Let's talk about the update 11 raid

[Scraap]

Weeeeel... If they're sticking with aberrations, the unholy spawn of a rust monster and a beholder could be fun as an add.
Make wit de magic, it turns and cuts that off.
Slap it around too much, time for a new set of weapons.
That'd give something for ranged and monks to play with. Wouldn't make it the only boss though. (or even necessarily a boss).

If they want to emphasize skill usage a bit, one each of a recruit-able intim, diplo, and bluff 'miniboss' for holding off waves of attackers.

If they want to reflect the effort of two toons working together, a bridge that can be blown up using a high level place-able trap that cuts off respawns.

Stat damage and penalties... would be great, if the code reflected the description, and penalties weren't cleared with one mass heal alongside damage, but that is likely a topic all on it's own...

I forget the name of the quest, but there's one that brings all magical effects down to half for the damage both divine and arcane on weapons and spells... One of the necro 3s...

[voxson5]

Oo, would also like to add that there should be some component to the raid that does either/ both of two things:

- limit the abilities of caster types (arcanes & divines), this could be achieved with a mob like dreamstealers and arcane oozes, ie ones that do SP damage

- involve the who party in multiple confontations, with each 'type' doing what they do best, arcanes nuking/cc'ing nasties so that melee's can take out various targets, all while the rogue and the divine go & purify some heavily trapped and guarded altar

Also, quests like Delerium and the IQ/Dreaming dark show off some really nice graphical abilities of the DDO engine, I would love for this to be utilized
(Even just the start area in Dream Conspiracy looks 100 times better than other "down the sewer on a rope" quests)

[sirgog]

(comments re randomness, not going to argue the point)

RE: People that want raids more like ToD:

ToD was a fun raid to me.. But the issue with it was it wasn't really tier'd and didn't last us. I had every single ring on everyone of my 5 chars I wanted to bring there within a couple months.. Just wasn't enough content/challenge to last us 2+ years like the Shroud could do.
And yea the extra optional boss for an extra chest was great. (Well once it was fixed, it was just an annoyance that encouarged lower difficlty before it worked on hard/elite)
But that extra chest never had extra raid loot.. Just +4 tomes, which are great and all.. But far too rare to make it clear line that doing that provides the better reward.

Using chrono as a example.. Ugh please no. imo that is the worst designed raid yet. Every boss fight there is boring tank and spank.. The minor wrickles of special abilities or teleporting away doesn't create for any challenge, just breaks up the fights slightly..
Abishai is a great example of a boss fight done WRONG.
Why?
Several MAJOR important features missing that make it trivial no matter what, even on epic:
No lockout. "Ohh party whipe.. no problem lets get our alts and win"
1 boss. Tank and spank.. Well he has a devastating fire special? Who cares. If the tank dies, use the next guy with agro as the new tank, he is a joke of a boss to tank.
Weak trash respawns that 1 player can handle .. Meh a raid 2-3 people can win yet again, trivial and boring.
No penalty for dying.. ToD got this right with the health regen.. Zero penalty at all just isn't acceptable.
If they fixed each of those points, it could be a good fight. As it stands now, it lacks anything that makes a raid truely challenging.

What it needs as far as those points go:
Lockout. Every real raid needs a lockout, you should absoluely not get a 2nd chance without restarting from the begining.
Multiple bosses. 1 boss, 1 tank and 10 players to help that tank is just way too easy. Requiring more players to be well built to handle bosses and more healers makes for a great challenge, that one part ToD did right (even if the 2nd boss is optional, he should be present)
Trash respawns:
Either - A) VERY TOUGH - hard enough to require more then 1 player handling them.
or B) Not fixed respawned, but rather they must be killed since they continue to pile up if not killed.. Example that gets this right: Velah, 2 claws at first easy enough, soon enough you have 4, then 6.. and it can easily overwealm one unprepared player. (tho imo they could be harder to kill for casters, being weak to ice and unresistant to most everythign else makes them a bit too easy for casters to solo)
Penalty for death:
ToD style of healing the raid boss is good, simply replicating that can work.
Ravers Penalty box i really like too.. Tho for an ongoing non puzzle mechanic fight, there should be some very difficult way to rescue them..
Abbots style of potentialy making it very difficult to rez if soulstone gets lost in the water due to death on a ice island. As well as healers potentially getting encased/quelled.
That one works, but is too specific to abbot mechanics to replicate.

