My opinion of how raids should be designed.

[Zazey]

I have an opinion of how raids should be designed. You cant force top tier players to wait 4+ months for others to kill it, and you cant leave others without a chance to atleast give it a shot. I believe that raids should be implemented every 3-4 months with the raid completion time taking around 2 months FL was a clusterF*** of difficulty ranges and DS was just all over the place. They should go back to their old way or do a gradual rampup like 1-1.5-2.5-3-4-5-5.5-7-8.5-10... That being said I have an example of what I feel would be a good raid backbone:

Lets say they release a raid with 10 bosses, make the first 1 entry level, a little bit of both ( relaxed enrage timer so that it is beatable by players with current gear, and not beatable by players with severe undergear, yet have a mild amount of mechanics, lets say one or two things to move out of.) The second boss should be essentially the same thing as the first one, but a little bit harder; make the enrage tighter and add a mechanic or two, nothing severely difficult but something doable.

The third boss (mainly because 3 seems like a nice break out of 10) could be a DPS check, essentially stating "Hey you can't be carrying everyone, take some time and spread gear out, go back to old content and finish gearing some players", now this doesnt mean make it EXTREMELY hard to beat, just hard enough to make players be in Relevant gear, with enough skill to atleast know their rotations.

The fourth and fifth bosses can be mechanic bosses, have them be unique. A good boss mechanic that they may want to revamp is Razuvious and his Mind control adds. This provided a new learning curve for the mcers to learn how to use their controlled NPCs, another thing you may want to look at is Baleroc Heroic, though for obvious reasons you may want to scale down the level of toughness, not by much though as it is a halfway point in the dungeon, so difficulty should be harder.

The sixth boss should have the difficulty increased a bit more, this should be a control fight, lots of adds to handle, ccs to be used ( because we all know how much we all love CCing RIGHT!???! ), as much as people say they brought back CC, they haven't, make a fight that revolves around it and test players to utilize abilities they normally don't pay to much mind to. Now you cant just have a boss that makes you handle adds only, as we saw that with gothik, taking players 5 minutes to figure out adds and then it was just lawlzfreelootz. So, a cool thing theyve done with previous encounters that they could explore is forcing raiders to pay attention to outside mechanics and phase transitions such as not pushing a boss while a player is under the effects of a boss ability ( Picture spine of DW though when you rolled, players being gripped by tentacles werent held down, and instead floated away, forcing you to break them before rolling. This would require you to manage CDs after poping tentacles or controlling how fast you kill them).

The 7th boss should be another gear check, this one much heavier then the previous. However, it shouldnt be so rediculously high that it requires you to be at the top of your class. It should essentially say "OK youve made it this far, but instead of just blowing through this shit and just killing everything in one night the day after release, go back and farm the bosses for another week, make sure your tanks can take hte damage, your healers can keep people topped, and your dps can beat the enrage timer" Personally im not a fan of pure DPS checks, I like them to throw in Tank checks and healer checks every once and a while, spice shit up. Once you beat the 7th boss and pass the final gear checks, the difficulty should be noticeably harder. This is the point in raids that some guilds just simply will not pass, due to shear lack of skill. And as much as some people agree with blizzards saying that everyone should be able to see all content, regardless of skill, I don't. If youve killed 7 bosses out of 10, youve seen a good chunk and you can consider yourself good. These next few bosses should be for the best, it gives them reasons to continue to do content, and it gives players who havent seen them the drive to WANT to see them. These bosses should be difficult, not so insanely overtuned compared to the previous ones, but the difficulty scale up should be definitly noticable between each of them.

The 8th boss Should be another mixture of mechanics and gear checks, "Ok you managed to kill the DPS check of boss 7, but did you literally just beat the enrage timer, kill it during enrage, or did you honestly beat the encounter." It should have a LITTLE bit harder of an enrage, say the 7th boss had an 8 min enrage timer, this boss should have something like a 7 minute 30 second enrage timer, nothing marginally different, but enough to wean out kills that just "Skated By". It should also require mechanics such as heroic rag did with multiple phases (maybe not as difficult as it was Pre p4 nerf [the nerf of the geyser] but still difficult) in which each phase brings completely new mechanics, then reverts to a "Chorus" phase, the transitions, like heroic rag in which they were essentially the same but added a new twist with each one. I personally would like to see something like Madness of DW ability CATACLYSM, but not so retardedly easy to overcome, maybe make an ability that gives you 15 seconds to do X amount of damage or you wipe but make the ammount of damage reasonable (could be one way of implimenting a DPS check). Beat this boss, and you can consider yourselves Skilled Raiders. Maybe give them a pet or something to make them feel special, because thats all what were after right, recognition of our godlyness, I mean hell why would I do achiev runs if I couldnt show off my cool-ass mount to scrubs.

