#The Lack of Introduction to the Headless Horseman

1 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

round charm
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Currently the other instanced bosses, Azacor and Gooberspore, have quests that basically introduce the players to the boss itself. Why can't Headless Horseman have one?

I'd imagine the quest would go as follows:

  • The quest can only be started after gray completion
  • You can talk to the Sierhaven NPC to further investigate into the story behind the Valley of Forgotten Pharoahs, teasing Hekawt's arrival in the process.
  • Through this players would have to find quest items that once were treasured in that city, which leads the players to face the Headless Horseman through this search.

The existence of the Headless Horseman itself is confusing without further reading into the lore of this boss. This would pose questions such as

  1. "Why is he here?"
  2. "What does this weird glowing spirit have to do with anything?"
  3. "Is he a Halloween boss?"

For where this boss is currently, he's very out of place and seems more like an event boss like the Snow Spirit. Writing him as the result of some tomfoolery in an ancient Ishnir civilization and leaving it at that, I feel like, contradicts the quality of Monumenta's stellar story telling. For comparison:

Azacor

  • Players hear about this demon's name through further questing and exploring the Azzy Grove.
  • There are multiple quests that have Azacor involved, namely Inner Demons and Study in Crimson.
  • There's an entire area of Region 1 dedicated to Azacor himself.

Godspore

  • Exploring the Wolfswood area of Region 3 introduces players to multiple POIs that revolve around the mushroom people.
  • Quests with Mycelian NPCs mention Godspore and further questing shows how this giant mushroom got its power.
  • The Godspore Cutting item allows players to hear what smolspore has to say about some certain things like its interaction with Hekawt and what it knows about the eternal lich.

And then you have Horseman

  • I swim
  • Water changes
  • Cool island
  • Oh shit a glowing spirit
  • Oh shit there's a boss here?
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steady dagger
round charm
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I like how the other instanced bosses have lore that isn't difficult to understand and is explicitly given to the player through quests. Heck, even Snow Spirit has that kind of storytelling. But Horseman doesn't...

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Unless there's been an update to Horseman that I don't know about, I feel like Horseman could use a retcon

slender ibex
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I feel like a "mini" horseman revamp could be cool, adding a new quest and rebalancing him around mid game would be good. I feel like even as an endgame fully infused player he can kick my teeth in with a blink of an eye sometimes and considering you can gain entry to horseman as soon as you enter R2 afaik, that's a worrying balance point imo

round charm
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I'd personally also like a revamp to horseman, fuck it, maybe retheme him too. He's too calender event-centered (Halloween)

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Just like Snow Spirit the difference is that his lore is obscure and he's not even from a Halloween event I think

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Like how about some NPCs that we already know of like Sierhaven to actually help create a key to fighting horseman.

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Or better yet, double down on being event-centered and start having halloween-themed mats during October. Like the christmas event, that way Boris isn't the only one hogging the creepers delights

hearty geyser
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Honestly this sequence seems fun to me. I personally don’t think everything needs a quest to bring you to it.

Maybe some hints that there’s something out their in the northern ocean? to help you find it on your own which feels cooler.

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ocean sundial
round charm
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him being there doesnt make sense to the player who actually pays attention to the story

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it doesnt seem consistent

hearty geyser
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I had no qualms with pulling up to horseman on my playthrough and I was being pretty story conscious. He seemd to be his own self contained thing and doesn’t need to tie into the main shaboo

hearty geyser
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If I understood horseman correct, and do correct me if I’m wrong, he’s pretty self contained as is

round charm
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which is why i suggested a quest for him

round charm
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lore that i myself havent even found in game

round charm
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imagine a world boss with no introduction

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the depths without a quest

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or even strikes like mist and sr

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mist itself didnt have a quest before until one for it was made more than a year later

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who's to say the same wont apply for horseman

hearty geyser
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its odd and inconsistent that it doesn’t have one, yes, but I don’t think it’s necessary a bad thing

round charm
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in the future*

ivory crown
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Had an idea for one sitting around awhile ago but it was just never a big priority for me tbh

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Horseman has lore on the island itself after all

unreal spoke
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yep i saw this and was gonna say

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there’s been ideas

radiant berry
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Add an lore book that can only spawn at the tov cache under hh arena

unreal spoke
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it would just be adding some POIs around the island

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get a material in each poi, etc

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probably would also be lore books in the pois

ivory crown
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That was one concept we had, was going to be a build shard project

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Turn Horseman into an azzy style key with some mini-PoIs to clear to get components

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Another involved the Horseman backstory and the "specter of death" that hangs over the island

unreal spoke
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a quest could definitely happen, new pois are unlikely

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For where this boss is currently, he's very out of place and seems more like an event boss like the Snow Spirit. Writing him as the result of some tomfoolery in an ancient Ishnir civilization and leaving it at that, I feel like, contradicts the quality of Monumenta's stellar story telling.

