View Issue Details
| ID | Project | Category | Date Submitted | Last Update | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0006277 | Valley 1 | Gameplay Idea | Mar 1, 2012 6:11 am | Mar 5, 2012 5:02 pm | |
| Reporter | Terraziel | Assigned To | |||
| Status | considering | Resolution | open | ||
| Summary | 0006277: Non-Gang Bosses should always be a higher tier than you. | ||||
| Description | This is mostly to counteract Boss gangs making normal boss battles feel a bit naff, rather what threat is one giant amoeba when I just took out 3 in the same room? So I suggest that Bosses in Boss Towers and the like are always +1 tier above you. For clarity I'm not talking about mini-bosses found around the world just bosses in missions. | ||||
| Tags | No tags attached. | ||||
| Internal Weight | Feature Suggestion | ||||
| related to | 0006349 | considering | New defensive abilities --- invincibility/reflection |
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I think if 90% of the bosses you encounter have an increased tier then that's silly. Just up the base stats for bosses and make gang bosses lower tier, that makes more sense. Or buff bosses without changing gangs (boss fights were much longer back in the early days of the beta, well, except for shadow bat fights) so the gangs become truly brutal. |
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Personally I'm not to concerned about the manner in which it is done, but stand by something needing to differentiate boss gangs and single bosses. With a flat difficulty increase, though probably needed anyway, the situation would be made worse, because single boss would really seem easy. Perhaps, make boss gangs only select bosses which you have already killed a lot of, sort of the equivalent of castlevania reusing early bosses as normal monsters later on. |
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Maybe bosses just need to be buffed until every individual boss is a major threat and a boss gang is a slaughter. |
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I agree, individual bosses should be more of a threat rather than increasing their tier. That used to be true, but changed as we rebalanced stuff. What seems most off? Their health too low? Their damage to you too low? |
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Health far and away health. If you increase their health you increase the duration at which they can damage you, and with that i think the current damage will probably seem about right. |
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Okay, good to know. I'm going to credit you for this change, just so you know -- watch for angry mobs in the coming day. ;) I'll tell them you had a gun to my head, just to make sure they come for you instead of me. :p |
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The giant skelebots also seem too easy to dodge, once you get used to it. Depends how many other things are shooting at you at the same time though! |
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Giant skelebots are meant to be easy, but I need to make them harder at higher difficulties I imagine. |
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Perhaps the same sort of multi-shot abilities the espers get? That might be enough. |
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I was thinking that, or perhaps faster shots at higher tiers. Although actually it would be better if the new abilities were not based on tier, but rather were based on unlockables. That way once you kill many of these guys, they get new abilities that are harder, and stay harder, for the rest of your game world. That is offset, of course, by your getting enchants that make all your characters better and stay with YOU for the rest of the game world. |
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I like the idea of them gaining new abilities. Personally my vote goes for them gaining defensive abilities over more offensive ones, though not to the exclusion of. I'd probably be less spam happy with launch meteor if I knew a boss could reflect it back at me. |
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I actually think health is fine; I'd rather fights were more dangerous rather than longer. Also new abilities sounds very good; agree with Terraziel about defense over offense. Would be happy to see some boss patterns; making the amoebas reflect damage back for a short time before firing their all-directions shot, for instance, or other classic-game inspired things. |
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Well, the thing about health is that bosses need to never be one-hit killable. Or killable in just a couple of hits. Because then, no matter what else the boss is, it's something that is over so fast it just doesn't matter. New defensive abilities are also cool, and feel free to submit ideas for those in general, like anything else. I'd love to do some stuff of that sort in general for the game, so I definitely don't want them to just get lost in this topic. The tricky thing with bosses is that they need to be, I think: 1. Quite hard if you are using same-tier spells against them. 2. Still reasonably hard if you are using tier+1 spells against them (as will often happen). It's a tricky balance progression, and something I need to get figured out so that it works alongside enchants and such, as well. Smart enchanting of yourself needs to be a requirement for later-stage bosses, but not something that is penalizing you early on in. |