Let's hear some more opinions on what people want and less "I disagree" tho please. Just stating that without giving your thoughts on what you want isn't really helpful.

I get that some players dont want a challenge, and thats why I offered normal as that setting, but just saying u want it all easy isn't productive.. Tell us why you want it all for free, and why you think you are more important then me, or anyone else that wants a challenge.

Biggest issue with ToD was that except for part 1, Normal, Hard and Elite are too similar in difficulty and have identical rewards. The biggest change to Horoth is that the orthons are more threatening on the higher difficulties and the fight goes longer - Horoth and Suulo are basically the same monsters with a little more melee damage and better To-Hit.

ToD part 3 should have been harder on Elite (part 1 is pretty well done on Elite) - Orthons should spawn without limit, and Horoth should have some unique abilities that change the fight - maybe something where he gives a warning, then five seconds later casts a Mass Trap the Soul on everyone (regardless of range) he has line of sight to. No matter what you are doing, when he gives warning, you've got to run behind something.

Suulo doesn't make the fight any harder, just longer - that's more time to run out of mana or screw something up, but he doesn't really change anything. Horoth should gain a new ability when Suulo dies to change things up a bit.

I think TOD should have dropped rings without +1 exceptional stats on Normal, the current rings on Hard, and the Elite versions should have been +7 to the stat they had on them. Suulo's chest should have dropped weapons or something unique that also gets a little better on Hard and Elite - something the quality of a Lit 2 on Norm, a +7 Lit 2 on Hard and a +9 Lit 2 on Elite.

Penalty boxes are good but skirt around the real issue - DDO should just bite the bullet and nerf all three raise spells to be out-of-combat only (10 second cast time, no Quicken allowed, any damage interrupts the spell). That would make death something worth avoiding. Maybe change True Res to be the one in-combat res, but put it on a 5+ minute cooldown.

[Tomalon]

Oh yea, and add this debuff to all players on entry on epic too:
Mneumonic brain hemorhage:
While under this effect, if you consume any item that provides mnenomic enhancements, your brain will expload.
(Drinking mana pots instantly kills you)

Maybe while they are at it they could add an undispellable exhaust effect that sets in after a haste runs out..

[crazydamage]

I like the sounds of this raid. The randomness of the elite boss encounter is a great idea to keep things exciting and challenging.



This I can go along with as long as they give melees an energy bar which goes down with each swing. Once that energy bar is gone, they can still move but not attack.

Seriously, things go bad sometimes. Mana pots shouldn't be a planned tactic but there are times when they are needed. I agree that too many players these days can't seem to manage their mana but then again, too many melees can't seem to manage their health and survivability either.

I would be looking forward to this type of raid.

That's ok we can still fall back on our 1000000 heal scrolls 100000 recon scrolls and 100000 silver flame pots.

[crazydamage]

Tiered yes, but not at all in the way you suggest.

I agree with casual-accessible on Normal, and brutal on the highest setting.

But as for 'you can't use any weapons not from this raid' - we actually have that silly mechanic in one quest in DDO. It's an unpopular quest and seldom run to completion above Casual.

Not to mention that some people would get the Elite flagging lottery over on their first Hard run, and others would not be flagged for Elite after 20+ runs.

Let players use the best equipment they have - and tune the raid around that, rather than irritating lottery mechanics like the Boots of Anchoring or the boring "DR/UpgradedDreamsplitter". And make the loot worthwhile for all content, not just for one raid.

What he's proposing wouldnt even hold players back.

I would simply collect all my trash shard/seal scrolls for trash epic weapons

(Sands, House P, D etc) and slot each of them with a different augment (Crystal Byshek etc).

[crazydamage]

The recent raid bosses have been getting more varied.

eVelah has a movement component to the raid. Dull and predictable now, but it was a start. (IMO it would be better if the time between breaths wasn't fixed, so you had to run from the visual cues rather than just timing it).

Bloodplate in eChrono isn't really beatable if you ignore the adds. He'll heal too much.

