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Raid Boss Video
Jirue
Member
Recently watched the Raid Boss video for the April update. Watching it, I couldn't help but draw some mental comparisons to certain other large dragon creatures from Monster Hunter.
Overall, the dragon breath attacks and AoE abilities looked nice. The only rough area mechanically to me looked to be in the physical body attacks. Maybe it's just cause I'm too used to Monster Hunter now a days, but the physical attacks seemed lackluster for a creature of that size. The body slams to the ground causing large waves were a nice attack pattern, but the small claw swipes seemed really bland compared to the rest of the attack set.
Guess I was thinking it'd be more like in the GIF above where it'd be stomping and charging around the battlefield more, causing more of those players in the back to need to actively avoid getting stepped on. Might just be something that doesn't translate well to the Holy Trinity battle style though.
Overall, the dragon breath attacks and AoE abilities looked nice. The only rough area mechanically to me looked to be in the physical body attacks. Maybe it's just cause I'm too used to Monster Hunter now a days, but the physical attacks seemed lackluster for a creature of that size. The body slams to the ground causing large waves were a nice attack pattern, but the small claw swipes seemed really bland compared to the rest of the attack set.
Guess I was thinking it'd be more like in the GIF above where it'd be stomping and charging around the battlefield more, causing more of those players in the back to need to actively avoid getting stepped on. Might just be something that doesn't translate well to the Holy Trinity battle style though.
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One of the things that literally nobody is talking about is the fact that we were watching a WORLD pvp boss. Those mechanics seemed very boring because they were. Add in another army of players coming to counter your raid group while you are fighting will add an entirely new feeling for most players. 5 minutes can turn into 15 minutes while still dodging all those mechanics, maneuvering in and out of combat to engage or disengage enemy players all while trying to keep the tank and healers alive. I felt it was a very fitting fight for the circumstances we viewed.
I wouldn't quite make them as mobile, because poor melee classes would hate the game, but certainly some level of bites, charges, tail swipes etc. would enhance the look and feel of the battle.
I agree with Khronus that perhaps a world boss won't necessarily require the most amazing mechanics either. Except for some of the FFXIV world bosses, I know of very little ones that are at all challenging or complex in their mechanics.
But yeah, some level of the more "animalistic" traits in their attacks would greatly augment the experience.
Given that the tank has 2 gap closers already, I dunno if melee classes will have any problem.
Remember, in Monster Hunter, most of the classes are melee, and most players prefer melee weapons.
I did appreciate that the dragons in the preview charged around a bit, but I'd love to see a tail sweep knocking over anyone standing too close to the dragon's back legs.
Making the bosses mobile is really important for breaking the mindset of "stand still and spam rotation"
Even with 2 gap closers on the tank (one that may or may not work on a raid boss), one of the things that concerns me if the disparity of mechanics that effect melee vs ranged attackers. Simply put, melee players will have a far harder time fighting those raid bosses than ranged players will.
Making the bosses more mobile harms melee players far more than ranged players. Let me tell you it's not much fun being a melee dps fighting a boss that you can't attack half the time because it's constantly moving around.
Big, sweeping, predictable attacks and things that affect the battlefield are what I'd mostly expect from world bosses, given the probably large number of people that will be engaging them, plus the high potential for pvp. Some of the animations were clunky but the flying slams, death animations and breath attacks looked and felt great, so I'm pretty confident that the future polish as the game gets closer to release is going to be sick.
The AOE's look fun but I would make the AOE's larger and also last longer.
The Dragon's Poison Breath looks nice, it should be longer (range), add a poison attack that is put further away (ranged players) that reduced accuracy for example this force ranged players to take more risk by moving closer towards the dragon, exposing them more to the other attacks.
I have to wonder if Steven didn't just bump their numbers up a bunch or set some sort of God mode. No footage to be shown if you keep dying. And he did die, twice in the first pass at the video we were shown during the stream.
But yeah it still felt like dragon went down perhaps a little too fast for my taste, and that it did too little damage to others.
Certainly something for the devs to keep an eye out for if the testers relay the same impression.
That kind of number tuning is easy to do later on, and is not the real focus on the upcoming alpha tests. Right now we should be looking at the fight as a concept and how the gameplay for it works, not how much damage the players take.
That said, as I pointed out above the fight looks very ranged-favoured right now, particularly with the dragon's wave ability. When the dragon does that ability, melee have no choice but to completely stop what they are doing and run away while the ranged players are able to keep attacking unhindered.
As things stand there is no mechanic to offset this disparity, meaning it makes more sense to stack ranged dps over melee for this fight. If the mechanics stay as they are, the only way to fix this would be for the damage to so low at close range that the melee can ignore it, and if they do that then there would be point to the ability at all.
Regarding the Ranged part, I agree the fight favoured this playstyle too much.
This is why I personally believe that Bosses like dragons are perfect to have buffs that reduce ranged damage past X amount of Meters/distance.
This would result in the ranged players still be able to keep some distance but there would also be more of a risk as they could be impacted a lot more by the boss's abilities.
These kinds of buffs could be easily applied during different phases to reduce melee damage, magic, or ranged physical.
Also, the dragon's abilities should target more players (the poison spheres) again forcing ranged players to move around more. Gw2 world bosses are fun but 9/10 are just pew-pew fests.
This means that should a mage get clipped from range, he's likely to go down as it probably has a lower HP pool.
Melee did get stunned if they were too close, but they could move to a mid range and move back in, without losing too much uptime.
What I couldn't make out, as there was only one tank seemingly, is if you could hit it whilst it was in flight.
If a melee can't hit it while it flies, and auto-stuns you upon landing if you're too close... yeah that absolutely sucks.
The hitbox for the dragon would have to be absolutely huge for melee users to still be able to hit it while it was flying before the wave ability. I doubt that is an option here.
In MH there is no advantage to ranged characters because the boss charges everyone randomly, so everyone is always on the move trying to stay in the boss's blind spots.
But if the tank is supposed to tank, then I guess the boss will focus the tank and ignore everyone else.
Hmm... thinking about it more, if the tank can hold the boss's attention, then it should open up safe flanking points for melee players, right?
Life well lived.
Right, but the point is in any MMO mechanics in general make fights less melee friendly in general. WoW raiding on Mythic difficulty for example is very unfavorable to melee and the tanks are always holding the bosses attention.
Curious to see how they tackle mechanics in AoC to be honest. I play melee in WoW and I play ranged I enjoy my melee more cause it definitely is harder for melee
Maybe some movement skills to aproach or flee may give melees a better feeling during a fight. Either PvP or PvE.
The idea of creating a PvP during the raid seems quite interesting. Two or more parties fighting for the loot after the raid. Tho that would mean a long time playing over that area and many, many spawns after deaths.
I cant guess the odds of it