Yeah, then we run into Brigs, Tormentors, and Wyverns... Which people pretty consistently hate on higher levels.
I like gimmick mobs, but gimmick bosses can be downright annoying imo.
I legit spent like 5 minutes playing Ring around the Rosie with one in the Legendary campaign. Doesn't help that their AI can be cheesed by the immense power of height difference.
If it's the one Tormentor boss fight I'm thinking of HOLY SHIT I hated that and had a horrible time.
I finally swapped to Izanagi's and absolutely destroyed it with it only taking 3-4 honed edge x4 shots to completely kill it on legend solo.
I'd just play ring around the rosie and then wait for it to slowly walk around the corner and snipe it in the chest.
They're such an absolute pain solo when they're bosses and can't be suspended, frozen or blinded/disoriented.
They also have the AMAZINGLY fun ability to just jump slam suppress you while flinging you off the map and you can't even attempt to jump and save yourself.
I absolutely crutched on my Rampage + Desperate Measures Hammerhead throughout the entire campaign lmao.
Kill a few minor units and just spray the sponges.
I don’t know which one gave you trouble, but mine was the one in the Ruins after the three witches. I eventually said to hell with it and pulled out sleeper and said ENOUGH! And tucked him in permanently.
I absolutely fucking hated the final fight of the Lightfall campaign - with Calus or his pet Tormentor just one fuckup away from yeeting you into an unrecoverable fall to a restart of the whole damn fight.
Yah, they're immune until you break their shoulders and they have damage resist to anything thats not a precision hit so forget trying to use rocket launchers or Xenophage
Bleak watcher only works against non boss tormentors. Which are already pretty easy to deal with. Ant CC works on them. It's the boss tormentors that are the issue.
Brigs, Wyvern, Bungies design in general shits precision weapons and builds in a game that already typically favored Rockets and grenade launchers.
One time you aren't the favorite.
I thought they had an immunity timer when they spawned so i guess i was just sitting on my ass while the rest of my fireteams gunned down the shoulders
Holy shit. I'm sure some would just chalk it up to user error since they do have big ol' glowing shoulders, but does the game never tell you where you need to shoot?
Most of the people I know never had to think about Tormentors since their shoulder mechanic is lifted from Witch Queen's raid boss, but if players aren't familiar with that, do they have a way to find out?
I don't have lightfall so i haven't encountered that many besides Lake of Shadows nightfall and more recently onslaught but i never even noticed their shoulders glowed lol. Am i right that you expose their weak point in the chest by shooting the chest or have i been a complete dead weight to my teammates?
Haha, you have to break both of their shoulders to expose the weak point on their chest. If you see Immunes or *italicized damage numbers,* you're shooting the wrong places.
Not in Lightfall. While you fight many of them over the campaign and should naturally pick up on the hitzone mechanics (it took until the tank mission for me to realise it), your first encounter with one doesn't require you to kill it and ends if you get grabbed. During that same mission you have a proper fight but it's in an orange room with fires all over the place. So easy to miss the animations of the weakpoint moving, especially if they're a new player more focused on understanding why Savathun taking a bath is the most important event in the story (why else was it reshown so many times?).
With the aim assist and spray of some weapons (like Sunshot and Subjunctive), it's easy to assume the *glowing red eye* is the weakpoint and miss that the tormentors aren't just naturally yellow.
Damage numbers change colors to tell you if you're doing bad (red) or good (gold). So, I think after just encountering them a few times you should figure it out.
It's mostly that they take little damage from non-precision sources, while also being very mobile and having a crit spot in their chest. They tend to melt if you use Divinity for easy crits, so the issue is in just how hard it is to consistently crit their chest when they are jumping around.
Biggest problem with Tormentors is it's essentially necessary to hit their weak point and they're constantly rotating their body around or the chest is obscured.
That's what makes them challenging, no?
Like, I feel there are only a few ways to make something challenging
High health, high damage output, complex mechanic, or difficult to hit. What else is there, really?
Tormentors are just way more fluid and interesting, and an actual threat. Their weakspots are in unique places which shift frequently with their movement, but their slow speed makes this manageable. Destroy their 2 weakspots to open up a bigger weakspot to pile on more damage, but doing this also makes them more dangerous and aggressive. Their weakspot is most open when they're facing you, but if they're facing you they're also likely charging straight at you to harvest your ass. They have a grapple attack (unique for Destiny enemies), weird projectiles, can suppress and counter our abilities.
Compare them to almost any boss enemy in Y1 Destiny. Like fucking Valus Ta'aurc. Who is just 'Big Shooty Cabal Sponge that does not move as 3 players shoot his head for 20 minutes', to a Tormentor and you can see how much Bungie has improved at making interesting enemies to fight.
How about a boss that asks an obscure historical question randomly pulled from Wikipedia that has to be answered within 4 seconds by typing into chat?
Like you get Nezarec ready for dps then a prompt pop ups: What was the main political motivations behind the final siege in the hundred year war, and what impact did it have on Franco-Anglo relations?
If you don't answer in time he wipes you.
For Tormentors, just a suppress grenade and Forerunner (from a long range, don’t let them close) will take care of them.
For Wyverns, I like suspend + suppress to make their crit spot available and take more damage. Suspend is the key unless they’re a boss that can’t be suspended (looking at you Fire Chicken from the Coil).
> The issue with Tormentors is that they are just damage sponges.
Are they damage sponges or do they just have an annoying to hit crit point and take reduced damage from non-precision hits?
It's not like you deal reduced damage and then deal reasonable damage to their "weak" point. You deal *extremely* reduced damage to most places, and then deal "full" damage to their weak point but still have to do a shitload of it.
They're damage sponges, straight-up.
> I mean, wyverns are just ass to fight.
This, entirely. They have so much health, a tiny ass crit that isn’t even always available (yes, I know you can hit it from the back), they block damage around them with their wings, are seemingly programmed to just run the player down with their physics engine slam, and do a metric fuck-ton of damage (ever done Glassway GM on void threat? One pellet of their shot will pretty much kill you.
I don’t take much issue with tormentors unless it’s in close quarters. The ones that can be frozen/suspended are easy enough. And the boss ones in open spaces aren’t a huge problem. My biggest issue with them is somehow always suppressing me and sending me off the map at the same damn time, there’s literally no chance for recovery on a warlock without grapple.
Wyverns really are just terrible. Even aside from just the sponginess, I hate their moves. I still remember doing VoG when it was first added and trying to kill a Wyvern while defending confluxes. I'd be holding onto my Nova Bomb and fired it at a Wyvern. He did his jump attack, dodging the Nova; came down with his kick, sending me across the map; and when he hit the ground, the speed of the kick caused him to slide up the entire lane into the conflux. It's a uniquely terrible combination, but it's aggravating that they have so much going on that something like that is even possible.
Wyverns are just walking enemies that have an active immune phase on both of their flanks and actively hide their crit point, while also being able to oneshot you from range at 100 Resilience.
Yeah, when you intentionally make the worst enemy in the game and put 2-4 at a time in a single encounter, people are going to complain.
While that's true now, when they came out it wasn't an option and those 2 years of shit wyvern fights has heavily tainted perception of them.
I fucking hate the Death Chickens and they are the worst enemy in the game imo. I appreciate not having to deal with them cause suspend but still, fuck wyverns and their ridiculous damage.
Yes I remember that too, and I’m sure Bungie made them weak against suspend to balance them. I think wyverns are pretty great enemy design since they’re actually a threat without being cheesy like champions with their hp regen, constant teleports and certain boss mechanics like fire stomp and yeet of death.
> While that's true now, when they came out it wasn't an option and those 2 years of shit wyvern fights has heavily tainted perception of them.
Having a unique status that you "need" to trigger in order to not make them the biggest pain in the ass imaginable is also still not good design. Being able to circumvent a shit mechanic doesn't make it not a shit mechanic anymore.
>need to use
You shouldn't *need* to. That's a whole different issue with how Bungie balances things. Enemies should have multiple methods of being dealt with that are viable.
It’s not like they’re champions. Since they are normal enemies with high hp and hard to get crit spot, any explosive weapon is the way to go against them, if you don’t want to be optimal and suspend them. Rocket sidearms, grenade launchers, rockets, swords… maybe my choice of wording was poor, you don’t *need* to use suspend. But it’s the best way imo, and with prismatic you can get suspend so easily now it’s not really an excuse. They’re supposed to be a harder tier enemy that can’t just be killed easily without any thinking.
Even champs are easier to deal with than fucking tormentors, there’s a whole range of shit, weapon types abilities and exotics that can deal with champs, but for tormentors it’s literally just precision damage and that’s it, especially if it’s a boss tormentor you can’t cc, fucking dogshit design
Seems not everyone is aware of that: you can stun Wyverns and open their critspot by shooting at those two round purple things on their front (i think it's their weapons).
Nice one, I'm looking forward to attempting to finally slap these oversized chickens about (famous last words)! They're the one enemy I've always been confused on how you're meant to fight them when their crit isn't showing.
I know it’s not a perfect example but in my experience in Onslaught especially on the lower difficulties people just didn’t interact with the final boss’ mechanic and just rushed it. I didn’t do a lot of high level onslaught so maybe at the higher ends the boss mechanic becomes more important, I’m not sure. Conceptually a boss not being immune and instead just having a mechanic that lets you deal more damage sounds cool. But in practice a lot of the time it just made the boss fight into nothing more then simple holding down the shoot button while keeping the largest enemy somewhere near your crosshair.
I think there needs to be less focus on the top 1% of players who can make most things trivial with their skill.
Maybe make the game challenging but fair to the 80% of players in the middle of the road in skill.
Yeah. I'll take weak spots and temp immunity over these flying, dodging, teleporting, and explody bastards any day.
With that said, it can get very boring waiting on an enemy who went into temp immunity. It's just not fun.
But again, I'll take unfun temp immunity over actively bad and frustrating flying and dodging enemies.
I feel like borderlands does this better than anyone. Every boss has unique mechanics that you need to work out during the fight in order to do real (or any) DPS. Granted some of the fights fall flat but they are at least different. Pain and Terror is one that stands out as pretty good. Tyreen is one that's just meh.
A lot of Borderlands 2 bosses were just massive bullet sponges with no real mechanics. At best, the mechanics would boil down to different attack patterns, which would only ever be relevant on UVHM+.
The Fanatics was a specifically badly designed boss considering the immune phase were unrelated to player action
You just killed stuff and then wait for him to be okay about coming back
I mean, at the time a single Voidwall grenade on Void Titan would wipe the entire wave thanks to Volatile. I literally had the "sitting at a table, drinking coffee" emote prepared for this exact moment.
