When comparing the difficulty of 4 Horsemen and Sapphiron, it got me thinking that many raid challenges are about your ability to spread your attention to many things at once - though they may be trivial in their own right. On Sapphiron, I can easily feel myself screwing up more often than I should when we have very limited mod tracking so I have to announce curse and deep breath while keeping track of the amount of frostbolts fired, closest iceblock, distance to other players, dispelling, DPS'ing, frost potions, combat resses etc.

The pattern of challenges is quite similar with the other Naxx encounters. The flavor may be a bit different with for example 4H being more focused on coordination between groups/players and Gothik being focused on timing and precision but, ultimately, adding to the difficulty of an encounter seems as simple as throwing in one more feature players have to react to, no matter how easy it is.

As such, there's no real limit to how difficult encounters can be made, even without scaling up the attributes to an impossible level and I was wondering if it could be entertaining to make a raid encounter pushed to impossibility. I'm sure most of you know the simple games which make you remember an increasing sequence. I imagined something along those lines for a raid encounter:
Starting out as tank and spank for the first 10 or so seconds and then gradually slapping on extra features the players have to deal with until it becomes humanly impossible, even if attributes are a minor factor and on a very manageable level.
The encounter would be optional and accessible as a reward after defeating some previous boss. You would get a reward which scales with your performance. You would have the option to retry the encounter infinitely before accepting the reward for the performance on the best try since last reset.

I think that after designing the first 5-10 minutes of such a fight, it wouldn't require much maintaining, with designers just keeping an eye on world progress and adding another minute worth of added features and a few rewards every time the top guild in the world is in danger of overcoming the encounter.

I think it could be fun to push the limits in such a way and would leave a challenge for the top guilds between the release of new content. If the encounter doesn't become too lag sensitive, it could even serve as kind of an inter-server raiding ladder where it isn't all over once one guild has scored a world first on something.

What are your thoughts on describing difficulty this way and on an unbeatable raid encounter like this?

The very nature of raiding guilds will preclude this encounter I'd have thought.

If the encounter isn't beatable, then after a few weeks, people will just stop trying. Whereas I like the idea of a rolling encounter, one which is never exactly the same, it would be unrealistic to expect Blizzard to carry on inspecting/tweaking encounters.

It's been said that Blizzard watch encounters and have notifications when certain things die, now carry this on, are the guys who are on night shift going to halt an encounter at 1%, hot fix new things in, just for the very few people who are going to try/achieve the goals?

I'll admit it would be very nice to see something like this in the game, but I am really very sceptical about the viability of it all happening, same goes for GM led world events.

Human Nature says that people will try, but really, where is the satisfaction in not eventually beating it?

This is sort of the model that came to mind when I was thinking about Ossirian, and it occurred to me that the tornadoes and the curse didn't quite seem to "fit". It's like they had the idea of Supreme Mode and the crystal debuffs, but it wasn't hard enough. So they made the room really huge and made the crystals spawn semi-randomly around it, but it still wasn't hard enough. So they added the Enveloping Winds stun, but it still wasn't hard enough. So they added the Thunderclap knockback, but it still wasn't hard enough. So they added the tornados, but it still wasn't hard enough. So they added the AoE Curse of Tongues, and called it good.

The fight already has a bunch of incremental difficulties, but you could easily imagine more. A time-based enrage, a random-target attack ala Corrupted Blood, AoE damage based on his vulnerability, spawning adds like the Anubisaths, and so on.

I don't really think taking this to the extreme would be much fun, though. Even most simple boss fights are past the limit of most raiders to split their attention between controlling their own actions and observing the events of the fight, hence the universal reliance on announcement mods. The solution to a fight that cranked out every gimmick in the book would start with some kind of tailor-made bossmod that did the work of paying attention to stuff for you as much as possible.

I think it could be fun as a sort of "bonus round" encounter. Durability death is off, all buffs are stripped, much like the arena.

Enemies would continue to spawn throughout the encounter, increasing in difficulty. It would start off simple, and either the boss would gain abilities or adds would spawn or damage would increase, and you could get a "score" based on how long you lived, how much damage you did, or what "phase" you got the boss to. Rewards would be primarily epeen based, like a tabard or a special title. Maybe some primals or other crafting goods, some gold, depending on how far you got. If rewards are material you'd have to only get one chance per reset though.

It would be an interesting experiment and could be used as a weird way of benchmarking your guild's performance and progression.

I'd wager the fight we call Ossirian now started with the crystals, and Supreme mode. "Okay, this fight is keep moving, and ... we're going to randomly pick where you go!" And then other things got whittled on - enveloping - can't have just one superstar, too easy - knockback - "Surprise, it's now harder to hit the bullseye!", tornado as sort of the icing for, "Okay, it's a little TOO straightforward going from point A to B... let's sometimes make the correct answer an arc!"

