Last week my planned piece was interrupted by news of the awesome Heirloom Items. The article was almost further delayed by International Talk Like A Pirate Day, but Juggynaut handled that topic. So without further delay is my first Designing A Dungeon post.
The goal of these posts is to try to come up with creative dungeon ideas, from a gameplay stand point. Feel free to link in any boss fight designs, lore, art aspects or things of that nature, I will simply be speaking from a overview gameplay standpoint. That also means that these dungeon ideas won't be concerned with petty details like “guild ruining”, just creative semi-original designs. If you have encountered a dungeon like the one I am talking about in another game (or perhaps the Wrath of the Lich King beta), by all means mention it!
PvP Racing Raid
I thought of this dungeon shortly after Blackwing Lair was released and yet it still has not been implemented anywhere I know of. Players who dislike blending of PvE and PvP probably won't be a big fan of this design but I think it sounds like a lot of fun.
The idea is to have a short, linear, indoor, raid instance. For the sake of the instance's longevity it should be created to be the hardest instance in the game for sometime. Therefore, it would have to be a launch instance or part of a large content patch.
After downing the “end boss” players will be able to open a gate into a giant PvP Arena - think the
Coliseum - to fight an
outdoor raid boss. Here's the catch, the outdoor boss is outside the instance and actually an outdoor boss. This encounter would naturally have a loot table that is a bit better than the instance and the boss should have a
very large model.
The design basically forces raids to race to finish the instance as fast as possible so they can get to the outdoor boss. The encounter with the outdoor boss would be designed to take a fair amount of time to complete. This would promote the epic struggle of two or more raids going after the same boss, while having to deal with each other. That kind of battle is the ultimate goal of the design.
The racing would definitely be an aspect that only very hardcore guilds would concern themselves with but I believe the hardcore deserve a little more “exclusive” content.
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