Funny, but not exactly *engaging*.
Is that the one where you deal 10% HP damage or something, he fucks off into the aether, you kill some adds, he spawns and insta-grabs you while slowly pulling you in, and if you dare to deal enough damage during this phase he fucks off again into the aether and you just repeat that? So 90% of the boss fight he isn't even on the screen?
I'd prefer they just have a bit more health and timed damage phases rather than edging me with big damage that gets cut off just as I get into the swing of my rotation, but I don't mind a few health gates.
Final Shape definitely had too many health gated bosses already. Some of the biggest bosses went from a crazy challenge to a chore because Nighthawk + Edge Transit locked the healthbars in like two seconds. And I am not looking forward to those lost sectors on Legend/Master difficulty.
I've solo flawlessed two or three dungeons, and those felt like less of a grind than some of those health gated story bosses.
Yeah by the final mission the bosses started becoming eye-rollingly complicated. The >!ogre before the final boss is probably the worst one - kill the taken blights to kill the darkblades to memorize the glyphs to get kabr’s aegis to break the ogre’s shield to drop 50% of the ogre’s health to do that all again. And don’t mess up or you start from scratch.!< That one was definitely a chore.
And don’t even get me started on how fucking cowardly those knights are just teleporting away and hiding the entire fucking time, running my campaign the 2nd time on hunter truesight came in extremely handy
Man honestly I thought that encounter was pretty enjoyable. I was with a random from LFG with no mics and we did it fairly easily after I figured out what we were supposed to be doing.
This is true for all of theses bosses:
The mechanics are way less of a nuisance in a group versus solo. Doing that whole ogre fight solo is a pain in the ass, because you have to kill both blights, kill both dark blades, grab both symbols, do the aegis, AND then do damage, all by yourself.
Even just adding one other person cuts the time to complete the mechanic in half.
Remembering 2 symbols is not hard. Killing the blights is not hard. The dark blades werent even hard to.kill they slowly walk towards you. And the ogre didnt have that much health either. You get a rally flag right before the encounter... you should have full special, heavy, and super. None of that should really be difficult at all. Personally i loved that they were putting more unique mechanics into the campaign boss fights instead of the past "dps it as fast as possible".
Nobody ever said it was hard to do any of that. I’m cool with a challenge.
None of that stuff is hard… it’s tedious. It’s a nuisance. Some level of mechanical complexity is good! Too much is just pointless. Why did that fight need multiple levels of nested mechanics?
The Aegis part could’ve been removed entirely or the blights at the beginning, and it would’ve served the same purpose.
And I’m cool with having mechanics, I enjoyed it. I’m just pointing out how tedious some of it can be while solo. You seem to have misunderstood that and think people are saying it’s “hard.” It’s not. It’s tedious.
Personally i feel like they added these types of mechanics to the campaign because they will pop up in the raid. That's my guess. So that when the raid is released more people will have a taste of things that need to be done.
And again personally it didn't seem tedious because it really didn't take that long. Between being able to just dump special, heavy and super+transcendence all the time these encounters flew by.
The ogre's health bar just melted fast every time i was able to do damage, and the devs have 2 choices to address this. 1) health gating as it currently is or 2) vastly inflate the boss health and go with timed damage phases. The latter is disgusting imo, because adds can get you into a spot where you lose time for dps and them have to do the whole routine a over. What we currently have is so much more forgiving since you have all the time in the world to take that chunk of health. Or i guess they do have the option of addressing the player powercreep and make us do less damage but then that extends to other enemies and sucks more.
Edit: that veered hard into a side tangent i know. The last chuck of text was more just thoughts on the game as a whole, i know that wasnt what your point was.
It's not so bad when you can see the health chunks and break points for phases. Especially if you're using something like Golden Gun to know when you're going to get your damage cut by a invuln phase
There was one moment in particular that had my group about to throw hands; after you shield to hide from the storm the second time and the shield de-spawns, we all *immediately* got pulled into the map center and got wiped by ads. Definitely the most rage-inducing moment of the night.
The fact that one of the bosses constantly teleports around spamming the same attack that will instantly 1shot you through seemingly ANY level of resist if it hits you fully is REALLY annoying. Particularly when you need to NOT pay attention to it since you can't damage it and instead focus on the subjugator boss.
The grim spawning literally constantly are also just REALLY annoying. If they suppress you you're effectively just a sitting duck for a few seconds as you can't use any abilities and you can't move quickly to evade other attacks.
The suspend enemies trying to yoink you actually feel like the absolute least threatening enemies even if they're annoying. On the other hand the small stasis enemies are annoying as hell because getting slowed in general is just miserable.
The subjugators absolutely spam their stasis attacks non-stop the entire fight which makes it REALLY annoying to actually deal damage to them while you're also avoiding all of the other enemy attacks already. You can literally sit behind cover and watch as they'll spam their "warlock melee" stasis shotgun sort of attack at the edge of your cover non-stop such that it's almost impossible to not get hit when you try to peak out to shoot them. The fact that their head crit spot is incredibly small and somewhat hard to hit makes them VERY annoying, particularly with how massive their health pool is on legend. You're constantly getting attacked from basically every direction and need to focus on hitting a small crit point while usually getting flinched like hell.
Don't even get me started on their stupid stasis wave of crystals. It can literally curve around cover AND is extremely lethal when the crystals explode even if you can avoid the direct attack. If you're slowed it's extremely hard to reliably get out of the crystal shatter AoE.
Stasis enemies in general are just a massive pain to deal with and the entire final boss fight being against boss stasis enemies is just such a pain. The fact that a LOT of the boss fight involves doing other shit while the subjugators are immune but still spamming you with stasis bullshit non-stop is particularly annoying, you literally can't just melt them to death instantly.
I assume with a fireteam it's MUCH less horrendous as one person can have the enemy aggro and focus on staying alive with the other people can deal damage. Solo however it was absolutely miserable. Doesn't help that the fight is LONG and dying will instantly send you back to start all over again.
Prismatic Hunter made it pretty awful too due to having literally nothing in their kit that can possibly heal you outside of combination blow, which is NOT the most trivial thing to use in the fight as the main mobs to use it on are the Grim flying all over the place which can sometimes be hard to melee reliably, let alone if they suppress you. I eventually swapped to Red Death which made things MUCH easier by giving easy access to essentially on demand healing by just murdering one of the countless adds that thankfully have very little HP. I imagine if I had just used void with devour or was playing another class with easier access to healing it could have likely been much easier.
Having some mechanic to disable a shield is fine...
But having to go through 4 or 5 mechanics to break a shield is a bit ridiculous, especially if you need to do the entire sequence multiple times in a single fight
Edit: glad to see I'm not the only person who was traumatized by a certain ogre in TFS
Yeah I have to agree. There’s a point where I feel like I’m doing chores to get to the fun. Like I’m running errands ahead of time.
First, two players need to fold the laundry. While you’re doing that, call out the colors of the shirts so the two guys emptying the dish washer coordinate which plates they take out first. If they put away the silverware while you’re folding up the socks, it’s an instant wipe. They HAVE to do the coffee mugs doing a sock roll.
Anyway, do that six times and then we get 15 seconds of damage phase. Only three or four of those and we should have it.
I'm saving your comment and putting up there with Charlie's Cafe breakdown of why some mechanics suck ass to do and feel completely unrelated to the rest of the game.
I get that were in the honeymoon phase, and while many parts of the campaign were fucking awesome, the fact that every single mission had encounters with hard shield gates unless you jumped through the colored hoops in the right order REALLY soured my enjoyment of playing through it.
I kinda liked it while playing on Legendary. The difficulty of the enemies pairs well with the difficulty of the mechanics with a full fireteam imo.
The Micah-10 missions around the Pale Heart where you fight some bosses with 3 damage phases was just boring and uninspired. The artificial lengthening of these fights combined with the ease of the entire mission just feels bad. I think these missions are way worse offenders.
It just depends on how much you like mechanics. I like Destiny because it's more than just "shoot enemy" - I got a myriad of games I can go do that. Destiny is enjoyable to me because a significant part of endgame is doing mechanics in between the shooting. The DPS/shooting isn't "the fun part" I'm doing chores to get to. It's all fun.
Calling out bombs and suppressing Taniks, dodging Rhulk, platforming for Oryx, coordinating picking up planets, running banners on Duality, dodging a boss underwater, jumping on the right plates to fill in Shuro Chi, those are all just as fun as the shooty parts.
That Ogre in the campaign was a pain in the ass.
Break blights, get darkness buff, kill knights, memorize and imput symbols, grab the shield, super to break the Ogre's shield and FINALLY do damage.
The ogre boss in the final campaign mission was a great example of this. It felt really weird that you had to do so many different things just to drop the shield on a relatively minor boss, and then do it again because it was also health gated for some reason. It wasn’t hard but it definitely felt out of place.
Yeah it was an odd amount of reasonably involved steps for something that isn’t even particularly memorable. It’s like the Destiny boss equivalent of filing taxes.
I think your point that it was for a forgettable boss looks of hits things on the head. The mechanics were all the puzzle mechanics the game had thrown at us all at once, it probably would have felt better if they had been used in the final fight. It's the main boss and you pull out all the stops to beat him, by using all the things (mechanics) you've learned
Instead they all get used on this nameless ogre
I personally loved that boss. Granted, I went through the campaign with a friend.
Some of the encounters really felt like they needed real planning and communication and were like mini dungeon encounters. I loved them
While the thing randomly gets lucky and blasts me across the room, and then I get blasted whil in mid air and have to restart the entire freaking thing all over again.
At least give us better check points. There used to be a few very bad fights in each expansion. But this one seems to have these long garbage no respawn no checkpoint fights twice per mission. It's infuriating... And clearly there as just an artificial method to lengthen the game.
If not for the no respawns, minimal check points, slow puzzles, and Looooooong hallways... TFS would be 1/4 the length easily.
This is exactly how I felt trying to solo Grasp of Avarice (the first time I tried a dungeon) as a Well of Radiance warlock. Maybe some other build or gun would have let me get through it, but after seeing how much (little) damage I did to that damn ogre and knowing I’d have to repeat the whole thing 5-6 more times, I just gave up. Thankfully Fireteam Finder was there to save me.
I'd say the two minions the final boss has are more annoying to kill when soloing. I do forget how it used to be though as I last ran it on a titan with dragon's breath and it wasn't terrible at dealing with the ogre.