I mean ultimately, it pretty much is an event boss. Also, I believe the lore between using grey to link the souls of soldiers and their horses already existed in grey already existed before the horseman was added, so it's not really something that was made up for horseman lore

sullen kernel
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Shifting, but yes it did pre-date Horseman

unreal spoke
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oh right yeah hekawt books

radiant berry
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Event boss darkkermit now we lower key price and legacy all item and only left cosmetic

unreal spoke
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i've got some ideas now to tie things together and expand the overall lore of the horsemen

radiant berry
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Will it connect that the hek summon elite is hh but separate to 4

unreal spoke
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for sure

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probably add a horseman miniboss/elite to gray as well

slender ibex
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as a last ditch effort as the last summoner falls it manages to conjure/call upon the final horseman of malakut with the remains of its power

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(it spawns in front of the pyramid and must be defeated to then open the way forward inside)

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I don't think it would be a good replacement for the trio elite mini final boss as the platform is so absurdly small for a horseman enemy

unreal spoke
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definitely wouldnt be at the end yeah

round charm
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So the plans are to introduce the horseman-type enemy in Gray, add POIs around the Horseman Island and let horseman have an azzy-style key.

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And apparently this was supposed to be a build-shard project too

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I was hoping for the Horseman Island to get bigger actually. I'd imagine it to be a tall mountain with a plateau at the top where the arena would be, and on the sides of the mountain would be POIs to clear. Some of the POIs could be underground or boats on the water. The horseman arena could also be converted into an azzy-style instanced boss where there's a lobby and an observer key bot but I have no clue what the server implications are for that.

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I'd probably just take the current Azzy Lobby and re-theme it to horseman

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Not sure if I still have bshard access but I'd love to work on the builds and POIs for this

unreal spoke
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there was a little progress

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I remember a giant lilypad was built, and I wanna say lightnest built a really small island

unreal spoke
unreal spoke
round charm
unreal spoke
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being that the whole thing is a eggnog fueled hallucination

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its not like horseman has less story than that right now tbh

round charm
unreal spoke
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what do you think needs to be spelled out or explained

round charm
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how horseman got there in the first place, some lore books or NPCs you can interact with that'll tell you what they know about the horseman. perhaps the pharoahs or sierhaven npc.

currently the glowing spirit just says that horseman killed hundreds of its kind and thats about it

unreal spoke
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i gotta look at its dialogue again, i think it does say enough to give a pretty good idea upon a lot of things

round charm
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that's not alot to go off on considering most players just discover horseman arena, read that dialogue and just dont ask what the fuck the horseman is from

frank marlin
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imho there doesnt need to be 5 novels worth of lore for a boss that feels like a 1 time halloween event like horsey

round charm
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thats the thing, horsemen continues to be inconsistent compared with the other instanced bosses

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the boss already has lore its just not explicit and obvious like the other bosses

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azacor got sort of a revamp with the new lobby and being move to the new instancing system and who's to say horsey shouldnt get one as well?

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before it used to be mist and horsey with 0 player introduction until mist finally got a quest

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and the devs did say that horsey was talked about already

round charm
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alright so i read the chronicles of hekawt and in one of the books it just mentions soldiers' souls being tied to their horses

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while i get the connection to horseman, what isnt obvious to the player is how the fuck horseman got to where he is rn

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nor his real name but nobody rlly cares about horsey's name

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i'd assume it would be al malakut-ish like kuhrma or tahsuri

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lore books to horsey pois that tie this chronicle to horseman would probably be great but im all for explicit storytelling

royal rune
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We have the horse's name

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It's daredevil I think

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And the rider wouldn't have an Ishniran name unless the people on the island were from Al Malakut since the horse seemingly lost its rider at some point before showing up on the island

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Then everyone who tried to get on the horse died except for Horseman who for whatever reason survived and reconnected the death ritual between the rider and the horse

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It sounds like a bunch of lies but that's how I understood the lore

round charm
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also with how people discover horseman first before stepping into shifting, the lore books in there should've been introduced before players gain access to horseman

ivory crown
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I don’t think players would need to know the backstory of horsemen to be able to fight this one. He doesn’t do a lore check on you before he’s willing to engage lol

round charm
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Yeah then again it's feigns inconsistency with the other instanced bosses

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rn when you're at a part of progression where you start to evaluate the journey you took in monumenta along with the complexity and depth of different aspects of the game, horseman looks like a dev made the boss, built the island, and placed him there.

