Diversity within Constraints: WoW's raiding mechanics and limitations

[Deleted]

[...]all three elements are present in the game as is[...]

I do not think so. There are ... ways to simulate this "feeling" of countering. The best example is for a Meele DD to walk away from some kind of danger in a way where he is constantly able to hit something "else" or the boss. Though this is most often not wanted by anyone because it most often means to endanger other players, and the player with the first "good intent of being more effective" is simply labled "egoistic".
Countering in WoW most often means to cut short on something else. For example the Infest ability of LK, (I like this ability as an ability to center the discussion around, as it was already done). And the way to counterit is by letting a priest skill disciplin and shield the whole raid non stop. This is no fun to counter or prepare a countering. This is plain boring. Actually this is the best form of avoiding the ability instead of healing around it.
This is also a thing that bugs me, the healing around it part of WoW. I do not want that healers are there to stand around and wait, but first some way of clarifying why there are healers anyway in other games. Healers in most other games are there to heal a character when he actually takes damage. This might be a bit ... plain ... at first, but with this statement comes another thing: The player is most often forced to take no damage. The healer is for the rest of the fight a supportive character with skills that boost the strength of others or engages in the fight itself by dealing weak damage.

(Jump over the next 2 paragraphs if you suffer under the "Too Long Did Not Read" syndrom):

In Final Fantasy for example, the player has most often a healer character in the team that heals when the party is low on health. In the meantime, when the battle started, the healer is most often used to buff the group with spells like "haste", "ener", "courage" and so on.
In God of War, the player heales himself by killing the enemy in a certain way, giving him green orbs instead of red orbs, but thus he gets less red orbs to level up.
In Kingdom Hearts, the player needs to either use precious potions which are limited within a single fight (aka. the Belt System of Diablo2), or use a huge bunch of mana to cast a healing spell, limiting his offense (which regenerates slowly).

Now look at WoW: A healer does nothing else but healing "by guessing". The healer casts healing spells non stop on a target he either thinks or knows that it will take damage. In the meantime he stands around. The paladin is the only healing class that has an ability (that noone uses) to attack the enemy and then heal more efficiently. Blizzard even further encourages this by making this playstyle neccessary. They let the life bars of all 25 players in the raid sometimes run down very sudden and very quick (BONESTORM and Infest). Now this damage is not "caused" by player failiure but by intent of the game designer. The only way to counter this damage is to constantly look at when it might happen and then watch carefully where the health bars need refilling. I do not say that this kind of gameplay is not challenging, that there are players actually enjoying this, but it always comes to one EPIC failiure in gaming: FRUSTRATION when you make a little mistake. Most notably the Tank death beacause all healers healed something else for ... 2 seconds. Get this sentence in your head. 2 seconds and WHOOSH everything disperses into dust, your whole effort for the boss battle, your whole progress within the boss battle and most commonly it also gives you the hate of the other players, even if they dont say anything, because YOUR(or all healers) mistake killed everyone. Now take a look at the other games and ask: Why did the tank even take damage? Isn't he there to mitigate or negate damage? In most other games the Tank is there to distract the enemy for a limited amount of time to let the healers refill the lifebars of their teammates when something went wrong. In most other games the healer is there to heal a limited amount of health back to the team when they made a mistake - aka "Its fine you are OK! Now get back into battle and try again!". In most other games the damage dealer is there to deal quick damage to end a fight faster than it would last when you would send in 3 tanks and 2 healers.

(end of TLDR)

Blizzard discourages you to think, to act, to enjoy something in a fight. Because there are certain game desing decisions that cause this:
1. Tanks ALWAYS take damage. They turned from "tanks" to "meatshields", from characters who "negate damage" to characters that eat ... "less damage" than others, so that there is enough time for 2.
2. Healers ALWAYS heal. They do nothing else. There are no mistakes done by someone, somthing always takes hits. Instead of someone who "heals up" someone who comes to them on their knees, begging them for more time to fight, they are there to keep the whole "clockwork" of a group "oiled" the whole time. If something overheates, THEY (most often) take the blame and the damage is irreperable.
3. Damage Dealer do what they can ... for up to 20 minutes straight. Well I have nothing against long and epic bossfights, but the efford of button mashing you put into it and the speed at which everything can go to hell is ... nothing fun. (Hammer away on the "2-Button" for 10 minutes ... yay fun!) The Survival aspect most often looks like this: One mistake: You die! ; If there is nothing to do and you just "have to take damage" - like Infest or BONESTORM, the "mistake" of letting you die is at the healer, and you can do nothing about it (most often).

