Defy Conquest a case study in base boss design

MoosePrime

@Heartbreaksoup said:
I'm most baffled by the AIM MEDTECH hanging out with Kang and MODOK, as she does not appear to actually have any powers or do anything.

I thought she was there to generate AP for Kang to use.

Did the goon character change in different rounds? I'm using 5* Deadpool, and one round I thought his Wade and Measured was hitting the goon on Black, then later it was hitting on Purple.

HoundofShadow

Let's talk about the elephant in the room that is rarely being brought up: the intelligence of AIs. When Demiurge was still blogging about MPQ, they touched on the topic about whether the AIs were cheating. In that blog, the dev also mentioned experimenting with playing against smarter AI but they decided against implementing it in the game. Between making challenging AIs and making the players happy, they went with the latter.

BCS tried out Heroic Boss events, and after major complains, they are dead for now and we've been getting generic boss eventd again.

Then, let's go back to the days where players were supposed to lose in boss events. I was not in that era yet, but players seemed pretty livid about that. If you're dealing with bosses, it makes sense that you lose majority of the time. Thanos destroyed majority of the heroes, and many other villians did. If you want to play a boss event where it feels like playing against a boss, let's bring the "players are supposed to lose" boss events. Let's have Kang fire his blue twice quickly so that you are left with only one hero to deal against him. It's thematic and it's a fitting scenario against bosses. You feel like you are losing, but with enough skills, you'll be able to beat boss fights with one hero while the other is away.

Or we can also equip the bosses with R5 meta supports. However, it's clear that players hated the idea of giving AIs supports.

DAZ0273

@HoundofShadow said:
Let's talk about the elephant in the room that is rarely being brought up: the intelligence of AIs. When Demiurge was still blogging about MPQ, they touched on the topic about whether the AIs were cheating. In that blog, the dev also mentioned experimenting with playing against smarte AI but they decided against implementing it in the game. Between making challenging AIs and making the players happy, they went with the latter.

Then, let's go back to the days where players were supposed to lose in boss events. I was not in that era yet, but players seemed pretty livid about that. If you're dealing with bosses, it makes sense that you lose majority of the time. Thanos destroyed majority of the heroes, and many other villians did. If you want to play a boss event where it feels like playing against a boss, let's bring the "players are supposed to lose" boss events. Let's have Kang fire his blue twice quickly so that you are left with only one hero to deal against him. It's thematic and it's a fitting scenario against bosses. You feel like you are losing, but with enough skills, you'll be able to beat boss fights with one hero while the other is away.

Or we can also equip the bosses with R5 meta supports. However, it's clear that players hated the idea of giving AIs supports.

Once again, you are having a different discussion to the majority of the rest of us. I don't know why you can't just actually and honestly respond to the issues being raised here without once again banging on about stuff nobody else brought up.

Bad

@dianetics said:

Gorr event was memorable. He had specific goons that I still remember. Don’t act like you don’t know what they did.
His goons went invisible on damage and hit hard when they came back.
I would love to do the Gorr event again because his goons were awesome.

Arcade was a civil war rebrand…Kang was the lowest tier PvE I have ever seen.

What new thing did this event bring? Besides broken subs that didn’t give points before the event was reset.

Be honest, this was not a typical boss event.

Oh yeah, I forgot about arcade. Probably not so memorable either!
Gorr event was really good because they designed his minions.
But as I said these boss events are thematically based. The minions were on his animations so they worked on them, also the shadowy background.
This one is also thematically based however modok was already there and his minion so there is nothing more other than a boss team and the "cosmic dawn" background. >

gamecat235

Those early Galactus events were brutal. Trying to use Ghost Rider’s Penance Stare at just the right moment to one shot Galactus right before you died… that sucked but I’ll say one thing, it was memorable, and challenging, and required strategy.

entrailbucket

@gamecat235 said:
Those early Galactus events were brutal. Trying to use Ghost Rider’s Penance Stare at just the right moment to one shot Galactus right before you died… that sucked but I’ll say one thing, it was memorable, and challenging, and required strategy.

I loved that. Our alliance was one of (I think) 3 that actually beat it, and we beat it first. I also loved the infamous "you're supposed to lose" Boss Rush.

I'm really glad to see an entire thread of people asking for more difficult/interesting events! I didn't think that was something that players were interested in at this point -- I assume most players just want to get rewards for showing up and doing nothing.

Bowgentle

@entrailbucket said:

@gamecat235 said:
Those early Galactus events were brutal. Trying to use Ghost Rider’s Penance Stare at just the right moment to one shot Galactus right before you died… that sucked but I’ll say one thing, it was memorable, and challenging, and required strategy.

I loved that. Our alliance was one of (I think) 3 that actually beat it, and we beat it first. I also loved the infamous "you're supposed to lose" Boss Rush.

I'm really glad to see an entire thread of people asking for more difficult/interesting events! I didn't think that was something that players were interested in at this point -- I assume most players just want to get rewards for showing up and doing nothing.

Was Galactus really hard?
I think Civil War was the only one where alliances had trouble finishing both sides.

gamecat235

The first couple of runs of Galactus that I was around for were quite difficult for everyone except those few elite players then. I was on a very good alliance at the time (in the lower tier alliance as I was rather up and coming then). And while our primary alliance did great, the alliance I was on struggled a bit and everyone helped and shared strategies and approaches (and Ghost Rider TU’s).

