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[DISCUSSION] Boss scaling

Hello, my Loves o/

So, I was thinking about scaling in general. I know that it might be a little early to be talking about this topic but to me it's fairly important - nevertheless.

<strong>Boss scaling</strong> - what do I mean?

Bosses / mobs in general usually have a certain HP-Pool, defense, attack yada yada. In many games these statts are static, they don't change.
In a lot of games scaling doesn't really work. Most games follow the same pattern:
e.g.
<strong>10 000 HP // 10 000 Defense // HP-regen (2%/sec)</strong>

The pattern is as follows: Your attack his high enough, penetrating its defense, dealing damage.

Now there are two possibilities:
- You need several players to kill the boss because of its high defense, your low attack damage and its high HP-pool / HP-regen in comparison to your (single) overall damage contribution.
- You basically violate the Boss into oblivion! Now, several weeks later. You've obtained better gear, your attack damage has reached new heights, new skills and an overall better character control.

<strong>My question would be, what would you rather see?</strong>

---

Now there are two solutions. UPscaling / Downscaling.

The question now is, how is it done?

[World Boss - Platinum Monster] The Butcher

<strong>It's either</strong>, all players in the Boss's spawn radius are counted and their damage is set. Player A does 2dps, Player B does 3dps, Player C does 1dps etc. Killing it becomes a joint venture that way you need everyone to compete! (Simplified)
The problem is if some players go afk or disconnet, the whole tab won't add up.
<strong>Or</strong>, you can easily kill it because of your disparity in damage, level and gear.
<strong>Or</strong>, you get downscaled - attack damage / crit / HP etc. get reduced.

The question now is to which extent? Do we want a similar system to GW2 , regions with certain Level restrictions? (Even though, in GW2, it isn't well done. I mean, it works and stuff but some aspects don't get upsacled / downscaled)

Your thoughts?

~ Zention

Comments

  • I like the "all players in the Boss’s spawn radius are counted and their damage is set " idea. I want that to happen so fighting bosses are harder. Most games I play, I solo bosses like their just higher level mobs, so they can easily be killed. The game is focusing in Participation (Someone bts said that in a video, somewhere...) so that means that they will make it so bosses cant just be soloed like most games. I'm not really reliable with my information about them focusing on participation, but the game IS focusing into the MMO features. Thats why I am hyped for this game, (hopefully) No more soloing hardcore bosses for mee.
  • Yup , WoW does that for the World Bosses, the boss starts with a default HP (E.g : 4 HP) calculated for the minimum raid group size 10 ppl, if you go above boss will deal a bit more damage and will scale up to 15 ppl i would have maybe 8 HP, 20 ppl would take it to 12 HP... and some Damage output scaling ... This would make world bosses impossible to solo kill and encourage groups and player interactions ...
  • Really good point. In ArcheAge in 2015 we used to contest bosses for hours (even days, I still remember 50 hours of Kraken PvP) Currently, in 2017, almost all bosses require only 2 minutes to kill them and competition/PvP over world bosses literally ended because of this reason.

    Buffing bosses in time parallel to the players' gear level could be a solution. If they keep adding content and new bosses that's also a good solution I guess.
  • I'd really like to see them add something like this: "The Butcher has been killed by arrow one to many times, now he wears scales", "He hate magicians, so he got some OP wards" etc. make the boss evolve with the playerbase, just make it so when the boss has faced to many defeats, it gets stronger. Sure this might end up making an extremely difficult boss, but isnt that the point? ;)
  • I think this is an incredible difficult topic. I for example want some kind of scaling, but its effects should be minimal...
    Well I guess with an example its easier to understand what I mean. Imagine you just started adventuring with 4 friends through the wilds and you suddenly encounter this boss <img src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/8xEyXGVxfHo/hqdefault.jpg" alt="Imp Captain" /> who happened to be the leader of some goblin tribes. With a lot of efforts and excellent teamwork you barely managed to bring him down. After that success you decide to explore further and find the lair of this dragon <img src="https://www.walldevil.com/wallpapers/a56/city-dragon.jpg" alt="Huge Dragon" /> I don't think such a boss should be downscaled to match your party size so that you can win, no your party should run for their life or just die.
    On the other hand after dedicating your life in getting stronger your party finally manages to be strong enough to kill that dragon. Now after encountering the goblin chief he shouldn't pose that much of a threat to you. To give you that feeling that the power of your character actually grew. Bosses that were once a huge problem are now easier to defeat. So he shouldn't be upscaled so much that he is on the same challenge as the dragon.
    That would be the argument against scaling.
    But on the other hand it's like you guys already said, it will get boring if you can one-shot everything. I don't think I need to elaborate that point since you guys already said everything. Because such a dragon should always pose a threat no matter how strong or many you are.