Xenon's patented solution for these 3 points (order for 25 bucks a bottle after the show):
Change the fights to more situational damage sources.(1. and 2.)
The boss may still meele the Tank non stop(1.), but let the tank eat less damage(2.). So much "less" damage that there is time for something else inbetween for the healers(2.). This "something else" can still contain the constant healing aspect, but on other targets, as this is something that players got used to over 6 years, and Blizzard wants to go things "slow". As a balancing reaction to that, let the healers heal less, and increase the costs of healing, so that breaks are nesseccary and are affortable(2.). Nesseccary not in the way of "standing around" but more of "helping otherwise"(1. and 3.). Affortable not in the way of "nothing happens" but more in the way of "less dramatic happens" (2. and 3.).
Decrease the health of bossfights to an amount, that players need to think about when and how to deal damage.(3.)
Increase the action on the battlefield that the decreased amount of health on the boss still does not "tinker" on the battles length. Times where no damage is possible because survival is more important, and when you fail at "surviving" it is YOUR fault, and noone else, and noone else is affected by this. (2. and 3.)

To get back to the whole "clockwork" metaphor: Blizzard needs to design their "multiplayer" part of the game in a way, that the clock they deliver needs no constant maintanence. It needs to work on its own and designing boss encounters that make this possible is one first step.

To reach that full, working clock, in my opinion the 3 Steps of Battle Enjoyment need to be fulfilled.
Blizzard delivers a way to learn the encounter.
Blizzard most often delivers a way to avoid something within the encounter, but still most often implements unavoidable damage sources that damage the flow of the "avoiding" experience (aka. the question of the player comes in mind "what did I do wrong?" - "nothing we just like to get your character hurt")
Blizzard nearly never lets a player counter an ability to "negate it to your own good". Even when you can kite the boss into his own Void Zone, and something would happen, would be an effective way of "countering". Or to bring in another word: to abuse the ability.

[Bralaap]

Blizzard said they will re-introduce "triage". For me this means healers will have to interact more, thus making the game more interesting for them. This will hopefully bring an end to the huge overhealing done, where especially paladins can not afford to stop healing else the boss will 1-shot the tank. So one group of players have to change/adapt their playing styles already. Let's see what Cata brings for tanks and dps.

But I do agree that letting certain roles do other things than they normally do during a fight, can make the fight much more interesting. Razorscale in Ulduar: it would have been more fun to let some players rebuild the harpoon turrets instead of the NPC's. Mimiron: some random people get fire-extinguishers and can use them on the fire patches (you don't have to, but you can).

And the binary system should change: kill the boss or wipe. Maybe let people escape sometimes in clever ways. Or the boss finds something else to do instead of killing raiders all the time ;-)

[Deleted]

Well there will always be a battle about life an death. Though I would realy like to see a bossfight where some ... "other" things get involved. Your ... "escaping" reminds me of the old jump and run games where a huge thing is following you. I can realy see it in front of me:
A Boss battle, first common Tank and Spank, but every time the Tank dies or after every 1 - 2 minutes the boss will go enrage, forcing the whole group to jump down a cliff and run around the dungeon for about 1 minute, always having the boss behind them, until they come to the exact place they fought, the boss being exhausted and the battle continues xD (having a lot of jump and run involved xD)

[vlad43210]

Whoa, Xenon, that's a huge post! I leave this thread for a couple of days (to work) and look what I find

Several points to respond to:

1. I think of countering differently than you do. Dispel / Interrupt = countering for me. Having countering that produces an additional benefit is an interesting idea. So this is why I said all three elements are already present in WoW.

2. Healing. I've only healed very little in WoW, and yes, it's basically a game of whack-a-mole. I agree on that point. I don't entirely agree on your proposed solution re: healers. I would argue that this solution (where healers heal X only if X is low on health and otherwise do "something else") could easily lead to the extinction of healers altogether.

