Optional boss modes making a comeback in Mists of Pandaria?

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

1-26-2012 @ 5:12PM

Ninerva said...

Designing triggered hard modes is essentially a matter of asking two questions:

1. What makes the boss harder on hard mode, and what is the reason this happens?
2. What can the raid do to cause this to happen or prevent it from happening?

If you can't answer the first question, the boss does not need a hard mode. ICC's gunship battle, for example, didn't need its NORMAL mode.

For an example of how this could be applied to a Cataclysm raid boss in a unique manner, look at Halfus Wyrmbreaker. On normal you have two inactive drakes each week, while they're all active on heroic. To make it into a trigger, keep the two random inactive drakes, but allow you to resurrect them before pulling the boss. Conveniently, this also gives you multiple difficulty levels. Rez one drake for medium difficulty, rez both for the full hard mode.

Just apply this thinking to each encounter, and you have an almost surefire way of keeping the triggers varied.

2-12-2012 @ 6:00PM

Matt said...

I agree with this so much. Them saying "We're afraid we'll run out of ways to do unique hardmodes!" is exactly like them saying "We're afraid we'll run out of unique achievements!". Any mechanical difference between hard and normal can somehow be implemented by the players. The times you run into problems, is when the Hard mode version is basically the same fight despite the mechanical changes. There were quite a lot of those this tier - though Yor'sahj is notable as being more different on Hard mode.

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