Let's TheoryRaid #2: Cyclops V2 - No Depth (Perception)

Doing this is my 'job' within my group. Cut me some slack today, I don't even want to be doing it.

Rather than discuss some random boss from some game no one has any context for and go through THAT, I'll just discuss what I'd want from the Boss we have. Or at least, a tiny bit of that since I still don't know how simple this was supposed to feel.

The Cyclops has no depth as it is now. If it is not intended to have depth it should be an Elite. Maybe multiple similar elites with this design to get you ready for fighting Tumok. Tumok is insufficient as is. It needs 3-5 additional mechanics or changes to mechanics to not be dry inflated 8-man content . To just be 'simple and introductory' instead of 'braindead' (based on what we saw)

Here is how. (I am giving myself a point for every response I get that ends up being just 'let devs do their job' or how arrogant I am... ugh what a day).

New Mechanic #1: "I Am Bigger Than You"
A huge enemy like Tumok has an advantage in that it can literally easily pick up and throw any player character regardless of their level. It could also grab them, throw them onto the ground and stomp on them. This would give Tanks something to CC. It would help you 'need more than one Tank'. It would actually endanger people or act as a Hate Reset. I could go on. Also if you make it percentage damage there's half your 'random annoying soloer' problems gone.

New Mechanic #2: "Sporulation"
It has spores, right? Put a big cloud of them out. Give people a special status when they run through it. "When you run or walk you take Damage over Time". Cleansable. Item Cleansable. Doesn't hurt you if you don't move. Or maybe it does if you're swinging a weapon. Whatever works. Also, when you DO destroy the tree, it should cover the ground in this stuff and make the effect much more. Why? So that when you actually do have to chase him around you suffer for it.

New Mechanic #3: "Big Swing"
Big knockback. You really don't need anything else. If you're Sporulated and have to run back into position you're taking damage. That's it. If Javelin pulls you to Tumok instead of him just being immune to pull, then good, Tank has a use for a skill. I can't even imagine half of Tank's kit working on this boss without needing to give him mechanics that actually need stunning. See Mechanic #1. Maybe it sends out a wave of spores in a cone. He already has this stuff, right? I wanted to put this as 'Changed' mechanic, but I'm not confident enough that anything similar was actually happening.

New Mechanic #4: "Bloodseeker Spiders"
Forget the wolves. Have him knock spiders out of trees with his charge or something . These spiders seek people who are below some HP threshold and swarm them. They poison them, they slow them and snare them. They are a general nuisance that go straight for the downed tank if no one stunned Mechanic #1 and made him drop the person before stomping them. They go for anyone who messed up and got hit somewhere. Now you can have even more Tanks whose entire job is to stay within a certain lower health threshold, if you want. Or reasons to AoE. Anythinggggg.

Changed Mechanic: "Fungal Rage"
You destroyed the tree and filled the air with spores? Joke's on you, Tumok's into that. Basic rage mechanic but now he heals himself tiny bits just by moving around in the sporified arena. Add some random CC resist. Change the way his attacks apply Sporulated. This is already basically what he does, right?

Even this is still just a basic fight but it at least does the very basic task of 'giving you a reason to have more players sort of' because he will use the fact that he is a chonky boi with lots of health to keep putting you in these situations, which is what 'Boss' means. Normal mobs don't get attrition mechanics because they die too fast and players just work around them easily. This is still barely a step up but at least now you 'need' two Tanks (or at least coordinated Synergy for CC) and your Healers care about something more than 'am I out of mana yet?' even if not very much.

The PvP around the base version, particularly if you are higher level than the group trying to get the drop, will just be a dumb 'I am taking random damage from this thing nearby'. What reason does anyone have to not just jump in and disrupt the very blatant DPS check that this Boss is?

Again, if you don't want it to be hard for people to have trouble learning 'don't run around while Sporulated and bring your Healer's mana down to nothing' that's fine but that's what Elites are for (or in some games literally normal mobs, but maybe FFXI is actually the only game that does this due to the TP Gauge thing?)

I think I noted but this wasn't put in Feedback Thread because it's not really feedback, is it? It's me 'roleplaying as an Ashes of Creation Developer' moreso than anything.

The above is the difference between 'This is sorta fun' and 'Do we really even need the loot this thing drops? Can we just ignore/skip it?' for me. In the sense that if I'm wandering with my group and we fight the current version as an Elite, it's immersive but it's not meant to feel super engaging. But if I have to get 2 or 3 groups together to have this experience? I'm looking for the way to skip it, and I'm definitely never going to feel 'man I wish I was lower level again so I could fight Tumok/the people who want to fight Tumok'.

Yeah, I totally agree with the "Elite" idea. Plop a few of these bois around the forests/mountains and maybe add a "proper" big boi that appears after you've cleared all the others and you have yourself an immersive world event that also makes people interested in killing all these cyclopes.

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If NiKr has taught us anything it is that in the games Steven is pulling inspiration from, this is as good as it gets. He could probably explain why better than me and I don't quite understand 'the appeal' on his end. But I do know that showing off this and just this, in a different game, is one thing. However I feel like for a L2-expy, the more reasonable assumption is that this is it, and the only feedback possible to give is 'this isn't enough', just in case.

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I assume that they simply can't make harder bosses which is why we haven't really seen any so far. But I do think that the general feedback of the more hardcore pve side of this forum will be "this is not enough".