The 9th boss should have a penultimate feel. It should be more difficult then the previous but not like it was between domo and rag ( I guess in both MC and FL :P ) where domo was probably a 5 and rag was an 11, it should be more like an 8.5 - 10 make it just a 9-10 and its too similarly easy, the .5 adds some pahzazzz if you know what im sayin. This boss should have a ton of mechanics that require almost perfect synchronization and execution like a splice between H Yorsaj and H Domo, you gotta get out of fire while dpsing adds and you cant take damage because you lose a damage increase but if you get off the adds or lose the damage buff the slimes hitting the boss and your SoL. Not exactly that but you get the point, challenging and frustrating. Shouldn't be a guild breaker but it should be one of those things that will make people decide upon putting time in or realizing that maybe they have different priorities then their guild. Again they should be rewarded. This is where you start to change what drops off bosses, sort of like what they did with spine/madness. Maybe this boss drops The Tier shoulders or Weapon/trinkets, but still make it drop off peices. Maybe give them a pet or a cosmetic treat, like unlocking a social item from a vendor acessable from killing this guy, maybe finkle comes out of his cage and is like "AYOOO DAWG CHECK OUT THESE DOPE FIREWORKS IVE BEEN HOLDIN!" Kill this guy and people on your server should recognize you as a solid bunch of experienced raiders. You should see a steady flow of applicants that are looking for a guild to progress on the final boss.

The final boss should 100% fucking have a final boss feel. It should be retardedly hard and downing this should show that you and your brosephs and braskies are the shit that you make yourselves out to be. Give these kids a god damn title and a mount for christs sake, and get them a sponser! This boss should tax everything your raid has, it should be fucking long, not some stupid 10 minute fight, IM TALKIN LIKE 20! It should require wipe after wipe after wipe to learn all the mechanics and master them. You shouldnt log onto MMO champ 2 weeks after a tier launch to see some quote from some top guild saying "Yeah we had a blast these last two weeks, Blizz sure did make it fun *grin*, We really felt like it was hard *Lawl 2 weeks*, We are opening recruitment now for next tier, as were going to spend the next 3-5 months farming this terrible easy ass place." It should be like Naxx 40 was Log onto MMO champ about a month-2 after it was released ---WORLD FIRST NAXX 40 CLEAR BY Nihilum--- Guildleader : "Yeah it was really taxing and were glad to have finally beaten it a week before next tier/xpac" This fight should have everything to it, infact rag was done very well, though the scaling up to him was lame. Prenerf maybe 14 guilds had him, first nerf maybe 200 then after the final nerf about 1000. Only bad thing they did was place nerfs to close together tho the final nerf was done appropriately, give him a hit with the nerfbat like 2 weeks before new tier to give not as good guilds a chance to beat him, but its not like it mattered because DS got released.

---NEEDED A PAGE BREAK HERE... DIDNT WANT TO KILL YOUR EYES AS THEY ARE PROBABLY ALREADY BLEEDING---

Killing the final boss should definitly come with notoriety, I enjoy the concept of mount drops and a title of course. You should definitly be at the top of your server, and you should see only other very well coordinated raid teams downing him. There honestly shouldnt be more then 200 guilds beating this before the first nerf, which imo should be about 3-4 weeks after the world first kill, maybe less depending on how other guilds are doing. Personally it would look good in this fashion: Top guild downs it, 1 week later the top 10-20 world guilds have cleared it. That rules out the superhardcore elite raiders. about 2 weeks ( 2 weeks is a reasonable ammount of wipes for hardcore guilds to get it) after you should be seeing your top Hardcore guilds downing it up until about your US 25 ( and I say US because generalizing world kill times is difficult). After about 3 weeks you should see around the top US 50-65 guilds having it down after putting in maybe 500 wipes not due to overtunedness but to coordination. At about 4 weeks you should see the remaining top US HArdcore guilds downing it, maybe the number jumps abit to about 150 leaving the majority of servers with 1 or 2 guilds clearing it. After that you can nerf it. The hardcore players had their fill and now its time to give a chance for the less hardcore guilds to do this. Now I think it would be ok to change the mount up for killing him after a nerf. An example would be from NAXX 10/25, say pre nerf you got the black proto, post first nerf you got the Plagued, and then post second nerf you just got a title, this is a way to reward dedicated guilds, and separate them from others.

