I was thinking of a way to implement this into a quest, but I can only see it as an instanced event like a dungeon. Or some way to create a quest instance.
There are two tunnels/portals ahead, one path to the left and one to the right. Your party actually has to split up, two going one way and three going the other way, but you don’t realize that yet.
The portal on the right is a room with waves of adds/mobs, there is no exit.
The portal on the left is a room with two “tinkering stations”, each with intricate 3d puzzles that you have to build. After building each puzzle, you place it on its respective pedestal and it causes a wall to shift in each room, revealing the exit.
Next room the roles switch. The left path that was just building the puzzles is now fighting a single monster, bigger, tougher, can’t be killed, but you have the ability to stretch it out and barely survive with dodging and healing. We’ll call him Jalfroggen.
Right path is now in the next room talking to a disfigured creature npc surrounded by three potion cauldrons who explains to you that the waves of adds in the previous room dropped potion crafting ingredients and if you want your friends in the left path to survive, you will have to make three different food items that the Jalfroggen loves, and this will distract him long enough for the others in your party to escape. Right path has the ability to move back to the waves of adds if you didn’t get enough of the potion crafting items or if you accidentally make ruined potions.
You get the idea, one group is solving a puzzle or escape room of some type while the other group is fighting mobs until both groups can advance. Sprinkle in bosses or full group content in between. The idea is to make it required to have 2 or more players.
One room, the walls could have holes knocked out all over the place. You have to place your arm into a hole and fish around until your controller vibrates, grip, and pull out a key. There are a few keys you have to find and each key holder has to unlock a device similar to entering ancient temple.
One room is filled with randomized rune tiles, there is an unlock pattern that you have to figure out and then the party has to find the proper runes and activate them in order. This may or may not work but I was thinking that to activate a certain rune tile you would have to perform an action that would trigger that rune for your class in artificing. For example the “U” tile could only be activated with a musketeer shooting it with a weakness orb, mage hitting it with fire spell, shaman hitting it with fireball orb, scoundrel shooting it with fire card. Similarly for affliction tile, hits per second tiles, etc.
