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What about some creative AI for the Bosses?
killerella
Member Posts: 215 Arc User
@ CRYPTIC DEV TEAM
The trend so far seems to simply be the higher level the boss, just add HP and tons more adds...Done! This gets really boring and pointless eventually, plus, where's the creativity in that? What about to forget the million adds, and just program in some creative "modes" for the boss? The boss could randomly, drastically, and sometimes catastrophically switch modes (of course with visual warning queues), this would force the party to really concentrate to keep up with the boss and a few "well purposed" adds in order to survive, rather than just do mass AOE to clear all the dumb and pointless adds while running from the boss.
Examples: One mode could be the (only)perfect opportunity to concentrate on damaging the boss as much as possible. Another mode could be to avoid using AOE skills that would surely cause disastrous consequences with the otherwise harmless adds. Another mode could be to only kill adds because they empower the boss and horribly explode if they actually reach the boss. Another mode could be a total run and hide mode because the boss is invulnerable and extremely deadly and quick. All modes could offer some distinct visual queues that give a brief warning when the boss is about to switch to a specific mode as well as ongoing visual queues of the current mode.
Visual queues to the player can be as simple as unique lighting, special fog, or even a glowing boss. An Epic boss could have 10+ modes, but randomly only use 5 in any given fight. No 2 fights ever need to be alike, or predictable. Honestly the possibilities are endless and the implementation is only limited by the imagination.
I Think Neverwinter is already poised to be one of the best games of 2013, why not make it "the best"? There's nothing like epic and creative boss fights to attract tons of people to the game and keep the end game exciting at the same time. Heck, you could even switch out the bosses pool of available modes from patch to patch to really keep it exciting for players (just don't tell us in the patch notes which modes were enabled/added), and maybe let us find out for ourselves that there is a brand new mode to contend with when we get our 1st "wtf" squad wipe
Anyway, just some ideas off the top of my head, I'm sure the creative folks there at Cryptic can come up with some amazing possibilities.
The trend so far seems to simply be the higher level the boss, just add HP and tons more adds...Done! This gets really boring and pointless eventually, plus, where's the creativity in that? What about to forget the million adds, and just program in some creative "modes" for the boss? The boss could randomly, drastically, and sometimes catastrophically switch modes (of course with visual warning queues), this would force the party to really concentrate to keep up with the boss and a few "well purposed" adds in order to survive, rather than just do mass AOE to clear all the dumb and pointless adds while running from the boss.
Examples: One mode could be the (only)perfect opportunity to concentrate on damaging the boss as much as possible. Another mode could be to avoid using AOE skills that would surely cause disastrous consequences with the otherwise harmless adds. Another mode could be to only kill adds because they empower the boss and horribly explode if they actually reach the boss. Another mode could be a total run and hide mode because the boss is invulnerable and extremely deadly and quick. All modes could offer some distinct visual queues that give a brief warning when the boss is about to switch to a specific mode as well as ongoing visual queues of the current mode.
Visual queues to the player can be as simple as unique lighting, special fog, or even a glowing boss. An Epic boss could have 10+ modes, but randomly only use 5 in any given fight. No 2 fights ever need to be alike, or predictable. Honestly the possibilities are endless and the implementation is only limited by the imagination.
I Think Neverwinter is already poised to be one of the best games of 2013, why not make it "the best"? There's nothing like epic and creative boss fights to attract tons of people to the game and keep the end game exciting at the same time. Heck, you could even switch out the bosses pool of available modes from patch to patch to really keep it exciting for players (just don't tell us in the patch notes which modes were enabled/added), and maybe let us find out for ourselves that there is a brand new mode to contend with when we get our 1st "wtf" squad wipe
Anyway, just some ideas off the top of my head, I'm sure the creative folks there at Cryptic can come up with some amazing possibilities.
Post edited by killerella on
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I think the 10+ modes and using randomly 5 of them is, while it WOULD BE super awesome and I love the idea of this, really hard to implement, plus really really hard to balance. You could get lucky with a boss and get the easy modes or the hard ones and maybe the way the group is pieced together some modes are easier than others and such things. That would place the component of luck into dungeons/raiding and I don't think you would want to go down that road. However, maybe you could develope triggers, which allows you to control the modes of the boss. (Like killing all the green adds or destroy some cool glowy crystal in the encounter.. or even let the boss hit/not hit a certain class/group of people with a certain ability. Or stack a certain spell X times on the boss. Or do under X or more than X damage to the boss in a certain time/mode.) Man that'd be so awesome. I'd say that'd be even more awesome than the foundry thing.
