World Unsoloable Endgame Bosses

Ascendant_ · Oct 30, 2020

CrunchyCol said: ↑

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.
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Strobelight, take it or leave it

Sg_Voltage · Oct 31, 2020

CrunchyCol said: ↑

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.
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I first want to say you clearly put thought into this, which is more than I can say for most suggestions. The ideas here are really good, but I think adding in any content which can't be soloed is something which can't be done for the sake of doing it. People are constantly complaining about Bob's tomb requiring three people, and they've been complaining for something like 7 years now because it gates important content behind other players being in the same spot as you. I think having the Eye require multiple people would lead to the same response since it's required for the final discovery, the final quest and eventually the portal to Dern (when that gets added in 5-10 years lol).

People still complain about quests like ???, but it isn't nearly as often since the quest doesn't really reward you for the effort (it does for some, but most players don't care about grinding dungeons in massive parties once they hit 105, they either quit or do profs or something). Basically, for most people, there isn't a real reason to do ???, and even if they just want to complete, there isn't any real urgency. By gating something like the eye, you're stopping somebodies progression until they find a party, which might never happen. (see LI and EO now)

I'm not against having a boss, or bosses which require multiple people, but I think having the boss be part of the "story" or having it drop a really good item for everybody is just a problematic idea.

CrunchyCol · Oct 31, 2020

Sg_Voltage said: ↑

I first want to say you clearly put thought into this, which is more than I can say for most suggestions. The ideas here are really good, but I think adding in any content which can't be soloed is something which can't be done for the sake of doing it. People are constantly complaining about Bob's tomb requiring three people, and they've been complaining for something like 7 years now because it gates important content behind other players being in the same spot as you. I think having the Eye require multiple people would lead to the same response since it's required for the final discovery, the final quest and eventually the portal to Dern (when that gets added in 5-10 years lol).

People still complain about quests like ???, but it isn't nearly as often since the quest doesn't really reward you for the effort (it does for some, but most players don't care about grinding dungeons in massive parties once they hit 105, they either quit or do profs or something). Basically, for most people, there isn't a real reason to do ???, and even if they just want to complete, there isn't any real urgency. By gating something like the eye, you're stopping somebodies progression until they find a party, which might never happen. (see LI and EO now)

I'm not against having a boss, or bosses which require multiple people, but I think having the boss be part of the "story" or having it drop a really good item for everybody is just a problematic idea.
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Yeah when reading the comments on this thread I kinda came to that realization. I think locking content behind unsoloable bosses just doesn't fit into how Wynn is built right now. If Wynn has some QoL changes that make playing with other people easier and more fun then the conversation might take a turn, but as of right now it's just not ideal. I also commented earlier about an idea with separate instances with different difficulties depending on how many people are fighting the boss at a time:

CrunchyCol said: ↑

Something else that might make the theoretical boss both more fun, harder, and less laggy (for solo players) 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.
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If that concept was also applied to a dungeon then that might spice up the endgame even more. Essentially the more people you have, the farther you can go into the dungeon, and the more bosses you can fight. It'd go (level 1 dungeon)->(level 1 boss)->(level 2 dungeon)->(level 2 boss)->(level 3 dungeon)... etc. Once you die you'd have to start over at the level 1 dungeon, or something that makes those higher levels extremely difficult to get to with a group. Obviously that would be an insane amount of work, and there would have to be some endpoint, but you would only be able to enter the higher levels of the dungeon if you had a certain amount of people. The biggest problem with that (imo) would be coming up with reward tiers for each level, which I don't really have many ideas for. I think if this specific "unending (which is unrealistic)" dungeon suggestion did come to fruition, then perhaps there shouldn't be any unique rewards for the higher levels, but just extra non-equipment items, like runes or powders or something. Anyway, I'm just tossing stuff out there in the hope that something sticks in a CT member's brain lol.

KikiTheKiko · Nov 5, 2020

My only two cents with this, don't make it a quest, simple as that. Then you won't have solo players feeling like they have to do it or else they have an uncompleted questbook. This would help at least mitigate the number of complaints people have about having something non-soloable.

TigerYaisou · Nov 5, 2020

Novalescent said: ↑

all bosses can and will be soloed by someone.
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accurate(not me btw, also this without any wynncon specific items)

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World Unsoloable Endgame Bosses

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