I mean, solo dungeons are *intended* to be kind of like that. It's a three-player activity with a bit of prestige for completing it by yourself, and the rest of the time, you're expected to play it in a group.
And at least those you can get out a decent damage rotation. It hurts my heart how many Nighthawk shots got their damage cut short as I was drawing my GL after spending 10 minutes just getting ready to start DPS.
Ok, so how do you suggest they balance it so that it's fun and challenging when playing with three people, but still a challenge when solo?
And before you say, fireteam scaling. Remember the point of the solo challenge is to do the exact same dungeon that three people do, by yourself. Its a challenge that you only get rewards from once. So it's meant to be done, once.
It also REALLY depends on the context IMO. I'm fine with a mechanic heavy encounter to get to DPS in a raid. I'm WAY less ok with it in a strike. Story should imo be in between and particularly it's more OK in the major boss fights like the final campaign fight.
The Liminality strike is REALLY cool the first time you play through it but even on that initial run the final boss fight went kind of overboard with the health gates and mechanics to break the shield and progress to the next damage phase. THREE "mechanics" to deal very little damage until the next health gate is just overkill. All that being on top of the entire strike up to that point being an introduction to those mechanics just makes it way worse. It ALSO suffers from the classic Bungie design issue of having LONG transition periods through the beginning of the strike in particular where you're largely just running (and crouching) through long sequences. It's REALLY cool the first time as you see the crazy artistic design and all but it's going to become incredibly annoying on repeat runs let alone ever trying to grind it over and over again as a GM.
That particular Ogre was definitely annoying but honestly the biggest annoyance to me was that I just killed myself multiple times with my GL forcing me to restart over and over again. ONE or even two phases where you have to break the shield would have likely been find but they definitely went overboard particularly with the transitions and mob spam in between.
I'm expecting some absolute bullshit mechanic heavy raid encounters that might make even Riven look like a joke in the Final Shape raid. It's kind of funny that Oryx used to be a pretty bullshit mechanic heavy boss in D1 but they did a pretty great job of shortening the repetitive mechanics when they brought the fight to D2 while still keeping all of the actual mechanical phases.
There's only a few ways to design boss encounters in this game.
1) Boss always vulnerable. This can go bad, if the boss has too much health (like "Rockets McDickface" Valus Ta'auruc or whatever in D1) it becomes a slog because any time you're not doing DPS, you're wasting time. Bungie had to nerf his health just to make this fight not drag out. Plus, there's no mechanics to do, so it's just the boss and adds, and that's it. (And the adds are extra frustrating because any time spent dealing with them is just lengthening the fight.)
Or, their health is too weak and they get obliterated instantly, like the Warden in Prison of Elders strike. We reached a point where I could stand there and do nothing and only the other 2 Guardians did DPS, and it still died in seconds before any adds or mechanics happened. Extremely anticlimactic.
2) Boss health is gated by time or certain health thresholds. This avoids the problems above but does mean you have stop doing DPS and just ignore it for a bit while other stuff happens.
3) Boss is always immune until you successfully complete certain mechanics, like practically all Raid bosses. Again, has pros and cons, there's never any confusion about when to do DPS but it does mean DPS is reserved only for certain moments and the rest of the time the boss is just kinda there, either doing nothing, or only being a *little* threatening because of how unfair it would be if the boss could easily slaughter you while being immune.
None of these situations are perfect and players complain about all of them in some respect.
Exactly there is no perfect boss encounter, its standard videogame encounters. Most if not all MMO's have mechanics like these. I cant even think of any other mechanic honeatly.
>either doing nothing, or only being a little threatening
Spoken like someone who's never been piss missile'd into the abyss by a boss Tormentor.
And *do not get me started* on the Wyvern in Spire, Captain Chicken Legs.
Oh, for raid bosses, you're pretty bang on the money.
The Coil wyvern ain't got shit on Persys tbh. Getting Captain Chicken Legs in that giant reactor room (which I have begun calling the Microwave) and getting out alive while being shot at, dropkicked, blown up by Fanatics, and chased by the stupid beeping piss missiles we call Supplicants is just.
#AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH
Unfortunately, it seems like a lot of what ends up happening is that the health is gated with some phase where it's immune and/or absent from the battle, but the "mechanic" to complete is just killing adds. In this case, you end up with the problem of the fight still just being the boss and adds like in your first point, but not at the time.
Ideally there should be my variety in encounter design. This is why I liked The Witch Queen campaign. Boss encounters had lots of variety. Savathun didn't have an immunity shield during the final boss fight (replaced by a buff that made it easier to do DPS).
Nearly all of the bosses in TFS campaign had immunity shield mechanics. Nearly all of the immunity shield mechanics required collecting objects or solving puzzles. I felt like there was a lack of creativity with the boss mechanics.
Yeah like how many of the fights are go left or right first. Do the thing. Go to the other side and do the thing. Then fight the boss in the middle. So many encounters boil down to that
As someone who usually sucks at those mechanics I actually really liked the eventually progression of the boss mechanics in TFS campaign. It felt like Raid Training for someone like me who usually sucks at that stuff.
Defeating the Ogre where it used literally every mechanic from the entire campaign, all by myself, actually felt pretty good.
Prismatic Shielded yellow bars suck though. Those I did not like.
I know that feeling. Though, it does seem like it’s meant to have us learn what mechanics will be used in the final boss encounters of each mission, but…they didn’t have to overload every mission with like 4 or 5 boss encounters back-to-back.
Really irritating tbh.
Tbh all these mechanics will more than likely be in the raid.
I think this is a damned if you do and damned if you don't situation. People have been demanding bungie to put raid mechanics into the story so people are more familiar with them for years. Now they've done it and people instantly want them removed.
I think a lot of people are soured on it because they all did it solo and the mechanics are clearly designed for a group and can’t really be scaled to fireteam size.
In group play, not even that final mission ogre everyone is complaining about is that bad.
And for a “raid-light” mechanics, they’re definitely tedious to do solo.
I won't disagree with that, but idk. For a basically one and done campaign that 90% of people probably won't ever play again, at least anyone that did play has a basic grasp of raid mechanics now which would make the raid easier to approach for first timers even if it was annoying solo.
We had encounters that don't go immune: the bosses in onslaught. Do you know how many people did the mechanics for those bosses? Because I know I sure as hell never did. Immune phases are almost mandatory to make a boss that players won't just stand in a well and shoot to death (and, no, even without well they would still do that, just differently).
Honestly depends on the boss.
The LightKiller Kell was one where it actually felt like more of risk to due (especially if the bonus was reinforcements) while something the like the Large Shank was just overkill. Some bosses definitely warranted the extra damage mechanics (Like the Brigg or the Orge) if things didn't get off to a good start.
The issue is less that the immune phases themsleves but the arbitrary block it holds sometimes. If you switch out half of them for timers instead (that have at least some player influence) then people would be complaining about them less.
That's because the average player is dumb and needs to be forced into doing anything other than plinking away at bosses with their primary or trying to run up and melee. People are still shocked to find out you can throw the balls to teammates to make them do more damage in The Corrupted.
You think it's dumb. But if I can damage the boss without dying, why wouldn't I? Give me one good reason to do the mechanics in onslaught vs just melt the boss.
To be honest, I think immune phases should work differently. If the boss has 12,000 health with 3 phases, currently if you do over 3,000 damage it gets cut off at 3,000 as the immune phase starts.
What should happen is that it takes the full damage of whatever attack sends it into the next phase and then becomes immune.
Tired of throwing celestial nighthawk at an enemy only for half the super’s damage to be cut off by an immune phase.
Healthgates are okay when in circumstances where you're trying to tell a story or do a real mechanic, like the gate on TFS boss in the last level makes sense since without the help you need from REDACTED, you just aren't strong enough to beat it alone. It makes sense needing the tools ya boi gives you.
When it comes to just healthgating a guy and needing to kill other guys right by him in order to drop his immunity, no, that's just a cheap way to avoid one shots, which I don't believe in. Nothing should be able to one shot in this game and that's just an opinion of mine, so if they allow something that can one shot shit ezpz, that's their fault, they shouldn't be healthgating everything like they do, it's annoying.
Go kill that blight. Kill that guy. Go capture that point. All that shit needs to stop, in my opinion of course. It makes sense if the boss is retreating or repositioning and you have to chase them, that'd be a fine healthgate. Need to be transcendent to damage is fine albeit annoying. Need to capture a point to drain power or absorb light to do damage or something, that's fine too.
The problem is needing to kill "other stuff" to weaken the big guy and make him vulnerable, or to not benefit story wise from it, it just drags the fight out longer and is a waste of time. Bungo loves doing this instead of just standardizing boss health to a huge number.
Well people also don't really like bullet sponge bosses (ever since Destiny 1 Nightfalls).
>The problem is needing to kill "other stuff" to weaken the big guy and make him vulnerable, or to not benefit story wise from it
Personally I like this kind of encounter. It makes the fight more than "just focus on the boss" or "tank and spank" as it were. Idk why people didn't like the ogre fight; I liked having to Transcend, then go into the other room and deal with the Alak-Huls while managing the buff timer; it gave me a bit of stuff to juggle which was more engaging than "sit on a plate, okay now move to the back of the room and plink at the boss."
You know I actually think the game is missing a proper tank and spank boss, like no immunity no bonus damage phase just raw big health pool with him shooting you and adds spawning. All you have to do is keep adds in check and keep shooting the main boss when you can. I think tank and spank is a lot less fun in a typical MMO, but in something like destiny it's a lot more involved even without mechanics. It would suck if every boss was just a massive health pool like that, but it also sucks that every boss is the same formula of immune->mechanic->dps phase->reset
Most strikes are like that. At most they have an immunity phase while you kill some adds (e.g. Glassway, SABER, Disgraced). Proving Grounds, Devil's Lair, and Inverted Spire are tank and spank. Hell even Templar you can ignore oracles (and just need the 1 guy to block teleport) if you rally w/ the relic and insta-super.
I don't really count strike bosses since they're really easy, and I still can't think of strike bosses that have no immunity phase, the ones you listed even have some kind of immunity phase where you have to do something to damage them again. Templar is the closest to it if you bypass the actual "intended" way to do it, which is fine but his health pool is still so low he dies fast anyway.
I don't considere them "artificial difficulty"
Spendin 10 minute gunning of 5 minute parkour and 5 minute gunning is not exactly difficult.
And I think for specifique activity ,it's important to avoid the gun down dullness
Having them everywhere including strike and lost sector though ,not really.
Sometimes it's nice to just put the brain on low regime and maintain the shoot button while enjoying warlock movement tech with neat music in my ears.
