The Abomination - The worst boss in every way

[Amplifier]

By now I think just about everyone has a good understanding of the Abomination boss. Introduced in Christmas of 2017, we received a garbage map, two garbage weapons, some of the best cosmetics in the game, a return to a heart-felt tradition of mine Killing Floor Christmas is one of my favorite parts of the holidays and a garbage boss. Almost everyone I’ve seen or talked to has had a similar opinion on the abomination. “He takes too long to kill.” “He’s not a challenge.” “He’s annoying to fight.” “He’s not a fun boss.”
Well I’m here to analyze everything wrong with the Abomination in hopes of identifying what makes him so unfun, so that future reworks to this boss (as well as future bosses) are more fun and intuitive to play against.

So starting with the most obvious point:

Too much health

The Abomination actually has the second lowest amount of “health”, being above the Patriarch but below Hans Volter and the King Fleshpound. This is of course not including his armor, however. On a 6 player Hell on Earth game the Abomination has:
3150 Head armor
12600 Torso armor
9450 “Spine” armor (This seems to encompass leg and arm armor)
In addition, Armor stops all incoming damage until it breaks, meaning that if a Rocket is fired at the abomination when it has 1 point of armor remaining, it will still absorb all the damage. AoE damage (explosives and Firebug) is also spread across all armor evenly.

So for all intensive purposes the Abomination in a 6 man Hell on Earth game has a total of 53550 “health”, consisting of 28350 health and 25200 armor. This puts the Abomination just a little bit below the health totals of Hans Volter 38061 – highest health boss and the Patriarch 18242 – lowest health boss COMBINED. 56303 – 53550 = 2753
Source: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1GDpg2mN1l_86U_RaDug0glFx8cZCuErwxZLiBKl9SyY/htmlview?sle=true#
But “the other bosses heal!” I hear you say. Which leads to my next point:

No counter play

Every other boss has a method for you to play around them to take less damage or kill them faster. You want to corner the Patriarch so he doesn’t run off to heal, or crouch underneath the King Fleshpound’s laser.
There is none of that with the Abomination. Beyond “run from him when he gets close” and “shoot at the parts of his body you broke the armor on” (wow so skillful you have to use common sense) there is nothing you can do to kill him faster. There is little tactical game play involved with the Abomination: just raw mechanical skill in your ability to shoot at its head and not its torso. Speaking of which…

No preplanning

If you have a Demolitionist or a Beserker you can do heavy damage to Hans Volter while he’s shielded. If you pick Commando or Firebug you can easily detect the Patriarch when he turns invisible. If you pick SWAT or Support you can stagger the King Fleshpound’s quarterpounds so that they don’t bug you.
And if it’s Abomination? Uhhhh, you can use the Railgun’s aimbot to hit its head more often, I guess.

Tying back to the last two points: there is little strategy to be formed in regards to what perks you want to fight the Abomination with. While bosses are randomized and technically can’t be played around, it is always possible to pick perks to help your team against bosses that you’d otherwise have trouble with. Seeing as the Abomination doesn’t involve any strategy beyond “pump bullets into it until it falls over” the boring strategy of “pick 2 Demolitionists, 3 Beserkers, and a Field Medic” becomes the optimum strategy for dealing with the Abomination.
What’s more is that trash clearing perks have very little to do against the Abomination as it spawns very few Zeds. This is also a problem with the King Fleshpound (which only spawns Quarterpounds) granted, but it’s far more apparent with the Abomination’s spawns. Which on topic…

Untelegraphed Damage

An important part of any boss fight is to implement visual indicators to show players what attack the opponent is using so that they can play around it. The Abomination does none of that!
Okay well that’s a lie. The Abomination does roar before charging at you when you break its armor. But that’s hardly its main attack. That honor goes to…