Then they probably went, "Gosh, this is still pretty tame for classes that have huge arc segments to fool around with. Ok, decursive busywork for the smartie pants!"

I'm just sayin'.

But raiding - the mental portion - seems to me to be an exercise in Simon. Blue Green Green Red Yellow Blue. Go! How much farther can this go? Well, my personal best on Simon was something around 33, but I am (no kidding or exaggerating) functionally retarded at sequence memory, so I was cheating (stuffing it into visual memory). So at a rate of about 4 per expansion, if release to Naxx is the pace setter, I need to quit raiding shortly after the 8th expansion or my secret will be out. Given an expected MMO lifespan of 7 years, you cats are all fine. Remember to send me postcards though.

But no, if everyone sharpens their teeth on fights with two-three gimmicks, and there's a set bag of gimmicks, while the new fights may be incredibly complex, if they're 10 old gimmicks, then so what? You learned them all, so mashing the old Blue Green Green Red Yellow Blue Up Up Down Down Left Right Left.. er, sorry, off track there - mashing the old responses won't be as daunting a task.

It's just like doing geometric transformations and then going back and saying, "But look at all the algebra I had to do at the same time!"

It depends on how far you take the different types of challenges. I think you could break encounter difficulty into 2 areas: Individual difficulty and group coordination.

I think of individual difficulty as managing ones own problems, paying attention to your health, debuffs, and positioning while trying to accomplish a particular goal. Challenges like remembering when to go grab a spore debuff on Loatheb fall into this catagory as well.

Group coordination can be described as throwing challenges at the raid group as a whole, these are the kinds of things you use warning mods for. These types of challenges require you to pay attention to not just yourself but everyone else, like positioning on C'Thun and Thaddius, or working as a 3 person team to kill eyes in Heigan's tunnel.

Designing encounters that stress more complex group coordination might burn out raiders more quickly. I say this because in those types of encounters 1 or 2 "weak links" in any raid group will hold back progression of the raid as a whole, which could lead to frustration with the game and the people you are playing with.

I think Blizzard should increase the difficulty for the individual raider as opposed to the entire group.

Since this doesn't have to be carefully balanced (it's a bonus round, okay?) you could do some very interesting things with randomness. Imagine a room in naxx where a random trash mob (from the entire instance) spawns. Then just repeat with a gradually increasing speed. Every 5 minutes or so, give the raid a 1 minute break.

The overlapping effects, need for crowd controls, and the very dynamic measure of everything would make it pretty fun.

Unfortunately, "fun and challenging encounter" doesn't really motivate anyone for very long.. you'd have to attach purples to it if you want people to do it. (witness how many people (or rather how few) are doing the arenas for any reason besides gadgetzan ganking.

Wouldn't it be possible for a fight like this to help fill a necessary role of a raid zone. Im sure all of you have read gurg's post on the consumable/buff dilemma regarding raid encounter designs. Perhaps have a boss such as this that drops X amount of necessary consumables and gold (in naxx case have it be GSPPs). The amount being based on the time you go.

Also, an example of this fight would be tanking Magistrate Barthilas for as long as possible. Not a real challenge with current end game gear, but imagine all DM blues, that would be tough.

"My guild beat stage 7 and all I got was this lousy tabard."

This would be a pretty cool concept, depending on how they developed it. Blizzard proved in Naxx that they can tune encounters with precision, so designing an encounter that could only be defeated when everyone in the raid has top end gear wouldn't be a major issue.

To some degree, Blizzard has already done some of the things discussed here. Bloodlord in ZG becomes more and more powerful if people in your group die, so a scaling enrage is nothing new. In the Noth encounter, the trash during teleports also becomes more difficult.

The creative part would be coming up with a way to reward people for reaching a certain point. It would probably also involve some way to let people abandon the fight. A fight that ended with "you all died but we're still going to give you loot" would be a silly way to design a fight intentionally. One example would be receiving a "mission" at the start of the fight to delay the boss in the next room as long as possible, and having a wall that everyone can jump down from.

I actually don't like the idea that people who died in the fight can loot the boss in the end. No bossfight should be designed in a way that some people have to die, like Vael and no dead player should be able to loot the boss. That'd give some challenge to people in personal level.

But I don't see how they can make dungeons more harder as long as they keep the players in the same spot. Gothik was a good idea, dividing the raid. Divide the raid to 25 and give each person a certain objective, a rather hard one, and then you'd be facing some hard boss fight. Even right now in the hardest encounters like 4HM, people in personal basis don't have a hard task to accomplish.

Flask of Petrification for the later stages, anyone?

