Bossfights: Enemies, Trials, & more!

More enemies!

As I've stated on streams and in the Discord, I have content pretty much ready to go for progression up to level 100, and am planning to raise the level cap and roll out new content in stages. The biggest thing that I'd like to do before raising the level cap is a balance pass to make sure that each class has a use that isn't totally overshadowed by another class. Unfortunately, with the first iteration of the bossfights there were a lot of class mechanics that were pretty much useless in a single target fight. Aggro mechanics, AOE damage and CC mechanics, etc. So, I have now added additional mobs to the fights that should help allow these mechanics to shine a bit more now.

Each fight will now start with a number of level-appropriate enemies that is determined by party size (generally 2-3 more than the party) in addition to the bosses themselves. There is also a bit of RNG surrounding the difficulty of the trash mobs (they can be pulled from a pool of mobs from the active floor plus or minus one floor), but they are generally pretty weak. I may end up tuning the difficulty of these mobs later on, but at least now we've can start collecting some solid data about how some classes function in a multi-target fight! And speaking of data...

More bosses!

While looking over some of the bossfight data I noticed that most of the fights on the higher end were WAY too predictable, and it was because the bosses there were tanks and were using class features that were intended to rely on supporting a party of other mobs. While the addition of supporting mobs will do a lot to help remedy this, I have also added additional bosses to each of the first ten floors, conforming to different archetypes - Melee DPR, Caster DPR, Support, and Tanks. In testing this has worked out pretty well - some class mechanics work really well against some archetypes and struggle against others. Keep a look out for some of the new bosses in your fight results and let me know what your thoughts are!

Solo fights. They're kind of a problem.

I noticed a few players (i.e, more than one) spamming solo fight fails in an attempt to grind out gear/xp/xa. After all, with no repercussions or cooldown for failing a fight there was no reason not to keep trying to do it in the hopes that you might luck out and get the wins you needed to progress. Unfortunately that was a bit frustrating to watch (and certainly frustrating for those of you that were trying to progress like this), but in those situations that was simply the game that I had built. In short, I didn't really think that through. I built this game with the intent to be played in a group (remember, the goal of the game is to enrich the stream experience first and foremost) but as someone that prefers solo play in most MMOs I realized that it was a bit silly to not make any provisions with regard to solo play. Some games just say "If you're playing solo that's outside of the scope of the intended gameplay experience so lol good luck" and I don't want to make that kind of game.

With solo play in mind, I realized that it was a little too easy to get yourself into a situation where it was impossible to progress solo. If you joined into some group fights and unlocked bosses significantly above your level or if you group fights got you xp fast enough that you outleveled your gear too quickly, it was entirely too easy to find yourself facing off only against only bosses that were too difficult for your level/gear/build, and unable to get the levels/gear you needed to progress.

Enter, !Trial

Trials are a new kind of bossfight to help give solo-focused players a little more control over when and how they progress through the content. The idea is that now if you are the only player in a bossfight when the ready timer is up, you will only be able to face bosses at a level that you have already cleared the trial for. Trials are solo encounters against the boss and five additional mobs, so it'll be a bit more difficult than most of the fights you will engage in with !boss. Once you have cleared a trial, it increases the highest floor that you can access with the boss command.

This should be considered a fairly serious undertaking for players looking to progress, so there is no way to choose the floor or boss that you will engage in a trial for - it will always queue you for the next highest floor, and failing a trial sets a 12 hour cooldown. These cooldowns are separate from the bossfight cooldowns (so you can continue to work on your level/gear while waiting for another attempt) but passing the trial will let you immediately progress to the next trial in line. It's worth mentioning that since trial always selects a fight from the highest floor it can, a player can test themselves against bosses at a significantly higher level than they are without having to rely on a large group for boss selection scaling.

In general, these fights are tuned so that you should expect to be 2-3 levels above them before they can consistently be cleared. That doesn't mean clearing trials at your level is impossible, but for most builds it'll be really dang hard.

One final thing to note - winning a boss fight or trial will always reward the player with xa and xp that are determined by the boss level, but the gear that drops will always be at the player's level Fighting solo bosses a few levels below you will still allow you to push your levels and gear just the same as if you were fighting level appropriate bosses. In this way solo play should still allow solo-focused players to progress, albeit a bit ore slowly. Group play is still the main use case that I'd like the game to reward first and foremost, but now there aren't any other bonuses or penalties for solo vs group play.

Other changes:

• Added timers to the character page to show not only your boss fight timer, but your trials timer and research timer as well (no more having to attempt research to see the timer!)
• Changed 'Highest Boss' to 'Personal Bests' on the character page, now showing your highest public boss and your highest trial completed.
• Fixed an inconsistency with how boss levels were applied to attack and defense rolls at higher levels.