improvements to Solar Vanguard battle

[spark spoke]

do any of you genuinely think that what you're seeing right now in the arena is remotely understandable? at any given moment, there are about a dozen light gray rings of death scattered around the arena, and there are blocks flying everywhere. I can't even see the boss half the time because of all of the particle spam. I suggest making less "stuff" happen at any given moment, and I suggest replacing most/all of the particles with models. moving around the arena as Shaman is itself a form of torture thanks to the dozen-plus rings of death

this is not related to my Oceanic Judge post from many months ago because that boss has a saving grace: you can DPS it so hard that it doesn't have time to unleash the water spinners

[zinc dawn]

Yea just don't stand in the circles of fire particles or the glowing sections of the floor

[long warren]

True, solar vanguard royaly sucks

[junior barn]

The zeal of the sun cannot be curbed.
The zeal of the sun cannot be curbed.
Now, you will burn away before me.
That is enough- Fall!
That is enough- Fall!
The zeal of the sun cannot be curbed.
Now, you will burn away before me.
The zeal of the sun cannot be curbed.
Now, you will burn away before me.
Now, you will burn away before me.
That is enough- Fall!

[slim helm]

God's weakest burst class vs health threshold spam bosses

[spark spoke]

also, I seem to take tons of damage out of nowhere in the second phase of the fight. I'm not on any circles of death, and the boss is far away, but ???????????????????? I'm still taking lots of damage

teleport attacks that deal 8,000+ damage instantly, very funny

[daring dagger]

itd be nice to get proper vfx for these attacks

i think this fight may see more major changes in the future once it's updated with the new mob ai systems

[slim helm]

The humble Shadestepper executing a Satsujin Backstab upon entering the fight and looking on in horror as the Solar Vanguard responds by flooding chat with text and spawning 100000 particles

[daring dagger]

the particle spam is rough

[slim helm]

also making sounds rivaling jet engines in volume

[tawny stirrup]

i hear you want more qira sounds after one person dies

[astral shore]

I personally love one shotting it and getting oneshot by undodgeable attacks, shoulda dealt 1 measurement of dps. Let qira fighta be ong

[ionic basalt]

Wow turns out when you don't engage with a boss mechanic it becomes unable to be understandable

Just don't try and one shot it and its manageable

Blocks flying is unnecessary though I agree

"You can kill the boss before it does anything therefore its good" is not a good measurement of boss design imo

Solar vanguard punishes brainless dps and that's fine imo. Maybe it would be better if it was based on hits or damage within a certain time frame instead but that might be worse idk

[rancid dove]

i'd also say the entire doing such high damage (that it's more likely just one shotting) that you can get pulled in to is one of the dumbest designs solar vanguard suffers from

[junior barn]

solar vanguard should have a (rolling dps)/80000 chance to do an attack with stronger attacks at higher thresholds
@wanton pewter thoughts

[rain elm]

Oh boy I sure love really unclear boss mechanics

||(The rings are controlled by how fast you lower the boss’ health)||

[hazy pecan]

So apparently a good way to punish people for trying to DPS him is to clutter the screen with a ton of particles, making it nigh impossible to see what is happening and causing frame drops on low end computers.

I think studios would love this reasoning.

Also bro has a Yukari pfp so they by default know what makes good bullet hell, and this obviously doesn’t.

[daring dagger]

well the particles are a separate issue to the actual boss design

those should be changed to use proper models now that the tech exists

[humble oriole]

This fight was pretty easy for me to understand when I did it, though you could probably guess what I was playing

[ionic basalt]

Nah like all old bosses it's just people not understanding telegraphing. The boss actaully does a pull then a big delay before it does the high damage pull explode combo.

Which is unclear yes but iirc it's the only combo that has a pull then a long wait. You're suppose to just create distance so the multipulls don't target you before the explosions

[ionic basalt]

As I said particles are a seperate issue

Unless you're overlevelled you generally don't even have enough damage to create that much chaos

Though tbh I don't think the health threshold pillars are necessarily needed for the boss the base mob spell combos which are the actaul part of the boss design I really like

[rain elm]

The concept is fine, the execution isn’t

I’ve already talked about this boss’ funny mechanic like a billion times though and most likely he’ll get updated so I won’t spill all of it here again

[ionic basalt]

Yeah sure I can agree with that

I think the execution particlewise is definitely not great, mechanically I find it fine but I can see how people would dislike it

[rain elm]

Nah I meant the part of identifying the mechanic in the first place

If it isn’t directly obvious to the player in-game how the mechanic works without jumping through several assumptions and logical hoops then it’s not a terribly well-designed mechanic

[gritty fern]

i like the fight personally :(

[rain elm]

It’s a cool fight but like a bunch of the Hive fights have flaws in them

[ionic basalt]

Oh yeah absolutely

[rain elm]

Tbh I’m only really focusing specifically on the “mechanics that are not obvious to a first-time player” kind, which the Hive has a couple of

[ionic basalt]

I love it too it's one of my my favourites in the game. I hope they do it justice in the inevitable rework(rip).
Main things I hope they keep is the big explosion spam heavy charge combos since they really get you to have to maneuvre in a specific way. As well as just the way the fight does go between close and far distance pressure with flamethrower and heavy charges.

