Random vs scripted pve game mechanics

[Wadrak]

Hard pass.

Because then you beating the encounter is decided not by planning and organisation, but by getting lucky and have that ability that would have killed you not go off. It's no longer a question of getting of phase 3 within 3 casts by dropping a healer or doing more DPS to beat it within 3 minutes, and now a case of hoping that it doesn't cast it quickly enough to kill you.

I understand your scepticism ... but then you can ask yourself whether beating a script a pattern means any success at all ?

Yes you can plan for it and organize better but is it at all challenging ?

[Garymorilix]

Well since you wouldnt know what RNG you gonna get you couldnt stack classes for it.

And yes perhaps it would make it easier for some guilds then others if they got perfect RNG.

But if its for greater good and makes the game more fun and challenging then I would prefer that.

Because race for world first, realm first etc is nice. But in practice this wouldnt affect it that much.
And its only small part of the game which would affect few players.



It means you have to react quick to unknown ability. Which creates more challenge.
If you know whats coming because you done encounter before its like:

Ah yees this is coming now ... zzzzzzz ... oh yes this ... zzzzzzz ... now this move there .... zzzzzzzzz

If you didnt know what happen you would have to keep your attention high and be ready for more possiblities.

What do you mean you wouldn't stack classes?

The exact opposite.
If you only had 5 seconds to move from one side of the room to the other and it triggers randomly then I can guarantee you you would exclude all the immobile classes right away. Literally banning shamans/wlocks/whatever from that encounter.

Reacting quickly to random sh*t is not how classes are designed in WoW.
You 2-5min cooldown on defensive CD's. What if the boss does a massive AoE where you had to use it and then it does the same in 30 seconds again randomly?
A clean wipe just because it randomly happened in this order?

And before you say "well, they can just make sure the same ability doesn't happen twice in a row" it is not an argument.
Any 2 ability could happen in a row that caues a wipe.

Raids and even dungeons have much tighter designs now with many abilities happening at the same time BUT in a controlled fashion.
You make it random and the whole encounter becomes a dice-roll.
This is not Classic where bosses have 3 abilities total and you just sit there and spam 1 spell to DPS. In that environment this could potentially work. This is not that environment.

If you were an actual Mythic player you wouldn't be asking for this type of bullshit anyway.
You tell me how Azshara or N'zoth or literally any boss would be more fun with random timers on random abilities.

[Oscassey]

But what if we instead had bosses which would use abilites at little bit more random timers ?
In order to create more challenge in the game.

I personally like the faction champions in WotLK. But I think it wasn't the opinion of the majority (cf. https://wow.gamepedia.com/Faction_Champions).

[Blackmist]

I understand your scepticism ... but then you can ask yourself whether beating a script a pattern means any success at all ?

Yes you can plan for it and organize better but is it at all challenging ?

Given only a tiny percentage of players complete full clears on Mythic before it's obsolete, I'd say yes. Yes it is.

[Ferozan]

I remember two cases of randomness that were pretty tense on pandaria that blizzard fixed.

The first boss in Heroic HoF would choose the left or the right platform at the start. If it went right, it would be doable, but if it went left, it would be pretty impossible to deal with the mechanics. I remember even Blood Legion making a twitter meme account of him joking about that.

The second case was the Paragons of the Klaxxi Heroic encounter. On PTR, it was supposed to be a random order of the bosses every pull judging by the adventurer's journal, but Blizzard quickly tossed that idea away to keep the order fixed. You would choose the kill order, but the order the bosses joined the fight was fixed.

A good recent example of bad RNG in fights would be Jaina's boats. The first phase boats RNG was kinda bizarre, there would be pulls that the boats came earlier or later than usual, changing the P1 dynamic because the blizzard fog mechanic was on a fixed timer.

[faithbane]

Well since you wouldnt know what RNG you gonna get you couldnt stack classes for it.

And yes perhaps it would make it easier for some guilds then others if they got perfect RNG.

