Tweaking the Bee Queen Fight

[mr. brj]

Let me start by saying that I, a mostly solo player, actually like fighting the Bee Queen, let it be by spamming panflutes, by distancing my character from the Grumble Bees and tanking, or by letting Abigail unleash a carnage while I mindlessly hold F. But when other players say that the fight is boring, I can also understand why. The whole fight is basically a struggle between hitting a boss that is not even worth kiting and trying to not get stunlocked by her minions. This makes the fight a resource sink in most situations, but it is also worth mentioning that the fight is also quite easy when there are multiple people playing.

And then there is another problem: the Bee Queen's aggro mechanics are still quite buggy. The Grumble Bees think that the shadow tentacles from the Thulecite Club are a seperate target (well actually any mob thinks that way, but in fights with minions, this makes a bigger difference). Apart from that, if a group of Grumble Bees get too far, then Bee Queen thinks that they despawned, causing her to spawn an additional group. These might seem like minor inconveniences, but they are actually more than enough to mess up this fast-paced fight.

 

So, what would I suggest to make this fight better and to fix the aggro mechanics? Well, I don't think the fight itself should change that much, only the numbers and interactions during the fight need some tweaking. So here is my list of suggestions:

 

1) Fixing the aggro mechanics: Limit the distance Grumble Bees can travel to down to an 8- (or maybe 9-) tile radius from the gigantic beehive while they are doing their chase attack during phases 3 and 4. Bee Queen already goes back to her spawn location after travelling for 7 tiles, an additional 1 (or maybe 2) tile distance should give her minions enough space to harrass the player while also staying in Bee Queen's aggro range. I believe this distance will be enough to prevent Bee Queen from unintentionally spawning additional minions, and once the minions stop travelling any further, the player still has to deal with preventing Bee Queen from despawning.

I'm suggesting this because I don't think Bee Queen should check for the amount of Grumble Bees in a world to decide whether she wants to spawn new ones or not. That would cause cheese methods like the labyrinth method to be abused to the point where the player would only have to deal with the minions every few minutes, if the fight lasts that long that is.

 

2) Making the fight less annoying 1: I'm going to quote from another thread here. I was suggested by @dubious little to post this suggestion anyways.

On 3/19/2022 at 12:20 PM, mr. brj said:

I actually like the Bee Queen fight too, although she is not my favorite boss. One suggestion that comes to my mind is her spawning Grumble Bees based on the number of players/mobs she has aggroed to. This needs a cap for the minimum and maximum amount of bees of course, otherwise the fight becomes boring for solo play and tedious for bunnymen/merm enthusiasts.

Maybe Bee Queen starts with 3 minions, and spawns an additional 1 per target (including followers) during the first phase, and 2 per target during the other phases? The fight would then stay almost the same for solo Wendy players, and other solo characters would have a decent matchup against the Bee Queen and her minions. Capping the maximum amount of Grumble Bees at 8 for phase 1, and at 12 for phase 2 also seems reasonable, as the fight is already too easy when done with a group of 4 or more. Plus a solo player that wants to utilize followers would also have to play more actively in that situation, and a group of 3 players wouldn't feel overwhelmed at all.

 

3) Making the fight less annoying 2: This has already been suggested quite a lot, but giving the Bee Keeper's Hat the ability to avoid stunlocks from the bees, including Grumble Bees, sounds like a fair perk, although I'm sure this would enable rushing the Bee Queen as any character without visiting the ruins. I don't know if you guys at Klei want this to be a thing or not, this is why I don't have any strong opinions on this particular suggestion. If the team doesn't mind it, then great! I would love to fight Bee Queen as early as possible and unlock the Bundling Wrap. Plus I like fighting her a lot, so it would certainly motivate me to play the game more often (and with any character) if I knew I could fight her with more accesible equipment. If not though, that's also fine. A Bee Queen start is, in my humble opinion, the best strategy for starting a world, so it is understandable to lock the fight behind certain objectives and skill levels, especially in solo play.

 

I hope you guys at least found my suggestions and thoughts on Bee Queen interesting, and I would love to know what you guys think. Take care all!

