Raids: What are the dynamics?

[Telemediocrity]

Seeing as how I've never been on a real 'raid' in DAoC, EQ, EQ2, WoW, or the like, only in games with, some might say, less complex raiding behaviors, I was wondering - what are the dynamics at work in a raid?

Is it basically just that you're up against a mob who hits a lot harder and takes a lot more punishment than usual?  But that beyond that, it's the same deal as usual of healing, aggro on tank, damage-dealers, etcetera?

I know that some games have specific gear prerequisites for certain raids where without them you'll get owned.

What are the more interesting raid dynamics out there used in the various games?  Unique or interesting special attacks that require special strategy to combat?

[Engels]

EQ has some highly scripted raids that are very very difficult to complete without a pretty coordinated large group of people. As an example, in killing Terris Thule, the demi goddess of nightmares, she goes through 3 or 4 'stages' of death, as determined by her health bar, where various things happen, including sudden spawns of very tough mobs directly in the middle of the fight, to AoE attacks that are utterly lethal to casters, and any number of things.

Equipment wise, it is of course easier to kill boss mobs in EQ with higher end equipement, but my old EQ guild managed to kill Rallos Zek without having gone to Ssra temple, which uberguilds often stated was a requisite to killing RZ simply because the equipment drops in Ssra Temple were the next best thing. Of course, to get to Ssra Temple you needed to collect these super rare 'shards' to get a key for ever single raid member, and this takes months to do, so its no surprise that the uber guilds stated it as a prerequisite. My guild proved them wrong, but only after 5 tries. He was very tough to kill. Time-wise, RZ is an easy mob, compared to the 'fake' god Mithaniel Marr and his temple, which can take hours and hours of coordination.

Personally, I'm glad the MMO world seems to be past that type of time sink.

[Telemediocrity]

EQ has some highly scripted raids that are very very difficult to complete without a pretty coordinated large group of people. As an example, in killing Terris Thule, the demi goddess of nightmares, she goes through 3 or 4 'stages' of death, as determined by her health bar, where various things happen, including sudden spawns of very tough mobs directly in the middle of the fight, to AoE attacks that are utterly lethal to casters, and any number of things.

This is really interesting.  So how much health he's got left determines his behavior?

The high-damage AOEs - is that countered based on where people are supposed to stand, or skills/spells that must be used right when he's about to hit that 'phase' to mitigate the damage, or making sure some guy off away from the group has aggro?

Please do tell me more - or if possible, point me to somewhere that describes this behavior in detail (I've never been able to find that, mainly because I don't know the fansites / search keywords for most of these games)

[Engels]

Uhm...

http://eqbeastiary.allakhazam.com/search.shtml?id=10334

The stages are listed in a post further down the page.

[Telemediocrity]

Hmm, interesting.  So basically, the effects that can happen are spellcasting, mob spawns, i assume maybe attack type changes?, things like that.

What about the big WoW raids I hear about, like Molten Core?  Similar style?

[Rasix]

Hmm, interesting.  So basically, the effects that can happen are spellcasting, mob spawns, i assume maybe attack type changes?, things like that.

What about the big WoW raids I hear about, like Molten Core?  Similar style?

WoW raids tend to have multiple boss mobs separated by trash mobs and in the case of Onyxia, it's just a single mob encounter (4 easy killed trash mobs before her, kinda like a warmup).

Now, I'm not sure if you know the lingo for this stuff, so I'll go over it briefly.

Trash mob: a mob that's before the intended boss mob.  Usually has a low percentage of dropping some gear, but its main utility is to put some time betwen you and the boss mob. Usually nothing special.  Trash mobs in the newest raid instance, AQ40, can be brutal.  The stuff you fight between Princess Huhuran (a giant wasp) and the Twin Emperors can give my guild more trouble than Ragnaros (the main boss of MC) or Nefarian (the main boss of Blackwing Lair).

Boss: the main target of the raid.  Usually something scripted. Likely to have unique abilities or abilities that function on a wider scale. Garaunteed loot drops.  Lots of hit points and has damage abilities sufficient that only one person should be attempting to take the brunt of the damage and that person will require dedicated healing.  Some bosses can be more aptly classified as encounters as they won't consist of just fighting the boss.

Molten Core was Blizzard's first real attempt at a raid zone, so they did what they'd done with all of their other level 60 instances: tons of trash mobs far between the boss fights.   

Molten Core is a big underground cavern with lot of magma (wooopidy doo).  You fight lots of uninteresting trash mobs that basically require the most basic strategies.  The only trash that's remotely interesting are the core hound packs, which require you to have 5 separate mobs all die at the same time or they'll resurrect themselves. Not very interesting thought after the billionth core hound pack you've killed.  The trash is  usually one trash mob at a time and the strategy is: tank it, heal, DSP, next.

