Bust out your thinking caps, people, or at least your creative re imagining caps. Today… today we’re going to use them.
Take some time out from whatever it is you’re doing… and let’s do something fun.
No need to design the entire raid start to finish, I mean you can, if you want – I’m only going to go through boss fight ideas.
I’m sure some of you out there on the internets have a specific boss fight you really liked, or have an idea for something that would be awesome.
Sewers of Northrend
It all began ages and ages ago, when human kind first began to build large cities. The question was asked, “What do we do with all this garbage?” Previous methods, such as landfills or simply dumping it into the ocean, angered druids and nagas alike. After several lawsuits (sparked by a case where a young naga child was killed by thirty five metric tons of human waste) a large scale, safe option was needed.
The first, and most logical option, was to simply incinerate all the garbage. However, this was theorized to be far too expensive. Experts, using shiny charts and graphs, showed that such a route would require at least 5 dozen fire mages around the clock, and the massive cost in mana potions to sustain them would have bankrupted the economy. Except alchemists and herbalists, of course.
The dwarves were approached. Expert delvers and miners, it was thought a hole could be dug deep enough that the core of Azeroth could be used for incineration purposes. The dwarves thought this was a great idea, and proceeded to embroil themselves in a massive civil war.
The gnomes were next approached. The gnomes had many ideas, ranging from using shrinking rays to miniaturize the garbage to gigantic cannons capable of launching the garbage into the nether. All of these solutions would have cost astronomically more than the original fire mage idea.
Then the idea was put forth to create portals. These portals would simply transfer the garbage to the other end, and, since a portal could be placed pretty much anywhere, the idea was made to place it somewhere barren and generally abandoned by most civilizations.
An inexplicable hole (more of a gigantic gouge in the surface of the world) was discovered in Northrend, and deemed suitable.
For years, the civilizations of the world have been dumping the waste of modern society into this giant hole thingy.
Until now…
In the deep recesses of centuries of junk and other identified things that squish, something woke up… and it wasn’t happy.
The Sewers of Northrend is a multi-winged instance hub, with several instances revolving around defeating an army of appliance golems, garbage elementals, and other creatures looking like the result of moldy sausages thrown haphazardly into a bathtub filled with poop and jello.
The raid component of this hub (a 10 man raid) involves the raiders going into the deepest, most disgusting part – The Deep Sewer.
The Great Clog
Health: 3,000,000
Enrage Timer: None
The first encounter in the raid. There are no trash pulls before this boss. The boss is blocking the way to the rest of the instance, by… well, clogging the entrance to the Deep Sewer. Hence the name.
Overview
The Great Clog itself doesn’t actually do anything. It just sits there. Instead, an add (essentially a ball of slime) spawns every 30 seconds. This add must be picked up by a tank. These adds are essentially invincible – they do die, but resurrect themselves after five seconds. Once the boss has been killed, all the adds despawn. This encounter does have a passive enrage timer.
The adds have a unique aggro table, in that only one person can ever be on their aggro table. They ignore healing aggro completely, only responding to damage or an ability directed at them. Once they aggro on something, they never switch targets again. In other words, once the tank hits them with something, they now have permanent aggro with no need to use any other ability on them.
When the adds spawn (you’ll be able to tell where they spawn by the gigantic snot stalactites) they start moving towards the boss. If they reach the boss, they immediately heal him back to full health. If killed, it will begin moving towards the boss again when it resurrects. It is absolutely imperative that these adds never reach the boss.
These adds are not very powerful. Their standard attack hits for barely a hundred damage on a tank. Healing will not be an issue… at first. Every time an add hits a player, that player is afflicted with a stacking debuff that increases the damage taken from any and all abilities. This debuff, called “Annoying Mucus” can stack infinitely and is not removable by any means.
Naturally, as more adds spawn every 30 seconds, this debuff starts stacking alarmingly fast. By the three minute mark, a single tank will be taking around four thousand damage a second and by the six minute mark, upwards of forty thousand damage a second.
Strategy
This boss is designed around the raid’s DPS being able to dish out at least ten thousand damage per second as a whole, thus killing the boss at the five minute mark. For instance, if the raid has 5 DPS players, all five need to be able to do at least 2k DPS. The DPS do not need to move, swap targets, just flat out DPS.
Having two tanks to split the adds can make this fight easier, if the DPS is lacking. However, even with two tanks, it is very hard to survive for long past the six minute mark. Even with the damage split, each tank is taking twenty thousand damage every second.
The Annoying Mucus debuff disappears once the Clog is defeated.
Loot
Big Stick – Polearm, lots of strength, stamina, and attack power. Massive amount of crit rating as well.
The Prophet of Garbage – Offhand frill. Large amount of Intellect, Spirit, and Spellpower, some haste rating.
Broken Piece of Glass – Dagger. Large amount of Agility, some Stamina, very high amounts of attack power and expertise rating, as well as some haste.
