Bosses Rework Discussion Ideas - Should & How Can Bosses Be Reworked for the Current Game State

[Opallll]

Saw a video on the current iteration of Walter’s skill tree and how post cave rifts he can trivialise even late-game fights. However this issue isn’t unique to Walter & is a matter of how many bosses cannot retaliate against ranged and adjacent attacks.

I don’t think that nerfing Walter will fix the issue that comes from the bosses’ mechanic design. So I’m just looking to start a discussion on how the current bosses could be changed/reworked to suit the current landscape, brainstorming ideas for Klei to potentially get inspired from. A lot of these bosses have gone largely unchanged since their release so I’m wondering.

I want to propose world settings that buff bosses, like attack speed and damage, so that experienced players can challenge themselves while newer ones can have a more relaxed game. Another idea I have is  Dragonfly having a ranged fire attack if the player is outside her melee range but she cannot move.

This isn’t an anti-cheese post!! I just want discussion on how we can flesh out bosses like we have with the survivors.

[Echsrick]

i dont think thats realy needed, not every boss has to be super complex

[Well-met]

7 minutes ago, Opallll said:

However this issue isn’t unique to Walter

it.... kind of is.

Blowdarts are craft-inefficient and howlitzer/gloomrang are only available at a point you won't care about bosses anymore.

 

[Mike23Ua]

Make each boss complex but fair and fun. Perferably how RogueLite bosses work, learn the attack patterns, dodge the attacks, defeat the boss.

[Opallll]

58 minutes ago, Well-met said:

it.... kind of is.

Blowdarts are craft-inefficient and howlitzer/gloomrang are only available at a point you won't care about bosses anymore.

 

Trivialising bosses post rift isn’t unique to Walter, in fact some survivors do not need rift gear to do so, nor a skill tree even. Maxwell for example can immobilise Dragonfly and keep her mostly still for damage with his shadow prison, using far fewer resources than Walter.

He also isn’t the only one who can attack at range, he is just geared towards it. Willow with either lunar or shadow flames can kite around enemies without having to take a hit thanks to the range, and she also requires fewer resources than him.

I should have clarified that when I said adjacent I meant methods of attacking that do not involve the standard melee & kiting. Range attacks and followers are really strong but resource intensive. My own issue is that bosses have little to no counter for ranged attacks unlike for followers. I also personally use Gloomerangs against the lunar mutated bosses as & the Brightshade Staff against brightshades and inkblights as they can’t do much about it. 
 

Bosses who have ranged attacks would not have to be worried about their attacker being at range or immobilised. And nerfing Walter when his methods are more expensive than others won’t fix the lack of retaliation bosses have against range 

33 minutes ago, Mike23Ua said:

Make each boss complex but fair and fun. Perferably how RogueLite bosses work, learn the attack patterns, dodge the attacks, defeat the boss.

Oooh that’d be a unique mode given the rogue like nature of singleplayer don’t starve, I’m also just a fan of rogue likes myself 

[Guille6785]

bosses are fine imo

[Evelo]

Instead of focusing on bosses, how about we rework/add more survival mechanics? Hmm?

[nicolas103]

I find the bosses to actually be alright when playing Solo, Hp Feels fine, Damage is okay.

 

However once you start getting into group play the bosses just kind of fold.

 

With 3 people i find the bosses start to hit a point where they just go so fast.

With 6 these fights dont even last like 10-20 seconds lol

Certain bosses do feel pretty good tho with 6 people.

(Misery)Toadstool feeling not so much a slog, Celestial Champion probably being the toughest i've seen for groups to defeat.

 

Regardless of how i feel it would affect solo play, i'd just like to see 2-4k HP added on to some bosses under 10k HP excluding maybe Moose, and Malbatross.

4-6k HP on some bosses is too low, even solo sometimes.

 

Other than that i'd love to see more bosses get AoE added to their attacks.

Namely Klaus as he hits only once person on all his attacks outside of his actual AoEs.

But there are others who still only hit one person.. Ancient Guardian, Dragonfly, Moose/Goose, TreeGuard just to name a few.

 

I bring this up as the way Aggro is in a group setting is if the boss targets you, you are the only one in danger outside of AoEs, meaning that everyone else is free to just attack until boss dies.