You fight the bosses. See more detail on all of these as the link I provide at the bottom. Pattern is basically trash for 10-30 minutes, and then a boss fight.

Some bosses have trash mobs tied to their existence.  You beat Magdamar and ancient core hounds stop spawning. You beat Garr and lava surgers stop spawning.

And after each boss you put out a rune with a quest/reward water. Once all runes are down it summons Majordomo Exetus.  If you get Majordomo to yield (you kill all of his guards and leave him alive), he'll summon Ragnaros, the ruler of the Molten Core.

Ragnaros is a giant elemental looking guy.  He'll attack whomever is right next to him and has melee aggro on him.  If you don't stick someone in front of him, he starts offing people at random.  He does ground based AE attacks with a knockback component.  All around him are lava pits so getting knocked back can be troublesome.  You've really gotta hit him with all you've got. Three minutes in, he'll submerge into the lava and spawn "Sons of Ragnaros".  It's around 7-10 fire elementals that also drain mana as well as do fire damage to people.  You group them up and kill them, hopefully not killing off too much of your mana.  He'll pop back and up and try to burn him down.   If he does his sons thing again, you're going to lose. 

He takes a lot of DPS and fire resist to take down. He takes good execution and coordination. He drops the best loot.  Once you've kill him, Molten Core is done. Enjoy killing him every week from now on.

More info for Molten Core at: http://www.wowwiki.com/Molten_Core  Has some details on the boss fights.  I honestly still don't know the detailed mechanics of most of the fights since my job is often pretty simple: keep people alive.

Hope this was illuminating.  If it doesn't sound very interesting, well.. it isn't Blizzard's best effort.  Molten Core is built on the bones of bad ideas.

[Telemediocrity]

Thanks for the writeup.  I'd heard between 1/2 to 1/3rd of that from screenshots, board posts and the like, but now I can understand it on a much more systemic level.

One question:  You mentioned mana consumption as a concern.  Does that mean that player mana is significantly finite?  I mean, in games like AC1, you'd use two spells like Revitalize Self (gain X stamina) and then Stamina to Mana Self (Turn X stamina into Y mana) in rapid succession, with the sum mana gained being significantly more than the mana required to cast.  So, with the exception of the casting time required (more casting time required if your mana gets really low), you essentially have infinite mana.

Does mana in WoW function something more akin to DDO, where in the midst of a battle your group's overall mana resources are rather finite, and so you can actually be winning the battle, though not decisively enough, but lose eventually due to running out of mana?

At least in older MMOs I've played, the 'race', the essential determining factor in whether you'd win a battle or not, was not mana nor health itself, but the enemy's rate of health regeneration versus your group's DPS - for the most part, if your DPS was greater than the enemy's health regen, you could whittle away for however long was necessary and eventually win.

I take it that's different in WoW raids?

[Catalan]

I was in a couple of raids in DAoC... I just stuck my char to another and fell asleep while we were 2 hours into it and pounding for longer for 30 minutes on Huge Foozle #347. No problem, It didn't matter much if I casted or hit the monster or not, when I woke up 3 hours later with keyboard marks in my face and a terrible neck ache, I even got awarded some Glaciar Whatever Jerkin that was supposed to be very phat lewt.
That was the good one... with my mature and reasonable guildies and trustable allies.
I attended another one, server wide, and it readjusted my concept of idiocy.

[Rasix]

Does mana in WoW function something more akin to DDO, where in the midst of a battle your group's overall mana resources are rather finite, and so you can actually be winning the battle, though not decisively enough, but lose eventually due to running out of mana?

Mana is finite but there are a number of ways to regen mana. Class specific abilities, talents, potions, armor stats (there's a + mana regen), trinkets, totems, paladin judements, etc. There's even soup you can eat before a battle that will help mana regen.  In a fight like Nefarian I run through my mana bar many times over.  Some classes given the right fight can nearly heal indefinately.

Boss mobs don't really come down to you just getting exhausted.  If everyone's out of mana, you're likely doing something wrong or you're already in an unwinnable situation.

At least in older MMOs I've played, the 'race', the essential determining factor in whether you'd win a battle or not, was not mana nor health itself, but the enemy's rate of health regeneration versus your group's DPS - for the most part, if your DPS was greater than the enemy's health regen, you could whittle away for however long was necessary and eventually win.

I take it that's different in WoW raids?

