I’m going to just summarize for everyone reading this. The goal of this suggestion is to simplify hunting down minibosses and make it less annoying. Some of these changes could be used for player hunting, but I’d personally recommend against it.
Seafaring Minibosses:
These will follow a set route for the most part. Only deviating when they meet one of the following conditions:
a) If they have a hunting mechanic, then this’ll take priority.
b) If they are attacked and in combat.
For any other scenario, they will follow this route, and if they are for whatever reason stuck (30 seconds of not moving more than x distance); then they will teleport back to the nearest point on the route.
They will remain out at sea for 30 minutes before landing on the closest island that has bounty/contract NPCs. Note that the point at which they spawn on the preset route is random, meaning they should end up on random islands if they don’t spawn on one immediately. Also if the island is already maxed out, it could just say in chat that “[Miniboss name] has killed/captured [Subject NPC].”
For minibosses specifically, there is a general area where they were last spotted that you will receive upon taking a contract. This means that when you take a contract, if you check your map, you’ll get a rough area of where they might be. This won’t update, and this gets placed on Cooldown for 10 minutes or until the bounty/contract is completed by you/taken care of by another player.
On Island Minibosses:
This is just going to be one change since right now they’re bugged or can be bugged. Every 15 minutes (+5 to the timer if someone takes the their contract/bounty), they will despawn and respawn on another island or being to go sea-faring nearby the island.
5/5 reasonability mainly on the seafaring part because for the LOVE OF ME i cannot find Evander when he’s sailing around. it doesn’t even have to be a route they could even just take your suggestion for minibosses and give us a rough area of where he’s at.
maybe i’m just not sailing properly or maybe it’s because my render distance is at it’s lowest but i just cannot find him. this’ll also prove extremely useful for when more are added, like Leviathan (Levi with your Lunar Magic I can’t wait for your addition ) because i’m sure they’ll also have signature armor/weapons that players will want.
it’s not such a massive issue with Evander because, realistically, you can just server hop and find him on an island, but when characters like Levi do happen eventually, it’ll be a pain to have to find them through mostly luck (or better graphic settings, so really it’s a skill issue on my part lmao)
Difference between Leviathan and Evander, is that I believe Leviathan is going to work like AA’s Kraken. Meaning Leviathan is going to spawn at fixed points around the map where you can fight them there.
Oh, if that’s the case then that’s fine, though it’d still be nice to know which area (something like “Near Limestone Key” or whatever) just so you don’t have to cross the entire sea
but i digress. it’d still be super useful for Legendary Ships which i somehow forgot to mention despite thinking of them
I honestly forgot about Legendary Ships, but those things are a different beast entirely. I wouldn’t be surprised if Vetex turned them into a mobile Raid encounter for the server to deal with.
As a side note, the fact Evander gives 8 entire Sealed Chests is telling (unless it was nerfed). I imagine Legendary Ships are probably going to drop some variant unique to them with their own drops (maybe stuff like the unique hull/weapons of that very same legendary ship).
Probably shouldn’t get too off topic, but this is bumping this suggestion so that’s a benefit I suppose.
Difficulty is subjective, and performance cost should be negligible.
I don’t see where some people come to these conclusions, not every little feature is going to bog down your PC. It’s a culmination of a bunch of things, you should be more worried about other things than something that’s most likely being handled Server Side.
) because i’m sure they’ll also have signature armor/weapons that players will want.