How would you make a hard boss hard?

[Zalmanusa]

Reliquary of souls, Opera, Moroes and Illidan. Those kind of fights were fun because they sometimes fucked up your perception of what a raid boss does.
Hard bosses are way more fun if they're interesting and original!

[PBitt]

Mimiron 25 man hardmode I think is a well-designed encounter. I actually think its the most 'balanced' boss in terms of all-around difficulty for each role. Meaning, the tanks, melee dps, ranged dps, and healers all have to be on their feet/have special tasks as the phases progress, and they are all equally important to be done correctly. Alot of the encounters these days minus some of the hardmodes just don't feel like teamwork but rather people just doing their own thing and not being aware. I think that is what makes a good fight and the ones that require teamwork are the ones I enjoy most.

[Feanorgandalf]

The best way to make a hard boss fight is to make it one where if any single person screws up or dies it's a guaranteed wipe.

Take a look at some of the 40-man raids back in original wow. C'thun is a prime example. That fight was in the game forever with some of the highest guilds in the world working on him and it still took ages to get it. At 60 it required near perfect co-ordination, positioning, and skill. Before all the major nerfs he had that was a true test but still overtuned. Also look at bosses like Razorgore, Vaelstrasz (before the time limit was removed), nefarian (the shear amount of effort put into it to kill at 60 in appropriate gear level). All of these bosses were well designed even though quite annoying. I still have nightmares of Chromaggus attempts :P

The big problem is I don't think that the bosses have been dumbed down as is suggested many times in WOTLK but the development of threat meters, boss mods/timers, and things like that a lot of the randomness has been removed from raid encounters. There has become too much player control in the raid environment lately and I gotta give some credit to hard modes like Firefighter, yogg +0, Heroic anub 25, heroic LK. This is a nuice way for blizzard to try to bring in the sense of chaos back into the raid.

[Hrothgrar]

Awesome boss fight, I was amused. One problem though, bring the player, not the class. No priests? no life grip?

[Hrothgrar]

Edited for reading comprehension fail =(

[CaptainArlong]

Platforms. The raid needs to jump from platform to platform while the boss sends fireballs at random areas. Basically it would be a 3D version of Donkey Kong.

Oh, and if you fall off a platform, you're dead.

I'm sick of video game newbies thinking WoW is a challenging game. Give me the reigns and I'll teach them just what a video game is. I still laugh at the people that think Mimiron was a hard fight.

[Flaks]

Not having done anything hardmode ever, I have very little say in this.

Nonetheless, it is my belief that the way yogg-saron and hakkar (yes, ZG hakkar) were tuned so that leaving up certain other aspects gave the bosses new and different abilities set a stage for a level of difficulty unprecedented in other games.

Lich King heroic seems to have taken away from this design philosophy by literally just tuning up aspects of the encounter already existing in normal mode. Leaving the encounter to simply be a very hectic gear check instead of providing new and unexplored challenges.

If they can do what they did with hakkar but provide greater rewards like they did with yogg-saron (which they technically did with yogg+0) I believe they'd be making a lot of serious players VERY happy.

[NightHaawk]

Make a boss that has 3 seperate bosses in the encounter.

Based on a cliff or something you can fall off of. Bosses have a shared health pool.

Each time each of the bosses hits a player, they get a stacking debuff. Debuff goes above 10, tank dies. The bosses can't be tanked near eachother. Tanks have to taunt every 8-9 stacks, without fail, or encounter ends in a wipe. Whenever the bosses are within 20 yards of eachother, they start doing a Shazzrah type arcane explosion for massive amounts of damage.

Every time a tank gets more than 5 stacks, someone gets Mind Controlled and starts running towards the edge of the map. They have to be controlled and pacified by something in the fight, either a character doing a Kil'jaeden Dragon sort of effect, a weapon you have to dislodge or disarm from one of the bosses, pick up and equip, or something silly like ana poison/tranqshot. Otherwise, they run off the edge and die.

Every time the bosses are taunted, they aggro wipe and an add spawns that needs to be killed that has no aggro table. It has to to be controlled and killed. The longer they're left up, a stacking buff is applied to the boss that increases attack speed/damage. The add has a raidwide damage pulse, so leaving more than 3 up at a time will probably result in horrible death.

If a person dies in the fight, someone with a flaming torch has to incinerate their body within 10 seconds, or the boss will raise them as a permanently mindcontrolled unit.

At 50%, they combine, turning into a cross between void reaver and the tiger boss in ZA. Every 30 seconds, he slams the current tank flying off the edge of the abyss and a priest has to life grip to save him, or he dies. Complete aggro wipe on that tank. Keeps all abilities from the previous phase except spawns 3 adds instead of 1. Continues to stack up buffs until he acquires a new target, and continues to kill tanks outright at 10 stacks. Might also do a soul reaper style affect on one member of the raid every once in a while to force cooldowns out of people.

At 25%, boss soft enrages, losing all aggro tables entirely and spawning portals/void zones/something horrible underneath everyone. You have to kill him by using the flaming torches you use to incinerate your raid members. Each torch takes off a certain amount of HP, so you eventually have to immolate him to death while doing the heigan dance.

