Boss mechanics

Edit: as a little clarification, this is just a fun topic I like to think about and hear other fun ideas, nothing more.

SInce we are all throwing around inspirations about this and ideas about that, I thought. Let's do something less graphical, because I'm genuially no fun and wrant to write huge walls of texts.
Let's talk about something that will keep you engaged differently then being awed at how good/terrifying it looks.

Boss mechanics.
(sorry for the horrendous quality but it didn't want to check 50 videos to find one without talk over commentary)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b496Mc9A4U0&t=53s
Maybe not the greatest boss mechanic of all time, but it was funny and different, so that's all this thread will be about.

Throw me your most stupidly fun boss mechanics you can think off.

One I always had was for a Boss that's not so much about killing, but keeping it in check, maybe even just an "unbeatable" add that has to be controlled and kept at bay, not killed.
Illustration below

Just imagine a huge room with lots of pillars, a Boss guarding an entrance, chains that keeps him in the room, but can stretch a long long time.
You aren't gona fight him really, but he's gonna enrage on you, chase you and you somehow have to navigate him around the room around those pillars until the chains can't stretch any further. He also has to be far enough away from the entrace now so you can pass. (insert some magical blabla like his proximity gives the entrance a magic barrier)
I would add to that that you can only cross chains on certain conditions, but in general they are gona decrease the "effective room size" you can use again and again. (old spider vs snake game anyone?)

So yeah, a boss that's not about killing, but figuring out what the clear condition is, and how to achiev it.

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Comments

Rem_

Well I haven't played an mmorpg really so I can't say much but I'd love to see unique fights~! That chess one seems so cool~! Maybe ones where DPSing the boss isn't the only way to beat him~!

Say maybe you could use some abilities together with your huge group that push enemies back, and you just push the boss off a platform that you're fighting on. I'm obviously terrible at giving examples since I have no experience but I thought I'd try

Karthos

Kara was easily my favorite BC raid, simply because of the atmosphere.

Atama

Karthos wrote: »

Kara was easily my favorite BC raid, simply because of the atmosphere.

Best Wizard of Oz-based raid in an MMO ever.

Wandering Mist

Unique boss mechanics are fine as long as they make sense and fit the theme of the dungeon. Putting the chess event into a raid like Icecrown Citadel for example would have been a terrible idea because the theme is totally different.

Putting weird mechanics into a fight just for the sake of it doesn't work. The mechanics have to make sense, both in terms of the lore and the gameplay.

Damokles

I really like bosses, where all members of a raid have to actually look out and keep on their feet^^
(Like Xul'horac in WoD, it was always fun to blame other people when they went boom

)

Wandering Mist

Damokles wrote: »

I really like bosses, where all members of a raid have to actually look out and keep on their feet^^
(Like Xul'horac in WoD, it was always fun to blame other people when they went boom )

Personal responsibility in raids is a tricky thing, especially if failing a boss mechanic means the raid instantly wipes. Yes it makes sense to have everyone in the raid responsible for the outcome of a fight, but in practice it can be very very frustrating. Expecting 20-40 people to perform a tactic perfectly 100% of the time is unreasonable in my opinion, and that's not even accounting for random lag spikes or anything else that can happen out of a player's control.

Personally, I like mechanics that force the raid group to adapt and change their tactics on the fly. I believe this is a much better test of a raid team's skill than just following a guide and executing a pre-planned strategy. For example, on the "Zul Reborn" fight in Uldir you had blood pools that would do a ton of damage to the entire raid unless someone stood in the pool. Simple enough to handle, just assign one person (usually a healer) to stand in the pool at all times. But then you had another mechanic that put a debuff on a random person that had to move to the edge of the room before the debuff expired. If the player who was soaking the blood pool also got the debuff, the raid would have to change their strategy slightly to accommodate it.

It's a simple thing but it requires good communication in the raid to handle.

