I was watching a video by Preach showing off 4 of the new raid bosses for SL, and a phrase poped up… “Gimmick fight”. So his opinion was that the particular boss encounter was kinda boring and gimmicky, but from what i saw it looked awesome and that got me thinking about previous boss encounters. For example i really like the Skitra fight in Nyalotha , sure its easy but it has a fun mechanic imo and then we have N’zoth where its more complex but its not particularly fun.
Do people preffer complex and harder fights or more gimmicky ones where abilities have a more RP vibe to the thing you are fighting (dragons for example with breaths and tailswipes, or a bat using sonar to detect enemies)?
Also im not saying its one or the other type of thing, you can have both at the same time im just asking if you had to choose what would it be ?
Everyone will have a different opinion on what constitutes a gimmick.
But I tested that dance fight on Beta and God, its awful. Hue hue, I have to press arrows to make my character wiggle this way or that in an intermission to stop a oneshot.
If theres as many as 4 bosses in there with contrived garbage like that ima gonna top myself.
If i had to choose an entire raid, i would probably choose complex fights over gimmicks.
I really like the idea of gimmicks and if executed correctly it’s a really nice fight to play in between complex fights to relax and have fun, but i would not want an entire raid of just gimmicks.
A problem is also that in order to make fights challenging with gimmicks, blizzard tend to make them very punishable and sometimes inconsistent to add that difficulty, and that’s extremely annoying.
I love the idea of Xanesh and doing the ball, but in order to not make it a joke, blizzard had to not only make the gaps very small, but also give the ball inconsistent exit angle to your characteralong with inconsistent hitbox.
This in combination with it being instant wipe, means that you’ll have maybe 50 attempts before you kill it, but you don’t feel like you’re progressing, you feel like you from pull 5 onwards is just waiting for the stars to align.
It’s especially annoying on farm when all other bosses are one shots, but sometimes this boss just kills you because the gimmick was made too inconsistent.
Back in legion in antorus we had the bridge boss imonar. I loved the idea of his mechanic with running a course over the bridge dodging things, but it was too easy if they didn’t add elements that make you feel less in control, and due to that it ended up being bad again.
The jadefire masters fight in BoD is one that had consistent gimmicks and i really loved that, with facing the monks in the air, that’s an example of a good gimmick, that is also not just instant wipe if you mess it up a little bit.
Overall, i really love gimmicks, but if you add too many gimmicks you’re gonna end up with some that are horrible, and complex fights are easier to nerf in case than bad gimmick fights, without removing the gimmick.