And that's normal mode.

So fucking full of win

[Conserve]

Again i dont want to hear anymore crying from "shitbads" in guilds who havent done anything. If you think this crap is so easy link your armory so we can make fun of u. Nothing is wrong with hardmodes now. Sure the creation of new hardmodes is a great idea but thats not the intention to this thread really. Its to down play all the encounters out there now.

http://www.wowarmory.com/character-s...on&cn=Conserve

Here.

Also, as a refrence i made an account simply to post a response to you.

For the sake of the thread however, hard bosses cannot be difficult without either mass RNG, or mass gear requirements. Look at all current content, and look at all of the RNG in those encounters. Sindragosa is very good,but with the RNG of unchained as well as the LOS issues with the blocks for frost bombs of death, the encounter is very bleh. Tank swapping makes it interesting, but sadly the fight doenst really have any elements of fun until ~35%.

Lichking is a giant slap in the face, as premonition put a table up with all the reasons they wiped, you can see most of those wipes happened because of RNG, others were yes player error. In order for an encounter to be fun it needs to have a level of difficulty with it, albit with less RNG, which makes the fight a giant gear fest. Mim is a very good example of a well made encounter with hardmodes in mind. However i would put sartharion 3d right beside him. The requirements for both bosses are not extreme in the way of gear, nor are they a giant RNG fest. Yes mistakes can wipe the raid, but its not an insta gib if one person messes up. Obviously hardmodes are meant to be hard, but when smashing your face against it for 3 weeks and over 150 attempts between alts and main raid groups are the only way to learn the encounter, i think your doing it wrong.

Best encounter in my mind is:
Boss has aprox 70 mill
20 mill mana

Phase one:

Boss aggros with an aura dealing 1dmg doubling every 10 seconds, every point of damage taken reduces boss mana by 1.

Phase two:

Phase two begins when the boss reaches 10 mill mana
boss will drop aggro table and begin to channel a spell called "Withering Decay" which immobilizes all players and begins to drop the floor around them (or voids)(players need to be within 10 yards of eachother to keep enough floor to walk across) However if players are closer then 5 yards they will take 50k a second and die. (no stacking fellas)

Phase three:

Once the spell has been finished the boss will now randomly teleport to each player (players are still immobilized) and release them from the spell, upon release they are mind controlled for 5 seconds and must be CCed (Spreading out your CC is key to winning this phase) after the MC has ended that player is free to move about to dps the boss, and cc other players

Phase four:

After all players are freed from immobilize and MC the boss will now be tanked like first phase but with a reduced area due to void floor. Players must move every 5 seconds to prevent void from spreading (void moves like a slower version of mim's fire but avoids players) however the void cannot ever be pushed back

Phase five:

When boss reaches ~50% she begins casting "Blossoming forest" which after the 5 second cast will remove the void, and replace it with floor, and vise versa. (this leaves the raid with the option to stack less in phase four to leave more space for phase five, it also happens with a 2 second grace period so you can move from regular floor before it becomes a void)

Phase six:

After the floor has been restored and the older area has been removed (the void still creeps like in phase four) the fight resumes with a new aggro table. Periodicly the boss will pull the raid into herself and begin to cast an arcane explosion, the raid must run out but spread out to avoid void creep (8 second cast) as well as players within 5 yards of eachother will become MCed until killed.

Phase 7:

~10% the boss will remove the non-creep aspect of the void and will begin to swallow up the rest of the room. Players will deal double damage but will begin to take 1/25th of the damage they deal and become unhealable for 5 seconds after last dealing damage. (managment of dps to maximize dps-hp ratio)

Boss dies.

[Oppressionix805]

easy, I would wonder when they implemented the Chuck Norris world boss into the game.

[Bloodrose]

One word: Chuck Noris's lair ;D

Umm... that's three words, genius.

[pfettel77]

Hardmode Putricide, he rezes Rotface and Festergut then Sindragosa flies in and starts throwing ice at people.

And you need to have Aspect of the Pack on or else Marrowgar comes whirl winding in, yelling his favorite line.

[Solado]

I always found a boss that does 2 skills at once a good "hard mode" where you had to focus on 2 things at once.

[Shawaam]

Just disable DBM. Try even Deathwhisper normal without it, she will be quite challenging to be honest. No one would exactly know when the adds would spawn, no notifications if you stand in D&D or get the curse etc. :P

[Fenixdown]

Make a boss that has 3 seperate bosses in the encounter.

Based on a cliff or something you can fall off of. Bosses have a shared health pool.

Each time each of the bosses hits a player, they get a stacking debuff. Debuff goes above 10, tank dies. The bosses can't be tanked near eachother. Tanks have to taunt every 8-9 stacks, without fail, or encounter ends in a wipe. Whenever the bosses are within 20 yards of eachother, they start doing a Shazzrah type arcane explosion for massive amounts of damage.

