Raid and Group mission mechanic ideas

Raids (and hopfully missions) are being designed right now for the new expac. I thought it would be interesting to have a thread of different ideas that could be used to create fun and interesting group missions and raids. This isn't to litigate the past, but more to come up with useful ideas the devs can put into the new expansion currently under development

I'll start with a couple raid ideas:
1. Boss that randomly changes who the tank is, but runs to them instead of summoning. Somewhere between 30 secnds and 2 minutes it just picks another war/pal/sk. Not summoning is important to create raid wide disruption (And give the tank a split second to protect themselves).
2. Adjustable events - where the damage and rate of adds spawning are opposite. So the more people who are close to the mob - the higher the damage it does (aes, melee, whatever). However the more people who are distant from the mob, the larger the rate of adds spawning. So a guild can choose to do the event differently.

Group misson ideas:
1. unique missions that are not poorly adjusted raids
2. weak hitting mobs with no hatelist. They cannot be held by the tank, but now cause problems for everyone (but cannot 1 round the casters).
3. impossible to fight mobs that must be CC'd until they go away. Perhaps they have an aura of 99% caster/melee slow. Things that make them untankable and require CC. Perhaps they just death touch whoever they melee every 20 seconds. Things that discourage tanking.
4. Mobs that reverse healing and damage. Damage will heal them, but heal spells with cause damage. Cleric superstars!
5. Conditions or situations that require using the pile of utility classes have, but cannot be simply solved with "the tank adds it to the pile and pops a glyph". If it can just be tanked through, it might as well not exist.

Edit: For group ideas, they cannot require a specific class as thats unfair to most players. For example, requiring CC to keep the mob away is 1 thing, but specifically requiring mez is to specific as many groups won't have a chanter/bard.

Are you trying to get rid of as many EQ players as possible?

Everyone is frustrated and bored that everything is a tank and spank snooze fest. So lets make things fun and interesting that require player skill. Things that cannot simply be outgeared. Players will adjust, we don't give eq players enough credit, and those who want really simple are on tlp anyways.

More and more people I know start using "tankless" (no plated tank) groups. And everything you have suggested would work against that.

Great. Please suggest other ideas then to make missions interesting.

OK... I kinda like this one. Pretty much every class has a set of abilities that they're intended to use when they get a little too much attention from a baddie. Defensive abilities, automatic self-heals, fades/FDs, etc. Some people know how to use them well and others rarely need to touch them.

1. 3 mobs spawn and announce the healer as the target.
2. Healer already had a self-rune and heal proc buffed and starts casting additional self-heals
3. Everyone else mashes that DPS.

It sounds like a nice, small stretch of game play.

I think I like this one too. Multiple classes have a root (even zerks have a 1-minute root), bard and chanters have mez (rogues have something mez-ish, too, right?). Ok, I like this one as well.

Sure. Sounds cool to me. Main boss needs to be healed to death while everyone else handles small adds?

I'd amend this to say "requires the use of utility abilities" like snare, stun, knockback, or whatever else. Each type of utility ability does something different and detrimental to the baddie.

While I appreciate the OP's pure motives, there is an easy line to cross between something that is challenging and just plain annoying. I hope any Dev considering things like this will also consider what it will be like to perform it for the 50th time and you just want to get through the event for the loot or the exp. Like dealing with the goblin that spawns under the world in Final Fugue.

I appreciate the idea of suggesting different raid mechanics, but this kind of hits at the heart of the problem with a lot of modern raid design. A lot of mechanics sound good on paper but aren't considered in the context of how a guild would respond to it. These two mechanics, when taken together, very clearly lend themselves to a guild just stacking and burning the boss. That would produce fewer adds and the tank swaps wouldn't matter (all the tanks would be stacked and ready). If the AE/etc. damage is too high from stacking, use Dragon Glyph.

It actually reminds me of the Shei Vinitras raid, which (ignoring some mechanics) is effectively:

1. The more people closer to the boss (on the platform), the more damage the AE does. It becomes unsurvivable with a full raid at the boss.
2. The faster you kill the boss, the more frequently the AE goes off (as it is % based).
3. Death adds spawn that run to the boss and heal it if they reach him.
4. People not near the boss have to deal with sweeper adds that have bad auras, but the people at the boss don't.

The mechanics sound fine on paper, but it actually became mechanically easier with fewer people. Bring 29/34 people up top and no one else, and you never dealt with the sweepers below, the AE was low enough that no one with gear could die, and your DPS wasn't high enough to trigger anything too quickly. There were adds that had to be baned, but they could be baned to death from up top before they went active. As a result, it was doable with very few players in era (you could argue this wasn't the worst thing, but at the very least bringing fewer people shouldn't have allowed you to avoid mechanics).

One of the great things about Mearatas was the combination of mechanics forced you to actually deal with all the mechanics. Guilds (us included) spent a lot of time trying to find a way to cheese it, but every "do X to avoid Y mechanic" made another mechanic more severe.

Thats a neat one. Different utility abilities doing stuff to a baddie. Snare will cause a slow, stun has a chance to make it skip an ae, ect.

