Raid Bosses

[tpyo]

This is an idea I've been thinking about for a long time.  To be honest, I ripped it off from Final Fantasy XI.

What if players could spawn raid bosses with a rarely dropped item?  Each raid boss could have an item that drops from any mob in their zone and can be turned in to an NPC in the zone to force spawn the appropriate boss.

For example, a player could be farming xp in Sebilis and come across "Trakanon's Scale."  Down in Trak's lair is an NPC, "The Miasmic Summoner."  By handing the scale to the summoner, the player can immediately force Trakanon to spawn.

As the server is growing and more people are getting higher level, its becoming harder to get raid bosses needed for progression, especially during "prime time" when dads are most able to play.  This will give people a chance to work towards their progression instead of just hoping their raid mob is up.  A friend of mine has been trying to finish up his kunark dragons for a little bit and just can't seem to find his last one or two up.
tra
There could be a number of ways this is handled.  Perhaps you need to collect multiple items.  Instead of just Trakanon's Scale, from the example above, you need four items: his scale from frogloks in the zone, his horn from juggernauts, tip of his tail from beetles, and his essence from undead.  That forces the player to his various parts of the zone.  Each item would need a low drop chance, and I believe its possible to do something time based to prevent people from just AoE farming (one of my EQ database/server nerd friends has mentioned that to me in the past).  Alternatively, instead of having to farm different items, farm multiple scales and turn them in.

I'd be happy to suggestion a complete list of items needed for each boss.  Players would probably be best off farming Skyfire for VP bosses, since there arent enough mobs in VP itself to make farmign reasonable.

Curious what people think.

-Tpyo, Gltch, Eror, Mistaek, Blundrr, Oopz

[Grandfather/Cuppah]

This might work along the lines of requesting an npc at entrance of zone to also enable instances of contested areas.
But there would need to be some costs/cooldown to this also, to balance out the ease.

[Zutfen]

I like the idea of being able to farm up, essentially, reagents for the summoning of a mob you need for progression.

The concept of instancing is much harder to implement in non-instanced-by-default zone, on the server side of things, so this may strike a good balance since it only requires the addition of a static mob and one or a handful of low % drops to the loot table per zone.

There could potentially be logic to check if the mob in question is spawned and if not, the "summoner" mob pops. Likewise, the summoner mob despawns once the popped mob is spawned, which prevents multiple "instances" of the boss mob from being up and causing headaches.

[TaterTott]

As the pop grows more and more this seems like an interesting way to keep people feeling like theres a good chance to get a boss without having to be hardcore camping it. I like.