Meh you are going to have to try harder than that :p
Every minute a pillar goes up from the ground and you have to 'cap' it (BG style), recieving damage cancels the effect. Each pillar activated gives a loot bonus.

And I bet they wouldn't mind you using that flask, blizzard loves it when we use flasks! :)

I'd love more encounters that are highly challenging to some individuals, but not necessarily to all. When we were raiding (christmas woo), doing Heigan was a painfully obvious example of why some of us would appreciate this.

Currently, most fights that require high skill from only few people, requires it from the tank(s). If there's one person in the raid you don't want fucking up, it's usually the guy with the big monster's attention. As a Warlock, the only time I've really felt that the fight was all about how well I did, is Twin Emps, where ironically, I was tanking. To some extent Razorgore, as I did the Orb, but that's not really unique to my class.

I'd love more fights where one or more individuals activate some sort of feature/mechanism and they have to perform some sort of job that depends entirely on them, but will wipe the raid if done wrong. Basically, the Razorgore Orb thing again.
Imagine a fight where the first person to do damage to the boss got ported to a special room, and had to do something akin the Heigan fast dance the entire time the raid was fighting the boss. Every minute, the dance gets harder (not necessarily speeds up, changes pattern perhaps?), so the better the person dancing is, the more time the raid gets to kill the boss.

As a DPS'er, there's only really two ways I really feel like I'm worthwhile to the raid:
1. When I'm performing one of these special tasks.
2. When I'm number one on the charts.
Unfortunately, 2's highly dependant on the fight and hardly something everyone can achieve often.

Ofcourse, an argument against having a fight that's highly based on how well an individual does would be that it would be too easy to piggyback through it for weaker players. For better or worse, C'thun, Thaddius and Heigan require a certain level of skill and awareness from the players in your raid (or in Heigan's case, half of them).

Tuning every encounter so that every role that must be fulfilled to beat the boss has the same risk factor would be very hard. Abilities that target random people are unfair in that model so you would end up with raid-wide or class-wide debuffs on all encounters.
Besides, non-healing classes usually rely on others for survival, why should you lose your loot rights because your assigned healer was slacking or had some technical problem?

/shrug. Each mob of the zerg defeated drops (or in case of a boss, "scales" he "sheds" when "hurt") can be used as either a protection pot or turned in to an NPC in bulk for a raid buff. Something like that.

Just have a boss there into the mix and let the reward ilvl be tied to the ammount of damage the boss takes.

Interesting idea, in theory but as stated it probably wouldn't work in practise. Before I go on I'd like to explain a little bit about myself, due to the nature of the topic. After 2 raids in Naxxramas, visiting Razuvious and progressing quite well, I decided to quit Warcraft (well, raiding :) ), as a hunter the fight reminded me too much of a fight like Firemaw or Chromaggus. I'm sure I missed out on a lot of exciting encounters and even a fight like Razuvious provides an interesting twist for some classes, but all in all, I felt I had mastered my class, I didn't feel like leveling and equipping an alt and the fights in the latest instances were too alike. As I said to the folks in my guild, playing Warcraft really is just solving a puzzle each time a boss needs to go down and the puzzles were getting old.

So, how far can raiding be pushed? Your suggestion is to increase the amount of acts a player needs to remember and the order in which to perform them, if I understood you correctly. If so, raiding can be pushed to unimaginable difficulties because in essence it's really not a process of performing the right tasks in the right order. It's merely a matter of reacting to what is happening and the difficulty is being able to actually understand what is happening. As said above, counting to 3 is simple and any player can do that, what makes anyone a good player is being able to count to 3 when required while performing a 2nd or 3rd task simultaneously. The addons that warn you when something's happening are useful, but for trained gamers also completely useless. What the addons do is point out in big white letters on your screen that something's happening, in fact many bosses warn you as well if you simply would be attention (Anub'rekhan's a good example). The addons really don't warn you, the just make it easier for you to be aware of what's happening.

Still, it's a matter of remembering what button to press, or where to move when said things happen. The player simply has to remember that button A is linked to situation B. Anyone is quite capable of remembering a whole lot of these combinations. What probably distinguishes the good players from the average players is the quickness of their response and the lesser amount of mistakes made. Good priests will not cast a single heal when Nefarian calls them out, average priests will now and then make the mistake of cancelling their incoming heals too slowly. So, increasing the difficulty of an encounter can be done be increasing the abilities of a boss: if a player is required to recognize 10 unique situations within an encounter and remember the 10 different reactions required, it will take some time before the player gets them all 10 right. Good players will need 1 try, average players will need more but in the end everyone is capable of remembering what reactions are required for each unique situation within the encounter.

