I fear many MMO’s have been going the wrong route with bosses, they always make me feel linear and underachieving when I manage to kill the ones considered hardest. Working to get enough DPS & gear so you are strong enough to kill every single thing in the game all by yourself is starting to become an annoying trope. Its alright making them faster & scarier, but increasing the HP a lot ? Doesn’t that just force everyone to aim for whatever gets you highest DPS and make players unable to kill certain bosses despite their skill/effort/teamwork/experience without high DPS players. Similar to just making them immune to stuns & debuffs, that also takes a way a huge part of the fun and makes many skills & combos non viable. Instead of making the game harder, it just makes players indistinguishable, using the same fighting patterns and methods for every boss * cough cough, bunny hop attacking and nothing else *
Can’t a MMO have a % chance for everything in the fight, nothing’s guaranteed? Skills that stun or debuff should always be able to fail on bosses, a 40% - 80% chance should be the cap so they don’t unintentionally stop use of half the skills to increase difficulty and end up making all boss fights feel repetitive & easy after players find a method to win and copy them. Its nice to have different bosses & monsters resistant to certain things though, they have to be diverse as possible and elemental or something resistant helps that. I just want the majority of the game to be viable even if not practical.
Instead of making some end game boss impossible for high evasion characters to auto dodge just give them a % more chance to hit, or a super tanky character to block and survive huge skills like from a normal monster, just give them a good chance to ignore blocks and a % of defense on hits.
A power up, state of buff for some extra difficulty can start as soon as bosses hit 40% health, has a 20% to activate every hit after. They get a little stat boost, become less idle, faster, and mainly target the player’s doing the most damage or trouble. At the last 5% health, with nothing else to lose they use all their energy & will power, skills have no cool down, a huge all stat boost and instant casting. Okay that can just apply to certain bosses with a “Desperation” mod, and every boss can have its own creative mod or thing that boost difficultly. With mods under the name, you have to actually pay attention to the fight and take everything that it seriously, no one can blame them if there’s a poison till death mechanic on some condition, easy to avoid if you read the mod.
I also am starting to think 1 random constant changing debuff to all aggressors. Every boss can have different ones, but some good ones I can think of include anti jumping, hitting, using a skill, using a pot, going out of the bosses highest AoE skill range, these can have a 60% to work so it won’t be annoying and limiting. Who knows, that may be all the game really needs.
Probably shouldn’t want to overthink it though, the game hasn’t been released yet. The difficulty we’ve seen could be unintentional, we haven’t even had an OBT. The challenge could come from something we haven’t seen yet outside of open world PvE, an arena or dungeon type of thing.