EDIT: to be continued in a few hours.
Exactly, that's what I mean by: the implementation is only limited by the imagination. Also, if Cryptic put some new mechanics/modes into the game, then foundry authors could find interesting new ways to use it too.
This will also make players feeling involved and most of all heard which would be something new. It could work, they certainly haven't tried.
Now I think we should got something really good going on in this thread and it shouldn't be stopped.
If you would implement like 10 modes, of different difficulty and mechanic, community-made (maybe edited a little), it would not only give the community the feeling of being truly involved (which, for the record, might be awesome enough to do it), but you could be able to create a whole new feeling of doing dungeons.
You give the players the right of intelligent decisionmaking. The group could say "hell, we're casuals. Let's go the easy way and kill this boss like he's a kitten in a bag" or they could more feel like "Man, we want to be the first to force the boss to his knees while activating the most bad-*** modes". Not to think of bonus loot for certain combinations, achievements (man, we mmorpg-players LOVE achievements), bad-*** titles, (we love titles EVEN MORE!) and plenty other things.
This would not also, in my humble opinion, be one of the best ways to show casual players high end content, but I think this could be a long-time-motivation that has rarely been seen before. I mean you could create a competitive PvE-scene, give the players a motivation to go in dungeons/raids more often, to see all the modes/get titles/achievements, give the community a feeling of being involved in the game and so much more. There is so much potential in this idea.
Also, as a final word to my wall of text, i would suggest to call them moods..instead of modes.
I wonder how long it would take players to figure out a new boss mechanic, though. The majority can't seem to wrap their brains around stopping to kill the adds as it is.
That's kind of a big problem with the boss design as it is.
"Anyone done this boss before?"
"Nope. Dodge AoE and kill adds?"
Case 1: "Yes"
Case 2: "Ignore adds"
An add centric boss design is just lazy. Take a game like Diablo for instance, it's a game where you kill hundreds if not thousands of mobs, at a rate at about 70 a minute, and yet there is no adds at the bosses. And if there is it's very few and they are easy to kill. And people still have some problems with bosses and they are challenging. All done with interesting boss mechanics.
In this game they could just pore the adds of the edge of the arena and give us a DoT that does like 20k damage a tic.
I think if any game devs can pull something like this off, it would be the Cryptic team. They are extremely community centric, very talented, and definitely involved to make this game the best. There's an old expression(before the movie) that reminds me of the Crytic Dev Team, "In it to win it" ...that about sums up what I've seen so far.
I don't think that an add heavy boss fight always has to be boring/lazy. If you take a look at bosses in other popular games, you'll see that a boss fight with add control as a main mechanic can be fun, too. Just the way it is now, that the adds just spawn and run after you and are nothing but annoying, isn't right in my opinion. If the Dev's love their adds, they can keep them. But they should at the least get a more interesting mechanic. I mean, yea, most of the adds have abilities that they use, but the quantity of the adds doesn't even allow you to see the beauty of their abilities. Not to mention, that the adds are most of the times the same mobs that run around in the area the dungeon is placed in. So in this case, I'd put quality over quantity. So Fewer adds, i even think that 2-5 would be enough, new or more complex mechanics would be very cool. And this is of course for an add focused boss fight(or MOOD!). If the boss has cool mechanics and creative AI himself, we might as well slaughter some boring adds to sharpen our knives.
1. The Phase Shift: The has 3 phases, Red(Ranged), Blue(Mele) and Green(Heal). In the Red and Blue phase the boss will be spawning mobs upto a number X, if the mobs are killed to a number Y, where Y= X/2, the boss will again spawn Adds till Y=X But the boss will be hitting for a lower damage. In Green phase the boss will not spawn any mobs but will be hitting harder. When the boss is in Red phase any mele attack on the boss will do next to no damage but will heal the Boss 2x of the usual damage they deal, while the ranged attacks will deal 5x of their usual damage, This reverses in Blue phase when mele deals damage and ranged heals. In green phase, any attack (mele or ranged) will heal the boss but killing Adds will reduce the Boss HP considerably.
