Its important to understand that raid encounters are evolving much inthe same way that games are (and species do); At a rapid pace, even.

Raiding as it began in EverQuest 1 began by expanding the concept of group teamplay by simply increasing the damage output, HP and damage of spells cast by the NPC thereby forcing increased DPS, HPS and collective HP pool of the players only attainable through greater numbers.

Subsequently, raiding has grown to include a few different branches of challenge - On a wider scale, we're pretty much seeing the same stuff in WoW that we did in previous games with some key elements changed.

As a list of elements to aid in identifying the challenges one might face:

Area of Effect - An element of combat that is not restricted to one player, but several. The range can be limited, it can be targetted in a direction if need be (frontal cone, backwards tail-lash), the shape of the area affected (Heigan waves) and so on. The actual effect of the AoE can vary from a buff, debuff, damage or other.

Deviation from standard behavior:
Aggro alteration - Marks on 4 horsemen, wing buffet, Patchwerk. Mechanics of a fight which alter the standard dynamics of aggro, thus introducing a new element to the fight.

Chaos elements:
RSTS - I think Conquest coined this term first; 'Random Secondary Targetting System'. Elements of a fight which randomly target a person not the current target of the mob, for an ability of some kind.

RTS - Simplification of above. An ability that simply randomly targets someone in the raid. C'Thun eye-beam / dark glare is one example.

Crowd Control:
Spawns - Mob spawning as part of a boss script. Gluth, f.ex

Dynamic Spawns - Razorgore, Nefarius phase 1 f.ex; Any kind of non-static spawning mechanic. Nefarius colors vary on reset, razorgore spawns vary per-time (What spawns, how many, etc).

Non-avatar related abilities:
Movement-based ability - C'Thun Dark Glare is probably the primary example of this; Thaddius is a horrible example of how it can be misused.


I'm sure I'm missing some stuff, but you get the idea. My theory is that by decreasing the relative margin for error and increasing the number of elements that need to be taken into account, you effectively smoothen out the learning curve more and provide a similar margin for error limited by a players ability to gauge situations and not their ability to perform an action very quickly to prevent a wipe. I had some graphs drawn up on this stuff to illustrate, as well as a suggested way to syntactically represent raid encounters through flow-charts and such, but I think I'll hold off on that for a bit.

I'm curious as to others thoughts on this; I'm not interested in whether you think raiding in WoW is too hard or too easy, or playertypes and all that. I'm purely interested in analyzation on mechanics of raiding, and how to provide encounters that are 'difficult, yet not Thaddius-like' if you get my gist. I'm also interested in seeing more uniqueness amongst encounters, without increasing the level of reflexes required exponentially.

Erh, well; I'm out of time as I have to head home. I hope this garners some sort of interesting discussion, or I'll look awfully lonely here. ;)

There was a thread here about various ideas for raid bosses quite a while back, and the idea that I have always thought would make an incredibly fun encounter was where one of your raid members was mind controlled/posessed, and essentially became the avatar of the boss.

The abilities and attacks would correspond to the player's class, balanced out by various default abilities of the boss to compensate for various class differences.

It wouldn't need to be some colossal end-of-dungeon type boss, but I think it would be immensely fun - there's a reason every raid loves the skull piles in ZG. Nothing beats giving that dude that constantly whines about loot a 39-man kicking, and they will probably love seeing giant numbers pop up over all their guildies.

You could also modify it with various twists: multiple people getting posessed throughout the fight, multiple people at the same time, ability for possessed player to "break" possession via shattering a crystal/tentacle/gandling-style encounter.

Indeed ;) I had originally concieved a bit more of a detailed post on my end, pulling a bunch of stuff from a wiki I put up a long time ago on EQ2 raiding and ways to solve the dullness in them (Aforementioned charts/learning curve prediction/syntactical raid design).

Its going to be interesting to see whats done with raid content come 25-man cap, given the attempted diversity of roles Blizzard is spurring.

