Tree of Savior Forum

Make the game difficult

Suggestions Game
#42

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. :skull: 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.

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#43

I read it in korean website when the meeting was going on. developers said their goal is not to make a game that is such a hit. But something that brings back nostalgia and allow new players to get into the game easily. it definitely mentioned something about releasing it to tablet.

#44

Yeah, I found some articles after looking for “mobile release” rather than tablet. Lol sorry, I couldn’t find anything at first so I was confused.

However, I don’t think this means a mobile port of the game - looking at the mockups, the interface just seems ridiculously small, and I don’t see any other way to make it work aside from having incredibly small hotbars covering most of the screen-edges. I feel like there might be some ToS-lite mobile game that’s linked to your account and gives you bonus items.

But yeah, there is no confirmed mobile port of the game, only the rights for a mobile aspect to the game.

#45

Andronicus:
Any plans to release Tree of Savior in consoles? PlayStation4, Xbox etc?

imcGAMES:
Not at the moment but in the future we may developer Tree of Savior for mobile.

Source: http://treeofsaviorgame.com/tos/913/andronicus-lunch-meeting-with-imcgames-business-staffs/

No need to worry!

#46

Demi-fiend is a scrub! Now, really, people struggle so much with MegaTen games because they only experienced really easy jRPGs in the past, so when they play a MegaTen game everything is just so “unforgiving” compared to everything else they experienced before, that this whole “omfg hardest boss ever” thing strats to get traction. For others who actually played older dungeon crawler games, especially Wizardry (which MegaTen draws most of it’s gameplay inspiration from) demi-fiend is a normal secret boss which require obscure strategies/skills to beat (things you wouldn’t use very much otherwise, dungeon crawlers love to do this kinda stuff). Not to say those players are bad, they just get in with the wrong mindset, because they never experienced something like that before.

Now back on topic, I think ToS should at least make bosses more relentless on players. The biggest problem during earlier CBTs is that bosses just went idle out of nowhere during huge amounts of time, and this breaks the mindset the game tries to build. Now, when talking about difficulty in games, this mindset is important. What ToS tries to convey is that you can dodge most attacks by moving around, if you stand still you’re gonna get rekt. That’s basically why in the early game they show bosses’ AoE, so you can dodge it and if you get hit you actually lose a bunch of health (about 1/2 for classes with low maxhp, 1/3 for “tanker” classes, if what we saw in the CBT videos hasn’t changed). This basically sets the mindset that you need to dodge if you want to survive PvE.

But in the earlier betas, as you progress in the game, bosses actually show less agressiveness and bigger idle times, which made us feel like the game was getting easier instead of harder, even when watching gameplay instead of directly playing it. It was deconstructing the idea that you had to constantly move to dodge attacks.

Now, it seems the problem was that the AI bugged out during said tests, and they’re supposed to be fixing it. Let’s hope they’ve fixed it already so we don’t get lv 300 enemies attacking and staying still during 10 seconds after it.

#47

Then give us a better example then Mr. Demi.

For me, Mr. Demi is a jawbreaking masterpiece. He comes just enough life, with tricky and powerful attacks, very dangerous helpers and unusual quirks who are not to unforgiving. What is there that is better then him?

#48

Actually, even Lucifer from Devil Survivor 1 is better designed IMO, and a lot of people can’t beat him without exploiting the recarm loop. The only known, not exploitative strategy that a kinda unexperienced player can use to try and beat him is tyrant-locking. Otherwise, you need to max out all your characters and demons or actually play very smart and attentive to beat him.

Sorry for the offtopic tho ):

#49

I really wouldn’t use this CBT data that Steparu posted for multiple reasons:

  1. He refers to quest bosses for the most part. But storyline/quest bosses are meant to be done by everyone.
  2. At the time, stats had no cap, and players could instantly revive for CBT. This is not the case in the future. Stats will have a cap, and will become %based. So having super high damage, or super high defense/hp is not something that you can easily get anymore.
  3. From the CBT, a lot of players were killed in 1-2 shot by story mode bosses aside from Steparu, and the open world bosses were much more difficult.

I’m not saying I disagree, I still think the difficulty should be upped a little, but we’ve barely only seen 1/3, just barely, pre-all-the-changes, so it’s not really a good time to judge it all.

4 Likes
#50

I agree, I’ve kind of stayed off this topic because we don’t have enough information at the moment to really tell if the game suffers from difficulty issues. The only thing I can say for sure is that the mobs and characters do need somewhat of a speed boost to make the fights more reactive than predictable (a bit more intense too). Also to see smart AI. With so many combinations of classes, the AI will need to be clever to avoid some serious abuse of some form.

Honestly from a personal stand point, I’d like a difficulty level between pre-ren and renewal. Pre ren on ragnarok was a bit too bat **** insane to reasonably assume anyone could max out, however renewal went the opposite route and made it too easy and mundane… Hopefully ToS reaches a nice balance whatever they choose.

