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Open world raids
akatosh
Member
With 80% of the raids being open world how will you prevent more then 40 people from doing a raid and trivializing its difficulty? I wouldn't mind some mechanic where the first group who tags it is the only one that can damage the boss, but I feel if the bosses are tuned for 40 players and the raids are open world. What would prevent a guild from taking say 48 players instead and making the raid super easy. Or at worst case them being just farmed areas where 80 or 100 players kill the bosses in 30 seconds as soon as it spawns. I don't mind the idea of pvp inside the raids, having to defend from other groups as well perhaps, although I don't like the idea of raids just being completely trivial.
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https://youtube.com/watch?v=LUJugtqTBxw&feature=youtu.be&t=24m17s
I forgot which boss it was but wow had a boss that the more people near it the stronger it got. They used to drag it to cities which pretty much required a gm to get rid of due to every person making it stronger.
I believe that was scaling where the Raids would scale to Levels etc, IS have stated Raids will be dynamic (or aim to be) where subsequent Bosses will be determined by the previous Boss Encounter in terms of threat/danger etc. Which is a kind of Scaling.
He answers that in the video I linked - they're going to use fight mechanics to ensure you can't zerg a boss and still need to actually perform boss mechanics correctly to down a boss. So even if you have 80 players, you'd still need to understand the fight to make sure you completed it. But it is open world regardless so you're going to risk having more than 40 people show up and you can't prevent that, so they're going to ensure that regardless of raid size, skill will still be required and more will not equal easier or faster fights.
I do not understand the position of IS then, how can one limit a Raid to 40 People when another 40 People can come in and out DPS you or fight you for the Boss? I imagine there is a contradiction of terms or practices and won't be able to assess it until I test the game or see these mechanics in action.
Yea I'm wondering how that's even going to work from a technical standpoint...?
How can you make subsequent Bosses more difficult based on previous bosses in an Open Environment?
How can you prevent a second Raid Group entering a Boss Area in an Open Environment without wiping both Raids Present?
How can two Raids compete for a Raid Boss if the Raid Boss has mechanics to prevent the two Raids from being in the same sphere of combat?
How can one Raid do 40% Damage Based on the Tag but a second Raid can do 60% Damage without a Tag and receive the loot?
How can you limit an encounter to 40 Man in an Open Environment unless you remove points of contestation?
The simple answer would be that some of these practices relate to Open Raids and some related to Instanced Raids...otherwise I'm completely stumped.
Now, if you were part of a group trying to steal a boss, you could use sacrificial pawns to trigger the dot scaling while focusing down enemy healers, and once the original raid group is dead, your raid moves in and picks up the boss. Easy peasy.
You can do the same thing with spawned adds, where they become more powerful and numerous based on the number of challengers within the boss' zone of influence, and those are all extremely simplistic anti-zerg mechanisms.
Things could be made more complex and challenging by say, reducing healing effectiveness within the boss' ZOI based on the number of people within a certain distance, or having the boss gain additional stats based on overall damage inflicted while leveraging AOE or environmental damage sources.
Even something as simple as "Boss drains n% of hp & mp of anyone within 100m every n. After draining x HP & MP, boss will use its ultimate, necessitating the use of mitigation and survival cooldowns across the raid. If the boss can then instantly do that again because too many people are close by, and all of a sudden it becomes unkillable.
As for making subsequent bosses more difficult based on how quickly a previous boss was killed, I mean, that's not that hard. Boss A sets a flag with its TTK when it dies. Boss B stats, skill costs/cooldowns, or mechanic flags are adjusted based on FlagA. Boss B sets a flag with its TTK when it dies. Boss C has adjustments made based on Flag A and Flag B.
We're in pre-alpha. The specifics you're asking for simply don't exist. o.o
Yet.
It's important to realise that a lot of systems haven't yet been implemented within the game. Just feeling like you should be able to get information on raid scaling and anti-zerg mechanics doesn't make that something that's necessarily true.
Primary archetypes haven't even been completely implemented yet, artisan classes, nodes, etc. All these systems through which players will interact with and participate in Verra are still in early iterations if they've been implemented at all.
As passionate as you might be about the subject, things that haven't been implemented won't suddenly appear just because you want it to be so. If nothing but specifics will satisfy you, then I recommend patience. We'll get them when they're available. Development doesn't happen overnight.
I'd love to hear someone at Intrepid talk about this a bit because it's an interesting idea but I'm a bit skeptical in how it can work - either instanced or open world. Once the boss's have spawned, that's it, isn't it? I don't understand how the mechanics of the fight or the loot they drop can differ after that point.
You can't and that's the risk part that they want people to deal with. From what I've read/watched I don't think any are going to be instanced. Although the endboss in the open world dungeon today had an instance portal. In Discord they said that was an open world/shared boss area, but theoretically they could make those private instances. However again, not sure that's currently their plan.
From playing other open world PvP games with significant world bosses, you will always have the fear of being wiped. In Aion often people would try to get to the world boss as soon as it spawned - which was hard enough to figure out by itself - so that you could try to down the boss before anyone knew it was even there. Sometimes we'd just have players camping the spot where a boss spawned to try to get it first which is fun by itself. In a game like this with very little fast travel, someone is probably going to be able to be early (and thus alone) often enough.
However there will always be times where it's a competition between you and other guilds, in which case what happens is anyone's guess - sometimes people will decide to just try to out dps one another, sometimes people may decide to try to wipe you via PvP. The unknown is the risk and excitement I think the devs intend to exist.
There's an interview somewhere - can't remember which because I've watched too many recently - of Steven reminiscing about his ArcheAge days and spending 24 hours battling with other guilds over the Kraken world boss. So I think he's hoping for similar competition here (perhaps not 24 hours, though lol).
Ok so this part hasn't been confirmed - " if the Raid Boss has mechanics to prevent the two Raids from being in the same sphere of combat?" In the interview he just generally stated there will be mechanics that you need to learn and perform correctly in order to not get wiped. He even said you can bring as many players as you want and these mechanics will wipe you if done wrong. So there is no separation of raid groups.
So like everything in the wiki, it's best to read/view all related references in full to get the entire picture. The wiki is brief notes at best that do not give the full picture. Here's the reference for that which makes it easier to understand - https://youtube.com/watch?v=KtVUiS7yAHE&feature=youtu.be&t=1h24m56s
The short answer is that bosses are won by the raid that does the most damage. Period. The more detailed answer is that tagging the boss first give you a "boost" to the overall dps contribution your raid needs in order to win the loot. So the 40/60 numbers were examples to illustrate the idea that if you tag first, you can still do less dps than the other raid and still win the loot because you got the "first tag dps bonus". But what percentage of the total dps you'd need is unknown. I'm sure in Alpha 1 they can test and we'll get more information.
I don't think you do, that's why they've proposed certain mechanics that would wipe raids of any size if done correctly, and I think that's totally doable based on what I've seen in other games.