Let's talk about the update 11 raid

[mystafyi]

First I've heard of anyone killing the Shadows. Always just 1 kiter, 1 tank, and 10 people beating on the boss's back.

Ive been trying to expand the notion of tanking shadows on orien since u9.... with crazy lag issues, its just plain safer and easier to tank them. even with a squishy drow pm with massive server side lag, its not a sweat with firesheild, cold resist/protect, and triple cold absorb gs stick.
orien is kinda behind the game when it comes to strategies other servers use. heck it took forever for prt2 shroud beat em all down and seperate tactic to catch on Ball healing through inferno on orien? lol folks would have a seizure at the thought....

[Yaga_Nub]

I agree that these kind of synergistic combos are fun, but hard to design in a way that players can figure out such things of their own, are not too restrictive on party setup and make sense for the flavor of the fight. I kinda like the Sor'jek and Conjoined Abishai mechanics and they could be expanded I guess. Imagine sor'jek always spawning a few mephits (color = certain damage vulnerability for example) at the same time and as soon as you kill the first one, the others disappear. A simple game mechanic but rewarding when you succeed to communicate well in group.


[EDIT]



As long as a fight takes a certain amount of time to complete and there are different attack speeds involved, it does matter. The 's' in dps is not decoration.

Correct, which is why your example using a 1 second swing and a 10 second swing is off-base as an example.



It's not a shame to admit a mistake, you know. I'd have already forgotten about it, but this is a pretty lame response, sorry. The semantics of apples and oranges are not the same because both are fruit.

You're right it's not so when are you going to admit that you're wrong?

[Kalari]

Granted I havent worked on the area Ive been thinking of in a long time but Id still love a raid based on the Plane of Death Dolruhh Id love a raid where you are at risk of your soul being trapped by the main bosses and your fellow raiders have to get your soul free again for you to continue on, love a maze area in the raid where your timed to get to the end to get to the next part and would love to have a story line that could and would affect the landscape depending on the win, if enough players beat it the effects of the taint is lessened but due to the number of failures that would happen with the new raid the after effects on Storm reach would be felt in places like House J where healing is a focus youd see more decaying factors crop up, for house P wild magic surges would cause random creature encounters.

Those would be some of my ideas tied into a new raid but I dunno if our servers could handle such but a gal can dream.

[Tinco]

Correct, which is why your example using a 1 second swing and a 10 second swing is off-base as an example.

Of course, I wanted to make it crystal clear so that you'd understand it

You're right it's not so when are you going to admit that you're wrong?

Peace is the answer. Right after 42

[SableShadow]

Yup but you should have explained it that way to begin with.

/kanny

[Sarisa]

[*]Disjunction is another potent and fun effect for boss mobs to throw.

No more disjunction until the horrible lag/freeze resulting from recalculating skills is fixed. Most prominent if you have any UMD boosting gear (or CHA skills Greensteel) on that gets disjunctioned, though hide/move silently gear can trigger it too.

Being hit with "toys" in Abbot or the disjunction traps in eADQ1 results in a 2-3 second freeze every time for a lot of people.

[Caine33]

Some great ideas presented...and some not so great ideas.

I'm always amused at the differing viewpoints of what the most DPS focussed toons are. Barb (Love Shade's ideas - My main is a barb as well) to rogue (only if you've ever played one) to sorc (now that they're so uber according to what I've read recently) to WF FVS (with Divine Punishments and SOS, look up achievements).

I think it would be interesting to see:

An endboss who teleports the toon who does the most damage/Heals the most damage (take your pick) in a 10 second span to a penalty area, where said toon needs to fight something else to get back.

You could have this occur every 15 seconds. This would keep you on your toes with startegy, as a select few couldn't just lay the beat down or keep the meaty tank up and whittle away the massive hp pool without worrying about going to the penalty box.

The reason I mention this is I've seen too many of the current raids requiring 2-5 toons and everyone else can pike (within reason).

Just a thought. Again some great ideas in this thread.

[Backley]

orien is kinda behind the game when it comes to strategies other servers use. heck it took forever for prt2 shroud beat em all down and seperate tactic to catch on Ball healing through inferno on orien? lol folks would have a seizure at the thought....