One thing I'd definately like to see more of is raid encounters which clearly lean towards several strategies all being very viable. This occurs more, the more elements you add to a fight; With the synergies between talent specs, I'd love fights where several setups are possible in the event that you don't have the exact same set of talent specs another time (f.ex: Missing your prot paladin? Adopt another similar strategy, just as viable yet slightly different in execution). I realize its rather difficult designing encounters this way, as any encounter where there is a clear, easier way to do things will be seen as 'the only way to do the encounter'.

Healing dynamics will most definately be shifted in TBC, and I'm not really sure where that is going to leave people. If they continue the trend of extremely DPS-reliant fights, heavy AE and optimization of raid group thats going to be pushing potions / raid setups to a new level from where they are now. Between Misery, Daze-related talents, Improved Shadow Weaving and the like theres a large percentage-based margin for DPS improvement which suggests to me that any DPS-restricted fight is going to warrant maximization of raid group setup.

Initially, I would think that Blizzard would want to slightly reduce the effect potions have on end-game raiding (As is, potting with MC/BWL gear puts you ahead of not putting in Tier 3 for many classes due to the length of fights and power of potions). Either they shorten fights and dramatically change the impact of HPS, or they keep expanding their lengths / keeping them from 3-15 minutes and reduce the over-all effect of potions on the game. Then again, people being online to farm makes the world seem fuller than offline or in an instance I suppose.

Mind Control is certainly an interesting element; I just hope it doesn't go the other way much more (i.e. Razuvious); Fights like Razuvious represent exactly what I'd hate to see more of. I don't mind the whole, 'classes doing alternate jobs', but completely unstable raid variables provide for poor content in the long run. Randomly wiping even though you do absolutely everything in the encounter 100% correct should never be able to occur.

Let the slackathon commence....

I'd like to see encounter that react based on non-obvious (sometimes derived?) factors. For example, a boss that does an ability based on the heal efficiency of some person, some class, or the raid as a whole. Other examples could include bosses that react to emotes, to class makeup (choosing 6 out of 15 abilities, or something), or to positioning (which, unless I am mistaken, is used in WoW, but not quite in this manner).


I'd also like to see fights that are more animation-heavy, but I can see how hardware limitations might halt that. Something like a growing/moving AoE that could be dodges and danced around but become attackable at a boss's quartile life percentages has potential, someday.

I'm also a fan of encounters where MC factors in. Maybe even an encounter that divides your raid and pits one side against the other (in a semi-intelligent, semi-random way) that culminates with the separation of the two halfs to 2 separate bosses (with a shared link, even).

I'm pleased to see Blizzard's deviation from the standard "tank and spank" in mamy of their newer encounters and I hope this trend continues. My favorite encounter is still C'Thun due to it being an execution based encounter relying on everyone in the raid to contribute.



I'd like to see more encounters that emphasize specific class abilities and give all the different classes a chance to be a star so to speak.

There's lots of interenting possabilities:

I'd like to see an encounter where rogue stealth is used creatively. Maybe they'd have to stealth and sap strange untankable adds. Or maybe they'd have to stealth by some adds to another part of the room where they activate a mechanism.

I'd like to see an enounter where a hunter can act as a kinda of "ranged tank", like they can on the wasp is AQ20.

Or how about an encounter where players recieve a debuff that turns spells of a particular school into healing spells. Like it turns all frost spells into heals, and mages have to become healers.

^^^^^^^^^ Profile motherfucker, do you speak it?

Damage Weaknesses, such as Chromaggus, and Ossirian.

Key debuffs could be another, for example Faerlina, and Ossirian (again).

Some people may think of this as gimmicky, but it's a nice way to throw some change-ups at everyone to keep out of the one button mash. From a priests perspective it'd be neat if there was an encounter where two priests had to levitate across the Deadly Slime Pool of Slimy Death and then mind control adds into a sacrifice pit while the raid across the slime pool pulls the flying adds away from the two priests. Once a certain amount of blood has been sacrificed, the boss is awakened and engages the raid, the two priests levitate back and the main raid takes out the flyers before switching to the boss. Or something.

People have been talking about the 'Legend of Zelda' feel to the newer raid encounters and I think that's exactly what Blizz is trying for (and I hope they continue).

Kiting/movement based encounters are pretty cool, and they haven't really exhausted the possibilities with that kind of encounter yet.