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Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Raid Bosses and Raiding in General, just some random thoughts/ideas.....
I'm in the little crowd that really does NOT like raiding....AT ALL.., BUT if some things were changed it might shed some interest to others of like mind, including myself. Just the mere thought of going to the same place week after week or day after day and fighting the same bad guy just grates on my nerves. Even when there might be 1-2 different mechanics to kill the boss. (This might be a long post...so hang in there..) Let me start off with this: I do know you need to keep players playing, and keep the community healthy. This little scenario below will do that, and it will also have players roaming all the lands.
So imagine you have been tasked/quest line to kill the big boss, you have your raid together and you all meet up or set out. You know the location of the big baddie, and you are about to head down into the said location, but to your surprise one of the lackeys of the big boss sees you while out scouting/patrol and alerts the the big bad boss man and the boss comes and meets you as your raid just starts to get going. You are caught flat footed and now your raid REALLY has to think and work together as one cohesive unit in order to win this encounter.....
Your and your guild have pulled together, a miracle of miracles is about to happen, you and your friends are going to pull this off! Then all of a sudden the boss runs away/vanishes/or some calamity happens in order for the big guy to escape. Some rewards are left on the ground but the boss is completely gone.
So, you and your guild is left dumbfounded, what is left to do but to hunt the boss down. Where do you start, where do you look? If the dev team keeps the special skills certain players have they can use these abilities to find clues, BUT they won't be made available till the following day, and you will only have a certain amount of time to find all of the clues and piece them together to find where the boss is holed up or hiding out.
You have done your work, you have narrowed down the clues and asked many townsfolk throughout the land and you and your raid are at the said location and you do find the big baddy waiting for you. You and your guild mates start again...will you down the bad guy or will he/she escape again before you can bring him/her down and claim the victory?
The scenario above is just one example of how IS could change the face of the whole raid system as we know it and make it for the better. There is nothing better that kills suspension of disbelief than standing in front of a raid boss not 100 feet away, while the two or three spazatrons are jumping all over the place waiting to get started. I would rather be drug across the desert by a pack of mules than have to go through that again with a new game and world.
Some notes about the post above:
1. Not all bosses would be like the one above, it's just one example, but please just don't have them sitting there doing nothing. They could surprise the raid or have the boss be an illusion when they go to fight it, the raid finds it's an illusion and the raid boss comes up from behind them and starts the fight.
2. The decision if the boss leaves or stays could be set on damage...did the raid do X amount of damage in this allotted time? If not the boss escapes, if so they continue fighting. Some bosses just might be nasty and fight till the death.
3. If the boss escapes, team work in searching for the boss should be paramount, and it should take the guild to all places in the world, asking numerous townsfolk and city officials/guards. This will in turn give the players something to do and show them the world while doing so and thus learning about the other races and cultures in the world. (Remember we want to keep the players playing.)
4. This hunting for the boss could lead to some VERY interesting PVP situations when the boss is found and about to be encountered.
5. Who's to say that the raid boss fight should be just two encounters? Why not four encounters and break it up over a one month period, with 4 individual fights, with each having it's own unique set of parameters? Maybe the boss wants to run and for one encounter you can stop him/her before escaping.
The possibilities are endless and Intrepid is wanting to make MMO's great again. So change some things up while doing so. It would be such a nice breath of fresh air for raiding in general and it just might bring some new people into the fold as well.
constructive comments are welcome.
Best,
Bal
So imagine you have been tasked/quest line to kill the big boss, you have your raid together and you all meet up or set out. You know the location of the big baddie, and you are about to head down into the said location, but to your surprise one of the lackeys of the big boss sees you while out scouting/patrol and alerts the the big bad boss man and the boss comes and meets you as your raid just starts to get going. You are caught flat footed and now your raid REALLY has to think and work together as one cohesive unit in order to win this encounter.....
Your and your guild have pulled together, a miracle of miracles is about to happen, you and your friends are going to pull this off! Then all of a sudden the boss runs away/vanishes/or some calamity happens in order for the big guy to escape. Some rewards are left on the ground but the boss is completely gone.