Boss mob regen really doesn't come into play. There's a boss fight in Blackwing Lair where the boss will throw a debuff on someone where any melee hits landed on that player will heal the boss. But you can prevent the boss from hitting them.  Certain bosses can heal, but it's not just straight regen and in all cases there is a counter.

There are some fights where it is just a DPS race though. You either need to kill the boss in a set amount of time or you're all going to die.

[eldaec]

Seeing as how I've never been on a real 'raid' in DAoC, EQ, EQ2, WoW, or the like, only in games with, some might say, less complex raiding behaviors, I was wondering - what are the dynamics at work in a raid?

Is it basically just that you're up against a mob who hits a lot harder and takes a lot more punishment than usual?  But that beyond that, it's the same deal as usual of healing, aggro on tank, damage-dealers, etcetera?

I know that some games have specific gear prerequisites for certain raids where without them you'll get owned.

What are the more interesting raid dynamics out there used in the various games?  Unique or interesting special attacks that require special strategy to combat?

It varies a lot, but in general the key mechanic that trumps all mechanics is getting 20-200 people to do what they are fricking told.

Managing aggro and pulling at the correct time is usually the most critical thing. This normally means having one single tank buffed to god like levels do nothing but keep the attention of the mob while a dozen priests heal him and a dozen dps classes kill him.

Beyond that it's all about convincing people to follow simple instructions to circumvent whatever weirdness that each mob has scripted into him/her.

Things that usually kill raids in all mmogs because someone wasn't listening...

 - "DO NOT CROSS THAT FRICKING LINE BEFORE I SAY SO"
 - "ONLY THIS GUY PULL, NOBODY ELSE PULLS. IF YOU ARE NOT THIS GUY, YOU DO NOT PULL, DOES ANYONE NOT UNDERSTAND OR NEED HELP DECIDING IF YOU ARE THIS GUY?"
 - "FIGHT FROM HERE, DO NOT STAND DOWN THERE, AND NO, I DON@T GIVE A RATS ASS IF THAT MEANS ONE PERSON OUT OF FORTY CAN'T USE HIS FAVOURITE SKILL"
 - "STOP HITTING IT WITH BLUNT WEAPONS YOU IDIOT, I ALREADY TOLD YOU BLUNT WEAPONS HEAL THIS GUY"
 - "WHEN THE DRAGON GLARES AT YOU RUN AWAY *BEFORE* YOU GET HIT WITH THE 4000HP AOE NUKE THAT KILLS YOU AND EVERYONE AROUND YOU KTHX"
 - "OI, MORON, YOUR PISSY LVL 3 STEALTH WON'T FOOL LEVEL 600 ASS-DEMONs, THE NO-ROAMING RULE APPLIES TO YOU TOO"
 - "GOING /AFK AND /FOLLOW FOR TWO HOURS DOES NOT CONSTITUTE A CONTRIBUTION TO THIS RAID"
 - "I TALK TO THIS CRITICAL RAID NPC, NOBODY ELSE TALKS TO HIM. I HAVE THE CORRECT ANSWERS TO HIS QUESTIONS WHERAS YOU ARE AN IMBECILE. IF ANYONE WHO IS NOT ME TALKS TO THIS NPC WE WILL ALL DIE."
 - "MOB IS AT 31%, AT 30% HE PBAOE'S AND WILL KILL YOU IF YOU ARE NOT MAIN TANK, RUN AWAY NOW. THIS IS NOT A DRILL."
 - "WHEN I SAY GO, YOU RUN ACROSS THE BRIDGE, YOU WILL HAVE 10 SECONDS TO COMPLY. DO NOT RUN ACROSS THE BRIDGE BEFORE I SAY GO, DO NOT WAIT AFTER I SAY GO. DO NOT LISTEN TO ANYONE WHO IS NOT ME. IF YOU DO NOT FOLLOW THIS SIMPLE INSTRUCTION YOU WILL DIE AND NOONE WILL BE ABLE TO REZ YOU."
 - "A NON-CLERIC JUST HIT THIS GUY, CAUSING HIM TO FULL HEAL, IF YOU ARE NOT A CLERIC STOP DOING THAT PLZ"
 - "THIS MOB IS MELEE ONLY, CASTERS, HIT IT WITH YOUR STICK THING. IF I SEE ANY FINGER WAGGLING IN THE NEXT 3 MINUTES, I'M KICKING YOUR DRESS-WEARING ASS FROM THIS RAID."


But perhaps the most common fatally ignored instruction...

 - "/ASSIST ME"

[vex]

Things that usually kill raids in all mmogs because someone wasn't listening...

- "EVERYONE FOSUC!" 

Maybe that was just us.

