Reminds me of some discussions I've had about DMing in a D&D-style fantasy world. Normal ancient conceptions of military tactics are just poor when you are talking about spell-casters who can teleport, massive creatures who can breath fire across a battlefield, spells that can deal huge AE damage, and so on. What many fantasy games come down to is something resembling real-world warfare. You have guerilla troops (archers and wizards hiding in cover), tanks (huge creatures like giants), machine gunners/flamer throwers (low level casters with wands or something), and so on. Having armies line up and charge each other worked fine in the 9th century, but they didn't have wizards who could toss fireballs.

Probably one of the more cinematic fights I had in MMOs was versus some of the arch super villains in City of Heroes. The game was simple and loaded with problems, but it was pretty fun to fight a super-villain flying above skyscrapers that would actually move between buildings shooting at your group while your flyers fired back and your other heroes either leapt from building to building or sprinted with superspeed up the fire-escapes trying to get in a position to attack. :P

There seems to be the usual WoW disconnect here between the more long term hardcore raiders (former EQ players) that think WoW bosses are great, creative, and have come a long way, and those more casual though often still time intensive players that loved WoW 1-59 and then were funneled into the raiding game expecting epic movie like encounters of 40 people doing great things and defeating dramatic huge encounters. Then being ultimately let down by by more or less repetitive encounters that are changed with a few new gimmicks each fight to make them appear different.

Not that I'm knocking WoW too much I just really think what the OP is asking for is several years down the pipe. Things are not going to change when simply putting new clothes on old bones is still so very lucrative. It will be a while before the whole aggro/dps/heal system is effetively overhauled and you have good enough technology where the AI actually does 'smart' things like try to kill healers first or whatever. Your asking for more of a Dungeon Master approach to big bosses where they have their own motivations and various responses depending on what the players do. This is a ways off. For now we are going to continue to have the more textbook approach to bosses. Study your homework, timing, positioning and if you have everything in memory to pass the test then you will beat the encounter.

This is some of the reason why people often argue in favor of the smaller raid design. Due to the fact that in a 5 man instance, blizzard cannot predict which mix of classes will attempt it, by default that leads several different roles open to one class. A warlock might have to tank a while, a druid may have to dps on the fly, etc. The bigger bosses get and the more people to take them down, by necessity the more scripted and limited actions can be assumed on any one player. There is not much room for dynamic spontanteous strategy adjustments. Simply because 40 people as a whole cannot instantly react and adjust to something they have never seen before without pre planning the scenario. If you mess up you just wipe, there is little in the way of plan B or C. And this is really where the epic'ness is lost.

When the sh*t hits the fan and players are able to somehow someway adapt and overcome despite this, this is what gets players recounting tales of how a fight was won or had their adrenaline pumping. When a WoW boss is defeated it is defetaed on a linear known course. You will know far ahead of time if you are checking off each mark along the way, doing things properly on the path to defeating it. The closest thing I remember as exciting is just more or less a mob reaching near the end of its lifebar at the same time the raid group suffers a huge mistake and starts to die one by one and then a race to see if the last few players can down it before everyone is dead. But that is quite a bit different from the dynamic and interesting scenario's being asked for by the OP.

I would identify myself as one of those "instensive players that loved WoW 1-59 and then were funneled into the raiding game expecting epic movie like encounters of 40 people..." That said, I actually do rather enjoy the raid encounters in WoW, at least the first few times through.

Perhaps I'm screwy, or should have been an EQ raider long ago, but I find the endgame raiding experience to be thoroughly gratifying, so long as progression keeps up. I do get burnt out when we kill Rag for the umpteenth time, but I suffer the same boredom with that much repetition in any game. Most of those don't have the additional content patches, either.

I remember a developer commenting about the time of release on the level of scripting vs AI built into raid bosses. He said something along the lines of

"while players would like to challenge mobs that can react and make intelligent choices about how to attack a raid, the basic MMO structure in WoW doesn't allow for that to be entertaining. How many times do you want to wipe because raidboss X moved and nuked your vulnerable healers first."

I think AQ and Naxx are demonstrating that they have a lot of depth to making entertaining fights with complicated scripts. Come the expansion they can cease trying to balance fights for the difference between the 2 factions and they probably have a bunch of earlier discarded ideas that can be brought out.

The BRD pseudo-PvP 5v5 arena event as part of the Tier 0.5 line is a good example of how this sort of thing could work. It's really fun and challenging done in appropriate gear.

I do agree that there's a lot of potential when it comes to making enemies that do have pseudo-AI, but don't have a massive statistical advantage to compensate.

Warning, nerd digression incoming:

Years ago, I spent some time doing coding and design for a PK/RP MUD (ROM derivative, nothing too fancy), which never really went anywhere, but served largely as a sandbox in which I could experiment with solutions to issues that had always annoyed me as a player. One such irritant was the fact that mobs were so dumb. Mobs were largely fodder, that periodically used some ability or other, or hit kind of hard, but had far, far more hp than any player (by an order of magnitude, and then some) to make up for it. I didn't really see why that had to be the case, so I spent some time putting together pseudo-AI for mobs that were supposed to be "intelligent" (it might make sense for an animal or undead to just be a big brute that wails on you unthinkingly, but it seemed ridiculous that a mob that was supposed to be a powerful sorcerer or cunning warlord would behave the same way). It was simple in implementation, but worked well: Intelligent warrior mobs wouldn't just randomly use skills -- they'd use them with purpose. They'd kick dirt in your eyes before disarming you, and then pick up your weapon if they could. They'd prioritize damaging you over stunning you when you had a lot of health remaining, but once you were injured they'd try to stun or knock you down to stop you from fleeing. Caster mobs with multiple spells would exploit elemental vulnerabilities, stop using spells if they saw their target was resistant to them, etc. Of course, the mobs with this flag set had their HP drastically reduced to keep it fair. In practice, they often performed more effectively than some actual players, and while I may be biased, I think they were certainly more fun to fight than an unthinking automaton.

Anyway, returning to WoW, yes, obviously it'd be stupid and unfair if a boss that hits your tank for 2000 were to ignore him and run around one-shotting all your cloth-wearers. But, of course, if a boss were to have that behavior, it wouldn't need to melee for thousands of damage per hit, would it? I'm not necessarily advocating a complete elimination of concepts like tanking and aggro. But I do think that there is plenty of room for raid encounter design that bends those rules.

Simple solution: the person the boss targets when he gets aggro gets a +100% run speed (de)buff for one minute (like, oh let's say "Adrenaline Jolt") so he can kite around the boss while the tanks attempt to regain aggro. He would also get a separate debuff ("Body Exhaustion") with a 5 minute cooldown that would keep the same person from getting Adrenaline Jolt again.

Of course, the fight would need to take place in a wide area so that kind of kiting could be possible, but I don't think it would be that hard.

Uh..."developer" doesn't necessarily mean someone who's a programmer or someone who is a designer. It just means someone who is actively working on the game itself, whether as a programmer, designer, artist, or whatever. If you say "Tigole is a game developer" that statement is true, but it doesn't mean that "Tigole is a programmer."

Kinda side-tracked the thread, but just something that perplexes me :P.

This statement made me laugh out loud in the middle of my office - I had a hard time thinking of an excuse when my boss looked over at me.