Razor Arm can't be boxed in for very long at a time (even if we do just box him in).

Cojoined Abashai Devastator does at least require you to pay attention to his special abilities (this, IMO, could be done better by forcing us to react to all of them, and in different ways to each).


What's missing, IMO, is abilities that leave lingering (possibly ever-growing) dangerous areas behind, and more 'you must kill this/these mob(s) immediately or the boss will wipe you' scenarios.

Something like a boss spawning a 20k HP fire elemental, and while that fire ele is up, the boss's fire attacks deal triple damage. And 15 seconds after the fire ele spawns, he covers the whole room in an Abbot-style Inferno (minus the SP drain).

That actually sounds kind of good.

[crazydamage]

100% Fort just means that you are an idiot to take a melee into the raid at all.

Assuming no mana dumping, casters do slightly better sustained DPS than melees against 0 AC, 0 Fort targets like Velah - adding 100% Fort (or massive AC) just makes melees go from a little behind a caster to so far behind a caster it's not funny.

Remember how bad melees (especially rogues, but other melees too) were when the cap was 14 and Necro 4 was new?

People still play melee?
You should be out there making FVS wiz and sorcs.

[Vengeance777]

My favorite raid when I started playing this game was Tempest Spine. You and your team were storming a well fortified location killing hoards of underlings. It had puzzles, it required cooperation, you had to split the party to kill fire and ice at the same time, there were tons of miniboss battles, and the big boss could hurl you off his mountain. The boss also required the party to get objects along the way so he could be beaten. It felt like a true pen and paper Dungeon. With the exception of the Titan raid no other raid has come close to duplicating it.

I would really love to see another Tempest Spine type of raid. I was so disappointed when I started playing the other raids in the game. They are all either walk into room kill boss, fight boss/do puzzle, or go to room A kill miniboss, room B kill miniboss, room C kill Big boss.

I loved the feel of Tempest Spine and would love to see that type of raid make it to the endgame. I'm tired of raids being an entry way and one room, made artificially long by pumping the hp of the boss to insane levels or having the boss port away during the fight. I want a raid that's long because its a huge map, with tons of chests, bosses, fights, secrets, and puzzles.


For those craving a challenge how about adding a survive the gauntlet/climb the tower style raid dungeon with increasing difficulty each floor. Something like the Cave of Ordeals from Legend of Zelda Twilight princess. You only have the resources you take in. Maybe a shrine once after a miniboss every 10 floors or so.

As you descend deeper into the dungeon the difficulty of encounters goes up. A group of beholders 5 rooms in, two doomspheres and a Lich 15 rooms in with skeletal mages healing them, an elder dragon and 2 young dragons 25 rooms in with a high cr kobold army, 2 Pit Fiends and some horned devils 50 rooms in etc. Preupdate 9 epic wards when you hit the deeper floors. Have some rooms be puzzles and add random traps throughout the dungeon. Place every type of dragon in the game throughout the dungeon, have their chests drop scales and helms, including red scales and helm very deep in the dungeon. Put a chest every 5 floors so people get something for trying. Amount of chests and chest goodies go up with difficulty setting and as you descend deeper. And don't make it as waves in one room. There's nothing worse than a sit and wait for next wave to come quest (looking at you Devil's Assault). Have it where you actually ascend or descend deeper. You could even make it on the plane of dreams with the mobs being enemies from your past or a journey through the planes so any enemy type would be possible in the dungeon.

Make the final chest drop 5 dungeon tokens and rare, highly sought after drops, like Pale Lavender Ioun stones, Augment Crystals, Hearts of wood, etc... Find a way to add something like the TR wings to a player that completes it, a badge of honor for surviving it. Don't give it unique loot though. This is a challenge dungeon whose main reward is completing it and would only be for the best of the best. What epic was originally meant to be. If unique loot is added people will complain that they can't reach the end and call for nerfs. This should be a grueling dungeon to test your toon and parties skills not for the weak of heart.

[sirgog]

People still play melee?
You should be out there making FVS wiz and sorcs.

Against 0 AC, 0 Fort foes with no significant elemental resists, melees aren't as good as casters for DPS, but at least they can contribute something - maybe 80% of the DPS of a caster that's not manadumping.