One thing though about these scripted events is, to me at least; the real fun is in learning the event.  Yea, dying repeatedly.  You really need to be forefront though for that to happen, as most of the scripts become well known rather quickly.  Even if you know the script though that doesn't mean you will be successful.  In EQ at least you really need to keep 50 or so people awake at the computer long enough through some really boring prep work (that's you Rathe Council) to be successful.

[Strazos]

Also, boss mobs tend to have a bunch of quirky abilities that nothing else in the game has. In EQ for instance, many mobs had an ability called (I think) Ravage. It would be a big melee hit, but hit the first 3 or so people on the agro list. So, you would have off-tanks in addition to your main tank, to soak up these other hits.

Also, in addition to EQ, boss mobs may have some VERY nasty spells, like AE diseases which kill you in 3 ticks, or something.

Heh, I remember a certain EQ raid where, if ANYONE died while in the vicinity of a certain boss mob, 4 high-level skeletons would spawn from the corpse. This basically means that if anyone dies, the raid will completely wipe, as one death will turn into 2, and at that point, you have 8 powerful mobs running around with no one tanking them.

My raid group was fighting this boss, and just as we killed him, someone died, which spawned 4 skeletons. This quickly turned into 2, 3, 5....a lot of players being killed.

In the end, my rogue was the only person left alive, standing stealthed among about 100 skeletons, waiting for them to despawn.

The following chat was pretty funny, as people were telling me to get the hell out of there, not realizing that I had totally dropped agro and went into perfect stealth, and that I was not actually in any danager....actually, this happened somewhat frequently. Good thing I was one of those freaks who actually LIKED corpse runs. It made me feel useful.

[UD_Delt]

My monday night was spent raiding the Lab of Lord Vyemm in EQ2. EQ2 raids consist of 24 people max. This was only the second time our guild has raided the lab and seeing as only one guild on our server and probably less than 10 game wide have finished the zone there aren't a whole lot of written strats for this zone yet.

The first challenge is proper group setup. The 24 man raid is made up of 4 groups of 6. In eq2 all buffs are group only so you have to have the proper class mix and group setup for 2 tank groups with proper buffs and then 2 dps groups. For the first time ever we actually got a raid group together that had one of each type of healer. That made the group setup pretty easy as the two tank groups had 3 healers, 2 tanks, and one class that could shift aggro to the main tank in each group. The left over dps go into the other groups w/ one healer per group.

The lab is a fairly long zone with 8 or so named mobs in it. In between each name is probably 6 or 7 trash encounters. Luckily even the trash encounters have a chance at dropping some good loot though so they aren't just a complete time-sink.

We rolled through most of the zone without a problem. The challenge in the beginning was just figuring out what resists you need (heat, cold, poison, mental, etc...).  We supply everyone in guild with various resist jewelry so there's no excuse for not carrying it with you. Since we didn't have a mezzer with us this time we ended up off tanking most things. The group setup I talked about earlier really helped with this since we had two tanks with full buffs.

The toughest mobs at this point were those with the AE fear. Once we figured out which ones were doing that though it was easier at everyone would just switch from run to walk for those fights so fear couldn't send you as far and wouldn't send you in to aggro other mobs. And with the proper resist gear the fear only lasted a few seconds.

Everything was going VERY well up until the last mob, Lord Vyemm. Vyemm is a level 74^^^ epic x4. Max level for players is level 70 to give some perspective. Vyemm posed the following challenges:

Frontal cone AE - Mental damage
Tail Whip is a rear melee AE
A 35 second long range AE that was heat damage and also a gravity flux.

Gravity flux is a spell that tosses you WAY up in the air and classes without safe fall would then take falling damage. The other problem with Grav Flux is that the main tank would lose aggro while flying. Whoever would land first and took action vs Vyemm would draw aggro and Vyemm can one-shot any non-tank class.

We still haven't figured out how to beat him after 9 attempts (each death takes 10% off your armor and at 0% it's useless). After that we were mostly out of armor.

After talking with the guild that did manage to beat him it appears they didn't have to deal with the mem-wipe during gravity flux so not sure if anyone has manage to beat the newly buffed Lord Vyemm.

We couldn't find a way to keep him facing the main tank and away from the rest of us during the grav flux. Once he turned toward the main raid and did his frontal AE it was pretty much all over. The other AE's also caused a problem with jousting (running in and out of AE range) as you would invariably get hit with one of the 3 AEs. I think the best we did was about 2 minutes in and got him down to around 70%. During that fight we found a spot where the tank wouldn't get thrown too far so would only lose aggro for 1-2 seconds. Everyone else gathered under the dragons belly to avoid all but the grav flux AE and made sure to turn off and interupt all attacks/heals as soon as the AE went off. Getting 24 people to react instantly to an AE is a bit of a challenge to say the least. We lasted a while but someone else eventually grabbed aggro, he turned and frontal AE'd the raid to death.

