Game Design Fruma Bossfights deal too much damage

Gonna keep this relatively short. Currently running a Fallen Hybrid build with 38k EHP.

Every single major bossfight I have encountered in the main Fruma questline has been, simply put, fucking bullshit to deal with. Specifically the fights with Zhiraok, Gikyo, and Majin. Most of the attacks have vague attack pattern indicators that are hard to read, but more importantly they are hard to dodge because you either A: have enough walkspeed to sprint out of the way. B: hope you can input your movement spell before the attack hits. Even then, some of the attacks are so impossibly hard to dodge that I take damage anyway. And this would honestly be fine if the attacks didn't chunk you for a stupid amount of damage!

Currently I am stuck on Majin, every single time I take a hit it deals a minimum of 25% of my max hp. I rarely get the opportunity to hit him back, because whenever he gets a brief window of downtime, I'm spamming heal potions. Plus I feel like I can barely even dodge any of his attacks! How do I dodge his spinning lunge that homes in on you?!

This is somewhat of a rant, but I do genuinely believe that the bossfights need to be toned down. Either reduce the damage of the bosses or make their attacks more dodgeable. I don't want to have to pick some braindead metaslop build just to progress through the game.

I finally ended up beating Majin, after I switched to Cosmic foundations set + Old keepers ring and Collapse, and switching from Fallen to Battlemonk. I shouldn't need to run rainbow tankslop to beat a quest boss (or maybe I just suck at wynncraft and need to git gud)

Would love some insight into how to beat these bossfights, and dodge their attacks

 

I didn't find Zhiraok or Gikyo to be too difficult, but that's mostly on account of the teleport spell (I've only played through on Mage). I'd say Zhiraok's swords are pretty clear indicators if you play in third person, but Majin's attacks are borderline undodgeable. Time dilation is singularly responsible for me beating that boss. Gikyo's somewhere in the middle of that difficulty scale but the Rex? phase projectiles always hit, which is a nightmare.

 

You are expected to require multiple attempts to beat them, and to have to learn how to match their tempos in their fights - which is why they pretty much let you get right back into the fight after a failure

 

Zhiraok was hell, even as mage, because for whatever reason, his charge seems to have infinite tracking ability, to the extent I've seen him do Zs in the arena to follow you, even when you teleport. The hitboxes for some attacks are also really unclear, I think possibly due to lag; I frequently would dodge an attack visually but still take damage pretty often. I feel like the fight was balanced with the idea of the player having really high walk speed, because when you have that, dodging the swords is pretty manageable, bad hitboxes aside. With low walk speed, I definitely think the fight is too hard though; the tracking on the swords means you will almost always be hit unless you teleport, and even then it feels really random.

I haven't got to any of the others yet, as I've been taking it pretty slowly and only just reached the Mistwoods.

 

I agree Zhiraok was was ok. I had some trouble with Gikyo, took me a couple tries. But even with those two I feel like they could be better telegraphed. Their only saving grace was that they didn't deal TOO much dmg, and honestly even Gikyo dealt borderline too much imo. Had many attacks from him that would drop me from 60% HP to 0% HP. And then Majin is like Gikyo but his attacks are nigh impossible to dodge and deal even more damage... Idk, I feel like a rewarding bossfight has a certain balance between damage, telegraphed attacks, and dodge windows. And I feel like all three of these bosses need that to be better balanced, in varying degrees (Majin fight needs it the most).

I understand that the bossfights are expected to take a few tries. But Majin specifically doesn't feel like he gives you any breathing room to even understand what he does. And even after I started picking up on his attacks, any attempt I made to dodge just didn't work, and then boom there goes 30% of my HP in one hit. There were many instances where he would drop me from full to almost dead because my attempt at dodging his attacks just didn't work. And when I can't even understand why my dodges aren't working it leaves the boss feeling extremely unsatisfying to fight. Rather than a skillful and rewarding battle I felt forced to run rainbow tank to just absorb the damage because I didn't feel like I had any other option.

 

Agree with these points, though Majin is actually very well telegraphed on account of calling out all of his attacks in the text above him. It's just that that either means he's in the middle or he's following you, which you can't dodge

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I also can't imagine how hellish fighting him on Warrior would be considering he just annihilates everything in close range.

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That's pretty obvious, the main complaint of the thread is the amount of damage a failure to dodge can result in. Especially in Zhiraok's fight, there are a ton of rapid-fire high damage swords, even more deadly if you're Subtracted at the time. In Gikyo's fight, dodgeability ranges from laughably easy (Gikyo 1, 2, 3, Mora?) to almost impossible (Rex?) but the damage is not lower in harder to dodge phases. Majin's raining comets attack requires high walk-speed, as if you use your movement spell you will likely hit ANOTHER ONE, and his tracking attack does more damage than all other his others. The only attack of his I could dodge confidently was the prismatic starstorm, which, if it hit me, instantly killed me.