Against 100% Fort foes or high AC foes - make that 50% instead. And if you don't believe me - take a group of 6 casters into Epic Big Top and watch how much faster killing Malicia is compared to a melee-heavy group.

That's ok we can still fall back on our 1000000 heal scrolls 100000 recon scrolls and 100000 silver flame pots.

Heal scrolls have a small effect and a significant cooldown. They aren't the same as mana potions at all, where the effect is huge and the cooldown insignificant as it's hard to burn 400 SP in the five seconds between finishing drinking one pot and the cooldown ending, even if you are in full mana-dump mode.

[crazydamage]

My favorite raid when I started playing this game was Tempest Spine. You and your team were storming a well fortified location killing hoards of underlings. It had puzzles, it required cooperation, you had to split the party to kill fire and ice at the same time, there were tons of miniboss battles, and the big boss could hurl you off his mountain. The boss also required the party to get objects along the way so he could be beaten. It felt like a true pen and paper Dungeon. With the exception of the Titan raid no other raid has come close to duplicating it.

I would really love to see another Tempest Spine type of raid. I was so disappointed when I started playing the other raids in the game. They are all either walk into room kill boss, fight boss/do puzzle, or go to room A kill miniboss, room b kill miniboss, room C kill Big boss.

I loved the feel of Tempest Spine and would love to see that type of raid make it to the endgame. I'm tired of raids being an entry way and one room, made artificially long by pumping the hp of the boss to insane levels or having the boss port away during the fight. I want a raid that's long because its a huge map, with tons of chests, bosses, fights, secrets, and puzzles.


For those craving a challenge how about adding a survive the gauntlet/climb the tower style raid dungeon with increasing difficulty each floor. Something like the Cave of Ordeals from Legend of Zelda.

As you descend deeper into the dungeon the difficulty of encounter goes up. A group of beholders 5 rooms in, two doomspheres and a Lich 15 rooms in with skeletal mages healing them, an elder dragon and 2 young dragons 25 rooms in with a kobold army, 2 Pit Fiends and some horned devils 50 rooms in etc. Have some rooms be puzzles or trapped. Place every type of dragon in the game throughout the dungeon, have their chests drop scales and helms, including red scales and helm very deep in the dungeon. Put a chest every 5 floors so people get something for trying. Amount of chests and chest goodies go up with difficulty setting and as you descend deeper. And don't make it as waves in one room. There's nothing worse than a sit and wait for next wave to come quest (looking at you Devil's Assault).

You could even make it on the plane of dreams or a journey through the planes so any enemy type would be possible in the dungeon.

Make the final chest drop 5 dungeon tokens and rare, highly sought after drops, like Pale Lavender Ioun stones, Augment Crystals, Hearts of wood, etc... Find a way to add something like the TR wings to a player that completes it, a badge of honor for surviving it. Don't give it unique loot though. This is a challenge dungeon whose main reward is completing it and would only be for the best of the best. What epic was originally meant to be. If unique loot is added people will complain that they can't reach the end and call for nerfs. This should be a grueling dungeon to test your toon and parties skills not for the weak of heart.

Tempests spine is nothing but a long dungeon.
We 2 manned tempest spine elite today at lvl 12 (FVS + Barb), had a rogue who unlocked the 2 doors and 8 others that lagged behind/died.

But essentially the two of us killed every single monster including the boss.

Fire + Ice do not need to be split, only killed within 30 seconds of each other. Not hard considering they are in 2 completely different locations.

Interestingly, DCed and dropped all 3 runes. FVS soloed the endboss with Divine Punishment stacking without any runes.

This leads me to conclude that tempests spine could be zerged at lvl as a great xp/minute quest (skip picking up the runes / completely ignore bridge to the inevitable thus cutting off like 10 minutes) and then just kill the boss without doing the puzzle/runes by using magic only.

[crazydamage]

Against 0 AC, 0 Fort foes with no significant elemental resists, melees aren't as good as casters for DPS, but at least they can contribute something - maybe 80% of the DPS of a caster that's not manadumping.