He does seem killable but it's going to take perfect timing and coordination from everyone in the raid.

Eventually this zone will be a 2-3 hour raid. I think we finished everything up to the final fight in about 2 hours. We then spent another 2 or so hours strategizing and attempting Vyemm. Turned it into a fairly long night.

[Telemediocrity]

Do main tanks have access to any long, slow DoT's in EQ2?  Where the main tank keeping some sort of wimpy DoT on him prior to the gravity flux would ensure he turns back to the main tank after the mem wipe?

[Engels]

This thread has made me nostalgic for the 'bad old days' of EQ. Its funny; although if presented with the same options I would never go back to the 80 person raid format, I do have fond memories of some raids that seem to outshine the more honestly recalled hours and hours of tedium and frustration.

Strazos, that encounter was the scariest, most tense thing evah. It wasn't simply dying that made the 4 skeletons pop (any one of which could kill any player within 8 seconds), but simply getting off the aggro list caused them to spawn. Stealthing, FD, even zoning caused 4 to spawn if that player was on this boss mob's aggro list.

The worst for me was the Bertoxxulous raids, the god of disease. 3-4 hours of mini bosses, constant tension, and absolutely necessary for progression at the time. And with a 200+ member guild, you had to do the raid over and over and over again to get everybody 'flagged' to keep advancing. I left EQ before my guild went much past this, but I hear that Council of Rathe was far far worse, 8 hours being standard for a raid. And not just 8 hours and you're done for your guild. Chances were you would have to do that particular 8 hour stint at least 3 times to get everyone flagged. That's 3 successful runs. Most guilds failed at any one of these events an average of 3 times before succeeding in killing the boss mob once.

Never again. Corinthians 13:11 comes to mind,"When I was a lifeless nerd, I did nerdy things, I raided like a nerd, I fought like a nerd, but when I became a nerd with a girlfriend, I put away EQ-like things."

[Telemediocrity]

I dunno... a lot of the fun for MMOs from me comes from having room for error - where you can play with an imperfect template, or an imperfect group setup, or having clanmates along who are fucking around half the time and can't be arsed to follow actual directions, and still winning.  I guess I don't just see the "challenge" in cat-herding; I mean, sure, it's difficult, but it doesn't seem so much intellectually (i.e. Flash games like The Dark Room) or physically (i.e. CS twitch skills) taxing as it does like a test of endurance.

I'm not seeing what having to worry about dying if things don't go right adds to PvE.

[UD_Delt]

Do main tanks have access to any long, slow DoT's in EQ2?  Where the main tank keeping some sort of wimpy DoT on him prior to the gravity flux would ensure he turns back to the main tank after the mem wipe?

The issue isn't the main tank regaining aggro once he lands. I don't think it's an actual mem-wipe so much as an aggro interupt only while the tank is in the air. I could be wrong here as we didn't have a ton of attempts to fully test it out. But the couple occasions where our tank got blasted across the room he would turn kill a bunch of people then the tank would land and he would go charging after him again.

The problem is the instant he goes into the air if someone else on the hate list is still on the ground they will instantly get aggro. Or if someone didn't turn off their auto-attack and lands they will grab it before the tank. Once he turns toward the main raid force it's very hard to recover.

The other strat we didn't have a chance to attempt is to only go after him with the 2 tank groups. Both of these groups have enough healing to eat the non-frontal AE's and the healers would never do anything other than heal. This means a tank would always be the one to grab aggro after the aggro interrupt. Putting all the tanks to the front would mean hopefully he would never turn toward the healers. It would make for a long slow fight but it might be doable.

[Nebu]

My problem with raids are that they are only moderately interesting for the first few people that figure out how to defeat them.  Once the word gets out, they become yet another Foozle_6879 for people to extract loot from.  If there was a way to make these encounters more dynamic, they may be able to preserve the fun a little longer.

I think that this is the fundamental reason that I prefer PvP games to PvE games.  Playing another human has the potential to produce a widely varied encounter every time. 

[UD_Delt]

I dunno... a lot of the fun for MMOs from me comes from having room for error - where you can play with an imperfect template, or an imperfect group setup, or having clanmates along who are fucking around half the time and can't be arsed to follow actual directions, and still winning.  I guess I don't just see the "challenge" in cat-herding; I mean, sure, it's difficult, but it doesn't seem so much intellectually (i.e. Flash games like The Dark Room) or physically (i.e. CS twitch skills) taxing as it does like a test of endurance.

