Greater Mirages - A system for Raid Bosses

[Crimsonpants]

Greater Mirages

As of now in the game, there is not much reason to fight bosses with friends, especially the later bosses like Calvus, except during the story mode. The increased damage and doubled health makes it not really worth teaming up to take down a boss, so here’s a suggestion.

Greater Mirages

When 8 or more players at once are fighting a single boss, their title will change from ‘Mirage’ to ‘Greater Mirage’. Here are some bullet points for how this differs from a regular boss:

• The bosses damage is doubled (when normally it would be 1.8x)
• The bosses health mechanics won’t change, but minimum it would require is x8, 8 people) (So Calvus would have 36,000 health)
• The bosses model is outlined for all nearby players (With 8+ players and the boss there would be too many particle effects and it would be too easy to lose them without some sort of outline)

Differences from a regular boss:

• Players who die and return cannot damage the boss anymore, they are effectively ‘out’ of the fight.
• Every player who is part of the bosses activation are temporarily partied up, similar to the planned love potion. This will hopefully ease the use of this feature by randoms. As a requirement, every member of the group HAS to have already beaten the boss once (the boss must count as a mirage for them)
• As a reward for overcoming the hardship, the bosses drop rate on items will be doubled, and everyone who damaged him will be treated as though they have full commitment when deciding rewards. (Even those who died mid-fight, so long as they damaged the boss)

Before anyone gets freaked out by the ‘double drop rate’, consider this would be a time consuming and very difficult process. You would need several people who know what they are doing and can pull their own weight. For Calvus, this would make his drop rate go from 1/10 to 2/10, so 1/5 and thus a 20% chance. For Elius this would become a 2/5, or a 40% chance. And Carina and Argos would get 2/7 (28.75%).

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So Why? For me, Boss farming is a fun activity, but it can be a bit mind-numbing and most of all- lonely. Right now having another person doesn’t really do much but add more health to the boss, it is far easier to farm solo. This adds a way to farm bosses that encourages finding others to play with, helping to bring together even randoms as people shoot their shot at the bosses in groups. As well could be one of the first things guilds can get together and do together aside from server conquest.

Great Mirages

A lesser form of Greater Mirages only requiring 5+ players, but instead of doubling the rewards, they are only increased by a flat 5%. (So Calvus is 15% chance, Elius is 25%, Argos/Carina is 19% etc.) Obviously this could probably be lowered to encourage the bigger groups, but this is also to offer an option for smaller groups of friends. Bosses damage would also no longer be doubled, and would stick at 1.6x unless more people come in.

This is just an aside, not really a part of the ‘core idea’, but having multiple ‘tiers’ to the mirages could encourage everyone from a small group of friends to big guilds to try farming bosses together.

[Crusade]

@Crimsonpants

love potion

That one Iris group

[Crimsonpants]

Ahh, this refers to the love potion on the planned potions list, the one that temporarily puts people into a party so they cannot harm each other. It’s not overall necessary to the idea, but can help in the event you are trying to get together a bunch of randoms.

[Crusade]

Omw to splash a berserker mid smash onto a recently rushdown’d player they’re bounty hunting.
Besides that, suggestion encourages group farming so that’s a positive.

[Firevein]

Me and the boys lining up to fight Iris at lv125

[ShadowJGaming]

Another term could be mass hallucination

[Tr0xic]

I would lower the player requirement and lower the drop rate increases, but make droprates and stats increase with more players. 8 players is too much to reasonably happen in public servers.

My biggest issue with this suggestion is that it doesn’t make bosses any more fun, and it doesn’t add much to the game. Bosses are still boring and the changes are just health and damage increases, you’ll probably still be able to sweep them especially with 8 players. It doesn’t help that this is basically just being peer pressured into grinding to meet the 8 player quota. While I don’t like to compare suggestions, mirror shards are a much better way to increase droprates in a fun way.

[NickyZ1]

i agree that it is lonely to fight bosses, but if you dont have a perfect build (the reason people farm bosses is to complete their build) it is quite difficult unless you mastared its paterns or has god internet and can parry all the bosses attacks, in other words, farming bosses with a team would be rewarding and i like that

[Crimsonpants]

For me, after you master the bosses patterns it can be quite boring to do alone, and bringing in friends just makes it take longer than it needs to. Unnecessary variables and all that.

[Sparta627]

This doesn’t make the boss any more fun in fact it would be even easier and arguably more boring since the boss (with the same move set as you stated) would be targeting multiple players and not focusing you down. Furthermore the drop bonus isn’t that good considering it is now 20% split between 8 people where if you were to do it alone it would be 10% and no split.

Basically, this doesn’t make it more fun, the reward incentive is worse especially with random and this is prone to a lot of buggy instances.

Feel free to counter any points I’ve made.

[Crimsonpants]

That’s not split between anyone. I specifically said everyone is counted as full commitment, so the roll is individual, a 20% chance for you, and everyone else gets a 20% chance to themselves.

The reason I didn’t suggest new boss moves or anything is to make this digestible to Vetex. He’s the one who has to implement this and from a code perspective, going back through the game to rework every single boss to have new moves and mechanics when fought is way too much work and feature creep for a single, simple idea.

[Sparta627]

Ok so are you saying that the king can drop multiple drops at a time then?

Also how does this make things more fun or more challenging, it in fact makes the fight more of a snooze IN MY OPINION and way easier.

King calvus isn’t really suitable to fight more than 1 person from what I’ve discovered since he just hard focuses one person and everyone else can just unload on him (pause). But I guess this is a pretty rough sketch up.

I do think the general idea is cool but the implementation is kind of not it for me.

[Crimsonpants]

It’s this or just leave playing with friends as completely invalid against bosses for any other reason then brute forcing your way through the story. With double damage and sizable health, as well as no respawns it brings difficulty in the requirement of people to actually be competent at fighting the boss. Arcane Odyssey can be a very social experience, but cutting all bosses out of any form of social interaction is asinine, as is demanding significant changes to be made to the individual bosses to make them more ‘multi-player’ friendly. This is the best option we can have that won’t require much more than some basic code work, whilst also being easily understandable, and easy to participate in. Tweaks could come down the road, but realistic suggestions must consider time to implement, and this would be easy to implement, and welcome. Maybe the drop rates could be boosted further to incentivize this features use more, but that’s not for me to decide.

[Sparta627]

I feel like down the road vetex will make bosses that require groups of people to fight. I think trying to hang onto the old bosses is kind of a waste of time at this point and it’d be better to create a new boss that is centred or heavily encourages group work.

Also I agree that AO is missing a social aspect back in WoM it wasn’t like this when hunting exiled and minotaur together. It felt a lot better and AO really just feels like a single player game despite being an ‘MMO’.

[Crimsonpants]

Gosh I hope so. Right now all it feels like is that sea monsters might be shaping up to be the closest thing to an actual ‘raid boss’.