So I do, or did do, a lot of M+ and lets be real, the boss design and mechanics in dungeons are super simplistic and boring.
I get not wanting to make them tough because then what will casual and lesser skilled players(no shade, some people struggle with tough mechanics, like Consort Radhan took me 20-25 attempts) do but complain mechanics are too hard. But I mean c’mon, nearly every boss boils down to a mix of three things
don’t stand in swirl
kill a couple of adds
take bad circle out bring good circle in
Very few boss fights have a single outlying mechanic like “shoot cannon” or “inturrupt”
Why can we not have more mechanically deep bosses. Something like
defend areas while mechanism siphons life from boss if an area gets overrun it instead siphons enemy life to damage party, longer enemies are alive the more damage it does.
split group so each player has to finish a trial granting buffs to help in the boss fight
boss spawns 5 areas, each person cannot take the same area multiple times, if done correctly boss loses a big chunk of health or is healed if done incorrectly
a giant golem or something that the party has to use ballistas and vehicles to defeat
WoW has done gauntlet fights in the past, they just tend to be ill received because they can’t really be sped up and are largely on rails which people find less interesting.
Extremely hard to balance across roles and specs. Even something like Nalthor the rimebinder is generally quite ill received. The last time people were fully split up though would be herald Volazj? A wrath of the lich king boss fight.
Not an awful core mechanic, but it is pretty easy to do just by rotating the group 72 degrees after each one.
People tend to dislike fights that stop them from playing the class / spec they chose. Vehicle fights rarely go down well and usually have to be embarrassingly easy to offset the unfamiliarity with the toolkit you’re given.
People want to play the class / spec they signed up for, and people want their decisions / actions on said spec to impact the encounter. Gauntlet fights reward you for being better by making you wait around longer, and vehicle fights stop you playing your spec.
If Malygos and Flame Leviathan weren’t absolutely trivial fights, I believe in my heart of hearts they would be the least popular fights Blizzard have ever made and it wouldn’t be close.
I like them, but they really only work because raiding is large scale. Something like Kyveza would be trivial in a 5 man group, whereas Ovinax would be boring as hell.
To put it simply most of the suggestions you mention that have been done typically aren’t well recieved and tuned horribly. Then there’s the simple fact of tuning in general , larger variety in mechanics makes it harder to tune around variable group makeups.
We kinda had this in Dragonflight with the Proto-drake boss in Nokhud Hold. But even that was ‘run to ballista and click it when boss does X ability’. Vehicle fights often get looked down on because you are not ‘playing your character’ but instead something else that you can’t really improve. It is why FL from Ulduar remains as the only true vehicle raid boss. Other bosses do have vehicles in them but they are often piloted by a small number of people. E.g. the abom from PP in ICC or Socathar’s mech in his encounter in HFC.
This honestly founds like bosses like the Tribunal of Ages from Halls of Stone. Where you just fight waves and waves of adds. Or hellfire Assault from HFC.
It is also why we haven’t really seen Gauntlets as actual boss encounters for a long time. The most notable w.r.t dungeons is Escape from the Lich King in Halls of Reflection. In which the best strat was to literally hide in a corner at the start and let the mobs come to you from the opposite direction. Blizzard actually had to put in a new mechanic to that encounter to stop that from happening. This mechanic was that Arthas farts on you non-stop if you are behind him. It is also why General Kaal in Sanguine Depths is split into two different phases that are not connected to each other. There is a trash pack or two in between the gauntlet section and the boss proper.
Doesn’t really work in a dungeon setting as you only have 5 people and two of them are the tank and healer. So unless you base the ‘trial’ around them like Norushen did in SoO, you are going to have problems. As seen with Herald Volazj from Ahn’Kahet.
I understand that, and it was just a suggestion of what COULD be done. As it stand, for me the fights are so boring that its easier to look for something on youtube and alt+tab to hit a defensive once in a while than it is to go through the boss
It depends on the tuning I find. On lower or even mid levels the leeway for players to perform is much larger, and mechanics can largely be intuited / stereotyped in terms of how to deal with them. As things scale up though the margins reduce and group execution / coordination becomes more important. A great example is a fight like Avanoxx. It’s a very simple core concept but as it scales up the space management becomes more relevant, players have to be mindful of their positioning for healing, and a lot more resources / coordination / good tank positioning is needed to handle each add wave.
Thise are fair points made. IMO i still believe ANYTHING is better than the current “tank and spank alt+tab to change youtube video while I play another game” fights we currently have.
