Ngruk said:
How about meaningful trash? No more trash for timing"s sake? Mobs other than bosses are there for pace of game and you can bitch all you want but it"s really that or WAR"s 1 mob in a lair approach.
But what if you could get to the boss with minimal fighting, and end up fighting an incredibly hard incredibly difficult encounter. If you win it drops appropriate loot.
However if you clear the minions of Bob before hand, they drop these crystal shards, the more shards you have the better. You enter Bob"s chamber and your wizard combines the shards into a staff that you now plant in the ground and the staff emits a radioactive aura that weakens Bob, and the encounter is easier, still tough, but he"s easier to kill.
The loot from the 2nd method is far "better" in some way, either more items, or more quality, but your group is rewarded for NOT taking the shortcut, and investing the time and energy to do it all.
How soon does that get stale? How do you avoid making it stale?
Create a staff as you say, have NPCs that have a buff aura for the boss, but can be killed beforehand, etc. are all similar system to create a hard mode encounter, that, no matter what, will go on farm after 1-2 successfull kills and become stale after 1-2 farm-mode kills.
The main issue with current day raiding is that encounters are predictable or you-tube"d with a full spoiler text on top after the first few worldwide kills.
Because mobs are (mostly) not contested in today"s MMOs, strats can be shared with impunity, this gives high end guilds an advantage obtained from cutting edge guilds and casual guilds will just reap the rewards from other people work.
As a system it benefits more the casual players because for them it would be a huge amount of work educating people on the strategy (it"s a lot easier for many to just watch a you-tube video than figuring things out), but it won"t seriously be that different from several wow hard-modes, so to say.
Less trash? I"d like to subscribe to your newsletter, but I still would like to offer a humble suggestion: static encounters that hang out in a freaking cave, ready to be pulled are what makes endless trash pulls boring, see Blackrock Depths for the epithome of boring, pointless pulls.
Make trash dynamic, first by having mobs populating a dungeon, behave as if they would be there for a purpose (sitting in circles is hardly one), make them move around the place, don"t keep encounter size fixed, but let it be splittable if a puller is good enough to time patrols (not allowing a one by one style pulling, but decently risky if the puller is careless).
Have more "unexpected" events, but not always in the same place at the same time, e.g. ghosts being able to move through walls in an abandoned catacomb could pose a problem as their pathing wouldn"t be so predictable and timing the pulls could be headache-worthy.
Add a mini-named to all your trash pulls (sort of sergeant-level mob), dropping something useful, such as recipes for tradeskilling or weapon/armor parts to be reforged or tailored into gear augments (droppable enchants so to say) alongside something that can help defeating your end boss as in your own example.
Using trash as filler is okay from a certain point of view, because it makes sense story-wise that a badass mofo is surrounded by lackeys and devotees, but as I tried to explain, it irks me when I go inside a dungeon and find only stationary groups of 4-5 mobs (in considerable amount, nonetheless) doing a circle jerk, waiting to be slaughtered.
A dungeon should last long enough to be interesting, so there is a need to fill it in ways different than loot dropping machines called bosses and that way is adding trash mobs. Spicing up trash is the right way to do things rather than removing it completely, because if all I find for dungeons are Onyxia style encounters with 2pulls-boss-2pulls-boss pacing, I think I"d get bored in a dozen days playing your game.
Take BRD: remove a few trash packs, add some mini-named, add more small events like the arena inside, add semi-unpredictable patrols like wall walking ghosts, burrowing worms, invisible mages, stealthed rogues, add interesting quests inside the place to open up parts of the dungeon and you have a good base to work on in my opinion.
A good example for me would be Unrest in EQ2, extremely fun the first time, it retains part of that fun even on subsequent runs due to how immersive the atmosphere of the place is (you can shoot me for using the word "immersive" right now).
Go kill stuff of a certain importance while being delayed by a few trash packs, some of which are avoidable by careful and smart players or killed by those that prefer to "play it safe", keep distance from the raid encounter that roams the courtyard, put in some mini puzzles (traps to be disarmed, cook a meal or play piano while defeating trash, find out the correct order to do things to progress inside the place) add some not hard but still entertaing encounters such as mirror images of a random group member attacking the party, etc. etc.
That place was a winner in my opinion, while places like WotLK 5-men instances are quite bad instead: meaningless trash that poses no challenge whatsoever, bosses with scripts going on that makes people fall asleep on keyboards while they wait for the boring speech to end (UP 1st boss is what I have in mind right now) and usefulness reduced to basically one-two week span before everyone is hitting the 1st raid zone making all dungeons obsolete quite quickly.
