Boss-wise, what does "overpowered" mean to you?

Something I've found to be pretty overpowered that might not have been mentioned yet is if the boss is set to an unreasonable time limit. Please, for the love of god, let me take as long as I need to to defeat the boss (or at least give me plenty of time to do it). I don't want to have to race against the clock as added stress to fighting a difficult boss.

Other than that, undodgeable/unblockable attacks, 1 hit or not. Especially if it's a boss that doesn't give you much of a window to recover the health you're losing to his OP offense.

 

I can feel somehow the frustration of a MonsterHunter player, am I mistaken ? x)

 

A good example of good boss fight would be any bosses from dark souls, they are VERY hard and EXTREMELY annoying most of the time, but they can be defeated with a little practice and patience, one thing i really wish games would do more often would be rewarding players for skill over grinding, again, dark souls is a good example. i'd like to mention castlevania/metroid way of boss fighting, most of them are really powerful and can kill you really easily, but (most) of them have weak points that once known of make the fight much easier, i really dislike this, weakpoints are something good most of the time, but i REALLY dislike the fact that most of them make the boss really easy.


tl;dr griding is bad, skill is good, final fantasy is overrated, weakpoints are cool, but shouldnt make the bosses too easy.

 

Honestly, there is no such thing as an overpowered boss. Underpowered bosses, yes. Overpowered? No. Terraria was way to easy and left me bored because it was sooo easy to farm bosses.

The only overpowered boss is one that you cannot possibly defeat.

Even ones that require multiple people are fine, since it adds a reward to grouping up and fighting with a team.

 

I'm sorry, I'm really not sure what you mean. Can you be more specific, spoiler-tag it maybe?

 

But that's it, what makes these epic boss fights epic is that (ok, Metroid and the boss BEAMING light weak points apart) you learn their weaknesses from your fails - Oh the pleasure of kicking Ornie and Smough's arses after an hour of raging fight ! - The more you try something on them, the more you understand how they actually work. Extending a boss's life artificially may not be a solution, it only results with the fight being longer and getting boring, or worse, frustrating if the boss manages to get all you got before you actually kill him (damn those MH !). IMO a good balance would be technical fight with a powerful yet learnable boss. Besides, nothing can stop them from adding optional bosses now and then !

 

i remember doing all bosses of megaman x without using their weakness(didn`t know at the time) and was really hard and i enjoyed alot, but when i discovered they had a weakness to the other bosses weapons and used it was kinda anti-climatic how easy the fights turned out.

i hope they make the bosses fights megaman like =D

 

IMO boss should not

• have an attack that randomly (by that I mean "bad luck") OHKO player
• have OHKO that can't be predicted by good player fighting it first time/not googled it ( because it is basically "you have to die few times to learn it" instead "if you are very skilled you might kill it on first try"
• have high-threat (high damage, say > 2/3 HP or other very bad effect like long stun) moves so unpredictable they can't be dodged (basically "RNG rolled that you wont be able to avoid this ability and you cant do anything with it"). If ability is randomized it should have at least short visual clue where it will hit so player can prepare
• have abilities that are so RNG that they can hit all at once, historically in games like WoW, random abilities had limits like "if boss uses ability A he wont use B for next 3 seconds", mostly to avoid random bursts that players can't prepare for
• be very "spongy" and repetitive, player geared to boss level should not spend few minutes avoiding same attack sequence and just attack it. EIther randomize it, add phases or some extras like spawning elite adds with random abilities

basically everything to eliminate "i got killed by RNG, maybe next time I get lucky" and maximize "If I'm prepared and very skilled I can take any challenge"

what good boss should do:

• be still at least a bit interesting after player "gets" how to kill it
• vary abilities, either in whole fight, or have phases with different fighting style
• fights should prefer skill over gear (not like in, say, Diablo 3 when its 99% about just having gear good enougth) so skilled player still have chance with sub-par gear
• maybe have "random mini-boss fight generator" ? Generate random big monster, add random number of phases, each phase containing 2-6 different abilities randomly chosen from pool
• rewards comparable to challenge, nothing is more dissapointing to beat boss only to get few useless items, nor boss that drops items that are on lower/same level than items required to kill that bos

 

I disagree, you want good loot? you need to gather up a crew and kick its ass rather than doing it solo

 

I think it means basically unable to solo, even with kickass gear. But that isn't necessarily a bad thing for a secret boss, like Sephiroth or Master G. Even the Dungeon guardian could be counted among those ranks.