I'm not seeing what having to worry about dying if things don't go right adds to PvE.

I would aggree with your assessment but only when something is figured out and is in farm-mode. If the correct strategy to beat a mob you've killed 100 times still requires perfection then that is just boring.

But when you are first figuring out a zone or a mob it's a lot more satisfying (for me at least) to be pushed to the limit of your combined abilities.

[Sky]

Raids are so much fun. I remember the first time my guild did Hate in EQ waaay back and I was able to do a 45 minute beer run and not be missed at all. My buddy the eqholic was at my pad, so he could have taken over if something bad had occured...but nothing did.

Riveting gameplay.

[Zane0]

Gear really isn't so important as the ability to play properly, in my experience.  Skilled and dedicated players will often be taken over idiots with superior gear.

The time commitment for raids depends on the game.  In WoW, good, organized guilds can clear the high-end instances in two or three hours.  Many encounters are fairly conventional (based around tanks and keeping them up), but Blizzard has shown some originality in designing encounters after MC.  For instance, the first fight in Blackwing Lair has several phases, the first of which involves 20 or 30 mobs being thrown at the raid at once.  They're too powerful to be killed straight out- some can be mezzed, some kited, some are more vulnerable than others.  There are multiple ways to get through this phase.

AQ, the new instance, has some very original fights.  One encounter, Battleguard Sartura, is a fight with a boss and four minions that cannot be directly tanked; they de-aggro every few seconds.  Players who aren't in plate get shredded in short order if they're within several yards.  Controlling these mobs is an exercise of trying to stun them at proper times, and getting everyone to know where to position themselves and when to run.

Fights like these are difficult to master, as they involve a good amount of random chance.  This is part of Blizzard's stated design vision for raids, I believe.

Warcraft movies is a good place to check out some encounters. 

[Merusk]

My favorite raids are ZG bosses, by far.  Even though we're doing MC (hey our group made it to Rag last week, only 4th time in there, whee.) I still like ZG a lot better.   The coordination required of the people is a lot more intense and the things the bosses do are a lot more interesting than the MC bosses. Not to mention the zone itself is a lot more aesthicly pleasing.

Mandokir is one of my favorites, just because he "levels up" when someone in the raid dies.  In some cases he'll shout "DING" and one of the other bosses shouts "GRATS!" back at him. Still funny after the 20th time you see it.

[Zetor]

I really dig the new bosses in AQ20. (WOW)

There's an encounter that's basically a battle scene between NPC soldiers (lead by a Lt General) and waves of baddies. The key in the fight is keeping the soldiers alive (they do lots of damage and hold aggro well) and killing / crowd controlling the baddies quickly one by one; there are 5-6 waves with unique types of bosses showing up in each (some have AOEs, some reflect spells, some heal, etc). Then in the end assisting the Lt General in his showdown against the boss... it IS possible to kill the boss the traditional way, but he hits waaay too hard for non-epiced groups to pull it off.
Another encounter is basically a game of 'hot potato'. The boss will target a person randomly, and that person will have to kite him around (some classes are better at this than others, but the other people can assist) and lead the boss to an egg, which the rest of the group burns down and makes it explode just when the boss passes over it. Then the boss takes X damage depending on how close to it the egg burst, chooses a new target and the process is repeated until it reaches 20%, at which point it becomes vulnerable to normal damage and is tanked/killed as usual.
Yet another boss starts from 0 mana, constantly drains mana from the raid, and when his own mana bar reaches 100%, he kills everyone (and uses random damage spells before that). So you actually need your druids in feral form (he can't drain their mana that way) and have everyone use all mana draining abilities they have.

The Defender mobs (while not really 'bosses') are very non-standard too.. they have three abilities randomly chosen from three sets of two ('primary attack', 'secondary attack', 'defense') and the raid has to discover which ability set they have and adapt mid-fight. For example, the primary attack can either be a meteor centered on someone not actively tanking the mob (that hits for a fixed amount of damage distributed amongst everyone in the area of effect) or a plague on a random person (cannot be dispelled, does moderate-heavy damage to the afflicted person and everyone in close proximity for 30 seconds). Obviously if it has meteor, everyone needs to cluster up to avoid getting one-shotted (20 people taking 500 damage each > 1 person taking 10000 damage) and if it has plague, people need to spread out and whoever gets infected has to run away from the raid for a bit. Etc... I honestly don't really know how people handle these mobs without voice comms.

Not really a raid encounter, but there's a fun new fight in WOW... you fight a 5-man NPC group composed of random classes, only they actually behave like people -- they try to concentrate on your healer, crowd control and stun-lock your groupmates, use potions and items, etc. Definitely different from your average encounter, almost feels like pvp. :P


-- Z.

