The boss is never hard. It’s just tedious.
1 Like
@riwerv1: As far as I’m concerned, the current state of boss fights is that they’re just glorified normal monsters. The game’s frequency of them kind of signifies that, especially with them being trivial in every way but time investment to deal with. “Boss fights are supposed to last long” is somewhat of an ignorant thing to say. The silly minibosses in RO didn’t last long at all; to be real honest, no boss in RO lasted very long unless it was MVP monsters, which not only were endgame material, they were also optional, only hunted for their item drops. And for that, I’m okay with being forced to group with other players to deal with them. It’s endgame and I’d expect that.
But for Tree of Savior’s boss fights, that’re required to progress the plot and show up in an alarming frequency and have underwhelming drop tables, exp rewards, and are trivial to beat in every way but time investment? It’s garbage. I should not be having to spend more than five minutes on bosses in this current state, because they’re not boss-like enough to warrant that time investment. Just calling it a boss doesn’t make it a boss; it better have a damn good reason for it taking that amount of time and currently Tree of Savior’s bosses don’t.
@shakeilhe: It’s not about catering to solo players. It’s about good game design. Tree of Savior’s boss fights are really badly designed in every way. There’s functionally no reward for beating a boss right now except you get to continue to progress the plot, which is silly given the frequency of them. The ‘reward’ of beating a boss by sitting there for 15 minutes shooting the boss on some classes is not a reward. There’s no gratification, there’s no ‘yes I did it! I feel awesome!’, there’s definitely no good item drops or exp rewards, there’s nothing except a mindless slog right now unless you’re playing something like Highlander that for some reason gets free passes.
Even if the game is designed to force players to group up (which by the way is a pretty crap design for earlygame; this is something I should have to look into doing for endgame content, not for level 50-ish content; early on players should be more enamored with exploring the world and enjoying the game’s visuals, sound, and plot, not having to worry about when the next boss is so they can find people to wail on the sponge with them), it’s not like grouping up suddenly makes bosses any less obnoxious. The bosses in Tree of Savior, outside of like two exceptions, are not bosses. They don’t act like bosses, they don’t reward like bosses, they don’t have anything in common with actual boss fights. They’re just giant uninteresting HP sponges.
And that’s really bad design and forcing players to party up to deal with it is ignoring the problem.
2 Likes
You’re “sure” others agree? lol
I, for one, do not.
There is a very clear pattern for bosses. Lower threat -> higher hp/ defense
Higher threat (capable of oneshot / consecutive twoshot kills) -> relatively lower hp.
I’d prefer seeing more of the latter type, but if you’re having trouble with bosses, either get a party, buy weapons off the Market, adjust your build, stop trying to rely heavily on Basic Attacks (even as a swordsman), and make use of type weaknesses.
If anything, most of these bosses still need to be turned up another notch with rewards increased in proportion.
I used a highlander as well. I’m going to assume you are talking about Catar Stroke since that is the one that finishes those early bosses quickly.
However, many earlier bosses have 2 problems unrelated to the skill itself.
-
They are weak to Strike type, which gives Catar’s massive damage an even bigger boost.
-
They don’t actively punish characters for standing right next to them and charging up a skill.
The latter is the main problem here. A charge up skill should do large amounts of damage. Its the enemies that need to be able to take advantage of it.
@ESeTyRC: I’d argue the first point is just as much of a problem as the second one, although for different reasons. The fact that Swordsmen tend to get to abuse the weaknesses results in them getting a lot of extra damage that other primary damage classes don’t get to utilize. Archers, for example, despite being listed as pierce-type damage on most of their stuff including their autoattacks, actually deal untyped damage, which results in a big loss of damage that would otherwise put them relatively on par with their swordsmen counterparts.
I’m not sure if that’s a bug or if that’s intentional design; looking at the design for Rangers though I’m inclined to think it’s intentional, but I want to believe otherwise.
There are a number of different opinions. But at the end of the day, it depends on what character you play as. Ranger and wizard are having difficulties with quests and survivability while swordsmen are finding it balanced/too easy.
That might be where the disagreement lies.
Just killed a lv 87 boss with my Priest lv 75 without any problem. I don’t have any decent dps and I’m a casual player so I think that the bosses are fine, and the battles can be very entertaining. The problem is, as many people already said, their AI and also a lot of bugs.
When I was leveling almost half of the bosses had some kind of bug and/or a way to exploit it. Some of them did nothing, while in other cases I could “float” in the air above them and just attack without retaliation. (These were mostly around lv 50 though, I haven’t find any serious bug lately)
ever considered lag making them not threatening at all? sometimes it stucks there =,= u guys need to think other possibilities
no, i meant the boss standing there doing nothing, or just walking around
I completely agree with you. The fight is too damn long without any satisfaction for defeating them. I can stand one or two final bosses being time consuming, but for every few quest? It just get repetitive and tedious.
