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Boss Adds and Aggro
jedizalm
Member Posts: 13 Arc User
TL: DR- I make a few suggestions as to nerfing the adds in boss fights a bit, and explain why.
So I have seen a few others post about this but its just not often enough. I cant be the only one to feel this way. Boss fights during dungeons either have way to many adds that cant be killed quickly, or they do too much dmg and spawn to quickly. I mean, these arent really boss fights, they seem more like a mini war in a small arena. I have never seen any one complete the mad dragon lair without having one char over level 50 to bash everything. I just got done in a failed grey wolf den where the adds alone, the simple low dmg low health shadow wolves do as much dmg as the boss. Seriously, The wolves were doing 1k per hit and the boss was only doing 1.3k. Now maybe its just me, being a cleric, and having all the aggro no matter what, but I only have 8k health, and when I get 6 shadow wolves, 2 scavengers and 2 warriors coming at me all at once, I cant survive.
And dont say it was a bad team, its a mix of bad aggro mechanics and over abundance of adds in a boss fight. I know because we tired over ten times to beat this boss and it never happened, we were all at least 41. In one instance, I remember poignantly, I stood behind all of the other team members to try to let them be a meat shield for the adds and boss. Literally, without doing any attacks, no heals, nothing, they ran PAST my team and came at me, even though the team set a barrage of damage at them to pull aggro. I even did the stupid trick, pull off all armour, activate soothe and re-equip. Nothing worked.
Needless to say, they need to change a few things about either the aggro mechanics in this game, or the bosses need to spawn less adds, or at least make them a bit easier to kill. I remember trying to do the dragon lair at some point in time...My buddy is pure dmg and crit chance Rogue and we went in together to try to the dragon at level 38...it took him two full combos with his basic attacks to kill a single imp. You tell me that is normal, and I'll spit in your face...through the internet. Thats too much dmg resist or health for basic adds in a dungeon boss fight, especially a fight that spawns of those adds every 2 seconds and 5 at a time. It requires full team concentration just to handle the adds and no one even touches the boss unless we get lucky and kill all the adds. And even then, that only lasts about 5-10 seconds at most.
Now, my rant may be over, but I have suggestions. Hopefully decent suggestions. Ones that might be easy to implement. Maybe, I dont know.
1. Make boss fight adds and mobs the same strength as world maps adds.
1a. As a cleric out in helms hold against a level 33 imp, I could nearly one hit it with my self centered AOE/heal. At level 33, same as them, it took me hitting them once with my aoe heal and once with my basic attack to kill them. They are notoriously easy to beat. Now, I'm not saying bring all the mobs in the dungeon down to that level, just the mobs in the boss rooms. You spawn 15-20 adds at us at a time, why make them so hard?
2. Reduce the number of adds in boss rooms.
2a. Simple enough. Just take the maximum number of mob spawns allowed in a boss room and reduce it. Maybe from 15-20 down to about 7-10. Something a little more manageable for a team of 5 people. You can keep them as tough as they are now.
3. Reduce the Spawn rate.
3a. This might be easier from a design and programmers perspective, honestly might be the easiest. Just take them from spawning so quickly. Make them spawn a little slower, little less often, something to give the team some breathing room to actually fight the boss. I mean, thats what were here for right? To fight a boss? If I wanted to fight nearly endless tough mobs, I'd do a skirmish, not a dungeon.
4. Reduce health/damage of adds.
4a. Given, this is very similar to 1 but instead of doing both, just do one more drastically instead of both somewhat. Take them from 5k health down to 2.5k, but let them do the same dmg. Or reduce their dmg from 500 to 200, but let them keep all that health. But not both, because thats just too nerfed. Cannon fodder has no need to be in a boss fight, and make them present SOME of a challenge.