[Morfiend]

Do main tanks have access to any long, slow DoT's in EQ2?  Where the main tank keeping some sort of wimpy DoT on him prior to the gravity flux would ensure he turns back to the main tank after the mem wipe?

MY first thought was have a OT stand out of range of the Grav Flux thing, so that when the MT is up in the air, the boss turns to the OT.

I have to say that I really love raiding BWL in WoW. The encounters are much more challanging than Main Tank on mob, heal + dps. Each fight requires a good deal of team work and brains. The only problem I have is that a lot of the fights are very Tankcentric, in that you live or die by the ability and quick thinking of the tanks. (main tank, and 2-4 offtanks). I should probably have rolled a tank, cause I really enjoy leading raids, but instead I rolled a rogue, so the majority of my raid time is spent inbetween DPS ON - DPS OFF. But since I do quite a bit of actually leading the raids, I have to know what every one else is doing, and make sure they are doing the right thing. MC can suck my ass though. Such a crappy raid dungeon. BWL and AQ are great.

[UD_Delt]

MY first thought was have a OT stand out of range of the Grav Flux thing, so that when the MT is up in the air, the boss turns to the OT.

Not sure that will work due to positioning. It would take the OT too long to get into range and while doing so Vyemm would end up out of position. Any movement on the part of Vyemm results in someone taking an extra frontal or rear AE. It's worth a shot though and I'll suggest it next time we can raid the Lab.

[Telemediocrity]

Aggro seems to be the common denominator in raid situations - where by definition the maintenance and management of aggro makes the difference between success and failure.

I think, now, I'm starting to see where the differentiation comes in between very different MMOs - if a game doesn't have aggro management (i.e. mobs basically go for whomever), you by definition can't have radically different defense abilities between classes (i.e. if mobs are going to randomly go for every member of the party, you can't let anyone get wtfpwned too easy).

It seems that if one were going to take apart the 'diku' paradigm for future, 'different' MMOs, aggro is the linchpin that has to be discarded - it by definition requires a certain selection of classes and from there a certain sort of group gameplay.  You have to let all the party members get knocked around similarly.

Essentially, all the strategy that is injected into these raids seems to arise at the base from aggro management.  If strategy is going to be injected outside of the 'classical raid' sense, it would require a move away from that.

I imagine, in such a MMO, the difference between classes would be something akin to the difference between using a shotgun, a SMG, and an AWP in CS (not getting into the twitch, it's just the first example that pops into my head).

Question:  I haven't played a whole lot of pen and paper D&D, nor did I ever get into the really high levels of MUDs.  Was aggro management big in those venues as well?

[HaemishM]

Question:  I haven't played a whole lot of pen and paper D&D, nor did I ever get into the really high levels of MUDs.  Was aggro management big in those venues as well?

That was entirely up to the DM. There weren't any real mechanics for it that I remember.

[Telemediocrity]

Gotcha w/r/t D&D.  Did they have the equivalent of difficult raids in the MUDs?  If so, how did they run them w/o aggro management being a key?

[Merusk]

Depended on the MUD.

Circle muds and ROMs that I played, mobs attacked the first person in the room list.  Lots of Circles and ROMs added in "Rescue" and "Heroic Rescue" skills that you could get as warrior classes.  These would grab whoever you named and "pull" them behind you, so you were the one getting beat-on instead.  This only worked one mob at a time, though, so you'd have to rescue multiple times if there was more than one aggressive mob in the room, or if one wandered in while you were fighting.

A lot of MUD admins would add-in tougher mobiles with specials or uber equipment or jacked-up stats for players to have a challenge.  However, most MUDs were so unsophisticated that it was just a question of attrition.  Would your HP or the MOBs go down quicker. Party members were only there to increase damage-done or keep your Tank's health higher.

 Tanking came from MUDs, because of the lack of aggro management and 3d movement space. It was just one guy standing there acting like a wall until the HP tickers resolved a winner.  I played MUDs for a good 5 years... so I suppose that explains my tolerance for "crappy" (as deemed by others) combat systems like WoW's.  They've come a long way since 1995, and I appreciate the chance to do more than stand there.

[Swede]

Bertoxx was a pushover... try coordinating a 72 ppl Rathe run with 40 other in vent screaming about how they wanna get keyed too...as of today ive never even come close to the thrill i felt when we killed him the first time, or faced anything that was so downright hard in the gaming world...


most of the raids in EQ was ZZZfests tho....i never ever ever EVER wanna see something like Vex Thal in a game again.

[Xilren's Twin]

Question:  I haven't played a whole lot of pen and paper D&D, nor did I ever get into the really high levels of MUDs.  Was aggro management big in those venues as well?

