LogFAQs > #948840521

Lokarin posted...

So here's a novel concept - why not make the bosses based around mobbing? World of Warcraft does this quite often

Conceptually, the idea of having bosses be a different experience from mowing down the rank and file enemies is an attractive one. It makes thematic sense, it mixes up the gameplay, it offers an opportunity for a more cinematic, exciting fight... It's just that the whole "Attack phase-->Vulnerable phase :||" thing gets a little tedious as soon as the attack phase stops being a genuine challenge, especially where the bosses that are meant to be difficult often have particularly long attack phases. When players are farming said bosses repeatedly and trying to do so as quickly as possible (because clear speed meta), that becomes even more pronounced, and if bosses don't drop enough unique loot to be worth that extra time investment, it becomes more efficient to just skip them entirely. That doesn't necessarily mean the bosses suck, just that they aren't worth spending time on if you're maximizing efficiency.

At the same time, though, if bosses are just more mobs, they have a harder time feeling special. That's not a problem if you only care about optimizing the gameplay loop, but it's a fairly small subset of players that only care about that. Most people (including the developers, in many cases) do place enough value in having an interesting world, story, and theme to warrant trying to design bosses that stand out.

In the case of WoW, you don't actually run into the build specificity problem to the same degree. Unless the game has changed a lot since my days of playing it, mobbing either consists of using crowd control to fight one enemy at a time (in which case you're still just doing single-target damage) or spamming your class' best AoE ability (which rarely even has the option to invest talent points in, let alone being a significant investment). It's pretty rare to see separate specs for mobbing and bossing outside of extreme min-maxing.

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