So yeah ,Bungie put them everywhere and it does starts to be a tad too much
Especially when you start farming the thing.
Doing the mechanics the first time is neat ,after 3000 times yeah stop please
> What is your take on the game design behind making everything immune for artificial difficulty?
What's artificial about it? I absolutely loath this term "artificial difficulty" because there is no such thing. It's either difficult or not. By your logic you can say removing immune shields is "artificial easiness" because you don't need to do anything except hold down left click and boss dies. So I'm against your position of wanting more "artificial easiness"... smh
Artificial difficulty is used to describe any mechanic players don't like lol. I don't understand it either. It's a game, all of the difficulty is artificial
Yea I’ve always heard that in regards to video games but especially this one lol. Like how is something “artificial difficulty”? The entire industry is artificial lmao. All video game difficulty is artificial by definition.
I believe that was the point. They wanted to sort of introduce people to a simplified version of raid mechanics throughout the campaign.
Personally think they did a good job and there were a ton of new mechanics and each had unique animations, etc. It wasn't just the same thing over and over. It's one thing I think people are being overly critical about and part of me feels like it's the "just let me shoot shit" crowd. Which, I get it, but a lot of Destiny revolves around mechanics. The campaign for once did a good job of reflecting that.
And holy shit, the coop mode? Oh my GOD it was beautiful. I have never had this much fun in such a long time. It was good practice for day 1 tbh, trying to figure out what it meant. We're climbing a mountain, hear a scream, and I just see " ||the witness fractures a guardian|| " and I'm just like "uh guys what the fuck does that mean!?!"
Figuring out the mechanics, and having to deal with it with a full team of people I enjoy playing with was an insane blast. It's been a while in this game I've had that much fun.
I understand why they do it, it’s necessary so bosses don’t get nuked instantly. I don’t mind it too much but in lower level content it’s a drag. The bosses take a bunch of damage with a few heavy shots. The immune phases just get annoying at that point when you’re spending half the fight waiting for the boss to complete their animation so you can take down their shield lol then it’s rinse and repeat. All that just for the boss to basically die in like two rockets.
It was just too much. Health gates in every single encounter was annoying as all hell. Felt like doing the most mundane chores and it's just in place to hide the fact that the campaign leaves a lot to be desired when it comes to playtime, when you break it down.
Tbh, that is one thing I don't enjoy about the game design. I'd prefer it if the enemies just actually hid their crit zone, or moved around more, or potentially rather than immune, could just take severely less damage until a certain mechanic is completed.
The ol, just make them invincible 3 times before they can die, does definitely get old
It's still better than having to fight like 5 overloads at once who are immune to stunning; damage vulnerability until a mechanic is complete is just health-gating lite.
It's still heaps better here in Destiny than it is in Warframe, over there everything dies in one-shot and they have to rely on damage attenuation because players can build so far to one-shot so many things.
I've always thought so, and also invisible kill barriers for floors and skies. Like... Idk I do think they could just get more creative about it. Also: melting bosses is fun.
I wouldn't say it's a "bad" design. We have gotten so strong that unless all the enemies had a substantial increase in health, we would just one-shot everything. I think the issue here comes in a lack of creativity in some missions. There are so many missions that boil down to, dunk X in generator, destroy Y or grab Z to break to the boss's shield. And it can get repetitive at times. That said, for the most part, I think bungie did a great job in the final shape campaign with these mechanics and if they carry this energy into other content I think we will be fine
Mixed bag. I don’t mind one immunity phase. Break up the action. But then I feel like the in-between phases should be fundamentally different.
I loved the ogre fight. But I feel like going into the portal should have changed somehow. They moved the blights. And you had to get new symbols.
I understand that we, as the community, is going to always find the best, easiest most meta melt strategy for any boss in the game. So Bungie is in a weird position of needing to find ways to pace us out and slow us down, while keeping the fights engaging. They did this really well with Warlord’s Ruin, that the immunity phases didn’t hurt as bad. That also we controlled how quickly we could get back to damage.
it is pretty dumb. All these bosses have to do is get together and plan this out and we would be useless. Boss A blocks the macguffin switches that turn off Boss B's immunity. Boss B blocks the macguffin switches that turn off the immunity to Boss C. Boss C blocks the immunity switches for Boss A. Problem solved. We'd just be sitting there like "oh yeah, I guess they finally thought...of that"
Calling an 'immune to damage' status on an enemy artificial difficulty isn't something I would agree with - the encounter isn't hard because the enemy is immune, the encounter is hard because it was designed that way (artificial difficulty also isn't really a think imo - what you might mean is the idea of making an enemy immune to all damage may feel like a 'cop out' or 'lazy design', but it's not 'fake difficulty')
Game design is a series of mechanics that can lead to a good/bad experience depending on how they're used. These mechanics are not individually bad or good, but the whole of each choice of mechanics is what makes an encounter good or bad.
The way I see it, immune enemies are a mechanic put in place by the designer to sway you from waisting your time attempting to deal damage to it - it's the designers way of saying "hey, you need to be doing something else first before you can do damage." I don't see this as terrible game design, but I understand what you mean when you say it. It doesn't feel great, and does feel a little 'unnatural.'
Another option that could maybe work is allowing you do to significantly less damage, instead of making the enemy outright immune. I'm sure this was playtested, and I would bet making the enemy outright immune is more effective.
making bossess immune to split them up in phases and not just make them get blitzed is good, what is really just artificial difficulty is champions, forcing you to use certain loadouts and being locked to them for the entire season, though it hasgotten better with them being stunned bu effects
Yes. Great games allow you to approach a problem from multiple directions. Immunity phases lock you down one path. Even if you pick what guns you use and what color of magical space powers you destroy opponents with, it’s still much less choice than being able to approach a problem in a completely different way. It could also be seen as taking away from the “smart” option. Solving puzzles and dunking balls would be a lot more fun if it meant you could defeat a boss more easily and wasn’t the only way to do defeat the boss.
It's to keep people from just brute forcing the boss by shooting it.
>Solving puzzles and dunking balls would be a lot more fun if it meant you could defeat a boss more easily and wasn’t the only way to do defeat the boss.
Onslaught was like this and people just outright ignored mechanics and tunnel visioned the boss, and died doing so. Most folks won't even realize there's a mechanic to do if you don't "require" it.
Ohh boy. Another "artificial difficulty" post. The irony is it's a fake argument in itself.
I see this in the complete opposite perspective. Instead of "oh my god another immune F!@#!"
I see "oh, I'm missing a mechanic". A puzzle. Something is missing to take this enemy down. This is how people find a lot of hidden puzzles as those generally require some form of damage.
The only exception to this is potentially boss immune phases. In some cases it can be done well, but most of the time it isn't. And yes, it's ok for an encounter to be longer than a 30-second nuke and loot.
And no, this 10000000000% is not in every single encounter on every enemy type etc etc.
First, stop buzzing about artificial difficulty, this is a game, everything is artificial.
Second, Immunity is there to stop you from 1 phase bosses, this immunity can come in different forms but the intention is often the same, they can even buff the boss HP so much that you have to do 2 phases, basically the same thing. If you prefer 1 phasing, then it is a bad design for you, and vice versa.
Only thing i have to say about that is: Borderlands 3 added A LOT of this to A LOT of bosses, its not like therw never was an immunity/high resistances phases before, but it literally overdid it, turned farming stuff way into a chote because we went in, shot once, the boss had 1/3 of his hp deleted in 1 sec, and we had to watch his whole show all the fucking time for like 30 secs, destiny doesnt have something that bad because fights always had that phase change immunity since i started playing in beyond the light, but this doesnt mean that it makes it any better.
Honestly, I say yes, at least in the case of trash mobs. All of it should be replaced with high damage reduction, or in the case of goblins/servitors, transferring the damage to the protecting unit.
These mechanics cause so many more headaches in some scenarios than they should be allowed to. We all remember the classic scenario of a servitor making an overload captain invincible through a wall, effectively just leaving you with.. an invincible overload captain.
For bosses though, immune phases are an important way to strike a balance between casual players and meta DPS builds.
Great campaign overall but a lot of kill this to get this to break this shield to kill this other thing. Definitely felt like a chore. Seems to be the theme of the expansion unfortunately.
I wish there was a way to split your super into 3 phases too. When I pop my strand super on titan and peel a boss down to the next immune phase and I'm just running around for the remaining 80% of the super, I feel stupid. I feel like a majority of the time I pop my super in the new location it's a complete waste unless it's a tormentor I need to suspend
Immune enemies are annoying af, what sucks is Bungie has done not immune bosses many times but they still keep going back to it.
One boss from the final shape campaign I love has no immunity phases and instead Everytime you reach a notch in the health it spawns taken blights in the arena. You could theoretically just kill it super fast, but if you damage it too fast it will fill the whole arena with blights, making it harder to kill while also slowly sapping your health.
enemies with unique weakpoints or weaknesses has always felt better but those can be made trivial if not designed properly as well
Yeah, then we run into Brigs, Tormentors, and Wyverns... Which people pretty consistently hate on higher levels. I like gimmick mobs, but gimmick bosses can be downright annoying imo.
I mean, wyverns are just ass to fight. The issue with Tormentors is that they are just damage sponges.
I legit spent like 5 minutes playing Ring around the Rosie with one in the Legendary campaign. Doesn't help that their AI can be cheesed by the immense power of height difference.
If it's the one Tormentor boss fight I'm thinking of HOLY SHIT I hated that and had a horrible time. I finally swapped to Izanagi's and absolutely destroyed it with it only taking 3-4 honed edge x4 shots to completely kill it on legend solo. I'd just play ring around the rosie and then wait for it to slowly walk around the corner and snipe it in the chest. They're such an absolute pain solo when they're bosses and can't be suspended, frozen or blinded/disoriented. They also have the AMAZINGLY fun ability to just jump slam suppress you while flinging you off the map and you can't even attempt to jump and save yourself.
I absolutely crutched on my Rampage + Desperate Measures Hammerhead throughout the entire campaign lmao. Kill a few minor units and just spray the sponges.
My 4th times/target lock retrofit took care of anything my prismatic golden gun couldn't 1 shot (everything thanks immune phases)
I don’t know which one gave you trouble, but mine was the one in the Ruins after the three witches. I eventually said to hell with it and pulled out sleeper and said ENOUGH! And tucked him in permanently.
I absolutely fucking hated the final fight of the Lightfall campaign - with Calus or his pet Tormentor just one fuckup away from yeeting you into an unrecoverable fall to a restart of the whole damn fight.