Honestly a in lore explanation I made for the effect is that you're breaking away the armour that restrains their energy, so having something like that expressed dialoguewise might be helpful

as well as adding like indicators on the healthbar, like have little chunks of rock that break off the healthbar or smth(idk if thats possible)

the hive fights are interesting because they're a mix of the old and new mob systems which means it kinda doesnt mesh well because they can overlap but also has a interesting dichotomy between em

[vernal silo]

Web spell

Do I really need to say more?

“You can’t move now, that’s my attack!”

[rain elm]

I mean mechanical flaws

In the new attacks especially

[vernal silo]

I mean, most work fine?

The problem is really that the hitboxes are insanely unclear, it’s hard to tell wtf is happening and you often will not understand how an attack works after fighting the boss like 6 times…?

They work mechanically, aside from maybe the explosion trail attack in qira’s fight which sometimes just seems to hit even if your path never overlapped and you’re moving super quickly

But even then I might just not understand that attack, since again, none of the attack design genuinely makes any sense here

[rain elm]

The two largest outliers are Psychomancer’s Clones and Solar Vanguard’s smoke rings

The method to trigger both of them (and how exactly they work) are not immediately obvious

[violet thistle]

what

are you okay

[spark spoke]

I like the idea of the fight

it's just that as Shaman (specifically Acolyte), I have to speedrun the fight to some extent because I'm going to die at some point to the "oof ouch owie almost all of my health is gone" combo

(in case anyone is wondering, I eventually won after ~10 attempts. I still couldn't figure out how I was occasionally taking poison-like damage for a few seconds at a time)

[ionic basalt]

Probably flamethrower

It deals dot damage in an aoe around it with a flame sound

Thats only close range though.

Or it was the big fire circles that spawn around the arena passively(new attack)

They cover a quadrant of the arena

With 2 active at once phase 2

Maybe somethin something particles being lowered made it harder to see it something

[slim helm]

flamethrower hitbox is so jank it might be

[ionic basalt]

Just treat flamethrower as a dot explode

Don't try to strafe it

But they're playing shaman so I doubt they're near much so probably fire circles

[rain elm]

https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/262010576295821312/1252909168835432589/tracking.gif?ex=68a4e457&is=68a392d7&hm=7ea838816bec12314bd2aa28a797af1aafeaf125d9fd1d2adc2b9655aa705cc0&

Flamethrower’s basically a 360 aura you can’t circle the mob to avoid it

[gritty fern]

its like one of the only fights where you can actually die lmao

i do agree though if u went into it knowing nothing its probably abysmal

[violet thistle]

i dont think danger quite makes a fight especially dated ones like this

[gritty fern]

idk its fun knowing the mechanics

[ionic basalt]

Yeah absolutely

That's sorta the thing with old fights it's hard to read but once you know how it works its fun to learn and practice each fight

Sort of like a puzzle

[spark spoke]

ye exactly

aside from the particle spam, my complaint arose from not knowing the underlying mechanism (attacks happen at certain health % lost) because it's not obvious at all. also the attack loop not being obvious either

being able to see and understand what's going on from the beginning is why I found The Eye to be so fun as Shaman despite mobility being tough - totem positioning and haul are their own puzzle in that battle, especially with the death laser forcing me to temporarily relocate

[violet thistle]

the difference there is the eye is a good boss

[spark spoke]

Solar Vanguard has a really fun concept, but the legacy design is what unfortunately makes it less good

[vernal silo]

The eye is a very good boss

Can we have threatening wretches and cascading arteries and stalking capillaries back, though

[ionic basalt]

Well yeah the attacks of the older system aren't as understandable but I think it's easier if you understand how the system works

Which is chains of spells typically telegraphed with a starting spell that's unique to that spellchain

That's what I think is better about older system bosses is there's more complexity and variance in spell chains while newer boss design like the eye just have a typical telegraph then single quick attack.

[spark spoke]

why not keep the best of both worlds? new telegraphs + old spell chains

[ionic basalt]

That's what I want

[spark spoke]

yeeeeee

[ionic basalt]

And what I'm hopin to see in the eventually rework

[spark spoke]

I bet that would be really fun

[ionic basalt]

One part about old telegraphs I do like is movement based telegraphing so instead of just a visual read it also pushes you to adapt. One major example is the terra drill boss altar in corkus. All of their combos are telegraphed by a number of charges(which are harmless). The amount of charges marking the combo that will happen after. So you're sorta kept on your toes

[gritty fern]

nobody else other than selvut is that tapped in to old mob spell combos im ngl

he does do it extremely well though

[ionic basalt]

Yeah

The bosses selvut did for the new system are pretty reminiscent of their old designs and a bit of the old system like durum Isles boss