Boss design buff

[SigmaQ]

First and foremost, I want to applaud EHG for designing one of the best boss encounter designs in ARPG. None feels unfair or boring and each feeling unique and fresh. There are some boss that I dislike for example Fall of Empire’s boss for the randomness and chaotic battle but it also shows the design diversity of the boss encounters.

Some food for thought that I have is to enhance the boss design by adding variation to them. For example, adding more boss skills in mono/higher corruption (100, 200 and so on), or modify the attack pattern for surprises.

Case in point is Lagon that is the same encounter in the story and monolith. The difference is currently in HP and attack power. We can for example get more challenge if there are more variation in attack pattern for example:

1. On 2nd phase, the wave can be either clockwise/anticlockwise, chosen randomly per run.
2. On 2nd phase, Lagon periodically shows up and shot the single straight blast of the eye laser. Or the telegraphed lighning circular AoE
3. Tentacles also shows up on 3rd phase on the side if the battle stage
4. Addition of 4th phase on higher corruption. But this requires lots of dev time.
5. On higher corruption, Lagon redeye attack now accompanied by the claw attack.

These require work on codes, animation, balancing etc and the current boss design is already great so it is an improvement that can be implemented in future patches (or after release)

EDIT: 3rd phase Lagon might have difference in the wave appearing from both sides? Unsure on this, but the idea is that this upgrade on enemy boss as we progress further is great and we can do more with it.

[Heavy]

Lagon is definitely one of the “cheaper” Monolith bosses, just because it’s a copy/paste from the story.

I really would wish, that the MoF Version would be an alternative version of him, replacing 1 or 2 attacks with somethign different entirely.
Or maybe ramp up his attacks to 11.

Similar to what they did with Husk Of Elder Gaspar in the Last Ruin Timeline, where almost all attacks from the Boss are very simialr skills to what the Elder Pannion fight in the story ist, but just cranked up to 11.

Also while I do love the Boss design of most bosses, I think the order of bosses in MoF is not appropriate.

Rahyeh, The Black Sun from The Black Sun Timeline is mechanically way to hard and punishing for how early he appears.

Also Emperor Of Corpses from the Reign Of Dragons is one of the more simple and straight forward bosses, whiel still incredibly punishing.

Those 2 bosses could easily switch places and make the Empowerer Of Corspes a little less punishing (especially the big AoE Blast)

Other than that, Mike talked about giving bosses more abilities at some point.

And I think EHG generally don’t want to add “more” abilities to most fights, but rather change or alter abilities, to keep the boss fights reasonable in terms of how many patterns the players have to learn.

But I really would love to see altered versions of MoF Bosses at either high corruption or maybe give us a 3rd Difficulty Version fo Each Timeline, after you defeated the boss in that Timeline at at least X Corruption.

This new difficulty has 1-2 altered abilities on the boss fight.

[Jerle]

I like LE boss designs in general. But also find the boss mechanics and patterns too simple for the most part.

Looking forward to EHG’s take on “uber” bosses.

[Heavy]

I think the biggest issue right now is the difficulty progression, as I already pointed out some difficulty differences between bosses above.

But yeah we would have 2 major avenues of getting harder bosses:

• New more End-Game “Uber” Bosses, which would probably be not accessable to more poorly skilled or casual players
• More difficult versions of existing bosses, similar to Heroic/Mythic Raid/Dungeon difficulty in WoW

I think both avenues are great and especially the latter one would be at least uniques for this genre and some mroe poorly ksileld or casual player would still not miss out on “major” content", except for those more difficutl versions of the same boss, they already know.

I personally would also like to see some “really hard” End-Game Uber Bosses

[Deliya]

I think that Orobyss is a good “testing the waters” of them adding randomized skills and abilities to bosses to see how it works. I wouldn’t be surprised if this gets translated to other bosses in future. It adds a much needed bit of variety to Monos, and some of the combinations are really fun and interesting.

This could be a precursor to a similar mechanic for bosses in Empowered monos, for example. The regular mono Lagon, for example, could have the same moves/attacks as his campaign version, but then when you hit Empowered, he has one of 3 or 4 other new abilities that replace, let’s say, his claw snap or one of his 3 eye lazors.

I also agree with Heavy that EoC is a mechanically very easy boss compared to many of the other bosses. Only reason I’ve ever died on him is too little move speed and no movement ability to get out of his big blast fast enough.

[Heavy]

I think the “randomized skill set” mechanics should be unique to Shade Of Orobyss (it’s just the shade, not Orobyss itself :P)

While I do like the mechanic, it’s very daunting for players that “occasionally” want to fight some bosses.