 

However, new attacks would go a long way, especially if theyre AoE.

[Opallll]

4 minutes ago, nicolas103 said:

I find the bosses to actually be alright when playing Solo, Hp Feels fine, Damage is okay.

 

However once you start getting into group play the bosses just kind of fold.

 

With 3 people i find the bosses start to hit a point where they just go so fast.

With 6 these fights dont even last like 10-20 seconds lol

Certain bosses do feel pretty good tho with 6 people.

(Misery)Toadstool feeling not so much a slog, Celestial Champion probably being the toughest i've seen for groups to defeat.

 

Regardless of how i feel it would affect solo play, i'd just like to see 2-4k HP added on to some bosses under 10k HP excluding maybe Moose, and Malbatross.

4-6k HP on some bosses is too low, even solo sometimes.

 

Other than that i'd love to see more bosses get AoE added to their attacks.

Namely Klaus as he hits only once person on all his attacks outside of his actual AoEs.

But there are others who still only hit one person.. Ancient Guardian, Dragonfly, Moose/Goose, TreeGuard just to name a few.

 

I bring this up as the way Aggro is in a group setting is if the boss targets you, you are the only one in danger outside of AoEs, meaning that everyone else is free to just attack until boss dies.

 

However, new attacks would go a long way, especially if theyre AoE.

I agree! I mainly play solo and get by fine most of the time but I can imagine in a group setting it may not be fun to be able to crubstomp a boss in less than a minute. 
I think a set of world settings to adjust boss health and difficulties would be helpful in more powerful groups or just a solo player looking for a challenge.

[nicolas103]

16 minutes ago, Opallll said:

I agree! I mainly play solo and get by fine most of the time but I can imagine in a group setting it may not be fun to be able to crubstomp a boss in less than a minute. 
I think a set of world settings to adjust boss health and difficulties would be helpful in more powerful groups or just a solo player looking for a challenge.

I would love an HP setting even for solo, just would depend if its specific increases, or in general as for me even 50-100% more HP would feel great until i went and fought Dragonfly, Or Toadstool for eternity, lol.

 

DR would be a great easy solution to this as well.

Say 4-8% per player added so at most like 20-40% DR for a boss which imo, probably would shift TTK all that much in groups past like 3 people.

[Opallll]

2 minutes ago, nicolas103 said:

I would love an HP setting even for solo, just would depend if its specific increases, or in general as for me even 50-100% more HP would feel great until i went and fought Dragonfly, Or Toadstool for eternity, lol.

 

DR would be a great easy solution to this as well.

Say 4-8% per player added so at most like 20-40% DR for a boss which imo, probably would shift TTK all that much in groups past like 3 people.

I know Terraria has similar mechanics where the boss health scales with the number of players, they also change the boss fight stats and attacks based on difficulty. That could be setting players can freely toggle, whether that’d be health or just make the boss harder. There’s already a damage setting but that’s for everything not just bosses. It’s a good way to accommodate new and experienced players

[Echsrick]

4 hours ago, Mike23Ua said:

 Perferably how RogueLite bosses work, learn the attack patterns, dodge the attacks, defeat the boss.

so just like how this game allready is

[somethin]

It would be pretty cool if Klei add a few range attacks to some boss, but I think the old boss are fine as is. When they add new bosses though, I expect them to have at least ways to deal with range attacks.

[Cheggf]

You say this isn't an anti-cheese post, but it is. The only tangible complaints you've said of the bosses are "Walter can cheese them by spamming ranged attacks" and "Maxwell can cheese them by spamming shadow prison". Increasing their numbers like you proposed would do literally nothing to address those characters being able to cheese the bosses, they'd still be able to do it.

The bosses have remained unchanged for so long because there's nothing wrong with the bosses (other than them dying instantly if more than 1 or 2 people fight them at once). If 2 of the 18 characters have 1 thing they do that cheeses the bosses so hard you're proposing completely reworking all the bosses, the only thing that would show is that those 2 things are problematic, not the bosses.

