World Unsoloable Endgame Bosses

This isn't going to be a super specific suggestion thread—I'm not going to be actually designing a boss here. It's just for some things that could be taken into account when making a boss that might help make the boss legitimately unsoloable (I think we all know how well that went down with The Eye). I'll attempt to avoid cop outs like needing two players to activate something or the boss having massive health regen.

Check out @Novalescent and their threads, especially the boss one here (It’s much better than my hastily written one): https://forums.wynncraft.com/thread...-world-bosses-includes-demonstrations.269179/

TL;DR: Make the boss have phases or aspects that force groups of players to have multiple builds so that a glass cannon build can't just kill the boss in 2 minutes, like The Eye.

Boss Health Regen:
First of all, let's get boss health regen out of the way. Some excellent arguments against boss hpr have been made many times, like how it can make defeating the boss cater towards glass cannons and make tank builds even more underwhelming than they already are. I think I speak for a large part of the community when I say that boss hpr is something that should be avoided if possible.

Boss Healing:
This is similar to boss hpr, but I think it's different enough to warrant some discussion. To my understanding, boss healing is when the boss uses minions or a random spell to heal, rather than regenerating a set amount every x seconds. I don't really like bosses having healing spells, so I'll talk about the minions.

Bosses having healing abilities that require minions or mini bosses can be excellent if done right. Just like the wretches in EO, these are events during the boss fight where the player can prevent something from happening. There could be a mini boss that heals the boss for, say, 10% of its health after the mini boss has been alive for 30 seconds. If the player defeats the mini boss in those 30 seconds, the boss won't heal any health.

I like this suggestion because it gives the player a specific goal in the middle of the fight and also gives a team of players the ability to decide something like"these three people take out the mini boss while the rest of us keep damaging the boss". However, this healing still makes glass cannon builds more desirable, so it's not my favorite suggestion.

Mass damage:
Basically the wretches in EO. Those are pretty fun and give the player mini events during the fight to complete. Not much more to say here.

Tank Thorns/Reflection Phase:
This part of the suggestion is one of the most important ones in my opinion and ties in with the next section. In a tank phase, the boss would stop doing direct damage and "hunker down", so to speak. What would happen instead is that the boss would reflect 100% of damage done, while ignoring player agility and defense. This is pretty extreme imo, but a smart phase to have. The reason being that the only builds that could realistically do damage during this phase would be tank builds.

Say you have an archer with 13k health that does 15k bomb arrows. If you hit the boss with a bomb arrow during this phase, you're dead. That's it. One shot. Compare that to a tank build that has 20k health and does 10k bomb arrows. After one bomb arrow, you're down to half health, but can health up quickly via hpr or lifesteal on minions and hit the boss again. Again, pretty extreme, but if I were designing a boss with the intention of having multiple people with different builds fighting, then I'd want to include something like this. To keep the duration of the fight a reasonable length, the phase would only last ~200k hp or so.

Now, some problems with this phase are that 1) the high lifesteal heavy melee meta would become more prominent, but heavy melee does more damage than you can have lifesteal, so that's not too much of an issue. 2) Unsuspecting players would accidentally kill themselves by forgetting about this phase or not knowing about it. All I can say is that this theoretical boss is supposed to be super hard, so you need to know your stuff. 3) It would encourage the use of crafted builds with very high health in an attempt to cheese the phase, but if people start to use more crafted items in builds, I guess that's a good thing?

Glass Cannon Phase:
Anyway, onto the next part. In accordance to the goal of the tank phase which was to promote the use of tank builds, this phase would promote the use of glass cannon, or really just high damaging builds. There are three ways that I can think of to do this. The first is a timer. Deal 500k damage in 30 seconds, for instance. Otherwise you have to restart. That's kind of a cheap way out, so we'll skip it.

The second way is making the fight harder the longer it lasts. Every minute, for instance, the minions health and speed doubles, and they get way more annoying to deal with. This would definitely encourage defeating this phase as quickly as possible, and having more people helps with that (rip lag).

