Is it possible to have equitable high EV bosses?

Spoiler: Pre-ramble

Single-client income has been suffering. Rather than nerfs, it could be cool to level the playing field between single and multi farming by adding higher EV single-client content. The most reliable way to prevent a new lucrative content from being multi-farmed is to have the activity max out a player's APM - it doesn't matter how many clients you have if you can't play them effectively. Bosses seem like most suitable place to do this because there's some innate expectation that boss fights should be challenging, furthermore it's less susceptible to balance issues such as some classes being fat, slow, and melee.

However, it would be unfair to introduce a high EV boss that only like 25% of characters can farm efficiently whether it be due to HP diff, class diff, funding diff, or other. This is why I imagine Auf, a very difficult boss, has pretty mediocre EV along with most of NT2 - because some characters just kill them way faster and easier than others and to be safe they've been tuned conservatively. It would be discouraging to any RPG player to get into a game, then find out that the biggest, baddest, most lucrative Bosses in the game strongly favor a small subset of character archetypes. Based on my experience playing other games, I don't actually think ~50% of RPGers naturally identify as Naruto, yet ~50% of late-game mains are NLs - this screams "content issue" to me.

So this brings me to the main point of this post: How can a Boss fight be made that's engaging and fair for everyone, and supports all archetypes of characters offered in the game - yet still be fun and not an exercise in self flagellation?

• To enforce APM, punishment for mistakes should be severe, but IMO the punishment should be dealt to your EV - not character death - because that would bar low HP chars from running. I.e. the run takes much longer if you make mistakes, but you don't necessarily fail.
• Boss fight should accentuate each character archetype's strengths and weaknesses. There should be no character that's just great at every part of the fight. There should be ways to assist and enable party members to do their best, and no I don't just mean press SE

To explore the concept, I've commissioned 2 excellent artworks to reimagine how PB could be more equitable and have different phases that make different classes shine

Spoiler: Current Pink Bean

• Single-target-only fight obviously prefers single target attackers
• Slowest classes have to commute the furthest every DR cycle
• Only ranged people can reliably hit from the safe zone that offers cover from the music note Seds
• Spam map-wide attacks punish those with weak avoid
• Terrain unused; There's no gameplay reason that some classes should be having way more mobility, it's just a pointless luxury
• PB is not protected by anything except DR and a big HP bar. That doesn't leave a lot of options for strategy
• The entire statue phase

Basically, the biggest punishment to your EV here is not being a ranged single target DPS (not including BM lel). Maybe the bean could be positioned elsewhere to cater to more characters but there's no getting around the fact that PB is just a series of big single target HP bars. Also since it's usually run with >18 people you can barely see anything the whole time so it really helps to be a NL

The coolest thing about NT2 is the smaller expedition size so you can see yourself doing stuff, and each person is more impactful

Spoiler: Pink Bean 2.0

By no means is this meant to be perfect or solve every issue, but I wanted to think about how bossing could be more inclusive and challenging without custom mechanics that aren't in the game yet such as:

• Limited pot use, which rewards things like regen, active healer, and not getting hit by everything
• A character stat that allows Tanks to be stunned/seduced/slowed/CC'd for less time and less severity than the "glass" cannons, or in ML's case the adamantium cannons
• Periods of CC immunity on the boss where it can run around and be dangerous (we kind of have that but I'm not sure it's intentional)
• Armor break, which reduces the W.Def on an otherwise almost immune to high RoF attack target (we have some flat W.Def reduction skills which are irrelevant by late game)
• many many more