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there's nothing captivating with horsey compared to the other bosses

upper tundra
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i mean, the boss is very much an event boss

round charm
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So currently the concerns for Horseman are:

  • TKTom: "Considering you can access horseman as soon as you enter R2, that's a worrying balance point imo"
  • Horsey can be perceived as a calendar-event type boss, despite him not coming from anything Halloween related.
  • Horsey does NOT have a quest that gives a proper introduction to players.
  • Horsey lore is very misplaced, with one book in shifting explaining what this boss could've come from whereas new R2 players do not even immediate access to shifting for them to have an idea of what horsey's origins are
  • Horseman should be balanced to mid-game or post-shifting
  • Horsey boss mechanics are jank as fuck, not upto standard with the other instanced bosses.
  • Horsey's reasons for being at the island isn't explicitly mentioned to players. (I'm not even sure if there's even a lore book that explains horseman's arrival to the island)
  • Glowing spirit at horseman island talks about hundreds of his people being slain, but that's about it?
upper tundra
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he was from a halloween related thing, he was the event boss of a halloween event back in the days of r2 release i think

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if my recollection of devlore is right it was a quick boss fight spun up ahead of the event and it's just stayed open since

round charm
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That's odd, his lore isn't even halloween related. The trickster challenge was more halloweeny to me

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The boss itself is halloween themed but there's no mentions of the spirit of halloween

upper tundra
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like i said, i don't think he was spun up with a giant path of lore to discover, it was very much just made and released if i recall correctly

round charm
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so i was actually right, "horseman looks like a dev made the boss, built the island, and placed him there" to add, rather quickly

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i still think, acknowledging current monumenta standards in terms of content, he's very outdated and could use a revamp.

upper tundra
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i mean, one of the people who were around at the time can speak with more certainty, but that's what i've heard on it

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everything could use a revamp to meet some new level of standards, but revamping everything to meet new standards means we never release new things again

round charm
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Wasn't it supposed to be a build-shard project?

upper tundra
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if it's not actively a problem/hindrance and it's doing pretty well, it seems fine to me

round charm
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alot of the work could be placed on the builders right?

round charm
upper tundra
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wasn't what supposed to be a build shard project? a lot of r2 stuff was back in the day (many pois), but that model is long dead for larger form stuff, and build shard would only be able to make the build side of things

round charm
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builders themselves can also willingly create quests right?

upper tundra
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there's always inconsistency, but that's the nature when the devs who make the things have changed both in terms of people learning more and just completely new people

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they can try, but if someone's going to actually try and make a lore path for horseman they've gotta run that by the lore team in the end, and i don't think the last attempt at a horseman questline worked out

round charm
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didn't azacor get a refresh? i dont see how horsey doesn't deserve one.

upper tundra
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azacor got arena and mech refreshes because azacor had become such a problem to work with that it was unfeasible to ever edit the thing or fix it

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horseman isn't a pile of tech debt waiting to explode anymore

round charm
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that is of course if a dev decides to try and work on bringing horseman upto standards, right?

upper tundra
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if a dev decides to change it and gets it proposed and going then ti'll happen, but that's largely up to them, and leaving it up to them tends to make it more realistic that it can happen since there's more creative freedom to that

round charm
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with star point being close to finished, and that one build shard project still in the process, the chances of a dev spearheading a horseman rework is slim but i remain hopeful

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the boss itself isnt enjoyable, and the horseman experience is rather short and forgettable

upper tundra
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can't say i'm aware of all projects, but star point seems completed as it stands beyond some stuff on the roadmap that isn't exclusive to it

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but there's further projects going on, as is the nature of getting past star point

round charm
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ive heard of such projects, im also looking forward to it. yet even so, r1 remained unfinished until all that remains was released when r3's star point was already out. i understand the focus is currently on r3 but with r2 also being unfinished the idea of a horseman rework could still be on the horizon

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i created this forum post purely to spread awareness of the problems with this horsey's current quality in terms of progression, bossfight and lore

sullen kernel
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I'm halfway tempted to close the thread out, because I feel like you've long since made your point clear and the past ~200 messages in this channel have just been circling around the same thing

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Is there anything else that really needs to be said