I’m not sure I agree with your view on that particular boss (since you can face tank it with anything that has capped resists), but also the xbows (or whatever they are) are mostly offscreen, so you wouldn’t be able to see where they’re aiming at if they didn’t have a big telegraph. They need something that says “we’re about to fire now move if you don’t want to be hit”.
Of the telegraphed attacks that we have at the moment, I think most of them that have a big circle on the floor are reasonable.
Void-fused Earth’s ranged attack, I think most people wouldn’t be able to predict where they would land if they didn’t have circles on the floor, though the melee one is obvious.
Profane Flesh’s necrotic mortar is fairly obvious since they explode a while after they land, but the big charged attack can be anywhere on the screen in a direct line once it starts doing the animation.
I face-tanked him too (like all other bosses I’ve fought in the Monolith). But I think that’s a different debate. My point here would be more that, regardless of how hard he actually hits, the encounter would be trivial because of the comprehensive telegraphing.
If there are abilities in the game that people cannot predict or comprehend (and I agree that the crossbow attacks in the above encounter may be just such an ability), then my preferred solution would be to rework the ability using physical signals until people can predict or comprehend it. Not just give them a cheat sheet and call it a day. Though I of course recognize that giving people a cheat sheet is the more economical alternative.
Edit: I changed the title of the thread to clarify what I’m after.
While LE definitely has more telegraphed stuff than simialr other games, they also have more than enough non-telegraphed abilities, that have other kind of indicators.
In the future, when we get mroe enemy types, we could get more of those “different” indicated abilities, such as wind-up animations etc.
But i don’t see an issue here, in fact i really to find this refreshing compared to other similar games.
I kinda agree with OP but in a different way.
The element of game design that I find underexploited in LE to warn the player to avoid attacks is sound, especially for bosses.
I don’t like to make this comparison every time but for me the best example to illustrate that is Sirius “Die !” voice line during Awakener fight (in PoE). Every player pretty much reacts to this sound stimulus than the actual animation to avoid the attack.
Using this aspect of boss encounter (and to a certain extent mobs encounter) has for me several advatanges :
Diversity of the gameplay
Give more identity to the bosses
I honestly think that it is an aspect completely underused in LE maybe for valid reasons, but would, in my opinion, immensely change the impression of some encounters.
Totally agree, this can be great additions, especially for Bosses in particular.
For more usualy mob types some distinguishable sound, that does not get annoying over alonger period of time would be more appropriate.
For Bosses, as you said, that would give them alot more character and would develop their identity. Maybe somebosses could also have very interesting sounds.
Some MoF bosses already have sounds associated with their abilities, but that can be improved upon.
While PoE is probably the worst example for this as a game in general, the Sirus fight is the one and only fight that is well designed in PoE, but that fight has such a high standard, which the other content of PoE can’t compete with.
As you said they give the player clue about the game play, while giving the character alot of identiy. For Sirus this is especially the case, since the Voice Lines develop over the course of the fight and get more intense/crazy for the later stages of the fight.
I agree. In PoE for example a lack of telegraphs often just means you’re instantly dead with no chance to react. It’s more than possible for a game to be challenging with visual (or audio queues), just by making players juggle what they’re looking at (e.g. FF14, Wildstar).
For an APRG, the extra clarity is really nice because things often get visually out of hand with clumps of mobs all doing their own thing.
I’d be fine with that in addition to visual ques, but audio cues alone handicaps people with hearing problems. More flavor voice acting for bosses would be great (“my brothers will not have died in vain!” ).
As for the OP, I disagree that the clear telegraphing is a problem. Dying to an ambiguous AOE is one of the most frustrating things for me. Sure, I can understand the argument that learning to estimate AOE sizes is part of getting better at the game, but so is learning to recognize which items are good/bad, yet I never see objections to the “economical” approach of using a loot filter instead of learning base types and affixes. It’s ultimately up to the devs to decide where to draw the lines between player skill and unnecessary burden, and I, for one, don’t mind if memorizing AOE sizes isn’t a requirement.
The God Hunter Argentus fight is definitely one of the more telegraphed fights, and it’s also undertuned. Another fight, Void Rayheh, is also among the most well telegraphed fights, and we’ve had a lot of discussions in the forums about whether or not the fight is too difficult. It has even gotten nerfed yet some people still believe it’s too challenging.
World of Warcraft also relies on heavy amounts of telegraphs in its dungeons and raids, yet those don’t make the game easy. It’s one thing to have a telegraph, and another to effectively react to the telegraph. Telegraphed attacks don’t negate difficulty. They allow for it to be presented in a different way, and some types of attacks would be nearly impossible to implement without telegraphs, because they would be almost impossible for the player to successfully react to.
I can understand the concern for too many visual telegraphs, and that making the game sort of one dimensional in how players react to bosses. I agree with you that having other cues is a good way to diversify what the player needs to look out for, and therefore how the player engages with the content. I also like @Grimtok 's suggestion for more auditory cues.
