EoC Discussion

[Quyneax]

Hard bosses is nothing if slayer monsters keep being so easy. All slayer monsters should be on par with glacors at 90+ slayer.

 

Imagine what would happen if all dark beasts had 100% adrenaline to start with, and would use Wild Magic when attacked, followed by Concentrated Blast, then they move in to melee using Barge and move straight to ult. In melee range, they use melee and open Slaughter > Kick > Sever, then go for the ult, which can be something that doesn't exist yet (cause Jagex doesn't like filling out ability tiers any more than they like filling out equipment tiers), but Massacre would work as well. All this being at t85+ accuracy of course, it's a level 90 slayer monster. That would make slayer interesting :).

 

Starting at 100% adrenaline is a huge, huge favour to monsters because they can die, respawn and have full adrenaline, which typically is not a very good idea for players.

 

Also, it'd be awesome to see someone run into a room full of mutated jadinko males and half a dozen of them aggro and immediately use Berserk > adrenaline fruit (of course jadinkos have adrenaline fruits, who doesn't these days?) and straight to Destroy or something.

 

And I imagine creatures like terror dogs and hellhounds hunt in packs, one of them will use Destroy on you, and when that stun wears off, the next one will use it. Funtimes :D.

 

Abyssal demons would make use of Barge and Escape (depending on what style you're using) while hybriding melee/mage, using Resonance and Rejuvinate as well. Abyss have always been a bit high-def, would be nice to make them resistant again. Warped tortoises should probably have Resonance on a 10 second cooldown or something :P.

 

Skeletal wyverns... so many fun things to do with these. They used to be the toughest slayer monster around (tougher than black dragons for sure, probably also miths), and they can get a crazy suite of abilities for extrasuperfuntimes :D. Maybe they have Debilitate, Immortality, Reflect, Revenge etc.? combined with Decimate for the lovely bonus damage vs. shield.

 

Obviously that's just examples, monsters also need food/healing (vampires don't even use Vampirism :(), the right stats (dark beasts as tier 90 monster), perhaps summoning (nechs/glacors already do, works fine) and perhaps unique abilities like the Unstable. And why don't any monsters (bar Nex) use soul split? Even just leech curses could make it much harder to kill monsters quite as quickly.

[Estoc]

How about a huge boss (requiring a concerted effort from 30+ players) where you can expect to die, sometimes more than once, but as long as you dealt a certain amount of damage to it, you are guaranteed a drop in a reward coffer?

 

Was thinking of a boss similar to Demon Flash Mobs, but with an associated dungeon to go with it, as well as low level monsters (think Kalphite Hive, Polypore Dungeon, but with a massive beast at the bottom), and a reward coffer outside the boss chamber.

 

The only reason you will need 30+ players at any boss is for some arbitrary requirement like Dagannoth Kings or because the boss' life bar is longer than the AU.

[crazycdcm]

It may seem a bit disconnected from what's been discussed, but one thing Jagex haven't done as much as they could have is having shared drops between bosses. All I can really think of is holy elixir coming from tormented wraith and corporeal beast.

 

What's wrong with a mighty set of gear being strewn across multiple bosses. (Eg breathing some life into mith dragons, qbd, other forgotten bosses I've... forgotten)

 

The only reason you will need 30+ players at any boss is for some arbitrary requirement like Dagannoth Kings or because the boss' life bar is longer than the AU.

 

You could need 30+ players at any boss if the boss were a boss capable of healing itself, or it simply needed to be tanked for people to be able to get off enough attack turns to kill it. I'm unsure what the AU abbreviation means though, so you may have already encompassed healing in your post.

[Alg]

The only reason you will need 30+ players at any boss is for some arbitrary requirement like Dagannoth Kings or because the boss' life bar is longer than the AU.

This is where I mention Dragon's Dogma, because they had a really cool take on this sort of thing. The game is single-player with some social features (You can make an NPC minion, and hire those created by other players into your party). Naturally, the bonus boss, the Ur-Dragon is a multiplayer boss fight, but you're still playing a single player game. It has a ridiculously high stats and an equally massive amount of health (1.4 million when the final boss has 100k). You have ten minutes before it flies away, and can only damage it through a handful of weak spots, which are destroyed after a while.

 

The online version of the boss fight works by sharing its current health among all online players, and everyone who deals a certain amount of damage gets a randomly chosen reward once it dies. The player that manages to do the final hit gets an even larger one. Even if they don't manage to kill it, they get some useful items as long as they managed to damage or destroy a weak spot.

 

As far as Runescape goes, that sort of mechanic would work well for a boss like the Penance Queen. You can't attack it directly, and just have to shrug off its hits while your team does the tasks needed to hurt it. This could also make it a boss based around noncombat stats; maybe your team has to cut a tree to get the kind of wood to make a ballista bolt, that a runecrafter enchants so the ranger can penetrate the shield protecting a weak spot that a meleer could reach.

