Just like the title said. No one has deemed to comment on slippery's thread "raiding is too hard" . So i say we give them ideas for raid scripts and hope they listen. Step 1 . The general gist of a good raid fight is ... I HAVE TO THINK! at least a little bit. Theer, the floor panels buffing you in various ways was amazing. I realize that mostly likely took special programming so use the flag mechanic. Adds, the lower you take them down without killing the more they buff you. If you kill them they debuff you, but don't kill you. (Skill based) A damage shield that reflects.. Use partical effects and mob animations ! Make it look impressive! (if you hit the mob you get a 30 second debuff, the more you fail the stop dps check the more you get debuffed) You could drop anything, hp, levels, whatever.. the point is you made it dependant on the player, not some random script. You've done dps checks , almost non stop .. remember nexona? How about adding a dps limit again? (skill based) Theme based fights.. Only auto attack works.. , then it rotates to spell damage works.. use your imagination.. The wrong damage type heals the mob for the damage you hit it with. 12 People get in big golem suits and run around and solo adds that are trying to get to grop 1 and 2 fighting the name in the center.. if any adds get through kaboom.. group 1 and 2 esplode. (skill based) The biggest thing is .. if you're going to have negative effects.. Insta deaths aren't really fun, make it dependant on the players! Heck if a player fails red text.... port them to the "naughty" jail Literally.. stick a cage hanging off the top of the zone, and make them sit in there for 10 minutes unable to evac or call. Dress them in pink, have fun with it.. Please don't troll, and your free to hate and detest the ideas.. Make your own, maybe they will listen. Post ideas pleasee, raiding needs help.. I'm not the one to do it, i'm just trying to start a positive direction.
Step 1: tank Step 2: spank Step 3: loot chest I'm being serious, anything short of that and it'll continue the cycle that exists now of 3 guilds dominating everything and dozens of other guilds that can't even clear easy mode. Need raid content that more people get to see/use otherwise its a waste.
People look back fondly on EQ1 Velious era, and everything in the game at that time was basically a tank and spank. You don't need complicated choreography and tests of reaction time for people to enjoy an encounter. You just need a big MOB that looks like a dragon and some cool loot.
Looking back on fights I really liked, I'd say Kraytoc HM sticks out as a good test of a raid in which one idiot can screw you completely but not be stupidly over the top with cures and control effects, the deathtouch wasn't too over the top in my opinion for a zone boss.
The_Cheeseman wrote: Adding some diversity would also help. I'd rather kill 20 different looking mobs with similar scripts in different looking zones than go through all that Drunder/Kael rehashing again...
Gaarysal@Permafrost wrote: Then they should go back to the easy mode/hard mode model like in Kael/Rime. Have one be easy mode for you and then hard mode for guilds that actually want a challenge. That way you're not missing out on any "content" as the only thing that's different is the script/challenge. Oh, unless you just want the best loot without working for it.
Gaarysal@Permafrost wrote: I think the opposite is true. There are a LOT more guilds (prob 20-30 or so) that could be clearing a lot more content if it was less stupid dps checks or power checks or needing x amounts of classes. If they make fights challenging thru what is going on (within reason) as opposed to kill adds in x amount of seconds in order to actually dps named before more adds spawn, cure 2 curse, dont cure 2, joust red text, random charm etc.. that stuff is just annoying doesnt make the fights more interesting.. I think the lower to lowmid end guilds probably would struggle with anything like that but they can probably still do the entry mobs and get better at doing unique scripts or they can just be content with doing the easiest stuff.
Npcs pop after a wipe to rez you.. And they make fun of you for dying. mobs that aren't static.. roaming mobs. why does EVERYTHING have to be solved with dps? remember pawbusters trapdoor? remember veksar? you build a golem to fight the name while you kill adds? Remember the suit of armor? that a tank couldnt tank? so we had scouts tank? roll reversal! crazyness...!! why can't a farging scout tank.. WHY DO ADDS NEED TO HIT FOR 100k auto attacks?!!?!! a rare drop key that a raid leader can use on a unpopped chest and pick the loot the raid wants from the mobs loot table
Venril pre- nerf remains one of my favorite fights - EXCEPT the clicky - made no sense to have someone over there doing that. Rest of the fight was wonderful.