[Edible Coal]

the answer is just more AOE attacks, a whole group can just tank everything

[Mike23Ua]

3 hours ago, Echsrick said:

so just like how this game allready is

No lol, not at all like how the game already is, the way the game already is actually kinda… sucks?

like let me explain before you get angry or whatever, Dragonfly has 27,500 health, that’s fine but…. If enough players are damaging her, she “Faints” to the ground so you can get in free cheap damage while she tries to recover. Playing Alone- Unless you bring a lot of AI Followers or set up elaborate catapult &/or gunpowder traps: Your unlikely to get her to do the faint for free cheap hits animation.

the fight itself, is a bunch of larva that players opt to wall off with wonky AI to avoid that part of the fight entirely.

Outside of that fighting her is about roughly the same as picking a fight with a Beefalo (hit it 4-5 times move away from its one slow attack)

Now If I was to redesign poor old Dfly, I would give her some really cool “RogueLite” type stuff, such as for example her Larva acting more like Bullet Hell projectiles that you need to avoid and dodge, or giving her a moment where she stands still but isn’t able to be attacked as she spins around in a circle blowing a flamethrower breath (and you’ll need to run clockwise or counter clockwise to avoid the direction the breath is being sprayed.)

Alternatively- You can just go play RAD it’s a Top Down perspective RogueLite which is how I’d redesign DSTs “entire” boss economy, TL:DR- the bosses are Fun, don’t have 50 billion health, have several variety of attacks and can easily kill the player if unable to time dodging properly.

[Opallll]

3 hours ago, Cheggf said:

You say this isn't an anti-cheese post, but it is. The only tangible complaints you've said of the bosses are "Walter can cheese them by spamming ranged attacks" and "Maxwell can cheese them by spamming shadow prison". Increasing their numbers like you proposed would do literally nothing to address those characters being able to cheese the bosses, they'd still be able to do it.

The bosses have remained unchanged for so long because there's nothing wrong with the bosses (other than them dying instantly if more than 1 or 2 people fight them at once). If 2 of the 18 characters have 1 thing they do that cheeses the bosses so hard you're proposing completely reworking all the bosses, the only thing that would show is that those 2 things are problematic, not the bosses.

I’ve likely worded myself poorly and I apologise: I should clarify that I simply want bosses to be given ways to deal with being immobilised/slowed down (like the shadow prison) or their target being at range without having to gut survivors’ most important perks. I got the idea for this post watching this YouTube video (

) and states that while the changes were good, he didn’t feel fulfilled by Walter’s range being able to trivialise a lot of bosses. However Jazzy doesn’t propose a nerf, rather giving potential future bosses as a way to deal with range as nerfing Walter himself won’t fix the issue.  

It’s pretty well known that ranged attacks break a lot of bosses because they heavily rely on their opponents being in melee range, Walter simply highlights this - anyone with enough resources or have end game gear and can take advantage of the exploit. Unlike them however, Walter is also incredibly reliant on range so the lack of fulfilment can exacerbated. Furthermore, there’s a good chance that similar perks will come out in upcoming character updates and the bosses aren’t likely to age well with these updates should they remain unchanged. 

You’re right that numbers alone won’t change much, which is why I had the idea of some bosses having new attacks to deal with perks like range but should be able to be toggled on and off - as DST is a sandbox game and curating your experience is important. I don’t think a boss like Deerclops needs to be super complex or made incredibly difficult like she is in the uncompromising mod, it could be reserved for the raid bosses as they are supposed to be more difficult.

As for the anti-cheese thing, I’ve no issues with things like using bee-mines, twins or other orthodox methods to skip over bosses, anyone can use them and it’s something you have to go out of your way for, you’re purposely looking to not have to fight. I’m mainly referring to the survivors’ kits, using their intended perks and methods to fight. If the intended/default way to play a survivor is too cheesy, then players may lose interest in playing them. Walter is restricted to range for most fights because of how he works, and because range overpowers so many bosses, he may not feel very rewarding to play. Other survivors have the ability to use both ranged and melee weapons and assuming Klei will add more ranged combat strategies, the issue may only get worse. 

This does call into question about character rebalances, however this can involve taking away important abilities that do more harm than good. Refreshing the bosses to accommodate something like range (even an extra range attack themselves) could help compensate.