The third way is just to raise the defense of the boss in this phase. Paradoxically being called the glass cannon phase, the goal of this variation of the phase is to almost negate the damage done by tank builds, while allowing glass cannons to deal enough damage to complete the phase. This phase would work well with the tank phase, because it would force the players to have both a tank and a damage dealer in the group, as long as a solo player doesn't just change builds mid-fight of course.

End:
That's all I can think of at the moment, but if I think of anything else I'll definitely add it to the thread. Also, please critique this as much as possible. There are definitely problems with it, and any discussion might help the CT with inspiration and whatnot. Also, again, check out Novalescent’s stuff. It’s way more fleshed out and inspired than mine.

 

The idea of a unsoloable boss in the future does sound very appealing, the only contribution I could think of while reading your suggestions was a combination of the tank and glass cannon phase. The boss would have both the 100% reflection as well as the crazy high defense or ramping difficulty or whatever is necessary to require a glass cannon build. The catch that makes this work is that the boss would have a special aggro system wherein the reflection aspect wouldn't be targeted at the attacker which would be the glass cannon, instead there would need to be a mechanic that made the boss target the tank character with the reflection damage instead. Perhaps whoever does the most damage in the first however many seconds becomes the target, so the tank would attack and once they were targeted the glass cannon would come in. Or maybe have the reflection be a directional attack so the glass cannon would physically need to stand behind the tank and the reflection damage would be shot or released as a physical attack. Though this needs some tweaking as it only really applies to a party of 2, but I think a mechanic like this would be useful because just as you intended, it requires both builds to be present, but with your suggestion in which the phases are seperate, as you said, its not entirely unrealistic that the person could just change their build mid fight. This mechanic would hopefully negate that possible problem.

 

If a boss is designed to be unsoloable, it should be strictly so - no half-measures or unfair tilting.

 

The main issue with this is that it requires you to rely on other players being good and not screwing up and dying (and the fact that no matter how unsoloable something might be, it'll be soloed within a week). The "multiple players required" stuff is always kind of disliked and avoided (Bob's tomb, ???), because, well, frankly the multiplayer aspect of Wynncraft isn't the best for this. It's hard to organize a group of people to do stuff like ??? and would almost certainly condemn this boss to a "once in a playthrough" status. There's also the obvious issue of having a complicated boss with a lot of players - Lagcraft.

 

This might work as a boss altar, dungeon, or similar, however I don't think that having it as a boss that needs to be fought to complete the questline (such as The Eye) would work because it can be hard to get a group of people together to do something.

 

I guess this would piss off most players.

It not hard to make unsoloable boss, it is hard to make it beatable for bad players and enjoyable.
If you make it super hard best players will still solo it, but normal players could die even when in large group.
If it is boring....

Don't forget that multiplayer occurs in the game only twice (Bob's Tomb (could be improved) and ??? (don't improve)), so it would be bad (as players do not have much experience in multiplayer here) unless there would be more multiplayer content

 

I think that soloable bosses are fine, they just need to be done in a way that makes them interesting. I would rather design them so that they are hard for all build types to solo, but not physically impossible. Thorns is an interesting idea. And remember, tanks actually deal decent damage, but its overshadowed by glass cannons

 

Yeah I agree that a boss like this should be non-essential. Perhaps even just a harder version of an essential boss, like how the corrupted dungeons are revamped/harder regular dungeons. I don’t think a boss with any unsoloable traits should be part of a quest or needed to enter a certain area. This is mostly just thinking about how to go about making an optional unsoloable boss without making it a requirement to have more than 1 person. Which may not be possible lol.

Yeah you’re absolutely right. But like dr_carlos said, an unsoloable boss shouldn’t be something that’s required for a quest or anything else. Imo it should be similar to LI—I’m fairly sure that most players haven’t completed LI and a lot of them don’t even try to begin with. It’s just something extra to offer a challenge to endgame players.