I'm happy to learn and help spread, but I don't play on any other server myself so I can't bring ideas over myself unless I hear about them on the forum.

Did read the comments on the recent Abbot guide thread linked in the newsletter, and tried the 'healing through inferno' method last Friday. 5 healers in party, all were supposed to drink Curse Removal pots, pretty experienced PUG otherwise, but wiped on the first Inferno. Completed on 2nd try with that character (no Inferno), and other character had 1-round completion with no Inferno so couldn't try again.

[rest]

I'm not sure who this "we" is. You're not speaking about me, that's for sure. I certainly don't want to see anything like this.

Instead of saying "we" you should say "I". This is a raid I want because I don't feel challenged. And don't lump me in with as someone clamoring for easy buttons. I don't want that. I find some of the current content challenging. Soloing Epics and such.

I don't want a bunch of development time spent on >1% of the gaming population. It's time to face facts: you and people like you who want super difficult challenges are not the bread-and-butter of this game. People who do micro-transactions and play maybe 5 hours a week are who Turbine is catering to now. Or even people who get into the game for 6 or 8 months, drop a hundred bucks and then leave for another game.

[Burninator]

Set some required objectives taht simply require insane twitch timing,

You really want that from a dev team that can't even fix a simple ladder bug that has existed since day 1?

[Unreliable]

Challenge does not sell.

[svinja]

Instead of farming a weapon on hard that is required on elite, and other attempts to create artificial barriers, I would prefer a difficulty progression more like this (hard and elite are just examples, doesn't matter if it's between normal-hard, hard-elite, or elite-epic):

Make elite just like hard, but the entire area is covered with undisarmable, no save, high damage, reasonably fast moving "traps" that enemies are immune to and that every person in the group needs to avoid the entire time while still performing their normal role efficiently. And if this is the difference between, for example, hard vs elite, add another new problem to the fight that makes it even more demanding on epic, such as adds that spawn and you also have to deal with them while dodging the traps and fighting the boss.

Doesn't have to be exactly this, but I would personally love challenges of this sort, that, while making fights more challenging, also make them more interesting and exciting, not just more challenging because the boss does more damage and has more HP, or even worse, more "challenging" because unless you farm a particular weapon you can't hurt the enemies.

The most important advantages of a challenge like this are that 1) it makes things more interesting 2) it applies to everyone, you are not carried by 2 people in the group who are good at doing it (in other words no "need someone who can do ..." LFMs) and 3) it does not rely just on pure memorization of the quest, a first timer may do better than someone who's done it many times if the former is a good player and the latter is not.

[Carpone]

[*]Stacking fort debuffs versus single targets. Imagine how much more interesting ToD part 3 would be if Horoth would use a sunder style attack that added a 10% stacking fort debuff (stack timer of 30 seconds new application restores stack).

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.

[*]Ability damage is a very easy way to make fights more interesting in boss fights.

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

[*]Disjunction is another potent and fun effect for boss mobs to throw.

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.

[*]If mobs are being tanked and spanked and have wings let them fly. Really this has been a noticably missing from DDO. Remember enemy mobs often will not have as good of options to harm us from a distance either, so they could make straffing runs and such. Dragons, beholders, and winged devils really should be doing this sort of thing as a standard part of their coding.

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.

[*]Healers and mages in less accessible positions. Some boss encounters should feature multiple levels overlooking a central room. This would allow the placement and spawning of divines/arcanes on the higher floors to support the main boss on the main floor. Stairs and ladders to these balconies/floors could be situated to make meleeing these mobs kind of a pain. Of course these mobs would have to be coded to have enlarge if needed so they could attack/heal those on the main floor.

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

[*]More planar effects! In top level content most of the action should be taking place on other planes of existence and with those other planes come their own planar rules. PoP was great for this and remains a hallmark of interesting design. Imagine an entire undead raid on the plane of death...infact the abbot seems pretty dumb not to make his base there... Some areas of planes could have stronger planar effects also (or even just from time to time)...such as for a raid that took place on Risia and under the stronger planar effects cold effects did 25% more damage...