For instance, let's say in Cata things are implemented as you would wish, healers only have to spam heal buttons half as often as they do now. Other times, they do damage, and their damage output is lower than that of pure dps. How would this work? You yourself suggest that one way to enable this approach would be to make a lot of damage completely negateable, to make it "your fault" when you get low on health. Then, the best guilds composed of people who never screw up, will never (or almost never) need healers! World 1st raids will be done with 1-2 healers tops, perhaps none, to maximize dps.

Alternatively, it's possible that instead of doing damage, healers do "something else." What this something else is not clear. Doing exclusively buffs or dispels seems to me too narrow a role for a whole character type, and healers would remain unpopular.

So the only way I see to implement your suggestion would be to heavily redesign a game like WoW into a game that basically only has tanks and DD, and most classes have a little healing capacity that they can use in an emergency. Raids would recruit a couple of people to spec into optimizing this healing capacity, still way below what healers can currently output, but enough to be the go-to guys when something goes wrong. The respec would only minimally impact dps, so people would do it.

Would this redesign lead to a better game? I'm not sure. Maybe 90% of healers really do hate it (and I don't mean just 90% of posters on this forum who have healer mains). I think that a good number of people actually do enjoy whack-a-mole healing, kind of like I enjoy rotation-based gaming even though it's not the most creative thing in the world. The reason is current encounter design. If I literally stood there and hit 1,2,3,4 for 10 minutes straight, it would be really boring. But as it is, I have to move, be aware of environments, switch targets, occasionally use other abilities, etc. These extra elements on top of a dps rotation make raiding fun for me, and I wonder if there is not such an equivalent for healers. Now there may not be, but even in that case I would argue that the goal is for Blizzard to sliightly lower the amount of healing necessary and involve healers more in a fight (through movement, awareness, etc.) vs. making healing an "only if you messed up" event.

3. (This is one of the big points I haven't addressed yet) "Making it so players have to think about when and how to deal damage." This is a cool idea, though again I would argue it's in the game already, perhaps to a lesser degree than you would like. I'm a shaman, and most of the time I hit the boss with my weapons. But from time to time I need to use quite a bit of my abilities, from all my different totems to countering to dispelling to brez. I see that as "thinking about when and how to deal damage." If I just sit there and faceroll my rotation, I will be doing some good... but on Valithria, for instance, I do some dps, I interrupt the frostbolts, I even throw the occasional heal. Even though I'm hitting my rotation most of the time, I'm also aware and thinking of other options most of the time.

Could this be done to a greater extent? Probably. I could stand to use Frost shock more often to slow / freeze mobs. I could stand to use my Earth Elemental from time to time, that would be cool. So in a sense, you're definitely right. But I don't think that this element is altogether missing from WoW as is, just not as strong as it could be.

[Mammoth]

One of the concepts I like, and was kind of used for Thorim in Ulduar, is splitting the raid into two (or three maybe for 25man) teams, who have seperate tasks to achieve with a tank required for each. It makes the fight different, harder to organise and it puts more emphasis on every raid member (you can't have a single healer doing most of the healing work for example).

[Deleted]

One of the concepts I like, and was kind of used for Thorim in Ulduar, is splitting the raid into two (or three maybe for 25man) teams, who have seperate tasks to achieve with a tank required for each. It makes the fight different, harder to organise and it puts more emphasis on every raid member (you can't have a single healer doing most of the healing work for example).

I also do realy like this encounter. Not only that a lot in this fight you have some kind of lore involved, but also the different types of abilities you have do deal with:
The Golem at the end of the passageway that shoots out shockwaves left or right and raises the corresponding hand is a realy well done part of the encounter for example. It does not involve any "countering", in that the minions are also vulnerable to the shockwave, but the learning and avoiding part of this ability is a very sweet gaming experience.
The traps at the end of the gauntlet are very easy to avoid, but for anyone being first time there this element is suprising and involves the environment. Very sweet from a design standpoint.
The arena does not realy involve anything special, but the achievment involved here is very interesting. Mind Controlling and keeping the controlled minion alive and controlled to gain the heroism like speed aura is a way of "countering" a boss's ability. You use his own abilites against him. That is countering.

