Ngruk said:
How about meaningful trash? No more trash for timing"s sake? Mobs other than bosses are there for pace of game and you can bitch all you want but it"s really that or WAR"s 1 mob in a lair approach.
But what if you could get to the boss with minimal fighting, and end up fighting an incredibly hard incredibly difficult encounter. If you win it drops appropriate loot.
However if you clear the minions of Bob before hand, they drop these crystal shards, the more shards you have the better. You enter Bob"s chamber and your wizard combines the shards into a staff that you now plant in the ground and the staff emits a radioactive aura that weakens Bob, and the encounter is easier, still tough, but he"s easier to kill.
The loot from the 2nd method is far "better" in some way, either more items, or more quality, but your group is rewarded for NOT taking the shortcut, and investing the time and energy to do it all.
How soon does that get stale? How do you avoid making it stale?
Hmm, not too bad really. This is similar to dungeon design in the Sunken Temple in all honesty, a phenomenally well designed dungeon where you have to kill the various trolls and hit switches in order to get the final bosses in the zone. Those trolls themselves don"t drop anything, but killing them is crucial to getting the later bigger bosses. Also similar to the 3 mobs in the temples in Undead Strat who were crucial to kill in order to get to the end boss. Those temple mobs did not have to drop loot at all, they were critical keys to the end as it was.
You can do things like this, switches needed to be hit in crucial areas of a dungeon in order to open up a trap door. Perhaps a Boss of a dungeon is a little of a security freak and as such he has it set up so that 4 of his minions in the dungeon have rings with specific markings on them. When someone needs to talk to the boss all 4 minions must come to a door and use those rings, which are in actuality keys on a round key stone that spins and opens the door only with all 4 rings inserted into their spots. So part of doing the dungeon is going to 4 seperate areas to get these "keys" off the named minions.
I think altering the difficulty of a boss is less of a benefit and less interesting then making the collection of crystals mandatory just to fight the boss. If it is a wizard then you can make up some reasoning that the wizard has enacted a phase shift spell and is thus incorporeal and impossible to attack until 5 different colored crystals are burned in his pressense, so the switch could be simply winging the crystals you have to collect in the dungeon into his burning fireplace and suddenly a fog of smoke wafts out of the fireplace and into the room, the wizard start yapping about "this cannot be, yadda yadda" and 5 seconds later the fight is on.
Using something like the cannon in the Deadmines as well, if you needed to collect the gunpowder in a very different area. Having to move to a different area of a dungeon just so you can hit the swtich on a drawbridge over a chasm you cannot cross otherwise. There are alot of ways you can make doing that other content interesting and required.
The fight against the last dragon in the Nexus reminds me of this in that you need to hit those orbs to get him to become attackable, only thing is the orbs are right there with him instead of spaced out all over the zone.
You could have an area of a dungeon that must be crossed that is poisonous gas and unable to be crossed by normal means. So you must fight your way to an alchemist area of the dungeon where the creatures living in the dungeon create an antidote for the poison they use to cross that area when they need to, loot the stuff off a table in the alchemy lab, and you are off to go through that area now with your 2 minute poison immunity buff.
The only thing is, I don"t like the system as much if it is simply for reducing the power of the boss or adding phat lewts, if the reduction in power is the difference in "ok now we can kill him" and "holy smokes, he just AOE 1 shotted us all" in which case it is mandatory then I like it and the loot can simply be the loot. In order to make a mob like this the boss could be a lich and in order to be able to kill him requires destroying his phylactery and other important pieces before you actually attack him or he simply regenerates and wipes your group out, yammering things like "you think you can destroy me, I am immortal as long as my phylactery is secure fools" so that you at least know what you missed.