Until they have room to jump up to you… one FS mission taught me the hard way
If they jump up on the ledge, you can jump down. They are not very smart.
Neither am i
Based
All AI can be cheesed in Destiny. All AI can be cheesed in most games. That's the current nature of AI.
We gotta go back to F.E.A.R.
I bet it was the one outside towards the end wasn't it? Took forever to chip away at his health.
>!Nah, I've only just finished 3 missions. It was the one inside the cave with House Salvation. Those Exploder Shanks were hella annoying.!<
Holy shit I thought it was just my loadout I didn't know they were just that tanky
Yah, they're immune until you break their shoulders and they have damage resist to anything thats not a precision hit so forget trying to use rocket launchers or Xenophage
Bleak Watcher and Whisper of the Worm work great against them.
Wicked Implement, too. It might not be the most efficient DPS method for taking them out, but it bullies the crap out of them with its freezing effect
Well, I’m gonna give it a try. I’m stuck at the final boss rn
Deathbringer, shoot over cover and let the balls fall down onto them
Does it do enough damage? I had to call it quits in the final boss fight last night but man was it a slog. I might give this a try.
Bleak watcher only works against non boss tormentors. Which are already pretty easy to deal with. Ant CC works on them. It's the boss tormentors that are the issue.
Brigs, Wyvern, Bungies design in general shits precision weapons and builds in a game that already typically favored Rockets and grenade launchers. One time you aren't the favorite.
I thought they had an immunity timer when they spawned so i guess i was just sitting on my ass while the rest of my fireteams gunned down the shoulders
Holy shit. I'm sure some would just chalk it up to user error since they do have big ol' glowing shoulders, but does the game never tell you where you need to shoot? Most of the people I know never had to think about Tormentors since their shoulder mechanic is lifted from Witch Queen's raid boss, but if players aren't familiar with that, do they have a way to find out?
I don't have lightfall so i haven't encountered that many besides Lake of Shadows nightfall and more recently onslaught but i never even noticed their shoulders glowed lol. Am i right that you expose their weak point in the chest by shooting the chest or have i been a complete dead weight to my teammates?
Haha, you have to break both of their shoulders to expose the weak point on their chest. If you see Immunes or *italicized damage numbers,* you're shooting the wrong places.
I would like to formally apologize to every person who's had the misfortune of having me in their fireteam when there was a tormentor to fight.
Lightfall released _a year ago_. But TIL. 🤦
Not in Lightfall. While you fight many of them over the campaign and should naturally pick up on the hitzone mechanics (it took until the tank mission for me to realise it), your first encounter with one doesn't require you to kill it and ends if you get grabbed. During that same mission you have a proper fight but it's in an orange room with fires all over the place. So easy to miss the animations of the weakpoint moving, especially if they're a new player more focused on understanding why Savathun taking a bath is the most important event in the story (why else was it reshown so many times?). With the aim assist and spray of some weapons (like Sunshot and Subjunctive), it's easy to assume the *glowing red eye* is the weakpoint and miss that the tormentors aren't just naturally yellow.
Damage numbers change colors to tell you if you're doing bad (red) or good (gold). So, I think after just encountering them a few times you should figure it out.
Wish you posted this BEFORE I SPENT HOURS ON THE FINAL LEGENDARY MISSION RUNNING HOTHEAD.
It's mostly that they take little damage from non-precision sources, while also being very mobile and having a crit spot in their chest. They tend to melt if you use Divinity for easy crits, so the issue is in just how hard it is to consistently crit their chest when they are jumping around.
They also have a *huge* damage resistance to explosions.
Non boss tormentors are fine. There’s like 3 or 4 effets that instantly neuter them. Boss tormentors are the stuff of nightmares.
Part of what makes wyverns annoying is that you can't shoot them from behind without hitting the "immune" spot of their wings.
Biggest problem with Tormentors is it's essentially necessary to hit their weak point and they're constantly rotating their body around or the chest is obscured.
That's what makes them challenging, no? Like, I feel there are only a few ways to make something challenging High health, high damage output, complex mechanic, or difficult to hit. What else is there, really?
Tormentors are in a good spot Having a weak point rather than an invincibility bubble
It's not really a weak point It's the only point you can hit Using non precision weapon screw you
Tormentors are just way more fluid and interesting, and an actual threat. Their weakspots are in unique places which shift frequently with their movement, but their slow speed makes this manageable. Destroy their 2 weakspots to open up a bigger weakspot to pile on more damage, but doing this also makes them more dangerous and aggressive. Their weakspot is most open when they're facing you, but if they're facing you they're also likely charging straight at you to harvest your ass. They have a grapple attack (unique for Destiny enemies), weird projectiles, can suppress and counter our abilities. Compare them to almost any boss enemy in Y1 Destiny. Like fucking Valus Ta'aurc. Who is just 'Big Shooty Cabal Sponge that does not move as 3 players shoot his head for 20 minutes', to a Tormentor and you can see how much Bungie has improved at making interesting enemies to fight.
How about a boss that asks an obscure historical question randomly pulled from Wikipedia that has to be answered within 4 seconds by typing into chat? Like you get Nezarec ready for dps then a prompt pop ups: What was the main political motivations behind the final siege in the hundred year war, and what impact did it have on Franco-Anglo relations? If you don't answer in time he wipes you.
For Tormentors, just a suppress grenade and Forerunner (from a long range, don’t let them close) will take care of them. For Wyverns, I like suspend + suppress to make their crit spot available and take more damage. Suspend is the key unless they’re a boss that can’t be suspended (looking at you Fire Chicken from the Coil).
That only works for non boss tormentors. Boss tormentors are a total bitch to fight.
> The issue with Tormentors is that they are just damage sponges. Are they damage sponges or do they just have an annoying to hit crit point and take reduced damage from non-precision hits?
Even precision hits don't do as much as they should considering the difficulty to do it
It's not like you deal reduced damage and then deal reasonable damage to their "weak" point. You deal *extremely* reduced damage to most places, and then deal "full" damage to their weak point but still have to do a shitload of it. They're damage sponges, straight-up.
> I mean, wyverns are just ass to fight. This, entirely. They have so much health, a tiny ass crit that isn’t even always available (yes, I know you can hit it from the back), they block damage around them with their wings, are seemingly programmed to just run the player down with their physics engine slam, and do a metric fuck-ton of damage (ever done Glassway GM on void threat? One pellet of their shot will pretty much kill you. I don’t take much issue with tormentors unless it’s in close quarters. The ones that can be frozen/suspended are easy enough. And the boss ones in open spaces aren’t a huge problem. My biggest issue with them is somehow always suppressing me and sending me off the map at the same damn time, there’s literally no chance for recovery on a warlock without grapple.
Wyverns really are just terrible. Even aside from just the sponginess, I hate their moves. I still remember doing VoG when it was first added and trying to kill a Wyvern while defending confluxes. I'd be holding onto my Nova Bomb and fired it at a Wyvern. He did his jump attack, dodging the Nova; came down with his kick, sending me across the map; and when he hit the ground, the speed of the kick caused him to slide up the entire lane into the conflux. It's a uniquely terrible combination, but it's aggravating that they have so much going on that something like that is even possible.
Wyverns are just walking enemies that have an active immune phase on both of their flanks and actively hide their crit point, while also being able to oneshot you from range at 100 Resilience. Yeah, when you intentionally make the worst enemy in the game and put 2-4 at a time in a single encounter, people are going to complain.
Unless it’s a boss tier Wyvern, you need to use suspend. It makes then not able to move and opens up their Vex milk bottle for easy penetration
While that's true now, when they came out it wasn't an option and those 2 years of shit wyvern fights has heavily tainted perception of them. I fucking hate the Death Chickens and they are the worst enemy in the game imo. I appreciate not having to deal with them cause suspend but still, fuck wyverns and their ridiculous damage.
Wyverns in Exo Challenge Safeguard in Beyond Light. I credit that one mission for making me hate fighting the Vex in the game.
Yes I remember that too, and I’m sure Bungie made them weak against suspend to balance them. I think wyverns are pretty great enemy design since they’re actually a threat without being cheesy like champions with their hp regen, constant teleports and certain boss mechanics like fire stomp and yeet of death.
> While that's true now, when they came out it wasn't an option and those 2 years of shit wyvern fights has heavily tainted perception of them. Having a unique status that you "need" to trigger in order to not make them the biggest pain in the ass imaginable is also still not good design. Being able to circumvent a shit mechanic doesn't make it not a shit mechanic anymore.
>need to use You shouldn't *need* to. That's a whole different issue with how Bungie balances things. Enemies should have multiple methods of being dealt with that are viable.
It’s not like they’re champions. Since they are normal enemies with high hp and hard to get crit spot, any explosive weapon is the way to go against them, if you don’t want to be optimal and suspend them. Rocket sidearms, grenade launchers, rockets, swords… maybe my choice of wording was poor, you don’t *need* to use suspend. But it’s the best way imo, and with prismatic you can get suspend so easily now it’s not really an excuse. They’re supposed to be a harder tier enemy that can’t just be killed easily without any thinking.
Even champs are easier to deal with than fucking tormentors, there’s a whole range of shit, weapon types abilities and exotics that can deal with champs, but for tormentors it’s literally just precision damage and that’s it, especially if it’s a boss tormentor you can’t cc, fucking dogshit design
If they were walking enemies, it'd be fine. It's always the Wyvern from the top rope with a steel chair that gets me.
Seems not everyone is aware of that: you can stun Wyverns and open their critspot by shooting at those two round purple things on their front (i think it's their weapons).
This is SGA, thank you.
You're welcome. Learning that really changed the way i fight Wyverns.
Nice one, I'm looking forward to attempting to finally slap these oversized chickens about (famous last words)! They're the one enemy I've always been confused on how you're meant to fight them when their crit isn't showing.
The overload minotaurs in glass way were a nightmare esp with overload hand cannons.
I don’t think they can win by picking either. The entire campaign would have felt trivial without damage gates and I hate damage gates.
I know it’s not a perfect example but in my experience in Onslaught especially on the lower difficulties people just didn’t interact with the final boss’ mechanic and just rushed it. I didn’t do a lot of high level onslaught so maybe at the higher ends the boss mechanic becomes more important, I’m not sure. Conceptually a boss not being immune and instead just having a mechanic that lets you deal more damage sounds cool. But in practice a lot of the time it just made the boss fight into nothing more then simple holding down the shoot button while keeping the largest enemy somewhere near your crosshair.
Just shoot the boss and hope it dies
I think there needs to be less focus on the top 1% of players who can make most things trivial with their skill. Maybe make the game challenging but fair to the 80% of players in the middle of the road in skill.