PB is an arbitrary example; I think these concepts could be applied to any boss

Spoiler: THE PINK CRYSTALS

• Crystals are tethered to PB so you can't just push the body somewhere else. They block projectiles shot from the ground meaning only melees and Corsair can attack from the ground (losing their Octo DPM in exchange for QoL) at least until the front crystal dies
• Small platforms (that you can be knocked off of) allows ranged to hit PB body from the high ground when the body is positioned correctly (Bucc job security ensured)
• They each heal themselves + PB(like Auf clones) and have DR on alternating timers.
  The idea behind the DR is so you actually want cleavers (who don't get DR'd as long as they can hit 1 non-DR'd target) and you want to discourage single target DPM from nuking the front crystal immediately. This gives you EV-based incentive to bring cleavers because the faster you kill the crystals the less total HP you have to burn through, not to mention cleavers can reliably put out some damage to help close the DPM gap on main body. I've put 2 crystals in the back because I think it should be possible to beat without a cleave, but just slower - just like how you can single-target nuke through Auf's 3rd clone wave.
• Heal is criminally underused by bosses; It's a much cooler mechanic than raw HP because it rewards DPM uptime (not just pure DPM), gives you alternative strategies for where you want to target your DPM, and is a great way to make cleave relevant if you're willing to bring enough cleave to overcome the heal. A poorly funded run could easily clear faster than a pog run simply because the boss healed less.
• The Chadmaster position:
  
  this isn't actually possible because there's no difference in minimum range between BM and NL, but I thought it would be cool if exclusively Archers could shoot from the short distance between the Crystal and the Body because otherwise they're purely worse than a NL who can virtually AFK on the high ground in this scenario with their avoid whereas Archers would get knocked off more and have to climb up slowly instead of FJ. Corsair probably would not want to enter the chadmaster position due to potential boat dmg, but in theory there should be a safe spot between the body and the crystals for the sweatiest sairs.

Spoiler: THE MINIBOSS

• Those blessed with mobility should be granted opportunities to use it. In addition to mini-bean spawns, maybe a mini-boss who heals a lot spawns at the top
• You can climb up on the (unpictured) ropes to arduously hit it with normal people, or you can FJ up there lickety-split with your NLs to kill it. Maybe even little targets can be added to let Shad assaulter up.
• NL will actually have a valid gameplay reason for crazy avoid + mobility + range + dmg + durability because they have a responsibility to stay on the small platforms to DPS the mini-boss
• Maybe there are spikes that pop up so NL's ability to jump attack has a gameplay reason

Spoiler: Other thoughts

It was hard to illustrate these concepts so I'll just hope they make sense in text format:

Bosses should not let you whack them with no recourse for like 60 minutes straight. Finding a window to attack should be challenging. Usually our windows in ML are hard-enforced by DR/WC but I don't think it would be too crazy for a boss to charge a big attack that kills everyone unless they i-frame or get out of range or something. Another common concept in games is that the DPS must be protected by party members or die, or some poor soul should bait out a big cooldown to make it safe for other party members to attack, but in ML our Tanks are NLs so I don't know how much room there is to work with.

Having shorter windows to attack, dangerous positions, positions that you have to invest effort in getting to, combined with healing mechanics lets a fight last longer (to water down the EV of highly geared chars) while still leaving a lot of agency to runners to be rewarded for playing better. Bosses should not utterly bar players with raw stat-checks like "must have 5mil DPM and >15k hp", weaker players should just clear slower and have to sweat more thus having lower EV and more legwork to strive for the day they might also become OP.

Many popular bosses like Rav/Pap/Zak/PB/Krex/HT you can clear very efficiently by just holding down Triple Throw and occasionally using some kind of attack pot, to the point where "attacker" is almost synonymous with NL+Sair and everyone else is called SE, Cleave, or HS. IMO this is not a healthy design for player engagement and retention.

TL;DR I think it's possible for ML to offer higher EV, interesting end game bossing that supports all character archetypes without crazy non-nostalgic custom mechanics. Existing boss designs are severely limited and I fear they've even influenced the meta into the idea that bossing should be holding down attack and anything that goes against holding down attack is an undesirable nuisance.

Many maple grinders have entered deep multi-client degeneracy out of efficiency but I believe deep down there's still the mushroom masher from 2007 in each of us who just wants to run around on 1 character at a time. If we all brainstorm, maybe there's enough collective will to add content capable of supporting alternative yet not poverty-stricken lifestyles in the ML endgame.