(Side note: when I was younger, I held any transcendent I met is such high regard because of how difficult it was to accomplish such a feat. I guess I just miss that feeling). Sorry for the Great Wall of text…

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#51

The dream game would be that not just the bosses be difficult, but the regular monsters not too terrible either.

I mean, I don’t wanna see a pure mindless grindfest. If it makes people wanna use bots then it’s too boring. Optimal PvE would be something that keeps being engaging and exciting.

But at the very least there should be a noticeable difference between how rewarding mindless grinding in “safe” places is and how rewarding engaging strategic party-play is (and even moreso boss battles).

For the latter to even exist, there’d have to be a lot of work put into making monsters unique and interesting. And not “challenging” in the sense that you just need to be overpowered and overequipped enough for them to be easy, but that you need to pay attention to what is happening and have some level of uncertainty to it that keeps it interesting no matter how often you’ve managed to beat it.

I’m probably hoping for too much though…

But hey, at least the huge diversity of skills to switch between should make grinding less stale in that case I guess?

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#52

What I expect from harder bosses is not having to hit a thousand times to kill it, but fighting against an intelligent AI that makes small room for mistakes and uses different strategies against different classes.
It’s like @ZetaGhost said, the fights need to be more reactive than predictable.
I wouldn’t mind if bosses were smart enough to constantly hit you, provide they do a balanced amount of damage (not hit kills), and you could mitigate some of its damage by dodging their attacks.

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#53

A good boss IMO is a boss where :

  • The first time you die or flee with a “OH FK FK FK FK” because their attacks are powerful and hard to predict if you don’t know them
  • After learning their abilities circle you waste them if you do no mistake (Meaning there are no gear or level or “Artificial” threshold, except for hit/dodge/armor calculus, so a level 1 char can’t kill a level 100 monster for instance)
  • When you kill them you burst in joy and are nearly drowned by all the sweat and tears you dropped during the fight. And your hands shake like you drank 15 liters of coffee.
  • You search for the boss’ drops on internet instead of YouPorn when you need to play with yourself.

Hope to fight some bosses like that in ToS (Like saw on TSW or Wildstar and RO ofc)

And from what I understand there are story and “wild” bosses, I don’t care how easy the story bosses are, just want to randomly encounter one of the “wild” bosses while farming on a low level map and ■■■■ my pants off when hearing one of their sounds.

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#54

Bosses need more speed to them. Simple as that. They are too slow.

Party incentives are a must.

Leveling does not necessarily need to take long.
I’d appreciate if they make the monsters more difficult to fight, however.

1 Like
#55

I think it would be interesting if it were still possible to avoid 100% of an opponent’s attacks if you took the appropriate action.

For example, backstepping out of basic attacks, sidestepping projectiles, running out of a spell’s radius etc. as long as you read them perfectly and took the right action you wouldn’t get hit.

And arbitrary things like a guaranteed miss rate depending on level or insurmountable armor just feels annoying. Although totally understandable, from many perspectives.

It would still take the level 1 character an absurdly long time to kill the level 100 monster…but still!

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#56

Well my first draft was something like “So a level 1 char could theorically kill a boss lv 100 but it would take ages, and the guy behind the screen will fall asleep or starve sonner than the boss”, but I thought it was too long x)

Still I completly agree with you, but most of the time armor and dodge values go high up, especially for bosses, so there is a point where stats and level will be a limit, but it has not to be the only and absolute limit.

Yeah that’s absolutely the spirit, done on RO, telegraph system in Wildstar (As long as the tank takes the auto attacks, there is a possibility to never take any damage OR to be totally killed without the boss attacking you direclty).
Well anyhow speed, cast speed, reduced delay before traps explosions reduces delay between two spells are always things that will make a boss harder, and it’s really challenging when there are more deadly than safe sprites on the screen :wink:

#57

I really liked when the ro server started new and you have seen hundreds of novices and then you went down to the anthell and around 30-40 novices attacked the mvp at the same time to kill it, it was just fun

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#58

Yeah level/gear scaling is the worst and should never be in a game. Like in WoW and other games where if something is 10 or more levels higher you just are dead meat. It’s a lazy way of making sure people don’t advance too easily, instead of just making things actually harder. e_e

#59

Well i remember back when ragnarok online first started, a level 40 swordsman could take on Golden Theif Bug and successfully get the MVP. Years later the MVP bosses became alot harder to a point where you needed a high level party.

#60

I would love it if the late game was hard! But sometimes if the early game is super hard too then it just puts you off and it isn’t enjoyable to a truly new player.

#61

Didn’t they already admit they toned the game down to be too easy during that test?

It might still be too easy, though. In RO, difficulty is an interesting topic. You can grind mobs with different styles, like 1 at a time or mobbing; and depending on your technique, you can either take a harder route and do it more efficiently, or do completely mindless killing which is very easy and not creative.

Maybe ToS Is the same? or maybe it’s just hard in end-game?

In any case difficulty is definitely a requirement for a good mmo.

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