    So yeah my idea would be to introduce some kind of challenge-rating. E.g. an Challenge Rating of 10 means that it poses a threat for a 15 player raid with the average level of 10. The challlenge rating defines how much hp and attack power the mob\boss has. And all bosses have a minimum and maximum challenge rating. E.g. the dragon might have a Challenge Rating (CR) of 25, minimum CR:23 and maximum CR: 27. So if the boss is attacked by 15 level 25 people the CR will be 25, if it's only 10 the CR might drop to 23 but if its attacked by less it won't get further down. The same goes for upscaling the boss.

    I'd also only scale bosses and not mobs or the player himself, because when the player started with a simple bronze sword and fought against an horde of goblins succesfully he should easily kill them after getting stronger. For me it would feel depressing when I managed to get a legendary sword of mythical might which actually isn't stronger than the bronze sword when killing goblins.
  • I personally don't like the idea of scaling.. I find it immersion breaking, and it also defies the entire point of getting a lot of ppl together to bring down the boss. I really enjoy it when a world boss takes months to down because players aren't geared enough and / or can't organize enough ppl to get together to take the boss down. Not saying every world boss should require 200 players to down, but it would be nice if it does require a significant amount of player coordination to make it a big deal.

    The reason why I hate the idea of boss scaling like GW2 where players in the radius of the event affect the boss difficulty, is that players can easily troll others or grief a guild they hate by bringing a bunch of ppl in the radius and simply not doing anything. This can obviously be extremely game breaking.

    I would rather a world boss get upgraded over time.. like once the devs realise that a certain world boss has become too easy as players use to kill it 30 minutes and now decimate it in 5 minutes.. perhaps its time to do a few Tweaks..

    It would be nice if the game simply kept track of all the attempts to kill the boss, keeping track of how many players significantly damaged the boss in each attempt, and how fast the boss was killed. This way the server could respond by increasing this boss's difficulty the next spawn if the last couple attempts were too easy.

    But.. this is all nice and dandy, but i'm no programmer, and I bet something like that would be a coding nightmare..
  • [quote quote=3313]
    But.. this is all nice and dandy, but i’m no programmer, and I bet something like that would be a coding nightmare..
    [/quote]
    Well that depends on what the devs want ;) If it was just a algorithm that boosted the stats of the boss according to what it was killed by the most, then that would be quite easy (I think even I could make that;) ). Which might not be the worst idea for making a boss harder, do something like this (I mostly do python so its gonna be pseudo-python):
    <pre><code>
    if bosskilltimer < 5 min:
    check-most-damage-done:
    if ranged: rangeddef += 5
    if ranged: physicaldef += 5
    if ranged: magicdef += 5
    </code></pre>



    Proper scaling however (which I don't want) is a tad bit harder IMO, cause how do you decide what to scale with... As you said It can easily be abused, so do you do a radius, amount of unique player hits or?

    In general I'm more for the overtime bosses adapt to the method of killing, make it a tad bit "realistic". Kinda "Shadow of Mordor" style if anyones played that. In that game sometimes you might try and kill a enemy, if you fail (or sometimes if you succeed) then the mob adapts, next time you meet if it say something like "Your punny arrows won't hurt me anymore" and its invincible to arrows.
  • Very tricky topic. If you're going to scale mobs, why even have levels? I especially don't like scaling down players to lower level mobs. I like feeling more powerful as I gain levels, gear, skills, etc. That sense of progress is lost if everything is just scaled and evened off.
  • [quote quote=3351]Very tricky topic. If you’re going to scale mobs, why even have levels? I especially don’t like scaling down players to lower level mobs. I like feeling more powerful as I gain levels, gear, skills, etc. That sense of progress is lost if everything is just scaled and evened off.

    [/quote]
    Yea scaling down always annoys me, scaling up however is fine in my opinion. That way more content Is available, but you still feel strong. Usually scaling up is only the basic stats anyway: health, mana, stamina, def etc. which is fine in my opinion ;)
  • i'd love to see the boss have it's specific skill so players have to work in group and must have tactic to take down the boss,not the style hit to dead with no tactic
  • [quote quote=3609]i’d love to see the boss have it’s specific skill so players have to work in group and must have tactic to take down the boss,not the style hit to dead with no tactic

    [/quote]
    From what the devs have said so far, this is pretty much a given :) (IMO). But it could also be part of the scaling, adding more attack patterns and such, slowly over time maybe depending on the amount of times the boss has been killed.
  • This is a tough topic because you want bosses that take 5 to 10 minutes to kill sometimes a little longer. However if you turn some content into a 17 hour FFXI boss fight people will leave because no one today can do that amount of time. You also dont want bosses being zerged so you need to have a need for CC and a trinity system otherwise content turns into like GW2 where everyone can heal tank and dps and its a zerg fest.

    One thing you could do is put a barrier around the boss that when numbers reach 100 people or so no one else is allowed within that barrier so you can scale the boss to the group within and have Average DPS =250 and then multiply that by the number of seconds you want it up. With CC\Support roles you might not hit 250 as an example so it would take longer.
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