The Abomination's Spawn

The Abomination’s Spawn. Its main form of damage: more colloquially known as “killer ♥♥♥♥♥.” Ugh.
These “zeds” are the most unintuitive, uninteresting, unenjoyable part of this entire game: flat out. Let me start by saying this: No one likes suicide bomber enemies in hoard-based shooters. There’s nothing fun about having an enemy run up to you at high speeds and do a ton of damage to you just because you couldn’t hit such a fast moving target. And that’s only part of the problem.
These “zeds” have way too much health for BOSS SPAWNS and will often take half or even a full clip from a trash clearing weapon to kill. This is “helped” by their incredibly wonky models which are composed largely of liquid-like particle effects which makes it very hard to locate their “heads” so that you can kill them more quickly. Add in their tiny models and how they provide you with basically no time to move away from them when they explode and you have an incredibly obnoxious sub-enemy to face. And they leave bloat bile puddles on the ground for you to walk into and take more damage on. Joy.
Which on top of everything else...

No damage

The abomination’s spawn does 12 explosive damage.
This is pathetic. The King Fleshpound’s chest beam does 10 damage every 0.1 seconds.
All of its other abilities are about the same, doing very little overall damage. It is incredibly easy for a Field Medic to heal through this damage, or to even just heal yourself through it.

Conclusion

The Abomination is the purest example of a bad boss fight. A good boss fight provides a challenge, takes strategy to prepare for, and doesn’t take too long to defeat. The Abomination provides zero challenge, requires no strategy to deal with, and takes several minutes to kill. It’s an unrewarding time waster, and an absolute damper on a good round of Killing Floor 2.
I hope that future bosses will feature more counter play and more uses for every perk. I hope that it will do a threatening amount of damage and also not take an age to kill.
I hope that the next boss isn’t an enemy you see on Wave 1 “but bigger.”

[Leon]

suprised you typed all this for a boss which is a waste of boss slot. he needs x3 damage buff, x2 speed, and giving him a bile thrower too as a weapon, if possible and this will make him into a boss.

[Jean-Claude Van Damme]

I always found this boss to be completely ugly and boring.


Even if they managed to buff it, this thing will always be a bootleg Bloat.

[Future]

yea i would like a more interesting boss like hans volter instead of this bloat copy & paste

[Dragova]

Didn't this boss's spawn originally lock you in place when it was first introduced? I remember getting held in place by one of those abomination spawns and getting mauled by the b-astard himself.

[Amplifier]

Originally posted by Phoobie:

Didn't this boss's spawn originally lock you in place when it was first introduced? I remember getting held in place by one of those abomination spawns and getting mauled by the b-astard himself.

It has a grab that used to do about half your health in damage on release. That was (thankfully) removed for being unfair, but that was the only thing of value that he did.

[Fumo Bnnuy n Frends]

you might wanna add that his armor doesn't cover him 100%
you can aim at his feet and directly hit his health bar lol

also yeah the abomination was a good boss in concept but needs buffs
his axes don't do much and he is too slow to be a threat if you walk backwards forever and don't stop moving or get blocked by trash zeds.

his s u c c attack doesn't do much either since you can easily sidestep it lol. His attack animations take too long to do and by then you can figure out what attack he'll do. His armor is a good twist having it on before he gets too badly damaged, but i agree once his helmet is removed you can completely bypass his armor entirely. Maybe fixing it so that you get massive damage reductions until you completely remove all pieces, even headshots.

he is a good counter for melee only zerkers, firebugs, and demos, but once the armor comes off it's open season. Every other perk, even medic, basically anything that uses penetration or bullet weapons can do him in

his minions are more annoying than a threat. Unlike qps from KFP, the abomination spawns just explode and toxify the area is all, rarely a threat unless you are low health, which lets face it if it's the abominatoin, unless you get cornered by trash zeds you'll be fine.

Also the trash zeds are a joke imo. It wouldve been better to give him zeds that relate to him like sirens, bloats, and elite crawlers instead of just trash waves of clots and normal crawlers. The blaots could help impede your route, sirens remove grenades, and the elite crawlers would be a good syenergy with the abomination because they can close the gap and stall while he gets close, also they explode and produce toxic clouds.

probably the worst attack is his charge, which is super slow and again, keeping your distance, you should be fine and can avoid it entirely.

