Raid Encounters (Keeping 10 & 20 man raiding fresh between tiers)

[Khelendross]

Infernal Dawn is almost here, but what of the long wait many months after when ID is finally clear and guilds have it on farm? Many times raiders just need something to break the monotony, not necessarily a new tier but something new and fresh. So the idea I propoise is something actually rather simple for Trion that while still requiring a fair amount of work, is far less than even doing a small filler dungeon.

The answer is raid encounters. Who has played WoW? I know alot of you have. Remember Magtherion? Onyxia? Sartherion? These are what I like to call raid encounters. They are instanced raids but they aren't a dungeon. The usually only have one boss, and typically just a few trash pulls and are usually a room or two (3 at most). They are something 20 man raiders can do fairly quickly so it leads to less fatigue, even if the encounters are more challenging. What I think would be cool, and I'll use HK as a linear example.

So patch after HK, a raid encounter is released. This guy is on par with Zilas difficulty wise. The patch following, another boss comes out that is on par with Rune King, next patch, Sicaron. Yet another patch and we have a guy on par with Grug, and the patch before the next 20 man, we have a guy on par with the end boss, Akylios.

These raid encounters could occur from a lore perspective in much the same way as slivers, accessible by a portal from using a sight ability (maybe even Omen Sight). These powerful raid monsters would be planar or normal Telaran monsters that have grown so powerful that have literally hacked a hole in the Vigil and are living in a space "in between realities". This allows use of existing art assets, so the real effort would be making the boss, there could be 10 and 20 man bosses as well.

I think its a good idea though, something Trion should think about to keep people busy in between large scale instance dungeon releases. What do you guys think?

[Quietmode]

Raid Chronicles!

[Samoajoe]

Loving this idea!

[Adastra]

I'm all for this, I always liked having things like Onyxia/Gruul/Mag, etc from time to time. It would be definitely nice to have something like that in Rift.

[Ephanie]

Great idea! I hope they add these

[tordana]

Would be a lot of fun -- I loved Watcher in LoTRO which was the same thing. There was zero trash and one boss.

[Zadozex]

Sounds good in theory. I would love to see it. The problem, I imagine, is most of the time spent on designing new raid instances is designing the boss encounters themselves. Creating new mechanics to deal with, tweaking the difficulty, play testing ( a lot of play testing), etc. Sure, new artwork/story tie-ins are added components, but I imagine 80% of the time spent for new raid instance creation are the boss encounters themselves.

To follow your suggestion, these single sliver bosses would have to be designed like raid bosses to provide some challenge. So instead of Trion designing new raid bosses, they'd be spending their time designing these bosses. You're just shifting content release to be 1 boss at a time as opposed to 1 raid at a time. It's very unlikely that they could do both 1 off bosses of the caliber you describe AND raid instances at the same time.

[JimboTCB]

So I guess everyone just forgot about raid rifts?

[Aguni]

So I guess everyone just forgot about raid rifts?

Raid rift bosses are easy as pie unfortunately.
They don't have many, if any mechanics too them outside of simply tank and spank with some movement.

[Calibrex]

AoC had the same thing. But the lockouts were similar to Rift - 1 week.

[ClericRet]

So I guess everyone just forgot about raid rifts?

I don't think Trion will release open world content that is mechanistically difficult like they do in instances.

on OP: I'm all for something like this. Loved Mag/Gruul etc. in BC

[thoroar]

I'm up for this

[Calibrex]

Can do what DAoC had

Open world raid mobs. Respawn timer from 20hours to 3 days.

[JimboTCB]

I don't think Trion will release open world content that is mechanistically difficult like they do in instances.

on OP: I'm all for something like this. Loved Mag/Gruul etc. in BC

I dunno, T2 Earth is kind of irritating, and unlike most other raid rifts you can't just ignore mechanics and DPS through it. You've got most of your key types of things in terms of mechanics that need to be paid attention to, and I think it's probably about as difficult as is reasonable without making it nigh-on impossible for pugs.

Hopefully the rest of the T2 rifts when (if?) they get rolled out will be a similar level of challenge, but I think expecting basically a whole new dungeon (or at least an instanced boss, which is pretty much all of the work involved in a full dungeon) as "filler" between actual dungeons is a bit excessive.

Besides, if you have a single boss raid, how do you handle loot distribution and progression? It's bad enough in HK where they have an entire instance to spread drops out across - do you have one boss drop everything and the chances of getting anything specific are vanishingly small? Do you have a multi phase encounter like Akylios so there's actually something to progress through? Or do you just want a shiny loot pinata you can whack at once a week to break things up?

[Cerium]

The other route, and this made for excitement in classic EQ, is to add a few overworld raid bosses that are a legitimate challenge.

- Add a T3 raid encounter to whatever the next overworld Zone will be.
- Scrap that strange encounter at the bottom of the chasm in EI and replace it with a T3 raid level difficulty boss. (easily worked in ad something escaped from ID)
- Rework both of the overworld bosses in Shimmersand and Stillmoor into T2 raid level encounters.
- Add a T1 level raid encounter to IPP.

Make these on a difficulty level close to the midragne of that tier of raid encounters so they're not easily done. Take them off the Weekly reset, and give them their own internal reset timers with a small +/- window (thinking 7 days +/- 12 hours) so they can be a bit more random.

This gives guilds a sense of urgency about bosses like this. Competing to muster forces and down these bonus bosses. It would give something to do to break up the monotony.

I do also like one-off raid instances too. I have always preferred these to be highly complex encounters though. No tank and spank or recycled mechanics, but something fresh and intriguing. Maybe make them a series of events to choose from in a hall of trials or something. A kin to EQ's classic MPG trials.