5. Add a cap to adds.
5a. This is my favorite besides 1. Basically, dont allow them to spawn endlessly. Right now, as far as I know, they never stop spawning adds in a boss fight, and they dont give exp. So....they are nothing more than a constant nuisance. Remove their ability to endlessly spawn. Cap them at like 50 of each type. That way, after we deplete the army of the boss, they are on their own. Given, I may like this option, it might be the most boring. Once you clear the adds, its just a tank and fight boss fight, much like every other mmo out there. Something I can tell that Cryptic was trying to get away from.
So in summary, we want....no we NEED better boss fights. The bosses are impressive, deadly, and fantastic, but they and all their wonderfully customized abilities are more or less being ignored because all the adds are in the way all the time, spamming their abilities, overshadowing all the hard work you guys and gals put into making these attacks. After my fight with the wolf den boss, I had no idea the entire time I was fighting that her giant purple attacks were actually giant shadow hands. She summons shadow hands to smash and rip at her opponents. Thats INCREDIBLE, but I missed it entirely until one time I died and ran to the door to watch. I then saw the giant awesome hands. Its sad you dont even realize these cool skills exist until your watching the fight, not participating in it.
I want to know the awesome power these bosses have at their disposal by both suffering from it AND witnessing it. But right now, the way boss fights go, we may never see those abilities in their full splendor because we are in the current process of dealing with 10 random mobs trying to peel our attention away from this epic beast. Boss fights are meant to be both awe inspiring and challenging, not a clusterf*ck of random monsters attacking you nonstop.
-Zalm
So I have seen a few others post about this but its just not often enough. I cant be the only one to feel this way. Boss fights during dungeons either have way to many adds that cant be killed quickly, or they do too much dmg and spawn to quickly. I mean, these arent really boss fights, they seem more like a mini war in a small arena. I have never seen any one complete the mad dragon lair without having one char over level 50 to bash everything. I just got done in a failed grey wolf den where the adds alone, the simple low dmg low health shadow wolves do as much dmg as the boss. Seriously, The wolves were doing 1k per hit and the boss was only doing 1.3k. Now maybe its just me, being a cleric, and having all the aggro no matter what, but I only have 8k health, and when I get 6 shadow wolves, 2 scavengers and 2 warriors coming at me all at once, I cant survive.
And dont say it was a bad team, its a mix of bad aggro mechanics and over abundance of adds in a boss fight. I know because we tired over ten times to beat this boss and it never happened, we were all at least 41. In one instance, I remember poignantly, I stood behind all of the other team members to try to let them be a meat shield for the adds and boss. Literally, without doing any attacks, no heals, nothing, they ran PAST my team and came at me, even though the team set a barrage of damage at them to pull aggro. I even did the stupid trick, pull off all armour, activate soothe and re-equip. Nothing worked.
Needless to say, they need to change a few things about either the aggro mechanics in this game, or the bosses need to spawn less adds, or at least make them a bit easier to kill. I remember trying to do the dragon lair at some point in time...My buddy is pure dmg and crit chance Rogue and we went in together to try to the dragon at level 38...it took him two full combos with his basic attacks to kill a single imp. You tell me that is normal, and I'll spit in your face...through the internet. Thats too much dmg resist or health for basic adds in a dungeon boss fight, especially a fight that spawns of those adds every 2 seconds and 5 at a time. It requires full team concentration just to handle the adds and no one even touches the boss unless we get lucky and kill all the adds. And even then, that only lasts about 5-10 seconds at most.
Now, my rant may be over, but I have suggestions. Hopefully decent suggestions. Ones that might be easy to implement. Maybe, I dont know.
1. Make boss fight adds and mobs the same strength as world maps adds.
1a. As a cleric out in helms hold against a level 33 imp, I could nearly one hit it with my self centered AOE/heal. At level 33, same as them, it took me hitting them once with my aoe heal and once with my basic attack to kill them. They are notoriously easy to beat. Now, I'm not saying bring all the mobs in the dungeon down to that level, just the mobs in the boss rooms. You spawn 15-20 adds at us at a time, why make them so hard?
