Final Boss Fight Feedback - Vanadis - Spoilers

[Kazanski]

Wanted to provide some feedback on the design of the final boss fight with Vanadis after finishing it. Going to set spoiler on most of the feedback just to be respectful to anyone who is not there yet.

Before I share my negative feedback, I want to share that I love the vast majority of this game and think it is really well done in so many ways. Love the way the story telling was done and the class design is mostly great, especially so early after a 1.0.

Feedback on the Fight:
The way the game changes during the final phase of this boss fight is jarring and is a very bad capstone to an otherwise great experience. Forcing the player to simply watch two titans slap each other for 10 minutes is not engaging game design. I'll confess, I did not clock the amount of time, but it felt like an eternity of doing nothing and watching slow animations play out in a way that was trying to be climatic and dramatic, but fell completely flat and leaves the player not participating. I don't want to be dramatic, but this is terrible.

At the point that the player is brought back into the game - I almost missed the cue that I needed to engage with the game again. This is not explained at all and the subtle tool-tip is insufficient to introduce an entirely new mechanic to the player. I've seen other players in threads mention that they just lost the game and were confused as to what happened. This is unacceptable.

Even if it were explained - this final mini-game is an extremely poor way to end the game for the player. Why would you change from the system that the game is founded on and move to a poorer game-play loop that you would never build a game on as the finale to your game? It is really hard to comprehend. Clicking bubbles and quickly playing cards in real-time was confusing, not enjoyable, and is a significant missed opportunity for the closing finale of the game.

The actual execution is just an APM (Actions per Minute) challenge to see how quickly you can click bubbles and play cards that don't hurt you. There is not an incentive for strategic timing or thought, it is act quickly and aggressively. This does not fit the genre and definitely does not fit the game that was built.

I went in blind to this fight playing Vanadis for the first time, succeeded, and didn't have any satisfaction from the victory because the ending sequence was so poor in design and execution.

I've probably used language that is unnecessarily strong here, but I wanted to emphasize how much I enjoyed the overall game and compare it to how disappointed I was with the way it concluded. Great job on the game and I look forward to seeing how the game continues to be supported.

[Mrrshan68]

oh yeah vanadis final fight is very very bad.
the minigame itself is annoying and stupid but tolerable, what makes it intolerable is the fact if you fail (and you will afew times) you are forced to watch some long ass 1-2min unskippable scene before trying again.
that is very very silly.

[wolfling]

I concur. The boss fight should be the highlight of the game and not a weird minigame you can retry over and over.

[Hesmah]

I also hated it. What's worse, when I got around to it in highest difficulty, even this minigame boss is harder. Which does kinda makes sense.

I was unable to win it since it was so punishing.

[Torias]

I got to it. I give up. Rip this nonsense out of the game now. Actually, add instant text, then rip this nonsense out.

[Azgalor]

Gods that was bad. guess I'll just reload the fight and lose intentionally so i can unlock Vanadis other classes.

[Furio]

Horrible game design actually. Glad it's not there in the challenges.

[Azure-Ghost]

I'm currently stuck in just this Bossfight cause the Rune that is supposed to strenghen Mortis Shield doesn't seem to work ( i use it but he keeps getting instagibbed through the shield anyway)
Is this a bug or is there something i do not see?

Oh found it out myself. Sometimes clicking on runes does not work and you have to pick up and drag them over to your target like explained in the tutorial (though weird that it does work with simple clicking most of the time)

[Maxen]

Yeah, that was not great :/

[Traver]

hate it as well

[Furio]

Originally posted by Azure-Ghost:

Mortis Shield doesn't seem to work ( i use it but he keeps getting instagibbed through the shield anyway)
Is this a bug or is there something i do not see?

Oh found it out myself. Sometimes clicking on runes does not work and you have to pick up and drag them over to your target like explained in the tutorial (though weird that it does work with simple clicking most of the time)

You have to left click the most glowing rune, and then use the card as usual.

[Azure-Ghost]

Originally posted by Furio:

Originally posted by Azure-Ghost:

Mortis Shield doesn't seem to work ( i use it but he keeps getting instagibbed through the shield anyway)
Is this a bug or is there something i do not see?

Oh found it out myself. Sometimes clicking on runes does not work and you have to pick up and drag them over to your target like explained in the tutorial (though weird that it does work with simple clicking most of the time)

You have to left click the most glowing rune, and then use the card as usual.

Yea i always picked up the right rune, i just couldn't use it as unlike all others instead of just clicking the rune i had to drag and drop it ontop of mortis as i wrote in the edited 2nd part of my comment.

[Kata]

I went through like six times before realizing I wasn't supposed to click the greyish colored runes. I felt very dumb when I figured it out lol.

[Morika]

Final boss is disgustingly bad, im losing my mind rigth now. I have been trying to pass that over an hour at this point and boss always 500 health left for some reasons.

[Azure-Ghost]

Originally posted by Morika:

Final boss is disgustingly bad, im losing my mind rigth now. I have been trying to pass that over an hour at this point and boss always 500 health left for some reasons.

there are only 3 important symbols to that fight.
-the slightly left leaning hourglass with the sicle attacked to the top right.
this one gives mortis a damage buff to the next attack he does

-the dented pentagram with the top part cut off
this one gives him a stun ward buff for the next stun attempt

and at one single time the bright glowing one when 5 pop up at the same time in formation after a phase is done and is used to buff his shield. (it loots like a big S knocked over by 90% to the right with two connected triangles like structures in the middle

Just make sure you alternate between the 2 buffs and don't cast the same again while he still has the buff icon for them on his bar (a head for stunward and a flexing arm for dmg)
and don't pick up any other runes or runes that have this purple corruption on them (they are not harmful ,just have no useful effect, but you only have limited space for how many rune cards you can carry at the same time)

make sure you drag over the runes from your bar to mortis instead of just clicking them as clicking only sometimes works (and finding out it suddenly does not could cost you the timeframe)

After the autophase where you can't do anything (which get skipped after a few failed trys) you get 1 shield phase to collect runes,
then one combat to use them,
another shield phase to collect,
combat phase again, then comes her hard blast which would kill mortis through the shield if you don't pick the bright glowing one from the formation to buff his shield
and then comes another combat phase where you have to click on the runes during combat to collect them (though if you done all right so far mortis should be able to finish her off without your help there but better safe then sorry)

took me felt dozen attempts to figure that out cause i couldn't find a decent descrption of what to do here.

[2009dh]

@Azure-Ghost: Cheers - Boss was frustrating me.