1 shot by boss on 73 canyon map with 7,5K ES and 75% res

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Qarl wrote:

Maps are still intended to be hard. Bosses in higher tier maps are intended to be terrifying.

How to make a boss terrifying: Moves that can put you into dangerous situations, intelligent AI that can react based on what the player is doing, unique moves such as throws, moves that require bullet-hell (although not as extreme) style movement to avoid, etc

How to make a boss annoying and simply "Cheese it or Skip it": Jay Wilson their damage numbers and add cheap skills.


If you want to make a truly terrifying map boss boss, merge piety and vaal, and add a bit of craziness:

All of Piety's current moves plus...

Piety will clone herself (clones only have 1% of piety's HP) into every portal that is active, rather than just teleporting
Larger spread on the ice shot, but faster attack speed and in a pattern that has her turning back and forth, forcing you to zig-zag in between the shots
Telegraphed Vaal slam dunk that creates additional smaller, weaker, explosions in an X shape from piety's position.
Telegraphed vaal rocks (shadows appear before the rock actually falls) that leave ground tar
Frenzy charge on hit (so if you let yourself get smacked around, piety will just get even harder)
Piety's lightning ball will follow players instead of going in a straight line
Piety will use Arctic Armor during her ice form
Piety will use Molten Shell during her fire form
Piety will use a 60s duration Immortal Call at 50% HP
Piety will gain 100% to all resistances for 60s at 25% HP
Piety gains 20% increased attack speed when below 15% HP
Piety has a highly damaging, but delayed frost wall. A line of ground ice is drawn on the ground, and after 1.5s the frost wall will burst from the ground.


Bosses are not like players. They should not be spamming one or two skills for the entire battle.



Also, Qarl, do you really think it's a good idea to balance level 70 maps around level 85+ characters with ridiculous gear in order to 'make it a challenge'?

How about balancing maps to their own level and just giving the higher level players higher level maps. If EXP is an issue with that, that means the EXP values should be tweaked, rather than making map levels completely meaningless.

Also, how about this: The characters with ridiculous gear shouldn't be getting challenged by these things as they are. Did you forget that maps have mods on them? Players in ridiculous gear that want a suitable challenge should run ridiculous mods. This would be happening frequently if you guys fixed the Risk:Reward ratio.

This map boss 'rebalancing' that is underway is simply a bandaid fix to a broken system.

You're just encouraging even more "farm catacombs to level 85" behavior.

Xendran I definitely like some of your ideas, although they obviously need tweeking (60 second invuln is way too long, for example).

The main thing though is, given the netcode in this game, I don't want anything that is timing sensitive. A well geared character needs to be able to lag a bit and still live. I'm specifically thinking about your zig-zag avoiding ice shots suggestion.

That said, I definitely would like to see more dynamic map bosses, instead of cheesed up rare bosses. The map bosses mostly feel like a gear/potion/cheese check, which I don't find enjoyable. The Piety fight I do think is pretty good, but archer phase could use... something. I'm not sure what. Vaal would be a good fight if the ceiling falling were telegraphed, and the slam were just fucking removed (or barring removal, the telegraph were made longer so that lag wouldn't kill you).

I understand that designing a unique and interesting boss like Piety for every map probably is beyond what we can expect, but map bosses need to feel less cheesy.

So basically screw map bosses especially on hardcore since the risk vs reward is no where near balanced? Out of several level 70's and few more 50's I have yet to ever get anything solo from a boss/orange mob that was good...same with groups although some of the yellows that dropped I never saw the stats of admittedly.

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Xendran wrote:

"

Qarl wrote:

Maps are still intended to be hard. Bosses in higher tier maps are intended to be terrifying.

How to make a boss terrifying: Moves that can put you into dangerous situations, intelligent AI that can react based on what the player is doing, unique moves such as throws, moves that require bullet-hell (although not as extreme) style movement to avoid, etc

How to make a boss annoying and simply "Cheese it or Skip it": Jay Wilson their damage numbers and add cheap skills.


