Dev Discussion #52 - Boss Mechanics

I've mainly played Lineage 2, so my experience with bosses usually boils down to "big numbers go bigger", both in the zerging part of the encounter and in the gearing one (OE included). Most mechanics of L2's bosses were super basic, mainly because you'd have the potential of pvp during the encounter.

I'd personally like to play a game that has that last part, but also has better pve with more mechanics. Ideally some classes would have utility abilities that let the first raid fight both the boss and the attackers at the same time, so that the pve's complexity doesn't make the pvx encounter impossible.

I would also love some action-based mechanics for bosses, mainly vertical targeting and directional blocks/dodges/jumps. This would not only support the hybrid combat design, but would also let higher skilled players succeed more often.

As for the detailed mechanics, I'll leave this up to Azherae and Noaani to explain (if they want), because they have a much broader and deeper experience with those. What I can say is that I like these suggestions quite a lot.

My main game does not do a very 'good job' distinguishing between Bosses and regular mobs. They are built using the same principles, for the most part.

This moreso means that regular mobs are built to feel like what most other people/games treat their Bosses as, design wise, than the reverse. This further complicates the act of answering the question, but the first thing I can say is that I only consider something a 'boss mechanic' if the game intends to leverage the exponentially higher TTK of the 'Boss' in some way. Otherwise I consider it a 'regular mob' ability or mechanic.

Interactions with the environment or special mechanics you must do to avoid a wipe or massive loss of capacity from the group are interesting, but they are designed to be avoidable. The most recent example is from Throne and Liberty's Kimer King (Chimera King? Kimera King? depends on your source).

The King uses many fire attacks and builds up heat over time as it is struck or attacks, similar to the standard FFXI behaviour (TP Gauge). When it reaches a certain value, it runs to the middle of the arena and begins to emit massive waves of heat, but it also is then standing under a cauldron of water or something that players can trigger by interacting with an environmental thing, to douse the King and prevent the attack. This is what I understand most games to mean by 'Boss mechanic'.

"Where I come from, you'd have to deal with it yourself." Basically. It isn't that I dislike these sorts of mechanics in any way, I just prefer that the tools to deal with them are part of someone's class kit rather than part of the environment most of the time .

I say all this to say that I don't distinguish well between 'Boss Mechanics' and 'Regular Mob Mechanics' outside of this, and I often expect that when someone says 'Boss Mechanics' in any 'specific' way, they mean something like the 'Dump water on Khimer King'.

Since, if they didn't mean that, they would be referring to what I consider 'regular mechanics', if a bit powered up or synergized better. This is no longer my expectation from MMORPGs (and should probably never have been, I'm just lucky to have landed on the one I would prefer the most).

Similarly, I don't think there are any mechanics in FFXI that I really find particularly unfun or frustrating entirely. Certain 'CC' style ones or Charm abilities can be upsetting because they force you to bring particular Classes but this is really just affecting your ability to lowman the content, which is on you as the player choosing to do that.

Discounting FFXI therefore, and also anything 'basically similar to Monster Hunter', which tends to rely on player execution and targeting skill moreso than statistics, I'd say my most fun bossfights were usually in Onigiri. Two are memorable for what they were specifically.

Tiamat was incredibly challenging/punishing at the time my group met it in story, not sure if we tried to do it at lower levels than expected or not (this is common enough that I can't discount it). It required lots of spacing and timing attacks and healing positions while constantly causing the battle to shift, in terms of whether any given player should be on offense or retreating. Very mobile.

Ahriman was interesting in an entirely different way. Due to either an Easter Egg or my 'glitch farming' ability, we didn't really 'beat' Ahriman, I just got the feeling that if I took hate and ran in circles around it for a long time, it would eventually 'get dizzy' and stop fighting, as it was basically 'a giant eyeball in the center of a room'. For whatever reason, it worked, but I expect that it was an Easter Egg because the fight is technically slightly more difficult to do in this way, and there were some signs that it was 'adapting' to this for a while.

Generally, my preference for bosses and mechanics in general tends toward 'too complicated to describe in any reasonable length post'. Other than that, it depends on the game, because what is challenging in FFXI is not the same as what is challenging in Monster Hunter or Onigiri, and I don't lump Fantasy MMO bosses into the same piles (except WoW and FFXIV, which as far as I know is the result of an intentional decision by Yoshi-P to cater to those who enjoy WoW style bosses). I can't comment on those two either because they don't interest me enough, though some of them do seem quite good at the highest levels, becoming more than just spectacle.

Other than those boss types, I'll try to think of anything that stands out as either 'avoid this because it sucks' or 'I always want a chance to fight this because it's so fun', but in general I don't experience either extreme very often in the games I choose to play.

NiKr wrote: »

I've mainly played Lineage 2, so my experience with bosses usually boils down to "big numbers go bigger", both in the zerging part of the encounter and in the gearing one (OE included). Most mechanics of L2's bosses were super basic, mainly because you'd have the potential of pvp during the encounter.

I'd personally like to play a game that has that last part, but also has better pve with more mechanics. Ideally some classes would have utility abilities that let the first raid fight both the boss and the attackers at the same time, so that the pve's complexity doesn't make the pvx encounter impossible.

I would also love some action-based mechanics for bosses, mainly vertical targeting and directional blocks/dodges/jumps. This would not only support the hybrid combat design, but would also let higher skilled players succeed more often.

As for the detailed mechanics, I'll leave this up to Azherae and Noaani to explain (if they want), because they have a much broader and deeper experience with those. What I can say is that I like these suggestions quite a lot.

This is somewhat a separate discussion, which would get deep into the weeds of 'how I believe a PvX MMORPG must design most of its non-instanced Boss encounters in order to be enjoyable as a whole'.

I feel like it would once again derail the Discussion from the original intent, to comment on it, particularly in light of the general poster/fan of the game principles of PvX (other than NiKr himself) who has strong interest in Ashes.

Basically, it seems like the average PvX player is already satisfied with what Ashes intends to offer and wouldn't even want it to be particularly different, so I think Development is best served just gathering data from them and not 'me arguing with them without any valid basis other than my biased design opinions'.

Especially since the design space of Ashes isn't yet (and has shown no signs of ever becoming) the basis required for the sort of thing I'd be thinking of.

tl;dr - Detailed mechanics aren't what this thread is about and PvX bosses are primarily about the PvP, from the look of it, so I don't have anything really worth adding to this particular discussion.