Final Boss, Too Easy (Normal Mode)

[Pnut]

Just finished yesterday, and maybe I should've played on hard?

With all of the health items and buffs you get end game, the final boss just felt really easy to me, like it should at least have double the health it has now.

EDIT: With all these concerned replies, I just want to point out that I understand increasing the health might not make the boss any harder than it is, and there is more to what makes a fight difficult. It was just a thought that I came up with real quick as an example for increasing the difficulty of the fight.

[tootstorm]

I played on hard and still found her fairly easy compared to Fennel and some others. I only died once because I had no idea where her AOE would hit.

As much as I love this game (and it'll easily be a contender for best of the year for me), I definitely wish it took the challenge a step further with most bosses. High difficulty fits the style of this game, for sure.

[rdein]

Thanks for the feedback. Regarding the final boss, I've heard about this before.
You are talking about both the normal final boss and the REAL final boss, right?
I'm not sure doubling her health would be enough to make her "harder", though.
I'd like to know your opinions on this so any future rebalancing could be done.

The solutions I'm considering for now are quick things such as removing the ability to stun her, decreasing the time between her attacks.

[Nomade]

I have the same opinion about the final boss the pardoner was a harder boss.
Even if I have to restart because I wanna perfect every boss in the game the pattern are quite easy and not very punishing sometimes you just have to walk to evade.
Pardoner took me one hour to perfect without using item and the final boss took less than 10 minutes.

I don't think the HP are the problem but the attack are just too predictable.


But it stay an awesome game one of my fav !

[Pnut]

Originally posted by rdein:

Thanks for the feedback. Regarding the final boss, I've heard about this before.
I'm not sure doubling her health would be enough to make her "harder", though.
I'd like to know your opinions on this so any future rebalancing could be done.

The solutions I'm considering for now are quick things such as removing the ability to stun her, decreasing the time between her attacks.

Sounds great!

Other than the bosses being a little too easy, the only other criticism I have is the item that adds fire damage (forget the name of it) makes the bow a little OP against normal enemies since it stun locks them so easliy. Not a big deal, I just find myself only using my bow near the end game on enemies.

Overall the game is one of my favorite retro style games, along side Cave Story and Freedom Planet and I really enjoyed playing it.

[DevD1337]

One thing for sure. Make her do some curse attacks as well,maybe at the start of each of her phases? Item's and accessories are the main problem of the boss not being as difficult. And perhaps all her phases being easy to hit since she mostly either stay's at one spot and takes all of the hits while it takes her forever to finally cast her attacks.

[Super Sonic]

I certainly felt that she was, ironically, one of the easiest bosses in the game due to the power ups you have by that point. Tainted Missive with Dull Pearl and Fire Arrows takes her down incredibly quickly. I suppose you could lower the potency of those attacks but by and large I found the balance of the game really good.

[Fennel]

Originally posted by rdein:

The solutions I'm considering for now are quick things such as removing the ability to stun her, decreasing the time between her attacks.

I think reducing the delay between the attack animations (The things you you have too look out for so you can dodge) and the attacks themselves would be nice too.
I think she's too static and spends far too much time waiting before doing something, even when you are just using arrows!

[DevD1337]

Originally posted by Exploding Prinny:

even when you are just using arrows!

PLOT TWIST, she takes away your arrows :P
Actually eventhough that came out as an joke...that's not a bad idea by taking away something the player may have been accustomed to use the whole game then be limited to just one source, being the leaf of course since that's how you get the true ending. BUT HEY it's just a thought.

[Omnomasaur]

I think the biggest problem with balancing the fight is the disparity of upgrades with which a player can arrive there. For the player that arrives with nothing more than the baseline, the fight is probably about right, but things like poison and fire with arrow spam and damage boosting quickly gets out of hand (especially heavy arrows).

A more interesting way to fix this could be to have the boss's attacks react to what the player is using against her, essentially increasing the risk/reward for those items without making the boss too difficult for players who don't have them. Some ideas along this line:

- If she get's poisoned her attacks have poison clouds.
- If she's being hit with fire then her attacks leave fire on the ground.
- Arrow spam could be countered by a summonable sheild which then has to be broken by the leaf.
- Tthe boss copies the damage buffs that the player uses to make buffing higher risk/reward.