But if its for greater good and makes the game more fun and challenging then I would prefer that.

Because race for world first, realm first etc is nice. But in practice this wouldnt affect it that much.
And its only small part of the game which would affect few players.



It means you have to react quick to unknown ability. Which creates more challenge.
If you know whats coming because you done encounter before its like:

Ah yees this is coming now ... zzzzzzz ... oh yes this ... zzzzzzz ... now this move there .... zzzzzzzzz

If you didnt know what happen you would have to keep your attention high and be ready for more possiblities.

You don't get it and won't get it because you are avoiding what I even said in my comment but let me try to explain further. The whole combat gameplay of wow and abilities are structured for proactive/preparation gameplay and not reactive gameplay. We have CDs that we have to save fur certain phases and we need to know when they are coming to plan ahead. "I don't know how long of a dps window I would have to burst because when/which ability is coming next is uncertain" is not a mentality that fits this current game, same goes for defensive abilities, potions etc. Also, by setting a system in which users can't prepare because of not knowing which ability is next, you are forcing all the abilities to be less impactful/deadly since you can't punish people or have 1 shot mechanics when you design those mechanics to come randomly/by surprise. In the end, you will end up with a game where each ability has its "punishment/damage" on the the back-end since you can't front-load surprise damage which would be quite boring as well.

[Jazzhands]

Well since you wouldnt know what RNG you gonna get you couldnt stack classes for it.

And yes perhaps it would make it easier for some guilds then others if they got perfect RNG.

But if its for greater good and makes the game more fun and challenging then I would prefer that.

Because race for world first, realm first etc is nice. But in practice this wouldnt affect it that much.
And its only small part of the game which would affect few players.

No, it literally affects all players who raid. Even if you're just a heroic/normal guild, you will still face the RNG issue every boss that you actually have to try on. It's not fun when only 1 out of however many attempts is even a viable attempt for victory, and that's exactly what this would do.

[Kumorii]

I understand your scepticism ... but then you can ask yourself whether beating a script a pattern means any success at all ?

Yes you can plan for it and organize better but is it at all challenging ?

Challenge is not decided by randomness.

[Accendor]

Hey guys,

I came back to wow recently to prepare for Shadowlands which I would like to play.

I was playing some bfa dungeons and raids.

And as we all know PvE encounters are scripted.
For example

Boss 1, is going to use ability A in 30 seconds
ability B in 45 seconds
again ability A in another 30 seconds
ability C in 2 mins
ability B in another 45 seconds.

So we have addons like Deadly boss mods or BigWigs etc to show us countdown when these abilities happen.

But what if we instead had bosses which would use abilites at little bit more random timers ?
In order to create more challenge in the game.

For example

Boss 1, is going to use ability A in 10-30 seconds
ability B in 30-55 seconds
again ability A in another 10-30 seconds
ability C in 1.30-2:30 mins
ability B in another 30-55 seconds.

Or what if for example adds group which spawn during bosses would each time spawn different mobs ?

I think boss like inquistor guy in Vault of Wardens he always spawned different add group in random order (not 100% sure about this, maybe it was the same order)
Or in Violet hold dungeon you always get different boss out of the pool, even though the dungeon was too easy, because of no mythic plus

I think it could make the pve encounters a lot more fun and challenging if its more random rather then scripted.

I know in Tower of Torghast they add random enemies you face each time. This is nice.

At first there was only one difficulty of dungeons and raids.
Then they added heroic more dungeons, later raids.
They they added mythic dungeons and raids. After that mythic plus affixes.

Players always improved and catch up even with mythic plus

I dont know perhaps this could be another way to make the game more challenging

There are already a lot of bosses who are not using their CDs "on cooldown". They use an ability and then you are guaranteed that they do not use them for e.g. 20sec, but if they use it after 25 or 30 or 35 sec is not always the same.