Against 100% Fort foes or high AC foes - make that 50% instead. And if you don't believe me - take a group of 6 casters into Epic Big Top and watch how much faster killing Malicia is compared to a melee-heavy group.

Heal scrolls have a small effect and a significant cooldown. They aren't the same as mana potions at all, where the effect is huge and the cooldown insignificant as it's hard to burn 400 SP in the five seconds between finishing drinking one pot and the cooldown ending, even if you are in full mana-dump mode.

Most things in the game can be scrolled;

Horoth scrolled
eChrono conjoined devastator : Scroll
VOD scroll
Hound scroll

Scrolling a target with proper AMP and if the healer has proper scroll mastery (and what healer doesnt), gives you infinite single target healing. If 1 healer scrolling isnt enough, use 2, (or 3).

Of course pots are better, but 1 SP pot costs the same as 100 scrolls plat wise (AH).
I think the point I was making is that taking away pots doesnt significantly affect any current raid or epic.

As for DPS wise, I will agree with your numbers. What is more important is that melees cannot wipe their own *** (meaning they cannot effectively DPS and heal at the same time, further, DPS is sacrificed by builds to gain any worthwile self healing at all) while, all casters (should) be able to self heal.

Group full of casters essentially has 0% risk of a wipe, while maintaining equal or better dps to melees. Group with only 2 healers are dependant on healers not sucking.

[Vengeance777]

Tempests spine is nothing but a long dungeon.
We 2 manned tempest spine elite today at lvl 12 (FVS + Barb), had a rogue who unlocked the 2 doors and 8 others that lagged behind/died.

But essentially the two of us killed every single monster including the boss.

Fire + Ice do not need to be split, only killed within 30 seconds of each other. Not hard considering they are in 2 completely different locations.

Interestingly, DCed and dropped all 3 runes. FVS soloed the endboss with Divine Punishment stacking without any runes.

This leads me to conclude that tempests spine could be zerged at lvl as a great xp/minute quest (skip picking up the runes / completely ignore bridge to the inevitable thus cutting off like 10 minutes) and then just kill the boss without doing the puzzle/runes by using magic only.

Yes I'm aware of how easy tempest spine is nowadays, it can be 1 manned at level with the right set up. It wasn't always like this from the vets I've talked to when the cap was lower and dungeon scaling didn't exist. I'm suggesting taking the ideas introduced in that raid and building from it, I don't want a raid that people zerg through.

- Have a vast area we have to explore and fight through with a variety of enemies., Not 3 rooms and one hall ( like TOD).
- Require the party to separate and kill some mini bosses within a certain time frame or they reset, like TS, Shroud p2, and the Tor dragons.
- Have an army we have to fight through like Tor and TS. Not a handful of minions.
- Require that we gather items or do things that weaken the boss.
- Add some puzzles and secret chests.
- Allow the boss the chance to split the party with a special move.
- Allow multiple ways of defeating and weakening the boss. Pure DPS option, Titan styled drop the ceiling on it then kill whats left of it lol, puzzle to weaken it, let a rogue turn its own traps against it, let divines weaken it with prayers, turn its minions against it, etc... Make it so we have option besides surround and hit it.

I'm really hoping the Truthful one's raid is something like this. If the Dracolich raid most of DDO's storyline has been building to is click quest entrance, spawn in the dragon's cave, surround dragon autoattack, sigh.

[Yaga_Nub]

...Agreed. More interesting locations. Vault of Night is awesome.

What planar effect do we see in VoN? The suggestion was that we would see planar effects like we do in PoP where each room is set in a different plane and has special effects.

[Yaga_Nub]

100% Fort just means that you are an idiot to take a melee into the raid at all.

Assuming no mana dumping, casters do slightly better sustained DPS than melees against 0 AC, 0 Fort targets like Velah - adding 100% Fort (or massive AC) just makes melees go from a little behind a caster to so far behind a caster it's not funny.

Remember how bad melees (especially rogues, but other melees too) were when the cap was 14 and Necro 4 was new?

Jesus, everyone just wants the easy button. Half the fun of doing any raid or quest is to do it with suboptimal groups. Why do you see all bard raids or all ranger raids or even all divine raids even before DP came out. Not everyone is scared to be a little inefficient because most people that I know that play DDO want to play with their friends more than they care about a PERFECT party. Please think a little.

