Level for bosses on The Island?

[LegacyXI]

Currently playing on a default server my buddy put up with no settings changed and wondering what level might I need to get my dinos at before I fight a boss on The Island map. Highest wild dino I have seen so far is 30 after many hours as everything else is generally pretty low. This is quite different from what I see in every video about Ark. Wondering if this lower wild dino level affects the bosses as well? Any help would be appreciated as it seems many people use level 100-300+ dinos which doesn't really seem possible if the highest level dinos I have seen are 30 so far and that is incredibly rare.

[Sicksadpanda]

The level is dependent on your difficulty scaling. The boss also gets stronger if you increase the difficulty (which also raises the dino levels...making them more powerful).

Despite the sound of it, I think making the difficulty "higher" actually makes it easier...other than the KOing part being the hard part.

Typically for boss fights, it's the level closest to max that are most preferable, but the stats are what matters the most since all dinos can have different stat distribution.

[Liralen]

I agree with Sicksadpanda- depends on your difficulty scaling. Difficulty setting is inherently lower if your friend basically allowed you to play his single player game (non-dedicated server). You can only play only when your friend is playing and you are tethered to him.

A lot of people don't like playing that way (including me). We play on dedicated servers instead, which are usually always available unless the dedicated server operator decides to shut it down or drops the ball somehow.

Players can play on a dedicated server completely independently of the server operator, at least to the extent of when or where they can play. See for example: https://www.battlemetrics.com/servers/ark which at the time I am posting this, shows dedicated servers ranging from 5-27 players.

If your friend opened up his single player game to allow you to play on it, odds are you can never reach this many players willing to play on it for the length of time it takes to kill the bosses, so that's why the difficulty is inherently reduced on non-dedicated/single player versions.

Also, the Island was designed for first time players and is inherently weighted towards low level dinos. However, you are not restricted to the Island regardless of whether you play on a dedicated or non-dedicated server, no boss killing required.

Although if you play on a non-dedicated server and are not the host, you necessarily are restricted to do whatever the host wants. If I were you, I'd encourage the host to transfer to Ragnarok and chose a spawning location close to water (near either the blue or red obelisks). The Northwest portion of Ragnarok is survival by a brand new player, where the blue obelisk is.

I've read there are risks to doing that in single player or non-dedicated, but best to bite the bullet and try it now before spending much time in Ark in the mode you are now.

[william_es]

Yeah, as others said, that depends on the max dino level of your game.

official uses max 150.

Taming a 150 wild dino perfectly will give you tames of 224 levels. If you collect enough of those and cross breed them, you can start getting their offspring with the combined best stats of each parent. Cross breeding takes a bit of time and effort. But you can easily reach babies that have levels in the 250-260 region, without even trying too hard. Some of those stats will be in the useless ones, like oxygen for most land animals, speed, etc. But the other stats like melee, health, etc will be much higher.

Cross breeding allows you to reach stats that would be impossible on a single wild tame. Every wild dino has it's level-1 in extra stat increases, randomly distributed across all the different stats. If it has one stat that's super high, it means less point went into the other stats. They all have to total up to a single number. But cross breeding allows you to combine those super high stat rolls, over and over, onto one dino.

Once you've got them stable (both the mother and father have identical stats), they will essentially just make babies that are clones of the parents. Don't risk your breeders, always use the children, since they're replaceable and you can always make more.

And then once you have these nice high level crossbreeds, you can start thinking about mutation stacking.

That is a pretty complicated subject. But mutation stacking allows you to produce babies that come straight out of the egg/womb with super high stats... without the need to level them up with exp (you can always do that too). Mutation stacked dinos allows you to replace boss battle losses even easier. With each new generation of babies, you are literally just waiting for them to reach adulthood. You can either send them into a boss battle as is, or ride around on each one and level them up (you can get 20-30+ extra levels from exp in a heartbeat without even trying hard, and more exp levels the longer you spend time... but exp level ups do slow down drastically at a certain point).