So someone asked me for ideas on how to beat Freddy Nine Lives for his life quest. This got me to thinking. Of all the experiences in the Spiral, fair to NONE are based on endurance over a set time or number of rounds. They are almost ALL "defeat boss, chance at drop."
There's two exceptions.
1 - Freddy Nine Lives. The tough, streetwise spiritist cat who goes nine rounds against you to test your mettle for the Life and Death spell quest.
2 - Radiance Reborn Mally. Survive ten rounds, and your quest is satisfied. With almost no hope of handing him a definitive defeat, you scramble to pull enough wraiths and vampires to keep yourself healed and carefully count his pips so you can drop a death shield over the top of his prism. You have the tools to survive, can you go the distance? At the end of the 10 rounds, Mally says he's had enough (and your quest is complete).
Now, I can see this style of challenge being abused by players who just immune-up and wait out the ten rounds or nine fights while reading tweets or paring their nails. They would have to be designed to challenge every type of player.
It would be a refreshing change from the latest dungeons, which have cycles of cheats that punch great holes in your team if you DON'T kill outright before turn 4 or 5. In addition, it would move away from the current boss drop table mechanism of "better rewards the sooner you kill" towards "objective completed get drop appropriate to your school".
Curiously enough, the conventional boss that comes to mind as a possible Endurance Challenge is Ghost Dog (Shadow). That DOT is a killer diller. Either you will resist death a lot, or you will have lots of Triages, or your pet will have mc Triage, or you'll find some other way (Shift, etc.) to get rid of these. Minions reappear a few rounds after they are defeated - sometimes different ones. Rewards might vary: the best rewards might drop for those players whose total resist is less than 40% AND manage to last over 100 rounds against an infinite health Ghost Dog with an endless parade of ninja thugs.
Thoughts? One thing I can see making a HUGE difference is finally using those level 70 Minions and all those Polymorphs we never train.
You don't get better rewards if you kill the boss sooner. You can't get immunity for Radiance Reborn Malistaire, because your stats are changed to Morganthe's stats. It's an interesting idea, though, to have special bosses that give better loot the longer you last. You should get loot even if/when you die (due to the boss having infinite health). I like the idea.
Better drops for killing sooner are a figment of your imagination. Drops have absolutely nothing to do with how long a battle lasts. I do like the idea of having more battles that are a set # of rounds though. As long as they aren't like Malistaire in Radiance Reborn. If you kill him before the 10 rounds, the battle is over and you have to repeat the battle to get the quest. You shouldn't get punished for killing the opponent. It would definitely relieve some of the tedium of these 3-6 hour dungeons.