That was entirely up to the DM. There weren't any real mechanics for it that I remember.

Yeah, the DM, aka the "missing ingredient" from MMORPG.  Having a human control the opponent could lead to much more variance in any given Raid or epic encounter.  Boss mobs wouldnt have to have ridiculous amounts of stats if you could allow significant variance between encounters, everything from variable spawn location to rearranging the geography of the zone itself each time.  In truth the instancing of raid zones by WoW really don't take advantage of the options instancing could provide.

But of course that's too expensive so once again static reusable content ftw!

Xilren
PS The irony about raiding in these games is they are actually the closest thing we have to "doing" a dungeon in a traditional D&D sense where there's a logical starting place, a set of objective, and an end state with victory and failure conditions.  It's the neccessary repeatablility which sucks.

[Glazius]

Well, uh. I'd be remiss if I didn't talk about the Hydra trial from CoH.

To activate it you go on a stomping spree in the abandoned sewers and wipe out big globs of Rikti, but that's just a standard hunt to open the contact up. You get an access card that'll unlock a certain maintenance door in the sewers for an hour and a half - the time starts ticking when you interact with a world object at the heart of the abandoned sewers.

The sewers aren't exactly easy to get around in - tight corners, narrow passageways, and enemy groups sized for 6-8 heroes. But assuming you get everybody there alright, you enter the lair of the Hydra. It starts off like a normal sewer but opens into a huge chasm with catwalks running every which way and Rikti sprinkled throughout. At the bottom is the head of the Hydra, an alien beast the Rikti brought in to serve as a heavy siege engine.

Getting down the catwalks is the "easy" part - though of course if somebody falls you need recall friend to pull them out of the mess they no doubt landed in. Scattered on the way down are weapon crates, one for every member of the team. Half are thermite flamethrowers, half are particle guns. Temporary powers. You need to get as many of them as possible.

When you finally hit bottom, the Hydra head is in the center of a chamber with four alcoves, surrounded by its own tentacles, surrounded by hatched Kraken, and groups of Rikti are in the alcoves protecting generators. Hatched Kraken are monster-class adversaries with a punishing AoE stomp (and they nerfed XP for them but boosted the mission complete, because people would kill the simple giant monsters for lots of XP and not actually try the Hydra). Tentacles come in the three major minion strengths - boss, lieutenant, and minion - and spit toxic sludge which can punch through a lot of defenses. Fortunately, the thermite guns can do some decent damage when used to hose down a tentacle.

The ultimate goal is to wipe out the Hydra head, but it's protected by an impenetrable force field - you need to wipe out all four generators before it'll shut off, and when a generator fails you only have a few minutes before the Rikti teleport in to repair it. To make things a little more complicated, only the particle guns can actually damage the Hydra head once it's been exposed.

To make things a lot more complicated, the Hydra head can shoot you with nasty psionics even through the force field, and they're pretty much unresistable damage, even for the 'tanker' classes.

To make things even _more_ complicated, when the head gets down to 50% and 25% health, a bunch of Rikti reinforcements gate in to protect it.

Of course, in CoH tankers get taunt and taunt effects, which rocket them to the top of the aggro list and leave them there, and they get a small one every time they hit something and can fire off a larger AoE one every 10 seconds or so. But psionics still punches through tanks, and when the Rikti show up to reinforce the Hydra, they're way too spread out to get taunted all at once.

The trick is timing - bringing down the generators with simultaneous attacks and then rushing in to do as much damage to the Hydra as possible - and maintaining the pressure in the face of the Hydra's pisonic assault.

--GF

[Nija]

Hmm, interesting.  So basically, the effects that can happen are spellcasting, mob spawns, i assume maybe attack type changes?, things like that.

What about the big WoW raids I hear about, like Molten Core?  Similar style?

Question for you.

How do you talk so much shit about all these games when you don't have any idea how any of them actually work?

[shiznitz]

I hate to bring UO into this, but on the aggro issue, how did it work? I don't remember anything complicated and there certainly were no taunt skills. Was it just proximity? I remember charging into many orcs while my brother's mage nuked and healed me. Occasionally an orc would peel away from the pack and chase him. I never actually fought the big mobs like dragons head to head since there was always a bard in the party provoking.

A game that gets rids of aggro can get rid of chain healing which means no healer classes which means everyone can have fun in a fight.

[tazelbain]

A game that gets rids of aggro can get rid of chain healing which means no healer classes which means everyone can have fun in a fight.

GW has no aggro crontrol, but healing is still inportant. Some of us like healing.  I don't see how making bars up is less fun them go down.