2. Reduce the number of adds in boss rooms.
2a. Simple enough. Just take the maximum number of mob spawns allowed in a boss room and reduce it. Maybe from 15-20 down to about 7-10. Something a little more manageable for a team of 5 people. You can keep them as tough as they are now.
3. Reduce the Spawn rate.
3a. This might be easier from a design and programmers perspective, honestly might be the easiest. Just take them from spawning so quickly. Make them spawn a little slower, little less often, something to give the team some breathing room to actually fight the boss. I mean, thats what were here for right? To fight a boss? If I wanted to fight nearly endless tough mobs, I'd do a skirmish, not a dungeon.
4. Reduce health/damage of adds.
4a. Given, this is very similar to 1 but instead of doing both, just do one more drastically instead of both somewhat. Take them from 5k health down to 2.5k, but let them do the same dmg. Or reduce their dmg from 500 to 200, but let them keep all that health. But not both, because thats just too nerfed. Cannon fodder has no need to be in a boss fight, and make them present SOME of a challenge.
5. Add a cap to adds.
5a. This is my favorite besides 1. Basically, dont allow them to spawn endlessly. Right now, as far as I know, they never stop spawning adds in a boss fight, and they dont give exp. So....they are nothing more than a constant nuisance. Remove their ability to endlessly spawn. Cap them at like 50 of each type. That way, after we deplete the army of the boss, they are on their own. Given, I may like this option, it might be the most boring. Once you clear the adds, its just a tank and fight boss fight, much like every other mmo out there. Something I can tell that Cryptic was trying to get away from.
So in summary, we want....no we NEED better boss fights. The bosses are impressive, deadly, and fantastic, but they and all their wonderfully customized abilities are more or less being ignored because all the adds are in the way all the time, spamming their abilities, overshadowing all the hard work you guys and gals put into making these attacks. After my fight with the wolf den boss, I had no idea the entire time I was fighting that her giant purple attacks were actually giant shadow hands. She summons shadow hands to smash and rip at her opponents. Thats INCREDIBLE, but I missed it entirely until one time I died and ran to the door to watch. I then saw the giant awesome hands. Its sad you dont even realize these cool skills exist until your watching the fight, not participating in it.
I want to know the awesome power these bosses have at their disposal by both suffering from it AND witnessing it. But right now, the way boss fights go, we may never see those abilities in their full splendor because we are in the current process of dealing with 10 random mobs trying to peel our attention away from this epic beast. Boss fights are meant to be both awe inspiring and challenging, not a clusterf*ck of random monsters attacking you nonstop.
-Zalm
Post edited by Unknown User on
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Comments
I've got a better idea (that was not my own original thought or suggestion, I just read it in someone's thread yesterday and couldn't agree more):
How about we come up with some boss mechanics that AREN'T "throw some adds at em?" The same kind of fight over and over again gets stale.
No.
Smartass.
Their boss fights are great, and some of the bosses have great and powerful abilities, but your right, they kinda do just revert to pseudo challenges by tossing endless spawns at you. But from a design perspective, its a bit easier that way and its hard to custom engineer a unique fight every dungeon you go into. I'm trying to meet them halfway by asking them to take what they have and make it a little it less impossible to work with.
I dont want things to be easy though. And I'm not a baddie, I just fail to see your ideals to fix the problems I have seen posted about multiple times. Adds and aggro have been presented multiple times as a persistent issue within dungeons and its apparently something that MIGHT need to be fixed. And honestly, I doubt you have ever played a cleric in a dungeon past level 20.
yeah, it does kinda suck but each of the bosses in their own right are pretty well designed. It just sucks they resorted to sending adds in all the fights to make them harder. I mean, the dragon alone is a tough customer to kill with all his abilities, and the werewolves are tough as nails, but tack that on with the mass of adds, its just annoying to the point that no one wants to do dungeons for their daily.