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

[BoolZ]

If you take away a rogues SA then what's left? Traps/locks and Diplo/Intim? If you up the DC on traps and locks to the point that an 18WIZ/2ROG with ~40 INT can't get it requiring a spec'ed rogue then they've just gimped their toon for the rest of the game. I wouldn't want to put to many build points in INT on my rogue knowing that ranks+equipment+GH will get all the other traps on a nearly (possibly completly) dumped INT.

DR Epic/100 isn't a challenge. It's just a gring to get a DR breaker and LFM's requirering you to link your boss beater.

Puzzles arn't a viable source of challenge because in a day or two maybe a week after release there'll be solvers online. In addition maybe I can maybe I can't play Mastermind or Lights Out, but I can or can't regardless of the toon I'm playing or that toon's level.

Same can be said about twitching. Maybe I can or can't twitch but it'd suck if lag caused even more raid wipes than it already does.

I like the idea of CHA/WIS/INT damage. Punish melees for dumping or not wearing an item and slow down casters.

My suggestions for increasing challenge:

Require self reliance. Make the group split up, some groups as small as two, to complete a bunch of smaller tasks that effect the whole run before meeting up for the big final push.

Take away the characters gear forcing them to finish with what they find in the quest. Maybe forcing them to get their stuff back during the quest.

Limit how many rest shrines are available or only restore up to 70% of a blue bar, but give us an alternate way to regen mana like the water in the Shroud.

Time limits. If the average time is 35 minutes to complete set a 40minute timer. You don't have to be the fastest or zerg through it, but get a move on. It doesn't even have to be for completion. Maybe something like a ritual is in progress, stop the ritual, or the boss is a lot tougher.

I think a prison break type raid would work. Get out of your cell, get your party out of their cell, get your gear back, eat some bad prison food, and escape requirering slaying the boss(1warded chest) possibly freeing an NPC prisoner while being tortured by killing an optional boss (1warded chest). All before a second more powerful boss arrives. (No extra chest for that. That's your punishment for not finishing fast enough.)


Either way. Anyone taking odds on BtC +5 Tomes on the loot tables?

[Carpone]

End Boss should be at least 3 major bosses at once, or major amounts of respawns that cannot easily be handled by 1-3 players.

Three bosses = 3 tanks + 3 healers + 6 DPS. How exactly is that a challenge?

In addition to the required additional strategy and stats.. Equipment would be pushed up by massively scaling the damage reduction of the boss:
Give him a weird arbitrary DR that our regular weaponry simply cannot handle.. Like Byeshks or Crystal. Set it to a high enough value to make it straight impossible without getting that weaponry - say 50 points.
The raid itself on hard should drop some of these weapons..
Thus the progression and tier'ing is created:
Do hard X times tell your geared for elite.

[...]

In addition to the heavy boss DR from elite.. All trash monsters on the way to the boss would gain:
DR100/Epic
This would serve a block, preventing non epic geared players from even reaching the boss.
Now ofcourse epics weapons dont even actually bypass epic DR atm.. But that can/should be fixed:
Either give all current epics DREpic bypassing....

All that would do it undermine the crafting system. "Hey guys, we just added this crafting system to make it easier for players make DR breakers for existing bosses, but we're not going to let you do this for new bosses/epic content we add."

Epic: We want it to be impossible.

No, we don't. I've played EverQuest and World of Warcraft at the forefront of end-game raiding for years. The amount of precision and coordination required to defeat overtuned raid encounters is not challenging. It simply leads to frustration which drives people away from the game. I want the challenge bar in DDO to be raised, but not to the level you suggest.

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)

Won't ever happen. Turbine sells Mana Potions. They're not going to shoot themselves in the foot by limiting sales. What next, don't allow Heal scrolls? All those folks who spent APs on scroll mastery sure would be happy. /sarcasm

What do you want the new raid to be?

I want a timed raid. If you don't finish in time, you fail (it's the one redeeming design mechanic with Reaver's Fate). On the flip side, I'd like to see additional rewards for completing it faster. For example, if the raid timer is set for 30 minutes you get X rewards. If you finish in 25 minutes, you get X+1 rewards. 20 minutes = X+2 rewards.

