There is a huge lack of events in raid boss fights. I mean they are so linear its not even funny. Basically they give a raid boss some unique ability (like gheddons bombing, Nefs class calls) but then its always the same shit. Main tank being healed over and over again by healers while dps does damage slowly so they don;t steal aggro and maybe some adds thrown in here and there. The reason this is the case, is that if they decided to make raid bosses filled with abilities, cool events etc, they would require a massive amount of testing for them to even WORK, which they evidentally dont have.

The coding has been made so tight, that it leaves little room for exploits, bugs etc.

Blizzard are known for their ability to make things feel epic. In WoW, I think the vast majority of players were expecting Raid bosses to be insanely different to normal bosses. I mean I was thinking, cool, Onyxia is a dragon, the fight must be so awesome. But then you go to it, and she basically sits there, punches the MT and breathes on him every few seconds.

I will never understand why they didnt add events that make the fights more realistic to lore. In the Nefarian fight, there should be a giant boulder above a certain place in the room, where if you do 3000 damage to it, it breaks and falls and can strike Nefarian, causing critical injuries to him that allow a 40 man raid to actually stand a chance against him. (boulder hitting his head is so uncreative but its one step more than blizzard have taken).

The biggest disappointment is the Ragnaros fight. This Fire lord surely has more abilities than swinging his giant hammer and knocking people back. Where is his cool ability to annihilate an entire raid but the Hydraxians give you a water shield that protects you from it? He is a fire lord and he doesnt even think to attack some healers that are stopping him from killing the MT.

While there is a certain criteria that a raid can be defined as using for end-game encounters (such as MTs and aggro control), this should be shaken every once in a while. There should be mini events that change the way every encounter is.

The quality of the game can be so much higher than it currently is.

http://www.kmtdesigns.com/hjfaq/index.php?...d=49&artlang=en

The idea of using the environment as a weapon is very interesting to me. I'll definitely be at least trying this one in Beta, probably in retail as well.

I see where you're going with this, that bosses that *should* simply sneeze on the raid and wipe it seem to go through a lot of work to be able to do so, but honestly that 'scripted event' would get old fast, and everyone would be clamoring for a way to just cancel any animations that happened to occur for the sake of time efficiency.

Maybe if/when they bring in controllable "siege weapons" there will be a bit more to these encounters, but somehow I doubt it.

The C'Thun fight is entirely different than any fight in the game. It's exactly what you're asking for--a completely new type of fight never seen before in WoW.

One can hope with the fact that they did go "out of the box" on the C'Thun fight design, we'll see much more like that in Naxx.

Also, entire game design centers around the tank/healer/damage dealer hybrid that was developed in MUD games and was featured in EverQuest's design. It's the central design theme of the game and breaking away from that is hard.

Your ideal boss fight is something akin to an old platformer boss fight, hit switch, hit boss, repeat three times, results. Honestly your ideas aren't all that different to bosses that are currently in the game, you've just put them into a different context. Add spawns, you kill it to make boss vulnerable, you hit boss. Hardly innovative, it's going to happen every week and you're going to tire of it.

I love the idea of class calls, untankable giant eyes that shoot lazers and dragons that require some LoS trickery. We've got it pretty good, really. I think Blizzard have done a great job designing a lot of their fights, the execution of the designs leaves a lot to be desired in many cases - but they are good ideas nonetheless.

I love fights that are designed to make you think outside the box, there are plenty of these, as I've said. It would extremely difficult to code a boss fight that required anything too abstract based on the mechanics of the game, I do agree with you in this.

Also what the hell am I supposed to do if I can't tank the mob? Death and Taxes said since I am a warrior I am a tank and am a retard if I try to do anything but.

Druid thread inc ^

Of course there already are a few unqiue things in raid encounters, but there is still a huge lack of the 'cool' factor.

I think the main reason behind the lack of events and triggers in boss fights is due to the lack of resources, mainly testers.

Say for example, you have a fight where there are 2 abilities. You would only need to worry about these 2 abilities 'working as intended'. Now say you have a complex encounter that has multiple environments, variables and a huge array of abilites and situational abilities. This would require 10x more testing, more work because it is not a simple tight code, like 2 lone abilities would be.

So for the fight with 2 abilities your coding looks like:
Use ability 1 when 10 or more players are close to each other
Use ability 2 every 5 seconds no matter who is targeted.

Where if you have multiple situational abilites, your looking at something like this:
If target is priest use ability 3 but if priest has less than 500 mana, skip target and use ability 3 on next priest.
Repeat with other abilities/classes/triggers

The more coding you have, the more potential exploits, bugs and problems with triggers you will get.

Blizzard needs to devote more resources to designing 'cool' encounters so that we can have 'smart' bosses.

I dunno about you, but I think WoW boss fights are much better than one tank being healed with a CH rotation while the rest of the raid plinks said boss in the ass.

I think the first couple of major raid bosses were kept simple on purpose. Gamers are notorious for making things work in ways they were never intended too. Has the "learning phase" been slow? Fuck ya is has. But I think now we are starting to see some interesting stuff...