 

That is a damned solid list of bullet points to keep in mind for anyone doing encounter/mob design in any game. Hat's off to you.

I'm reasonably certain billing your game as solo-play and multiplayer friendly then flipping the bird to all those people who bought it for solo-play is considered something of a company-ending move among indie outfits.

 

Well I don't mind being taken by surprise by a huge boss from time to time...Assuming that it would only work once ! I feel it's more satisfying than rolling on every enemy like a monster truck because we spend 3 hours grinding health cookies before ><. I think you somehow contradict yourself when you say 'because it is basically "you have to die few times to learn it" instead "if you are very skilled you might kill it on first try" '. IMO skill comes with practice, and practice comes with a bunch of fumbles. If you don't find a bosse's weak spot rapidly, he won't wait to make a blood spot out of you ! And that's what, maybe, is crucial when you face uncommon challengers : you want tension, you want adrenaline, you want to sweat the frak out ! You want to feel like a microbe fighting a white blood cell ! You want blood ! You want bananas !!!... well at least, what you want is a little bit of challenge, and the old codes of videogames make it so that this particular challenge is brought to you mostly by the danger of failure and painful death.

All that apart, I kind of appreciate your main ideas, would make more dynamic and rewarding battles (Borderlands 2's bosses for instance were only...rewarding, when they were in good mood. But again, not the same type of game).

Also, it would be interesting if the precoded bosses would benefit from a personal, specific battle arena with custom structures, but again, maybe too much to ask atm. ^^

 

I believe this was already state to be the case.

 

a boss is overpowered for me, if:

1: They use a new kind of algorithm that let the Boss see what your moves are by scanning your input and create a counterreaction in a fracture of a second so he always can evade like a ninjacat
2: all his weapons beginn with "Atomic"
3: he can regenerate even out of a cell left and the only lavapit must be first digged free through 200 layers of uber-steel.
4: he is a supernova about to explode in 5:00 minutes and the FTL Fix needs 4:59 and you must first kill trizllion minions thats between you and the FTL console.

 

It's overpowered if it kills me!

 

Xan's not actually contradicting himself with those statements, though. Take a second look at it:

What he's saying is that a boss shouldn't have an ability that a player has no way to counteract with an extremely high/instant lethality which cannot be predicted or reacted to without prior knowledge obtained either through outside sources (Google/strategy guides/big brother told you about it/et all) or first being killed by it to know it exists. The "if you are very skilled you might kill it on first try" part comes from the fact that part of a boss battles's difficulty will be predicated on how well you grasp the mechanics its built around, with most good bosses challenging you to think about and use the same mechanics you've been playing with in new or interesting ways and that if you do know those mechanics inside-out you'll maybe be able to use them to turn the boss fight in your favor on your first attempt.

 

I see, yeah well instead of being one shot by it you might want to lose like 60 to 70 % of HP and see that it hurts x)....hm....let's say 40%....of course if the boss is seen charging up the giantLazorofdoom, it's up to the player to realise it could burn...a lot ^^

 

Exactly, the thing is, what XANi's saying is that a boss *should* have that charge up. There's a few out there in the game-land that like to bust out with OHKO's with no tell and no way of knowing beforehand, which is a bad thing.

 

Tell this guy about it :

x)

I guess it cand be explained by the fact that people may like different types of challenges depending on the variety offered by the game's genre. You can't ask everyone to like the same thing, after all.
Personally, I'm not completely against those one hit slashes, but they, as you said, have to be rreeaaaally predictable and correctly avoidable.