If you want to make a truly terrifying map boss boss, merge piety and vaal, and add a bit of craziness:

All of Piety's current moves plus...

Piety will clone herself (clones only have 1% of piety's HP) into every portal that is active, rather than just teleporting
Larger spread on the ice shot, but faster attack speed and in a pattern that has her turning back and forth, forcing you to zig-zag in between the shots
Telegraphed Vaal slam dunk that creates additional smaller, weaker, explosions in an X shape from piety's position.
Telegraphed vaal rocks (shadows appear before the rock actually falls) that leave ground tar
Frenzy charge on hit (so if you let yourself get smacked around, piety will just get even harder)
Piety's lightning ball will follow players instead of going in a straight line
Piety will use Arctic Armor during her ice form
Piety will use Molten Shell during her fire form
Piety will use a 60s duration Immortal Call at 50% HP
Piety will gain 100% to all resistances for 60s at 25% HP
Piety gains 20% increased attack speed when below 15% HP
Piety has a highly damaging, but delayed frost wall. A line of ground ice is drawn on the ground, and after 1.5s the frost wall will burst from the ground.





Also, Qarl, do you really think it's a good idea to balance level 70 maps around level 85+ characters with ridiculous gear in order to 'make it a challenge'?

How about balancing maps to their own level and just giving the higher level players higher level maps. If EXP is an issue with that, that means the EXP values should be tweaked, rather than making map levels completely meaningless.

Also, how about this: The characters with ridiculous gear shouldn't be getting challenged by these things as they are. Did you forget that maps have mods on them? Players in ridiculous gear that want a suitable challenge should run ridiculous mods. This would be happening frequently if you guys fixed the Risk:Reward ratio.

This map boss 'rebalancing' that is underway is simply a bandaid fix to a broken system.

You're just encouraging even more "farm catacombs to level 85" behavior.

Couldn't agree more great post.

I'd say maybe 20% of my unique items have been boss drops. They're certainly worth doing, but if there's a serious risk of death you should absolutely skip them. I never do map Vaal - I'm melee, one lag spike and I'm toast. I do map piety because I can use fairgraves and topaz to make her cheesy-easy. Map Kole is easy enough for ranged that I just run around playing with my dick while they kill him.

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Qarl wrote:

Maps are still intended to be hard. Bosses in higher tier maps are intended to be terrifying.

We will check map bosses on an ongoing basis to make sure they are around the right level, but from around level 70 maps onwards you should expect them to become increasingly unreasonable.

We want high level maps to provide challenging experiences even for the most extreme players and characters.

Risk vs reward against bosses is just not worth it it seems =/

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magicrectangle wrote:

Xendran I definitely like some of your ideas, although they obviously need tweeking (60 second invuln is way too long, for example).

Yeah, i can see 60s getting overly annoying after fighting her a few times.

Perhaps 30s would be more resonable though, i'm always open to options.

"

The main thing though is, given the netcode in this game, I don't want anything that is timing sensitive. A well geared character needs to be able to lag a bit and still live. I'm specifically thinking about your zig-zag avoiding ice shots suggestion.

Assuming that it's coded in a way where they only zigzag when there are no piety clones, you can hide behind a frost wall or a pillar.

Hey, this could bring about another interesting mechanic for ice shot: If piety has active clones, they all fire a 2 projectile ice shot from where they're standing. If there are no clones, she will do a 4 projectile zig-zag at higher speed.

imho nearly every build has some map mods that are too hard to play, or unplayable at all. Like a lot builds cannot do no-regen maps, or bloodmagic maps.
"Chain" mod is hard in groups, for summoners or totem builds, especially when you have another mod like "Monsters deal x% extra damage as...", while its an easy mod if you solo a map with nothing beside you that could trigger the chain.

I agree 100%

Would love to see more AI on them would be a lot more fun.

To me it is simply bad game design when they "spice" things up by introducing these one hit kills. My summoner had no chance against leaping Blacksmith. Or crit from Kole.

With vulnerability this is arguably one of the most difficult bosses in the game.