Raid encounter design - death by a thousand paper cuts

[Wilfire]

It seems like these days there are only two types of bosses in raids: those that flood the room with adds and those that flood the room with dodge / soak mechanics. After raiding ToS for 3 months I can't say there are any memorable encounters in that place. Looking back at another mid-expansion raid (Firelands), bosses there had defining mechanics. Rhyolith? Oh that's the boss that you have to turn. Alysrazor? Oh that's the boss where you have to fly. Fandral? Oh that's the boss where you have to manage his forms.

In ToS the only boss that sticks in mind is Maiden. As for the rest of them, I can't say that any of them really have any defining mechanics. It seems like most of them are just different mixes of one shot soaking / dodging mechanics and adds. I guess the world top 10 raiders enjoy those kinds of fights where you have a million things to watch out for but I'd really like to see some more bosses with unique mechanics.

P.S. how many more bloody circular boss rooms will we have to suffer through?

[Soisoisoi]

It seems like these days there are only two types of bosses in raids: those that flood the room with adds and those that flood the room with dodge / soak mechanics. After raiding ToS for 3 months I can't say there are any memorable encounters in that place. Looking back at another mid-expansion raid (Firelands), bosses there had defining mechanics. Rhyolith? Oh that's the boss that you have to turn. Alysrazor? Oh that's the boss where you have to fly. Fandral? Oh that's the boss where you have to manage his forms.

In ToS the only boss that sticks in mind is Maiden. As for the rest of them, I can't say that any of them really have any defining mechanics. It seems like most of them are just different mixes of one shot soaking / dodging mechanics and adds. I guess the world top 10 raiders enjoy those kinds of fights where you have a million things to watch out for but I'd really like to see some more bosses with unique mechanics.

P.S. how many more bloody circular boss rooms will we have to suffer through?

KJ's knockback chains are different/memorable, as long as you ignore the annoying soaks. I agree overall though it seems everything is soak or move the debuff out the raid, but then again, it always has been - with very few fights that are different between to break it up. I mean, can you imagine if every fight we had to fly around following a boss or switching legs to turn it around? That'd become boring too.

Slightly off-topic/ranty, but, I like Maiden as an encounter, but hate the fact the fight - similar to KJ - is one person fucks up the raid suffers & is basically a wipe. RandomGuy1 stood on the wrong side (again /sigh), great now I have to jump off (at best) because I was in the right place. I'd much rather mechanics just kill the one person who made the mistake.

P.S. how many more bloody circular boss rooms will we have to suffer through?

As long as they're not as tiny or restricted (awful camera positions) like Star Auger or Sisters I don't really care what shape a room is tbh, I'm focused on the boss not the room, unless of course there's something you can physically fall off of... Then I can kill my guildies with Swapblasters. Yes, I'm that guy.

[Nevcairiel]

Blizzard has already admitted quite openly that many bosses used too similar concepts in Tomb (different encounter designers using the same option, etc). Overall all bosses are fine individually, but viewed as a whole, there is too much repetition. The most prominent of those is "soak this thing the arrow points at" kind of things, which is in like half the bosses in ToS.

From Tomb, Mistress and Maiden have their own memorable things (even if Maiden is just a mixture of Thaddius and a few other abilities we had), and personally I like Host with the spirit/corporeal mechanics as well as KJ.

Antorus looks quite interesting, though.

[Zapporius]

I wasn't raiding for two tiers and came back to ToS and I must say it's boring as fuck. Well loots and discord banter is fun, but the raid itself is bland.

[Deleted]

1) Switching targets and dealing with multiple mobs is much more difficult than tunneling down a single boss
2) In the absence of splash damage, due to self heals and people avoiding mechanics you don't really need healers. Every encounter that Blizzard failed on delivering enough splash dmg got heavily underhealed
3)I think they've been okishly original in some cases
4) You're never suppose to meet the berserk timer.
5)No, they're fun
7)No

In general, I actually think Blizzard has a really good record of interesting mechanics in the recent past( Trains boss for example), but they have overly used some mechanics(time 30% movement/cast/etc in Nighthold and soaking in Tomb) so that people got annoyed.

[Flazian]

It seems like these days there are only two types of bosses in raids: those that flood the room with adds and those that flood the room with dodge / soak mechanics. After raiding ToS for 3 months I can't say there are any memorable encounters in that place. Looking back at another mid-expansion raid (Firelands), bosses there had defining mechanics. Rhyolith? Oh that's the boss that you have to turn. Alysrazor? Oh that's the boss where you have to fly. Fandral? Oh that's the boss where you have to manage his forms.

