Bosses have an adaptive diminishing return of the damage they can receive.
The reason for this is that all character builds (the tanky and the dps-y) should experience boss mechanics somewhat equally. Basically, this is a nice idea, but it also has been discussed extensively in this forum why players don’t like this mechanic.
I think the solution to this is straightforward and almost already implemented in the game: It’s the monolith timeline modifiers.
When reaching a boss you will have accumulated quite some modifiers which then influence your bossfight.
To get the desired boss fight experience (without artifical DR) the monolith-modifiers should be revisited.
The basic idea is that a tanky character should more often choose “monsters deal more damage”-type of modifers and dps-y characters should more often choose the “monsters can take more damage”-type modifier. To some extent this is already how it works, but the numbers have to be adjusted to achieve a much more pronounced effect for the boss fight (and thus get rid of the artifical DR).
When players reach the boss they will have accumulated enough modifiers which suits their
playstyle and which automatically ensures that the bosses takes a reasonable time to kill.
To balance this, and to prevent dps-y characters to cheese out the concept, “reflected damage” plays a keyrole:
Dps-y character-builds should never be able to (repeatedly) choose the “monsters are more dangerous (but not so tanky)”-modifiers to speed things up and use their dps as a crowd control/defense (and then one shot the boss).
“more monster damage”-type modifiers (designed for tanky characters) should always have to be accompanied by mechanics that will ensure that the monsters hit the player first, before the other way around.
This could be:
Timed (but short) invulnerability shields
reflected damage (I think this the overall best mechanic to achieve this)
crowd control immunity (only works up to the point where dps-y characters may oneshot mobs)
Yeah,
I’m understanding the benefits of the boss damage absorption mechanism, but I’ll never like this current DR system.
My first idea about Boss DR was different from your idea.
・ Boss has battle spirit (has special threshold)
・ The threshold rises and falls depending on the damage given within a certain period of time.
・ If we deals high damage in a period of time, the boss’s spirt will decrease and the boss will greatly strengthen the defense (like now) but intead of it, boss offence is greatly lower.
・ If we continue to deal low damage in a period of time, the boss’s spirit will increase and the boss will greatly offense ability, but instead of it, boss’s deffence is greatly lower.
(This makes it necessary to avoid major attacks even for tanky characters)
It was something like above.
Damage reflect system is easy way, but may be not welcome from DPSer.
On the other hand, as you said, I think taking timeline’s balance is best way.
But I also think it is too extreme difficult.
Yeah, this is very difficult problem.
However, unlike when this mechanism was first introduced, my mind is calm and now I am not so concerned about the future of this mechanism.
I believe that zealous developers will always make it better, sometimes boldly, like this time defense changes.
DPSer are supposed to choose the other category of modifiers! (which does not have reflect) which makes monsters more tankier so they have something to actually use their DPS against.
There should be two categories for the monolith modifiers:
A) monsters can take more damge
→ you are supposed to choose this more often if you are a DPS-y character
B) monsters will deal more damage and get a little bit of reflect (or another mechanics to prevent them from being one-shotted before attacking the player)
→ you are supposed to choose this more often if you are a tanky character.
The reflect is necessary to prevent DPSy character from choosing B and oneshotting everything (including the boss in the end)
This way every character type gets their proper bossfight, eventually - all without artificial boss DR systems of any kind.
I don’t like reflected damage for bosses as that will just push everyone back to DoTs as a source of damage.
I actually like the idea of the DR on bosses. I don’t really know how they do it currently, but it would be nice as a reverse DoT. When the boss loses a certain % of it’s max health, it gains a Buff that reduces incoming damage by x%, These buffs stack. They expire after 4 seconds. This makes insane burst lose effectiveness on bosses. It just means the player has to move around a bit instead of annihilating the boss so quickly.
Those ideas are even worse than the current implementation, infact they are horrendous. Reflected damage and Invuln shields are so bad, please stop. The ironic thing is PoE has ''invuln stages" but you actually feel strong in deleting 33-50% off a bosses HP to get them there
The ‘desired’ boss experience is I can keep working on a character until they get strong and stronger and annihilate bosses, a boss in an aRPG shouldn’t be ‘dynamic’ in the fact I NEVER get stronger in comparison to them, its an awful experience and makes characters actually pointless.