How about encounters that make the DPS do something creative in order to succeed? Swapping agro between tanks: been done for three expansions now. Fail-if-the-curse/trauma/elemental/noxious/arcane isn't cured. Fail if the curse IS cured. Incurable stuns/stifles. Incurable anything. Forcing the onus of success 80% onto healers is foolish: see the turnover in raids of healers due to burnout. Many just make a DPS so they can stay sane. How about going back to the encounters like Ykesha's Inner Stronghold contained? It was truly a raid wide cooperation; scouts and mages had to go grab adds before they detonated their bombs and wiped the raid, for instance. Now everything is on a hair trigger; my raid alliance failed on a DPx4 mob because one group's healer could not keep up with trauma cures. The answer shouldn't be to have to load each group with two healers IMHO. It's frustrating; one or two folks who cannot get into voice chat because it crashes them, or into Teamspeak because it's distorting and impossible to hear, and we cannot do what we set out to do. Yes, it doesn't necessarily have to be really complicated (and the fact that it can't be done without voice chat is unfortunate) but it needs to be fun. Things that frustrate over and over due to buggy scripts, luck factors, and extremely short timers before fails on detrimentals are what make it UN-fun. Ideas? How about raid mobs that vary their strategy in real time according to damage type, dps amount, debuffs and so on: dps too hard and it quits taking damage. Debuff like crazy and it's vulnerable again. What if you had a raid in which the mob randomly picked a player and caged them high above, with the trapped person slowly descending onto a big button which when depressed blows up the raid? You can delay the descent by debuffing or stunning the mob, and healers might be able to 'heal' the descent mechanism and slow its progress. And yes, throw in tank and spank encounters as lures. We work hard at the complicated scripts; easy ones on occasion would be a treat. Also I'd love to see OLD raid content FIXED. Kurn's Tower is a very good example of neglected broken encounters. Remember the first namer in there? Red and Blue domes; you run to the one that matches your debuff. But now you get first one then the other color debuff, within seconds. The whole zone is like that. We all know encounters that aren't working correctly old and new.
I'd like raid zones to have a few innovative ideas, a few TnS named, and minimal trash. But raid scripts need to rely on visual cues or the default user interface. There are already too many hidden mechanics that require third party programs to let you play effectively (or even know that there is a problem). The floor tiles mentioned before is a good example, and that zone also had a multiple tank fight, and other named with damage reflect on/off, and other named with curefest and joust requirements. The zone might have been a little too busy, but it was innovative. I liked it, except for the three sages - I don't like hard fail conditions, and I don't like excessive control effects used against players, and that fight had both at the same time. Although I'll grant that that fight was also the only fight since level 50 where heroic opportunities were important - and it was well done, since it was a damage immunity. You could see what you had to do, and failure just meant you could not proceed on the fight until you did it. If they made a fight like that now, it would require a specific HO within seconds or everyone in the zone instantly dies, and you wouldn't know what HO you needed to do unless you had a third party parser voice trigger tell you. (But if your raid did enough dps, you would bypass the script completely.)
Some of the simplest ideas are good too. The Halls shoulders mob where you had to keep still when the add was up was a challenge lol how hard is it to not move yet ppl wiped the raid many times because they couldn't stand still Maybe have a mob buff the raid with Channeled focus so they could move and cast and HAVE to keep moving. If they stand still for more than x seconds, wipe! The Kurn's tower heroic mob was good where you hid in the tunnel and let the flames burn the mob and help with DPS was novel too - I am all for using the environment to assist with the raid scripting. It's more fun working out the strat that way and everyone has to pay attn....