So, you and your guild is left dumbfounded, what is left to do but to hunt the boss down. Where do you start, where do you look? If the dev team keeps the special skills certain players have they can use these abilities to find clues, BUT they won't be made available till the following day, and you will only have a certain amount of time to find all of the clues and piece them together to find where the boss is holed up or hiding out.
You have done your work, you have narrowed down the clues and asked many townsfolk throughout the land and you and your raid are at the said location and you do find the big baddy waiting for you. You and your guild mates start again...will you down the bad guy or will he/she escape again before you can bring him/her down and claim the victory?
The scenario above is just one example of how IS could change the face of the whole raid system as we know it and make it for the better. There is nothing better that kills suspension of disbelief than standing in front of a raid boss not 100 feet away, while the two or three spazatrons are jumping all over the place waiting to get started. I would rather be drug across the desert by a pack of mules than have to go through that again with a new game and world.
Some notes about the post above:
1. Not all bosses would be like the one above, it's just one example, but please just don't have them sitting there doing nothing. They could surprise the raid or have the boss be an illusion when they go to fight it, the raid finds it's an illusion and the raid boss comes up from behind them and starts the fight.
2. The decision if the boss leaves or stays could be set on damage...did the raid do X amount of damage in this allotted time? If not the boss escapes, if so they continue fighting. Some bosses just might be nasty and fight till the death.
3. If the boss escapes, team work in searching for the boss should be paramount, and it should take the guild to all places in the world, asking numerous townsfolk and city officials/guards. This will in turn give the players something to do and show them the world while doing so and thus learning about the other races and cultures in the world. (Remember we want to keep the players playing.)
4. This hunting for the boss could lead to some VERY interesting PVP situations when the boss is found and about to be encountered.
5. Who's to say that the raid boss fight should be just two encounters? Why not four encounters and break it up over a one month period, with 4 individual fights, with each having it's own unique set of parameters? Maybe the boss wants to run and for one encounter you can stop him/her before escaping.
The possibilities are endless and Intrepid is wanting to make MMO's great again. So change some things up while doing so. It would be such a nice breath of fresh air for raiding in general and it just might bring some new people into the fold as well.
constructive comments are welcome.
Best,
Bal
0
Comments
You spend months getting together 40 people all willing and able to raid at the same time of the day, on the same says each week. You spend time making sure you have an appropriate spread of classes. You spend time helping those that need to be leveled up. You spend time making sure everyone has an appropriate base equipment level. You spend time making sure everyone knows what they should be doing.
Then finally, your first raid day comes along.
You go in to the zone, get about 15 minutes in and the end boss of the zone comes charging in at you. You work him down until he's nearly dead and then he runs away.
Suddenly, you have no raid content.
You don't amass 40 players to go out in to the world and *find* an encounter. That is the domain of solo content - I believe they call it "questing".
The expectation of a raid - any raid - is that there is content to be had. That content could be instanced or it could be contested, the raid could succeed or it could fail. None of these things actually matter. The thing that matters is that when a raid assembles, there is content for them to take on. Not knowing where the content is functions the same as there being no content, and with no content, you have no raid.
In it's current state, this is literally the worst idea on these forums.
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However, there are some aspects of it that could work - if taken as individual ideas and then seriously altered.
You could have an encounter at the start of a raid zone that will run away - though players with CC would have to be able to stop this from happening so the raid can kill him if they want - though the difficulty of stopping him fleeing could actually be set quite hard.
If this encounter successfully runs, it will join the next boss in the zone - making that encounter much harder as you have two encounters to deal with. However, once again this boss could run away - using the exact same mechanics as the first fight.
This could carry on all the way through the zone, so that if a raid doesn't successfully CC and kill it, every encounter in the zone will have this encounter tacked on to the side of it, making the zone much longer and harder than it would have been if the raid had have killed it earlier.
