I’ve been doing a lot of monolith boss farming lately for prophecies and it’s gotten me thinking about the boss design and how they fit into endgame progression. I just wanted to take a stab at some potential ideas on how these could be changed/added to to make them more interesting. These aren’t necessarily what I think would be best, just ideas that give the vibe I’m going for.
As a preface: I get that Diablo Style ARPG boss design poses unique challenges. There’s a bit of a contradiction in their existence. I think they are important, memorable milestones that people kind of expect out of most RPGs. Nobody remembers their first echo at 396 corruption, but they do remember the first time they take down some epic boss. Despite this, boss design is often orthogonal to the general experience. The most common gameplay is clearing hoards of enemies whereas bosses are largely about single target damage, pattern recognition, and reaction times.
Unlike an MMORPG like WoW you can’t reliably design fights around a group, nor any super specific role requirements. Unlike a more action focused game like Dark Souls, you can’t design fights with finite resources in mind due to builds having access to infinite sustain. And more generally, the game lacks constraints on build power that enable fights to be trivialized regardless of how interesting they are.
Despite all of that, I wouldn’t give up on trying to put them in ARPGs because I think their cool factor outweighs the challenges. But you do have to keep those constraints in mind.
So with that out of the way, what’s my current problem with bosses in LE? Well it’s two things.
Corruption
The biggest issue has to do with the fact that you often don’t need to engage with their mechanics at all because of their place in the endgame progression system. Infinite scaling corruption that you need to grind to raise has a lot of issues, but it’s perhaps most apparent for bosses. You are almost never going to be fighting a boss at a difficulty that forces you to interact with their mechanics because you will mostly only engage with the boss at a given corruption once you know you can comfortably play at that corruption level. And even if you did go out of your way to fight them at a higher level, to what end? It’s still the same fight as before. It’s entirely arbitrary where you decided to stop your corruption at so it’s not like it’s going to feel like a meaningful milestone. That you have to push it super high to get to a point where the fight even does what it’s supposed to at all isn’t great. This just makes them feel like they have little value as content outside of their role in farming. Your first kill won’t be special because it will probably be at 100 corruption or maybe between 100-300 corruption. And then after that without some meaningful reason to go fight them at a higher level, you will eventually just settle on a farming difficulty for them.
Aberroth being at a fixed difficulty level was a pretty nice addition to the game in that regard. It gave a very clear goal post to shoot for and you knew what it meant when you beat him. You weren’t fighting the kiddy version and the REAL fight will come at some arbitrary point in the future, you just beat him. Same thing with Uber Aberroth now. Unoftunately for me, I’m not as excited to push a character all the way up to the point where it can kill the uber fight. Part of that is just that it’s time I could be spending on other cool builds, but I think part of it is that there’s just a big gap between regular and uber with nothing novel in between. Going up from the start of endgame to Aberroth takes you through a series of rungs on a ladder on your way to the top. You kill each timeline boss first, then you take them on at increasing specific intervals of corruption along with their associated harbinger, then that takes you to 300 corruption where you’re ready to take on Aberroth at a level that should make the fight interesting if you’re not playing a broken build. But after that? You’re not going to be ready for Uber Aberroth right away, so what do you do now? You just go back to farming the same stuff you’ve been farming at corruption levels you gradually push up as you can do so comfortably until whatever arbitrary point you feel you’re “ready” to try Uber. I don’t even know what the equivalent corruption level for Uber is, but I’d assume it’s pretty high up. That’s a lot of play time where the only milestones you’ll have are minor gear upgrades.
So I thought: How about this: Lets make some hard mode versions of the regular timeline bosses. More than just some arbitrary number boost from corruption, these would be fixed difficulty fights like Aberroth with new, tougher mechanics, that would act as stepping stones on your way to Uber. Smaller, but still memorable goals to keep you going until you get to the big one. So what would these fights look like?
Fight Design
The mechanics, even when taken on at a level where you have to engage with them, are pretty basic. It’s essentially only variations on “don’t stand in the bad.” It would be nice to find more interesting ways these fights could challenge players. While it’s not the perfect point of comparison for the reasons mentioned above, I take a decent amount of inspiration from WoW raid bosses, mostly because I spent a lot of time with them growing up and I think they’re fairly interesting.
Before talking individual bosses, I think there are two general design patterns that could be lifted from raids to help make our bosses more difficult in an interesting way.