This is all probably too complicated and would change the fight too much, but I just wanted to toss some ideas around since I was thinking about it.

[Pnut]

Originally posted by rdein:

Thanks for the feedback.
You are talking about both the normal final boss and the REAL final boss, right?

For clarification, I'm assuming that I fought against REAL final boss since I upgraded the leaf? I've only done one playthrough so far so I don't know the difference between the normal and REAL final boss.

[rdein]

Originally posted by Ballistic Peanut:

Originally posted by rdein:

Thanks for the feedback.
You are talking about both the normal final boss and the REAL final boss, right?

For clarification, I'm assuming that I fought against REAL final boss since I upgraded the leaf? I've only done one playthrough so far so I don't know the difference between the normal and REAL final boss.

Yes, you did!

I did some balancing tests, and I currently arrived at these changes:

-Increased HP of all Final Bosses, along with their damage output and poison resistance.
-Final boss cannot be stunned anymore.

It's hard to add new moves and things like that after the game is released as it would take time to plan, produce, test, etc. I believe these changes I just made at least made the fight a bit more like the other bosses.

[tootstorm]

Originally posted by rdein:

snip

Omnomasaur's suggestions about adding risks for using buffs against the final (or other bosses, depending) are really solid ideas.

In some respects, I felt the combat shined its brightest at the one-on-one human encounters like Fennel (omg, she is the best) that forced constant movement and anxiety--much like Bloodborne. Like someone else said, the final-final didn't really cause distress because her attacks were telegraphed and easy to dodge.

Q: Would you ever post up source code for this or past games? I really want to know how some of this stuff, like Fennel's combat, is handled by GML.

[an Aki]

Honestly, I feel what's done is done. After playing it on hard the first time, the final boss was the only boss i got my first try. The rest took forever. Especially Fennel and the armor/archer duo. Both of those were VERY good fights.

Thing is, every boss could be rendered trivial with the absolutely insane amount of options to game gives you if you go out of your way to obtian them... and this sort of design is fine. Especially considering it's how metriodvanias are balanced.

So... The only thing I see making the fight better is to just give it more unpredicatabily to thier patterns, or something that would make it tough to figure out if you were to enter the fight without a whole lot of the overpowered setups. I went into the fight with bare minimum gear... on hard mode(frist run), and felt kind of upset that there wasn't much to learn from it. But.. maybe that's okay.

Well, if it changed, it's changed. Can't say I had a problem with it enough to demand it be tougher.

[thefollowingcharacters]

Please God no, do not destroy the beautiful difficulty you've made my adding HP. No no no no. The problem with the last boss was the attack patterns were not very threatening or too infrequent. I also understand that you have to face 3 bosses in a row, so you don't want to make it too difficult, especially when people want to finish the game.

You erred on the right side of making the last boss too easy instead of too hard. Slight tweaks to attack patterns please only, don't buff HP.

[R4dioS1lence]

Adding or subtracting HP doesn't change difficulty, only length of the battle. Attack patterns, behavior, predictability, and speed change difficulty.
Fennel is difficult because she's fast and hits hard and wide, so missing a dodge or getting a bad position is mostly fatal. The last boss, while it takes a long time, telegraphs the attacks a lot, and the most telegraphed the attack, the harder it hits (some of them one-shot at full health on Hard).
Against Fennel, I tried to use Atk boosting (Tainted Missive) and ended up not paying back well, since I couldn't hit her enough to make it count, and that bit of life lost makes the next attack lethal unless healed (which spends the few bells you have at that time). On the other hand, against the last boss fight I used the Black Sachet, getting the least hits in (believe I made a perfect fight), and even combo'd the Tainted Missive at the last stage, which made it last a few seconds (I believe it did three attacks before dying). I still consider Fennel the hardest boss on the game (and did it feel good defeating her...), but that may be because I was still getting the hang of the controls or because I couldn't dodge in mid air at that time.