TL;DR I think some bosses aren’t aging well with the current skill trees, character updates, and weapon updates, the inability to counter range is a huge example of this. While Walter is very good at exploiting this, taking away these perks won’t fix the issue with how encroaching range can be, it’ll only make him more frail and other survivors will be able to continue exploiting range in their own ways. Klei seems to be going for some more dynamic combat but it doesn’t seem practical when you update the survivors but not do much for the enemies themselves. Giving the bosses and enemies more ranges/AOE methods could help fighting back against something like being immobilised or heavily slowed.

[WilsonHiggs]

Enemies in general should have more stunlock resistance and some kind of range atack to counter walter CC rounds and maxwell shadow prison. Also there is the problem of how dumb is to fight inks and brightshades with the new ranged weapons... what a ridiculous hard mode when you can stand still holding F

New bosses have very little HP so, with the new dps brought by skill trees, they fall so quickly despite klei adding planar mechanic to make them more durable against stacking damage buffs

 

Pan flute needs a nerf. Klei is simply making bosses inmune to sleep but removing options isnt fun. Pan flute makes every sleep item useless while klei is removing scenarios where sleep works... we should have the room to choose between nap sack, pan flute, wormwood's sleeping mush, wicker book or sleep darts. But any of them should totally neutralize a boss, they should have a growinf sleep resistance like toadstool

 

1 hour ago, Mike23Ua said:

the fight itself, is a bunch of larva that players opt to wall off with wonky AI to avoid that part of the fight entirely.

That is their choice. If they dont want to interact because they are lazy.

The lavae phase are pretty balanced for 1 player. Just because you can see even teams of 6 players using walls doesnt make it unbalanced, just they are lazy and cowards

7 minutes ago, Opallll said:

TL;DR I think some bosses aren’t aging well with the current skill trees, character updates, and weapon updates, the inability to counter range is a huge example of this. While Walter is very good at exploiting this, taking away these perks won’t fix the issue with how encroaching range can be, it’ll only make him more frail and other survivors will be able to continue exploiting range in their own ways. Klei seems to be going for some more dynamic combat but it doesn’t seem practical when you update the survivors but not do much for the enemies themselves. Giving the bosses and enemies more ranges/AOE methods could help fighting back against something like being immobilised or heavily slowed

Agree

[Gashzer]

Did someone say....Moonlight Shackle? 

https://forums.kleientertainment.com/forums/topic/158295-moonlight-shackle-new-celestial-altar-craft-suggestion-afw-nerf/

[Cheggf]

7 hours ago, Opallll said:

It’s pretty well known that ranged attacks break a lot of bosses because they heavily rely on their opponents being in melee range, Walter simply highlights this - anyone with enough resources or have end game gear and can take advantage of the exploit. Unlike them however, Walter is also incredibly reliant on range so the lack of fulfilment can exacerbated. Furthermore, there’s a good chance that similar perks will come out in upcoming character updates and the bosses aren’t likely to age well with these updates should they remain unchanged[...]

As for the anti-cheese thing, I’ve no issues with things like using bee-mines, twins or other orthodox methods to skip over bosses, anyone can use them and it’s something you have to go out of your way for, you’re purposely looking to not have to fight.

It takes 10,000x more time to be able to use ranged attacks as someone other than Walter than it does to use something like bee mines or the Twins. Walter is the only one who has it as a normal thing that he can do, and I see no reason why Klei would change other characters to encroach on what Walter does. He has always been the only character with a ranged attack, the slingshot has always been one of his main things. It's just now people kept complaining enough that the slingshot wasn't soloing the entire game on their behalf as quickly as people actually playing the game were able to do with melee weapons, so Klei has buffed it way too much. Walter is the only one with this problem, the game has never been designed for ranged combat because nobody before Walter has ever been capable of it. Any issues "with the bosses" are an indictment of Walter. He alone is going against the game's core design principles.

Also, Walter is not even remotely reliant on the slingshot. I never have and never will be using it as anything other than the situational tool that it was originally intended to be. I don't care how much they overbuff it to try to usurp melee, the slingshot is boring, so I'm not going to use it as my main weapon. Before this skill tree the slingshot was a tool, so how could he have been reliant on something that wasn't really capable of fighting effectively to begin with?

