Bosses buffs additional view

I would say there's a lot of cases where doing things like predicting the first mass sed in HT or the first Ariel in PB comes down to guesswork. In a run where everything goes smoothly and cancels/DR are not problematic, experienced runners know the HP thresholds at which these things occur and it's not a surprise. But in some runs, especially if cancels are bad or there are inexperienced runners, the HP thresholds can be significantly off from what they normally would be, to the point where even a veteran runner has a significant chance of being unable to guess the timing correctly. In those cases there is definitely a not-insignificant amount of guesswork that happens.

Keep in mind all of this is directly targeted at the debate on whether or not to add % HP on boss HP bars.

 

That doesn't seem like wholly bad design to me? It's a team game, so if some of your runners are inexperienced and cannot give you accurate estimates of the amount of damage they've laid down on each arm, then it makes sense that the squad will suffer as a whole due to poor information. If the runners are all veterans and blaming cancels, I'd probably call that a healthy dose of psi.

Is the uncertainty of the first Ariel DP a particularly contentious subject? Asking genuinely from lack of experience!

 

No, and I don't think mass sed is particularly problematic in general either for squads with veteran runners. I do think stuff like this is a little unnecessarily punishing on newer and less experienced players though. There's not an objective right/wrong here, I just personally am of the philosophy that player skill shouldn't be dictated off of unknown information (even judging damage contributions of other players is technically guesswork) and it's more of a burden on newer players, the population that is the least in need of additional things to try to track. I think adding in % HP on boss HP will help ease newer players into bossing and give BT more clear thresholds to utilize when designing actually challenging mechanics for players to deal with, both of which I view as positives. But it's also not a mechanic that the game needs necessarily, and I can see a lot of the viewpoints against. I just kind of think that being able to judge HP bars is kind of a fake skill and doesn't really indicate anything about the abilities of the player other than their capability of memorizing numbers which I don't personally view as fun or impressive.

 

I'm certainly not trying to argue an objective right or wrong either, just discussing your personal philosophy (that I also hear among many other players, as well as the opposing viewpoint). I think those points for are very reasonable, but you could also very reasonably argue against.

For instance, variance and hidden information can be extremely important in providing a diverse gameplay experience and extending longevity (see: roguelikes for a really extreme example). I also agree with the little Sob that low information provides a level of mystique and grandeur to bosses that can elevate a lot of player's experiences, especially for casual players. It's also very thematic to many old-school RPGs where wikis and libraries didn't exist and knowledge was a primary resource for a player (and peope often argue the Legends meta is still like that). It can also facilitate situations where veteran players with more information and experience help newer players by sharing that knowledge, which is a nice positive for the community aspect of the game.

Not trying to divert the conversation again, but I think a much more important overarching question to consider when discussing this kind of change is: what are BT's actual goals and design philosophies for introducing and managing complexity in this game? For such a community oriented game, I think BT's agendas and core values should be a lot more transparent to all players. And with those values, we could make much better arguments about whether this kind of change belongs in the game, instead of being driven solely by a small set of individuals.

 

It comes with experience and is typically not done by pulling out the calculator and adding up the numbers, and sometimes you end up being wrong and learning from it which is just fantastic. If anything, if the % thing were to be added you'd likely see lists with benchmarks for each boss and idk how you can see that as anything but boring.

 

I think the HP bar is especially necessary for any long form bossing content. Without the sense of progress, all the fights become a redundant drag. At least Horntail was designed well with built in progress indicators like wyvern colors and skills. Others aren’t as well designed.

Imagine fighting pink bean and not knowing how to gauge your attack pot usage. The barrier for entry would be significantly harder for any new squad to overcome while the older squads can fall back on years of experience and trust from consistently clearing. Considering how hard it is to get any new squad up and running, I don’t think a steeper learning curve is a good thing.

LF> multi-colored mini beans

 

I think nobody is arguing to remove hp bars entirely? But rather, whether to reveal the precise %hp and/or individual hps for multiple parts.

 

Oop. I didn't see the post Soblet was replying to. I thought % boss was in regards to an HP bar.
I was imagining boss fights with no HP bar and thought you guys were being crazy.

 

Tbh diversion aside I think these are actually the more important questions. A lot of the possibilities that are opened up by having things like % HP on the health bars can only really truly be taken advantage of if BT is willing to make appropriate changes. I think this might be a more important conversation to have tbh but one that needs to be driven by BT.

Not done by numbers no but estimates are usually done based off expected time to reach a threshold based on some known level of DPM and comparing that with what you know of the squad's DPM and current uptime. Or intuition. Either way, to me it's not very interesting and it doesn't feel rewarding even when I get it right. The more satisfying parts of gameplay to me are things like, there's a sequence of 3 casts coming up in succession, Dark wyverns followed by Red wyverns followed by LA Wdef and knowing in what order I have to pre-cast things like BB to deal with it appropriately. And the only reason you can do things like that is because the timing is known and the animations are clearly telegraphed. To me, that's a much more fun experience than just guessing "I wonder what kind of sed this is."

FWIW I'm not like entirely opposed to keeping things as is. I acknowledge there's also benefits to the unknown and there's definitely moments that are enabled by not having % HP. Recently I had a run where I counted down from 10 trying to predict when a body part would die and it died less than a second away from my predicted countdown end which was amusing. Moments like that would no longer exist, although I'd also argue that moments like that are kind of a novelty that lose their charm over time.

 

We're all itching for a HT rework. Something as simple as changing mass sed animation to a different color could change the meta significantly.

 

I would actually rather push for new content or a rework of underutilized content, I think.

 

HT should probably be better seen as a (flawed) benchmark for engaging gameplay that other content should desperately aspire to be.

Totally agreed.

Diverting again, we need so much more of this kind of quick decision making based gameplay. Even then, I personally remember a point deep in the HT grind where none of that really mattered any more and the only noticeable difference between runs was due to cancel rng (which is a lot of hidden information compared to knowing the full sequence, for example) and timing body part deaths for 200 party leaving.

 

Being an expert 200 kicker is a learned skill tho

 

such a weird and tedious mechanic honestly. i wish 200s had the option of turning off the ability to take exp from the party or something.

 

this man really lobbying for more fartsy buffs

 

hmm true okay maybe just in expeditions

 

thinking about this more - i guess we'd see a lot of 5x200 ht leech services? the eph on that would be completely absurd

 

Eh I don't think that's a bad thing. Encouraging level 200 chars to run content I think is a good thing. People are already asking for more incentive to do things at 200.

 

very well, then it's actually a moo moo daycare nerf

 

me me me

buff me

right here right now

hellooOO