Create/critique unique and interesting boss mechanics

[mediic]

I had an idea to think of a mechanic intended for mythic difficulty only that would require good voice communication on the fly, something that boss mods or raid markers couldn't handle.
It may be against Blizzards design philosophy to create abilities that can't be detected by boss mods (not show up in combat log), but I think it would be a breath of fresh air to have something that required some real coordination without a boss mod holding your hand.

So here's my idea, with placeholder names and some notes in italics:

Doom Laser: 5 second charge up time, 12 second channel.
Targets someone at random and deals extreme damage to them, and anyone caught in the beam every 0.50 seconds for 12 seconds.
Mitigated by Forcefield ability. Taking a single un-shielded tick will 1 shot you, even through CDs/immunities.
The 5 second cast time is where your raid has to communicate how to deal with it


Forcefield: 5 second channel
As Doom Laser begins it's charge up cast, three random raid members gain the extra action button ability forcefield (good timing eh? someone can think of a more plausible gimmick I'm sure)
Forcefield will reduce Doom Laser damage on the target by 99% while active.
You have to chain the 3 forcefields (with room for 3 seconds overlap) in order to cover the 12 seconds of Doom Laser.
During the 5 second charge up cast for Doom Laser you have to identify the target, and have the 3 random forcefielders work out who is shielding 1st, 2nd, and 3rd.


notes: For the purpose of this ability, the raid members who receive the Forcefield ability would have to be undetectable to boss mods - I'm sure that's possible to hide something from the combat log. Not necessary, but to make it extra spicy, the target of the Doom Laser could also be made unknown to boss mods, with the target having to quickly announce that it's on them so people can move away and the forcefielders can target you.

To prevent a possible tactic of having 3 raid markers that the forcefielders quickly move to which designate who is going to forcefield in what order, you could have another boss mechanic which encourages spreading out in the room - so there wouldn't be time to reach the markers.
I expect there would be two ways of handling the voice comms; the forcefielders quickly announce themselves and the raid leader assigns 1,2,3 or the forcefielders work it out among themselves and deal with possible conflicts if two or more people call the same number.

That second way reminds me of how our raid dealt with assigning interrupts for empowered MCs on heroic Garrosh. Two people would say "I got first interrupt on X", one of them would quickly adjust and say "I'll get second" and you hope that's where the confusion ends. Might be better ways to deal with it, but I think it makes for an interesting mechanic to try to reproduce that.

Requiring DPS or tanks have to quickly target an ally and save them with an extra action button is a nice change of pace for them also.

edit: Thinking about it some more, you only have to assign the first shield in the 5 second charge up time, you have 10 seconds - until the first forcefield is expiring to assign the second forcefield and the third one is obviously whoever is left. This might be a bit too lenient, numbers could be adjusted to make it more challenging.

Thoughts? What do you think of the ability? What do you think of the idea of a voice comm required ability? Do you have a better way to do it, or something else entirely?
Let's hear it.

[mediic]

Weakauras. Suddenly the mechanic became redundant.

The whole point is that it doesn't appear in the combat log, so boss mods/weakauras can't detect it and make the mechanic trivial.

[l33t]

That's plain bad design. You know, even on mythic there are people who are playing without mic for their reasons.

Also, there is absolutely nothing even remotely "interesting" in your wonderful abilities, beyond the fact they are hidden from bossmods. H&F stamps running is way more difficult and engaging gameplay-wise than what you propose here.

[mediic]

That's plain bad design. You know, even on mythic there are people who are playing without mic for their reasons.

Also, there is absolutely nothing even remotely "interesting" in your wonderful abilities, beyond the fact they are hidden from bossmods. H&F stamps running is way more difficult and engaging gameplay-wise than what you propose here.

H&F stamps is certainly a great mechanic.
'Not remotely interesting' seems a bit harsh. Even disregarding the 'no bossmods' thing, I think the idea of random raid members having to chain channel a shield on an ally without much overlap is at least moderately interesting... could be cool visually also, like the Sinestra battling laser beams or something.

Anyway that wasn't the point, the point was a mechanic which requires communication outside of bossmods.

Thinking about it more, a better way to handle my example ability would be for everyone to have a macro that says /raid I have Forcefield, that they press when they get the ability and then they could use them in the order that they appear in chat. So no mic required! which defeats my purpose

I guess it's harder than you'd think to make up an ability that requires voice comms to handle. You might be right that it's bad design to require voice comms since mics break, mumble crashes, or people can't talk for whatever reason. Still, ideally the highest difficulty raiding should require a level of coordination where you need voice comms imo.

[theburned]

H&F stamps is certainly a great mechanic.
'Not remotely interesting' seems a bit harsh. Even disregarding the 'no bossmods' thing, I think the idea of random raid members having to chain channel a shield on an ally without much overlap is at least moderately interesting... could be cool visually also, like the Sinestra battling laser beams or something.