In ToS the only boss that sticks in mind is Maiden. As for the rest of them, I can't say that any of them really have any defining mechanics. It seems like most of them are just different mixes of one shot soaking / dodging mechanics and adds. I guess the world top 10 raiders enjoy those kinds of fights where you have a million things to watch out for but I'd really like to see some more bosses with unique mechanics.

P.S. how many more bloody circular boss rooms will we have to suffer through?

First off...Firelands is your example? That was a pretty bad raid saved by how good Rag was. Secondly I'd say most of ToS does have "memorable" mechanics. Goroth is the pillar boss (although I think he should have been moved back a bit in the raid as he had real potential to be a good fight if destroying the pillars was a greater focus on mythic instead of the random soak mechanic they threw in), Inquisition is the manage your corruption fight, Harj isn't that memorable, Sisters is probably right after maiden in terms of uniqueness with the changing, Mistress summons in a whale, squid, and a kraken thingy as well as other aquatic creatures. While hydra shot is pretty meh, all her other mechanics are quite good.
Maiden is probably my favorite fight in there, it's just fun af grabbing orbs. Avatar doesn't do anything too memorable he's just a gigantic pain because of the beams and unbound and soaking. KJ has the singularity chains, reflections (tank add as a counter to the knockback on mythic especially is pretty damn cool) darkness phase (although it's kinda bad to be fair), and obelisks (Rift stopping DoaTS is pretty cool too).

The raid also isn't all one color palette like NH and EN which is nice. You go from Nelf architecture to undersea scenery to titanic vaults to the nether. Just because you dislike the raid doesn't mean you have to twist things around to make it seem way worse than it actually is. It's a decent raid that got ruined by overtuning and a few too many soaking mechanics. Doesn't mean the whole thing is bad.

[BiggestNoob]

ToS is just a garbage raid with not a single decent boss in it. Every single boss is completely fucked over by something making it go from "this could be good" to "this is complete shit."

Blizzard has done this a lot in Legion. It's almost as if they have a meeting to discuss a design, and something that's actually good is presented but some idiot (Ion perhaps?) comes along and says "but how can we make this utterly shit?"

[Deleted]

You are giving Firelands as an example of a good raid? Dayum... People memory is so short these days. This raid was considered super blend back then, if not for Ragnaros that literally SAVED the raid from going down as one of the worst ever. Just go read some thread of 2011, you'll see.
People have always complained about the new raids, even the better one. ToT was deemed to linear, with a messed up difficulty curve etc...

There is actually a lot of unique mechanics in ToS but they are overshadowed by the tomb of soakgeras meme/bad "implementation". The floor on Sister is really cool (though the visuals/room are kinda iffy), the realm mechanics on host is cool too but they fucked up it's implementation (basically in mythic you barely have to change realm if not at all), Misstress M has a lot of innovative mechanics (feeding the maw, pupperfush/shark mechanics, thundershock...), Avatar M has an awesome concept too with the beams (the fact that you can go in P2 whenever you want is pretty neat)...

Yes there is some problems in the raid and some critics are justified, but i disagree when you say that there is no new mechanics in this raid.

I favor vanilla style raids because they got more done with less, it seemed. I haven't raided seriously since Cataclysm, but there are several common themes present in WoW raiding (and even more present from LK on) that i don't care much for.

1) Adds are the source of difficulty on the encounter. This has been a problem since WoW first started. A lot of fights, you get to the boss that you have heard rumors about. You know this guy is going to wreck your face. But, it turns out, the boss is a pushover. The guys he summons are what causes wipes.

2) Splash damage just to give heals something to do. This has been a problem since LK. The boss just does random AoE, unavoidable damage just so healers are part of the arcade game, too. They tried to fix this during Cata, but were only partially successful, it seems.

3) Tank switch mechanics. This has been a problem since LK (or perhaps, BC, even). In six xpacs, they couldn't find more creative uses to the tank? I guess this is why i hate the unholy trinity so much.

4) The enrage timer. Despite post-vanilla encounters having far more mechanics than their vanilla counterparts, only one mechanic truly stands out, and that is the hard enrage. Soft enrages allow the raid group to be much more creative. This is why i believe player health needs to be a finite resource.

5) Multiple phase encounters. Adding another phase essentially allows Blizzard to fit two fights into one. I don't care much for this because going from one phase to the next often changes the theme of the encounter. Only a few encounters have really felt thematically unified.