HoundofShadow

If you want a boss event that feels like a boss event, those are the essential qualities needed, and some of those can be drawn from movies.

To make bosses challenging, the first thing the dev should do is to bring back roster based scaling beginning from round 1. If your mmr is 550, then Kang and his teams will be 550 on round 1. With each reset, their levels will increase by 50. At round 8, their levels would be level 950/1000.

Secondly, you can only win against Kang using swarm based strategy. It's thematic and fitting. You can't SC, Hulkoye, mThor or Chasm him away. It could be something similar to Kaecilius node. Destroy or match x number of swarm tiles to deal certain damage to Kang. If you could use 5* Wasp's Swarm to destroy his Away countdown, deal bonus damage. They could play around with this concept.

Thirdly, equip Kang and his team with R5 supports. Bosses are tough and equipping them with meta R5 supports make sense.

Fourthly, players would be losing majority of the time. Or, even if they were to win, they would be using 2-3 healthpacks per boss fights. Again, it's thematic. No one rarely escape with a few scratches against real bosses.

However, at the end of the day, if the dev were to implement these, many players are going to complain about this and possibly quit the game.

entrailbucket

@Bowgentle said:

@entrailbucket said:

@gamecat235 said:
Those early Galactus events were brutal. Trying to use Ghost Rider’s Penance Stare at just the right moment to one shot Galactus right before you died… that sucked but I’ll say one thing, it was memorable, and challenging, and required strategy.

I loved that. Our alliance was one of (I think) 3 that actually beat it, and we beat it first. I also loved the infamous "you're supposed to lose" Boss Rush.

I'm really glad to see an entire thread of people asking for more difficult/interesting events! I didn't think that was something that players were interested in at this point -- I assume most players just want to get rewards for showing up and doing nothing.

Was Galactus really hard?
I think Civil War was the only one where alliances had trouble finishing both sides.

Well, 3 alliances out of 10,000+ managed to complete the first Galactus event...so...

Let me see if I can dig up the forum thread.

Bowgentle

Maybe my memory is skewed by being in Prime at the time.
Or was that Django still?
I honestly can't remember.

entrailbucket

https://forums.d3go.com/discussion/33616/on-galactus-run-1-game-feel-vs-ultron

Enjoy!

ThaRoadWarrior

I can't decide if I do or don't like this boss event not even requiring me to switch my team out for the side nodes. Like it's just Wa5p/Hulkoye stomping through these easy nodes with no friction at all.

Bowgentle

@entrailbucket said:
https://forums.d3go.com/discussion/33616/on-galactus-run-1-game-feel-vs-ultron

Enjoy!

That is so weird, I have absolutely no memory of this being so bad.

entrailbucket

@Bowgentle said:

@entrailbucket said:
https://forums.d3go.com/discussion/33616/on-galactus-run-1-game-feel-vs-ultron

Enjoy!

That is so weird, I have absolutely no memory of this being so bad.

It was really, really difficult, which made it really, really rewarding to win. 99% of players absolutely HATED it though. I remember it, both because it was so much fun, and because of how much everyone else cried about it.

Bowgentle

October 2015, so before OML could shrug off all damage, yeah.
I can see this not being popular.

Captain_Trips88

I think boss events need to have some gimmick to them that is different to your standard event. Its what makes them interesting or challenging. Apocalypse with his tiles (ok modern 5* can wipe him out in one move but back in the day you had to clear his tiles), galactus and ultron with their unique tiles, hell even sinister six had unique powers that meant you had to plan your team to cope.
With there being no specific required characters I've not had to change the team or think at any point, it does mean I've used 5* wasp more over the last few days than at any point since she was released, not that I've fired a power.

so positives - its great to see boss events and the 5* rewards are fantastic. Just please can we have something more fun next time?

KGB

@Bowgentle said:
October 2015, so before OML could shrug off all damage, yeah.
I can see this not being popular.

Not only that, but there were hardly any quality 4* available either at that time. No Grocket, Juggs, Polaris, Captain Marvel etc that either had a big nuke, produced tons of strike or could do massive passive damage.

Top it all off with the fact that champion levels weren't introduced yet so a 4* topped out at 270 rather than 370.

It's obvious today if they re-ran that event with that Galactus it would be a cake walk.

KGB

entrailbucket

It was a good idea but they can't really do anything like that again -- characters are too broken now.

The idea was: Galactus has one giant health bar for your entire alliance. All damage you do to him subtracts off that bar. In each individual fight, you had about 3 turns before he wiped your entire team, so you try to do as much damage as possible before you lose. It was cool and thematic, because a huge team of heroes is fighting against a massive, cosmically powerful threat that they can't beat on their own. (Compare to Galactus now, who gets oneshotted by any decent 5*).

Anyway this went over very, very badly. Mostly it was the hilarious health pack conspiracy theory stuff -- this completely insane, completely untethered-from-reality idea that they make a ton of money from selling health packs, so extra hard events generate tons of profits. This is not even close to true and has never been.

Galactus and Boss Rush were pretty major turning points. After the insane, utterly over the top reactions to those (read that thread -- I like the guy who said this was the worst experience with any form of entertainment that he'd ever had), they really stopped taking risks or doing anything at all interesting with event design.

DyingLegend

Easy event with a nice break

No complaints from me