I was sticking to one aspect of a quest but if you think that I'd put heavy fort on a boss and not also put some TRUE DnD style SR on that same boss or at the very least some anti-magic zones around the boss then you're focusing too much on one thing.

I'm all about equality. If I was designing something and I wanted to screw with people, it would be everyone not just the rogues. For instance, I'd also have the boss occasionally cast a new spell called Calm that would dispel not only the spell Rage but a Barbarian's rage and Madstone rage. I'd try to find a way to create the Heat Metal spell to use against the PCs. The boss cast that at the beginning of the fight and maybe again a few minutes later. It would be a 50 to 60 point a tick fire damage spell to everyone wear or holding metal and would do extra damage to WF as the metal started to burn the livewood in their body. The boss would also cast Quell. OFTEN. Every 15 to 20 seconds, the person that was doing the most damage would be telekinetically hurled away like the dragon does with her wing buffet in Prey but twice as far and with no save. Or maybe if the boss was another giant, he would kick you away. It would be fun to see someone punted.

I hope I made my point. Please stop focusing on a single comment because you can't think of anything to add to the discussion besides negative comments. What's the old saying, If you can't say something nice don't say anything at all? Well I'm changing it, If you can't say something that adds to the discussion, don't say anything at all.

EDIT - ZOMG - The boss or one of the mini-bosses that helps the end boss should be a bard and he should freely use fascinate on us. That would be fun! It would be the new hold spell. Everyone would be sweating as they wondered whether or not they would get hit before the fascinate ran out. Mobs could be scripted to leave fascinated PCs alone and then to start picking us off one by one.

[Tsani]

So why not steal a page out of WoW's book..

Big Boss + 1-5 mini-bosses, mini-bosses can be engaged before you engage the big boss and killed for no loot, or you can leave them up and the boss can summon them mid-fight, giving you something else to deal with and possibly buffing the boss while the mini is up. Each mini either upgrades the existing loot level or provides +1 chests at the end of the encounter. You'd have to work the timers on the summoning of the mini's to make sure they aren't trivial to kill and add enough to the encounter that if you choose to leave them up you have to do significant damage to them to stay ahead of the curve ie.

Engage Boss
45 seconds in 1 mini (gives boss anti-melee buff)
1:15 in 2nd mini (gives boss anti-caster buff)
1:30 in 3rd mini (gives boss raid dmg buff)
1:45 in 4th mini (gives boss xxxyyy buff)
etc.

This means that the fight gets progressively harder the more mini's you leave up, and leaving particular mini's up could make the fight harder depending on the make-up of the group and others easier. For example 1 give anti-melee buffs to the boss, 1 give anti-caster buffs to the boss etc. so killing mini 1 and 3 on a healer/melee heavy group makes the fight easier and different than killing the anti-caster one on a caster heavy raid.

As to boss AI, its a lot harder than you think to come up with creative solutions for making bosses "smarter" as most of the fights are either scripts or reactions to events. Reaction type events give you more flexibility, but then just become part of the script, and then people will just find a way around them, such as 'if I cast ae heals, the boss eats me, so I won't cast ae's and only do single target' etc. But I do agree they need to give bosses a wider range of abilities including doing more things like feeblemind or self buffing. A reactive of 'hey I just ate 2k frost dmg, I'm going to self-buff frost resist' and forcing the caster to be more dynamic is great, but it greatly increases the amount of coding that must be done to capture all the events that could possibly happen. Tank and Spank while boring, is also easy to program, easy to balance and with the right splashes of env events easy for people to understand.

Tsani

[Thrudh]

Jesus, everyone just wants the easy button. Half the fun of doing any raid or quest is to do it with suboptimal groups. Why do you see all bard raids or all ranger raids or even all divine raids even before DP came out. Not everyone is scared to be a little inefficient because most people that I know that play DDO want to play with their friends more than they care about a PERFECT party. Please think a little.

I was sticking to one aspect of a quest but if you think that I'd put heavy fort on a boss and not also put some TRUE DnD style SR on that same boss or at the very least some anti-magic zones around the boss then you're focusing too much on one thing.

