Hello fellow designers, this ones for you!
A way to make bosses unique every encounter!
Archtype
- Each boss will belong to a specific concept or element. For example; various bosses are made of fire, or leva, some of ice or water, others earth or rock.
Static Abilities
- Each boss will have set of static abilities. This abilities will be a universal ability, say something like a blizzard.
Dynamic Abilities
- each week, a few (2-3) dynamic abilities will be seleted from each archtypes pool.
The End Result
The bosses will have a set of static and dynamic abilities. The static abilities should shape the framework of a fight, from staying out of a constantly spammed blizzard, to hiding behind a rock (to prevent from taking damage to flying projectiles).
As each week rolls by, the boss will pick up a new ability. For example, if a ice boss spams blizzard, one week he may dynamically pick up frost nova, rooting people in place. The result of this will be that some bad game play may open players up to getting rooted in a blizzard that does really nasty damage, or the next week after having to stack in the blizzard for a block to explode that heals the raid through the damage.
in this concept, raid bosses can produce huge amounts of repeated gameplay with very little interaction from the design time, a highly efficient design, and very engaging one for players.
Some key points to making this work
The abilities should be designed with the support of gui related elements that can assist players in making choices at first-glance. for example, aoes that you stay out of should have a red ring, while others you get in should have a green one. This will help create a baseline for player choices and the end result will ultimately be who is able to master it the fastest.
Best wishes.