Multi-phase fights that could be practiced independently, or raidwide BR each phase

[garicasha]

TL;DR Fights where you could either choose what phase you wanted to work on, or fights where a phase 1 wipe just battle rezzed everyone and allowed them to do phase 2, 3, 4... could be a good way to reduce burnout while keeping end bosses as epic encounters.

Part of the reason I post this now is because it'd fit well for a (possible spoiler, click to see) Murozond encounter.

Ever since Kael'Thas v.1.0 we've known that fights with phases of increasing difficulty are exponentially harder than fights with easier final phases. By making these changes that could be smoothed out.

One way the game could be made more difficult in a way that would give top end players more of a challenge without shutting out more casual players would be fights with very different phases, except the phases could be practiced independently.

There's a couple of ways this could be done.
First it could just be like how the Malygos drakes worked, where there were "practice" drakes as part of a daily that you could mess around with and read the abilities of without being in Phase 3 of the actual fight.

A second way would simply be a fight where for whatever reason you could just select any phase of the fight to start on. This would probably work best for a robot or mechanical-themed boss, although 'magic' can be a catchall of course.

A third way, which I think would be cool for Murozond, is the "Grand Magistrix Elisande" way where you go back in time and do every phase. Although maybe that's a bad example, because I'm actually picturing, say, a five-phase fight, but if you wipe on phase 1 everyone just gets battle rezzed and phase 2 starts.

This would be really good because it'd prevent burnout somewhat as you're not doing phase 1 over and over and over, but if the fight is 10ish minutes long, then in an entire raid night of 3 hours with 5 minutes between wipes / breaks, a guild would get 12 pulls in. Then each night they'd only spend a max of 24 minutes doing any single phase. So it wouldn't be like that first night of Mythic Kil'Jaeden progression (and many other bosses such as Denathrius, Rygelon, Anduin, anything where one mistake = doing phase 1 again), where every time someone misses a meteor soak you do Phase 1 again and nothing else.

It'd be good for mythic because the phases could be really action packed. Kinda like Rygelon, who...I think his entire thing was scripted to take only 90 seconds, but there was so much going on and people had to DPS the adds and go to the void so dang fast that it was really quite difficult. So the cutting-edge guilds could bash their heads on 5 super hard phases and have something to do. But if the phases have to be done sequentially, then the time commitment to learn each progressive phase makes the fight exponentially harder on guilds where the members aren't at a world-first level. This would make it much easier for guilds for whom Cutting Edge isn't a foregone conclusion a chance to learn the whole fight.

But it's also a good addition to the game for more casual guilds, as they tend to spend more time taking breaks and letting dogs out and talking about strategy for 15 minutes instead of just pulling. By allowing them to see every phase every pull, they'd get to spend more time actually playing the game because their longer wipe recovery times would happen less often.

But I really do think this would be a good change that caters to players of every skill level. And WoW is such a mature game that there are enormous differences in skill levels.

[VinceVega]

Mh... i don't think i would like that. It makes bosses just completly useless also the first time you manage to fight through phase one it is mostly a fluke 99% of the time. Only BECAUSE you have to do it over and over again is it, that this phase falls so fast.

If you just have to do it once and then never again you won't learn anything on how to optimize the phase. Think about ressource management.

The first few tries on Sarakreth i did not give a fuck about my mana as a healer as it was more about learning the fight. First time getting him through to the last phase a was 100% utterly oom.
So am i 100% forever on this fight because we did not know how the phase was played really? Or does everyone get 100% mana/life back after a wipe making mana 100% useless as i can just spam spam spam. Let us intentionally die. Get 100% mana back and again for the next phase?

Also in the next week we just stand again at the point where we would wipe trough phase 1 over and over again.

EVERY raid guild i have been part of (normal heroic or mythic) got to the point after at most 2 weeks where phase 1 was learned and not a huge problem anymore. So it takes 3 minutes each try.
None of them woul dhave had the experience wihtout wiping and repeating it and would have wasted way more time each week getting to that point again.

[potis]

No.

There is a thin line between "bad design, and what is this boring shit" versus "this is okay"

It has nothing to do with phases, a boss could still only have 1-2 phases and take forever if the values are adjusted, the only problem is the length of the fights not the phases.

Firstly pretty much fights longer than 7mins are boring, was the consensus when similar discussions appeared, and 7mins means the average guild, which means top guilds blast them in 5-6mins or less.

What i would prefer to see, instead of 15min fights like Sylvanas or Guldan and a few other similar fights, it would be better if they were split into two fights of 5-7mins, with obviously the second fight having some sort of elements or extra scaling like the boss runs off to meet the second boss, or his pet, or his generals, and gains new abilities cause buff X, or enchantment Y.