Basically, with LI the bad players try to beat it but can’t, and the really good players can solo it within 20 minutes. The difficulty curve is one thing, but LI is still soloable because there aren’t parts of it that demand or even encourage group play. I want to try to come up with ideas that favor group play while not just making the boss absurdly difficult.

As for multiplayer in general, since the theoretical boss would be optional, it wouldn’t force group play for any of the core game, but people would *hopefully* have to learn to work together and communicate beforehand. That’s kind of a pipe dream tho lol.

You make a good point, and honestly if the bosses are all soloable but interesting I’d be overjoyed, but I would like a little tiny bit more group play, even for just an optional side thing. You’re right about tank builds being able to do decent damage, but with the thorns/reflection thing (at least the way I suggested it), full tanks would be able to actually out-dps partial tanks because full tanks could heal up faster and thus attack again sooner.

To be honest, one of the reasons I made this thread was because I wanted to come up with something that would allow full tank builds to enter the meta and become legitimately useful rather than just proof of concepts.

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Yeah this seems pretty reasonable, and ideally there would be mechanics similar to that which require a coherent strategy like that rather than just pure dps. I do like this suggestion and something where the phases are combined would be cool, but like you said it would have to be tested and scale with different group sizes.

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Definitely valid lol. (This is actually a thread maybe probably secretly aimed at making full tanks actually useful)

 

Completely true—I’ve had quite a few times in Wynn when I wanted a group for something but just could not find one. Similar to LI I’d prefer it to be something optional that some players wouldn’t even feel bothered to try.

Something else that might make the theoretical boss both more fun, harder, and less laggy is a separate instances difficulty scaling measure. The way that would work is that there’s an easy version of the boss that can be soloed by anyone, but as you add more people to the group, more difficult versions of the boss would become accessible, but not required. A large group could still enter the soloable version of the boss, but they could also enter version 2, 3, or 4, for example. Random numbers here, but if the group had 8 people in it they wouldn’t be able to enter version 5 because that difficulty needs 10 people in the group.

Don’t know how effective this might be, but it would allow for mediocre players to beat the boss and get the rewards while allowing the best players to have a challenge and work together to beat the hardest version. It would both make the boss a true unsoloable challenge and also let players with bad connections or less skill get some rewards.

 

This seems nearly identical to Novalescent's suggestion.

 

Tanks are actually extremely effective in PVE, usually dealing decent damage, but being effectively unkillable.

In PVP, defences work differently, so tanks are less effective, but glass cannons still deal huge amounts of damage. On a boss dealing 17k dps is fine. Against a player? Your enemy stands no chance.

 

Oops you’re right. I completely forgot about Novaleacent’s threads when writing this last night. I added the link to their boss thread on the main post.

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You’re right that tanks are useful, but they’re not as useful or really even as fun to play as a balanced or glass cannon builds (imo). More damage is essentially always nice to have, while more tankiness stops being useful at pretty early point, before a build can really even be called a full tank. I think this is largely because there are no parts of the game where a tank is objectively better than other builds. That’s why full tanks simply aren’t very present in the meta. @JaydonTheWarrior has talked about this a bunch, and I’d love to have a group dynamic where the group says “alright, we need a tank with us if we want to have an easier time with the boss/dungeon/whatever”. I just want tanks to be more useful.

 

Unsoloable bosses without a required player count is/was a bit of a pipe dream, but I’ve always liked the dynamic of needing players with different builds/roles in order to defeat the boss/dungeon. I might be trying a bit too hard to force that dynamic onto wynncraft, but I would like to see some encouragement for working in a group, even for veteran players.

I agree with all your comments, and definitely agree with the second one. Having the player perform actions that don’t require killing a minion but rather competing a task makes the boss fight more interesting and strategy oriented. For the fourth one, having warning signs is a must, even if it’s exposition rather than a hint or indirectly telling the player. You could also have a more subtle hint to let you know you shouldn’t attack the boss, but if you do attack during that phase but then die, it’ll tell you that you died because you attacked when you weren’t supposed to. But yeah, definitely have warnings so people aren’t confused.