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So maybe after the first nerf week one you see the US kill charts go to about 200, week two you see about 275 and then week three you see about 350. After this you can nerf it again, or wait until the number jump week after week declines to say 75-50-25-10.. 10 seems like a good reasonable number to nerf it. Nerf it again, take away the drake but keep the title. Week 1 you see about 500 guilds, week 2 around 600 and so on. After about 750 guilds have cleared it, new content gets released. This in all gives top tier guilds about a month or two of progression and a two month resting period before new content. IT also gives guilds with players that are getting burnt out after 3 months a new tier of content to get excited about.

--- Pardon grammar/spelling errors, and feel free to troll me on these ---

[Chrno]

don't agree on all points, but overall a nicely written post and i can see where your comming from

[Zazey]

No im not saying make it insanely hard, it does look like that tho. Im just saying that all guilds should most likely eventually down it.. but it shouldnt be for a while. If you make raids too easy you piss off not only hardcore raiders, but raiders that are looking for a challenge. If you make raids to hard, you piss off casual raiders that cant down anything. I think something thats clearable by everyone, but it a moderate amount of time is good. Hence why I said 1-2months for hardcore guilds and then 2-4 months for everyone else. The point of making content that challenging isnt to keep everyone out, its to ensure that the content lasts long enough for new content to be released.

[Deleted]

I have NEVER been a hardcore raider. I have NEVER killed the final boss of any tier (apart from ToC and ICC) and ICC in the pre-cata patch.

And yet... I made a small guild in a small server with 5 of my friends. We downed Deathwing normal before the 5% nerf. With 2 pugs.

Did I feel good about myself?

I didn't.

Why? I don't know:

1) I have already killed him 1000 times in LFR. Wow I saved Azeroth by jumping around or being alt-tab on facebook while the rest 10 of the 25-man kill them for me.

2) He was extremely easy to kill on normal after all as well.

I felt much better when in TBC I knew that killing the final boss would be something *Heroic*. When I saw some1 with Warglaives I admired him. Now I'm "meh" if I see any1 with the legendary staff (or even daggers).

I disbanded the guild since half quit the game because they already killed the last boss 1 month after release in 2 versions of him (LFR and Normal) and joined another guild, we are at 6/8 hc in 25-man. I am the top healer in the guild so don't think I am just a noob being carried. We killed Warlord by completely ignoring the mechanics. Ultaxion was the easiest fight I have ever seen. This is not heroic at all... After the 10% everything is faceroll. We had a dps that dealt 24k dps in the fight that is supposed to be a gearcheck. That is only sad.

I am done with raiding in Cata at least. I have killed Deathwing already 1000 times, why would I bother killing him in heroic as well? The only reason I would would be if it was harder than normal. Well it won't be soon. And even if it was... So what?



I am not hating, I never liked wow only because of raiding, I still LOVE the game. I just dislike raiding nowadays.

---------- Post added 2012-03-14 at 12:46 AM ----------

I have NEVER been a hardcore raider. I have NEVER killed the final boss of any tier (apart from ToC and ICC) and ICC in the pre-cata patch.

And yet... I made a small guild in a small server with 5 of my friends. We downed Deathwing normal before the 5% nerf. With 2 pugs.

Did I feel good about myself?

I didn't.

Why? I don't know:

1) I have already killed him 1000 times in LFR. Wow I saved Azeroth by jumping around or being alt-tab on facebook while the rest 10 of the 25-man kill them for me.

2) He was extremely easy to kill on normal after all as well.

I felt much better when in TBC I knew that killing the final boss would be something *Heroic*. When I saw some1 with Warglaives I admired him. Now I'm "meh" if I see any1 with the legendary staff (or even daggers).

I disbanded the guild since half quit the game because they already killed the last boss 1 month after release in 2 versions of him (LFR and Normal) and joined another guild, we are at 6/8 hc in 25-man. I am the top healer in the guild so don't think I am just a noob being carried. We killed Warlord by completely ignoring the mechanics. Ultaxion was the easiest fight I have ever seen. This is not heroic at all... After the 10% everything is faceroll. We had a dps that dealt 24k dps in the fight that is supposed to be a gearcheck. That is only sad.

