delivering an attack with more damage.

Mages and offensive casters are running around, casting their spells, putting up mana or fire barriers to lessen the damage from the fireballs, or blinking/teleporting away from the rocks coming down. Healers would be doing some damage as well as healing, and if he turns to them, they can put up a barrier, too, to absorb damage and save them. Or use a bright holy flash of light to temporarily blind the giant, and allow them to move out of LOS, effectively hiding til he turns his attention elsewhere. Rezzing could occur in combat, but would take awhile to bring someone back around.

Ironically, much of the game is like Diablo as you level up. Tanks are only really created when you start to raid. It's an unnatural creation, that I don't feel fits well in any game. The beauty of this, is that the pvp and farming aspects of the game become more balanced. You can tune everything to a certain expected damage level, and not worry that some characters can't do squat for damage, because no such characters exist.

Anyway, this is probably going off on more of a tangent than his thread deals with. Perhaps, if enough people want to discuss it, I can make a new thread. It would require quite a few game changes, and perhaps is something that can't be done with WoW. Maybe WoW II, or another MMO.

I don't know if this has been mentioned yet, so apologies if it has, but I'd love to see some more animations/flair to bosses in the first place, let alone new/more abilities.

For example, I was discussing this with some friends a while back and had the idea of Gruul, when he gets too many growths he could start picking up people and throwing them into the walls of the cave for a spectacular wipe scene.

Just little things like that to spice up bosses instead of whack-whack until everyone crumples on the floor dead.

I've always thought that they completly messed up Gluth the first time I saw him. Would have been nice to get that platform thing hanging over his head to just drop down on him and kill him.


Love to see a fight with a Boss in the middle of the room with NO AGGRO TABLE (much like C'thun) pretty much deals no damage if you're not close to him BUT u can't kill hum unless you kill the 4 pillars around him. Once the pillars are dead the ceilling drops on him and he dies (could also open up a passage to the next boss or something.

Make him do damage in aoe when in melee range, make the pillars immune to magic damage (meaning only melee can damage the pillars) and make adds run in the room faster and faster as the fight progresses (making it a dps run + healing intensive).

Of course my idea would need some improvement

It's funny how so many of the silly ideas in threads like these are basically already used in the game in a better/differently tuned format.

The last time we had one of these threads, a lot of the best ideas turned out to already basically be in the game

. Zul'Aman adds a few of the better ones I always liked that were kicking around; the Fury Swipes shit from the lynx boss is one I always liked, basically the idea of "random nontank becomes the tank" (same story for Gurtogg and fel rage). I also particularly like Malacrass' soul drain though the idea there I originally hoped for was something that actually mind controlled a member of the raid and boosted them to boss status, such that you had to kill them/beat them down to 1% to get the next stage to appear.

What I find interesting is a lot of the ideas for "add fights" so far in this thread (post immediately above mine is a big example offender) are basically "Shade of Akama but actually properly tuned so you need to balance DPS on killing off Defenders too rather than letting them stack up".

I would like to see more creative movement bosses.

Imagine a boss with a stacking buff that increases your healing and damage done by x% for each stack and it stacks by running and jumping. Quite similar like the ram race event, it decays if you do nothing and stacks even higher if you run and jump around.

Combined with that buff, I would like to see special and moving terrain like small moving plattforms and some sort of mechanism to help classes without many instants by providing them an alternatve way to deal damage or to heal without constant movement. Maybe similar to the Super Mario games where you jump on the head of the enemy to deal damage, maybe by splitting the raid and giving the groups different tasks, so that only some (10?) have to do the jumping (because I already know that some in our guild would _never_ be able to succeed on such an encounter -_-) which also prevents stacking instant cast classes.

Then there are soooo many combinations. You could include the color event from Ogrila where each mistake does raidwide damage with a bit more running, you could make some sort of a kiting event or very quickly changing terrain with dangers that kill you like the dragonhawk aspect in Zul'aman or the sporebat clouds on Vashj and even some dancing events like Heigan++ with more rythm. Just imagine some cool troll who challenges your raid to dance against him. There are lots of possibilties, you just need to look at successful jump and run games like Sonic or Super Mario.