[Capybara007]

i personally like beequeen too but there is stuff that could be way better

my idea is to not make her just spam more bees when the ones in the fight die

say, after you kill the 6 bees you have 10 seconds of grumblebee-free time to hit beequeen

[mr. brj]

23 minutes ago, Capybara007 said:

i personally like beequeen too but there is stuff that could be way better

my idea is to not make her just spam more bees when the ones in the fight die

say, after you kill the 6 bees you have 10 seconds of grumblebee-free time to hit beequeen

I think this idea sounds good, but it has some flaws with Bee Queen's current mechanics. Bee Queen spawns Grumble Bees in groups, meaning if you kill 1-4 of them while there are 8 in total, she spawns a new group of Grumble Bees, and if you kill all of them at once, she spawns all of them in two seperate animations. This is one of the things that make it easy for Wendy to tank her, you already have that Grumble Bee-free downtime thanks to Abigail. Spawning all the Grumble Bees in a single instance can get overwhelming in situations where you have to take a small break from the fight, for example during houndwaves or while healing. Removing the group mechanic also encourages tanking with a single Grumble Bee alive, making the fight an 8 minutes of standing still.

A potential compromise for that is to make Bee Queen spawn an additional group once all of the minions from a single group are dead, not when a member of the group dies. Plus she should activate that 10 second timer once the last Grumble Bee dies. Then, I think your idea should work just fine for a single group of Grumble Bees, but not for the second group. That said, this still requires the player to deal with the minions more than the boss herself, which makes the fight annoying for most players in the first place.

This is my speculation at least:D

[Capybara007]

if we get into an ambicious territory, it would be interesting to see different types of bees being spawned by the boss, each one of them having their own ai, similar to how spider queen summons different types of spiders

beequeen could spawn:

Royal bees: A normal grumble bee that is slighty faster than bee queen, 200 hp

Royal killer bee: a bee that has 50 hp but deals 50 damage and its very fast, their ai is aggresive and everytime beequeen screams in her 3rd and 4th phase they get a small speed buff

Sentient bee: only summoned in 3rd and 4th phases, slow and deals low damage, but has 400 hp, his ai is defensive, always staying right next to bee queen while she sends the others to kill you

and bee queen's ai could be changed aswell, perphaps when there are lots of bees she will let them do the job for her, like real kings and queens that send executioners, and when there arent too many bees around, she will become more scared, like she lost confidence, trying to run away from you only attacking once if you hit her (the grumblebee free period)

but like i said this is too ambicious and most likely will not make it into the game, still i think its an interesting topic to discuss.

[Cheggf]

Bosses scaling on playercount is unintuitive, illogical, and has the potential of causing people to get upset with others if they feel they aren't pitching in and are just scaling the fight up.

[dubious little]

1 hour ago, Cheggf said:

Bosses scaling on playercount is unintuitive, illogical, and has the potential of causing people to get upset with others if they feel they aren't pitching in and are just scaling the fight up.

It could just apply to the player limit set, with the overall limit being 6, example:

A solo world has less bees, a 6 player world has the normal amount, a 12 player world would have the same amount as 6, etc etc for however else you wanna balance the inbetween numbers. This would essentially just be balancing for 1-3 (1-2?) players, making it mostly unchanged.

 

[mr. brj]

2 hours ago, Cheggf said:

Bosses scaling on playercount is unintuitive, illogical, and has the potential of causing people to get upset with others if they feel they aren't pitching in and are just scaling the fight up.

 

The first replier to your post is absolutely right about their statement, at least barring the phase 1, so no need to worry about it being unintuitive or upsetting others:

 

1 hour ago, dubious little said:

This would essentially just be balancing for 1-3 (1-2?) players, making it mostly unchanged.

 

The spawn mechanics I suggested basically translates into the following settings, with allies such as Abigail, Pigmen, Merms, Bunnies, etc. also counting as players:

 

1 player setting: 4 minions during phase 1, 5 during phase 2

2 player setting: 5 minions during phase 1, 7 during phase 2

3 player setting: 6 minions during phase 1, 9 during phase 2

4 player setting: 7 minions during phase 1, 11 during phase 2

5 or more players: 8 minions during phase 1, 12 during phase 2

 

Also a little note on phase 1 having more Grumble Bees. Fighting the Bee Queen in a group of 4 or more already makes the fight too easy. However, the only realistic scenario where the Grumble Bees in phase 1 will harrass the players more often would be for 3 players, as that means that each player will get 2 minions aggroed onto them, guaranteed.

 

Does the 1 player setting need a minimum cap for the Grumble Bees in phase 2? Most probably yes, 6 sounds perfectly fine to me, while 5 is still annoying for sure. This is just my theory crafting process, and there is definitely room for improvement. I haven't thought of how killing Grumble Bees would effect these mechanics yet.