 

Yeah, tanks are most useful in solo PVE. In groups they are often useless and are just there. Giving them a role as support or a way to prevent the boss from attacking the glass cannons and tank the damage for the group would be good. Since mage is already good as support due to heal, I feel that warrior should have a way to tank the damage for the team.

 

saying that darkness incarnate is soloable is like saying you can beat the eye by punching it. you can, but its not gonna be realistically doable. Im pretty sure DI has only been soloed with archer, but i think its doable with a mage glitch as well.

 

Agreed. Warriors already have Guardian’s major id which makes guardian users good tanks for a team, and archer has ignis to act as support, but those are fairly uncommon for the average small group to have access to. I think making mechanics where the boss attacks the tanks would be really useful. For example having a mechanic where the boss always has aggro or aims for the player with the highest current health. So if a tank build has 25k health and is down to 15k, they’ll be targeted before a full health glassier build with only 12k health.

 

Something I've learned while making the WSR bosses is that no matter what I do, unless I make some strict blockade mechanic that prevents it, all bosses can and will be soloed by someone.
It's how player power works in Wynncraft. Each class essentially has the same capabilities and potential as the other, the only difference being in terms of base DPS. The items however make it so essentially any class can be any playstyle given you have the right build and such. As such, the classes that aren't really supposed to be certain roles like proper DPSers, such as Mage or something, can do so.

It's one of the designs of Wynncraft that I don't really agree with since everyone can do everything, but you have to deal with that reality when making a boss. No matter how many mechanics you throw into a boss, someone will find a way to solo it. And as I said, you can only really prevent this if you add a proper blockade mechanic that prevents this, such as some sort of 1-shot ability that prevents you from doing it solo, but at that point you'd probably find people just bringing along bodies to "solo" the boss by doing everything themselves, then using the people they brought along just to absorb or do the group mechanic so they don't die.

Anyway, great idea anyway and one that I would love to see implemented. Even if they're not "unsoloable," at the very least they'll be extremely difficult and (hopefully) fun to do with other players, such as friends and guildmates. :)

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Is this not the point of an MMO? You get players together, such as friends or guildmates, to conquer these types of PvE challenges. Now of course if this is something like Qira where it's a "one and done" scenario where you can only get the loot once, then yes it will fall into that category.
I actually think people like the Multiplayer aspects and parts of Wynncraft. The only reason why it's disliked is probably because it isn't done to a level that fits with Wynncraft. Bob's Tomb is definitely one of them, mainly because you have to get 2 of the proper classes to do this 1 short task of opening a tomb.

Implementing systems such as a Group Finder would help many casual players that don't play Wynncraft for the multiplayer to pick up groups. However, I also wouldn't be opposed to NOT having something to help players find groups, as that's what Guilds and playing with friends is for and would give you more of a reason to join a Guild or find friends. You take on these challenges with them.

 

As someone who has much more experience with bosses in Minecraft than I do, I’ll defer to you on the possibility of a legitimate unsoloable boss. However, after reading the replies to this thread, I think it doesn’t really matter whether a boss is unsoloable or not. If you make a boss that has phases, minions, mini events, etc., and someone still solos it through the clever use of game mechanics or sheer skill, then that’s ok. As long as ~95% of the player base can’t solo the boss, then that can be good enough. It’s pretty much like you said—as long as the boss is hard enough to encourage group play and most of all be fun, a small subset of players soloing it is fine. The problem really lies in the quality of the boss after being live on the server for a while. Do people get used to it and can solo it just fine after a while? Do the elite players get bored with it after soloing it a few times? That kind of thing is usually inevitable, but the longer that stuff gets delayed, the better the boss was built to begin with. Avoiding mechanics that make the difficult sharply increase with a little lag, I think there are lots of ways to make the bosses very difficult, and especially more fun.

 

You make some really good points. As an MMO, that is or should be a central part of the gameplay. However, I can't help but think that if LI or EO required me to get a team of players together every time, I wouldn't do them more than once or twice. It's just too difficult to get a large group of players together for an event on a regular basis unless it's just free xp or something.