6) Fights revolve around the human reaction time. This has been a problem since LK. While these horribly quick paced fights are seen as many times harder than their slower counterparts, a lot of the difficulty stemmed from getting used to the encounter. Thus, every encounter since then has pretty much been predictable.

7) Utility matters even less. With all the technology that Blizzard has at their disposal, they have done a horrible job at building up on utility. This stems from LK's 'bring the player, not the class' philosophy. Generally, if you are tank you are only threating and surviving; if you are a healer, you are only healing or shielding; and, if you are a damage dealer, you are only dealing damage! I remember when they brought Life Grip into the mix, i was so happy, expecting to get a lot of use out of the spell. In the CC raids that i did, i don't remember needing it at all.

In my opinion, this is why fights seem less memorable.

Lot of wrong things in here...
2) Unavoidable damage is necessary, else you end up in situation like Star Augur and Elisande were the top guilds had to two heal the fight. And guess what happened? People complained, saying it was bad raid design and shit. Yup as always.

3)What? You think tank switch in Vanilla was better than it is NOW???? Tank switch and tank mechanics in general is somethign that has improved drastically over the expansions. In Vanilla, tank were just meat shield doing no mechanics (and no turning the boss towards a certain direction is not what i call "doing mechanics) and spamming 3 buttons to generate threat.
Yes i agree that more often than not the tank switch mechanic is just "swap at X stacks". But it's hard to come with innovative tank switch mechanics for every single bosses of an instance, and it's still better than Vanilla design of tanks (especially the off tank) doing nothing.

4) I don't really understand what you are complaining about here? You don't like hard enrage timer?
I guess, it's a personnal preference. Sometimes hard enrage are boring and give you an anticlimatic end when you kill the boss (Guldan M?), whereas soft enrage (with all the raid slowly dying) add epicness to the kill.
Though enrage timer, whether they are soft or hard, are necessary, else you would just 10 Heal the fight and do no mechanics.

5) That's a big no for me here. Multiple phase encounters are just so much more fun that a simple one phase encounter where everything is the same. All the great and memorable bosses were multiple phase encounter. Can you Give me some examples of great single phase encounter that you like?

6) I don't really get your point. A slow pace encounter is MORE predictable than a fast pace encounter, just because you have more time between each abilities to prepare for the next. Can you give more concrete example too?

7) ????? Class now have way more utility/spells than in Vanilla/TBC. The description of " if you are tank you are only threating and surviving; if you are a healer, you are only healing or shielding; and, if you are a damage dealer, you are only dealing damage" is a perfect description of Vanilla class design....
For your example of life grip: imagine a boss were Life grip is necessary and you have to use it a lot. Then this boss requires your raid to class stack priest healer, and what happen? Well people complained about "bring the player not the class"....
Plus, the life grip can be a life changer in some fights in tomb, so bad example.

[Polarthief]

inb4 people start to fondly recall Molten Core before being countered by people who don't nostalgia-glasses a raid with 1-2 mechanics of "dispel this" every fight.

[Aggrophobic]

Well, ToS looks cool and the HC version worked quite well.
Mythic is a pain though and might very well end up as the worst tier I've progressed on.

[Rafoel]

I favor vanilla style raids because they got more done with less, it seemed. I haven't raided seriously since Cataclysm, but there are several common themes present in WoW raiding (and even more present from LK on) that i don't care much for.

1) Adds are the source of difficulty on the encounter. This has been a problem since WoW first started. A lot of fights, you get to the boss that you have heard rumors about. You know this guy is going to wreck your face. But, it turns out, the boss is a pushover. The guys he summons are what causes wipes.

2) Splash damage just to give heals something to do. This has been a problem since LK. The boss just does random AoE, unavoidable damage just so healers are part of the arcade game, too. They tried to fix this during Cata, but were only partially successful, it seems.

3) Tank switch mechanics. This has been a problem since LK (or perhaps, BC, even). In six xpacs, they couldn't find more creative uses to the tank? I guess this is why i hate the unholy trinity so much.

4) The enrage timer. Despite post-vanilla encounters having far more mechanics than their vanilla counterparts, only one mechanic truly stands out, and that is the hard enrage. Soft enrages allow the raid group to be much more creative. This is why i believe player health needs to be a finite resource.

5) Multiple phase encounters. Adding another phase essentially allows Blizzard to fit two fights into one. I don't care much for this because going from one phase to the next often changes the theme of the encounter. Only a few encounters have really felt thematically unified.