To make it more interesting, the developers could make it so that the encounter that runs away adds additional drops to the loot table of the encounter it is killed with, on top of drops from it's own loot table. This would make it so that raids that want additional drops from mobs deep in the zone need to pull this encounter along with them, fighting against it but not killing it in every boss encounter until the one they want additional drops from.
I was wrong.
OP; make it so raid bosses can run away, forcing the raid to go out looking for them.
Me; no.
Find people you want to hang out with, and then you will enjoy raiding with them.
Perhaps start a new thread with this idea:
I'm not sure how many of you have played Zelda: Breath of the Wild, but there's an interesting element in that game that I think should be added to ALL rpg's - especially MMORPGs:
Sound: Monsters have Listen skills, and characters make noise
In other words, all enemies, bosses, etc, all have ears. It wouldn't be hard for a solo player to sneak up on a sleeping boss... but it'll be pretty darn difficult without a lot of coordination for a 40-man raid team to sneak up on anything.
Self preservation in animals is a very real thing, too - so I wouldn't mind if a big bad boss decides to take off running - but all mechanics would have to change in the desperation. But you shouldn't have to wait to finish a fight. If anything, it might drag a fight across a whole map or potentially run in to other mobs and creatures making the fight more difficult. If everybody dies somehow, maybe you have to track it down in a new location... but shouldn't be that difficult with 40+ people searching - even if they all weren't Ranger's with a tracking skill.
You could even add the gift of sight to enemies, too! Crazy idea. If they see you in their territory, or dungeon, or cave... they attack the intruder. None of this boring "Oh, there's a ton of people piling in to my room... and they're awkwardly staring at me with armor and weapons... Well, they just killed everybody else in this room - but those guys were jerks... I wonder if they're friendly home invaders?"
An encounter that can hear you coming could be good, if your group or raid are quiet enough you can catch the encounter sleeping, feeding or otherwise off guard. This would be good as an occasional mechanic to use.
Encounters fleeing is never a good idea. I can not think of one animal - real or fantasy - that would take 40 people to kill, and would run if you infiltrated it's home. Everything I can think of would defend it's home to the death.
Same with sentient beings - few that are strong enough to require that kind of force to take down would flee under any circumstance.
As I said in the second post of this thread, if you organize a raid of 40 people to come together and suddenly find yourself without a target to take on (not knowing where the target is functions the same as not having a target), then you don't have a raid.
Locating the encounter is what quests are for - not what you assemble a raid to do.
Addition- in my original post, I'm sure I didn't explain it well enough, by the boss running away, this wasn't just after a few hits, this would be after almost a 20 -30 minute fight, this way you could break the whole fight(full life to death) into a sequence of events and the boss would be doing some REALLY cool stuff for each stage of the fights/encounters ,which would take place over the span of a few weeks.
I'm just tired of the same ole go here and kill this guy mess..it's time for something new, but i'm sure the groans would be enormous, because people don't like change and I'm sure there will be plenty of people screaming wow clone before it's all over with.
Don't get me wrong either, I SOOO want this game to succeed, and I think it and the whole genre needs a MAJOR makeover.
Your idea in the OP literally takes raiding and turns it in to content that exists in solo play as quests - running around trying to find an NPC.
That's like a raider that doesn't like crafting saying "you know what would get me more in to crafting? If a dragon was trying to kill me while I crafted, and me and my 39 friends had to kill it!". That idea would be trying to turn crafting in to raiding, something equally as uncool as trying to turn raiding in to solo questing.
Ashes raids will have variety. There will be some randomness in the encounters, and there should be some entire raid dungeons that have their population alter based on local node influence - to the point where some of these dungeons may not even be accessible on some servers.
With the variety that is planned for raiding, if you still do not enjoy it, then simply accept the sentiment of yours that I have quoted above. Come to the conclusion that raiding is not for you, rather to the conclusion that raiding should change to suit you.
Not everything has to change and Making MMO's Great Again means going back to tried and true systems that other games have tried, and failed, to reinvent.