7 hours ago, Opallll said:

This does call into question about character rebalances, however this can involve taking away important abilities that do more harm than good.

If you are to give the bosses ways to "deal with" Maxwell's shadow prison that is no different than simply removing the shadow prison. What use is the ability if the bosses are being explicitly designed to counteract the ability? The entire point of the ability is that it's to cheese bosses for free, if they didn't care about being trapped why should he even be able to trap them? Just to pretend like they didn't take away "important abilities" that he didn't have for a decade until they arbitrarily super overbuffed him for no reason in his rework?

[Chewabacca]

I don’t even agree with the idea that ranged combat can never be fun, but the core of this is right. The issue isn’t with the bosses, it’s with Walter's kit, specifically slowdowns and icker rounds being too much. Ignore those or figure out a nerf/cost increase, and the slingshot can be fun (for the people who were ever going to find ranged combat fun). Not exactly like Walter players were begging to be able to do this before the tree, or that a bunch of us haven’t gone “why do we have 3 rounds with the same special effect?”. I don’t think it’d be much missed if it were tuned down.

But more generally on the subject of how to make bosses that are still fun with ranged combat (disclaimer that I have pretty limited experience with bosses compared to most players on here, this is just some stuff that I noticed made things harder (in a good way) for me with the slingshot):
* space constraints
* make the player have to get close and take risks in order to get the loot
* enemies that come from multiple directions (thinking here of the Lurking Nightmare, who is the only shadow creature that Walter can’t just stand still and let the auto-targeting handle)

Buffing attack speed to the point where the slows aren't overpowered would mean that attacks would be so fast that every character who couldn't slow the enemy down would be cooked. Increasing damage doesn't matter for ranged combat because the whole upside of ranged combat is that you're less likely to get hit, and currently bosses already do enough damage to punish Walter players who screw up on that count. If anything that would just punish melee more.

Adding ranged attacks to bosses doesn’t automatically make them more challenging for a ranged character. Thinking here of Scrappy Werepig who will chuck stuff at you if you stay outside the arena and shoot him, but you can just move side to side a bit and be basically fine. At least most bosses need you to actually slow them down, Scrappy does it to himself. Something that doesn't have a ranged attack but is fast, can hit hard, and chases you down is more exciting than something that defaults to a slow ranged attack if you're not doing melee.

Also, no offense, but it does drive me slightly crazy that this is the 3rd video I've seen get treated like a defining manifesto on Walter. Do I only notice it with him because he's my main or what?

[Nini voovoo]

I don't think bosses need to reworked for specific characters. Different characters have different strengths. Wilson is the basic experience and anything else is playing to those strengths. Like, you wouldnt want to buff fuelweavers woven shadows just because wendy and wormwoods can ignore them, you wouldnt want to skyrockets every bosses damage because weremoose has 90% damage reduction, right? And all of this doesnt even mention Wurt and Winona removing the word "fight" from "Bossfight" entirely.

A lot of characters have ways to make fights easier by their nature, you cant, and you wouldnt want, to balance every boss around every character, it would lead to every boss being machanical mess. If you dont want the bosses to be trivialized by walters ranged combat, you are free to simply not play walter. Advocating for walter to not be able to immobilize bosses is fair game, advocating for bosses to be build around walters kit is not.

[Opallll]

15 hours ago, Chewabacca said:

I don’t even agree with the idea that ranged combat can never be fun, but the core of this is right. The issue isn’t with the bosses, it’s with Walter's kit, specifically slowdowns and icker rounds being too much. Ignore those or figure out a nerf/cost increase, and the slingshot can be fun (for the people who were ever going to find ranged combat fun). Not exactly like Walter players were begging to be able to do this before the tree, or that a bunch of us haven’t gone “why do we have 3 rounds with the same special effect?”. I don’t think it’d be much missed if it were tuned down.