Every time a tank gets more than 5 stacks, someone gets Mind Controlled and starts running towards the edge of the map. They have to be controlled and pacified by something in the fight, either a character doing a Kil'jaeden Dragon sort of effect, a weapon you have to dislodge or disarm from one of the bosses, pick up and equip, or something silly like ana poison/tranqshot. Otherwise, they run off the edge and die.

Every time the bosses are taunted, they aggro wipe and an add spawns that needs to be killed that has no aggro table. It has to to be controlled and killed. The longer they're left up, a stacking buff is applied to the boss that increases attack speed/damage. The add has a raidwide damage pulse, so leaving more than 3 up at a time will probably result in horrible death.

If a person dies in the fight, someone with a flaming torch has to incinerate their body within 10 seconds, or the boss will raise them as a permanently mindcontrolled unit.

At 50%, they combine, turning into a cross between void reaver and the tiger boss in ZA. Every 30 seconds, he slams the current tank flying off the edge of the abyss and a priest has to life grip to save him, or he dies. Complete aggro wipe on that tank. Keeps all abilities from the previous phase except spawns 3 adds instead of 1. Continues to stack up buffs until he acquires a new target, and continues to kill tanks outright at 10 stacks. Might also do a soul reaper style affect on one member of the raid every once in a while to force cooldowns out of people.

At 25%, boss soft enrages, losing all aggro tables entirely and spawning portals/void zones/something horrible underneath everyone. You have to kill him by using the flaming torches you use to incinerate your raid members. Each torch takes off a certain amount of HP, so you eventually have to immolate him to death while doing the heigan dance.

And that's normal mode.

Crazy thought, dude...but maybe try to come up with a boss that WON'T get nerfed in less than a week?

Oh, and I love how you guarantee that you will have at least one priest in 10-man and absolutely needing a life grip for this encounter. "Bring the player, not the class" ring any bells? Or, for that matter, having three tnaks in 10-man. Oh, that's right, let me guess. "10-man is for casual scrubs", amirite?

How's about we just combine every boss ability and all their total health pools into one encounter that has a 6 minute enrage timer! That sounds more feasable.

I award you no points, and may God have mercy upon your soul. Next time, consider that there would need to be two group versions of an encounter. There's not a snowball's chance in hell this could be converted down without removing half the abilities in this fight.

[Deleted]

Abilities:

1. Charge á la Epoch (CoS 3rd boss)
2. Phase-shift (MainTank disappears to another face "Hey! That was our MainTank!!")
3. Mortal wound á la stinky, precious, gluth etc.
4. Cleaving
5. Flamewall
6. A more persistant touch of insignificance
7. Healing-possible-50%-of-the-time-gas
8. firestorm (don't move, or burn)
9. a defile-like move on current target (not switching for a random target himself)
10. Portal to other phase (to be able to save that poor MT that got smashed into the other phase)11. a buff weakening on movement (on the boss)
12 Tanking link (Deals half damage, but multiplied by the distance between MT and OT in yards) OT = persson 2nd in threat, no matter if it's a tank or a dps.

These in the most random order and combination. Stacks on Mortal wound stacking every 1.5-2 sec. Most of these spells are 1.5 sec casts and have a 15 sec duration.

What happens in the other phase: in the other face the same bossfight is going, but the MT will not see his raidmates. This phase is untill the Mt has 11% hp left, which he has to lose asap (taunting the boss, which means the boss is attacking 2 tanks at once)

[Daimyon]

Make a boss that disables addons.

But seriously, tuning bosses has nothing to do with a genuinely hard boss. Tainted Core hot potato anyone?

[Gnorllock]

Hodir/Nexus stacking frost damage debuff would be in effect for the raid damage.

Every minute the target with the highest threat would get d/ced and the boss does a 8 second cast to place a void zone under them. Every 58 seconds agro would drop. There would be an enrage in place to make maxing damage absolutely critical while maintaining complete control of threat.

At the start and every 20 seconds after, healers are randomly given a select few players that they are able to heal. The person highest on threat will always be healable but not every player will be able to receive heals. Heroism will be required to meet enrage but also cause the boss to attack 30% faster for an added healer mechanic.

The boss will attack and move around more like a rogue trying to attack you in pvp rather than a lvl 1 wolf.

At this point everything I can think of has been done and can be beaten through trial and error. I tried to think of something hard yet something everyone is in control of, minus who is unable to be healed, but then they become in control of their own health, something dps normally doesn't do.

[Lao_tzu]

more nice ideas, sounds like Conserve has been thinking about this a while.

yeah the random idea seems to be one of hte best ways, needs to be managed well to tune it.

An easy one but one that I find a very cleaver design would be Ick and Crick in a 25 man mode with adds and a few more abilities
it always always always kill's nabs in heroics. especially when he does a fast swap from pursuit to nova. nice fight.

[Cariborne]

I'm sick of video game newbies thinking WoW is a challenging game. Give me the reigns and I'll teach them just what a video game is. I still laugh at the people that think Mimiron was a hard fight.

Mimiron wasn't hard, it was his Hard Mode that was hard.