Of course there would always be people complaining "OMG LAZY BLIZZARD", but i would totally prefer a 15 min boss, to be created into 2 bosses with even more abilities, with the second fight being more dangerous/maybe not nerfed for no fucking reason after the 2 month mark.

Secondly, most first phases are literally retard checks in every end game boss, they might be there, but there is 0 excuse failing them after the literally second time, if not first, its just people being bad that causes things.

The mechanics of most phase ones are literally braindead level.

[ONCHEhap]

What i would prefer to see, instead of 15min fights like Sylvanas or Guldan and a few other similar fights, it would be better if they were split into two fights of 5-7mins, with obviously the second fight having some sort of elements or extra scaling like the boss runs off to meet the second boss, or his pet, or his generals, and gains new abilities cause buff X, or enchantment Y.

So pretty much FFXIV final bosses.
Works well there, would work well here

[Hold]

I feel like this was tried with the sha of fear to a rather lackluster results with the buff you recieved after clearing the first phase.

[potis]

So pretty much FFXIV final bosses.
Works well there, would work well here

Yeah, but FF has been doing that in their single player games since forever, multiple phases of boss opening or spawning larger, or whatever similar form they do there in JRPGs.

FFXIV following the trend is simply being a FF game and its okay, not every other boss should do this, but we already had a few 15min bosses, lets not have any more from now on is my point.

[Elbob]

so you wipe in p1, the boss resses you and you continue the fight. You then complete the rest of the fight flawlessly and the boss dies? or he hits 1 hp and just kills everyone? wtf?

How would this work with bosses that phase on hp or do fight altering mechanics based on hp. This idea seems super half baked and I suspect the finished product wont be much better. There are INDIVIDUAL fights this concept has worked with IE Avatar of Sargeras but to try and force that sort of thing on to every fight just sounds restrictive to fight creation.

[Jujudrood]

I would just prefer they stop making 10+ minute encounters.
Shit is boring.

[Thirtyrock]

Snip

I definitely think a "practice mode" where you could start on any phase of an end boss fight would be good. It wouldn't count towards a kill, obviously, but being able to start on p3 of Rasz or Sark and practice just the mechanics of that phase would be really nice.

[Zardas]

Spine and Madness could be considered as what you mean : instead of having a huge Deathwing fight in multiple phases, we got 2 "bosses". So might as well do that again (but better of course).

[garicasha]

so you wipe in p1, the boss resses you and you continue the fight. You then complete the rest of the fight flawlessly and the boss dies? or he hits 1 hp and just kills everyone? wtf?

How would this work with bosses that phase on hp or do fight altering mechanics based on hp. This idea seems super half baked and I suspect the finished product wont be much better. There are INDIVIDUAL fights this concept has worked with IE Avatar of Sargeras but to try and force that sort of thing on to every fight just sounds restrictive to fight creation.

It could be done a few different ways:
—5 phase boss, after every 2 minutes you get rezzed and returned to full, you have to do 20% of his health in every phase or you lose. If you hit 20% early you go in to the next phase so you can’t just skip Phase 5.

—Multi phase boss with a final phase that gives you some sort of buff for how you did in each of the previous ‘loops’, tuned tight enough that no performing each phase / loop would result in hitting berserk

But most importantly, I’m not suggesting this is the sort of thing they should use for Every boss.

And there would have to be something that adjusted mana use to be relevant since it’d get reset each loop. Maybe just starting with a set pool and then no regen. Although I'm not a huge fan of the idea as Vezax was one of the most gimmicky fights ever, but maybe a debuff that increased mana costs by 3x so that it was possible with poor play to go OOM in 2 minutes.

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If you just have to do it once and then never again

That’s not what I’m proposing at all with either idea. In the time ‘loop’ idea you’re still doing phase 1 every pull…you’re just also doing all the others as well.

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Fights longer than 7mins are boring.

Part of the reason for this is that these super long fights have to be made a little easier to account for that exponential difficulty that happens when a raid can only practice a really difficult phase when they do all the previous phases flawlessly. This was almost certainly a factor in the difficulty of Sylvanas phases 1 and 2, which were probably kept a little easier because Phase 3 is very, very hectic.

One other idea that wouldn't use Elisande time loops is just that instead of players dying, they get to continue playing. So maybe they get a debuff and the only way you pass the boss at the end is if the whole raid doesn't have the debuff, or maybe it's like a Hodir ice block on Yogg-Saron thing where you get a timeout but get to keep playing. Again there's a dozen different ways they could actually do this, the core part of the idea is that the boss fights could be kept epic without being completely impossible if the raid got to do the WHOLE fight every pull instead of stopping every time a mechanic was failed. And I'm not saying we do this for every single boss or even every end boss, just I think it would be a cool idea for Murozond in particular.

But I don't think I've explained the idea real well, because pretty much every comment was shooting down something that wasn't part of my idea.