Pink Bean Body Phase Changes

Just going to start this off by saying please read this post in its entirety if you wish to comment on it.

Pink Bean is the final boss of Maple. It should be the hardest, most skill-intense fight, and rely upon teamwork and coordination to complete. The statue phases of this fight accomplish this for the most part, particularly stages 4 and 5 once sed mechanics come into play. However, stages 4 and 5 are by far the hardest part of the fight, and once they are done, body phase feels like a breeze. More importantly, body phase feels the exact same every single time. There are few instances on runs where body phase goes awry, and a mix of Res and TL spam makes up for any skill checks. I find most of the end-game community has found the pink bean fight, particularly the body phase, to become repetitive at this point, and slightly lackluster.

My suggestion to improve this: have Pink Bean randomly spawn 1 of the statues from stage 5 (with lowered HP) on a cooldown.

Pink Bean would be able to spawn left man, left bird, right bird, right man, or Ariel at random, with a specified cooldown of somewhere between 5-10 minutes (this time can be tweaked.) Clearly, having these statues spawn with their regular health would take too long to burn down. I would recommend having these statues spawn with 25%-50% their usual health, though again, this number can be tweaked.

For the sake of example, let's assume that stage 5 in a run is finished with around 1 hour left. This would mean that the bean would spawn anywhere between 6-12 statues over the course of the body phase (due to the cooldown.)

I would recommend NOT having these statues appear in a set order. That would defeat the purpose of the suggestion, which is to make the fight feel different every time. I think that the bean should spawn one of the 5 statues, completely at random, so long as that statue is not currently in the map. If a statue is still in the map, the bean will spawn one of the other 4 remaining statues. If there are 2 statues still in the map, the bean will spawn one of the 3 remaining statues, and so on and so fourth. I would also suggest that these statues spawn in with all of their abilities at their disposal. For example, typically right man and Ariel only DP after certain HP thresholds are reached. This could potentially incentivize runs from just ignoring the spawned statues completely. If Right man/Ariel are potentially DPing from the very moment they spawn, however, runs are far more incentivized to kill them as quickly as possible.

Every single body fight would play differently, would require adapting on the fly, and therefore make the fight harder and more fun.

Furthermore, I think it would incentivize active gameplay (which is fun and builds community) rather than muling characters and leaving them AFK on the left side (which feels bad.) Here's how it would make gameplay more active: Say the bean spawns right man. Attackers move to the right to attack right man. To avoid the runners being hit by big bang/sed, the pin would want to move the bean to the left. This would place any characters on the left side of the map into danger of being hit/seduced, and therefore lead to fewer mules and more active gameplay. At the very least, it would making muling characters harder, as they would have to be moved around more and watched more carefully.

Some foreseen criticisms I'll get out of the way:
- But GALBATORIX, this change will be even MORE of a shadow buff for those STINKY buccs, how DARE you make a run even more reliant on an OP class for pin and TLs. Classes with high avoid like DISGUSTING Night Lords will get a shadow buff from this too. Yes. I think an improved boss experience is well worth shadow buffs to classes in fights.
- Melee classes would probably be hurt the most by a change like this, as they need to be on platforms to hit the birds, which opens them up to being hit by sed. Their low avoidability does not help this. However, it also opens the possibility for them to CLEAVE, yes CLEAVE wahoo! the bean and a statue at the same time. I really do not want to discourage hosts from bringing melee any further than they already are, so I'm totally open to suggestions for how to use changes to BUFF melee in PB instead of nerf them. I just can't think of any specifics right now.
- Players in current runs will have to shifted around: use more apples, run with more people. Yes. I don't see anything wrong with that. This boss is meant to be the hardest in the game, and people have already optimized the heck out of it with runs of like 15 people. I don't see an issue in making it harder.
- There may be fewer total runs per week, and therefore reduce the supply of MW30/Stompers even more, which would further increase their already high price. Yes. These are absolute end-game items anyways. They are by NO means a requirement to have to join any boss run, so I don't see the issue of decreasing their weekly supply.
- Runs may choose to ignore certain spawned statues as a means to cheese the fight through permanent double status effects, or other creative methods. This would have to be tested to ensure that adding in statues does not make the fight easier than it is now, and runs are incentivized to kill statues.
- This is not a priority for development team right now, as they are currently working on other, more important things like HP challenges, events, and balancing. Yes, I'm fully aware, and I agree that these other items should come first. I'm not saying that this needs to be a priority for development, but I think down the road it could be fun, and I'm assuming this would be much easier to implement than bringing a fully new boss in.

An alternative suggestion would be to have Pink Bean spawn strengthened versions of the area bosses Dodo/Lilynouch/Lyka instead of statues. Cleave benefits hugely from this, and it avoid a lot of the problems mentioned previously. Furthermore, it's a fun call-back to the guardians of the temple leading up to the pink bean fight, and each of these bosses has a mechanic that you encounter in the expedition already: Banish, DR, and Sed, respectively. It wouldn't change the fight as much as spawning in statues, nor do I think it is as fun as the statue idea, but at the very least it's an idea. Maybe a mixture of the 2 ideas could be interesting?

The point of this post is to provide a new concept that would make the fight more fun and unpredictable. By no means are the exact details of these suggestions fine-tuned. Obviously an implementation like this would require a lot of testing and balancing to make it work, but at the very least I wanted to get the gears turning.

Final thing I wanted to say is that I love this game and am very grateful for staff/dev team that work hard and volunteer their time! I am not complaining about the game, I'm just brainstorming ways to make it even more fun.