There were soem good ideas in SWG form the instances (one has already been mentioned indirectly exploding npcs that run towards the tank) for example in exar kun the first boss had 6 adds you could only one would be live at a time, the tank and healer would have to be right up at the boss keeping agro and the tank alive (the boss would not take dmg till the adds were dead) an add would come live and head for the tank the grp would pull and kill it, rinse and repeat then they would fight the boss. (in SWG you could use skills on the move) so the tank, healer would run around the room hitting the boss as it pursued them while the group members would run behind the mob shooting at it. (with a invuln turret type npc in the ceiling shooting AOE shots randomly on the ground). Another fight the mob would be in the center of the room (could not melee as he would gas you if you got anywhere near him) and was shielded by 4 npcs. you'd have to defeat waves of 3 npcs to make one of the shield npcs vulnerable (rinse repeat) then the boss would start spreading gas in the areas you could move in (you'd have to keep moving and the gas would dissipate) another fight would have the boss spreading fire on the ground (it would spread slowly on it's own and on-fire running players would spread it) only the tank would have immunity to fire, but the tank would be debuffed to take damage as he used power (the debuff would come off on it's own and apply to another grp member then back to the tank) The last room had an interesting system you had to kill two npcs within a set timeframe of each other and would swap their hate lists. so you would need two players to hit each and keep the npc's health similar (if you failed to kill them within the timeframe they would go invlunerable and you'd be unable to complete the instance) - in EQ2 i would expect some sort of buff on the npcs as opposed to them going invlunerable like in SWG. These sorts of things are creative and would make a nice addition to EQ2 if done in a reasonable fashon.
Before you look at new ideas you should look at existing raid mechanics and evaluate which ones are good and bad. The Good: - Right click cancel detriment. This is actually a really good mechanic because it keeps people from falling asleep during raids while others do all the work. This is far superior to cure curse mechanics which puts all the responsibility on healers and zero reponsibility on the DPS. - Colored mobs like hand of Vallon - Flagging and no hit mechanics such as the three Generals in Tallons stronghold. The Bad: - opposing luck based mechanics: this having two or more mechanics which directly oppose each other such as being rooted into an AoE. - memwiping adds with cooperative strike. Individually memwiping adds are fine, individually cooperative strike is ok too but when you combine them both you produce a luck based mechanic where a loose add can memwipe from the OT and kill the MT. - Erriak's fear into red message or anything where you were CC'ed which you had to do something or the raid went boom - Good/Bad curses that require ACT, such as Modrfrost. The right way to do curses is like the original RoK Byzola. Old Ideas that were good: - Health dynamic: remember when healers actually had to heal. This mostly has to do with players Not having enough HP for healers to really heal up. Every AoE is basically a one shot now and all it takes is one heal get everyone full again. DoV raiding health is purely a boolean function. You are either alive or you are dead. There is no inbetween. If you look at old raids raids players were almost never at full health. Lot of old raid strats used to consist of the raid leader constantly yelling "green the groups" because there was always something to heal. This made raids a lot more exciting. Players would need to have 3 to 4 times more health for this to work. - Power Dynamic: This has also been reduced to a boolean function. You either have full power or no power especially in hard mode fights. Remember when you actually had to conserve power. Or Venril Sathir where the whole raid had to keep power between 30% and 70%. You had to actually thing about this instead of power feed every time its up. Remember having to sprint off power if you had too much. - Disassociated AoE: last time used was Iilisad's barrier where the circle on the ground and you have to get out of it. - DDR: fights were you had to constantly move around such as: Avatar of Growth, RoK contested Tangrin, All versions of Theer. - Other fights that were just put together well: Avatar of flame, Avatar of Justice, Avatar of Valor, Anashti Sul, Switch master, original version of Parah Celsis. And of course Theer being the best raid encounter.
Novusod wrote: Really getting tired of "the bad" as you suggested as rehashed raid strats....instead of making strats where a majority of the raids success rests mostly in their healers being able to coordinate whack-a-mole curse and det cures within x time or raid wipes is getting annoying.
If your going to reuse zones for raid mobs.. Use things we don't ALWAYS go to. Spawn an epic version of antonica or zek or isle of mara.. or barren sky,,, or anywhere... Have epics roaming around with their minions.. There's something to be said for open world epic slaying.. Yet it can still be an instance..