Spoiler: Later Fights

I don't think Tasim's ranged attack is capable of missing and the arena is tiny which makes attacks that would typically be pretty easy to dodge nigh impossible. Her Majesty was ironically the easiest fight after Zhiraok (who I got on the first try both times), only taking me about 4 tries because... you guessed it... her attacks were much easier to dodge and she had a bigger arena than everyone else.

The ideal state would be attack damage rising with dodgeability (currently I only think the starstorm has this) and almost impossible to dodge attacks, like Rex?'s twain's arc, deal much less damage.

 

A single movement spell dodges Rex?'s twain's arc. You're meant to time it, just like you're meant to with The Watched.

 

no indication before firing, save that Rex? is on the chair. I was spamming and teleport and got hit every time

 

theres both audio and visual

 

I've really enjoyed both Gikyo and Majin, and I think their difficulty is at a good place right now. Can't say too much about Zhiraok, he randomly froze in the first fight and I killed him, and a random other player killed him for me the second time. Majin is currently my favorite boss in Wynncraft.

Majin telegraphs all his attacks really well (by literally shouting out what attack he is going to do), and I have found reasonable consistent ways to dodge each attack. Note that I am a lightbender mage. For SHOOTING STAR!/MAJIN STRIKE! (the spinning lunge), I teleport straight away from him, then teleport a second time straight upwards whenever I see him yell out the attack. This works most of the time. I haven't had any trouble hitting bosses, though that is probably because I am a ranged build and can hit them from across the arena.

I have... around +10% walk speed I think? Not a lot. I've been able to consistently dodge the comets by just walking from one side of the arena to the other and occasionally teleporting.

I think the reason the bosses deal so much damage is because lightbender exists. I heal myself to full health every 2 seconds. This means if bosses don't do enough damage to kill me in 2 seconds, they are not threatening.

 

This part is impossible to dodge with mage since you have to time it perfectly, I couldn’t dodge it either

 

I don't think Majin is unfair, but as someone with some mild vision problems, there are times I can't make out what Majin is about to do.

 

It's not impossible. You just need to press right click twice while they charge the attack (indicated by the bow drawing back sound), then right click a third time when you hear a "ping!" sound, which indicates they are about to shoot. That third right click will trigger a perfectly timed teleport automatically if you do it as soon as you hear the ping.

 

only helpful if the sounds play

 

So what I’m hearing is that if you time it perfectly, you can dodge it

 

i'm currently stuck on the majin fight. i tried as a boltslinger and did well enough.(prolly because the 90% walk speed) and i just attempted trapper. it's so much harder. i'm 45k ehp and i still get folded, my build is meant as a tanky archer and each spin attack wipes me out like 10-15k per hit

 

The timing is not very tight. You have a pretty large window to cast teleport, around 0.5 seconds I would guess. It's nothing compared to some soulslike bosses that I have fought that have 0.15 second dodge/parry timings.

 

haven't gotten to the majin fight but vanilla minecraft servers aren't comparable to console games because synchronization lag exists

 

As boltslinger, all the other bosses were good except 2nd Zhiraok which was insufferable. who would have thought sharing same telegraph for 2 completely different attack was good (throwing dagger or spinning dagger around, oh but throwing dagger sometimes still curves and hits you anyway) Along with every attack inflicting CC so you get comboed by dagger the moment you stand a bit close

Tasim was kinda bs too with its spinning charge effectively stunlocking and instakilling you with no telegraph, but mostly because the dam arena was too small.

I found Gikyo and Majin to be the fairest and most fun actually.

 

Yeah, in general dodges in this game don't feel nearly as consistent as parries in soulslikes; the tells are usually worse and the timing can be a bit... peculiar, because both are being affected by connection to the server, and any lag that has. It's more like when you're trying to co-op with your friend and suddenly you miss every parry and dodge because the enemy is operating half a second out of synch with you, except the lag isn't consistent enough and the tells aren't predictable enough to be able to parry before you should in order to actually time it right.

Also, I'm gonna point out that most of the soulslikes with really tight parry timings are considered exceptionally difficult games, largely for that exact reason. I don't know that "not as hard as a game a lot of people didn't finish because it was too hard" is necessarily the same as saying that it's reasonable for the average player of another genre of game. Going strictly by Fromsoft games, they've actually removed moves with that little timing (Promised Consort) because they were too difficult to dodge properly.