Anyway that wasn't the point, the point was a mechanic which requires communication outside of bossmods.

Thinking about it more, a better way to handle my example ability would be for everyone to have a macro that says /raid I have Forcefield, that they press when they get the ability and then they could use them in the order that they appear in chat. So no mic required! which defeats my purpose

I guess it's harder than you'd think to make up an ability that requires voice comms to handle. You might be right that it's bad design to require voice comms since mics break, mumble crashes, or people can't talk for whatever reason. Still, ideally the highest difficulty raiding should require a level of coordination where you need voice comms imo.

First of all if they are planning on a non-boss mod thing, it will be because the ability is utterly destroyed by boss mods, this one is only trivialized by it, thus it shouldn't be necessary or helpful to have it. Not sure if they can actually do a no-boss mod thing, but I doubt they would want it for this kind of ability.

as for the macro you mention, it's /s because it shows up on screen, rather than in chat only, and it's already handled by boss mods...

Your entire idea to make a mechanic is based upon the goal of making it require voice comm, which is a very flawed idea, and thus you have added loads of pseudo hard mechanics which aren't really hard, but you think you made them harder by removing add-ons.
A good coordination mechanic isn't one that requires voice comms, but one that makes the ability easier to handle, yet doesn't entierly break it.

Quite a good example would be eye of anzu, which doesn't really rely on voice comm, but using voice comm allows your swapping of the eye to be more efficient.

How do you suggest you add a mechanic which is close enough for 3 people to reach with voice comm, but which doesn't allow you to put out 3 markers, especially due to the reason for it being too far away. It's not like voice comm gives everyone 100% increased MS, and a stampede would be used in case it is needed.

[Deleted]

Not sure what mythic level you raid on, but the mythic bosses i've killed have required communication, even with bossmods/wa.

[mediic]

First of all if they are planning on a non-boss mod thing, it will be because the ability is utterly destroyed by boss mods, this one is only trivialized by it, thus it shouldn't be necessary or helpful to have it. Not sure if they can actually do a no-boss mod thing, but I doubt they would want it for this kind of ability.

I agree that if they were to hide an ability from boss mods they would be more likely do it to keep an otherwise interesting boss mechanic from being completely trivialized by boss mods, which they've shown they are not inclined to do so far (m kromog hand assignments comes to mind as an interesting mechanic trivialised by bossmods)

as for the macro you mention, it's /s because it shows up on screen, rather than in chat only, and it's already handled by boss mods...

The point of the /raid macro was to have a list in raid chat of who has the ability, based on who pressed the macro first, therefore bypassing the need for voice comms and possible confusion to assign an order to chain forcefield. They are spread in this scenario so /say wouldn't work too well.

Your entire idea to make a mechanic is based upon the goal of making it require voice comm, which is a very flawed idea, and thus you have added loads of pseudo hard mechanics which aren't really hard, but you think you made them harder by removing add-ons.
A good coordination mechanic isn't one that requires voice comms, but one that makes the ability easier to handle, yet doesn't entierly break it.

I don't agree that making an ability require voice comms is a flawed in principle, but fair enough, I can see why people would feel that way.
As for loading my example with 'pseudo hard mechanics' that wasn't the intention at all. I was just trying to think of a simple reason to require voice comms for an ability - assign an order on the fly or someone dies.

How do you suggest you add a mechanic which is close enough for 3 people to reach with voice comm, but which doesn't allow you to put out 3 markers, especially due to the reason for it being too far away. It's not like voice comm gives everyone 100% increased MS, and a stampede would be used in case it is needed.

The forcefield would be a ranged ability, the point about spreading out and raid markers was just another clumsy attempt to force voice comms.

Anyway, my example clearly fails to achieve the goal I was after so I'm not sure why I'm defending it...

Not sure what mythic level you raid on, but the mythic bosses i've killed have required communication, even with bossmods/wa.

Yeah, you're right, I understated the level of coordination needed for mythic raiding even with the bossmods/wa handholding. I think it's pretty clear what I was getting at though.
An ability that can't be strategized or boss-modded away, something that would require quick verbal communication to overcome. I'd like to see more of that, apparently I'm in the minority.

[theburned]

Well it was a try, you could try to find something to add to killrog fight though, to keep it from being flamebender 2.0

[Cracked]

I have a fun mechanic for gear check boss:

Ultimate Reversal

All your damage is converted to healing that is evenly distributed among your raid.
All your healing and overhealing is converted to boss damage.
Raid takes X damage per second.
Boss needs to lose Y% of health to end this ability.

It's essentially continue doing whatever you are doing, but you could see tuning it so that if your raid doesn't do X dps, you are gonna die to AoE damage and if healers don't spam their heals, the raid is gonna run out of dps cooldowns and die.
Obviously the tuning couldn't be THAT steep, because then class stacking would be a thing.