Well the first couple of bosses were simple because well its Blizzard's first MMO. I think we really can't complain about boss design (aside from making broken encounters-C'thun) until we play the expansion and still come across loldps lolheal encounters.

Your idea of "cool" is most people's idea of craptacular. What is a tank's job supposed to be if he isn't tanking? What is a healers job if they don't heal? What are the DPS classes doing if they don't do DPS? You honestly want healers tanking, DPS healing and tanks doing dps? The different classes have a job for a reason. Blizzard doesn't need to change their job description, they need to allow them to do their job in unique ways.

As for your boss that can sneeze on a raid and completely destroy it, go fight C'thun. You'll get all of that you can stand.

Yeah, this thread is a bit silly. WoW raid design is overall good, but remember they're also introducing a lot of new players to the raid game. Give them time to layer on more complexity and combine old concepts in interesting ways. A lot of players are just now learning to do stuff like tank transitions, how to maximize aggro, how to prevent spike damage deaths, etc.

Lets complain about loot, risk versus reward and PvP instead. All in favor?

Just add server stability and customer support to the list and voilá.

QFFT.

Blizzards raid encounters are more interesting than 90% of the shit we saw in EQ. It got better with OOW, and I hear it has some very interesting encounters now, but well.. I wasn't raiding anymore by that time. In SOE's third expansion, they were designing boss encounters so boring that people went afk for up to 40 minutes fighting them, including the main tank (THO/VT anyone?).

No, they weren't simple because it was Blizzard's first MMO. Their raid designers had more experience with raids than most people in the industry. They were simple because they knew that a huge portion of the playerbase were new to the whole "MMORPG Raid" concept, and those players would have been turned off by the raiding game if the first encounters were extremely advanced. Molten Core was a fantastic raid zone to teach people basic principles regarding maintanking, offtanking, crowd control, aoe avoidance, debuff curing and positioning. One small step at a time. Of course it was boring for seasoned raiding veterans, but the zone wasn't intended to impress us either.

Feel free to bitch at Blizzard for slow content pace, terrible loot progression, failure to understand scaling issues, and various other issues. Their raids are still the most interesting in the business.

I thought that many of the AQ20/AQ40 fights were unique in various ways. Freezing/shattering Viscidus to damage him, breaking Buru's eggs on him, using Ossirin's crystals to weaken him, and it started in ZG too, with the sons/Hakkar interaction.

I find the variety in WoW's bosses these days to be quite good.

christ I hate Ossirian. Sure it's 'creative,' but it's at the absolute bottom of my list of enjoyable encounters. I generally like Blizzard's encounter design (excepting MC which is too simple -- but for an understandable reason), but Ossirian just isn't fun and wasn't even fun the first time I did him. Might be different for a healer and/or tank, but as DPS I really can't stand it. There's no other fight in the game I dislike as much.

Now Vael... Vael is a fun fight. I can't think of any other boss that comes anywhere near to capturing the "this is one bad motherfucker" feel that Vael has.

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I still think a great boss would be one where it mind-controls a random member of the raid, buffs them to raid-boss HP/mana/damage levels, and then the remaining 39 people need to try and take them down -- and the mind controlled person gets to watch on in glee and horror as he starts mowing down his comrades. The better geared your group gets, the harder the boss becomes. You'd basically need to learn 8 different encounters (or more, if it's based off specs as well).

Being able to polymorph the main tank really doesn't do enough to satisfy my urge to wipe entire raid groups.

I am gonna put my vote in on Vael too. My guild had a bitch of a time killing him (and we are Alliance too!), to that point that people started not showing up on "Vael night". Finally, sans enough repair costs and potions to choke a large cow, that bitch dropped. For me, probably the closest WoW has to giving my guild the EQ feeling. Sadly, I was not even there.

I thought twemps would be the same, but they were not. Admittedly, the fight was challenging and intense, but it lacked the fun factor for me. Vael is balls to the wall, all out kill it before it kills us. Twemps is like walking on egg shells for 10 minutes hoping nothing goes wrong. That being said, it was a nice change from the norm.

sounds fun

wow, that is an awesome ideea :) it`s to cool for blizzard to ever implement something like that tho :(

I'm voting Ossirian as favorite. Vael is boring. PoH PoH PoH Flash MT PoH PoH PoH... wake me when he dies.

I really dislike Ossirian. Sure it might be different, but it doesn't make it fun.

Vael was and is an awesome encounter, and I still find Ragnaros to be cool, even though the encounter itself might not be the most complex one, he's still got a cool factor that puts other bosses to shame. C'thun is cool too, if you ignore the fact that he's currently impossible; although we stopped trying him after two weeks of phase 2 tries so I might not be as frustrated with him as some others.

I'd put my vote in (having not seen *any* AQ40, so bear that in mind) for Razorgore as the "best" encounter currently in the game.

It's the only one which really has multiple *totally* different strategies, all of which are capable of success in the hands of the right raid, none of which is particularly easier or harder than the others. Whether or not they intended all the strategies I don't know, but I think in terms of being a boss you can approach in multiple ways, that lets you actually design a strategy that caters to *your* strengths, Razorgore succeeds.

Vael, on the other hand, is pretty much my favorite, but that's because I get to whip out a dagger and try to break my backstab button.