Hey fellow Dungeoniers,
I’d like to propose a question to this community regarding explorable dungeons and their difficulty/mechanics. I feel that in most explorable dungeons except afew, the bosses are just an endless dps zerg with no real incentive to “follow the mecahnics” because they are too weak or non existent, OR the mechanics are too easy/long/boring. By this I mean just a simple AOE attack that needs to be dodged coupled with the boss having tons of HP. I’m all for harder stuff that it takes real groups many times to complete a boss, From my time playing WoW I have never cleared EVERY boss in one sitting the 1st time and I don’t see that as saying we sucked i’m trying to say the skill curve is too low on alot of these bosses. I’ll mention afew bosses I do enjoy and a little bit about why and then maybe some that I see as pointless.
First and foremost everyones favorite, Lieutenant Kohler from AC.
I really enjoy this encounter. It’s short, sweet, and has a decent yet effective mechanic that is all about the timing rather than just moving out of the red circle. Granted if this was a higher level dungeon I would have expected maybe more stages but for the level it is designed for it does the trick.
Secondly, Subject Alpha (First Encounter) from COE.
The best thing about this boss is the hecticness of it all. The adds spawning. The earth attacks he throws out, aswell as the AOE’s. Notice how I said 1st encounter. It seems just long enough to not get boring and can be a punishing encounter if you aren’t quick to react to what is going on.
Thirdly Tribune Burntclaw from COF.
The mechanics here are fun. BUT he has way too much hp OR needs another phase to make this encounter viable. Its very fun for the 1st time but can be very boring if you’re not in a DPS intensive group or coming in for a repeat.
I have chose these for example because I have done these recently but again its just a select few. However, there are many boss encounters with mechanics that just feel dumbed down or just a snoozefest.
An exaple for this is the 2nd (I think) boss in SF Path 1 (where she offers the guy a promotion). The boss can just be pulled down the ramp at the other side and beaten on with no regard to mechanics or anything. A reason I feel that this is such a bore is because all of the trash is quite high in HP and takes a while to kill which is similar to the bosses which you can just DPS down with no regard. Because of this they just dont feel like bosses or meaningful at all.
Another example is The Ghost Eater AC.
Are there even any mechanics for this boss? There are adds that seem to just do nothing and can just be ignored since they go down easily enough with alot of the main AOE focused on the boss.
I’d really like people to chip in with afew of their favorites and maybe some other bosses they feel are boring/obsolite/tedious so we can maybe offer this up so devs can see patterns.
The question I would like to ask you is:-
Would you like to see specific paths for Level 80 characters?
I say this because from the amount of XP you gain from doing dungeons, you are already well on your way to 80 or at least, in other terms, very far past the level requirements for just the rare armour set. I have yet to go ARAH but I can already spot inconsistensies with the quality/difficulty/fun of encounters.
My Idea is to have maybe one path for each dungeon that requires you to be 80. It is balanced for fully exotic players but not role specific ( by this i mean a certain spec, just because i feel it contradicts the message of the game ).
This dungeon would have a cooldown meaning you can only do it once per week/two weeks to give equal rotation for all the dungeons meaning they are not rushed through.
The loot would be significantly better such as greens/rares from trash and bosses, with chances of exotics from lower bosses and then from the final boss maybe a 0.1% chance of getting a legendary pre-requisite that is (Account Bound) Meaning there is other ways to get the legendaries other than the MF, granted the difficulty should be seen in reward but compare the drop chance to maybe the Warglaive of Azzinoth or maybe slightly higer for the amount of weapon types there are.
Sorry for the whole wall of text but hopefully we can get some good discussion out of this and the direction of dungeons as a community.
Kipz
Dinkleberg
(edited by Moderator)