[Mister Torgue Flexington]

Originally posted by TF2SP TAC CAT (tac. as. chen):

you might wanna add that his armor doesn't cover him 100%
you can aim at his feet and directly hit his health bar lol

also yeah the abomination was a good boss in concept but needs buffs
his axes don't do much and he is too slow to be a threat if you walk backwards forever and don't stop moving or get blocked by trash zeds.

his s u c c attack doesn't do much either since you can easily sidestep it lol. His attack animations take too long to do and by then you can figure out what attack he'll do. His armor is a good twist having it on before he gets too badly damaged, but i agree once his helmet is removed you can completely bypass his armor entirely. Maybe fixing it so that you get massive damage reductions until you completely remove all pieces, even headshots.

he is a good counter for melee only zerkers, firebugs, and demos, but once the armor comes off it's open season. Every other perk, even medic, basically anything that uses penetration or bullet weapons can do him in

his minions are more annoying than a threat. Unlike qps from KFP, the abomination spawns just explode and toxify the area is all, rarely a threat unless you are low health, which lets face it if it's the abominatoin, unless you get cornered by trash zeds you'll be fine.

Also the trash zeds are a joke imo. It wouldve been better to give him zeds that relate to him like sirens, bloats, and elite crawlers instead of just trash waves of clots and normal crawlers. The blaots could help impede your route, sirens remove grenades, and the elite crawlers would be a good syenergy with the abomination because they can close the gap and stall while he gets close, also they explode and produce toxic clouds.

probably the worst attack is his charge, which is super slow and again, keeping your distance, you should be fine and can avoid it entirely.

which is why good Firebug players will spam his feet with the Husk Cannon

[Littlefoot]

I had no idea his armor would absord all damage regardless of their HP. That makes no sense because it punishes both Demo and Sharpie.

[Amplifier]

Originally posted by TF2SP TAC CAT (tac. as. chen):

his axes don't do much and he is too slow to be a threat if you walk backwards forever and don't stop moving or get blocked by trash zeds.

His axes actually do 55 damage per swing, which is the regular damage for a regular melee hit. The thing is that he usually favors his bite ("gorge") attack which does considerably less damage than the axes, even on HoE.

That, and he's slow as ♥♥♥♥ and will never catch up to you to hit you regardless.

Originally posted by Littlefoot:

I had no idea his armor would absord all damage regardless of their HP. That makes no sense because it punishes both Demo and Sharpie.

The armor also absorbs AoE damage evenly between it. Meaning that, if you headshot him with a Rocket, about 25% of the damage will be spread to his chest and arm armor as well.

[Mister Torgue Flexington]

Originally posted by 👖ＰＡＮＴＳ👖:

By now I think just about everyone has a good understanding of the Abomination boss. Introduced in Christmas of 2017, we received a garbage map, two garbage weapons, some of the best cosmetics in the game, a return to a heart-felt tradition of mine Killing Floor Christmas is one of my favorite parts of the holidays and a garbage boss. Almost everyone I’ve seen or talked to has had a similar opinion on the abomination. “He takes too long to kill.” “He’s not a challenge.” “He’s annoying to fight.” “He’s not a fun boss.”
Well I’m here to analyze everything wrong with the Abomination in hopes of identifying what makes him so unfun, so that future reworks to this boss (as well as future bosses) are more fun and intuitive to play against.

So starting with the most obvious point:

Too much health

The Abomination actually has the second lowest amount of “health”, being above the Patriarch but below Hans Volter and the King Fleshpound. This is of course not including his armor, however. On a 6 player Hell on Earth game the Abomination has:
3150 Head armor
12600 Torso armor
9450 “Spine” armor (This seems to encompass leg and arm armor)
In addition, Armor stops all incoming damage until it breaks, meaning that if a Rocket is fired at the abomination when it has 1 point of armor remaining, it will still absorb all the damage. AoE damage (explosives and Firebug) is also spread across all armor evenly.