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Are they getting into one-hit kill territory now? I feel like I need about eight-ten goes of lightning ball for a giant skelebot, which should be about as good DPS as you can get against a boss in the current game, admittedly without worrying about headshots. Anyway, I'm going to Mantis Terraziel's reflection idea. |
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0006349 |
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"Are they getting into one-hit kill territory now? I feel like I need about eight-ten goes of lightning ball for a giant skelebot, which should be about as good DPS as you can get against a boss in the current game, admittedly without worrying about headshots." Well, what are we talking about, here? What tier of lightning ball? Same tier as the boss? Did you have any power-increasing enchants on? If yes to the former, that drops to something like 5-7 hits territory, possibly lower. If you're hitting them in the head, your original number drops to 4-5 anyhow, and so then we're in 2-3 hits territory with a tier+1 spell. Then when you add on an enchant that buffs your power, while you do headshots with a tier+1 spell... yeah, you're in 1-2 hit kill territory. |
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My point would be that ten shots of ball lightning takes 10 seconds. In my own experience, No boss has survived more than three shots of Launch Meteor, which is about 5 seconds. These barely count as fights. Edit: that's without a power increase, indeed i got one and chose not to use it. |
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Yep, both excellent points. Ideally, I think a boss fight should last at least 1-3 minutes if you're absolutely dominating them, and more like 4-6 if you are just doing average, and longer if you are really struggling but determined to pull it out despite inferior equipment or something. |
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Also, my other point would be that a regular skelebot takes 1-2 shots of ball lightning. These are just cheese. Having a boss only a few times stronger than that is way out of line. |
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Well then, sounds like they need a health buff; mea culpa. But I feel like they'd still be pretty easy a lot of the time if it took 20 normal/10 buffed shots and I'd rather see a creative solution to further raising difficulty rather than a return to the marathon fights of yesterversion. Perhaps a range of different randomly applied special abilities, of which massive health (say postbuff health X5?) could be one, potentially joined by other possibilities like more powerful attacks, faster attack speed, and spell reflection? An occasional marathon fight would be fun. |
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That said I haven't fought an ameoba or a dragon for ages and they were pretty tough last time I tried, so I don't know if those have become easy or not. |
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I might be crazy but aren't bosses supposed to have varied stats already? Though obviously random special abilities above and beyond that is pretty assured to make battles more varied. |
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I'm pretty sure you're right, but right now base health is low enough that even a 50% increase isn't really noticeable if you aren't counting shots. |
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A few notes: 1. I agree, the fights were too long before. But a lot of that "too long" ness was just because they were kind of same-y throughout. If they had been more interesting throughout, then I don't think they were actually too long. This argues for all bosses to have more attack patterns, or attack patterns that change as they get damaged more, or whatever. 2. Bosses do have varied stats already, but in the conversion to the new health systems that apparently got nerfed way too hard. They vary... but it's too subtle right now. Even so, having bosses just do extra damage, or have extra attack power, seems kind of non-visible and not that interesting to me. 3. Having some system of "boss modifiers" (like little addons that float near them and attack you independently or something) might be more interesting and flexible. That way one base boss type could have any number of different modifiers, and then really works like a ton of different bosses. And as we add modifiers that can be used by many bosses, the combinatorial nature of this really goes up. 4. You could argue that simply having other enemies spawning in the room are already a form of boss modifier themselves. But I'm thinking something that sticks really close to the boss, and that you can't deal with separately from the boss, is really what is needed there. 5. Thus the focus for the next few weeks could actually not be on adding more base boss types (though we'd still add a few), but instead on adding tons of modifiers of this sort. That way, rather than adding 10 new bosses and getting 10 new bosses, we add 30 new modifiers and 2 new bosses, and get -- assuming there are around 10 bosses now -- (10 + 2) * 30 = 360 different feels of boss battle. And for more advanced tiers, if two modifiers could apply at once, then you get 12 * 30 * 30 = 10,800 unique boss permutations. Then next time we add a single base boss type, that's actually adding 900 new permutations. Add one more modifier instead of that new boss type, and that adds 732 new permutations. That's the sort of math I like, because it really leads to a magnification of the on-hand manpower we have. It's at the core of the success of AI War, and we've been struggling to duplicate that here. I think we've hit that with the enchants finally, but for bosses in particular that's not been something we've hit yet. But this sort of system might well be just what the doctor ordered. |