@vlad
@1. Well, I should have guessed this but to emphasize this again: "Countering" in my ... theories does not equal the action of "Countering: to counter: to use the spell "Counterspell" or abilities with similar effect at the moment an interruptable spell is cast by your enemy."
No this is not what I think "countering" is, thats why I also used the word "abuse". Not in a way that breaks the "Terms of Use" but in a way that it is intended to be.
Your "idea" of countering by interrupting or dispelling is possible. I might referrence to the shield Kael'Thas uses in his EoS encounter. This was alot more interesting, but it didnt involve anything positive for the player when dealing right with it, just the "usual" - the Tank stays alive (which he should always do). The idea of dispelling can be seen again in the LK encounter do get the desises to the great adds. This is realy a way of "countering" in the best way possible to show actually.
1. "The spell kills a player instantaniously and jumps to the next best target, also increases the damage buff of the boss everytime it jumps. Disappears when no target is close."
2. "The spell can be dispelled and jumps to the next best target, increasing the damage buff of the boss, but the target survives. Complete avoiding the spell by running out of the group where no target is and having it dispelled there."
3. "The spell is dispelled next to a hostile target to let it take effect there, efficiently killing it quicker than any raid damage is able to do. (a few million points of damage per "runout")"

@2. I must agree with you that "elite" guilds will use less healers in my case. Thats why I would also reduce the effective healing effects in the game to make more healers "needed" in the game. The idea behind this is that some characters will still take damage, like the tank, or certain abilities deal damage, but surviving these abilities in a certain way will grand the player benefits. Healing up this damage in a certain timeframe (which is greater than nowadays healing-timeframes) is the quest for the healers in the encounter. Healing up taken damage from "screwd uped" abilities will be the other. If a player screws up after he takes regular damage, he will most commonly die. If a player is healed after the regular damage impacted and then screws up, he may survive, but giving no benefits to the group. So the healers still have an important role of refilling healthbars, but it is more forgiving due to higher timeframes and also, if a player dies after "regular" damage was taken, you can always say: "You knew that the next damage you take will be lethal, so why did you screw up right then? Watch out more when you dont have full life!"
Also I had another idea of what cataclysm might change, as the cataclysm announcement was still young. Now most things are known, but let me give you my ideas in short form:
Every healer gets to talent already existing abilites to "supporting" abilites.
For example: The Paladin can talent his "Judgement" spells to be usable on allies. Judgement of Justice would increase the damage of the target for 10 seconds by a certain %, Judgement of Wisdom would regenerate a small amount of mana to yourself and your target and Judgement of Light would give the target some kind of shield or self healing ability for a short period of time (or just heal).
The similar talent effects would also be aviable with different abilites of other classes, like the damage increasing effect would be at the Druids "Thorns" buff for a short period of time, or the shocks of the shaman would be usable like the ones of the paladin. The priest would gain a whole bunch of new abilities to heal, like a "Mind Flay" like ability, that gives these different short buffs to it's targets while channeled.
This is the "something else" to do when not healing, assisting the group. The new priests "death grip" or better "life grip" that was announced by Blizzard is a step in the right direction. I realy like it. Or the Guardian Angel of the HolyPriest. Though it is somehow today just used to let a character "take lethal hits on purpose", it is right in that in my "future scenarios", the ability is used to shield someone from making a lethal mistake that is inevitable.