Also, it’s much tiring for wizard and archer class to fight the boss because they have to constantly avoid damage by circling, compared to cleric and swordsman class that can almost tank the boss for the whole duration.
1 Like
OP should play barbie online.
The reward is the items you get. I’m not sure I understand what you want out of boss fights. Do you want a blowjob and a well-done every time you fight one? And this is not a themepark style game where you’re supposed to solo til cap and then raid for gear in the same dungeon until an expansion. The game wants you to party early on so that you have to interact with other players in a positive manner. Though you can still solo everything pretty easily depending on class, only like a c2/3 wiz would have problems.
Now making it worth re-fighting a story boss you already fought with potential drops to encourage helping people more would be an improvement.
@cronolvl99: Then the drop tables should be revisited, because these item drops suck for most classes. A card and a club is not a reward for an Archer, and even if it was, it’s not like it’s an Iron Bow or something that’ll actually help the Archer.
What do you mean you don’t understand what I want out of boss fights? I just want bosses to be interesting to fight and actually be worthy of boss status. Right now they’re basically glorified normal monsters with a ton of HP, and their attacks, drop tables, and exp tables proves that.
Forcing players to party up does not fix the fact that bosses are garbage right now in every single way. I don’t know why I keep having to say this, but partying is not the solution.
Edit: Also, ‘interact in a positive manner’ got me laughing. All it really does is show you how lopsided the class balance is right now, honestly. Besides, most of you are somewhat insufferable in-game, like in most MMOs. This is more because I’m antisocial and introverted to a fault, though, and not because a lot of you are super trash people.
tbh not much ppl agree with you…not sure why u want to make boss easier when its already easy…kill boss lvl90 with lvl78…and kill boss lvl 96 with lvl80 without so much problem…i wish they are properly scale with their lvl…this is far to easy even no skill player can play
The drops aren’t tailored to your class. If you get something you can’t use go sell it to buy something you can use or buy an attribute upgrade. It’s almost like this is an MMORPG or something.
That’s kind of what bosses are. We aren’t playing monster hunter or dark souls and your level 30 story boss is not the frozen Lich king or Bahamut raid tier difficulty and you shouldn’t expect it. Bosses get harder as you advance, even the same bosses you fight several times get new moves and more aggressive as you level up. Not to mention world bosses.
You don’t have to party up for a boss, but if you are a low damage class or building yourself for support you should kind of expect to look for a party to do stuff. If you want it to go faster you find a party. You are also contradicting yourself by saying bosses are too easy but also take too long at the same time and require a party. Which is it?
You can be lord autism all you want, the game does try to point people towards grouping up though. It’s not the game’s fault that half the population are Barbarians running around one shotting rooms without regard to who was in there or archers/tanky melees putting a key on their Z button/kneeling shot and going afk. There is huge class balance issues, but the root problem is always going to be the player behind the class more than anything else.
On my Cleric I use both sword and hammer. Sword is most of the time more effective than my hammer (even if my hammer has better physical damages). So when my hammer does +50% on a boss which has a big armor, it does only +10/+20 damages. And if I’m against a really weak enemy I can have +100/+200 damages (never on bosses). IMC games has to manage damages values for sure.
ps : I’m using Deprotected Zone lvl 10.
@cronolvl99: And I’m saying that the game trying to encourage me to do that so early in the game is poor design. The drops aren’t tailored to my class, sure, but even if they were, chances are they’d be garbage anyways. It’s almost like the tables aren’t worth the time investment, especially when the game starts tossing boss fight after boss fight after boss fight at you. I don’t mind getting something not tailored for my class, but I do mind when I get garbage from a fight early on in the game that doesn’t help anybody, and I definitely mind when I spend a huge amount of time just circling around the boss just to get rewarded with… functionally nothing. It’s not worth the time investment and attempting to say it’s fine because this is an MMO is demonstrating a complete lack of game design fundamentals. This isn’t 2000, and even if it was, other games from 2000 did this better.
I’m not contradicting myself by saying that bosses are too easy and take too long to do. Large amounts of HP does not make a difficult boss, Crono. Especially when 95% of the boss’s attacks seem to be shared patterns across most bosses in general, so there’s a general lack of variety in how you have to play. Partying up does not fix this problem, and suggesting it does is merely attempting to sweep it under the rug.