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That sounds pretty cool to me. I like a lot the idea of having them as sort of independent modules, so you can tell at a glance which ones are present and plan accordingly. |
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A theme in certain boss fights is ability orbs that can be destroyed to remove the powers of the boss, if you make the modifiers in this vein then it adds a new tactical approach to attacking the boss. You can either try and destroy the boss with all his abilities or weaken him first. If the modifiers are visually unique enough then you will get used to them and start knowing which orbs to go after. Edit: So yeah, we have definitely hit on something here. This would help with Overlords as well as they would be bosses with an far increased number of abilities rather than just health. |
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All agreed here. My thought is that the ability orbs would stay near the boss, and would do one of two things: 1. Either buff up the boss in a direct fashion (more power to the boss, shield the boss, cause them to reflect, whatever). 2. Or act as simply an active guardian that doesn't actually buff the boss, but makes the boss more dangerous to approach (they attack you directly, mainly, in other words). Having these be something like "ability orbs" or "familiars" or something would mean that basically any of these modifiers could go with any boss. |
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Sounds good. I understand rightly that you're thinking of both rather than deciding between those two as options? |
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Most definitely both. A given modifier would probably do one or the other, but some single modifiers might do both. I imagine it could be a pretty flexible system. |
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Tight! |
| Date Modified | Username | Field | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mar 1, 2012 6:11 am | Terraziel | New Issue | |
| Mar 1, 2012 7:40 am | tigersfan | Internal Weight | => Feature Suggestion |
| Mar 1, 2012 7:40 am | tigersfan | Status | new => considering |
| Mar 1, 2012 4:10 pm | KDR_11k | Note Added: 0020108 | |
| Mar 1, 2012 4:20 pm | Terraziel | Note Added: 0020109 | |
| Mar 1, 2012 4:51 pm | KDR_11k | Note Added: 0020123 | |
| Mar 2, 2012 4:25 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0020189 | |
| Mar 2, 2012 4:38 pm | Terraziel | Note Added: 0020192 | |
| Mar 2, 2012 4:55 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0020193 | |
| Mar 2, 2012 5:57 pm | Moo | Note Added: 0020196 | |
| Mar 2, 2012 7:05 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0020209 | |
| Mar 2, 2012 7:08 pm | Moo | Note Added: 0020210 | |
| Mar 2, 2012 7:23 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0020211 | |
| Mar 2, 2012 7:28 pm | Terraziel | Note Added: 0020212 | |
| Mar 2, 2012 7:29 pm | martyn_van_buren | Note Added: 0020213 | |
| Mar 2, 2012 7:31 pm | martyn_van_buren | Note Edited: 0020213 | |
| Mar 2, 2012 7:35 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0020214 | |
| Mar 2, 2012 7:44 pm | martyn_van_buren | Note Added: 0020215 | |
| Mar 2, 2012 7:45 pm | martyn_van_buren | Note Edited: 0020215 | |
| Mar 2, 2012 7:50 pm | martyn_van_buren | Note Added: 0020216 | |
| Mar 2, 2012 7:50 pm | martyn_van_buren | Relationship added | related to 0006349 |
| Mar 2, 2012 7:50 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0020217 | |
| Mar 2, 2012 7:52 pm | Terraziel | Note Added: 0020218 | |
| Mar 2, 2012 7:54 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0020219 | |
| Mar 2, 2012 7:54 pm | Terraziel | Note Edited: 0020218 | |
| Mar 2, 2012 7:55 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0020220 | |
| Mar 2, 2012 7:58 pm | martyn_van_buren | Note Added: 0020221 | |
| Mar 2, 2012 7:58 pm | martyn_van_buren | Note Added: 0020222 | |
| Mar 2, 2012 8:00 pm | Terraziel | Note Added: 0020223 | |
| Mar 2, 2012 8:03 pm | martyn_van_buren | Note Added: 0020224 | |
| Mar 2, 2012 8:09 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0020225 | |
| Mar 2, 2012 8:13 pm | martyn_van_buren | Note Added: 0020226 | |
| Mar 2, 2012 8:16 pm | Terraziel | Note Added: 0020227 | |
| Mar 2, 2012 8:17 pm | Terraziel | Note Edited: 0020227 | |
| Mar 2, 2012 8:20 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0020228 | |
| Mar 2, 2012 8:24 pm | martyn_van_buren | Note Added: 0020229 | |
| Mar 2, 2012 8:32 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0020230 | |
| Mar 2, 2012 8:34 pm | martyn_van_buren | Note Added: 0020231 | |
| Apr 14, 2014 9:30 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Category | Suggestion - Gameplay => Gameplay Idea |
