There are two main ideas I would like to propose: Co-operative battles, and continuous battles.
Co-op battles is the idea of having multiple people working towards a single battle, which I think has two possible variants.
The simpler option would be to have an enemy team with a very large amount of health and or armor which doesn’t re-set after each fight, and that is consistent across all members of a group (likely a guild). Each participant would be limited to one or two attempts per day, with rewards given to all participants. It might be advisable to have each enemy gain a moderate amount of armor at the start of each fight, to mitigate the power of sheer numbers. If the enemy ends a fight with higher health or armor than it started the fight with, it should re-set to the lower value, to prevent weaker players from worrying about their first attempt.
The more complex option is having each players team act as a single unit in a team of four players. A unit on the players team would be selected to act as the “face” and fill one of the four slots in the co-op team. From here there are two options: either have that be the end of it, or, when a unit is killed, replace it with the next unit from that players team. Each battle of this type would have one player act as the leader, who would control the entire team, but rewards would be given to all participants, with a preference to the leader.
Continous Battles is the idea of facing multiple teams in a row, without resetting your team. I feel like this one is quite self explanatory in how it could be implemented.
Feel free to comment on which options seem interesting to you, or suggestions for alternative ways to implement them.
Cross Guild Wars with the Dungeon to create Dungeon Raids. A mythic or legendary troop from the weekly event kingdom acts as the “raid boss” for the week. Players (who are in guilds) get a certain number of chances over the course of the week to fight against teams built around the raid boss, selected randomly from a pool of preset team arrangements to make sure the AI teams are neither poorly built nor entirely predictable. Winning a battle earns raid points, and if a guild’s members have earned a high enough total of raid points they receive rewards like event keys and traitstones matching the raid boss’s colors. There could also be a few bonus objectives which let players earn extra points; for example, a DRACOS1337 raid could give bonus points for using Ghiralee in a winning team.
all guild members fighting against the same “huge” enemy where the damage dealt to that enemy would update collectively from each member fight
it would most probably have some extra battle rules so that it cannot be easily soloed by simply elevating own stats to 1000 etc (perhaps the boss would steal some of your stats each turn?)
@Anchovies: I agree that would be cool, and allow them to tell a bit more story for the individual characters. Things like giving a certain unit a bonus or penalty against a certain boss could communicate a bit of a relationship.
@Annaerith: I think a punisher mechanic would have to be used. Some skill that gets stronger based on your stats. Damage based on the targets attack for example. I think they would also have to have at least one ability to remove your buffs.
@UKresistance: The first idea doesn’t require mid battle communication, it just applies the changes to health and armor at the end of the fight. If two players fight it at the same time and each deal 100 damage, then the boss would just have 200 less health when those fights complete.
The second idea also doesn’t require mid battle communication, as only the leader needs to be updated in real time, the others aren’t actually performing actions. This means the battle can be run in the same manner as any other, and just sends out a mail message to the participants when the leader finishes.
The third idea also doesn’t require mid battle communication, as each section of the fight is equivalent to one normal combat, the game would just report back after each section.