Make ancient fuelweaver stagger if player runs out of bone cage's range to dodge it

[grm9]

Make ancient fuelweaver stagger (get locked in an animation to allow players to freely attack it) for an amount of time if there are no targets when FW spawns bone cages by slamming the ground with it's hand, meaning all players ran out of range before that happened.

This would encourage performing the more skillful dodge for the attack instead of simply using the lazy explorer and make no lazy explorer no damage viable in the second phase of the fight.

Other option is to make him fail melee attacks 1-2 times after performing the bone cage by replacing the attack animation with the animation of it's arm falling to the ground and it trying to connect the arm back to the skeleton.

An example of how it could be implemented, aside from not having a proper animation for being hit while staggered because i don't know how to create new animations:

I doubt it'll be added considering how few people it'll impact with most people doing the fight with a lazy explorer despite the dodge being more rewarding if this gets implemented, but worth hearing others' opinions about this idea.

[Guille6785]

idk how I'd feel about this, it wouldn't feel nearly as satisfying to do if it trivialized the fight this much

[Cassielu]

Every game has a few actions that only the "best players" can do, and they're not for everyone.

Also, lazy explorer isn't bad as you say, solve bosses ability with special features of items is a fun gameplay, as well as a theme for the entire AFW battle --like two wizards fighting. These pure action sequences are more like planar mobs stuff.

[grm9]

2 hours ago, Guille6785 said:

idk how I'd feel about this, it wouldn't feel nearly as satisfying to do if it trivialized the fight this much

Atm it isn't being done at all in phase 2 when unseen hands are dead because of how much time it wastes and how short the windows between unseen hands summons are, no? Stagger would last about long enough for damage dealt during the windows when kiting to be comparable to tanking (another idea was to just increase damage on next hit after the dodge to compensate instead of stagger, but that'd be odd in comparison to how bigger punishes when dodging are implemented on other bosses). Could be disabled in p1 and in p2 if unseen hands are still alive.

[Guille6785]

28 minutes ago, grm9 said:

Atm it isn't being done at all in phase 2 when unseen hands are dead because of how much time it wastes and how short the windows between unseen hands summons are, no? Stagger would last about long enough for damage dealt during the windows when kiting to be comparable to tanking

the end result of this would be that you could either tank and use up a decent chunk of armor or do 1 bone cage dodge and essentially just also tank except without any damage, I think the resource management aspect of the fight is part of what makes fuelweaver my favorite boss, I don't think something like this could really be implemented without making the fight a bit more shallow

It's also worth nothing that chinese players tend to use the nightmare amulet to get more time between bone cages for more damage (by baiting out the insanity attack for a second), I think that's a clever use of mechanics (and a benefit of doing the fight with the nightmare amulet vs non-nightmare amulet) that would be undermined if fuelweaver just stopped attacking altogether after the first dodge