Where did this notion that time required was a correlation to difficulty come from, anyways? It’s been a farce for the longest time and I don’t know why people accept it. If I’m at no risk of dying, it doesn’t matter how long the boss fight is; it’s just not a hard boss period. And that’s every boss fight in the game right now. Don’t force me to spend an unacceptable amount of time on something that isn’t even going to demand more than 5% of my attention, seriously.
Let me pose an analogy, actually: Say there’s a boss fight who has 100 HP and all you have to do to beat it is not stand in front of it. Boss is too easy, right? Should be, piece of cake. Now let’s add three zeroes to the end of that boss’s HP so it becomes 100,000 HP, but the fight otherwise stays the same. Does the fight get harder, or does it just get more time-consuming?
Like seriously, I grew up on Ragnarok Online and Phantasy Star Online and neither of those games had this overarching problem. Why is it Tree of Savior does?
Early game drops outside of the vubbe fighter gloves are all common tier anyway, I don’t know what the complaint is. You don’t start decking out in blues and such until 80+ and most purples/reds are from world bosses.
You aren’t dying to early bosses because they are early bosses. The fact that not standing in front is the key to success is clearly pointing that out as even by 50 most bosses start using various circular AoEs around themselves and other attacks that include that. Sure, they’re telegraphed so that you can dodge them but it would be poor game design to constantly force unavoidable damage on the player as well. The fact that you can dodge all or most of the attacks is good design. This isn’t maplestory where you chug a pot every second, or WoW/FFXIV where you constantly take unavoidable raid damage and need a healer spamming to keep the party alive. Bosses that can’t hurt you don’t need to go away in 10 seconds either. They don’t need to be a 30 minute slog either but no boss takes more than 5 minutes unless you’re a full support or something. Really though what level did you even get to though? I either missed it or you have not said.
RO had a huge problem with class balance disparity and a mixture of stupidly OP and woefully underpowered classes. Were champ or SinX well designed classes? No, they were broken and stupid where one could one shot pretty much any boss in the game and the other just had to right click and wait for it to die. RO also had a ton of unavoidable damage which is bad design. And you may as well not try and MVP on anything but those because your minutes of spamming grand cross and grape juice or poking with your pike etc on other classes can be invalidated as soon as a champ walks by and uses asura strike.
PSO is the definition of HP sponges and outside of Dark Falz final form, Olga Flow and the episode 4 guy whose name I don’t even remember most bosses there were also piss easy. It was also an extremely janky and slow game where even the strongest power gaming looks pretty boring or turns everything into ohko or near rooms with Gene flow’s sword or Heavenstriker spam.
Those are not good examples of good game design. I too have enjoyed many years of the games, but at no point will I ever say any newly made game needs gameplay anything like what they had. World design, lore, music, etc yeah. Gameplay and especially bosses hell no. And I’m also not saying ToS bosses are perfect, but I am saying they get harder as you go and there’s no need for story bosses to be some super difficult thing so early in the game.
@cronolvl99: I don’t think they’re good examples of modern game design, and if I wanted to partake in game design like that I’d just go play them because at least they have nostalgia. That kind of design doesn’t belong in Tree of Savior and that’s why I’m upset that it does. This is 2015, things should be more involved from the get-go, and failing that, they shouldn’t eat up so much time.
As for where I got to, level 60 ranger is the highest I have right now. Ranger isn’t a support class, but its damage is seemingly nonexistent and is relegated to just playing a left click class without a good left click, and that’s why boss fights tend to take so long on it. Stuff in Gate Route and onwards was taking 15-20 minutes while simultaneously not being a threat, and it’s not like my gear was particularly bad. Sure, I don’t have an Iron Bow on that character, but I am using a level 40 +5 bow so it should be able to do decent damage, especially given that I am playing, in theory, a damage class.
RO had a huge problem with class balance, sure, but at least that class balance didn’t really show itself that much because every class served a function, even in the true endgame of War of Emperium. I would know, I played Gunslinger at endgame and while I was severely gimped I was still competent and functional and credit to the team. Sure you wanted certain classes over others, but everyone was useful. As far as MVPs go, the same applied, but you were somewhat punished for attempting to do something unorthodox like a damage Crusader over something more conventional.
As for PSO, I get more an HP sponge vibe from ToS’s bosses than I did from anything PSO had. Sure PSO’s bosses were not particularly hard, but most of them also did not take too much time to do solo unless you were playing Hunter, and even then that was more because Hunter’s gameplay was atrocious and clunky and not because they lacked damage.
Honestly I don’t expect to be at risk of dying early on, but I do expect for things to be stimulating enough to hold my interest the first time around, and failing that, to not take a ridiculous amount of time. I feel Tree of Savior fails on both of those accounts for a large number of classes. As I said, this is 2015, not 2000, so why do we have 2000-era gameplay design in a 2015 game?