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Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
(Raid) Bosses - would this work?
Ravudha
Member
For Diablo 4, it looks like stun effects continuously applied by multiple players build up and can eventually stun bosses.
Do you think this kind of mechanic could work well for MMO bosses? Thoughts?
Do you think this kind of mechanic could work well for MMO bosses? Thoughts?
1
Comments
This sounds kind of nice feature. It also adds some strategy to time the stun in right place.
I was thinking the same thing
It does indeed, however it's important to note that the raid boss encounters are designed around that CC bar, and often success in the fights relies on depleting the bar at just the right moment.
That's the thing about many of the suggestions I see on this forum. It's not just a matter of shoving stuff in and hoping for the best. If you are going to add in a feature from another game it needs to be integrated properly and the developers need to understand WHY the feature works in the first place.
Bosses NOT being susceptible to CC is idiotic. It removes half of the role of support classes when bosses are unstoppable monstrosities for literally no reason other than being a boss. A conjoined effort from multiple players should be able to CC anything in some way.
A CC bar doesn’t seem particularly effective for intuitive gameplay, but a large amount of cc spells hitting a boss within a short time frame should work on to some degree.
A humanoid boss should be susceptible to everything a player character is susceptible to.
Monstrous bosses should have unique susceptibilities based on what they are.
For example, a massive dragon could be susceptible to blinds and temporarily crippled limbs due to its size, while being highly resistant to slows and immune to stuns for the same reason.
A large spider should be susceptible to slows and stuns being easily tripped up on its many legs, but resistant to blinds and crippled limbs due to having extra eyes and limbs.
Nothing feels worse than seeing “This target is immune” when a stun or cc effect is necessary to save a teammate or yourself, especially when there’s nothing about the boss to suggest why it should be immune.
The reason why most bosses can't be CCed is that it would defeat the point of having a tank. Why have someone intentionally take hits from the boss when you can just CC it whenever it does a big attack?
If you want CC to be used in boss fights you have 2 options:
1. CC-able adds that need to be managed throughout the fight.
2. Making the boss susceptible but only at very specific points in the fight (through the use of a CC bar).
Where did you find the path onto that wild and off-topic tangent?
No where did I ever say fights should be designed for two people to complete it easily, I said if multiple players (aka 4-6) are casting cc abilities all together, they should be affecting a boss. It doesn’t need to be able to permanently disable the boss, but it shouldn’t be made worthless when directed at a boss simply because it has the title of “boss”.
Four mages casting a snare field in the same area should slow anything on it, trash mobs more than a boss, but the boss SHOULD be affected.
It’s a cop out to make bosses immune to all CC affects, or only subject to a lull phase by what basically amounts to a quick time event.
CC immunity timers to prevent stacking CC endlessly is fair. Certain bosses having full immunity to certain effect based on the sort of monster they are (such as ghosts being immune to all physical disablements) is fair. Requiring a large amount of players use CC simultaneously when the targets are more robust is fair.
Having Bandit Boss be an unstoppable force for literally no reason is not fair. It’s ridiculous and nonsensical.
If the fight is designed properly, logical CC options are perfectly feasible. Requiring some adds be subdued before the boss can be affected by CC is perfectly doable (ex. mages buff the boss, casting protective spells). The bosses wouldn’t always be CC’d. All it takes is an immunity timer between CCs or during key phases and attacks to deal with that.
A tank would always be useful for positioning and soaking the damage while grouping adds. A tank could be subject to ramping damage while under solo threat, giving groups options to bring an off-tank and juggle aggro, try to outheal the damage, or CC bomb to reset to damage amp. A tank could be the one responsible for blocking (literal blocking) projectiles that would otherwise hit the group. A tank is still subject to the same mechanics as the group, plenty of situations which would be much easier to handle if they could reposition with a brief pause in boss damage.
Making all bosses immune to CC is the easy option to take for design. But Ashes is trying to make things more complex than the path of least resistance, so I can only hope they put more thought into boss fights than throwing out any idea of CC options for support classes.
This is only really an issue under the assumption that CC abilities are widespread and have quite low cool downs which i believe would be a terrible design decision to make anyways. Having a massive amounts of easily accessible stun mechanics is the easiest way to destroy the pvp aspect of any mmo game. However, if stun mechanics are scarce with long cool downs and require multiple simultaneous activations from different members of the group, this adds an extra layer of depth to boss fights mechanics, ultimately making the experience more interesting and the skill ceiling higher. The devs could even make certain mechanics on boss require party coordinated CC to prevent wipes on specific 1 hit mechanics.
Also, as you said, its very easy to just make some boss attacks or mechanics uninterruptible if the devs feel that CC would cheese the experience. In those instances they could just add an aura or some other notification on the boss that represents to the players that CC will not be effective for a certain amount of time.
You assumed wrong. I don't play to recover a near wipe, I play to avoid deaths at all, like most people do.
It actually allows for a larger difference between average and skilled players when fights are designed around CC being able to affect a boss. A team can play it standard and simply face-tank the boss while doing mechanics, soaking more damage and pushing for more heals. Or the group can coordinate and with proper timing of their CC abilities, take pressure off the healers so you can run more buff-cc supports over pure healing supports. A tank can focus more for their own sustain or more corralling of adds because they can trust the group to lay CC spells and give them decent time to leave to boss on its on while they focus on other aspects of the fight, rather than leaving that all to an offtank.
And a melee DPS having a few seconds to actually do their job is the exact opposite of a problem. There shouldn't be animation locks in the first place, it makes combat clunky and punishing for a melee player for no good reason. Cancel the damage with the animation if they really feel the need to, but locking players in animations with no ability to cancel out to dodge or block is awful.
I like to stun with a bar
I like bar, owned by stun.
If that's the angle they are going for with the boss fights then I am perfectly fine with that. I have absolutely no problem with having CC-able bosses as long as the fight is well thought out and the decisions make sense. What I hate seeing is a games developer putting features and mechanics in their games just because they were successful in other games.
I'd like to see certain mechanics only negated by certain CCs like if a boss is casting a spell, you have to negate it with a silence. If you stun the boss, they will start casting again and be cc immune. Another idea is something like a boss goes on a rampage. Similar to my other example, if you stun them, they will continue there rampage afterwards but if you slow them, you are able to kite it out.
I also like the idea of possibly carrying this to certain debuffs. Example i can think of is an armor break where it takes multiple players using abilities that break armor to actually break the armor and so the group can do more dps. This could be incorporated into the CC immunity so groups have to decide if they want to debuff or cc but maybe i'm getting a little to crazy with this.
Yeeahh..... I'm getting a "matrix architect" vibe from this post. Care to explain what you mean in a way normal people can understand?