A proposal for a different way of doing challenging content

[Alien_Gamer]

This idea mostly came about because of 8 man raids but this could easily be applied to dungeons (and maybe 24 man raids) too.

There's a few things that I hear about fairly frequently, both on these forums and in game chat regarding the overall structure of raids. Some of these are:
-not enough content
-not enough hard content
-I'd like to raid but no groups will take a new person
-The raid community is shrinking because (good) new people are hard to get.

Personally I think all of these issues are related to how raids are set up.

In the current structure there is a normal mode which features basic damage and a few mechanics (A, B, C) and a hard mode which has higher damage, mechanics A and B, a modified version of C plus mechanics D, E and F. This creates a division between the levels of content; someone can be perfect at normal mode and be woefully unprepared for hard mode because of the new mechanics. Its this division that causes developers to spend more time creating similar content instead of additional unrelated content and puts a cap on how much content can be created in a given time.

My proposal is to change how this content is given to us.

The normal mode of the raid should feature all mechanics that the devs want the raid to have. The additional mechanics would involve some tweaking of boss damage output and HP but as devs already tweak that stuff throughout development this isn't much additional work. This has the benefit of giving all players the chance to practice mechanics before things get hard. It lets players prove themselves to veteran raiders before jumping into the deep end of the pool.

The challenge comes in the additional modes that can be placed after the normal mode. Instead of having two modes like we currently have, I propose four modes.

Mode 2: Hard Mode
Same mechanics as normal mode.
Boss hits 10% harder, boss skills activate 10% faster, aoe fields are 10% larger.
This is for those people that have proven themselves in normal mode and want a bit of a challenge.

Mode 3: Savage Mode
Same mechanics as normal mode
Boss hits an additional 15% harder than normal mode, skills activate 15% faster, aoe fields are 15% larger.
This is for those people who aren't just good, they're experts at their class and the mechanics.

Mode 4: Extreme Mode
Same as Mode 3 except the boss no longer shows a cast bar and AOE field markers dont appear. To beat this you have to master all mechanics and know how to beat them based on telegraphs alone.

This kind of structure creates a scalable structure that players can use to increase their skills without huge barriers to entry caused by new mechanics. It also creates practice levels for people to get good on before trying something harder. Also, once the system is in place it would take fewer development resources for more challenging content; instead of creating two separate versions of the fight, they only create one and let system scale the content for the other modes.

Thoughts?

[Canadane]

Sounds boring to be honest. It's the same fight with a few extra steps to dodge mechanics.

[Sida]

One of the better things in the higher versions now is that they do include new mechanics. In same vein with your suggestion, the HM versions of the dungeons should also just be exactly the same ones, just with scaled enemy health. That wouldn't be any fun either.

[Alien_Gamer]

Once you've learned the mechanics of an instance it becomes boring if you do it enough, that doesn't change with either system. Even now with everything on farm mode, if you want new mechanics you go to a different fight. What I proposed won't fix the issue of something getting boring if done enough, nothing can really do that. I'm proposing a way of making content more scalable so more people can get into it and so devs can "hopefully" create more content. By having more content then there's more stuff to farm and less boredom or burnout.

I don't think my idea is perfect but I think it has more room for devs to work with it than the existing system.

[Acidblood]

Hmm, interesting idea, but I would probably approach it from the other side... that is, keep the existing Normal and Savage modes with their current differences (enough players already have trouble with the mechanics of Normal), but introduce Echo mode (i.e. 'Hard mode') much sooner. The catch would be though, that at this stage Echo mode would only drop Normal mode loot (with maybe a few extra tomes) and once you enter a Raid (or Trial) in Echo mode, you are locked out of Savage mode for the day / week...

The idea of this would be that Echo mode provides a sort of training mode to Savage, allowing less skilled groups and new players interested in Savage raiding a way to learn, or at least see, the mechanics without smashing their head against a wall for weeks on end (or waiting for it to be become nerfed and irrelevant).

As far as providing extra challenges for the truly skilled, less telegraph markers would be a good one, as would min iLvl challenges, and not sure how easily it would be to implement, but they could also have the boss mix up the mechanics... i.e. instead of always doing A > B > C > D, they could do B > A > D > D > C (or even random orders in some cases).