The only problem is that most players will simply hate such encounters because they can not master them. t.t

I like the idea of an item that roots you, lowers your health to 1 and gives you 100% aggro on the boss. Forcing you to keep passing it around out of range of the boss.

Fights need to be more interactive and more fun. Anything that does that is a winner in my book.

I really hate "tank and spank" it is just so dull. Avoidable AEs that require the players to be awake and aware of their surroundings are great. Kaels AE is great, you should never die to it, and it keeps people moving!

How about a fight where it switches healers and DPS. The boss every 30 seconds switches between a normal tank and spank, to your healers nuking and your DPs healing (Mages need to start nuking the MT to heal him up, Healers need to nuke the boss with their heals). Maybe some dragon that switches between live/undead. During its undead time only heals hurt it for example (and rez is not an instant kill =). Can make it so that you need to do a certain amount of "damage" to the boss in each phase to prevent slacking during the healer nuke time.

Would be great to see the rogues backstabbing the MT to keep him healed =):
"Damnit, MT died, dodged too many of my SS's"
"Idiot! heal from the BACK! And don't forget to keep S'n'D up too! 60% of our heals are from white hits!"

I want to see the real Grobbulus fight, how it was intended. Not the broken version we got .

I think the original plan was for the disease to turn you into an abomination if you didn't cleanse it off, and you had to either risk the poison AOE spreading within/near your raid, or risk dealing with an abomination.

Tigole and Furor I'm sure have hundreds of ideas they can cook up, and really we're just waxing poetic here. My alltime favorite fights so far -

Gothik the Harvester.
C'thun
Nefarian
Kael'Thas
Illidan
Illdari Council
Teron Gorefiend
Twin Emps
Bug Trio
Kel'Thuzard
Majordomo

Out of those, Gothik still remains my favorite because you couldn't truly brute force the fight unless you had absolutely insane dps on both sides. You had to pace everything, and if you completely blew away the live side, the dead side paid for it. One of the first fights where you needed some type of raid wide dps coordination outside of "HIT IT HARD YEAH!".

Between that and Bug Trio - I liked those because the outcome was dependent on the choices your raid makes.

C'thun, Nef, Kael, Majordomo and Kel'thuzad were just plain epic. Great fights. Coordination on a grand scale at the time, no real "perfect" way to do it with multiple strategy opportunities, and all very memorable. Not to mention pro voice acting.

Scenery changes in a fight would be a huge improvement and something that could be done right now using all the existing frameworks in wow. Boss gets to 75%, becomes scripted and non damageable, runs to another room or breaks through a wall, and the raid runs behind him to catch up and get in position. Just changing things up with a new background scene helps so much with the tedium of a 15-20 minute fight.

Ninja Gaiden for xbox might be a good example of this, several of the bosses deform/destroy the terrain around you as you're fighting them, creating a dynamic (yet predictable since the changes are always the same) environment for the fight.

Kael kinda sorta does this with the whole fly around walls collapsing lightining thing. More would be better!

Dramatic environmental changes I'd imagine would be an easy thing to implement, to make a boss truly feel "epic".

Walls collapse? I didn't even notice that when we killed him last week. Yah, more would be better.

That's kinda what I was hoping Vashj was like when the only thing I knew about the fight was that you could throw Tainted Cores around. A game of keep-away with the power crystal would be pretty awesome; you're keeping the boss distracted while trying to dismantle their doomsday device.

Come to think of it, you could run with an idea roughly like one in FF: Crystal Chronicles; a fight features periodic horrible zonewide AoE damage. Characters have to pick up an item which gives an aura of safety around them, but the item severely hampers them in some way. Add some mechanic where you'd have to swap the safety item around (so that nobody would just be sitting there the whole fight doing nothing holding this item). Though, come to think of it, it's similar to the idea of the Magtheridon fight, just the other way around. Hmmm.