If you saw my post about this showcase, that L2 boss Golkonda is 1 lvl away from max lvl. And you know what the difference between him and the very first boss in L2? One "mechanic". He has a stun and a buff cancel (with basic buffs on top of that). A lvl 20 cat boss for one party has a root and those same basic buffs.

I definitely hope that Intrepid's devs that came from game with better pve will push Steven towards harder content, and it's been stated as much that they'll at least try. But until we see such a boss it'll be hard to imagine if they can pull it off. Both L2 and AA (according to Noaani) had super basic pve, and those two are Steven's main inspirations and measures for AoC's design.

I loved L2's bosses mainly because they were one of the main triggers/funnels for pvp. Their respawn was a community event and quite often would spill into much larger conflicts (both within guilds and across them), but when it came to their pve design - they were more basic than your stereotype valley girl. And imo Ashes could definitely strongly improve on that. And they've promised to do that, which is why this long-awaited showcase was kind of disappointing.

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Aghh, that's my bad, I forgot to include the thing I wrote in other messages. They can't make it right now cause they don't have their AI fully developed. And a proper boss can't be done w/o AI. That's what I meant. My bad.

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I haven't paid this much attention to other game and even outside of that I don't think we've had this kind of open development before either.

Intrepid wouldn't have to show the fully designed boss that's definitely gonna be in the game on release. They could get a bunch of mechanics from different bosses, put in into a suitable mob and just fight against it to show off what their pve design can do.

I get that it'd be better to keep stuff a complete secret before release and let the players explore it all on their own, but how can we know that Intrepid can jump over their heads if we've never seen them do that. Imo it's that kind of blind belief that leads to people thinking that TL was somehow an action combat game (while all teasers and trailers showed it not to be) and that all these new UE5 mmos will all be amazing (though I doubt they'll even exist). It's how we get Dreamworld and the like.

Now I'm not saying that Intrepid are a bunch of hacks that can't design a good encounter, but I'd definitely like at least some sort of example of that before release. I hope we get it once they figure out their AI.

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Yeah, I explained my mistake in the previous post.

As for showing different content, I do agree with Azherae on the point of "this could be done with a single party". And that point ultimately comes down to messaging that we receive from Intrepid. This boss would've been just fine if it was presented as a simple one-party encounter, that might even have several copies around the map.

But instead it was presented as a 16+ member "world raid boss". Now I understand that everyone has their own preference and image of what a "world raid boss" should be, but even for me, an L2 player, a "world raid boss" means something big and epic and preferably difficult.

If the "world" is meant to just represent that it's a "boss in the open world", then literally anything non-instanced will be a "world boss". Also, judging by this list, "world bosses" are meant to be difficult as fuck

This was not. And if "the difficulty is represented by the amount of people you gotta bring" or "pvp will make it difficult", then it's just easy pve that someone with higher standards would probably call bad.

Also, literally anything open world will be made more difficult by pvp, so I personally don't even consider that a value point.

So yet again we come to a point of messaging. This was either a "world boss" who's supposed to be really difficult or it's supposed to be a simple boss that walks around a forest and can be attacked by any random group of passerby.

And as a personal point, even low lvl introductory content should still be difficult or at least hint at a growing difficulty. A dps check only hints at future dps checks, just as it did back in L2.

Introduction to solo content: You have abilities. Learn to time your CC, Heals, or Burst to be effective.

Introduction to party content: You have a tank, a healer, and DPS. Perform your role to control the situation or the enemy will kill everyone. When you're comfortable, look for chances to synergize!

Introduction to raid content: You have multiple subgroups with distinct individual roles. You will need to adapt to changing situations in a coordinated manner, not just focus on your own role.

Tumok is a nice introduction to parties, but with its current level of depth, it won't introduce even the most basic concepts of raids.

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I talked about "difficulty" here a bit, so I won't spam it here. https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/comment/402951/#Comment_402951

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Would it be though? In the currently presented state? People will have bards that will boost their dps and they'd probably just bring mostly ranged archetypes to meet the dps checks of this boss. If by some weird chance that doesn't work out - they'll just zerg it. Hell, they'll probably just zerg it from the get-go.

The second video from my post represents that. The boss in that video is one of the "world raid bosses" of L2 on lower lvls. It has a shitton of hp and the gear/buffs that you have on that lvl are quite weak, so people just bring a shitton of players there to bring it down. If the only check of difficulty is "do you have enough dps" - it's gonna be resolved by zerging.

Now one might argue that Intrepid has promised us some anti-zerg mechanics that would prevent that very approach, but yet again we just come back to an issue of messaging. All it would've taken to resolve this particular issue was for Steven to say "and you won't be able to just zerg this badboi down, because when there's too many people around, those healing spores have more resistances and heal faster, that aoe has a bigger range and rate of attack, and that tree trunk spawns a ton of spore dudes that put strong dots on everyone around".

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Nah, they can definitely be fun and exciting, but I do think that world bosses should be pinnacles of difficulty at any and all levels. We have several other types of mobs to provide lower difficulty content. Simple raid bosses could still require 2-3 parties and be the training grounds for all the newbies. But if you call smth a "world raid boss" I'd expect it to be as difficult as possible at your current stage of progress.

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But that boss will probably just one-shot you Like, yeah, I guess if Intrepid somehow make a purely action combat boss whose attacks you can 100% dodge if you're skilled enough - that would be the pinnacle of hardcore content, but I somehow doubt we'll ever see that.

L2 had several epic bosses at different progress stages (pretty much gear tiers) and they were all pretty difficult. Now they were obviously just zerged, because L2 do how L2 does, but still.