2. The Enrage Mode: The boss has 2 modes, Normal and Enraged(Glowing). In normal mode the boss does considerably low damage but takes low damage too and spawns Adds. If X number of mobs are killed the boss goes in Enraged mode when he takes 3x damage but deals 3X damage too. After some time the boss cools down and again starts spawning adds. Now this gives 2 ways of killing the boss. Either purposely enrage the boss and kill him when he is taking more damage or only CC the adds and whip the boss while he deals considerably low damage.
3. The Suicidal Boss: The is normal, Has huge(I mean HUGE) amount of HP and spawns Adds that too have decent HP and deal avarage damage. Now when the number of Adds reach a certain number X the boss calls a suicide!! when all the mobs run to the boss and explode. The explosion radius depends on the number of Adds, this explosion also deals huge amount of damage(20% of total HP) to the boss but has a potential to 1-Shot any player in its radius. So the mechanics is, control the number of adds to control the blast radius or keep the number very low so the boss wont call suicide!! (although that will make the killing boss thing very time taking since it has HUGE HP)
4. The Elemental Mayhem(WTF AOE): This boss has to phases, Fire (Red/Burning) and Ice (Blue/Frozen Skin). The boss randomly shifts from Fire to Ice and vice-verse and at random amount of time does a AOE that ignores all kinds of defence and deals over 10000K Damage!! so its a sure Wipe. Also when boss is in Fire mode, his attacks put a burn DOT that has realy big ticks and attacking the boss with mele also puts this burn DOT on the players, in Ice mode the boss attacks has t good chance of freezing the target and attacking with ranged surely freezes the target.
There are also 2 types of Adds spawning, fire and ice. Killing those Adds puts a debuff on the player corresponding on the element of the add. Fire adds put fire debuff that deals DOT while ice adds put a ice debuff that reduces movement speed.
To avoid being 1-shot by the AOE players need to debuff themselves by killing adds with the opposite element of the boss Fire or Ice. Also the fire and ice debuff from Adds help reducing the the damage taken or removing the effects of hitting the boss.
So, here are four mechanics that dont need the boss to have 10 modes and use 5/10 at random.Also these mechanics use Adds but not just garbing a handful and throwing them in but actually putting a purpose for them to be there. Even if you illustrate these mechanics in patch note, it will still need good coordination, timing and team-work in boss Fights and will make the dungeon runs interesting.
Thanks, but currently i am not a Foundry author, the Foundry needs a lot of work b4 i can make the maps i want to. Lets hope the foundry gets better an i can make the maps i have already planed out
If these mechanics come from 1 player brainstorming some random ideas, guess what a community of players could think of/create.
I really want someone from Cryptic to respond to this. This thread has been on the first page for 3 day now..
I agree, if this were an official community thing, like a foundry contest, it would get tons more love. Maybe they could even let the community design/test/vote one of the official bosses as a kickoff event.
Most likely Cryptic has already read this, but I can imagine this is no small task to address. A change this big could take months or even a year of planning. I would be willing to wait however long it took, it would be worth the wait and would be as exciting as a major content update. I think a change like this would go a long way towards getting current player retention and finding new player attention.
"let me guess don't stand in bad and a lot of adds?"
This isn't your first mmo devs, I am shock at how lazy it is to have every boss fight have adds.
*Heavy movement boss fights ala dance dance
*Bose healing fight one of my favs were the healer has to heal target to kill the boss
*Fight with two bosses were one can be CC and a dps has to kite it around.
*Puzzle boss, were the team has to deal with a puzzle with adds ToR has this.
*Aggro wipe boss
*Fight were a player gets ported and has to make it back
*Boss that you can only hit when a shield is down.
*Fake pvp fights there is one at low levels all ready.
Instead of throwing countless adds, actual players can be called upon. For a group of 5, 3 players come to assist the boss. if the party is wiped the players assisting the boss teleported back and get some rewards
Yea, if something even close to the imaginations in this thread would be implemented, it would be a huge project. And nobody can expect a DEV posting a respond where he is like "Great idea. BRB, doing it."
But a "Okay, we read it and have this and that to say." would be much appreciated.
Another thing that comes to mind, while we're at it: Being able to make more use of the terrain and implementing helpful objects respectively. Cannons, traps, items to apply certain debuffs to bosses, you name it. Some of these could even be linked to professions, e.g. Leadership and Alchemy.
The basic idea is already in-game with throwing adds off edges, why not expand the concept?
I agree, it would be nice to know what they are thinking.
and I can handle the truth, no matter what Cryptic says....