Blizzard is mostly restricted by what and what not is possible with boss fights, for example, an encounter with the healers DPS'ing and the DPS'ers healing, well, there isn't a real 'excuse' you have for making that possible. So in short, all cool ideas are limited by this factor.

However, I was thinking by adding a Gnomish/Goblinish (Steamweedle cartle?) dungeon, and that it is promoted by the gnomes and/or goblins as an arena trial event (hope that is understandable Oo).
This way, every wacky encounter that you could think of, could be implemented, without the restriction of making an encounter that feels 'logic'.

I think you are confusing tanking with Blizzard's threat mechanic. They aren't the same thing.

Tanking is a perfectly valid concept: you put your heavily armored, most defensive people on the front line to bear the brunt of the enemies attack. Your lightly armored types stand behind them and heal or dps from the relative safety that the tin cans provide. If you want a battle mechanic that "makes sense" then tanking needs to be a viable option in any melee scenario. Maybe less so against a ranged boss.

Once you take that for granted, then you have to understand the threat mechanic for what it is: its a game mechanic that substitutes for the fact that WoW - and in fact any MMORPG on today's technology - can't handle the sort of real-time bump mechanics it would take to allow you to do "real tanking". Quite frankly, this is where PvP falls flat on its face in my opinion.

Square the big-bad off against a 25-man squad containing a mix of heavily armored "tanks", lightly armored melee dps, ranged dps and healers. How would you imagine the fight to go?

Big-bad starts to whale on the first available targets - your tanks. Whoops, only takes him a second to realize that those guys in the back are healing him. Big-bad now wants to close quickly on the lightly armored casters and take them out to stop the healing. Why doesn't he?

Because your heavy defensive people are interposing themselves between those melee and their vulnerable healers and dps. In a "real" scenario you would do that bodily - just watch the big-bad bounce off of a shield wall of warriors and see how far he gets before he's beaten to the ground with shield slams and run through five times. But no MMORPG today can handle the real-time updates it would take to implement those sorts of bump mechanics to prevent him from running straight through the tanks to the soft underbelly that are your casters. So, instead, you get an artifical mechanic called "threat" that is a different way of allowing the tanks to remain the front line of defense for the rest of the raid.

Like I said, IMO this is where PvP falls flat on its face - with no bump mechanics and of course Threat is meaningless - when the enemy decides to focus fire down the priest they just run through everybody else as if they weren't there.

Could you handle the PvE (and maybe even PvP) threat mechanic in a different way? Perhaps. You see glimmers of this with talents like Intercept which basically allows a warrior to intercept a blow intended for another character - in short, a way of protecting the people the boss really wants to kill. But its still tanking.

Only somebody as insane as Medivh's father would fight this way. Why on earth would you think it makes sense to almost kill one of your opponents then randomly switch to another and try to do the same thing to them?

The problem with what you've described is that it is an "everybody looks out for himself" system. There is no synergy, no teamwork, just 25 people running around doing their own thing trying to do as much dps on the boss as they can and not get killed in the process. Its one way of doing it but I'm not sure everybody would hail it as a better system.

I wish WoW had some kind of physics engine.

Think about how many cool encounters could be based around it. D:

It looks like their next MMO may have a Physics Engine!

Blizzard Entertainment - Employment Opportunities

I would love to see Blizzard's archive of scrapped bosses

Because I'm quite sure that they had the idea of switching heals and dps before, but the problem is, that healers take 7-9 spots usually where dps takes 12-15 spots. Some might argue that heals do bigger hits, but in my opinion it isn't nearly enough. Which brings the idea of raid stacking. Blizzard designers surely could find a way around it, but then it's more like a complete boss encounter than new mechanic.

I'm quite sure that we will see further tweaking of "old" mechanics, such as dying due to unavoidable ability and being resurrected as someone who plays a key ability in the fight or more interactive bosses/surroundings with upgraded dps checks, like do 50-60k damage here but if you do more, you are screwed and new kiting/tankless bosses. And don't forget for future boss fights, if we find some new interesting ability on trash mobs, we are bound to see it sooner or later on a boss.