An interesting repository for odd mechanics in a Warcraft setting is actually close to hand; DOTA. I've been playing it a great deal lately, and I find it'd actually be an extremely interesting idea for a dungeon, and a lot of the heroes could make the conversion to WoW boss quite easily.

Some sort of hyjal-esque dungeon where you fight your way through creep waves for ~15m and then face a semi-randomized boss from a small pool would make for a very interesting and very replayable raid. Something along the lines of a "tanker" thrown against you first, then a nuker, then a carry for an end boss. And each boss, though fitting into a general theme for their position and dropping possibly tokenized loot based on their position in the instance, will also have semi-unique loot from themselves only.

DOTA concepts do offer some interesting boss fight concepts, I think.

Axe, for example. 15% chance every time he takes a melee hit to whirl and deal small physical damage to everyone nearby. Ranged targets randomly get marked by a 1000/sec DoT that lasts for 15sec, on 2-3 people at once. Every 30sec or so he uses Berserker's Call to force everyone to attempt to melee him for ~5sec, temporarily cutting off direct healing to the raid. And if anyone drops to execute range, he'll instantly attempt to Cull them.

Or Tiny. A boss that hits for extremely hard (like 15k+ per melee round on a high armor tank), but swings extremely slowly, with like a 5sec+ swing timer. So healing on the tank comes in spurts, and all the while he's randomly throwing people around the room, causing aoe 3k physical dmg and additional falling dmg to the actual projectile, as well as randomly placed stunning, AOE rock falls.

Hell, even DOTA's lich could have an interesting conversion. Chain Frost could be a 1k dmg projectile that doubles damage every bounce, but unlike "foo Wrath" spells, it'd be forced to always jump 4 times (and be unable to bounce back to someone already hit by the projectile recentl,y except for the tank who always starts the chain. the end result is a magtheridon-oid effect where you have to set up a chain of players behind the tank to take the 1k, 2k, 4k, 8k, 16k damages).

It seems like a potentially untapped reservoir of interesting concepts.

Great thread, I really need to read public discussion more often. I've been throwing around the idea of an "encounter design" blog, in order to curb the raiding pangs. I have a friend who's willing to do the art...

A few generalities, or comments on the thread so far:

• Generally speaking I don't think encounters where "healers become tanks", or encounters which rely on pet control, are a good idea. They're fun in small doses or as a component of an encounter, but the static and reliable class decisions made by your class shouldn't be altered at will.
• The most challenging fights are those where there is no solid battleplan. Kiting is a good example of a mechanic that encourages this - guild A that writes the bosskillers guide uses an affliction lock to tank. But - uh oh - guild B runs light on AoE and needs to use a hunter instead. Hard to balance, but rewarding.
• Ironically, if Thaddius is anything to go by, Blizzard starts with the art/idea and works from there. It begins with "wow, this kind of boss would be awesome!" well before any abilities are fleshed out. Concept art is even done before abilities. Once they have that they started with a simple mechanic and worked from there.

Here's a few favourites. Most are intentionally vague because I haven't sat down to flesh out how they'd manifest as an encounter. It's possible I've thought of an idea that's been done - I haven't seen BT/Hyjal yet and are only vaguely familiar with most fights.

Another Live/Dead Mechanic: The raid begins with 25-players on a boss. The boss, similar to Vaelastrasz, has some form of periodic raid-killing ability that, in this particular encounter, also makes the boss weaker. However the 'dead' players are not sacrificed, but manifest in a spirit-world. The spirit-version of the boss gains abilities and strengths as the living boss becomes weaker. The difficulty is two-fold. Firstly, the living-boss must be managed in such a manner that if he dies too fast/slow, either "world" will be overwhelmed. Secondly, and where I hope to develop the unique strategy - the spirit world boss is organic in his adoption of abilities, and players must be sacrificied by the living boss in a manner to accomodate his abilities. Communication is required between the two parties as to what the living can transfer over, and what the dead need. Think Gothik - except you're managing the players rather than the mobs.

A player-following mob that switches targets on damage: Originally I had this idea as in the Arthas encounter, with a very slow Frostmourne flying directly towards targeted raid members who are in a circle around Arthas. Frostmourne 1-hit kills anything in contacts, however, it picks a new target (over 30 yards away) if it is hit by a spell. The twist is that every time this occurs Frostmourne's speed increases by 1%. You end up with a game of chicken where if players deflect it too soon, and hence cause it to retarget, it quickly acquires speed and eventually ends up uncontrollable. If a player waits too late, however, they get killed. Acts as a unique enrage mechanic (also have some poorly fleshed out ideas for a multi-phased Arthas but... I won't go in to that).

