I'd love to see a Boss encounter where, if the players die, the boss and his entourage loot the player character's corpse. They will then equip some of the gear, gaining the stat bonuses and visual appearance of the items. This will make the boss encounter more interesting and make the combat more varied. Plus, the boss would become harder each time a group dies.
This would encourage us to make some interesting strategic choices, including swapping out some gear before the fight. Plus, the boss and his entourage would look like a group of pirates.
Equipment lost this way can be recovered by defeating the boss (and, perhaps also by another method if needed).
While this sounds interesting, it reminds me of way back in the day when i played FFXI. If you died you lost XPs, and it made it to where some fight people refused to help because they didn't want to risk deleveling. I'm not a fan of mechanics that give folks a reason not to help out each other. I also think it would suck to have to go through a huge amount of hassle just because the healer had a bad connection.
This would be a wonderful thing if you had that boss outfit whatever gear the last player it killed had on. Then you have a boss that requires a sacrifice, if your aware of the mechanic. A group would pick someone to outfit with weak gear and go get killed, then they would all attack and hopefully win and revive the sacrifice. Fun, and risky if you could assure the boss could still present a challenge. And if the group was unaware or previously a lone crazy player had died the boss may effectively be buffed until the next sacrifice. Timers for the effective switching of gear and etc . But it could be a nice test.
The image of random gear taken on the boss and minions, looking like pirate hodgepodge loonies is awesome. The scout/rogues having to sneak in and generate a long report on the gear , everyone franticly looking things up and deciding if they can take the room is fantastic.
I have suggested more than once that if a boss killed players it should gain experience and levels. No I wasn't really serious. But that could make things interesting, and the boss could be reset to default level periodically. Sadly, this would lead to griefing where people would sacrifice characters, perhaps created for this very purpose, to make the boss harder for others to kill.
mallanb81 - sorry but I disagree. There should be penalties for dying - serious penalties not just 50 copper pieces to repair armour. Otherwise fights are trivialized - you can die over and over and over and not really care. Indeed - death can become a form of transportation to get you to wherever the respawn point is. I would rather have a fight where no one else cares enough to help because of the risk than have a fight where *I* do not care because the result is meaningless.
The idea sounds great, but if the team dies at bosses lowest "difficulty" increasing it would only lower their chances after each wipe and in the long run most would stick to giving the boss only one shot. This idea could work well for single player games - especially soulslike, where people are expected to struggle and most of the players play specifficaly for the challenge - mmos gather different types of people, most play primarly for player interactions, many want to be challanged, but not to the point of cursing at the monitor. What could be done instead is making different difficulties (chosen upon entry) for instanced bosses with upgreaded visuals and stats and for non-instanced bosses the chance for them to gain unique modifier and names preffix/suffix (represented visually as well) alike normal mobs (pyrofobic, aggresive etc) - such empowerments would be rewarded with better drop rates or even the addition of new items to the drop list.
Hegenox - LOTRO has two servers where you can choose the difficulty you play at. They use it for landscape mostly. Harder difficulty makes mobs do more damage and be harder to kill. There are some other effects. I am sure other games do much the same but I haven't tried any others for a while.
Different difficulty for instances is rather common in MMOs these days. You can set the difficulty to tier 1 or tier 2 or tier 10 etc and the higher the number the harder it is and the better the average reward.
dorotea said:Hegenox - LOTRO has two servers where you can choose the difficulty you play at. They use it for landscape mostly. Harder difficulty makes mobs do more damage and be harder to kill. There are some other effects. I am sure other games do much the same but I haven't tried any others for a while.
Different difficulty for instances is rather common in MMOs these days. You can set the difficulty to tier 1 or tier 2 or tier 10 etc and the higher the number the harder it is and the better the average reward.
I really like the idea of servers with different diffiulty levels. Or at least a server with higher difficulty. That would give the die hard,"we want it tough" a place to go without screwing the life of the regular players that may be don't have a BDSM inclination... and it would also give them, rightfully, bragging rights.
And to go back to some other ideas, I always wondered why NPCs couldn't also gain levels, after all... may be not crows or bunnies that kill newbees, but bosses or even gobs, and in general, creatures that have some intelligence. That being said, they rarely have the chance to kill enough people before being slain... right now at least. But imagine a boss that gets tougher over time because he is a really hard nut to crack and each time some amateurs go at it, they make life more difficult for the whole server. That would create a serverwide challenge to NOT try it if you are not really well prepared. With a learning curve for the high end guilds that go at it, learning the raid would mean that the longer they take to learn the fight, the tougher it gets.
As for the idea of a NPC looting a corpse/ all the corpses. I see a small objection: you could that way create a PvP environment where one person kills the boss and loots the stuff from another.
The boss would only equip items that were at least as good as his own gear.
Iif you die and get looted, you can get your gear back by beating the boss or by coming back later (after someone else has beaten the boss or a certain amount of RL time has passed). Your gear can be recovered from a pile of scavenged items (only you can find your own items--everyone else finds mostly junk items).
There would be warnings when you enter about the special loot mechanics so no one is surprised.
The idea is to create an added sense of risk, add some unique mechanics, and create a more varied boss.