Raids will just stack everything in a single spot and this won't be an issue other then needing to change the healing target

Depending on how this worked out I can see this being managed by limiting the number of people who zone in and just have others wait in the guild hall. If you make it based on a percentage of people in the zone that just makes it harder for low raid attendance guilds.

This just seems like it would be an annoyance that raiders would just burn through

Depends on what you mean by CC as you need to be very careful about not having required classes in the group game.

This would be really bad in a purse melee group that has a single class that can cast a heal. Do they cast on the NPC and let the tank/group die or do they heal the tank/group and let the NPC live? This goes back to the last item and having required classes.

Seems like it is going more into having required classes

I'd like to see more RNG elements that are numerous and thus not cheese-able with restart fishing.

Like, adds that spawn 1-3 other mobs on death. And, those mobs have random elements (aside from number). One emotes and charges/locks a random player. One starts clocking up an AOE. One targets main tank and gives them some issues. One blocks, mitigates, or slows heals. One makes all spell (or melee) dmg do 10x aggro for a while. Etc. Would require multiple RNG events (add deaths) so it isn't RNG-cheesed.

At times I play in a group with BST,MAG,RNG,NEC,BRD + healer merc.
Griklor mission - interesting, once learned how to deal with the flight.
GD - got boring quickly
Velketor - boring and annoying "tank and spank"
KD - fun-fun-fun, especially getting achievements.

Zlandicar - absolutely best hard-hitting quick burn. I had to learn how to tank hardest-hitting mob with my beastlord (btw, no glyphs).
The rest of CoV missions - a horror show, once and done.

Shei mission - very fun and interesting. The bard became a real contributor.
AHR - became trivial with pet tanking, very much a basic grind.
Basilica - was very much fun to learn how to do it. After a while became boring and out of rotation as it is too long.
Bloodfalls - same as Basilica, fun at first and then boring and long.

Door mission - fun to get achievements, then basic grind mission.
Bridge - much fun, especially figuring out how to do it without tanks and to get achievements. Still enjoyable.
Deepshade - same as Bridge.
Mean Streets - excellent design, much fun and many tricks to use. Seemed horribly designed at first and after figuring it out it is FUN!

Final Fugue - repeatable ad infinitum. With all my alts in different group configuration. Variety of classes use their tricks. DPS checks and spell unlocks. Multiple adds and tough single targets. A well designed mission.
Hero Forge - a horror show. At multiple stages a mission can become a whipe by a roll of the dice. Very narrow-minded path scenario. Once and done mission.

The list is from a tankless boxed (although 2 players playing) group prospective with no automation of any kind, manual "alt-tabbing" and not even "mouse-button-macro" gear. Compare it to your own experiences.
I do those missions very differently than the same missions I have done with a group of my buddies with real healers and real tanks.
My point is that mission scripts need to be done keeping in mind that different players play them very very differently. Perhaps, LS approach of having 2 very different missions targeting different playstyles has some merit, as long as the devs readjust their chest content (basically, equalize those, so if a group does only one mission it still can get geared up with "other mission loot") as the T3 loot is not universal ore anymore.

You're not required to keep farming every single raid all year. There's room for at least 1 complex/challenging raid that you can stop doing after a month or two if you find that it's no longer fun or just too much trouble.

What is the point of designing content that most people don't want to do and would only draw in a small number of people? With the number of complaints about the lack of content that come up each expansion making raids that people end up skipping just adds to that complaint. It would be different if we had more content and raid forces didn't finish all of it in a single raid night each cycle.

Outside of melee, everyone at midrange - stack on boss, off tank grabs adds to stack on boss as well. Lower AE so it's not pressing means the threat of a few extra adds isn't stressful for the healers/tanks and everyone just burns accordingly.

At least that's how I looked at it at first. I'm not overly fond of how EQ raiding operates so I can't say for sure if that would work or not.

require a naked halfling to gain aggro on the boss without doing damage as a sacrifice to appease his mercy to move to the next phase

require a BL pet to tank the boss

raid is on 2 balancing scales. mobs spawn on one side or the other to cause an imbalance, and players have to jump between scales to prevent the raid from tipping over into an inescapable pit of troll turds.

space ship to space ship combat

mass killing of absurd amounts of mobs to swing faction one way or the other as directed by the script

a group of trade skillers has to build a weapon to kill the boss, while the rest of the raid protects the TSers

maybe the tradeskillers need to create an alter to sacrifice the halfing on? Ohh, or maybe just a pie tin and some forks. Halfing pie!

And when it comes to group content why make content folks will do once and that is it. Having a challenge is all well and good but if its irritating to do folks won't repeat it. At least I suspect most won't. But I could be wrong.

Challenging stuff is fine if its IN ADDITION to what we get now but I am not sure that will happen. I am hoping we got back up in number of group and raid missions this next expansion.

Group misson idea:

You have to grind as many mobs as before the exp nerf, to receive the same amount of experience as the reward.

The way you combat that is by making the rewards commensurate with the challenge.

What makes a challenge irritating is when it requires better gear to complete than what the mission rewards.