[Cheggf]

2 hours ago, dubious little said:

It could just apply to the player limit set, with the overall limit being 6, example:

A solo world has less bees, a 6 player world has the normal amount, a 12 player world would have the same amount as 6, etc etc for however else you wanna balance the inbetween numbers. This would essentially just be balancing for 1-3 (1-2?) players, making it mostly unchanged.

 

The fight is already balanced for 2 to 3 players. Any more and it becomes ridiculously easy. If the change doesn't actually affect servers at all unless you're the one hosting them why not just use a mod to scale the fight instead of forcing it on everyone? I like the challenge of the fight and if you aren't good enough to solo fights meant for multiple people in the multiplayer game that has together in its title there's plenty of options to make it easier. R/b staves, pan flutes, nap sacks, minions, character swapping, etc.

20 minutes ago, mr. brj said:

The first replier to your post is absolutely right about their statement, at least barring the phase 1, so no need to worry about it being unintuitive or upsetting others:

Max player count changing how the game works is even more unintuitive. It only affecting worlds you host replaces it causing discord with it being pretty pointless. Would exclusively affect console players and it's not even an objective improvement.

[dubious little]

2 hours ago, Cheggf said:

The fight is already balanced for 2 to 3 players. Any more and it becomes ridiculously easy. If the change doesn't actually affect servers at all unless you're the one hosting them why not just use a mod to scale the fight instead of forcing it on everyone? I like the challenge of the fight and if you aren't good enough to solo fights meant for multiple people in the multiplayer game that has together in its title there's plenty of options to make it easier. R/b staves, pan flutes, nap sacks, minions, character swapping, etc.

Then just make the changes for only a solo world. Because there isn't a mod that functions this way to my knowledge (I.E specifically only altering multiplayer centric fights and not changing their health), as well as a mod isn't guaranteed to be maintained by someone or continued by someone else. It doesn't have to be forced, Klei has done a great job at making the game customisable, just make this a setting in the world gen. The fight isn't hard solo (or at all really), it's just tedious and forces you to use specific strategies which isn't an issue with multiple players or many other bosses, I personally don't find it fun to spam panflutes, tank or build bunnymen hutches. This issue extends to other multiplayer centric fights, which is why I'd like for them to balance it out in general. I don't want the game to be easier.

2 hours ago, Cheggf said:

Max player count changing how the game works is even more unintuitive. It only affecting worlds you host replaces it causing discord with it being pretty pointless. Would exclusively affect console players and it's not even an objective improvement.

How would it be pointless? It's not like a 12 player Klei hosted server is going to ever have an efficient way to balance bosses in the first place. Meanwhile all these changes would just be making a few bosses spawn less minions so you can work around them solo rather than just block them off, I don't see why wanting that in a fight is a bad thing, you can still perform all the other strategies.

[Cannoli]

12 hours ago, Cheggf said:

Bosses scaling on playercount is unintuitive, illogical, and has the potential of causing people to get upset with others if they feel they aren't pitching in and are just scaling the fight up.

Every year, since 2015, this forum has one or more threads requesting bosses scaling based on playercount, with several members supporting this demand. 

You should advice Terraria devs, their Expert mode is "unintuitive and illogical".

[mr. brj]

8 hours ago, Cheggf said:

I like the challenge of the fight

Yes me too, an not only the challenge, I also love the fight itselft. But apparently a lot of people don't, and I doubt that this is a skill issue. I would appreciate it if you could contribute to the thread by giving other suggestions that address this.

8 hours ago, Cheggf said:

why not just use a mod to scale the fight instead of forcing it on everyone?

Because there is something called the vanilla experience, or an intended way to play the game. There are players that do have a problem with the current intended way of the Bee Queen, and I believe they have a right to be. And again, I don't have any problems with the current version of the fight, but a lot of people do. Some forumers liked my initial suggestion, and one forumer asked me to share it. This is simply what I'm doing. It's up to Klei to decide if they want to use this idea in one way or another, this is why we have these suggestion threads.

8 hours ago, Cheggf said:

Max player count changing how the game works is even more unintuitive.

It's not max player count, it is the amount of players and allies the Bee Queen is aggroed to. Klaus does that while spawning Krampii or targeting his magic attacks. Choosing to fight Klaus alone or in a group is a decision you make before going in the fight, even when you are playing with other people. This is why I don't think implementing such mechanics would be unintuitive, but if you still do, that's also fine. This is a suggestion thread after all, the last thing I want here is to start a long discussion.

20 minutes ago, Cannoli said:

You should advice Terraria devs, their Expert mode is "unintuitive and illogical".

Your previous sentence touches an interesting subject I also support, but please keep it on topic.