I know it’s getting adjusted in 2.0 and I’m looking forward to seeing which places it is. But I wanted to voice my opinion right now, since it came to my mind. Maybe it can slip in an update for 3.0
The idea for bossward is great, however to me it feels bad in practice. Might just be some mental issue, that seeing 1/4 of a bosslife go down and then having to remove the full lifebar as ward, all while thinking (If I’d do less damage I would need to do fewer overall damage/ If my damage was burstier or cooldown dependent it would be more efficient).
That would probably disappear if a boss had 3 complete life-bars with different colors and in between each life bar is the reducing ward threshold.
Now I of course don’t know how much the backend calculations and the UI are intertwined, but I think that “simple” UI adjustment would make boss ward feel a lot better, while still retaining the objective.
But the health bar is already segmented and you can see when ward is getting triggered.
Also having the hp bar go “full” again when it jumps to the second bar might have the opposite effect of what you want. You feel liek you are not progression the bosses health.
On top of that Kill Threshold would be really weird, because if the boss had multipel health bars and you have for example 10% Kill Threshold you need to do some mental arithmetic to figure out roughly, when the boss will get executed.
What they’ve said already is that they’re removing it from a bunch of mobs which shouldn’t have them (like the random Captains in a level) and that ward will decay faster.
I 100% agree, it is completely a display issue where partially getting the red bar down feels kinda bad. if we went through all the ward bars first and then the hp bar it might be better too. Something like dragon’s dogma’s bar display might be better.
For example: https://i.imgur.com/nyOYXPp.jpeg
Having the original from there might be enough if all the ward goes out first, This might represent health better in a way that players don’t feel punished (they are not, bosses just have way more health than they seem to have).
That would defeat the purpose. The point of boss ward is that it decays over time so that lower DPS builds don’t have to actually bring it all down.
With your change, what would happen is that you would simply run around doing nothing waiting for the ward bars to drop before actually starting the fight.
if you want to run around avoiding the boss for 5 minutes before damaging it sure, there was a video of someone that did the life part and then waited. I’m not suggesting for ward to decay before you engage the boss, that would be insane.
It’s all about the gameplay it encourages. Right now boss ward has issues, but at least it creates a natural rhythm.
A low DPS build will hit the boss, spend their resources and hit the ward threshold. Being a low DPS build, it’s easier to just let it decay, so they can “rest” during this period, getting back their resources (like letting mana regen). Once ward is gone, they spend all their resources again, and on and on until they kill the boss.
Having all ward bars go first all in sequence would mean that a low DPS build would always just sit around evading the boss until the ward went down. You could hit it a few times, but it wouldn’t make much difference overall.
So rather than have a boss fight where you hit with all you got, recover resources while evading, hit with all you got, recover resources while evading, etc, you’d end up with evading the boss for a few minutes until you could finally start working on the health bar. And you’d still need to have recover periods to get resources back.
So that change might be better visually for some players, but would be actually horrible for low DPS builds.
