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Cosmic snowballing
aiqa
Posts: 2,620 Arc User
There seems to be a lack of a middle ground for the difficult of cosmic fights. This is felt most clearly at Eido, but the other cosmics have the same problem. All the fights have a certain performance bar that your team needs to clear. When your team has a higher performance things snowball quickly into easy mode, but when your team struggles it feels like your being punished for struggling and end up failing.
Of course there are exceptions, but the fights are designed a bit to strongly in a way that promotes this snowballing effect. I would like future content to move away from that a bit.
Of course there are exceptions, but the fights are designed a bit to strongly in a way that promotes this snowballing effect. I would like future content to move away from that a bit.
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But all in all I don't think it's my place to come up with how to exactly handle the fights. I think the sentiment "try to avoid difficulty snowballing" wasn't given enough attention in the cosmic designs so far. And it is important to voice such concerns long before we get any new content.
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
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For Eido it's clear what is meant here. When we don't get those green orbs down, they pop. This kills some people, and debuffs the rest, meaning that the next reds or greens that come out we're going at them with even less potential than we did the ones that popped on us. At this point Eido will regen lots of health until he goes back to the phase where he summons portals. Now we have portals, greens show up during portals, people are getting killed by portal beasts, greens aren't dpsed enough and they pop. It becomes an extremely difficult situation to recover from.
Kiga doesn't really have a snowball ( odd considering he's Mr. Cold ). Each time we screw up it doesn't really lead to a downward slope of decreasing ability to recover. If we mess up on the Ice Tomb, everybody dies. If someone dies to storm, the fight just gets longer, but we're still in the same shape we were before. If dogs get loose, it's a game over unless that can be recovered very quickly, and if it is recovered then we're right back on course. Even if the tank goes down, all that's likely to happen is either a game over or a lengthening of the fight, but nothing really changes to disadvantage us. The period where dogs get loose and start eating everyone can feel like a snowball situation, but in actually it's just an immediate game over.
For Ape, hitting the hearts just lengthens the fight. People dying to his aoe, fire patches, or fireball also just lengthens the fight by temporarily lowering our damage output. What can lead to a snowball is if the tank goes down and Ape's position goes bad, in which case hearts will spawn too close to him. However the way to fix this is one of the oldest mmo tropes in the book, "stop dps and let the tank regain aggro", so no real issue there.
At Dino again missing a DPS check just makes the fight longer. Folks not blocking well and ending up dead or stunned during the dps check also doesn't really count as a snowball, because it's entirely temporary and the only end condition it leads to is a missed DPS check, which just makes the fight longer. The only real snowball here is if either of the tanks go down. However if there aren't people above a given "skill threshold" present then that's likely to just lead to a swift game over rather than a disadvantaged period of recovery attempts. Again the period of time where the Dinos are going around eating everyone can feel like a snowball situation, but it is again just an extended game over.
Overall Kiga, Ape and Dino don't really have any excessive amount of potential "snowballing" and the conditions that lead to what they do have are very basic to the trinity structure of the game. So really that leaves us with Eido. While we are setting crazy records like 4:20 in clearing him atm, that's with a group that largely consists of people that have cleared the "skill threshold" the OP mentions. However, would it be appropriate to design content that is meant to be only clearable by those people without such problems to solve? The idea that only players who clear a certain skill threshold can clear certain content in video games is not a particularly unusual one, and in this case even with this in place the intended audience for the content is burning through it. I don't think a design goal is to make Eido more accessable to people below that skill threshold, so I'm not certain that removing this skill check is really a good idea. After all, even with all this in place we do sometimes manage to recover even from that nightmare.
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
In future content I think the devs should think a bit more how the fights keep at certain difficulty level even if all the damage checks are made and you block the big AoEs or the lava under your feet. I think Eido was a good first attempt at that, but the Eido approach has its own problems and is still (to) strongly dependent on damage checks.
Like I've said in the past, it seems that the more specific a suggestion is the more useful it is. Very general suggestions don't give them much to work with. Plus a lot of the current issues of snowballing into easiness is because the balance pass isn't complete and we keep finding ways to exploit what hasn't been reworked yet. I wouldn't call a bunch of people using the Fist AT as qualifying for "passing the skill threshold".
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
Going from impossible to easymode farming, by improving the team setup or organization slightly, is exactly why I've made this thread. So while the devs might already try to keep fights at a consistent difficulty, that hasn't worked out great so far.
There are stages, jobs, roles, and a variety of mechanics, including a giant but non-lethal AoE (the massive repel).
I am looking forward to the next Cosmic.
Whoever you are, be that person one hundred percent. Don't compromise on your identity.
It’s a cool fight just for that.
There's pretty much four ways to lose a fight:
- Immediate Fail: you do something wrong, and you wipe immediately, resetting the fight. Examples: Failure to kill Living Fire/Ice in Fire and Ice, dogs going rogue at Kigatilik, ice tomb detonations at Kigatilik.
- Cascading Fail: you do something wrong, and as a result of your mistake other things go wrong, likely resulting in a wipe in a minute or two. Example: at Eidolon, a bunch of characters die in a Red phase, and Eidolon heals, causing him to trigger a Yellow phase. Ressed characters are down dps, so Yellow orbs are still active when a Green phase triggers, and rampaging adds cause the Green phase to also fail. Somewhere in this process the healers and/or tank die.
- Slow Fail: you do something wrong, and as a result of your mistake the fight resets to an earlier stage. You can continue fighting, but if you make too many mistakes, the fight never actually progresses. Examples: healing mechanics at all of the Cosmics.
- Timer Fail: you fail to beat a timed fight. Examples: of the regular Cosmics, only Eidolon has a timer at all, but most event cosmics have timers.
