The boss and boss scaling in multiplayer are ridiculous.

[AlCool]

So playing in a solo game, on hard lets say, the boss will do VERY small amounts of damage, and will often not even be able to full take off my armour until the very end of his life.

Move into a hard mode game online, hosted by myself, still playing alone, and the boss can suddenly take off 100% of your armour in just 2-3 bursts of his machine gun at a ludicrious range. Playing as a support it becomes impossible to kill him when 2-3 bursts of his machine guns, just one full melee combo, or being too close to just 1 or 2 grenades when they go off (Or hit you through a wall or roof) and you take 100% of your hp and die.

Why does the boss not scale to the amount of players in the game? When 2 players are in the game, he shouldn't be doing 3-4x damage as he does in a solo game of the same difficulty. As it is, the boss does more damage on normal MP, than he does on suicidal solo. He is literally easier to kill on suicidal as well.

It doesn't help that he becomes near invulnerable when he charges to heal to full hp off one of the players, as compared to the Patriarch running away to heal and you being able to chase him down and stop him before he does, and not always healing to 100% guarenteed.

As he is, the boss is far less fun to fight than the Patriarch in KF1, and just makes you have to dance around all the time for his hyper accurate grenade throwing (All the grenades will hit your directly if you don't move) and machine gun fire, and constantly run away. He chases you indefinitely until he catches someone, only making tiny pauses to spam 3+ grenades and then continue chasing while taking virtually 0 damage from the other 5 players shooting him.

TLDR the boss is no fun and he doesn't scale up properly per player in the game.

[Ivara Ara]

I personally find him easy as hell when people coordinate and just boost him through the phases. Even more so when you know you can confuse him by walking in circles. Yes his damage scaling is weird, but it is nothing that is truly gamebreaking. He telegraphs his attacks very nicely, unless he starts running+throwing grenades in a weird manner.

[AlCool]

Boosting him through the phases is the only way to deal with him. Just knock him till his colour changes, let him grab someone, and repeat. His pathfinding is mediocre so you can infinitely circle things and he won't be able to grab you, but you will run out of ammo before even getting close to killing him until he gets to his last phase.

He is far less fun to fight than the patriarch who wasn't so ludicriously predictable and yet still unfair (And he could go invisible!). The new boss doesn't even change noticably between difficulties. He's the same hyper accurate grenade machine across each one. His grenades also seem to have a very weird range in multiplayer, where you will get hit while being quite far from the visual blast radius, which also doesn't happen in solo.

[Ivara Ara]

Originally posted by AlCool:

Boosting him through the phases is the only way to deal with him. Just knock him till his colour changes, let him grab someone, and repeat. His pathfinding is mediocre so you can infinitely circle things and he won't be able to grab you, but you will run out of ammo before even getting close to killing him until he gets to his last phase.

Wrong on so many levels, my team of 6 always kill him, even on suicidal with doing so. Ammo is never a problem... he only becomes a problem if it is 1 player left against him, stop making him seem like a huge problem. When Hans is clearly not that big of a deal, once SS and Demo get released he will be even more of a cake walk.

[@theweedfather]

On hell on earth he's a bullet sponge of the highest order, hell on earth balancing is rediculously broken in itself.

[CrotchToast]

i haven't played on anything above hard yet so i don't really know about the damage scaling and whatnot but i do agree that he's not very fun to fight, especially as a zerker. the only time i can be useful during the boss is if he doesn't focus on me at all and i can just saw the back of his head with the eviscerator. any time i try to parry him he'll still damage me anyway even though he got knocked back and if he starts meleeing the ♥♥♥♥ out of me there's literally nothing i can do because even if i try to parry i'm gonna die anyway. trying to sit back and shoot sawblades doesn't work because the ammo count is limited and they don't even do that much damage anyway. most of the time the fight boils down to running around the map for about 10 minutes only being able to stop for a second or two to shoot and then having to run again immedately or be grenaded to ♥♥♥♥

[Ceno]

Originally posted by AlCool:

Boosting him through the phases is the only way to deal with him. Just knock him till his colour changes, let him grab someone, and repeat.