Mirror-Image style boss (Jandice, Sartura): This concept has always been a good idea in theory, but Blizzard has yet to make it challenging. The short version is that this type of mechanic should require visual tracking, rather than using symbols or measuring damage both of which present a binary. A boss could, for example, spawn 7 copies and through some assigning technique (e.g. N, NE, E... / 1st, 2nd, 3rd / DPS with symbols assist), players must identify and track the motion of a spell through the air and see how hard it hits on the target. Done repeatedly throughout an encounter, with sufficiently complex spells, numerous copies, and enough movement and disarray to make assigning difficult, this could be a challenging and fun mechanic.

Edit:

Just rolling with this, you could even make this in to a kind of conduit concept. A lightning must pass through players to energise some item in the encounter, or even to reflect on the boss itself. You could end up with a kind of moving-tether throughout the encounter.

Thinking about this thread and what would make a great boss is actually quite hard.

I would prefer one that has fulfillment but not so hard you will never get it right. So not Solarian easy or pre-nerf Magtheridon hard. My probable lack of inventiveness will probably not make my boss fight much good but oh well. To be very happy with downing a boss, it has got to do something truly epic at the end. I think totally sweet Cutscene would do the trick but then again thats just me.

I think phase one of Al'ar was very good, definitely worthy of a good boss fight. Phase two was slightly more tank and spank with a couple of adds thrown in. As a post before me said, I think a raid-killing ability is very good but can easily be stopped. I must too add at this point, a fight with 5 stages like Kael or Illidan is very hard to get right and very basic in terms of each stage.

So taken into account, new ideas I think will be great for boss fights are...

Enhancing Effects Upon Release: If a boss inside the circular chamber in which he lives has 8 or so enhancing effects in a box, equally spread across the room. One with +50% damage, +1000 spell hit, +25% crit, +1000 healing... and so on which buffs the player who opens it. Probably very hard to do a bossfight based on this, but its a good idea nontheless.

Boss Weakening Over Time: Being all used to the fact that bosses get harder after you spend too long (enrage) or naturally hitting for more (Gruuls growth). However, a good idea would to be have the boss throwing out Bolts for 5k and 10k hits on the MT then at 80% only 4k and 8k and so on less and less and less. Until about 30% where he rapidly get much stronger increasing to about 15k and 8k bolts after around 5 minutes, where nuking really is needed. Both the start 30% and last 30% would be a nuke-out event to try and beat the mana loss. I would be very happy with a boss fight that went like this, would be extremely fun.

A Boss That Goes For Healers For Once: Questioned many a times by people who just dont believe that bosses could be so stupid to hit a man in 3 inched thick titanium rather than someone with about as much protection as a thong. Obviously the fight would not continue as healers would all be dead. But my idea is that the boss charges straight at whoever casts the first heal, puts a very large DoT non-dispellable debuff on then moves onto the highest threat until someone else casts a healing spell. Whoever casts the spell and gets the DoT can not get the DoT again for the entire fight (lets say the DoT does 3k damage per 5 seconds for 5 mins (10 min boss fight)) and that then they are put in a bubble where they cannot do anything for 5 mins.

At the start you get get about 4 healers with the debuff managing to keep themselves and the tank up. (1x Resto Druid on debuffed healers, 3x Normal healers) Hitting the 5 minutes (and 30 seconds) mark lets say the debuffed people go in the bubble and the other 4 healers will have to get the debuff and keep themselves and the tank up.

WoW Forums -> Lvl 1 cow raid downs lvl 70 mage

Some people got tired of theorycrafting and made their own raid boss. D:

I applaud the effort.

YouTube - 25 lvl 1 vs 1 lvl 70

(minor derail...)

Very, very cool. Actually, I had been thinking something about something somewhat similar to this; basically, a "heroic" arena implementation, where you would pit 2-3 low rated (1400s) 5s teams against top end (2200+) teams... was wondering if it would be theoretically do-able... but thats another thread in a different forum.

My only complaint is that an encounter as epic as this doesn't have Rage's "Bulls on Parade" as its song.

Sorry to touch on it again, but I wanted to share my thoughts.