Just lol...
It would be nice to have there something more interesting than just: dodge huge attack, care on adds, surviwe and restore hp before next add-spawn...
Or let's have a boss fight where there are no adds, but every 30-60 seconds the boss activates a MASSIVE damage shield for a while, so if you hit it while it's up you'll basically die instantly, and its attacks become more intense and frequent during that period too.
Or any other BILLION possibilities that are better than "...and then some more adds should come out."
Yes, impossible.
No one has beaten it.
So. Many. Facepalms.
This again adds to the idea that there are certain time restraints and complex mechanics to deal with. Again, I'm just trying to work with they have before us. I would also like to add new concepts to the boss fights, but thats more workload they may not be able to handle at the moment.
As I have stated above, there is certain time restraints, workloads and mechanics to work into these kinds of boss fights, something they might not have the ability to. Trust me, I've seen some awesome boss fights in my time as a gamer, but adding a whole new complex set of algorithms and brand new lines of code is a time consuming and frustrating thing to work with. Something that isnt exactly set well into a free to play game. I mean, you paid nothing for this game, or at least have the option to play without paying for anything, and so they just dont have the same kind of budget to work with that games like WoW have.
Its not impossible, just very close to impossible. Its rarely beaten to say the least. As I said in my OP, I have never seen or even heard of it being done without a char above level 50 to be able to kill adds in one hit. Usually a rogue or GWF. I would say everything in this game is possible, but some might be far to difficult for their level. And I'm not a big fan of having to find or use glitches to beat bosses unless its part of the boss fight, something somewhat scripted into the game.
I consider this a challenge. I will provide a working example of the first situation I described made using only the Foundry editor. I already know EXACTLY how it can be done, and it will probably take me a couple hours to set all the events down. Will return with published working example as quickly as possible just to prove to you that this isn't something that requires "programming of new algorithms." BTW that word doesn't mean what you think it means -- algorithms aren't used to cause the things I'm describing. What I'm describing are scripted events. Algorithms are used in games to develop enemy AI, but I'm not asking for a dynamic monster that changes up its strategy based on player actions, I'm asking for a DIFFERENT scripted event.
Putting the things I mentioned in would be NO harder than putting in a bunch of adds -- they can do it with the tools they have, in the same amount of time, if they're even half as good with their editor as I am.
You're supposed to use moves that knock them off.
This is the same thing as having someone kill them in 1 hit except you can do it without being 15-20 levels over the content.
This is true for the adds on the Spider boss as well. I don't understand why I see so many people using an exploit to beat her now -- all you have to do is draw the adds over by the edge and use knockback moves to hit them off the platform.
But I agree that they should focus on other stuff other than adds on boss fights, it gets boring pretty fast, they all feel the same
don't be so sure man - sometimes rly simple ideas are the most difficult to programm them with. All depends how they're built it, if they hardcoded some boss-behaviour etc.
I wrote some rly great application to forecast products for pharmaceutical company, even some PM was glad to use it (belive me - it was rly big achievment
The way you describe it, it sounds like the entirety of the dungeon is a boss fight, instead of a boss fight. Its not much different with the progressing of difficulty from entrance to end. I mean, they even have multiple mini bosses along the way as you go to present a minor challenge. I would have to see a few examples of different boss fights you would like to see what and why it is to be able to see your concept better. But honestly, the teleporting to rooms with guards seems more or less annoying and it seems the entire dungeon already does that, I'd rather not have a mini version of the exact same dungeon I just did during the boss fight.
And for the damage shield, would that just be temporary hit points, massive dmg reduction, or a pure immunity to damage? And the basic idea of berserker mode is always nice, but I think most bosses already have that. As you do more dmg to them, their atttacks become more and more frequent and powerful.
Take for example the werewolf boss. Once you get her down to about 70-75% health, she enrages, turns into a werewolf and gets all new and powerful abilities that she spams ever harder and more fervently. Thats basically what you described, minus the shield. And honeslt,y sheild bosses do nothing but pester players because it does nothing but delay the inevitable.