I am done with raiding in Cata at least. I have killed Deathwing already 1000 times, why would I bother killing him in heroic as well? The only reason I would would be if it was harder than normal. Well it won't be soon. And even if it was... So what?



I am not hating, I never liked wow only because of raiding, I still LOVE the game. I just dislike raiding nowadays.


OP your suggestions... I like.

[Underskilled]

While your opinion is incredibly sound and well written, OP, I don't think the question is "How should a raid be designed?", Blizzard most likely already understands the idea of a mechanics fight, dps fight, healer fight, etc. What needs to be asked is, "How can we design fights like this, while keeping them original?". Now what we need to consider from this question, is amount of content, and the originality of the content. It's just my opinion, but Blizzard has never struggled on making original, but what's been lacking lately is the sheer amount of original content.

Lets look back a couple years ago. Back to the wonderful world of ulduar, proclaimed as one of the best raids Blizzard has made to date. And lets also think about Icecrown, another raid with tons of positive feedback. Finally, consider the bulk of t11 content as well. Now, what do these three examples have in common? Obviously, they all boasted a large amount of original bosses.

Now lets consider ToC, one of the most hated raids. The bosses certainly were original, but there was four of them, hardly enough to call a successful patch. Also consider t7 content, it certainly boasted a large amount of bosses, but originality was severely lacking.

The point I'm trying to get across is, from what I understand OP, you want raid bosses to be original in their own sense. However, lately Blizzard has really not been lacking with originality, what they've been lacking, is the quantity.

[Zazey]

Yeah, my main point is that blizzard, although they say and seem to design unique fights.. they really aren't unique. The areas in which they are fought and their individual environments are 100% unique, but the mechanics and how the fights play out are not. Look at KT for example, the environment actually plays very nicely into the fight that already is a very very unique encounter. Now look at spine, the encounter is quite possibly the easiest fight, outside of heroic (which was partly due to the fact that it was just severely overtuned). The concept was to make a fight that felt like you were flying. Now I don't know about you, but I don't get the sense of flying, I see clouds going by me but why the hell am I looking at something in the corners of my screen instead of the fight. The roll mechanic had to be done in a fashion that wouldn't visibly make players nauseous, which is understandable.. but the only evidence of you rolling is a slight movement of clouds, that you aren't looking at or at least shouldn't be, and the word ROLL on your screen from your DBM.

What I, and many others would like to see, are the original style of 10-20 bosses per raid, anything less just doesnt honestly have a raid feel to it. The difficulty rampup should be gradual, unlike firelands where it was vast changes in difficulty. Another thing that I am for, but Im sure thousands if not millions wouldnt support, is having essentially 1 Difficulty and 1 raid size, however I feel that LFR should be implimented, I just dont feel that the difficulty should be that much dumbed down. IMO - 20 man raids LFR difficulty, and then Normal (where normal brings legit difficulties). The reason you see much better content from TBC is because they weren't devoting so many man hours into balancing and coding 5 diffent modes (10,10H,25LFR,25,25H) Not to mention the gear they have to change. Another issue with this is size design. Blizzard has said it themselves, there is a lot that goes into designing the size of an encounters room. Issues they have to handle are making rooms big enough for 25s and for players to not experiences framerate lag, yet small enough so that it doesn't make it too big for a 10 man to function properly in. They've experimented with scaling differences between 10 and 25 and personally it gets annoying for players that do 25 and then 10 and have to remake strats because the positions you stand in are different in both versions. So 1 raid size would be a good thing, and imo it isn't hard to manage or obtain 20 raiders, infact most 10 man guilds have about 10 raiders and 5-10 backups with about 10+ more sitting out that want to start raiding. 25s could scale down or form 2 20s as most 25 man guilds have about 25 raiders with 7-15 backups on nightly.

[Underskilled]

I tip my hat to you, and agree completely. There really is no point in having extra raid sizes/difficulties, that only causes more resources to go toward balancing them, and less to the overall quality and quantity of raids and bosses. Having some bosses easier, or harder, or really just impossible for certain sizes of raids just really leaves a sour taste in your mouth.

As for the difficulty, I believe that should go with the quantity. If one raid has 15 bosses, rather than make all 15 fairly simple, and spend all that time balancing a "heroic" version, why not simply make 4 bosses fairly easy, 6 bosses of average difficulty, 4 bosses of quite hard difficulty, and a soul-crushing, guild-breaking final boss?

It's simply pointless to spend all that time balancing an extra set of bosses, or four extra sets counting 10H, 25N, 25H, and (to an extent) LFR.