@3. Well yes in some encounters there is some diversity in things of ability usage. For example, Hunters like to get in close to somewhere dangerous just to "disengage" quick enough to raise their effectivenes. Me as a warrior likes to charge around the battlefield after dodging abilites of bosses like the shadowbold barrage of Bloodqueen. But in the end it all goes back to 80% of the fight having your eyes on the Watcher add on. On the Saurfang Hardmode encounter, my guild lets me skill Defense and all I do is running around and stun or taunt the blood beasts he summons, and in the meantime I keep debuffs on the boss that usually my other warrior-mates would have to keep active while DPSing, so they also have an easier time. I realy like this, though this "diversity" only comes back to me, and not others (maybe the shamans and owls who kick the adds around ... but thats all).
The thing with "hit and run" somehow reminds me of the current discussion about Arms and Fury Warriors. While Arms is supposed to be the warrior who presses a button and then the character takes a huge swing to hit the enemy with huge damage to realy CRUSH the enemy, today it is more that Fury deals the huge amounts of damage at once. Currently I deal about 14k at max as an arms warrior, and yesterday I dealed a 25k bloodthrist crit on a regular encounter. Somewhere there is the point I want to take aim at:
While one character might have abilities that focus on "many hits in quick succession", these abilities would take time to take effect, time the character needs to stand at the boss. Other abilities this character may have would be less damaging, but much more effective in a short period of time. So the player needs to decide: Is it save that I get out my full combo-rotation, or do I stick to these other two buttons here for now and be ready to disengage the danger zone faster. A player who tries the "long combo" while having less time, would deal a lot less damage when he has to keep getting away from danger spots. A player who tries the "short combo" while having less time, would deal over all less damge than the whole "long combo" would deal, but more damage than the other would be able to deal in the same timeframe. These "short combo" abilities would have a long cooldonw, while the "long combo" abilites would have a short cooldown. In the warrior example, this would be as a fury: "Do I do a fast hitting Bloodthrist, Slam, Heroic Strike combo where I need more rage and thus need to stand longer at the boss, or do I stick with two meele hits and do only a Bloodthrist and finish it with an Heroic strike to get all my rage out there quickly?" and as an arms: "Do I go out for a Bladestorm or do I hit Mortal Strike, Overpower and Slam once and get out there fast?"
This is something you have to project now to your own class, but you get the deal.

Xenon Out for now! GIMME FEEDBACK!

[Xorkrik]

Regarding healing.

In Classic healers had a mana pool. And that was that. There was some minimal regen but nothing useful. There was mana potions but they where not very good from what I recall. When a healer was OOM that was it. However as a healer your potential healing output is very high. You hardly ever get to use your healing power to the fullest, because you'd run out of mana too quickly. In Classic you had the standard get out of the fire type mechanics. However they dealt low enough dmg that the combined healing force could easily heal through it. But then the healers would run out of mana and then the tank would die.
So in Classic the healers had the HPS to heal through pretty much any screw up besides letting the boss/minions hit non-tanks but if you screwed up too much -> OOM wipe. So the fights consisted of trying to minimize the damage the raid took and dealing the damage needed. You could heal the dps to 80-90% of full health in order to not overheal and waste mana. Dps would use healing potions, healthstones (Traded 1 by 1!!) and even bandage in order to save healer mana.
There wasn't many enrages from what I remember simply because they where not needed.

TBC. Here healers had some mana regen. And chain-potting mana potions & 5 sec rule dancing you could extend your mana quite a bit. Here we started to see enrages either hard or soft. Also some "don't stand in fire" abilities started to hit fairly hard and became hard to heal through. We started to see more dps races.

WotLK. Yay healers have infinite mana. Or atleast enough mana regen to last until the enrage. So for all practical reasons infinite mana. To counter near infinite mana healers (almost) every single boss have an enrage timer. Avoidable raid dmg abilities (fire!) seems to be fairly binary. Either you get out within the 3-4 sec or you die. Healers can't really heal through it.
The tank damage becomes trinary. Full - Wounded - Dead, ie two-shotting.
We see the introduction of a lot of raid wide damage auras to give the healers something to do. There is also a lot more unavoidable random raid target damage to be healed up. Healing becomes see dmg = heal dmg.

The subtle change is that healers have become raid health maintainers. You don't so much save people from dying as top people up for the next random unavoidable damage. You just cast the spells that will get the whole raid up to full again the fastest. Thinking about mana efficiency or overhealing is a thing of the past. Just spam the heals as quickly as possible.


For Cataclysm I hope they tune the mana regen back a bit so you can go OOM. And make having 50% overhealing a bad thing, instead of normal...

[Simon_Moon]

One thing is this game is too casual in the opinion of many elitist raiders out there, even if a single mistake made in 2 seconds can kill 25 people and lead to 5-10 minutes downtime in gameplay. Whatever encounter you design, no one wants it facerolled in the first week, besides by the World top 10 raiders. And then there has to be a hardmode, demanding perfect execution from the top 5% in the community. I am really curious how things will work out in the future.