Ragged Doll – Trinket. On use, provides a large boost to spellpower for 20 seconds. Also has a decent amount of Intellect and Stamina.
Idol of Revised Transformation – Idol. When equipped, all shapeshifting no longer costs mana.
Bracelet of the Lost Snake – Cloth wrist. Large amount of Intellect, Spirit and Spellpower, with a substantial amount of haste.
Heavy Wooden Door – Shield. Massive amount of Stamina and Block Rating. Some Strength.
Kleenex Box – Token for boots. Can be turned in to Drawoh Seghuh for a truly excellent foot piece. Can be used by any class.
Very fun read! Thanks! It was a great way to end the week. =)
se te va la olla….. *
* “you have gone crazy ”
Very much fun anyway
))) It´s only presence in your blog shows the state of 85% of wow players, dreaming about northend
Made me laugh and yet it’s a completely practical raid encounter. Well done!
Thak you for this post for an odd reason. It was just yesterday that I was trying to remember if a structure fromed from drippings at the top of a cave was a stalactite or a stalacmite. Now my suspicions have been verified.
What’s a sewer raid without a giant ‘gator? I’m trying to think of other bosses that you could encounter, but I’m drugged up and brain farty thingy.
Some sort of horrible mutant that was created for the years as magical refuse from the Violate Citadel accumulated beneath the city? Perhaps he was originally an adventurer like you.
A rat king, featuring waves of rats that come at the sound of his call? Perhaps you could even incorporate an old item (Piccolo of Flaming Fire) to make this fight even easier!
Sweet mother of god, the expansion needs to hit soon so you can go back to playin, doan it?
Rippers… when the little voices start givin you ideas ferra post, it’s time to walk away…
Haha great read. Those Gnomes will never learn… The Alliance should banish them back to Gnommergan.
The little voices haven’t guided me wrong yet!
Except that one time… and that day last year when… yeah, the dog wasn’t happy… and that other time with a grizzly bear…
Ok, so the voices have a 50/50 thing going. Still. I haven’t died yet.
How about a mini-boss named Myk Roe who appears after the first boss is defeated, but retreats after 3 minutes of combat. I’m blanking on some good flavor text, but imagine some good Dirty Jobs references for his abilities. If the raid can’t burn him down before the timer he will leave(That was a dirty job!) and hassle the raid until they get to the next boss. This hassling will involve randomly targeting raid members with short crowd control effects including but not limited to stun, slow, sleep, silence, mind control, and fear. Myk will give the raid another 3 minute window to take him down after each boss. Defeating Myk will give everyone a key to a room near the raid entrance with armor repair vendors and a cleaning device similar to the one in Gnomeregan. Remember the Sparklematic 5200?
I fleshed out the idea a bit more.
—==The REAL Molten Core==—
The dwarves, as noted above, were petitioned to drill a hole into the center of Azeroth in order to burn the refuse of the various civilizations of the world. This took far longer than originally expected, and while the rest of the world had already begun emptying their waste into the giant crater in the earth on Northrend, the dwarves deep in the tunnel had no word from topside. After many years of endless digging, the dwarves reached the very core of Azeroth, a place so hot they had to create mechanical golems to dig the last few miles. But, when they finally breached the core, they found it to be no cooler then a normal day in any temperate location on Azeroth, such as Hillsbrad or Ashenvale. Yet the rock surrounding the core was still far too hot for normal life forms to survive in. Yet when you stepped into the core, instead of being scorched into the nether, it was like you had crossed a magical barrier. Something was wrong, very wrong, at the very core of the world. After traveling back to the surface and hiring some gnome mages (who were out of work since they didn’t score the garbage incinerating job) they were able to determine that there was something, or somethings, or even a lot of somethings, residing in the core of the world. Could they be dragons? The dwelling of an old god, hidden from the eyes of the rest of the world? Perhaps a new race, unknown to all the top dwellers of Azeroth? One thing is for sure, anything capable of holding back the heat generated at the core of a planet is a being of immense power indeed.
Boss(es) coming soon, maybe.
I was recently thinking that it would be nifty to have a boss that, every time you hit him for some inordinately large amount of damage in a single hit (the idea would be that you’d need to crit with your mightiest cooldowned attack, buffed with other cooldowns and buffs and such) you’d knock off a piece of the boss. Someone would then have to quickly grab this piece and whack the boss with it (sort of a la Najentus). Or something like that. Without doing this, the boss would be very very difficult to defeat.
In particular, maybe it could be some 25-armed rock golem thing, each arm holding a mighty weapon. You need to knock his arms off, and then pick up and use his weapons against him. They would of course be mighty legendary things… You could make the encounter about as complex as you wanted, by having interactions between the weapons’ effects (either in players’ hands or in the bosses hands), by having some other external event determine which arm you lopped off (thus making the timing of your crit-nuking more essential), etc…