What I really think the Cthun fight had that made it so special was a combination of elements that raiders had never seen before:
-No Main Tank! The first fight where the actuall 'boss' wasn't tankable and therefore had no aggro worries, or direction. Tanks WERE required though, and they had to be fast.
-A large enough space to force group self reliance. Every group became a sort of independant team and had to take care of each other. Sister groups knew they had to step in for fallen comrades nearby.
-The first real 'idiot check.' I can't recall a single fight before this where one person could easily wipe the entire raid by not knowing where to stand or what to do. Also not knowing DPS priorities was a spell for certain disaster.
-Raidwide Communication! Never before had a raid to be so in sync as to know how many tentacles were up, where they were (what Quadrant!), and how the stomach status was looking. (I still have my WEAKEN HIM! macros)
-A Weakened Phase! I'll never forget when we first killed him in 2 weakenings, with priests smiting their little hearts out and everyone doing every last ounce of dps they could in that brief moment. Was beautiful

I've cleared BT and the thought of Cthun still brings more of a tear to my eye and a race in my heart. Now that was a fight.


fake edit: We went back a few months ago and killed him again with 14 people for laughs. Clumping on one side of the room to force tentacle spawns is easy mode. Also a rogue in the stomach = weakened in 30 seconds How things have changed...

I think that people have some great ideas... and they all boil down to "give us something different!!"

Balance is always the issue though, as a boss "throwing people around the room doing 5K dmg" might seem ok until 4 of your healers get tossed and 2 of them die! Obviously this could be tweaked.

My dream for MMO bosses would be:

1.) Removal of Enrage Timers
- this is just a lame mechanic and I have to assume it's programmer laziness.

2.) Longer Boss encounters
- While I have never done MH (which might be what i'm describing), I like the idea of a prolonged multi phased battle.
- Longer encounters would have to have times to allow rez'ing, drinking, etc... but still push your abilities
- This would eliminate the need to have so many insta-gib mechanics that they rely on to provide barriers.

3.) More Randomness
- Wouldn't it be nice not to have a full script where you know Act1 is this... Act2 is this. Why not have 10+ things that "could" occur, and in any order.


Just my 2 cents

They want to push DPS requirements to (a) encourage DPS classes to not suck, (b) not encourage guilds to put undue pressure on healers, and (c) discourage guilds from stacking raids with healers. They could use mechanics that exist in encounters like Gruul or Prince, but those are essentially just enrage timers in disguise. There's not going to be a wholesale return to open-ended boss fights.

Are you testing player skill or player patience? Encounters that are easy on a minute-by-minute basis but hard just because of error accumulation generally aren't fun. Never mind that mana conservation is still hilariously broken in the raiding game right now. Mechanics that encourage players to stay on track to finishing instances in a reasonable amount of time are good, but that's just my personal preference as someone who doesn't have eight hours a day to play the game. It annoys the shit out of me when people take four hours instead of two because they're busy bullshitting or afk.

More randomness of content is probably good. It does get more difficult to balance, and I'm sure forums will be spammed with "VARIATION X IS IMPOSSIBLE COMPARED TO VARIATION Y" posts, but whatever.

I'm in two minds over this one. Yes long fights can be tedious, but oddly pre-AQ/Naxx one of the most enjoyable fights to beat first time as a healer for me was Chromaggus simply due to the excellent tuning it had with regards mana requirements (though the sand requirement was a pain at the time) I think our first kill was about 13minutes. Yes ofc, mana is pretty broken at present though.

On a purely selfish note I like any encounter where I need to dps, tank and even spot-heal/Innervate as a Feral

Maybe we should be analysing the current "top 3" fights for common traits? Certainly there are elements of similarity between Cthun and Kael (with Archimonde a close 3rd mainly because it's too unforgiving of player disconnects), which are the most rewarding boss encounters so far in my opinion. Cthun and Kael both require division of labour within the raid and tight co-ordination.

I would like a sick and twisted boss that is similar to Leotheras, however healers must keep the MT health below 30% or the boss heals to full. And it has an enrage timer.

In short, I'd like bosses which tax not your gear, but your individual skill. Too many bosses are gear or dps checks. Why not healer checks like back in naxx? Alternatively, bosses which have threat lists based upon some genuine AI for once. Healers would then need to be very careful. The boss wouldn't deal enormous damage, but the fight would be a very strategic play of threat.

A few ideas that I think would make interesting encounters;

- Environmental changes. How about a boss that flips the world upside down, and to avoid dying the raid must fall back to a sheltered place, where they fight on the ceiling. Or Indiana Jones style closing walls that will crush you if you take too long.

- Multi-part bosses. I don't know how feasible this'd actually be, but having say a huge construct with targetable body parts. Better yet, not all are hostile perhaps. For example, you could stumble across a dragonkin that was infected with some parasite. You'd have to keep certain body parts healed up as you DPS ones that become infected to flush the infection out. Imagine that, a boss that gives you loot for actually helping him!