Too Few Raid Mechanics, New Ones Needed

[des1235]

Responding to the original post, I haven't read the rest of the thread so sorry if it's already been mentioned:

there's more mechanics, for example the shield you must grab on mythic Tortos in ToT, and also those balls that drop from the sky in ICC on the council fight or whatever, that you have to bounce up, or the healing bosses (ICC, ToES), or the wind stuff that pushes you off the platform (a la Lei Shen), or the portal stuff (i.e. drawing things). The problem I think is most of the raid never needs to handle those mechanics, only a few people are assigned to the most important stuff (eg. belts on seige, flying on alysrazor) and thus the fight looks quite boring to the rest of the raid. (as an aside: I think Blizz has done pretty well in terms having a large amount of mechanics, but there's a difference between having a mechanic and having the lore support it -- that is, why do we care if the boss does something? Why is the boss doing it? Getting the story right is I think very important in terms getting the players to buy into why this mechanic is important to care about beyond the kill-me-dead part)

[Herecius]

Responding to the original post, I haven't read the rest of the thread so sorry if it's already been mentioned:

there's more mechanics, for example the shield you must grab on mythic Tortos in ToT, and also those balls that drop from the sky in ICC on the council fight or whatever, that you have to bounce up, or the healing bosses (ICC, ToES), or the wind stuff that pushes you off the platform (a la Lei Shen), or the portal stuff (i.e. drawing things). The problem I think is most of the raid never needs to handle those mechanics, only a few people are assigned to the most important stuff (eg. belts on seige, flying on alysrazor) and thus the fight looks quite boring to the rest of the raid. (as an aside: I think Blizz has done pretty well in terms having a large amount of mechanics, but there's a difference between having a mechanic and having the lore support it -- that is, why do we care if the boss does something? Why is the boss doing it? Getting the story right is I think very important in terms getting the players to buy into why this mechanic is important to care about beyond the kill-me-dead part)

Agreed. Having mechanics that play to the lore of the encounter is pretty good for the fantasy of actually beating the boss, I think, though as somebody who spent the entirety of SoO on the Siegecrafter belt, I must say that it was the rest of the fight down below that looked exciting to me, not the other way around, ha.

It's pretty challenging especially when it's a boss that is literally invented just for the raid; I'd venture to say that Hellfire Citadel has more bosses that are directly relevant and mentioned in something outside the raid than almost any other full tier, but even it has things such, say, Fel Lord Zakuun who exists only in the instance. Everything else though had a place somewhere outside the raid; even the pilot of the Iron Reaver, whatever her name was, appears outside the raid sorta in the Tanaan zone, same with Tyrant Velhanni.

[cparle87]

Hmm ideas . . .

Imo it is not so much that we have too few raid mechanics, it's that many from earlier in the game have been retired.

How about an encounter with adds that require multiple kiters instead of just one (like Razorgore and Nef)
How about range tanking bosses or mind controlling adds
Maybe more terrain interaction (not necessarily platforming, perhaps destructible terrain?)
How about having the raid or a split group go through an obstacle/mob trap-filled course (think Thorim side corridor but make it like Troves of the Thunder King)
I also like vehicles though personally I think that if a vehicle is added in a raid, there needs to be a daily or something outside the raid where players can familiarize themselves with the vehicle (only thing about Malygos drakes that was done right)
How about LoS being a thing again?

We had warlock tanks in Gruul's Lair. We had MC'ing mobs in Naxxramas. We had destructible terrain on the spider in Firelands.

[Deleted]

Didn't read it all tbh but here are a few ideas:

* Boss ability or mechanic that inverts directions - you opt to turn right but character turns left instead. You press to run forward but you run backpedal instead. Might be hard to implement if you steer and run with your mouse but could work? To add extra difficulty, there should be void/fire/whatever zones that damage you if you run into them, or maybe edges you can fall off.

* Boss ability that require you to sit down to avoid damage, imagine a horizontal slash you can only avoid by sitting down. Similar to "Only The Penitent".

* This would probably only work for a mythic encounter: A debuff that reduces you to a certain % of your health, and if you were healed above, say, 75% you would insta-die or take almost lethal damage. Could be too difficult, like players have to track HoTs to not exceed the threshold. This would be active for the majority of the fight or the entire fight - maybe only on tanks, on random people or just simply everyone.

* Similar has been done but you have to MC the boss and there are adds with various abilities. You'd have to steer the boss into various offensive abilities from adds, or environmental hazards, in order to kill it but at the same time you also have to kill the adds as more and more spawn. More than one person has to MC too, as a debuff would be put on the MCing person and it breaks after maybe 30 seconds. If the boss is loose for more than a set amount of time, it would do a raid wide insta kill mechanic plus it should do massive melee dmg so you can't cheese it by tanking it and interrupting the ability by MCing for a second or two. A bit like how hard Razuvious hit in Naxx 40.

[Deleted]

Didn't read it all tbh but here are a few ideas:

* Boss ability or mechanic that inverts directions - you opt to turn right but character turns left instead. You press to run forward but you run backpedal instead. Might be hard to implement if you steer and run with your mouse but could work? To add extra difficulty, there should be void/fire/whatever zones that damage you if you run into them, or maybe edges you can fall off.

Everyone would just re-map their keybindings and/or invert their mouse for that boss; then it would just become extremely annoying to need to to have to change your keybindings just for a single boss; with mouse inversion probably only being an option for some players depending on their mouse drivers. (So basically a mechanic which depends on players having particular hardware or software installed)

* This would probably only work for a mythic encounter: A debuff that reduces you to a certain % of your health, and if you were healed above, say, 75% you would insta-die or take almost lethal damage. Could be too difficult, like players have to track HoTs to not exceed the threshold. This would be active for the majority of the fight or the entire fight - maybe only on tanks, on random people or just simply everyone.

Healers are very heavily RNG based, so unless healing gets a major re-work, this would do several things:

1. AoE Healers would need to refrain from using the majority of their spells and stick to single-target healing. Single-target healers would probably be the only viable healers in the fight.

2. There would need to be very little unavoidable damage in the fight because the only way to avoid wiping from RNG crit heals would be letting players drop down to around 10-20% HP before healing them.

3. Healers would have to make sure they weren't wearing any RNG trinkets or RNG set bonuses

4. Even assuming all of the above, healing addons like VuhDo or Healbot can be set up to highlight players under a certain HP threshold, so you could actually get those addons to do the hard bit in figuring out who you can heal anyway.