Enrage Timers: While I’m generally not a fan of timers in games, I do think they played an important role in fight design in WoW in such a way that I find lacking in other ARPG bosses. It does a few things. First, it shifts where the difficulty and punishment of the fight is. With no timer, you can just keep playing defensively forever and slowly chip away at the boss. This isn’t the most interesting way to play, but it also means that the punishment for screwing up needs to be pretty severe. It’s very binary. You either avoid everything or you die instantly. With an enrage timer, now your movement during the fight reduces your uptime, thus making it more difficult to hit the enrage timer. So it granularly rewards or punishes you for how efficiently you handle the mechanics. If you can position yourself so you don’t need to move that long to avoid stuff, you kill the boss faster. If you have to waste a bunch of time flailing around, you don’t meet the enrage timer. It’s a way to demand mastery over the fight without those really sharp moments of punishment which also make it harder to learn the fight since a death immediately cuts off your attempt. Second, it acts as a gear check. That’s not something you want in all games, but in a game all about finding loot, I think this is a reasonable way to challenge not just the player’s twitch skills, but their build and gearing choices. It also can give you a signal that you might not be ready and it gives you a way to farm to make the fight easier in that respect. It also has the side effect of making early kills way more impressive because they may have been done while just barely at the edge of what is needed to succeed.
Planning, strategy, and in fight decision making: Ideally you want the fights to test more than just the player’s ability to avoid things. Creating elements of the fight that have you manage space or some resource, prioritize one thing over another, etc rewards players who think about the best way to approach the fight rather than just the one who is best at reacting to what is happening. We already have a little of this in Aberroth. You need to position the void beams to optimize the safe space you have to deal with other mechanics. There’s no way to avoid placing the beams at all if you’re just good at dodging, so you have to plan to succeed. (Assuming appropriate damage values.) Another kind of design that can promote this kind of play is the council fight. A set of bosses which do different things and which complicate the fight in some way by the order in which you kill them.
With that out of the way, the fights themselves. While some of these could go into the regular fights, it’s probably most reasonable to leave the regular fights as is and just add these to the hard versions. This isn’t going to be as long, mostly because any specific suggestions I have are incomplete at best. Also this is a very long post.
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Abomination: It seems like a waste to have the soul vessels be something you just awkwardly run around and destroy at the start of the fight without much complication. It’s less a mechanic and more a check to see if you can read. Maybe have them activate as phase transitions to give the player something to do other than standing in the middle of the room. Maybe they empower him in different ways, so strategically choosing which to go after first is important. Maybe he could channel at them at some point like Majassa and you have a DPS check to destroy them before he finishes or whatever.
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Rahyeh: I feel like the part where he sweeps the arena and blocks it off with a DoT should take better advantage of how it limits space.
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God Hunter Argentus: Perhaps more could be done with the balistas other than just having you walk out of them. Maybe they’re adds you could kill? Maybe they could firendly fire and you could try to use them to kill some adds that would otherwise be tough/impossible to deal with? The add phase itself could already be helped through the addition of an enrage or some other time pressure to make getting through it efficiently important.
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Lagon: Some time pressure might make the add phase more interesting. Maybe have some adds that are harder to kill and do something to complicate the phase so you’re not just running around hitting tentacles.
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Frost Lich: idk, I actually haven’t done him enough to know what to say about the fight.
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Harton’s Husk: There are those giant idols of ruin shooting stuff at you and you can technically kill them which would reduce the damage you’re taking… but I basically never do because there’s kind of no point. They’re not threatening enough, they waste DPS time, and I can just dodge their stuff if needed. So having them do something that makes them more of a priority might be interesting.
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Emperor of Corpses: What do those adds even do? Make them do something I’ll notice. Maybe for the bit where he does the big AoE you need to run out of, make that bit last longer and have some stuff you have to do at the edges like a separate phase. If you’re familiar with it, something like interlude phases for The Lich King.
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Herot: Same thing. What do those adds even do? Make them do something. Also make the limited space that you can kind of move around the map matter more. Like imagine having to try to bait him into more favorable areas of the map to fight in.
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Immortal Shamans: They’re already almost a council fight. They just don’t do anything different. Make them different and make it so you can’t just AoE them all down together. Or make it so you do wan to kill them as close together as possible. One of the two.
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Gapsar: I have no notes. I just want to tell people that I’ve had “Gaston” but replaced with “Gaspar” stuck in my head and I must pass that curse along to you.
That’s all. There are other bosses with the new woven stuff, but honestly I either haven’t done them enough or they’re so unmemorable that I don’t have anything to say about them.