6) Fights revolve around the human reaction time. This has been a problem since LK. While these horribly quick paced fights are seen as many times harder than their slower counterparts, a lot of the difficulty stemmed from getting used to the encounter. Thus, every encounter since then has pretty much been predictable.

7) Utility matters even less. With all the technology that Blizzard has at their disposal, they have done a horrible job at building up on utility. This stems from LK's 'bring the player, not the class' philosophy. Generally, if you are tank you are only threating and surviving; if you are a healer, you are only healing or shielding; and, if you are a damage dealer, you are only dealing damage! I remember when they brought Life Grip into the mix, i was so happy, expecting to get a lot of use out of the spell. In the CC raids that i did, i don't remember needing it at all.

In my opinion, this is why fights seem less memorable.

1) Interesting view, yet as I think about it, there are no fights in ToS where adds are a source of problem. Each fights strongly feels like the fight against specific boss. The exception would be Desolate Host, but thats understandable due to character of the encounter.

2) Actually, the true "single target" attacks dont exist in real world. When somethine explodes, it deals damage to everybody around. Projectile deals dmg to everybody it hits - and that is true for every moving or falling object. I don't see any bosses in ToS for which the AoE dmg seems forced (oh, ok, maybe Harjatan with his AoE melee attacks). Besides, why would you bring healers if there was no unavoidable dmg? This isn't arcade action game.

3) The true purpose of tank switch is to force guilds to bring 2 tanks. Tank deals less dmg than dps, and does no raid healing, so its less desirable than other roles. If the fight can be done with 1 tank, it will be done with 1 tank. And you probably cant even imagine the lengths top guilds went to in order to deal with the fight with 1 tank.

4) Enrage timer exists so you cant cheese the fight by bringing 10 healers and 10 tanks. The dmg mitigation of such comp would make any raid encounter trivial.

5) Are we talking about the same game? Please tell me which ToS bosses have phases that feel unconnected.

6) I agree with that. In Vanilla WoW was all about preparation, now its all about speed and dexterity. That's just a Blizzard's view of how their game should look like. They are doing this on purpose.

7) Utility matters less than Vanilla, but certainly more than in Cata or MoP. Kil'jaeden's soaks are the antithesis of "bring player not the class" philosophy.

[Deleted]

I want a boss-room that's a maze. You have to chase the boss through it. He keeps making remarks about how "a-maze-ing" his maze is

[Deleted]

I'd love a raid encounter that's death by a thousand paper cuts instead of death by a fucking sledgehammer to the face whenever someone in your raid fucks up.

[Wilfire]

I don't remember anyone ever complaining about Firelands. On the contrary, most of the people in my realm really enjoyed that raid. People who think that switching realms, managing "corruption" and getting manhandled by adds are innovative mechanics probably never raided before Legion. The only bosses with unique mechanics in Legion are Guarm and Maiden. Everything else is super bland.

The thing is, unique mechanics and super-tight tuning never goes together. That's why the old raids always have a couple of "loot pinata" bosses in between the big boys. Putting 4 wipefests in a row = shit design.

[Deleted]

In modern incarnations of WoW, you are correct. But, if you were to reduce the power of healing spells, then you are wrong. In vanilla, a healing spell healed much less in proportion to the health of the player. In addition, the cost of the spell was far greater in proportion to the healer's total mana, throughout the fight.



Tanking now is arguably faceroll compared to vanilla. The boss tells you when to use taunt. The boss tells you when to use your cooldowns. Like i said, i last seriously raided in Cataclysm, and last seriously raided on a tank in Wrath of the Lich King. In LK, tanking was awfully simple for most fights.



Soft enrage isn't really an enrage. It just means you ran out of resources. It allows the raid flexibility, but having everyone heal except the tank or two tanks is quite the exaggeration. Blizzard put in the enrage timer so they can tell the raid exactly how much of a role you have to bring.



While i like Gruul's design (especially an earlier iteration), i am not arguing for no multiple phase encounters. I am arguing to reduce it tremendously, for example, to end bosses only.



It's really hard to find a good example in WoW, because of Blizzard's intent for an arcade game. Think chess. Beating your opponent can be really difficult even though you have a lot of time (at least compared to one's own reaction time) to make a move. You have to think for the future. This is largely non-existent in WoW, especially in anything past-BC.

Imagine you have to fight four trash mobs, W, X, Y, and Z. W is the highest damage, because he is a caster mob. X is a healer. Y is medium damage dealer, but cannot be tanked. And Z is a tank, who stuns and is otherwise a pain to leave up. You have only two forms of CC. Now, just like chess and current WoW, you come into the game with a plan. But, unlike current WoW, let's have our four mobs react to your actions. You cc X and Z, thinking you can just burst down W, and out heal all the damage that's coming up. All of a sudden, Z gets a random buff that grants him immunity to CC. How do you respond?