[Deleted]

I don't see why you would want to break bossmods and require voicecoms.

Hard mechanics are hard even with both of those things - if you want mechanics that make it impossible to track with a bossmod, and need a voicecom, you're opening up a can of RNG bullshit. And that is the absolute worst kind of design.

First its the idea of in a raidgroup, you always have some people who don't talk much, or don't have a mic. If they suddenly need to but can't - rng bollocks.

Secondly any ability that is untraceable by any mod, and doesnt appear in the combat log, by definition is going to have to be some kind of crazy RNG. And have an incredibly fast reaction time - because once its hit, bossmods will catch it. If you can predict who its going to land on, its trackable. If it always goes on a tank, or a mellee, or whatever, its trackable. If its always on a range, you can plan movement to control where it is. None of these things require voicecoms - it makes them easier, but isnt required. Is the ability going to be inherently random when its cast? Cause if so - more rng bullshit. Oh its easy to deal with, unless it overlaps with another ability at which point you have to use a raid CD. But because you can't track it - you don't know when. And you might have several different ones on different tries. Now if its a fast hitting ability, healers panic maybe you use 3 raid cd's instead of 1. Thats fine. IF that was the only time that overlap happened in the next 3 minutes - which you don't know, cause RNG bullshit. Any boss with heavy RNG is inherently awful to progress on, and this kind of stuff would be downright awful.

The more interesting way of doing it, which several bosses have atm is where there are known incredibly hard parts of the fight that you need to get through with ability overlap, with correct planning and whatnot, as well as making you deal with the same ability in different ways by adding buffs to it or changing the environment, making dealing with it more difficult(Blackhand Impale is an example of that). And even if you know when those parts are coming up - just because you have bossmods and whatnot doesn't mean "oh i know this is happening iz ez". Figuring out exactly how to deal with something with as little cds as possible (because you might need more later on) and may take a huge amount of attempts - with extra RNG added in, thats the worst kind of progression. The kind where no one did anything wrong, you just got bad luck. And if you have every single mechanic down - including the rng one -unless it overlaps with stupid stuff or comes before cd's are ready or whatever, then thats gonna happen and might add anywere from 1 to 40 extra wipes on a boss, which kills motivation.

And yeah it would have to be that RNG. If its after X time it can be tracked, if its at X resources it can be tracked, if its after X ability it can be tracked - if anything else in the fight gives any indication of when it happens, it can be tracked.

I do understand where you're coming from, but it absolutely would not be fun or engaging gameplay in any way. Maybe on lower difficulties - and only if its not a potential wipe ability - but even then it could be annoying as fuck, and certainly not on mythic.

[Cracked]

Sinestra orbs couldn't be tracked, sure they had an estimated cooldown, but it wasn't accurate and no bossmod could tell you who got fixated by orbs. And it was fine, it was a fun mechanic.

[mediic]

@chaw I don't think you're correct that a undetectable ability would necessarily have to be an RNG clusterfuck like you describe. I wouldn't call the ability I came up with for the OP an 'RNG' ability. Sure it's cast on random targets, but every spec is equally capable of handling the mechanic, the only way you would get fucked over by RNG is a situation like "oh god, charlie the guild retard got forcefield again and didn't notice, god damnit charlie" - which is fine, imo - charlie needs to l2p!

An ability that requires voice comm is going to have an element of randomness to it by definition I think, otherwise you could plan ahead and have a strategy for how to deal with it. I don't think that's a bad thing. There's a difference between randomness which keeps the encounter unpredictable and dynamic, and RNG that fucks over the raid if the dice don't land how you want them to.

[theburned]

@chaw I don't think you're correct that a undetectable ability would necessarily have to be an RNG clusterfuck like you describe. I wouldn't call the ability I came up with for the OP an 'RNG' ability. Sure it's cast on random targets, but every spec is equally capable of handling the mechanic, the only way you would get fucked over by RNG is a situation like "oh god, charlie the guild retard got forcefield again and didn't notice, god damnit charlie" - which is fine, imo - charlie needs to l2p!

Oh noes 3 people being 80 yds away from each other or more got the ability we are fucked... compared to oh shit people being within 10 yds of each other got the ability, good freebe

[mediic]

Oh noes 3 people being 80 yds away from each other or more got the ability we are fucked... compared to oh shit people being within 10 yds of each other got the ability, good freebe

6.5.2 patch notes:
Forcefield now has 12 million yard range.

happy? use your imagination, jeez

[Cheze]

this isn't really that different from lots of mechanics that they've used at one time or another; the only really 'interesting' thing you've done is said that addons won't be able to 'detect' it.

which, to be honest, isn't really very interesting. All it really does is force mic discipline on the raid, which is fair enough I guess but not really terribly compelling from a gameplay standpoint.

[halzhirou]

You know, even on mythic there are people who are playing without mic for their reasons.