So for all intensive purposes the Abomination in a 6 man Hell on Earth game has a total of 53550 “health”, consisting of 28350 health and 25200 armor. This puts the Abomination just a little bit below the health totals of Hans Volter 38061 – highest health boss and the Patriarch 18242 – lowest health boss COMBINED. 56303 – 53550 = 2753
Source: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1GDpg2mN1l_86U_RaDug0glFx8cZCuErwxZLiBKl9SyY/htmlview?sle=true#
But “the other bosses heal!” I hear you say. Which leads to my next point:

No counter play

Every other boss has a method for you to play around them to take less damage or kill them faster. You want to corner the Patriarch so he doesn’t run off to heal, or crouch underneath the King Fleshpound’s laser.
There is none of that with the Abomination. Beyond “run from him when he gets close” and “shoot at the parts of his body you broke the armor on” (wow so skillful you have to use common sense) there is nothing you can do to kill him faster. There is little tactical game play involved with the Abomination: just raw mechanical skill in your ability to shoot at its head and not its torso. Speaking of which…

No preplanning

If you have a Demolitionist or a Beserker you can do heavy damage to Hans Volter while he’s shielded. If you pick Commando or Firebug you can easily detect the Patriarch when he turns invisible. If you pick SWAT or Support you can stagger the King Fleshpound’s quarterpounds so that they don’t bug you.
And if it’s Abomination? Uhhhh, you can use the Railgun’s aimbot to hit its head more often, I guess. :etghunter:

Tying back to the last two points: there is little strategy to be formed in regards to what perks you want to fight the Abomination with. While bosses are randomized and technically can’t be played around, it is always possible to pick perks to help your team against bosses that you’d otherwise have trouble with. Seeing as the Abomination doesn’t involve any strategy beyond “pump bullets into it until it falls over” the boring strategy of “pick 2 Demolitionists, 3 Beserkers, and a Field Medic” becomes the optimum strategy for dealing with the Abomination.
What’s more is that trash clearing perks have very little to do against the Abomination as it spawns very few Zeds. This is also a problem with the King Fleshpound (which only spawns Quarterpounds) granted, but it’s far more apparent with the Abomination’s spawns. Which on topic…

Untelegraphed Damage

An important part of any boss fight is to implement visual indicators to show players what attack the opponent is using so that they can play around it. The Abomination does none of that! :ghsmile:
Okay well that’s a lie. The Abomination does roar before charging at you when you break its armor. But that’s hardly its main attack. That honor goes to…

The Abomination's Spawn

The Abomination’s Spawn. Its main form of damage: more colloquially known as “killer ♥♥♥♥♥.” Ugh.
These “zeds” are the most unintuitive, uninteresting, unenjoyable part of this entire game: flat out. Let me start by saying this: No one likes suicide bomber enemies in hoard-based shooters. There’s nothing fun about having an enemy run up to you at high speeds and do a ton of damage to you just because you couldn’t hit such a fast moving target. And that’s only part of the problem.
These “zeds” have way too much health for BOSS SPAWNS and will often take half or even a full clip from a trash clearing weapon to kill. This is “helped” by their incredibly wonky models which are composed largely of liquid-like particle effects which makes it very hard to locate their “heads” so that you can kill them more quickly. Add in their tiny models and how they provide you with basically no time to move away from them when they explode and you have an incredibly obnoxious sub-enemy to face. And they leave bloat bile puddles on the ground for you to walk into and take more damage on. Joy. :deadeyes:
Which on top of everything else...

No damage

The abomination’s spawn does 12 explosive damage.
This is pathetic. The King Fleshpound’s chest beam does 10 damage every 0.1 seconds.
All of its other abilities are about the same, doing very little overall damage. It is incredibly easy for a Field Medic to heal through this damage, or to even just heal yourself through it.