To increase difficulty even more then, is combining boss abilities. Ability A requires the player to cast Spell X, Ability B requires the player to move to spot Y. Easy. Let the boss perform Ability A and B at almost the same time and the player will have to think fast, move first or cast first? That's difficult at first, but in essence it's nothing new. What the player needs to remember is that Ability A and Ability B performed at the same time require moving to spot Y first and casting spell X there. Essentially, what I'm saying here is that Ability A + B = Situation C and moving to spot Y and casting spell X = reaction Z. All the player has to remember is that when C happens, Z needs to be done.

Combining situations has it's limits, remembering actions and reactions is simple when it's a one on one process, but when a certain situations requires from the player to perform multiple tasks in the correct order, there will be a breaking point where the player loses interest/concentration before he has mastered the situation.

To increase the difficulty even more is to introduce an element of randomness, not unlike the trash mobs in AQ40, which have a random set of combinations. The tactic for the trash mobs is simple though, but if you randomly pick a combination of 2 abilities from a pool of 10 possibilities, the player can no longer memorize all the possible variations and has to adapt. 10 abilities possible, 10 specific reactions required, when the 2 random abilities are cast, the player needs to remember the reactions required for these two possibilities and perform these reactions quickly and correctly.

So, the difficulty limit for raiding definitely does not relate to the length of the fight. With proper dedication, anyone will be able to remember insane amounts of action-reaction combinations required for a boss, as long as the abilities are not combined, everyone will be able to remember what to do and when to do it. Combining abilities to make the required actions more complex does increase difficulty slightly, when things need to be memorized in the correct order, there will be a point where certain players just can keep up no longer. If a certain situation requires 3 actions, most people will be able to cope, but if there's a boss with a set of abilities that require from the players to memorize and perform multiple strings made up of 6-7 abilities, some players will simply fail.

I do not know how far raiding can be pushed, but as it seems to me, the limit is where even the best players can no longer correctly react to situations because they fail to adapt. They won't fail when a boss performs 10 different abilities seperately, or 20 or 100, there will be people who can remember all 100 actions required to counter all 100 abilities. The number of able people gets less when combinations are made, and certain actions need to be performed in the correct order, but I think the real limit is when memorizing is no longer enough, when players are required to adapt and improvise constantly. If a boss has such a complexity that multiple abilities are pulled from a fairly large pool of possible abilities, thus requiring from the player to actually understand what's going on, then the boss becomes unbeatable quickly.

There are a set number of things you can actually keep track of at once, and beyond that point it will never be possible for you to process more simultaneously in your lifetime. Unless you're autistic, you simply cannot manage eight or nine tasks simultaneously, instead we have to use clever human tricks like memory and our ability to separate encounters into their discrete parts.

For example, when you are at Thane, you are almost never thinking about happening at Blameaux, until of course you transition to her and push Thane to the recesses of your memory.

If you are proposing that encounters be designed where players have to manage six or seven tasks actively at one time, then I think you would find that such an encounter is not nearly as fun as you think it would be. Additionally, if the discrete elements cannot be placed into your memory in such a way that you can do them without thinking about them, then the encounter itself or specific stages may only be completable by bots. But then what fun is it if you can force yourself to be an automaton with regards to such game mechanics? You've never actually changed how many encounter elements you are actively engaged with, you've merely increased your experience such that you can essentially ignore parts of the encounter.

Multiple inputs can be handled by an effective UI. Good boss mods, good layout, and intuitive outputs allow people to handle just about any situation, especially once they've had a little experience.

The limiting factor of an encounter is the global cooldown and spell cast time. There are a a finite number of actions that anyone can take in a given amount of time (other than moving from spot to spot).

Which would be great if every player was a healer/some other combo. As it is, it would just get some players more and more upset that the healers let them die (as if the healers were watching porn while your hp slowly tapered off to zero). Although I suppose it would make for some interesting dynamics within the guild.

"Why does Joe die every fight and never get to loot the bosses?"

"He pissed the healers off a few months ago and they still haven't forgiven him."

"Oh. Hey, I have 100g - any of you priests want some of it?"

Everquest has had events similar to this since the expansion before WoW came out, where players had to react on a personal level to defeat the encounters (An example being, there was a raid trial where 6 archers are lined up around a wall and everyone got one of three possible messages every X seconds, they would have to duck jump or move to avoid being shot by an arrow).
Another example from that same expansion is the final boss of it, taken from http://www.loralciriclight.com/001277.html:

There's also an endurance match dealie, albeit for one group though, where the reward is a progressively better statted item, as in the item itself just keeps getting more stats heaped on, I believe it had like 100 rounds but you could resume from where you left off.

GoD was a horrible broken piece of crap. Please don't suggest EQ as a good source of boss mechanics.

Technically those bosses were in game when wow came out, but they were completely impossible to get to because of broken zones before them. Remeber Uqua? Remeber "Need more brawn?" yeah. Good times.