I want rewards that scale with difficulty and optionals. Look at Tower of Despair for an example of both. The option to kill Suulomades for an extra chest is awesome. More of that. Also, you get more Shavarath Trophies of War on higher difficulties (normal=1, hard=1d2, elite=1d3). I'd like to see that applied to acquiring raid loot. Take a look at the Crystal Cove crafting system as an example. If you wanted to acquire the most green shards, you had to run it on level 25. You could run it at lower levels, but the maximum reward you reaped was lower.

I want more raids that require situational awareness. The devastator in eChrono is an example. When he enters his red dragon form, the tank needs to move out of the way (this isn't truly the case, as an Evasion tank with a good Reflex save, Firestorms and Cloak of Ice can easily eat the fire breath -- but it illustrates my point). Instead of just requiring situational awareness for the tank, I'd like to see the entire raid have to react to it (like Velah's breath in eVON6).

I want more raids where it's not just tank and spank. Bloodplate in eChrono is a simple example. You have to kill the armorers before Bloodplate teleports. eVON does some of this too, with dodging fire breaths and dealing with adds.

More raids that require smaller groups to go do something. I love Abbot and VON6 because the raid splits up to accomplish mini-goals. The smaller groups highlight individual contribution, which DDO needs to showcase more of.

I don't want another Shroud raid and disagree with you that it's the best designed raid. Parts 1, 4 and 5 of Shroud are borrrrring! Part 3 doesn't test your skill, it challenges your ability to tab out to a solver. Part 2 is the only part of Shroud I like, because it requires coordination.

[Shade]

Wow 114 replies in a day.. We are exicited about the U11 raid indeed!

Oh and keep the hyper-randomness out of the harder fights.

Remember when Shroud was new? Groups going for server firsts on Elite recalled if Sagrata was present because he made the part at least twice as hard. Hell, some PUGs recalled at sight of Sagrata for the first two or three weeks.

lol..
Your on my server and im sure your well aware of what I've done with the shroud. And sorry I couldn't take ya along, not sure you were around back then.. But the "good" players were in my group. And we did beat shroud on our very first attempt, on normal, hard and elite - gamewide first. And we did face Sargrata, and we kicked his ass just fine. We never recalled, we wouldn't even consider it. We were all about the challenge. We ran Shroud on elite almost every run post of that too, even tho we knew the rewards weren't worth it, we just did it anyways. For the challenge, for the fun. Having Sargrata showed up just added to that, tho we never really considered him that big of a deal.

Getting a completion should be about skill, not about 'we won the dice roll before any other group on the server, we were first to get no Sagrata .

Where other failed (Legion) we succeeded. Not because we didn't get Sargrata, I think we actuallly did get him. But because we wouldn't accept defeat as an option.

Shroud was about skill, planning and strategy. Even with Sargrata being so much harder then the other luitenants. Adding in some randomness, thats still possible to win ,but much harder then otherwise not getting him. Just adds fun.

Im not suggesting we get some 100% unkillable unwinnable scenarios. Just ones that are FAR more difficult then your average run, to mix up the tedium that tends to set in after you beat a raid on elite X times.

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.

[fluffybunnywilson]

I'm going to say that I want N/H/E and no Epic option on the raid. That way, I get to claim that the developers are listening to me when there is no Epic in U11.

[Auran82]

I do like the idea of something like a stacking fort debuff on the 'tank' with a timer and is something used quite often in other games (swap tank after x 'stacks' of something) and might be something to make it so people actually have to pay attention to whats happening. Honesly, the most dangerous thing in ToD 3 from experience, is a lag spike or just an unlucky roll on disintegrate with badges and melee attacks going off at exactly the wrong time causing a tank death and possible chaos depending on who was second in the aggro list (though tbh, the times this has happened and we have recovered and completed are some of the most exciting and memorable raid experiences)

Fights where everyone is generally required to watch their surroundings, watch debuffs (other than curses) and just do more than autoattack the back of a boss would be nice. Hell, having the tank need to reposition the boss sometimes would be a change.