Right now, I don’t get the feeling that the telegraphs are too extreme, but I can see reason to be concerned about it getting out of hand as more enemies are added to the game.
Absolutely true. My remark about sound was concerning voice acting too.
Again Sirius is the perfect example of what good voice lines and voice acting can add to a boss encounter. Music too.
On the point you are raising how people with hearing problem or disabilities deals with this aspect on such an encounter ?
Voice lines as cues have the advantage of having it both ways : their text can be displayed on screen and therefore be visual for people with hearing problems.
I don’t have firsthand experience (my hearing is good), but from what a deaf friend has said, it comes down to a mixture of constantly acting as if those attacks are coming and yomi (FGC term that’s basically a combination of mind-reading and baiting your opponent).
Your argument is half-reasonable: Boss fights are currently terrible slogs against giant bags of HP that have way, way, way too many attacks that make it impossible to fight back and force you to spend time purely dodging, doubly so if you’re a melee character.
But the other half is where you’re wrong: That’s not an issue of going overboard with telegraphs. Look at a game like Secret World, which had and has (F the reviewers) the best combat of any MMO ever made. EVERYTHING in that game is fully, cleanly telegraphed by both animations and outlines: There are no untelegraphed attacks unless they are unavoidable hitscans and the like.
Over-telegraphing isn’t the problem, encounters with no interesting attack patterns, large periods of dead time, and 4-10 times too much HP are the problem. Enemy health and survivability needs to be seriously reviewed in light of the current gamestate, and brought way way way down in many cases, most of them bosses.
Fights need more interesting attack patterns, and ones that don’t prevent you from inflicting damage. Create small safe pockets, give players tools for briefly surviving in those dangerous areas, make attacks brief and quick and snappy. Bosses right now are too slow, too pendulous, and just not fun.
I played Wildstar in the past and I think after this there is no more overtelegraphing posible :D. Bosses are sadly designed this way to be no pushovers if you outgear/outscale them. Sadly this ruins a lot for me because H&S are all about scaling for me. Why should I waste a lot of time on a level 70 boss when I’m level 90? I don’t get the design philosophy but the system behind it… making bosses meaningfull. Sadly the bosses aren’t meaningfull but time consuming to a point where I think the devs want to fool us ^^.
Hm, i don’t say Uber Elder is bad, but i think it’s not better than Sirus.
I do like Sirus way more.
I just think that most other fights like Elder, Shaper and Uber Elder are not was intuitive.
When i did Sirus the very very first time (without knowing anything about the fight). I still was able to deal with alot of the mechanics, while they were at no point to easy. After getting used to the mechanics and exactly knowing what to do it got way easier, but still not soooo easy to a point were it does not challenge me anymore.
Most other fights in PoE are not clean and readable from the get-go you actually need to do them multiple times to notice and understand all the mechanics cleanly.
Just go to my Profile and ignore me, that way you can’t see my opinion, might be the best option if you can’t handle different opinions.
If it’s a genuinely held opinion then it can’t be a lie though it can be wrong as far as you are concerned (which I know is where you stand & that’s fine as an opinion).
For me the telegraphing is a good thing.
I’m on the autistic spectrum, and as a result I tend to get overwhelmed when there are a lot of visuals on the screen. Trying to process visuals and audio cues at the same time can also be difficult. So for me, this system is a godsend.
I think a possible solution would be to have the option to toggle the over-the-top telegraphing, and also implement the more subtle audio/visual cues. That way, people wanting more challenge can have it and people like me can play the game in a way that suits us.
On the other hand, you have people whose machines don’t provide beautiful, clear, crisp visuals to understand necessarily when a monster is performing something you need to avoid.
Take the Sirus fight in Path for example. On a good machine, you can see everything if you pay attention and reliably dodge his mechanics. On a lower-end machine, the images get distorted and blurry so it’s incredibly easy to lose track of the boss in a field of similarly colored objects and pixels and feel like you died for no reason because you couldn’t make out what was happening.
I can see your point, but I’ve been in plenty of situations where I felt if they would just show me where the damn aoe is going to land I could dodge it, otherwise I’d never see it coming because the screen is cluttered and I don’t run a setup that costs multiple thousands of dollars.
I think Last Epoch’s boss design is more or less on track to be fair and consistent if you learn the mechanics and gear appropriately which is, in my opinion, the most reasonable outcome to expect out of a game like this.
The telegraphing of attacks how it is implemented currently was demanded by the community some months ago. Because there is a lot of screen clutter due to skill effects and hordes of enemies. Personally I like the clean telegraphs we have currently. Many games do it this way and it prevents players feeling treated unfair.
I agree that with bossfights there could be solutions with wind up animations and sounds that prepare the player for when an attack will be launched. It’s already in with Lagon’s eye becoming red before he unleashes his beam.of doom.
But you then have to learn the skill mechanics like timings, range, widths and so on. People propably would not be able to beat a boss on the first try.
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