Damokles

@wanderingmist
A good example for adaptibility would be the Circle of Shivarra in Legion then?
They summoned one of 4 different gods and each time the raid had to do something different.
Aman'thul: burst them one or two at the time before they can reset their health and slowly wipe the raid
Golganneth: Dont stack and spread out
Kaz'goroth: Dont stand in the middle, and dont stand infront of the adds
Norgannon: Pray that the shaman/druid or dk are good enough to stack the adds

I also really like such fights, but they are a pain in a pug ;D

Wandering Mist

@Damokles

Not really, because although there was an element of randomness to the fight, every possible scenario still had a fixed strategy for dealing with it. Yor'sahj in Dragonsoul had similar randomness involved, but there was still a fixed strategy in place no matter which combination of globules spawned.

What I'm talking about are things that cannot be reasonably accounted for and require an immediate change in the strategy.

grisu

@Pokosaurous I wouldn't have thought about that. Having no mmo experience can be really helpful in finding creative approaches simply because you don't crosscheck every single thing with "can an mmo do that?".
I like this there are many ways that could be done. You could, as a concept, have to time spells and damage in a bulk so it's like this massive wave that forces the boss back. A boss so powerful that it doesn't hurt him physically, but the force of the spells itself just isn't resistable.
That's a pretty cool thought.

@wanderingmist Yes obviously, I myself strongly believe in the integrity and theme of a Dungeon/Raid which in turn strongly shapes the enjoyment of it. My most loved memories in MMOs relate to that. For me it's not about getting those unique Boss mechanics into Ashes or any mmo really. I just think it's a fun topic to be a little creative.

@Damokles I know what you mean, just executing that dance perfectly as a whole can be extremely satisfying in the end.

Damokles

@wanderingmist
Isnt that a little bit impossible? The range of virtual intelligence to do something like that and keep it balanced is way out of humanities league right now xD

wanderingmist wrote: »

What I'm talking about are things that cannot be reasonably accounted for and require an immediate change in the strategy.

That would require the boss to be able to randomly choose his attack patterns and ability sequence, which would need the boss to possess an incredible amount of abilities to switch them up regularly.

The only thing that I would think that it was acceptable to be random would be a random rage mode after a certain hp aloss began (like it could begin between 35% and 15% remaining health)

Did you know what the reason for the difficulty for the dancer of the boreal valley in dark soul 3 was? It was because all fights in Dark Souls had a certain rythm, but the dancer was programmed in such a way that she switched her rythem mid-fight, throwing most people off balance with that switch ^^

grisu

It seems hard to even grasp what an immediate change in strategy really entails, because if you know, for example, those bloodpools and the debuff exist, then all you have to do is designate a backup to the one in the bloodpoll. Now it 's kinda back to just being a standart strategy you have to execute. At least from reading about the fight that's how it looks to me.

So what would be something that really is strategy changing in a boss fight that a raid has to dynamically react to?

My first answer would actually lean on that example. Randomness of some kind. (that's why I kinda get the bloodpool example, but also don't not having played that fight)
If you don't know who will be affected or where it spawns, there will always be some extra scenario you might not have thought of before. If the bossroom layout combined with a "bad pool location" forces you to choose now between stacking together or not doing damage, what will be your reaction? Can you hold out on not doing the damage for some time and reposition drastically? Do you risk the rng that he will spawn a pool under the group and do massive damage to your raid?

Which leads me to my second answer. Options. If you have options to approach "any" given situation, it might create more of a dynamic feel to it.
From my experience, this is EXTREMELY hard for a group to execute, when everyone knows from the getgo what their role is in the fight it will be a lot easier for them to just be that person, but reacting to commands midfight which you don't expect are just a graveyard in the making.

That said, I would love a game that promotes this approach, pputs that into their entire gamephilosophy and adjusts peoples way of thinking to it. I think this would make a much more diverse and fun playing field.

Both have their merrits, a perfectly executed dance and a well coordinated raphsody of everchanging movement. I like them both and ideally you should be tested in both if you want to achiev the top of the top.

That's my opinion at least.