You can see from chrono that I think their intention was to have a more challenging fight, but as usual, the players worked out the easiest way to complete and it became the norm.

Regarding the difficulties mentioned, I really hope they are looking at changing epic so that it has more than one level of difficulty, something like so you can have Normal/Hard/Elite/Epic-Normal/Epic-Hard/Epic-Elite so there is more room for tweaking and more opportunity to have Epic-Elite be insanely difficult without locking everyone out of 'epic' altogether.

[voxson5]

Hit reply early, (i'm only on page 2 so far)

I had put this idea in another thread, ca't remember where, but basically:

Exploit the planescaller in the 12 for the wilderness & location for the new raid (Xoriat / Dorruth (sp?) etc - mmm happy hunting grounds or the Abyss)

Environmental effects that negatively impact the party / raid group:
- anti-heroism effect? (-4 saves, heroism/ GH/ good hope dont work but bardsongs still do)
- plannar rot (being on a very negative plane vs the prime material, characters loose stat points based on time exposed to the environment, can be restored with restoration spells)
- reduced healing effect / reduced repair effect

Three (3) different boss fights during the flagging that come together for the climactic raid, bosses based on storyline and environment, and follow current storylines. eg:
-drow palemaster, story dates back to the giants rule & subjugation of the Drow
-friendly NPC that is captured by boss & turned against the party ->undead elven ranger
-friendly NPC captured & subverted by boss -> WF FvS

So, for this idea, raid would culminate with an epic battle against:
-3 powerful and diverse enemies
-high level palemaster, with appropriate buffs/offensive & defensive casting/summoning/gate spell
-high level, extreme ranged burst damage undead enemy with evasion & resists, fom etc
-high level divine melee with exceptional survivability (based on Sirgog's sole survivor)
-different locations in large arena style area (think Colosseum structure, arena/stairways/viewing boxes/corridors)


Certainly there should be some sort of consequence for not using quest specific DR breakers, more than just doing less damage.

Quest specific DR breakers should *definitely* hold their own against GS or high level crafted items, but be far superior vs appropriate enemy

The "raid" itself needs to be more like Tempests Spine / Shroud and less like hound & reaver, we want puzzles! varied enemies! Challenging obstacles (DR/SR/AC/logistics/environment/traps/exploitable shortcuts that are very difficult to get to and make the end fight basically impossible).

mmm, looking forward to it

[sirgog]

As someone mentioned, there's already 50% fort on bosses on some levels so personally, even though I DO understand the hit that a rogue's dps would take, I think stretching it out to 75% or even 100% is perfectly acceptable. At 100% fort for a boss, at least on elite and epic if nowhere else, the boss wouldn't need to have an assload of HP. Without an assload of HP, now casters can get into the game more than they have as well. Rogues, at least well build rogues, will not have their dps reduced to zero with heavy fort. Indeed they would find themselves in the same boat as the rangers, although the rangers will have extra damage from FE most likely. Add in a boss that is scripted to move quite a bit and EVERYONE's dps will be taking a big hit.

There has got to be a way to reduce mobs HP while at the same time making sure they don't die with one swing. Fortification is the easiest way to do that as all PCs know because even the barbs with 1000 HP would be dying very quickly if they didn't all wear heavy fort items. But it's also the reason that mobs hit so hard. If we didn't all wear heavy fort by default then the devs wouldn't have to have a +100 STR mod on every mob in the game to ensure us taking lots of damage during fights.

Finally, people will always take rogues just like they always took rangers in first year of DDO. That's why you're in guilds and channels and have friends in the game. I'm not worried about pugs, if you can make it to 20 without meeting people that you like to run with and that likes to run with you, then you have a bigger problem than SA and heavy fort. Is that an optimal solution? Actually, yes it is. Raids aren't about soloing so if you want to get in them you'll find people that want you in the raid with them. A good player's reputation will always get them in a raid more than their class will.

EDIT - I just thought about this. Maybe the Sunder and Improved Sunder feats should reduce fortification instead of AC. Then players would have a way to defeat fortification on mobs.

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?