I’M SO ANGRY
So, as I hinted at on Saturday, I’ve got a few thoughts about encounter timers – specifically, ones that are designed to limit the amount of time you have to complete an encounter. The title of this post is alluding to what most people tend to refer to them as – “Enrage” timers. This is probably because, in a lot of cases, when this goes off, the NPC you’re fighting grows in size by about 25-50%, turns red, and starts beating the hell out of you and everyone you have ever loved, and “Enrage” is less silly than “Hulk Out.” (Though I find the concept of the “Hulk Out” timer rather amusing.) So, why do I have to think about this?
Well, as I see it, there are two ways to have an enrage timer for an encounter. The first is the more simple way to do it – you simply say, “Yup, they have 4 minutes to beat him, and then he turns into Bahamut and destroys them forever.” As soon as you make the guy mad, he starts a timer and it’s possible to predict the exact moment that he will punch a hole in the earth and kill you. Because this is the easier way to do things, it gets used a lot – going back to my experience with WoW, I’d say that every enrage timer you fought in Icecrown Citadel was a hard-enrage timer. If there was an enrage timer, it was a fixed number that could be immediately predicted. However, the main problem that I have with this is that it also meant that, usually within the first minute of the fight, people knew if the enrage timer was going to be a problem at all, because if you had 5 minutes to kill a guy with 10 million hit points, then if you hadn’t gotten him down below 8 million HP after the first minute, you might as well give up, because your DPS would only go down as the fight went on. It meant that people became INTENSELY elitist about gear and an arbitrary number that “scored” your gear – if your gear score wasn’t above X value, you didn’t get to come to Y super-cool place, because X value meant that you couldn’t do Z DPS and without you pulling Z DPS, nobody was going to get Φ Loot. (Yes, I just bust straight into the Greek Alphabet to keep this charade going. Just go with me.) It didn’t matter how good you were – people would look at you, get a number without even talking to you, and dismiss you…despite the fact that I saw some people pull numbers way above what was “expected” for their gear score, and some people who couldn’t pull half of what their gear score was expected to pull. And a lot of this was simply because there were hard timers that you knew you had to beat.
The other way to make an enrage timer is to put a timer in that causes bad things to happen. Maybe the boss gets 5% more powerful every 15 seconds – at some point, you can expect him to one-shot whomever he’s pointing at, but you can mitigate that by gearing up or bringing along classes that can artificially inflate your ability to take damage. Or maybe the boss has a super-powerful attack that he does after a certain amount of time, and every time he does it, the time until the next one is shorter – so he does it first at 90 seconds, then at 60 seconds, then at 35 seconds, then at 20 seconds, and then every 15 seconds after that. These numbers are steep, but then it’s possible, if you’re lucky enough, to still fight him through all the damage. Or perhaps, and I’m blatantly stealing this example from Loatheb in Naxxramas (WoW, again), you have the boss throw out a bunch of AoE damage and completely limit how much healing you can do during the fight. That way, after a certain point, you’re probably going to be totally screwed, but it’s possible that you might get lucky and somehow manage to push through it. I think that designing an enrage timer in this way is a lot better – it’s harder to balance, because you do want players, at some point, to lose because they simply can’t keep up, but it also means that players can get much more of a sense of accomplishment if they manage to beat it despite all the odds. With a hard timer, there’s a point at which you might have a few seconds to beat it while the boss runs around one-shotting your group. With a soft timer, even as people die, you can struggle and possibly prevail – one of my friends likes to tell a story about how all their DPS had died and they were told “OH MY GOD JUST SHIFT OUT AND HIT HIM WITH ANYTHING YOU HAVE BEFORE YOU ALL DIE” and they managed to beat it with about 4 people, out of 25, still standing.
To summarize the previous 800 words in two sentences: Punishing players for taking too long by immediately killing them all is a stupid way to make encounters seem tense. Forcing them to adapt as the encounter gets harder and harder as you go, and eventually expecting the encounter to become too difficult for them to handle, is a great way to encourage them to get better and leaves the door wide open for those stories that people will remember forever where they somehow managed, against all odds, to do something that no one else thought possible, both of which are good.