Wandering Mist

@Damokles It's not impossible at all, as I showed with my example of the "Zul Reborn" fight where the raid has to decide very quickly who is going to soak pools (that can spawn anywhere in the boss room) while taking into account anyone who gets a debuff that would force them to move out of a blood pool.

The more boss mechanics with random elements you incorporate into a boss fight, the more adaptable the raid has to be. On Mythic G'huun for example, you have a whole bunch of mechanics all working at the same time, forcing the raid to react to each individual situation.

Azryil

One thing I don't want to see is in lieu of interesting mechanics they throw in as many mechanics as possible and periodically have them overlap the fight just turns into a massive cluster fuck.
Mythic Archimonde in Warlords of Draenor being a perfect example. Each mechanic on it's own was boring and simple to deal with, but over the course of the fight two or three of the abilities would overlap with each other which just ended up turning the fight into a mess.

Wandering Mist

@grisu The problem with options is that more often than not there are always be better options than others. For example, For the final Deathwing fight in Dragonsoul, raid teams had to choose which order they would deal with the platforms. Guess what, every single raid team did the platforms in the same order, because that was the easiest order regardless of your raid composition.

@arzosah I get where you are coming from and there are definitely times where a boss right is ruined by having too many mechanics to deal with.

Rem_

@grisu Yea~!! I haven't thought about that but I guess you're right, I don't really have stuff to compare to so I can throw ideas out there~! I'm glad you like the pushing-back one~!

I'd love to have some bosses just be hard and have the normal kill them fast, but some special bosses should have some really memorable fights~! Like maybe if there's a fire boss you do sooo little damage unless you're using water spells if you're a magic class.

Another thing I could think of would be cool is having a lot of mobility, like having to move around instead of just stand infront of the boss. Perhaps maybe if you're fighting a huge firey boss he sets the floor ablaze~!!! If you don't move from it, BAM! yur dead~! n.n I think having to move around and think about your positioning would add a lot to a raid as well~!!

Also of course I'd love to see the boss transform as well, that could be super cool. If you get the boss to a certain amount of health is bursts into like an angery moodeee!!! cx

grisu

In the context of this discussion I wouldn't call Deathwings fight "giving options" but a mechanic that people had to figure out.It always started with sacrifycing the healing buff. That's logical because mana and healing usually wasn't the issue but the enrage timer, so dps. After that it's rather obvious which gives the most dps benefit so raids go by that.
Doing it any other way isn't plausible, sacrificing 3 healers and keeping the healing buff to gain 3 dps for one of the raidwide dmg buffs was nonsensical at the time.
So yeah it was "an option", but not really, it clearly had a weight system in that meta.

In the same way Sunfire plateaus DPS check boss (i forgot his name, but the one that was famously cleared with a shitton of mages) had "no option" on how you build your raid. His dps check was so tight and abnormally high that the mechanic was, figure out the absolutely highest possible dps currently.
You had "the option" to bring other people, other classes, but to clear this fight the mechanic was, "what's the absolut maximum possible dps". That's not really an option on how to approach him when the classes aren't perfectly balanced.

I get what you mean, but saying giving bad options is bad is just universally true and not a problem of options in fights but design. If you design a bad boss, it will be a bad boss wether it has bad options or bad mechanics(/ mechanics disguised as options).

Ferryman

Boss mechanics can be and somehow should be complex like in WoW imo. However, making mechanics such that players needs to rely on addons was kind of stupid tbh.

I am not sure if there is a single fight over others in my mind, but I hope to see different variations of boss mechanics.

If there would be possibility to win a boss fight with different kind of strategies and team compositions, that would be actually interesting. I know it can be hard, but who knows..

I hope that there will be less dps check fights and we can see more value on every role. Maybe even in some fights supports and healers has the main role like in that WoW ICC fight where you needed to protect and heal that dragon.

Azryil

I think without the arms race between boss mechanics and raid mods, Intrepid should be able to make more interesting fight without the player base simplifying the fight with addons.

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