Ok, all thoughts are noted down, thanks. And Iazu, you're never too new to make proposals, as long as they make sense.
So there's a few things I thought of that might make bosses at least more interesting to fight. Not going to go into difficulty yet because a lot of people do seem to be concerned about it potentially harming solofarmers and newer players.
NOTE: These are just small and easy changes that shouldn't need much time to implement, yet could have a decent enough impact to really make bosses feel more like actual bosses.
1) Bosses need more offensive skills/older skills need to be updated.
This has always been my biggest concern when fighting a boss, but these guys rarely do anything other than auto attack. And they attack pretty slow as well, but that's a matter I'll adress further down my post. When they do use a skill, it'll rarely do much either. I think we were all rather impressed when we saw the fearsome terrasaurus king spit a giant fireball for the first time we played this game, only to then find out it does about as much damage as two auto attacks.. Why does it not do more damage/have something like a burn effect? When you see a boss charging up for a skill several seconds, you expect it to actually do something. If kings use high damage/high cooldown/long cast time skills, this also means players will be rewarded for their fast fingers. A quickly timed reactionary stun/sleep/dmg reduction buff/heal to prevent yourself from dying would reward those who are actively paying attention and punish those who are semi-afk.
And when it comes to skills, bosses need more delayed targetted AOE's. The only dungeon boss I like doing is the SOD one. Why? At least the fight is interesting (if you don't lure him like a sissy) when you're kiting him around the map, dodging the swords he spawns that do massive AOE damage. Why is he the only boss that has such a skill? You've already shown you can add such a mechanic, if other bosses could have some of these fighting them would feel a lot more interactive. Imagine the desert scavenger spawning pillars of erupting sand, or small sandstorm areas that do consistent damage, etc. Especially the end level bosses (sikuku ruins and whole of orlo) should have more skills, that lower level kings don't have much going for them is a given.
2) Bosses need to have an additional damage buff/passive.
I think we've all seen it before, but you've seen those godly knights that take pretty much no damage from any PVM mob in the game. When the attack doesn't miss or gets blocked, it'll do 5 damage. Why is this? The problem is how damage amplification/reduction work in this game. If you've ever played a knight, you'll know that when you use your 50% dmg reduction buff, you generally won't reduce the damage by 50%, but sometimes less, and sometimes even more. This is because damage reduction stacks together with PVM/PVP amplifiers. For the earlier stages of the game, this doesn't really matter, but come end game, it ends up quite troublesome. I don't know the formula for damage amplification/reduction completely, but it seems that when a knight has a full brave/luna set with their 50% dmg reduction buff on, they'll have 100% dmg reduction in PVM, which means facing any mob becomes a walk in the park, because no matter how much AP this mob has, no matter whether he does physical or magic damage, you will reduce it to zero (or five, since this is the lowest possible damage number in game).
To counteract this, boss monsters especially should have an additional damage buff. The reason being that amplification counteracts stacking reduction. If a boss had maybe, 20% additional damage, it would counteract the 100% and lower it. Knights would still reduce a lot of damage, but not become completely immune anymore.
3) Bosses need to spawn more minions.
This one has always irked me a lot, but a lot of bosses in the game seem to be alone. They're supposed to be the rulers, the kings of their kind, so why do they never spawn any minions to fight for them? The only ones that I know do spawn any are the guardian tree and the aqua/krawfy king. More bosses should spawn minions.
4) Bosses need more critical chance/rating.
Another small thing that could be added, but bosses (mobs in general) have incredibly low crit chance. In fact, so low that even my 10sen/20 crit rate cleric NEVER takes any crits from the majority of monsters. Why is it like this? I don't mind if you take some of their raw AP away for this, but bosses need more crit rate.
5) Bosses need more attack speed.
This is something that I'd really like to see, but currently bosses (and most mobs in general) attack very slow. This makes their attack patterns very telegraphed, and you don't have to worry about suddenly taking another auto attack that could kill you if you're not paying attention.
6) Bosses need more strong buffs/debilitating debuffs.
Make dispell and purify actually feel worth their cost in PVM! Right now a monster rarely ever buffs himself, and when he does, it's hardly anything to speak of. Most of us here have faced the terrasaurus king before and will know just how oh so powerful he gets when he uses his ap/def buff. He now hits for 2200 instead of 2000 and you hit 1900 instead of 2000. Very impressive indeed... Boss monsters should have short duration high impact buffs given to them, windows of short power in which you think "this really is a boss, better be careful when he has that up".
Debuffs are even worse. Aside from an occasional slow (which doesn't affect you at all since you're standing still, facetanking the giant minion anyway), and some monsters having a small damage over time, both of which don't make you feel the need to purify, there seem to be no debuffs in this game used by monsters. The only exceptions are some AOE stunspammers (Kera, bone spider, ulverick, moss ent) and the AOE mute/bleed from the bosses in HoO, neither of which you can do anything about. Why are there no big defense/mdefense downs (like dual raiders PVP circlebreak and mages aural pierce)? Where are the strong attack speed/movement speed slows that actually feel debilitating? High damage-over-times? Purify is only really used in PvP right now cause it doesn't feel like you need it in any PVM situation.
The reason these changes are so simple is because the ROSE game engine is rather old/outdated and I don't know if any newer game mechanics can be implemented without it potentially causing trouble. The server isn't very stable as it is. Thus I decided to make use of whatever is currently available in game and tweaked it around a bit.
PS: I suck at writing/proofreading.
Edited by jerremy, 23 September 2014 - 03:42 AM.