Another point is, Blizzard cut out a lot of possibilities with bring the player not the class shit. Needing a mage/warlock tank, doing something you can only do in stealth and so on. They could put every class skill to a clever use, making them feel unique and useful. In addition, giving several classes similar abilities may lead to the optimal compromise.

The Lichking encounter shows Blizzard can still deliver amazing fights. The question is if they are just lazy, or if too many subcribers will never beat fights like this.

[Deleted]

The thing is that Hardmodes are not realy ... well tuned.
A "hardmode" that gives more loot ... well ... ah screw it I write another lengthy post:
Blizzard announced the "point" system for "badges".
As soon as it came up I sometime wrote a post about "bonus points" through well played fights.
If a player fails to accomplish something in a fight, he screws the bonus points for the group. Nothing more.
If a player dies by failing to accomplish something, he gets some minus points.
If a player successfully solves a problem in a fight, he and the whole group gets bonus points.
These "problem-solves" and "screwups" would then be summed up at the end of the kill to give the player the "score" for the bossfight which is then converted into the "loot points" that are the "badge"-counterparts of cataclysm.

Hardmodes would grand more points. Hardmodes would differ from current Heroic Modes in that they still involve special mechanics of the bossfight. There the "abusing" of the bosses abilities comes back. "countering" an ability of the boss is part of the "bonus point" feature. Doing these special things optionaly during the fight will grand more points and make the fight harder when you consider doing them.

The Heroic Mode of current raids is just some way to keep people busy. Seriously when you killed the Lich King you have seen everything of the game. It is over! "Thank you for playing my game!" Achievments are the only things that keep people at the game afterwards. Completing the game does grand you no benefit in other parts of the game. There are no hard questlines, there are no hard optional bossfights, there are just HEROIC modes; They do not equal HARD modes. They are just like every 5man dungeon ... heroic ... but hard? ... I dont know ... no they are not hard they just have more lifepoints. It is like setting the game difficulty from "Normal" to "Hard" ... wait that IS exactly what you do! And if you are done with them ... well thats finally it. Blizzard does not want you to use your Items from PvE to use in PvP. That is also a problem.
In old days, in games with PvP, even in WoW, it was the quest of the player to gear up in PvE to be more powerfull in PvP. A good raiding guild would have the best gear and would thus be a very welcome ally in scirmishes against the other faction. Today ... well your Lich King loot CAN give you some benefits against PvP players, but most often you will still be facerolled without PvP equipment.
So when you do PvE, the game is over when the last boss falls. Period. You can put it in your shelf, wait for the next expansion and buy another game in the meantime. This also has to change! Good players in either PvE or PvP need to be recognized. Today the only thing that stands out is your gear score. When you stand around without a Guild in Dalaran with 6500 GS you get whispers all over the place from server top guilds (i have a friend who has that problem). When you stand around with 6000 GS ... well you are a nobody. The most famous players of the server are most often the greatest and meanest flamers of the trade channel or those who are officialy branded as ninja looters, so that they are never again invited into any guild or raid. A Title says not much nowadays. I can tell you that someone with the "Insane in the Membrane" achievment is someone who is dedicated to the game ... but is he a good player?
Someone who has a highscore in a bossencounter can be easyly recognized. You see someone on the street and say "Hey thats the guy/guild who scored rank 1 on 80% of the bossfights i played! He/they must be good!"

I also have here 3 pictures of an UI about how it might look like.





Each Bossencounter has his own Points and the player can "buy" loot with the points when some Item that dropps at the boss is never looted. Each week the player has other Items HE CAN USE as a "bonus item to buy", out of the Loot Table of the boss. The costs for each Items are about the 1000 Point mark.

FEEDBACK!

[Durandro]

Honestly, I was slightly disappointed there weren't more vehicle mechanics in Icecrown Citadel. And before you boo me, this was what I envisioned:

Gunship Battle is essentially the same. Only this time its directly before Sindragosa, and you fight her IN THE AIR while circling the Frozen Thrown. Those Jetpacks? Those were practice, as you now need to send half your raid to leap onto her back as she makes straffing runs with her frost breath attacks. And those cannons? They are now used to shoot down Frostwyrm adds.