Now, i am not advocating for WoW to turn into a turn-based mmo, but just asking for more time to think. Of course, if you are given more time to think, those decisions must be more impactful. Right now, you either make the clear right choice or the clear wrong choice, but in a matter of a second. I shun this kind of design (at least, when it is every single fight).



Perhaps it was, i haven't played Legion. Though, i think if you were to count the amount of utility spells in the game right now, i would imagine most of them came with the original game, or some variation of it. Life Grip and Smoke Bomb are two that i know are not (and that was in the start of Cataclysm, when Blizzard was trying to relaunch vanilla, in some ways).

The issue i have with raiding nowadays largely stems from two things. 1) The unholy trinity of class design; and 2) The arcade feel of raid design.

Because of this, players have, generally, infinite resources in an encounter. Mana management is pretty much out the window. Thus, player health is out the window. You either have health, or you don't. When you add in more finite resources, you add in a whole new level of game design.

- - - Updated - - -



I haven't raided in Legion, so, i understand a lot of my points can only reflect the general feel of the modern state of the game. But, you hit on something very key. Let's say we have two classes, one is a marksman, the other is a demolitionist. The bombs guy clearly does more damage, so much more it is not even a contest. However, when he explodes the boss, he will be sure to do damage to all (friendly and enemy) nearby targets. The marksman's damage only hits the target of his choice.

With this, you put the damage onto player decision. Again, coupled with boss reaction, could make for some really interesting encounters.

Yup and the healing design in Vanilla forced healer to only cast a healing spell every 5 seconds, often cast cancelling etc... Maybe you like this design but i can tell you that not many people do, and it would be really funny to see the Wow forum if Blizzard implement Vanilla healing design in legion?

Tanking faceroll now compared to Vanilla????? Nothing else to say on this man. But every high end tank will disagree with you.

An exemple of soft enrage timer in Tos is mythic sister. And what was the only creativity here? Bringing 5 healers even 6 in some cases, so the raid could fuck up every mechanics.

For the one phase only encounter, i guess it's personnal preference, but so many great fights would have been so bad with only one phase.

And for your analogy with chess it is bad, because raids are PvE and not PvP. You can never predict what another human being will do.
Maybe you want more unpredictable encounters when you don't know what will happen next. But everytime there is RNG in an encounter, and guess what happens when there is rng in a fight? People complain.

[therealstegblob]

You are giving Firelands as an example of a good raid? Dayum... People memory is so short these days. This raid was considered super blend back then,

What are you talking about? Firelands was pretty well received. Other than the fact some people didn't like how the trash/raid layout went and people complained about Whats-his-name Balrog boss guy being too hard.

Anyways, I agree that in general raids lately have been a little under par, with stock mechanics for a lot of fights. They could use some new blood or new innovating ideas on their raid design team, I think.

[Khorm]

The most memorable fights have always had more than two tanks. Blizz needs to get creating 3 tank fights as the norm.

[Deleted]

The most memorable fights have always had more than two tanks. Blizz needs to get creating 3 tank fights as the norm.

I heavily disagree with that. It wouldn't be beneficial in any way to move to a permanent 3 tank setup other than trivialize every single fight even more for tanks. I rate how they did ToS in that regard. With a couple of viable 3 tank strategies but mainly still keeping the 2 tank format.

For me the most memorable fights from a tanking aspect in ToS is Mistress(really like that you could use the tank debuff to your advantage), Maiden(I enjoy fights where i have to plan my CDS corrctly or I'm screwed) and ofc KJ with fel claws and all the bonkers stuff going on.

[Deleted]

To each his own. I abhor the unholy trinity, and the effects on raid design are one of the reasons i hate it so much!

The holy trinity is this game's main pillar. For explanation and reference, compare it with GW2.

[Sergio]

You are giving Firelands as an example of a good raid? Dayum... People memory is so short these days. This raid was considered super blend back then, if not for Ragnaros that literally SAVED the raid from going down as one of the worst ever.

Er what. I raided all through Firelands, it was generally well received. The bosses for the most part were pretty interesting, alysrazor and ragnaros in particular standing out. Also the environment was fantastic. The only complaint about it that i remember was that it lasted too long for a raid with only 8 bosses. DS on the other hand...was a whole new level of suck.