Conclusion

The Abomination is the purest example of a bad boss fight. A good boss fight provides a challenge, takes strategy to prepare for, and doesn’t take too long to defeat. The Abomination provides zero challenge, requires no strategy to deal with, and takes several minutes to kill. It’s an unrewarding time waster, and an absolute damper on a good round of Killing Floor 2.
I hope that future bosses will feature more counter play and more uses for every perk. I hope that it will do a threatening amount of damage and also not take an age to kill.
I hope that the next boss isn’t an enemy you see on Wave 1 “but bigger.”

to add to your response about the Patriarch....

a good Berserker player equipped with the Eviscerator and specced into "Skirmisher" can literally run after him when he attempts to heal himself!!!!

I say this, is because when I just gotten finished soloing a majority of the Biotics Lab on Normal as a bit of a test run (before others joined in towards the end). I literally ran after him and kept whittling down his health with the spinning blade, and eventually shot the blade as the killing blow once Zed Time activated (on perfect timing too, nonetheless)

[Amplifier]

Jesus you don't have to quote my entire post...
But yes: Patriarch does have the lowest health out of all the bosses. This is because he has some of the highest damage dealing attacks in the game, as well as the ability to run off and heal quite effectively on open maps. Including his healing ability his health is about the same as Volter's.
His movement speed is really slow on Normal because it's Normal we're talking about here. His movement scales with difficulty.

[Mister Torgue Flexington]

Originally posted by 👖ＰＡＮＴＳ👖:

Jesus you don't have to quote my entire post...
But yes: Patriarch does have the lowest health out of all the bosses. This is because he has some of the highest damage dealing attacks in the game, as well as the ability to run off and heal quite effectively on open maps. Including his healing ability his health is about the same as Volter's.
His movement speed is really slow on Normal because it's Normal we're talking about here. His movement scales with difficulty.

ah, thought so

[Fumo Bnnuy n Frends]

Originally posted by Mister Torgue Flexington:

Originally posted by TF2SP TAC CAT (tac. as. chen):

you might wanna add that his armor doesn't cover him 100%
you can aim at his feet and directly hit his health bar lol

also yeah the abomination was a good boss in concept but needs buffs
his axes don't do much and he is too slow to be a threat if you walk backwards forever and don't stop moving or get blocked by trash zeds.

his s u c c attack doesn't do much either since you can easily sidestep it lol. His attack animations take too long to do and by then you can figure out what attack he'll do. His armor is a good twist having it on before he gets too badly damaged, but i agree once his helmet is removed you can completely bypass his armor entirely. Maybe fixing it so that you get massive damage reductions until you completely remove all pieces, even headshots.

he is a good counter for melee only zerkers, firebugs, and demos, but once the armor comes off it's open season. Every other perk, even medic, basically anything that uses penetration or bullet weapons can do him in

his minions are more annoying than a threat. Unlike qps from KFP, the abomination spawns just explode and toxify the area is all, rarely a threat unless you are low health, which lets face it if it's the abominatoin, unless you get cornered by trash zeds you'll be fine.

Also the trash zeds are a joke imo. It wouldve been better to give him zeds that relate to him like sirens, bloats, and elite crawlers instead of just trash waves of clots and normal crawlers. The blaots could help impede your route, sirens remove grenades, and the elite crawlers would be a good syenergy with the abomination because they can close the gap and stall while he gets close, also they explode and produce toxic clouds.

probably the worst attack is his charge, which is super slow and again, keeping your distance, you should be fine and can avoid it entirely.

which is why good Firebug players will spam his feet with the Husk Cannon

yeah but still does minimal damage
your best bet is to use another firebug weapon that's not a flamethrower, go for the abomination spawns that die in 1-2 husk cannon hits, or wait for his armor to get removed entirely and unleash the cannon

[abugaj]

Needs a major overhaul.

[amathy]

Originally posted by 👖ＰＡＮＴＳ👖:

“pick 2 Demolitionists, 3 Beserkers, and a Field Medic” becomes the optimum strategy for dealing with the Abomination.
takes several minutes to kill.
also not take an age to kill.

https://streamable.com/9sse1
🤔

i agree with most of the post except it takes maybe 20 seconds to kill him if you just stack railsharps