Basically Gunship Battle is a simple 'practice' encounter before Sindragosa comes in and rocks your boat. And I'd have her tuned to equivilently her current difficulty, only including the jetpack and cannon mechanics to keep it spicy.

And then after you defeat her, the gunship drops you off on the roof of the citadel (no lame looking portal) and flies off, with maybe the losing side also dropping off a its own attack party along with Fordring. A little banter and rivalry, then the Lich King comes down and mocks you. The losing faction then tries to killsteal, and Arthas insta-kills them all and mocks them again as failures. Then the fight against you starts.

Now wouldn't that have been cooler? You could have also avoided skipping a huge part of the Citadel with the assent to Deathbringer Saurfang (one of the complaints was the place didn't seem big enough, right?).

[Bralaap]

The problem with the vehicle mechanics, mounted combat etc. is that at the way the game is designed now, all your abilities have become obsolete. Basically except from increasing your healthpool by wearing better (= higher iLevel) gear, there is nothing you can do to change the damage you do, and especially the way you do damage. Every person entering a canon or a siege engine does the same amount of damage in the same way and fulfills the same role. More diversity is needed!

---------- Post added 06-20-2010 at 07:18 PM ----------

Xenon, I like your idea about the points. Aside from a group effort, you will now have a personal effort (or ranking) too. This could maybe cause some drama again if people are going to use it the way they use GS now: "LFM for CataRaidOne, need to have at least an average of xx points in the last 5 raids completed."

[Deleted]

Thanks Bralaap.
Though I like the part of vehicle combat you complain about the most and I thing in the Malygos Fight it was realy well done, because the players all had the same abilties, but you had to focus on one thing, and needed to be good at it. Letting your debuff run out was like screwing up your rotation.
A player has a new environment in which he needs to make him feel at home. Thats a challenge, and challenges are things we need.

[schippie]

I have always had the idea that:
-Normal mode should be the standard predictable fight where bossmods are actually usefull(timers etc).
-Hardmodes should be more random on CD's for things that need to be interrupted , adds that spawn etc. Then you would really have the choise.

On a side note i dont think this wil actually ever work cause not all things could be random (certain boss combos would easily wipe a raid xD)

-I stil would like to see alot more vehicle mount boss fights there alot of fun to do. (Tho lootship gets a bit old after a while but the seiges in ulduar (part before boss and boss to) always is stil alot of fun.
-The thorim fight i also liked purely cause you need to handle the adds in the arena with one team and run through the gauntlet with another part to get thorim to the ground.

Overall i think making more and more bosses you cannot avoid having certain mechanics look exactly the same as a boss somewhere else in the world. But they could try to get more then the standard list we have now a days adds,fire etc.(with the vehicle mounts fights they already added a really nice one tho.)

[anyaka21]

Personally, I think Blizzard has done a pretty masterful job in trying to change with the times and the mods. Let's face the simple facts that for the most part, raiding in Vanilla was pretty easy. Sure it took a long time to gear up, it took a long time to attune, etc... and even after tat was done, you had attrition and had to do the attunement stuff again, because you had to, if you wanted to keep raiding.

DBM changed the nature of raiding and Blizzard changed with the times with new elements and cooldowns, distances, movememnt, etc... Thus, the reality of raiding is Blizzard is trying to make content more difficult, but players keep coming out with mods that are trying to make the fights easier.

One point though, that I have, though, is that players today, just don't get the simple concept of 'been there, done that'. Most have raided through Vanilla, BC, and now WotLK, and for the most part, things haven't changed, and most likely won't. Most boss abilities really aren't anything new, most are kind of like copies or semi copies of something else that has been done earlier. Example: Gruul and the bounce and the damage, and that's pretty much just like Princes and the spreadout 13yd mechanic, which isn't any different than BQL. Defile isn't really that hugely different from the MC boss, or XT, or Solarian, etc... Same basic ideas, just done slightly differently.

Is it just that Blizzard's hardware or coding is at it's limit or is their design teams basic creativity at it's limit? IDK. But regardless of this, the basics of most fights, hasn't really change since the dawn of RPG's, and by RPG's, I mean pen and paper. In the end, you have to have hp's and the boss has to have zero hp's. Thus, however you wanna cut the cake, that's the simple mechanic of all all but one boss in all of WoW.