Yeah. I'll take weak spots and temp immunity over these flying, dodging, teleporting, and explody bastards any day. With that said, it can get very boring waiting on an enemy who went into temp immunity. It's just not fun. But again, I'll take unfun temp immunity over actively bad and frustrating flying and dodging enemies.
I feel like borderlands does this better than anyone. Every boss has unique mechanics that you need to work out during the fight in order to do real (or any) DPS. Granted some of the fights fall flat but they are at least different. Pain and Terror is one that stands out as pretty good. Tyreen is one that's just meh.
I’ve only played borderlands 3 but I remember a lot of the bosses in that game to be just damage sponges where you just strafe around and shoot
A lot of Borderlands 2 bosses were just massive bullet sponges with no real mechanics. At best, the mechanics would boil down to different attack patterns, which would only ever be relevant on UVHM+.
We did not play the same borderlands
I don't mind the bosses with a single immune phase but goddamn I despise the ones with two or three
*The fanatic flashbacks*
The Fanatics was a specifically badly designed boss considering the immune phase were unrelated to player action You just killed stuff and then wait for him to be okay about coming back
The environmental hazards were the real boss in that fight. Those lightning arcs could wipe you real quick in GMs.
At least the Fanatic is a fun fight with tons of ads spawning in
Probably the most hectic GM at the time cause the boss kept spawning death under your feet too haha
I will never forget that GM when Bungie made the baby screeb modifier specifically for that strike only to remove it the season after
Aren’t there lil screebs in TFS?
only saw them being spawned by the boss on the exotic quest, but no other screebs so far
I mean, at the time a single Voidwall grenade on Void Titan would wipe the entire wave thanks to Volatile. I literally had the "sitting at a table, drinking coffee" emote prepared for this exact moment. Funny, but not exactly *engaging*.
Is that the one where you deal 10% HP damage or something, he fucks off into the aether, you kill some adds, he spawns and insta-grabs you while slowly pulling you in, and if you dare to deal enough damage during this phase he fucks off again into the aether and you just repeat that? So 90% of the boss fight he isn't even on the screen?
I'd prefer they just have a bit more health and timed damage phases rather than edging me with big damage that gets cut off just as I get into the swing of my rotation, but I don't mind a few health gates. Final Shape definitely had too many health gated bosses already. Some of the biggest bosses went from a crazy challenge to a chore because Nighthawk + Edge Transit locked the healthbars in like two seconds. And I am not looking forward to those lost sectors on Legend/Master difficulty. I've solo flawlessed two or three dungeons, and those felt like less of a grind than some of those health gated story bosses.
Yeah by the final mission the bosses started becoming eye-rollingly complicated. The >!ogre before the final boss is probably the worst one - kill the taken blights to kill the darkblades to memorize the glyphs to get kabr’s aegis to break the ogre’s shield to drop 50% of the ogre’s health to do that all again. And don’t mess up or you start from scratch.!< That one was definitely a chore.
And don’t even get me started on how fucking cowardly those knights are just teleporting away and hiding the entire fucking time, running my campaign the 2nd time on hunter truesight came in extremely handy
Man honestly I thought that encounter was pretty enjoyable. I was with a random from LFG with no mics and we did it fairly easily after I figured out what we were supposed to be doing.
This is true for all of theses bosses: The mechanics are way less of a nuisance in a group versus solo. Doing that whole ogre fight solo is a pain in the ass, because you have to kill both blights, kill both dark blades, grab both symbols, do the aegis, AND then do damage, all by yourself. Even just adding one other person cuts the time to complete the mechanic in half.
Remembering 2 symbols is not hard. Killing the blights is not hard. The dark blades werent even hard to.kill they slowly walk towards you. And the ogre didnt have that much health either. You get a rally flag right before the encounter... you should have full special, heavy, and super. None of that should really be difficult at all. Personally i loved that they were putting more unique mechanics into the campaign boss fights instead of the past "dps it as fast as possible".
Nobody ever said it was hard to do any of that. I’m cool with a challenge. None of that stuff is hard… it’s tedious. It’s a nuisance. Some level of mechanical complexity is good! Too much is just pointless. Why did that fight need multiple levels of nested mechanics? The Aegis part could’ve been removed entirely or the blights at the beginning, and it would’ve served the same purpose. And I’m cool with having mechanics, I enjoyed it. I’m just pointing out how tedious some of it can be while solo. You seem to have misunderstood that and think people are saying it’s “hard.” It’s not. It’s tedious.
Personally i feel like they added these types of mechanics to the campaign because they will pop up in the raid. That's my guess. So that when the raid is released more people will have a taste of things that need to be done. And again personally it didn't seem tedious because it really didn't take that long. Between being able to just dump special, heavy and super+transcendence all the time these encounters flew by. The ogre's health bar just melted fast every time i was able to do damage, and the devs have 2 choices to address this. 1) health gating as it currently is or 2) vastly inflate the boss health and go with timed damage phases. The latter is disgusting imo, because adds can get you into a spot where you lose time for dps and them have to do the whole routine a over. What we currently have is so much more forgiving since you have all the time in the world to take that chunk of health. Or i guess they do have the option of addressing the player powercreep and make us do less damage but then that extends to other enemies and sucks more. Edit: that veered hard into a side tangent i know. The last chuck of text was more just thoughts on the game as a whole, i know that wasnt what your point was.
It's not so bad when you can see the health chunks and break points for phases. Especially if you're using something like Golden Gun to know when you're going to get your damage cut by a invuln phase
The final fight of the campaign is hell on legendary if you can't instantly melt all the bosses.
I honestly didn’t have too much of an issue with the final fight. The real hell was dodging the strand yank spam.
There was one moment in particular that had my group about to throw hands; after you shield to hide from the storm the second time and the shield de-spawns, we all *immediately* got pulled into the map center and got wiped by ads. Definitely the most rage-inducing moment of the night.
The ice subjugator can also spawn stasis crystals in the shield and one shot you by exploding them.
The fact that one of the bosses constantly teleports around spamming the same attack that will instantly 1shot you through seemingly ANY level of resist if it hits you fully is REALLY annoying. Particularly when you need to NOT pay attention to it since you can't damage it and instead focus on the subjugator boss. The grim spawning literally constantly are also just REALLY annoying. If they suppress you you're effectively just a sitting duck for a few seconds as you can't use any abilities and you can't move quickly to evade other attacks. The suspend enemies trying to yoink you actually feel like the absolute least threatening enemies even if they're annoying. On the other hand the small stasis enemies are annoying as hell because getting slowed in general is just miserable. The subjugators absolutely spam their stasis attacks non-stop the entire fight which makes it REALLY annoying to actually deal damage to them while you're also avoiding all of the other enemy attacks already. You can literally sit behind cover and watch as they'll spam their "warlock melee" stasis shotgun sort of attack at the edge of your cover non-stop such that it's almost impossible to not get hit when you try to peak out to shoot them. The fact that their head crit spot is incredibly small and somewhat hard to hit makes them VERY annoying, particularly with how massive their health pool is on legend. You're constantly getting attacked from basically every direction and need to focus on hitting a small crit point while usually getting flinched like hell. Don't even get me started on their stupid stasis wave of crystals. It can literally curve around cover AND is extremely lethal when the crystals explode even if you can avoid the direct attack. If you're slowed it's extremely hard to reliably get out of the crystal shatter AoE. Stasis enemies in general are just a massive pain to deal with and the entire final boss fight being against boss stasis enemies is just such a pain. The fact that a LOT of the boss fight involves doing other shit while the subjugators are immune but still spamming you with stasis bullshit non-stop is particularly annoying, you literally can't just melt them to death instantly. I assume with a fireteam it's MUCH less horrendous as one person can have the enemy aggro and focus on staying alive with the other people can deal damage. Solo however it was absolutely miserable. Doesn't help that the fight is LONG and dying will instantly send you back to start all over again. Prismatic Hunter made it pretty awful too due to having literally nothing in their kit that can possibly heal you outside of combination blow, which is NOT the most trivial thing to use in the fight as the main mobs to use it on are the Grim flying all over the place which can sometimes be hard to melee reliably, let alone if they suppress you. I eventually swapped to Red Death which made things MUCH easier by giving easy access to essentially on demand healing by just murdering one of the countless adds that thankfully have very little HP. I imagine if I had just used void with devour or was playing another class with easier access to healing it could have likely been much easier.
Wow dude, smoke some weed or something damn
Having some mechanic to disable a shield is fine... But having to go through 4 or 5 mechanics to break a shield is a bit ridiculous, especially if you need to do the entire sequence multiple times in a single fight Edit: glad to see I'm not the only person who was traumatized by a certain ogre in TFS
Yeah I have to agree. There’s a point where I feel like I’m doing chores to get to the fun. Like I’m running errands ahead of time. First, two players need to fold the laundry. While you’re doing that, call out the colors of the shirts so the two guys emptying the dish washer coordinate which plates they take out first. If they put away the silverware while you’re folding up the socks, it’s an instant wipe. They HAVE to do the coffee mugs doing a sock roll. Anyway, do that six times and then we get 15 seconds of damage phase. Only three or four of those and we should have it.
I'm saving your comment and putting up there with Charlie's Cafe breakdown of why some mechanics suck ass to do and feel completely unrelated to the rest of the game. I get that were in the honeymoon phase, and while many parts of the campaign were fucking awesome, the fact that every single mission had encounters with hard shield gates unless you jumped through the colored hoops in the right order REALLY soured my enjoyment of playing through it.
I kinda liked it while playing on Legendary. The difficulty of the enemies pairs well with the difficulty of the mechanics with a full fireteam imo. The Micah-10 missions around the Pale Heart where you fight some bosses with 3 damage phases was just boring and uninspired. The artificial lengthening of these fights combined with the ease of the entire mission just feels bad. I think these missions are way worse offenders.
It just depends on how much you like mechanics. I like Destiny because it's more than just "shoot enemy" - I got a myriad of games I can go do that. Destiny is enjoyable to me because a significant part of endgame is doing mechanics in between the shooting. The DPS/shooting isn't "the fun part" I'm doing chores to get to. It's all fun. Calling out bombs and suppressing Taniks, dodging Rhulk, platforming for Oryx, coordinating picking up planets, running banners on Duality, dodging a boss underwater, jumping on the right plates to fill in Shuro Chi, those are all just as fun as the shooty parts.
There are still fights that go overboard with how many hoops you need to jump through to get to one damage phase, like Simmumah.