Why have a bossing character if they cant even do it better than my other 5 characters?
You do understand that that this is a player choice, don’t you? Because I have written this like 5 times now.
If you don’t want to have a mechanic that ensures that the player gets damaged by the monsters (for example reflect) then you can always choose a different category which means more tankier monsters or bosses. You don’t get surprised (by for example reflect ). Its a choice you made before the fight which is designed for tanky characters to give them something to prove their strength against.
What the desired boss experience is is not anyones decision to make but the developers.
They obviously don’t want players to cheese boss mechanics by DPS. That is why they have actually dynamic bosses right now in the game.
Hence my suggestions because they actually avoid exactly what you wrote here.
The boss is not anymore dynamic (like it is now in the game).
The boss experience is tailored by the player - like it is tailored through “map modifiers” in PoE for example. The difference is that with the monolith system you have a much higher degree of control over the modifiers.
For the same timeline modifiers chosen you would see the expected improvement in how fast you kill the boss if you have more dps.
But at some point - when your dps gets too high - it would be smarter to change a modifier so that monsters have more HP but deal less damage because the larger monster HP is a non-issue due to your DPS.
No one would claim that e.g. map modifiers in PoE mean that it is pointless to improve your character because the boss is "dynamic " due to the modifiers.
Exactly this will also not be the case.
What will be the case is, that there will be two types of “boss builds”
The DPSy one (the one you refering to) will be excellent at killing bosses with lots of modifiers from category A. This type of character would have a hard time to kill a boss from category B because he probably can’t handle the boss damage
The other type of “boss build” - a tank - will be excellent at killing bosses with lots of modifiers from category B. This type of build would have a hard time to beat a boss with modifers from category A because it would take ages - or he wouldnt even manage to counter the bosses insane regeneration which only a DPSy build could handle
In fact, I would probably find another game. Damage reflection in games like this really just piss me off. It would kill nukers or glass cannons (all assumptions atm). Dmg reflection is such a punishing mod that I’d rather just not. Personal preference here, but I’m voicing.
You forgot the ( ) quote conveniently. But anyway, yes I have. This is still my assumption which means if worst case scenario is reflect/etc counters hard dps characters, I dislike the feeling I get. I dont think anyone can control how an initial feeling is, so that’s that. But! I’ll start quoting so you know, for sure, that I have read any of the posts.
Hmmm. Interesting opinion. Dps characters should not be able to dps like they wish. In fact, your example says dps builds should have little choice. Tanky characters, however, can have modifiers specifically for them! So I would say you have some sort of bias towards dps builds? Ah well. Ill just disagree with this.
Again, hate for dps. You want players to specifically ‘avoid’ some content because of their build? Hmmm. I hope EHG doesn’t adapt your philosophy to this extreme.
I could continue picking it apart, but I’m at work. I’ll continue if need be when I get home. Cheers!
(1) DPS should dps like they wish. Right now they can not: because of the DR of bosses. This whole thing is to enable them again to “dps as they wish” and at the same time respect the Developers core concept that bosses should not be trivialized down to trashmob level.
(2) No: I introduced two categories of map modifiers. A is aimed towards glass canons and B is aimed towards tanky chars. (it is already somewhat like this, just not distinct enough to make boss-DR obsolte) I never said there have to be only two choices per monolith stage. I would like to see more than two options: For example four options per monolith-stage: 2 from A (aimed towards glass canon) and two from B (aimed towards tanks). But the total number of monolith-options is not what this topic is about. This topic is about refining monolith-modifiers in such a way that the DR of bosses is obsolete.
(1) How on earth is choosing certain map modifers “avoid content”? This is how it works already right now: You get two options, you check them against your build, you choose one. Do you even play the game?
(2) You do realize that the whole system is actually already in the game? They dont have to adapt anything because its their own idea in the first place.
You and all the others here act as If I want to turn the game upside down. This is about number tweaking of a very awesome existing mechanic and a security mechanism (to prevent glasscanons from literally cheating the mechanic) so that the DR of bosses could be gone for good (which all of you seem to hate but at the same time no one is interested in a solution.)