As far as hardmodes go, really, most didn't add that much to a fight. What I mean by this, most hard modes add 1-3 abilities, along with the more hp's and more damage. And as thus, only a handful have drastically changed the nature of the fight. For example, Firefighter, how much real change did Blizzard do to this fight? Not much from a simple perspective, they added fire. But it drastically changed how the fight was done.

The problem is, that the majority of people, at least that seem to like to post or QQ, dont' understand that, for the most part, not every boss is gonna be harder than the previous one, not every boss is gonna be tuned. blizzard has interwoven hardmodes with not so hard-modes, and lets also face the reality that a lot of people that post in these forums and QQ probably aren't even 10/12 on hmICC25, maybe not even 10m.

But I guess my final point is, Blizzard is trying to change things up. They are trying to make interesting boss encounters, they are trying to make hard-modes that are hard, etc... Will they be successful on every boss, every time? no, of course not. Just like Usain Bolt won't set a world record in every race that he runs, just not gonna happen. People need to understand that once you've played mmo-rpgs for a long time, things really just don't change that drastically. Boss still has to die, you still have to live.

I do like the idea of rankings in game with added rewards, whether it is class based, role based, raid based, or a combination. For example, best timer on a boss fight gets an extra loot, or best dps or heals gets an extra badge, etc... Or have a timer on for speed runs that garner an extra chest at the end, not unlike ZA, but have the amount of loot based on server performance.

[Sabbie]

I've played quite a few mmo's and WoW is the only one I've noticed with such complex and diverse boss designs. The only other two games I've seen endgame with was FFXI and Aion. Both had some very rough and exciting encounters but not as fast paced and crazy as Warcraft ones.

[Deleted]

You can argue about the pace, though I already stated that WoW has a very unique infrascructure for their bossfights to create a fast pace. FFXI is a very slow game, so slow that you can actually take a walk to the toilet while fighting a boss. This is nothing we want to go to.
@anyaka21 :
I would not place a measurement on the difficulty of an encounter by how many people killed him. There is a difference between "oh my god he two shotted the tank within 3 seconds!"-difficult and "oh my god something wents wrong everyone is taking damage! Oh my god the tank died because I did not look at him the last 10 seconds!"-difficult.
If people do not manage to come through a boss because of the first reason, this is bad boss design (in my oppinion).
If people do not manage to come through a boss because of the second reason, this is because the players are realy screwing something up.
The first one is the typical Saufang Raid-Block, beaten by skilled button mashing.
The second one is the typical Mimiron Hard-Mode-Block, beaten by skilled using your own head. Sometimes DBM will not help anymore.
We need more Mimirons.

Xenon out its freakin 5:30 and the sun shines again ...

[Gron]

Personally, I think Blizzard has done a pretty masterful job in trying to change with the times and the mods.

vs.

People need to understand that once you've played mmo-rpgs for a long time, things really just don't change that drastically.

This shows that those who are unhappy will feel Blizzard is not catering to them, just others.

[Bralaap]

For example, best timer on a boss fight gets an extra loot, or best dps or heals gets an extra badge, etc...

I don't like this idea at all, people are watching too much at dps/healing meters already. Especially DPS have this attutide of "I will not move because healers will heal me through it, I want highest DPS done". Some fights people have less influence on the damage they do too, for example Vile Gas on Festergut.

[Mongoose19]

Troll fatale

[Deleted]

I don't like this idea at all, people are watching too much at dps/healing meters already. Especially DPS have this attutide of "I will not move because healers will heal me through it, I want highest DPS done". Some fights people have less influence on the damage they do too, for example Vile Gas on Festergut.

He somehow turns my statement around to something I also do not desire.
The points there are given for correct gameplay, not for "who is the best damage dealer". Also the extra loot is only personal. Like when you kill Saurfang for 2 months and the Will doesnt drop. Each week you have an additional chance that the will is in the bonus Item section and you can buy it from there IF you have enough points for this bossencounter, meaning --- a) "you play him realy well" or b) "you fought him already so often" --- to affort the item form the bonus section.