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?

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!"

Well you could always make the encounter rewarding.
Making it that the longer you keep x% of the raid alive you get a better reward. more items, higher Ilvl... the options are legio.

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.

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?

One of the problems with a statement like that is that the people posting on these forums are fairly consistently those who are, for want of a better term, less likely to f**k up.

Whilst to you, and many others here, 4H / Gothik type encounters, which require a high level of awareness and coordination, dynamic target selection etc.. Is a relatively easy task. 4 Horsemen for me is move every 3 marks, can I count in multiples of 3 ? Yes, all good then. Yet people still have issues with this very simple task. It's the same reason why there's always going to be top DPSers, top Healers and top Tanks, some people are always going to be more interested, more capable and more willing to do their best, whilst others will struggle.

Blizzard basically from a business sense cannot afford to make encounters that pushes the top 5% of players, because it will isolate that content from them majority of the player base.

I'd contend that anyone can handle the current encounters, throw someone with a moderate knowledge of their class, with suitable gear into a 4 Horsemen raid, and they'll be able to do the fight. The fact that some people will require a pre-read strat, and 1 / 2 attempts to be 100% consistent, whilst others might take 10, 15, 20 attempts to be marginally consistent is where the top tier guilds are able to separate themselves.

From a personal standpoint, Heigan is probably my pick for the 'hardest' encounter individually, and if you take away the trash room, would easilly be the most fun as well. It's the sort of fight where each individual player can either do the job or they can't, no matter how many consumables you use, or how much the group carries you, if you can't dance, then you're going to die.

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).