But more generally on the subject of how to make bosses that are still fun with ranged combat (disclaimer that I have pretty limited experience with bosses compared to most players on here, this is just some stuff that I noticed made things harder (in a good way) for me with the slingshot):
* space constraints
* make the player have to get close and take risks in order to get the loot
* enemies that come from multiple directions (thinking here of the Lurking Nightmare, who is the only shadow creature that Walter can’t just stand still and let the auto-targeting handle)

Buffing attack speed to the point where the slows aren't overpowered would mean that attacks would be so fast that every character who couldn't slow the enemy down would be cooked. Increasing damage doesn't matter for ranged combat because the whole upside of ranged combat is that you're less likely to get hit, and currently bosses already do enough damage to punish Walter players who screw up on that count. If anything that would just punish melee more.

Adding ranged attacks to bosses doesn’t automatically make them more challenging for a ranged character. Thinking here of Scrappy Werepig who will chuck stuff at you if you stay outside the arena and shoot him, but you can just move side to side a bit and be basically fine. At least most bosses need you to actually slow them down, Scrappy does it to himself. Something that doesn't have a ranged attack but is fast, can hit hard, and chases you down is more exciting than something that defaults to a slow ranged attack if you're not doing melee.

Also, no offense, but it does drive me slightly crazy that this is the 3rd video I've seen get treated like a defining manifesto on Walter. Do I only notice it with him because he's my main or what?

I’ve beaten almost all bosses multiple times as different survivors (WX-78, Wormwood, Wanda, Wendy, etc.) so I can attest that those qualities can make ranged combat more challenging. Though usually in my experience I beat Scarppy Werepig post-Celestial Champion, so I have the laser cannon to content with, he also moves very fast and has solid melee range, not to mention the physical damage reduction. Fuelweaver is a boss where positioning is important and he can snare you from a distance or use an AOE attack that covers most of the arena, so for me he isn’t a boss I would say needs tweaking because he’s managed to hold up well. Even Wendy players fighting him solo have to be careful as he can 4-shot Abigail and if they lose her it’s over.
I’ve also used range on phase 3 celestial champion as the first 2 are simply too mobile to use range and even then I’m still in range of the laser and gestalt wave attacks that can deal lots of damage if not careful. I actually have fought FW as Wurt pre-CC and I still struggled because my merms would block woven shadows or unseen hands by constantly triggering the shield so he could heal or delay the shield being taken down. His arena also negated my corrupted marsh turf. (I only brought like maybe 15-ish merms getting them into the arena was a nightmare.) I’ve also used range on phase 3 celestial champion as the first 2 are simply too mobile to use range and even then I’m still in range of the laser and gestalt wave attacks that can deal lots of damage if not careful.

Regarding Walter, I was really excited when Woby got some mobility skills to take advantage of in combat as a means to dodge or kite of but was disappointed to see that the issue of just using icker rounds was still a thing. Furthermore a lot of bosses don’t seem to be good at dealing with range, which can make ranged combat dull. Walter means a lot to me as a character so I didn’t want to single him out because I’ve played other survivors using range where said range can trivialise some fights, and it feels unfair to blame him specifically for something others can do.

Toadstool isn’t a boss that I would say ranged combat is always instantly advantageous, because the high health pool incurs really high costs for weaponry alone. Not to mention the area-denying spore clouds, stomps and earthquakes that can wipe out armies of mobs, and the mush trees that give damage reduction. All this to compensate for being so slow moving. 

As another example Dragonfly relies a lot on her mobility at the moment so if she cannot move then she’s a sitting duck. My own proposition was to give her a ranged attack that she can use if she cannot move, however a more universal buff where giants are more resistant/immune to immobilisation (e.g. shadow prison does not last as long on bosses) could be useful. I do know that they’re going to fix the cheese strategy of dragging her away with the panflute so you have to stay within her arena and near the lava ponds.

I also don’t necessarily think a survivor being good at one boss means that said boss is bad, a friend of mine states that it’s more of an issue if most bosses can be trivialised by one thing, which (again) is what range attacks can do. 

Each survivor has their nuances so it’s hard to account for them alongside bosses  and as someone who works with game design I agree that you cannot tweak a boss where they have every single potential counter. I personally had in mind more simplistic tweaks for raid/late-game bosses. 
 

I also apologise for the video thing this is an opinion I’ve held for a long while I was only inspired by said video. But I can see what you mean about the honey/icker rounds, I don’t think a Bearger corpse imbued with the power of an entity sent in by the moon shouldn’t be stopped dead in its tracks by some goo.