I'm all about equality. If I was designing something and I wanted to screw with people, it would be everyone not just the rogues. For instance, I'd also have the boss occasionally cast a new spell called Calm that would dispel not only the spell Rage but a Barbarian's rage and Madstone rage. I'd try to find a way to create the Heat Metal spell to use against the PCs. The boss cast that at the beginning of the fight and maybe again a few minutes later. It would be a 50 to 60 point a tick fire damage spell to everyone wear or holding metal and would do extra damage to WF as the metal started to burn the livewood in their body. The boss would also cast Quell. OFTEN. Every 15 to 20 seconds, the person that was doing the most damage would be telekinetically hurled away like the dragon does with her wing buffet in Prey but twice as far and with no save. Or maybe if the boss was another giant, he would kick you away. It would be fun to see someone punted.

I hope I made my point. Please stop focusing on a single comment because you can't think of anything to add to the discussion besides negative comments. What's the old saying, If you can't say something nice don't say anything at all? Well I'm changing it, If you can't say something that adds to the discussion, don't say anything at all.

EDIT - ZOMG - The boss or one of the mini-bosses that helps the end boss should be a bard and he should freely use fascinate on us. That would be fun! It would be the new hold spell. Everyone would get sweating as they wondered whether or not they would get hit before the fascinate ran out. Mobs could be scripted to leave fascinated PCs alone and then to start picking us off one by one.

Those are fun ideas. +1

[Cyr]

All this does is force every want-to-be-tank to take full ranks in Intimidate and wear Intimidate gear. That's not thinking out of the box, it's putting players into a box.

Actually that would only be true if you ran with tanks who had no way to reduce their agro. It's rather easy to play a hate tank if all you want to do is keep agro 100% of the time. In fact, it's kind of boring. If some raids depended upon swapping agro it would be much more interesting and in no ways would require everyone to wear intim gear....intim would be the easy way to pull agro, but you can also shed agro with diplo or by letting a close to the threat level dps pull it away from you. The idea here is to not have these dots stack up so fast that you would go from uber tank to **** tank in five seconds, but more like 45 seconds. Also note that an arcane can pull agro pretty quickly from a tank if the tank lets them.

...which is instantly fixed by the Heal spell.

Yup, it would have to be a debuff like effect that stacks that is not fully healed by the heal spell to work in a meaningful fashion.

Disjunction isn't clever -- it's a lag fest. You get disjunctioned and you lag out. Been that way a long time. I don't ever expect it to be fixed. Even if it didn't cause lag, randomly turning off gear effects is too random. Encounters should be designed where player skill matters, not avoiding random effects.

Actually disjunction is clever, but it's buggyness in game is really horrible. It would need to be fixed before being a major feature of a new raid for sure. As for randomness disjunction can be alot less deadly then rolling a 1 on a saving throw as you can swap gear often times to compensate. I have serious lag issues in general in game, but I find that if I make sure to do a reboot right before going in dq1 epic the balls in there only give me about 0.5s lag...which while annoying is playable through.

All this means is that raids will stack arcanes/divines to keep dots on the boss when it's flying. If Turbine is going to add flying bosses, then Turbine needs to make thrown/missile weapon damage meaningful.

Agreed that caster dps poses a major design problem right now. Beholders would have their own potential defenses here, but other flying bosses might have serious issues here.

Annoying != challenging. And again, all it would do is promote bringing casters over melee to the raid.

Actually anything that makes it harder to get to a mob in a raid makes the raid more challenging for melee. Again caster imbalance in quests poses a problem here. Things like high SR mobs (drow) or anti-magic could help, but again the base issue lies in cater imbalance versus ranged combat atm.

Agreed. More interesting locations. Vault of Night is awesome.
Huh? The idea is planar effects as in those effects that effect everyone in an area and give certain bonuses and penalities.

In Red.

[SiliconShadow]

Although I do have to say, pretty much U11 is mostly knocked out and would be on Mournlands right? So it is all pretty much a whole big wish.

[Yaga_Nub]

Although I do have to say, pretty much U11 is mostly knocked out and would be on Mournlands right? So it is all pretty much a whole big wish.

Ok so we're talking about the U13 raid then.