On the other hand, especially on higher difficulties, randomness really becomes a pain, even if it is only small things.
E.g. in the N'Zoth fight the boss spawns eyes that can rotate clockwise or counterclockwise. Those eyes then shoot lasers through the room which you have to dodge. Getting hit once almost certainly means you die and most of the time during progress, if one person dies, the whole try is over.
Depending on your strategy you always want the eyes to move in a specific direction, because it makes them much easier to dodge. Yes, it's doable even when they move in the "wrong" direction, but its simply harder.
In addition to that this mechanic happens like 9-10 minutes into the fight, so "randomly" wasting that much feels terrible, especially after 300 pulls.

Same is true for the bosses in Violet Hold. The concept is really cool, but as soon as m+ comes into play, there will always be that one random boss that just wipes your run while another one basically means you can not fail the run anymore.

[mojusk]

randomness is good to an extend, its bad if theres a option A B and C and if you get C you might aswell wipe.

[ymirsson]

I understand your scepticism ... but then you can ask yourself whether beating a script a pattern means any success at all ?

Yes you can plan for it and organize better but is it at all challenging ?

So, what about your cutting edge achievements?

[Echeyakee]

Some randomness is ok, but overall I think it should be scripted. It makes for a much better experience, when it's consistent. Especially in mythic raiding, it's really disheartening to wipe because you "got unlucky". It's simply bad and lazy design.

[Wadrak]

So, what about your cutting edge achievements?

Lol

I got all glorys of the raider in WotLK excluding the ICC one with mounts with black proto drake. Done within current content.
Realm first Algalon 10 man.

Since then I only played here and there did only few mythic bosses, none in BFA actually.

[erifwodahs]

All in all random fights would be meh design same as overtunning to increase difficulty rather then making some cool mechanics.
Some random stuff is present in the game which is more of a scripted random than plain random, which is ok, but any more would just create Extreme ups and downs where boss difficulty is either HC if you are lucky or mythic KJ if you get unlucky. Again, creating a fight with "dead pulls" is bad design.
People being lucky or unlucky is why curruptions sucked for parsing or in PvP. You could get lucky and just "proc" someone down in arenas or get unlucky and get oneshot. Trust me, being unable to do anything about your death is very very frustrating pvp or pve.

[ymirsson]

Lol

I got all glorys of the raider in WotLK excluding the ICC one with mounts with black proto drake. Done within current content.
Realm first Algalon 10 man.

Since then I only played here and there did only few mythic bosses, none in BFA actually.

So it is not as easy as you made it seem like?

[keldarepewpew]

No adding randomness to the boss mechanics wont make the bosses more intresting or harder it will simply lead to more outliers, world first might get scored because some guild randomly gets a super super super easy pattern imagine how dumb that would be.

It would cause so many dumb situations its actually funny. One week your guild might one shot a boss and then On the reclear you might have bad rng and be unable to kill it at all. Im glad blizzard doesn’t do this props to them.

[aceperson]

my issue with adding rng to pve content is how do you balanced the fight around the possibiltiy that abilities may overlap? without rng, you can ensure whether it will or won't happen and thus allow preplanning. with rng, if it happens, you need to react extremely fast or wipe and there may be another overlap before you get those cds again. if you wipe to something that is not your fault, the fun is gone.

[Accendor]

Lol

I got all glorys of the raider in WotLK excluding the ICC one with mounts with black proto drake. Done within current content.
Realm first Algalon 10 man.

Since then I only played here and there did only few mythic bosses, none in BFA actually.

I basically had the same achievements during Wotlk, except server first algalon. We killed him, but a little bit later.

Let me tell you that Woltk difficulty is nothing compared to e.g. Legion and BfA. Like at all.
Final raid bosses regularly need 300 tries and more, even for good guilds. I don't know why you think that is not challenging enough.

[Wadrak]

So it is not as easy as you made it seem like?

And what are your achievements when you say its so challenging ?

[ymirsson]

And what are your achievements when you say its so challenging ?

That question makes no sense.