[Estoc]

It may seem a bit disconnected from what's been discussed, but one thing Jagex haven't done as much as they could have is having shared drops between bosses. All I can really think of is holy elixir coming from tormented wraith and corporeal beast.

 

What's wrong with a mighty set of gear being strewn across multiple bosses. (Eg breathing some life into mith dragons, qbd, other forgotten bosses I've... forgotten)

 

The only reason you will need 30+ players at any boss is for some arbitrary requirement like Dagannoth Kings or because the boss' life bar is longer than the AU.

 

You could need 30+ players at any boss if the boss were a boss capable of healing itself, or it simply needed to be tanked for people to be able to get off enough attack turns to kill it. I'm unsure what the AU abbreviation means though, so you may have already encompassed healing in your post.

 

Astronomical unit

 

I can't see a boss that needs 30+ people to counteract his healing as being fun. That's just making a "difficult" boss for the sake of being difficult, just like Kalphite King's 1hko is there to stop it from being soloable.

 

Edit:

The only reason you will need 30+ players at any boss is for some arbitrary requirement like Dagannoth Kings or because the boss' life bar is longer than the AU.

This is where I mention Dragon's Dogma, because they had a really cool take on this sort of thing. The game is single-player with some social features (You can make an NPC minion, and hire those created by other players into your party). Naturally, the bonus boss, the Ur-Dragon is a multiplayer boss fight, but you're still playing a single player game. It has a ridiculously high stats and an equally massive amount of health (1.4 million when the final boss has 100k). You have ten minutes before it flies away, and can only damage it through a handful of weak spots, which are destroyed after a while.

 

The online version of the boss fight works by sharing its current health among all online players, and everyone who deals a certain amount of damage gets a randomly chosen reward once it dies. The player that manages to do the final hit gets an even larger one. Even if they don't manage to kill it, they get some useful items as long as they managed to damage or destroy a weak spot.

 

As far as Runescape goes, that sort of mechanic would work well for a boss like the Penance Queen. You can't attack it directly, and just have to shrug off its hits while your team does the tasks needed to hurt it. This could also make it a boss based around noncombat stats; maybe your team has to cut a tree to get the kind of wood to make a ballista bolt, that a runecrafter enchants so the ranger can penetrate the shield protecting a weak spot that a meleer could reach.

 

Runescape combat is designed around our character sitting there being a meat shield and randomly blocking attacks based on defence bonuses. This means that high hits can only get so high before they start randomly killing you (this is not a boss fight, it's a lottery ticket). With offense at a maximum while still maintaining fairness (bosses not randomly killing you because of RNG) Jagex is left with two options, the damage sponge or puzzle boss. Neither options are challenging, and both are fairly dull after you've killed them multiple times.

 

Now, we have two bosses that can "randomly" kill you in a single hit, Jad, and to a lesser extent pre-eoc Warped Gulega. They've been around since 2006/2010, and still we haven't had a "real" boss use their mechanics, perhaps one of the most skill oriented bosses in the game. Seems to me like Jagex is content with creating bosses with high health and low player skill requirements.

[Platinum_Myr]

People want high-skill bosses, but then they are sometimes tedious to play against multiple times.

 

Part of the issue is that high skill bosses are great for quests, but I think they are really un-fun for repeat kills where your reward is not a decent guarantee...

 

Also they've tried a few things with the Queen Black Dragon..

 

I know I would not find something like dark beasts going crazy ability spam... but then again that is because I am used to a low-skill gameplay.

[Ammako]

I really dont think the problem lies in just "PvM is too easy" , "It is too hard to die" or "We need higher level content" . The main problem with the game is how everything is put together, as it has been brought up several times. Be it the combat system, end-game content, skills and requirements, EVERYTHING. The game is full of examples of this: take for instance Mithril Dragons, what do they drop? Dragon full helm? A T60 helm which is useless everywhere? Really? Dragon Kiteshield from QBD? I'd only need one to take a screenshot since meleeing with weapon+shield does not exist anymore and is useless everywhere. Who does corp now? Dont even get me started on smithing/mining/fletching/woodcutting and so on. What benefit there is from training hunter?

 

The fault is mainly in how RS is developed by applying a patch over a patched game which gets patched every couple of months throwing new stuff into the mix but not fixing nothing actually. And this has been going on for years.

 

At this point the only way to "get it right" is to overhaul the entire extraction/production skills, and do it at the same time as re-desinging combat, equipment tiers, bosses difficulty and even drop rates for these. As it stands now RS has BAD DESIGN written all over it and wont be corrected by adding a new boss that is lvl 2000 and requires a full server to kill only to drop the new mega melee weapon which is lvl 99 and will tear appart in 2 ticks anything below the previous named boss just to keep the top end players happy for a while before the games becomes too easy again.