One million times.
Scale dungeons better, or the adds at least should be scaled down to lower than the lowest party member. I assume it would have to be low as map mobs.
Do this and give more threat to gf.
Closed
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Knockback moves only give you a second or two AT MOST to breath but right after that, they are all right back on you, sometimes even worse because you might have hit fresh mobs and gained new mobs aggro. I usually try to avoid aoe styled knockbacks as it simply brings about even more aggro than I already have.
I'm trying to stick to just the mobs in boss fights since most dungeons are easy enough on their own. Its always the boss fights that are scaled to difficult to defeat with all the mobs. Aggro does need to be adjusted, but that isnt my reason for posting, as I think they already know that aggro is off in the game.
There are other ways to make bosses hard rather then having EVERY SINGLE BOSS in the game spawn a **** ton of adds. It's poor design and shows that they have no creativity when it comes to boss design.
I do however think that Guardian Fighters need a buff. They're as much tanks as clerics are healers right now. The roles need to be swapped around! Give the GF's more AoE damage and better threat management tools. Make them more important.
Didnt have any real issues that time, though i did first time round.
Difference was that we had a high prio on adds Big adds>smaller adds and boss.
Cleric was ofc an aggro magnet so I made sure to keep em off him by CC or killing em with help from the other dps.
Not sure why it went so well but noone was getting hit by massive attacks, and simply clearing adds quickly before resuming dps on boss. Never had that many adds up at any one point either.
As for the constructive criticism in this thread regarding variety and so on, Im all for it, but keep the encounters difficult so that it feels good once you get the bugger down.
On the contrary, I think they did well with most of the bosses and their skills and abilities and the like. They just couldnt find anything other than more monsters to present players with a challenge on a short term solution. Its a cheap way to present a challenge, similar to allowing the game to cheat in order to present a challenge, but sometimes they dont have a whole lot of choices. This game is free if you remember.
Every single T2 boss is the same thing. DPS the boss asap while (Clerics usually) run in circles kiting the endless mobs.
Its just boring, there are no unique mechanics for the most part. It is a tiresome time sink of a challenge if anything. I think PW wanted to think up something worse than putting in 45 minutes worth of trash mobs. Well they succeeded.
As a cleric, I understand....I WISH....gods I WISH kiting worked in this game....too bad it doesnt. No matter what, mobs will always be able to keep up with you and hit you, dealing dmg. If you think all clerics do is kite, then you have never played a cleric. We cant kite mobs that can keep up with your horse mount and still hit you, even as melee mobs. You tank them to the best of your ability. And hope that SOMEONE peels away from the boss to help you clear and kill a few of the adds so you can keep healing.
Of course they heal, its how we survive! Having two clerics is great. Peeling off the mobs that have ranged attacks is the job of the 3rd not on the boss. I only mean to use the word "Kite" lightly here. Kite-tanking is a bit closer?
Its just a crappy way to do things and we end up doing it with every boss.
Kite-tanking is actually a much more descriptive word for what clerics do. We run around like lunatics healing ourselves trying to survive 20 mobs while everyone beats on the boss. And then, they only scream at us when we die and the get wiped cuz they think we arent healing them. 'Cleric sucks!!1!' oh yeah? lets see you try to tank 15-20 mobs on a class that is built to heal everyone else. For gods sake we only heal ourselves 60% of our own heals.
There is often a safe spot in the boss rooms for clerics, the one in wolf den is quite obvious but i'll let you find it, it's funnier when you uncover it yourself.
Less aggro for clerics? No thanks, i would hate being a heal bot. I like the kiting cleric and having the GWF or GF and CW with me to deal with adds. Adds may have less HP but it would just mean easier boss fights. I don't know, i really love challenges and having my *** beaten badly to learn to play.