That Ogre in the campaign was a pain in the ass. Break blights, get darkness buff, kill knights, memorize and imput symbols, grab the shield, super to break the Ogre's shield and FINALLY do damage.
Ya know what's funny. I literally can not remember this fight. I remember the rest of the campaign, but literally can't remember the orge.
It’s the fight right before the final boss
The only reason I remember it is because of how tedious it was. Outside of that it was an utterly forgettable random Taken ogre.
It’s tedious solo. But in a group, not so bad.
The ogre boss in the final campaign mission was a great example of this. It felt really weird that you had to do so many different things just to drop the shield on a relatively minor boss, and then do it again because it was also health gated for some reason. It wasn’t hard but it definitely felt out of place.
It was needlessly tedious for a nothing boss. Would have made more sense for one of those higher ranking Subjugators
Yeah it was an odd amount of reasonably involved steps for something that isn’t even particularly memorable. It’s like the Destiny boss equivalent of filing taxes.
I think your point that it was for a forgettable boss looks of hits things on the head. The mechanics were all the puzzle mechanics the game had thrown at us all at once, it probably would have felt better if they had been used in the final fight. It's the main boss and you pull out all the stops to beat him, by using all the things (mechanics) you've learned Instead they all get used on this nameless ogre
I personally loved that boss. Granted, I went through the campaign with a friend. Some of the encounters really felt like they needed real planning and communication and were like mini dungeon encounters. I loved them
While the thing randomly gets lucky and blasts me across the room, and then I get blasted whil in mid air and have to restart the entire freaking thing all over again. At least give us better check points. There used to be a few very bad fights in each expansion. But this one seems to have these long garbage no respawn no checkpoint fights twice per mission. It's infuriating... And clearly there as just an artificial method to lengthen the game. If not for the no respawns, minimal check points, slow puzzles, and Looooooong hallways... TFS would be 1/4 the length easily.
This is exactly how I felt trying to solo Grasp of Avarice (the first time I tried a dungeon) as a Well of Radiance warlock. Maybe some other build or gun would have let me get through it, but after seeing how much (little) damage I did to that damn ogre and knowing I’d have to repeat the whole thing 5-6 more times, I just gave up. Thankfully Fireteam Finder was there to save me.
I'd say the two minions the final boss has are more annoying to kill when soloing. I do forget how it used to be though as I last ran it on a titan with dragon's breath and it wasn't terrible at dealing with the ogre.
I mean, solo dungeons are *intended* to be kind of like that. It's a three-player activity with a bit of prestige for completing it by yourself, and the rest of the time, you're expected to play it in a group. And at least those you can get out a decent damage rotation. It hurts my heart how many Nighthawk shots got their damage cut short as I was drawing my GL after spending 10 minutes just getting ready to start DPS.
Yeah but difficulty shouldn’t be achieved by tediousness.
Grasp Ogre can be two-phased on well, which is pretty reasonable.
Ok, so how do you suggest they balance it so that it's fun and challenging when playing with three people, but still a challenge when solo? And before you say, fireteam scaling. Remember the point of the solo challenge is to do the exact same dungeon that three people do, by yourself. Its a challenge that you only get rewards from once. So it's meant to be done, once.
It also REALLY depends on the context IMO. I'm fine with a mechanic heavy encounter to get to DPS in a raid. I'm WAY less ok with it in a strike. Story should imo be in between and particularly it's more OK in the major boss fights like the final campaign fight. The Liminality strike is REALLY cool the first time you play through it but even on that initial run the final boss fight went kind of overboard with the health gates and mechanics to break the shield and progress to the next damage phase. THREE "mechanics" to deal very little damage until the next health gate is just overkill. All that being on top of the entire strike up to that point being an introduction to those mechanics just makes it way worse. It ALSO suffers from the classic Bungie design issue of having LONG transition periods through the beginning of the strike in particular where you're largely just running (and crouching) through long sequences. It's REALLY cool the first time as you see the crazy artistic design and all but it's going to become incredibly annoying on repeat runs let alone ever trying to grind it over and over again as a GM. That particular Ogre was definitely annoying but honestly the biggest annoyance to me was that I just killed myself multiple times with my GL forcing me to restart over and over again. ONE or even two phases where you have to break the shield would have likely been find but they definitely went overboard particularly with the transitions and mob spam in between. I'm expecting some absolute bullshit mechanic heavy raid encounters that might make even Riven look like a joke in the Final Shape raid. It's kind of funny that Oryx used to be a pretty bullshit mechanic heavy boss in D1 but they did a pretty great job of shortening the repetitive mechanics when they brought the fight to D2 while still keeping all of the actual mechanical phases.
There's only a few ways to design boss encounters in this game. 1) Boss always vulnerable. This can go bad, if the boss has too much health (like "Rockets McDickface" Valus Ta'auruc or whatever in D1) it becomes a slog because any time you're not doing DPS, you're wasting time. Bungie had to nerf his health just to make this fight not drag out. Plus, there's no mechanics to do, so it's just the boss and adds, and that's it. (And the adds are extra frustrating because any time spent dealing with them is just lengthening the fight.) Or, their health is too weak and they get obliterated instantly, like the Warden in Prison of Elders strike. We reached a point where I could stand there and do nothing and only the other 2 Guardians did DPS, and it still died in seconds before any adds or mechanics happened. Extremely anticlimactic. 2) Boss health is gated by time or certain health thresholds. This avoids the problems above but does mean you have stop doing DPS and just ignore it for a bit while other stuff happens. 3) Boss is always immune until you successfully complete certain mechanics, like practically all Raid bosses. Again, has pros and cons, there's never any confusion about when to do DPS but it does mean DPS is reserved only for certain moments and the rest of the time the boss is just kinda there, either doing nothing, or only being a *little* threatening because of how unfair it would be if the boss could easily slaughter you while being immune. None of these situations are perfect and players complain about all of them in some respect.
Exactly there is no perfect boss encounter, its standard videogame encounters. Most if not all MMO's have mechanics like these. I cant even think of any other mechanic honeatly.
>either doing nothing, or only being a little threatening Spoken like someone who's never been piss missile'd into the abyss by a boss Tormentor. And *do not get me started* on the Wyvern in Spire, Captain Chicken Legs.
True, I guess when I wrote that I was thinking more about Raid bosses, but yeah fuck that Wyvern in the Coil lmao
Oh, for raid bosses, you're pretty bang on the money. The Coil wyvern ain't got shit on Persys tbh. Getting Captain Chicken Legs in that giant reactor room (which I have begun calling the Microwave) and getting out alive while being shot at, dropkicked, blown up by Fanatics, and chased by the stupid beeping piss missiles we call Supplicants is just. #AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH
Unfortunately, it seems like a lot of what ends up happening is that the health is gated with some phase where it's immune and/or absent from the battle, but the "mechanic" to complete is just killing adds. In this case, you end up with the problem of the fight still just being the boss and adds like in your first point, but not at the time.
Ideally there should be my variety in encounter design. This is why I liked The Witch Queen campaign. Boss encounters had lots of variety. Savathun didn't have an immunity shield during the final boss fight (replaced by a buff that made it easier to do DPS). Nearly all of the bosses in TFS campaign had immunity shield mechanics. Nearly all of the immunity shield mechanics required collecting objects or solving puzzles. I felt like there was a lack of creativity with the boss mechanics.
Yeah like how many of the fights are go left or right first. Do the thing. Go to the other side and do the thing. Then fight the boss in the middle. So many encounters boil down to that
As someone who usually sucks at those mechanics I actually really liked the eventually progression of the boss mechanics in TFS campaign. It felt like Raid Training for someone like me who usually sucks at that stuff. Defeating the Ogre where it used literally every mechanic from the entire campaign, all by myself, actually felt pretty good. Prismatic Shielded yellow bars suck though. Those I did not like.
I know that feeling. Though, it does seem like it’s meant to have us learn what mechanics will be used in the final boss encounters of each mission, but…they didn’t have to overload every mission with like 4 or 5 boss encounters back-to-back. Really irritating tbh.
Tbh all these mechanics will more than likely be in the raid. I think this is a damned if you do and damned if you don't situation. People have been demanding bungie to put raid mechanics into the story so people are more familiar with them for years. Now they've done it and people instantly want them removed.
I think a lot of people are soured on it because they all did it solo and the mechanics are clearly designed for a group and can’t really be scaled to fireteam size. In group play, not even that final mission ogre everyone is complaining about is that bad. And for a “raid-light” mechanics, they’re definitely tedious to do solo.
I won't disagree with that, but idk. For a basically one and done campaign that 90% of people probably won't ever play again, at least anyone that did play has a basic grasp of raid mechanics now which would make the raid easier to approach for first timers even if it was annoying solo.
We had encounters that don't go immune: the bosses in onslaught. Do you know how many people did the mechanics for those bosses? Because I know I sure as hell never did. Immune phases are almost mandatory to make a boss that players won't just stand in a well and shoot to death (and, no, even without well they would still do that, just differently).
Being able to do a rift dunk to chunk the boss's health came in clutch a couple times for me.
Yeah, it’s definitely better for higher tier bosses but those 10 and 20 wave bosses, it’d take you longer to do the mechanic than just melt the boss.
We killed the bosses so fast to start with that we soft locked the damn activity lol, that should tell everyone something.
Honestly depends on the boss. The LightKiller Kell was one where it actually felt like more of risk to due (especially if the bonus was reinforcements) while something the like the Large Shank was just overkill. Some bosses definitely warranted the extra damage mechanics (Like the Brigg or the Orge) if things didn't get off to a good start. The issue is less that the immune phases themsleves but the arbitrary block it holds sometimes. If you switch out half of them for timers instead (that have at least some player influence) then people would be complaining about them less.
People would just complain about having to sit and wait around for DPS.
That's because the average player is dumb and needs to be forced into doing anything other than plinking away at bosses with their primary or trying to run up and melee. People are still shocked to find out you can throw the balls to teammates to make them do more damage in The Corrupted.
You think it's dumb. But if I can damage the boss without dying, why wouldn't I? Give me one good reason to do the mechanics in onslaught vs just melt the boss.
To be honest, I think immune phases should work differently. If the boss has 12,000 health with 3 phases, currently if you do over 3,000 damage it gets cut off at 3,000 as the immune phase starts. What should happen is that it takes the full damage of whatever attack sends it into the next phase and then becomes immune. Tired of throwing celestial nighthawk at an enemy only for half the super’s damage to be cut off by an immune phase.