Are you saying this is a bad thing? I mean...this is the design intent of the boss itself...

Hans is perfectly fine as he is, sans pathing issues. He's a little too easy, to be honest. He'll be even easier once Sharps/Demos are added to the game. Normal solo is a joke against him, Normal multiplayer is well balanced, Hard solo is a little tough, Hard multiplayer is a lot of fun, and Suicidal solo/multi is basically a slight continuation of Hard. HoE is broken in every regard, so we'll have to wait for it to be fixed a bit.

On a related note, join a 128-person server on Normal difficulty and fight Hans. Even though his health scales like the dickens, you'll see how easy he really is. If he throws gas nades, run. If he throws explosives, run. If he pulls out the STIGs, take cover and force him to nade instead (he won't shoot without Line-of-Sight, and you can use the animation of him drawing his guns to get some shots in before taking cover again). If he melees you in the later stages of the fight, do not turn your back on him; you cannot outrun him, but you can dodge him and shoot him quite easily. Heal yourself just before he grabs you so that you regenerate health as he sucks it and can start the syringe cooldown earlier. Don't shoot him while there's white smoke out, since he has 85% resistance to all damage.

And stop comparing him to the Patriarch. We have no idea what slaughter the Patriarch will cause once he's released in KF2; KF1's easiness is irrelevant.

[Shrapnel]

Originally posted by Kevin_Rowan:

i haven't played on anything above hard yet so i don't really know about the damage scaling and whatnot but i do agree that he's not very fun to fight, especially as a zerker. the only time i can be useful during the boss is if he doesn't focus on me at all and i can just saw the back of his head with the eviscerator. any time i try to parry him he'll still damage me anyway even though he got knocked back and if he starts meleeing the ♥♥♥♥ out of me there's literally nothing i can do because even if i try to parry i'm gonna die anyway. trying to sit back and shoot sawblades doesn't work because the ammo count is limited and they don't even do that much damage anyway. most of the time the fight boils down to running around the map for about 10 minutes only being able to stop for a second or two to shoot and then having to run again immedately or be grenaded to ♥♥♥♥

I was in a group last night, zerker was best I ever saw, he literally tanked the Boss the entire time, blocked all his shots and never got grabbed.Ever.
I dont know if its a timing thing or what but he was always in block mode and him and boss just kept dancing back and forth while we let him have it

[CrotchToast]

yea it could be a timing thing or something to do with my connection or i might just be bad at parrying lol

[AlCool]

The problem isn't that he is difficult. I wouldn't even call him difficult. It's that he isn't fun to play and his attacks are all cheap shots near guarenteed to do damage.

Originally posted by Ruben T:

Wrong on so many levels, my team of 6 always kill him, even on suicidal with doing so. Ammo is never a problem... he only becomes a problem if it is 1 player left against him, stop making him seem like a huge problem. When Hans is clearly not that big of a deal, once SS and Demo get released he will be even more of a cake walk.

I was talking about when he is chasing to heal himself. As a commando you can see the literally no damage he takes when he is doing that, compared to how quickly you can take off half his HP before that moment. You could stop the patriarch from healing, and kill him before it if you could chase him down. Once this boss starts healing he stops taking damage and heals to full HP. He also seems to take no damage when he is doing his little animation and yelling about his new attacks after healing.

Originally posted by CENO:

Are you saying this is a bad thing? I mean...this is the design intent of the boss itself...

I am saying it's a bad thing. The boss isn't fun to fight. He is literally the exactly same fight every time if you play with a team who knows what they are doing. Right down to who he aggros to.

The scaling is still a problem as it doesn't seem to care about how many players there are for anything but his HP. When the flashpound barely can take off 10 or even 20% of your armor per hit, then the boss hits you with 1 grenade and takes off 50%, the scaling is out of wack. 2 fleshpounds and 2 scrake can't even take your armor off until above hard difficulty before you can take them out, but the boss on normal can take it off in just 3 little 100% accurate machine gun shots, or if you happen to get hit by even 2 grenades. If he decides to combo ONE player multiple times in a row and they fail to dodge the swings, he can take you down from full health and armor to dead in just a couple seconds. Everything about his damage is inconsistant, especially compared to the Patriarch.