Which of those failure modes is most acceptable?Epic Stronghold
Block timing explained
Well, I was actually trying to kill them. But hitting them in the face repeatedly is a great way to build aggro.
Regen tanks are great for fights where you don't want to have a healer heal the tank constantly. Obviously it requires a fight where the tank can avoid dying without a healer, but hey.
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Whoever you are, be that person one hundred percent. Don't compromise on your identity.
Doesn't it work that way for you?
Whoever you are, be that person one hundred percent. Don't compromise on your identity.
Anyways, back to the OP, the "snowballing uphill" issue is something that hasn't been solved in all the time that games have existed, even before they went digital. Simply put, once a player has figured an encounter out that's that, there's really no way to bring them back. In group based content, having a bunch of these players is always going to yield dramatically different results than having a bunch of players who haven't figured it out. Whether you're playing dark souls or building a bridge, this holds true.
So long as encounters require skillful behaviour to pass through them, there will eventually be a point at which players have internalized that behaviour. In fact the "snowballing upward" effect can't really be considered a problem, as it is the reward that players enjoy for having mastered an encounter. The way that games generally solve this issue is by having something for those players to continue on to so that they don't stick around and carry all the new players through it.
So the specific solution would be tiered instanced content. Make even more difficult content with new exclusive rewards where players can control who shows up, and make it time consuming enough that the players who are up to that level will not want to return to the previous content. It has to be instanced in order to prevent unqualified players from showing up, and it has to be time-consuming to ensure that players must focus on this content and have no time for the previous content. The rewards would also need to exclusive to this content to ensure that qualified players are doing only this content to get them.
Preferably this would still be scaling content so that the number of players could be variable just like with cosmics so that everyone who is qualified can come, and so the run can happen without needing to get a specific number of people.
This would then help to keep the challenge in each tier of content more consistent. It would also make the skill growth of players more consitent than it is now since it removes the ability of people to get dragged along by players who have already mastered the content, as this generally stunts the growth of the players being dragged.
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
I did it, in part, because I knew not all of my allies had the ability to do so. In part it was because I just love curb stomping things.
Yeah, the devs kept finding new ways to annoy the players. But we kept finding new ways to smash faces.
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Tank Fred to death!
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As for slow fails, the cosmics don't really have those. There's nothing you can do early on at any of them that is going to lead to a long fight that is impossible win. The closest thing would be the dogs at Kiga, but it's not going to take very long for that to kill everyone. In fact, if someone can screw up the dogs but keep them controlled enough that the fight continues for a significant amount of time then it's feasible that they can either keep that up for the whole fight or even recover from it.
Instant fails would actually do one thing that that article you posted says is a good idea. Rather than slow fails, our cosmics will end up in a situation where the players aren't making any progress. Doesn't qualify for a slow fail since it's not going to lead to a fail state, and in fact at any given moment players could show up that quickly make the fight successful. For the "no progress" situation, having the cosmics just kill everyone after a certain amount of failures would solve the issue. For example, after a certain number of failed dps checks, Dino enrages. Ape and Kiga could both have an enrage timer that ticks up when they're above a certain amount of health, so if they're constantly getting healed due to player mistakes then eventually they're going to enrage and kill everyone.
This would let the players know that it's just not gonna happen and that they need to change something if they want to succeed, rather than just flailing hopelessly against the boss for a long time. This wouldn't necessarily require that the boss go on cooldown either. Just resetting the fight so that folks can address the problem, switch roles, call in reinforcements, or see if somebody doesn't know what they're doing wrong. Players generally won't stop the fight like this themselves so some sort of prompting from the game would be helpful.
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
Epic Stronghold
Block timing explained
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
Incidentally, somewhat opposite from this, one solution to the original problem posed above is boss mechanics that are based on damage taken instead of timers (or a hybrid of the two), meaning the high dps group that's burning through everything has to deal with special mechanics more often than the slower group.
Epic Stronghold
Block timing explained
A mechanic that makes speed runs harder would be an impediment to "positive" snowballing.
Whoever you are, be that person one hundred percent. Don't compromise on your identity.
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A few examples to how that can be avoided
- add more dynamic difficulty scaling
- make the combat performance bars "fuzzier"
- add more non-combat mechanics to keep a certain challenge level even after the combat performance bars have been cleared
Epic Stronghold
Block timing explained
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> I clicked because I saw "cosmic snowballing." The lack of pictures is disappointing.
>
> ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
I clicked because it's the Holiday Season and I saw "snowball" O_o
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My super cool CC build and how to use it.
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
This could include:
* searching for clickie items
* traveling somewhere quickly
* using environmental cues to do a quick "puzzle" (like click or move items in a particular order)
* saving NPCs
* dodging environmental effects
There are encounters in game that already use these mechanics. I would like seeing them with a Cosmic
Whoever you are, be that person one hundred percent. Don't compromise on your identity.
Frostbiter (Freeform Ice DPS)
Battle Hazard (Unleashed AT)
Glacial Tyrant (Glacier AT)
Silver Mantra ( Freeform Single Blade DPS)
Magnetros (Freeform Heavy Weapons/Lightning Hybrid)
I've played ESO and there were other mechanics. you must not have got far enough in the game.
Depends on what you call far. I have about 420ish CP and was running vet dungeons with my guild. But enough about me, how you doin?
Edit: Arrgh what is up with hitting the quote button? $%^&
Frostbiter (Freeform Ice DPS)
Battle Hazard (Unleashed AT)
Glacial Tyrant (Glacier AT)
Silver Mantra ( Freeform Single Blade DPS)
Magnetros (Freeform Heavy Weapons/Lightning Hybrid)
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
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My characters