On Tanking Boss Abilities and Attrition-based Gameplay

So from the interview with Zizaran, there was a long segment discussing boss encounters like Arbiter of Ash and addressing players' options of building to tank more mechanics. Jonathan brings up two major concerns with addressing this: player recovery can be very high, and changes to encounter design would push them to being more attrition-based MMO-style boss encounters.

I wonder if Jonathan or Mark have played any MMOs recently. In Final Fantasy 14, boss fights are a spectacle visually and aurally, aand the gameplay of a boss is likened to a dance. Attacks are telegraphed and many of them are designed to be dodged. Boss encounters are also designed to be approachable by casual players as most bosses are required content to experience the main quest or side stories. I feel like there are lessons that can be learned from MMOs to improve the experience of boss encounters in POE.

I present 3 examples of boss encounters from Final Fantasy 14: Hegemone and Agdistis from the Endwalker expansion 2 years ago, and Valigarmanda from the current expansion Dawntrail.

Boss encounters in Final Fantasy often start with a short tutorial and warm-up phase. They will showcase several of their key mechanics in succession, to allow time for the player to learn a visual tell or see the expected AoE of an attack. These attacks usually do a significant amount of damage, about 70% of a player's health pool, such that a newer player can afford to get hit by one of them and survive.

The reality is that Final Fantasy 14 has for a long time suffered from the problem Jonathan mentions: player recovery and healing are too strong. A healer player can bring a character from 1 hp to their full 120k hp in less than 10 seconds. As Jonathan brings up, if a big boss attack does 30% hp damage, and then needs to cooldown for before doing the big attack again, then power player recovery makes the big attacks pointless if they do not oneshot.

Final Fantasy addresses this in several ways to make their boss mechanics threatening. The first is by combining their key mechanics in increasing complexity to challenge their mechanical dodging skills. Attacks A, B, C, and D may not individually kill, but try dodging A+B at the same time, or a rapid sequence of A to B to C to D. In this way, a player can afford to make a partial mistake and come out damaged, but fully failing the combination is lethal. The second way is by punishing individual failures with stacking penalties. The classic way in Final Fantasy is vulnerability debuff stacks. Each time a player fails to dodge an avoidable attack, they get a 2 minute debuff that increases the damage taken from all sources by 15%. This debuff is stackable so failing enough times means a normally survivable attack is now lethal. In more difficult boss encounters, the punishment for failing mechanics is that the player's outgoing damage is reduced by 25-50%. This extends the duration of the encounter and can lead to a failure to beat the required dps checks of the fight. GGG has previously used punishment mechanics in their previous pinnacle boss fights in POE1, such as the Drowning Orbs in Eater of Worlds or Maven's Punishment from the Maven's rotating lasers, but I personally feel they are too binary in shutting down a player for errors rather than incentivizing them to focus up and concentrate on mechanical skills. They could instead be tuning their bosses so that tanking a big hit means you have reduced amounts of mitigation and recovery, and even set a threshold so that after X number of failures, the next hit is an instant kill.

When it comes to attrition-based boss encounters, I wonder what Mark and Jonathan expect the average boss encounter experience to be. Do they think bosses should be 5-7 minute encounters with complex dodgeable mechanics? How many mistakes should we be making in an encounter? By design, longer encounters incur some form of attrition on the player character, if not by explicit resources like health and mana, then by player focus and execution of mechanics. If a boss like Arbiter of Ash demands perfect play because any major mechanic is a oneshot, is it any surprise that players would rather skip that requirement and approach the boss with overwhelming firepower instead? In the discussion, Zizaran brings up managing the limited life flask resources he had when fighting Viper Napuatzi in Act 3, and I think if Jonathan and Mark are able to take some of those insights into their pinnacle boss design, they could really elevate the experience of beating those encounters by the skin of your teeth rather than just requiring perfect execution.

What interesting MMO or Souls-like boss experience would you like to see in POE2? How do we feel about boss encounters in the story acts like Geonor or Viper versus the Pinnacle bosses like Arbiter of Ash or Xesht?

I'm just not sure why they think it's bad. I mean, it would be bad for PoE1, but they CLEARLY do not want to make PoE1. The entire design of this game is geared towards making more impactful decisions than just spamming your clear or single target skill. Regen is bad for this, so is leech and so is flask recharge. If you want combat to mean something the consequences have to actually persist beyond the encounter a bit. That's basically design 101. Imagine if Dark Souls had infinite healing, oh wait we don't have to because Demon's Souls was like that. Combat was way less meaningful in that game because you could just spam full recovery grass after every fight. That's what flasks are in PoE2 (saying nothing of leech and regen which make it even worse), and it's why every serious boss needs a oneshot.

Attrition is not bad, in fact it can be very good, it just looks different than 100 white mobs per square meter of map with zero loot, or bosses oneshotting anyone with less than full investment into defense. If they actually leaned into it and balanced the game around it I do think people would enjoy it, but it seems like they're insistent that it's not what they want to do, which begs the question of why they're trying to slow the game down at all. Without the willingness to use at least some level of attrition in a map/bossfight, the game will eventually gravitate towards PoE1 again. I like PoE1, but if PoE2 becomes PoE1 there will have been no point in making PoE2.

For me it was ironic, because I knew how campaign worked. I literally stacked flat hp on all my gear and beat the entire game with 1 rare item on my character. If you can tank the hit without getting one shot, you will always instantly heal back to full. The only hard bosses were Jamanra and Viper, because those are the only two bosses where you can't get your flasks back lmao.

In maps, I've consistently found bosses and rares to be the easier part of the game. All I have to do is watch the telegraph of the boss or the minions and try to dodge. Again, flat hp so they don't one shot me usually and then I heal during the cooldown phase while blowing them up in 10 seconds (yes, my gear is horrendous so they should be tankier).

It's the white mobs that get me. 12 dudes with slightly out of sync telegraphed slams. If one hits you, you're hit stunned and you're dying. Again, I don't have the gear to blast so I have to actually engage with them. No meaningful passives to be found on the tree, because the damage is so high that you need good gear with passives to hit a break point on number of hits before death.

Volatiles are horrendous in melee because once they explode they're primed to spawn again. Dodge volatiles. Go into melee. Dodge the slam. Dodge the volatiles again. Were the volatiles off sync? He might have the slam ready again.

Man, I would prefer doing attrition based gameplay for melee than this one shot stuff. Yes the game is intense. Yes the game is "interesting." Yes I am not really having that much fun.

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sinjin25#2521 wrote:

For me it was ironic, because I knew how campaign worked. I literally stacked flat hp on all my gear and beat the entire game with 1 rare item on my character. If you can tank the hit without getting one shot, you will always instantly heal back to full. The only hard bosses were Jamanra and Viper, because those are the only two bosses where you can't get your flasks back lmao.

In maps, I've consistently found bosses and rares to be the easier part of the game. All I have to do is watch the telegraph of the boss or the minions and try to dodge. Again, flat hp so they don't one shot me usually and then I heal during the cooldown phase while blowing them up in 10 seconds (yes, my gear is horrendous so they should be tankier).

If you're getting through the campaign by stacking flat hp and then tanking hits to recover in downtime, this is exactly the sort of gameplay that Jonathan seems to want to discourage. For an experienced player like you, I think it's great that you can use your knowledge and planning to trivialize an encounter, but that's not what they hope the average player is doing.

Would you be okay with all the bosses feeling more like Viper, where the risk of running out of flasks meant you needed to engage with dodging her attacks? Would you be okay with fighting the Silverfist Ape boss in Act 3 but the third time you got hit with the big slam, you would always get oneshot?