A solution to arena challenge boss balancing.

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As soon as you leave the Collectors HQ, where's the first place you go? Not to the arena, you don't even know there's anything extra to do there. And if you do, you're going to get stomped there by Enraged Gigaslime or have the fight of your life.

Go there after Flying Fortress, tough fight. After Seasonne, easy. After Season Temple, wham bam gold charge destruction. Anywhere beyond that and you're left wondering what the point of the battle was at all. It's wasted development time and isn't too much different from just repeating the regular Gigaslime battle.

Considering that most players only go to the arena (if they ever do) once they've exhausted all other game content (something that might be remedied by a notice board in town advertising new challenges added?) and the vast majority of challenge bosses will be fights you can't hope to balance in the guessing game of when players will try them. Not without doing something like applying beast mode, which itself is kind of hit-and-miss in guessing your power level when gear, cards, skills, talents, etc are all a factor.

An alternative? Taking a slightly modified page from a Tai Ming boss.

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Seal The Boss

Here, bosses start with a sealing animation on the right side of their HP bar. With this, it doesn't matter how many thousands of damage you burst in a second with your Sword of Gamebreaking, you're not killing the boss in five seconds flat. Your goal is to get the boss sealed. How to do that?

Fight the boss normally. The seal placement is stationary, but if you do small, weak amounts of chip damage (i.e: burn, spitter plants), the seal will gradually slide left. If you do large burst damage (i.e: heroic slam, meteor), it will slide left faster. But it has a maximum slide speed. You're not actually doing any 'damage' to it, your damage is just a calculation to determine how fast or slow the sealing bar slides to 0 for the boss. The fight becomes an actual encounter you have to actively participate in, as a challenge boss should be, rather than single-mindedly DPS racing the boss. (Hello, shadowclone and flamethrower :p)

To further make it a challenge regardless of level, different challenge boss attacks could do Max HP % based damage (with some % reduced by defense or having higher Max HP), rather than having a flat damage value. Example numbers: You have 100 HP and 0 defense? Enraged Gigaslime hammer does 50% of your health. 100 HP and ## defense? 40%. 150 HP and 0 defense? 40%. 150 HP and ## defense? 35%. Removing 'You die in one hit if you go there immediately' or 'You can shrug off all the boss attacks at the end of the game' from the equation goes a long way in ensuring a satisfying and fair challenge.

An alternative solution that I'm a bit iffy on is...



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Tug-Of-War. It's a match to determine who gets sealed first. You damage the boss, the sealing animation gradually or quickly slides left, as above. The boss damages you with a weak attack (Winter's Winds), it slides gradually to the right a bit. The boss damages you with a heavy attack (Slime Hammer), it quickly slides right some distance. With DEF / Max HP playing some part in determining how far right it slides for you on damage received. The more damage you take throughout the battle, the further and further that bar slides right as you continue to get hit - like Super Smash Bros causing you to fly farther and farther from the same attacks as your % goes up.

Which would mean it's impossible to die from taking damage in this fight, you just have to avoid getting 100% sealed, or taking so much damage momentum throughout the fight that a single hit will smash your sealing bar all the way over.

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Alternatively, if not for the arena, this could be a good way to rebalance the Hall of Memories. Assuming that isn't being scrapped outright. Which I hope it isn't, refighting old bosses is a major convenience / source of fun / way to learn their attack patterns or test with different builds. Even if they don't drop anything.

(I think the first format could also be an interesting challenge replay open for Story Mode, applying that to all base bosses. :D)
 
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