[Enzime_UK]

i'll agree the patriarch is way more fun, a lot more unpredictable too, i hope when he is released they keep his mechanics the same, the stealth, healing, machine gun, rocket launcher, and that silly thing that pops out of his gut and bounces you across the map,
for me the new boss in KF2 (hans volter) is hard if your health drops and your sprint starts to fail, because you are sprinting alot if your team go down or he is simply after you non-stop, ive seen beserkers at low level run him in circles as you already said, and just chip away untill hes dead

[Bru741iX]

Originally posted by AlCool:

He is far less fun to fight than the patriarch who wasn't so ludicriously predictable and yet still unfair (And he could go invisible!).

Patty not predictable?
I'm sorry but he was extremely predictable. There is a total of three thing he can do when attacking players at range:

Keep walking, uncloaked.
Charge, both cloaked or uncloaked.
"One in the pipe!"

The total amount of ways he attacks people can be counted on one hand..
The same goes for Hans.
In no way are either of them "unpredictable".

Sorry for the OT, but those few lines made no sense to me.

[AlCool]

Originally posted by Bru741iX:

Patty not predictable?
I'm sorry but he was extremely predictable. There is a total of three thing he can do when attacking players at range:

Keep walking, uncloaked.
Charge, both cloaked or uncloaked.
"One in the pipe!"

The total amount of ways he attacks people can be counted on one hand..
The same goes for Hans.
In no way are either of them "unpredictable".

Sorry for the OT, but those few lines made no sense to me.

I wouldn't say that knowing what all his attacks are makes him predictable, as then everything would be. He did let you know when he was going to shoot a rocket, which was good because they could one hit you. He could also shoot his chaingun at a distance, and when he charged he would sometimes do his chest attack that did a ton of damage, or a couple weaker attacks. He didn't have an obvious attack pattern as the new boss does, where he literally just does the same thing back to front.

Hans will find you, fire a specific amount of bursts of his machine gun based on what level of him you are on, then stop and throw grenades, then repeat until the next level. Each level added something incredibly miniscule, like throwing more grenades, or meleeing when low on health before the next level. He literally does the same things, in the same order, every single time. The patriarch did none of his attacks in the same predictable order every time. Whether he charged in cloaked/uncloaked, wanted to fire his chain gun or shoot a rocket, they all had to be prepared for. He wouldn't do them in the same order, every single time. The new boss even changes between his grenades in order between gas, damage, and smoke until he has to heal again.

[Pinkeh]

Try the 32 player server boss. Scaling +++

I find Hans predictable and his pathfinding exploitable. Kiting around an object and jumping off ledges and stair cases tends to muck up his targetting and he'll switch to the next closest target. We do this on suicidal with 6 man and he sprints after each player and loses his target whilst the rest of us bring shotgun hell. We normally take him out in phase 1 or it drags on to the last phase

Early on people get wiped because they dont expect his acid grenades, once you learnt to recognise his abilities and adapt your tactics, it's predictable.

[Omnibrain]

I just hate that a LOT of games (at least in normal difficulty where I play) end up the same way: whole team except one guy dies very early due to grenades, then we all watch the remaining guy running in circles for 10 minutes until he finally finishes Hans off.

I don't think thats the way the devs want it to be... I would suggest making him run so fast that he cant be outrunned and kill the last guy to end this boredom. In exchange I would nerf the aoe dmg somewhat to give medics a chance.

[Ceno]

Originally posted by BOMBmarley:

I just hate that a LOT of games (at least in normal difficulty where I play) end up the same way: whole team except one guy dies very early due to grenades, then we all watch the remaining guy running in circles for 10 minutes until he finally finishes Hans off.

Maybe...dodge the grenades?