 

I know I am dreaming but I hope to see someday all of this corrected, there's so much which could be added : Enhacing current armor/weapons via skills, random bonuses to all drops making armors/weapons even more unique, having ALL production/collection skills take part in your gaming experience. But sadly it will never happen.

Agreed, one of the better ways of making RuneScape better would be to rework everything from the ground up, but the community will definitely cause a problem.

Either by throwing a tantrum because the game would have become too different, or by becoming bored due to no actual new content being released in a while.

Granted, there is a lot of people who will welcome the change with open arms, and there are also other ways in which people would complain (be it valid complaints or not), but what I mentioned is just two examples.

[strilmus]

yep

 

keep saying the community attempts to judge before seeing the overall result of the project and then jagex just halfasses it because they can't decide whether or not to satisfy the immediate requests of the players or the overall picture

 

gonna keep happening until we're dead unless they get somebody with a godlike amount of drive behind them to finish the job

[thejollyroger]

How about a huge boss (requiring a concerted effort from 30+ players) where you can expect to die, sometimes more than once, but as long as you dealt a certain amount of damage to it, you are guaranteed a drop in a reward coffer?

 

Hard bosses is nothing if slayer monsters keep being so easy. All slayer monsters should be on par with glacors at 90+ slayer.

 

People want high-skill bosses, but then they are sometimes tedious to play against multiple times.

 

Part of the issue is that high skill bosses are great for quests, but I think they are really un-fun for repeat kills where your reward is not a decent guarantee...

 

I'd like to combine all these ideas. Go ahead, keep some Slayer monsters about where they are now, but I suggest that Jagex expand on more boss-type monsters for those categories. We have some examples now, as KBD, QBD, and Zamorak GWD bosses can correspond to slayer tasks, but it would be nice to see more, and not just higher level versions like at the smoky well in Pollinveach. It could be done somewhat like hard version GWD, where drop probability is better than the weaker versions.

 

This way, players can either choose for greater risk, better drops, but slightly less slayer XP/hr, or vice versa, as it is about now.

 

At this point the only way to "get it right" is to overhaul the entire extraction/production skills, and do it at the same time as re-desinging combat, equipment tiers, bosses difficulty and even drop rates for these. As it stands now RS has BAD DESIGN written all over it and wont be corrected by adding a new boss that is lvl 2000 and requires a full server to kill only to drop the new mega melee weapon which is lvl 99 and will tear appart in 2 ticks anything below the previous named boss just to keep the top end players happy for a while before the games becomes too easy again.

 

I know I am dreaming but I hope to see someday all of this corrected, there's so much which could be added : Enhacing current armor/weapons via skills, random bonuses to all drops making armors/weapons even more unique, having ALL production/collection skills take part in your gaming experience. But sadly it will never happen.

 

This was something I was discussing with a friend, to make skills have some value again. One of them was to allow raw mats to repair degradable items, and to have more of them. The challenge is to avoid bots getting a hold of them, so we may need instanced areas, more especially as minigames like Manage Thy Kingdom or Player Owned Ports.

 

But I'm not terribly hopeful, either. Jagex seems to have abandoned their management, puzzle, RTS and other playing style efforts to pursue the traditional MMO crowd more aggressively, which I think means they'll still work EOC hard before even thinking about other modes of play.

 

It may seem a bit disconnected from what's been discussed, but one thing Jagex haven't done as much as they could have is having shared drops between bosses. All I can really think of is holy elixir coming from tormented wraith and corporeal beast.

 

What's wrong with a mighty set of gear being strewn across multiple bosses. (Eg breathing some life into mith dragons, qbd, other forgotten bosses I've... forgotten)

 

Yeah, Jagex took some game ideas, but didn't spread them very wide. Barrows armor, godswords, and upgradeable weapons/armor are generally confined to one minigame or boss area.

 

I also seem to remember something about a set effect for all the Achievement Task gear... what happened to that?

 

As far as Runescape goes, that sort of mechanic would work well for a boss like the Penance Queen. You can't attack it directly, and just have to shrug off its hits while your team does the tasks needed to hurt it. This could also make it a boss based around noncombat stats; maybe your team has to cut a tree to get the kind of wood to make a ballista bolt, that a runecrafter enchants so the ranger can penetrate the shield protecting a weak spot that a meleer could reach.

 

Yeah, there's no strong incentive to use skills against bosses. There's Troll Invasion, but that's single player. It's a great idea, but I worry about a concept like this at Barbarian Assault: already too many players struggle with the tasks right there now. I mastered all roles and grabbed a full Penance set, and I remember too many players that hosed me (especially when I was Defending) because they just wouldn't call on the horn consistently.

 

They'd have to alter the pace or otherwise educate players on the gameplay better.