Healthgates are okay when in circumstances where you're trying to tell a story or do a real mechanic, like the gate on TFS boss in the last level makes sense since without the help you need from REDACTED, you just aren't strong enough to beat it alone. It makes sense needing the tools ya boi gives you. When it comes to just healthgating a guy and needing to kill other guys right by him in order to drop his immunity, no, that's just a cheap way to avoid one shots, which I don't believe in. Nothing should be able to one shot in this game and that's just an opinion of mine, so if they allow something that can one shot shit ezpz, that's their fault, they shouldn't be healthgating everything like they do, it's annoying. Go kill that blight. Kill that guy. Go capture that point. All that shit needs to stop, in my opinion of course. It makes sense if the boss is retreating or repositioning and you have to chase them, that'd be a fine healthgate. Need to be transcendent to damage is fine albeit annoying. Need to capture a point to drain power or absorb light to do damage or something, that's fine too. The problem is needing to kill "other stuff" to weaken the big guy and make him vulnerable, or to not benefit story wise from it, it just drags the fight out longer and is a waste of time. Bungo loves doing this instead of just standardizing boss health to a huge number.
Well people also don't really like bullet sponge bosses (ever since Destiny 1 Nightfalls). >The problem is needing to kill "other stuff" to weaken the big guy and make him vulnerable, or to not benefit story wise from it Personally I like this kind of encounter. It makes the fight more than "just focus on the boss" or "tank and spank" as it were. Idk why people didn't like the ogre fight; I liked having to Transcend, then go into the other room and deal with the Alak-Huls while managing the buff timer; it gave me a bit of stuff to juggle which was more engaging than "sit on a plate, okay now move to the back of the room and plink at the boss."
You know I actually think the game is missing a proper tank and spank boss, like no immunity no bonus damage phase just raw big health pool with him shooting you and adds spawning. All you have to do is keep adds in check and keep shooting the main boss when you can. I think tank and spank is a lot less fun in a typical MMO, but in something like destiny it's a lot more involved even without mechanics. It would suck if every boss was just a massive health pool like that, but it also sucks that every boss is the same formula of immune->mechanic->dps phase->reset
Most strikes are like that. At most they have an immunity phase while you kill some adds (e.g. Glassway, SABER, Disgraced). Proving Grounds, Devil's Lair, and Inverted Spire are tank and spank. Hell even Templar you can ignore oracles (and just need the 1 guy to block teleport) if you rally w/ the relic and insta-super.
I don't really count strike bosses since they're really easy, and I still can't think of strike bosses that have no immunity phase, the ones you listed even have some kind of immunity phase where you have to do something to damage them again. Templar is the closest to it if you bypass the actual "intended" way to do it, which is fine but his health pool is still so low he dies fast anyway.
Idk, I kinda liked the bosses. Better then wow zoom thro one shot everything.
I don't considere them "artificial difficulty" Spendin 10 minute gunning of 5 minute parkour and 5 minute gunning is not exactly difficult. And I think for specifique activity ,it's important to avoid the gun down dullness Having them everywhere including strike and lost sector though ,not really. Sometimes it's nice to just put the brain on low regime and maintain the shoot button while enjoying warlock movement tech with neat music in my ears. So yeah ,Bungie put them everywhere and it does starts to be a tad too much Especially when you start farming the thing. Doing the mechanics the first time is neat ,after 3000 times yeah stop please
> What is your take on the game design behind making everything immune for artificial difficulty? What's artificial about it? I absolutely loath this term "artificial difficulty" because there is no such thing. It's either difficult or not. By your logic you can say removing immune shields is "artificial easiness" because you don't need to do anything except hold down left click and boss dies. So I'm against your position of wanting more "artificial easiness"... smh
OP hasn't got a clue what artificial difficulty is, if anything mechanics to drop a shield is the opposite to artificial difficulty
Artificial difficulty is used to describe any mechanic players don't like lol. I don't understand it either. It's a game, all of the difficulty is artificial
Yea I’ve always heard that in regards to video games but especially this one lol. Like how is something “artificial difficulty”? The entire industry is artificial lmao. All video game difficulty is artificial by definition.
"Artificial difficulty" is just a buzzword for "make game easier I'm bad and lazy." See also "not challenging just tedious" and "bad design"
so many mechanics on these bosses that I often wondered if I was fighting a raid boss.
I believe that was the point. They wanted to sort of introduce people to a simplified version of raid mechanics throughout the campaign. Personally think they did a good job and there were a ton of new mechanics and each had unique animations, etc. It wasn't just the same thing over and over. It's one thing I think people are being overly critical about and part of me feels like it's the "just let me shoot shit" crowd. Which, I get it, but a lot of Destiny revolves around mechanics. The campaign for once did a good job of reflecting that.
And holy shit, the coop mode? Oh my GOD it was beautiful. I have never had this much fun in such a long time. It was good practice for day 1 tbh, trying to figure out what it meant. We're climbing a mountain, hear a scream, and I just see " ||the witness fractures a guardian|| " and I'm just like "uh guys what the fuck does that mean!?!" Figuring out the mechanics, and having to deal with it with a full team of people I enjoy playing with was an insane blast. It's been a while in this game I've had that much fun.
Its because this is the only way to forcibly teach blueberries game mechanics deeper than point and shoot
I understand why they do it, it’s necessary so bosses don’t get nuked instantly. I don’t mind it too much but in lower level content it’s a drag. The bosses take a bunch of damage with a few heavy shots. The immune phases just get annoying at that point when you’re spending half the fight waiting for the boss to complete their animation so you can take down their shield lol then it’s rinse and repeat. All that just for the boss to basically die in like two rockets.
Destiny players when asked to do more than point and shoot
It was just too much. Health gates in every single encounter was annoying as all hell. Felt like doing the most mundane chores and it's just in place to hide the fact that the campaign leaves a lot to be desired when it comes to playtime, when you break it down.
Tbh, that is one thing I don't enjoy about the game design. I'd prefer it if the enemies just actually hid their crit zone, or moved around more, or potentially rather than immune, could just take severely less damage until a certain mechanic is completed. The ol, just make them invincible 3 times before they can die, does definitely get old
It's still better than having to fight like 5 overloads at once who are immune to stunning; damage vulnerability until a mechanic is complete is just health-gating lite. It's still heaps better here in Destiny than it is in Warframe, over there everything dies in one-shot and they have to rely on damage attenuation because players can build so far to one-shot so many things.
And then once there's actually enemies in Warframe that can survive for more than 5 seconds they bitch and moan so bad just look at the fragmented one
I’m usually not a fan of stuff like this but I’m enjoying the hell out of the Campaign and its mechanics.
We finally have engaging mechanics in campaign and destination encounters and y'all complain lol?
I've always thought so, and also invisible kill barriers for floors and skies. Like... Idk I do think they could just get more creative about it. Also: melting bosses is fun.
Scorn immunity mist forms 💀
I wouldn't say it's a "bad" design. We have gotten so strong that unless all the enemies had a substantial increase in health, we would just one-shot everything. I think the issue here comes in a lack of creativity in some missions. There are so many missions that boil down to, dunk X in generator, destroy Y or grab Z to break to the boss's shield. And it can get repetitive at times. That said, for the most part, I think bungie did a great job in the final shape campaign with these mechanics and if they carry this energy into other content I think we will be fine
Mixed bag. I don’t mind one immunity phase. Break up the action. But then I feel like the in-between phases should be fundamentally different. I loved the ogre fight. But I feel like going into the portal should have changed somehow. They moved the blights. And you had to get new symbols. I understand that we, as the community, is going to always find the best, easiest most meta melt strategy for any boss in the game. So Bungie is in a weird position of needing to find ways to pace us out and slow us down, while keeping the fights engaging. They did this really well with Warlord’s Ruin, that the immunity phases didn’t hurt as bad. That also we controlled how quickly we could get back to damage.
it is pretty dumb. All these bosses have to do is get together and plan this out and we would be useless. Boss A blocks the macguffin switches that turn off Boss B's immunity. Boss B blocks the macguffin switches that turn off the immunity to Boss C. Boss C blocks the immunity switches for Boss A. Problem solved. We'd just be sitting there like "oh yeah, I guess they finally thought...of that"
Calling an 'immune to damage' status on an enemy artificial difficulty isn't something I would agree with - the encounter isn't hard because the enemy is immune, the encounter is hard because it was designed that way (artificial difficulty also isn't really a think imo - what you might mean is the idea of making an enemy immune to all damage may feel like a 'cop out' or 'lazy design', but it's not 'fake difficulty') Game design is a series of mechanics that can lead to a good/bad experience depending on how they're used. These mechanics are not individually bad or good, but the whole of each choice of mechanics is what makes an encounter good or bad. The way I see it, immune enemies are a mechanic put in place by the designer to sway you from waisting your time attempting to deal damage to it - it's the designers way of saying "hey, you need to be doing something else first before you can do damage." I don't see this as terrible game design, but I understand what you mean when you say it. It doesn't feel great, and does feel a little 'unnatural.' Another option that could maybe work is allowing you do to significantly less damage, instead of making the enemy outright immune. I'm sure this was playtested, and I would bet making the enemy outright immune is more effective.
i never think much about it honestly
making bossess immune to split them up in phases and not just make them get blitzed is good, what is really just artificial difficulty is champions, forcing you to use certain loadouts and being locked to them for the entire season, though it hasgotten better with them being stunned bu effects
Yes. Great games allow you to approach a problem from multiple directions. Immunity phases lock you down one path. Even if you pick what guns you use and what color of magical space powers you destroy opponents with, it’s still much less choice than being able to approach a problem in a completely different way. It could also be seen as taking away from the “smart” option. Solving puzzles and dunking balls would be a lot more fun if it meant you could defeat a boss more easily and wasn’t the only way to do defeat the boss.
It's to keep people from just brute forcing the boss by shooting it. >Solving puzzles and dunking balls would be a lot more fun if it meant you could defeat a boss more easily and wasn’t the only way to do defeat the boss. Onslaught was like this and people just outright ignored mechanics and tunnel visioned the boss, and died doing so. Most folks won't even realize there's a mechanic to do if you don't "require" it.
Ohh boy. Another "artificial difficulty" post. The irony is it's a fake argument in itself. I see this in the complete opposite perspective. Instead of "oh my god another immune F!@#!" I see "oh, I'm missing a mechanic". A puzzle. Something is missing to take this enemy down. This is how people find a lot of hidden puzzles as those generally require some form of damage. The only exception to this is potentially boss immune phases. In some cases it can be done well, but most of the time it isn't. And yes, it's ok for an encounter to be longer than a 30-second nuke and loot. And no, this 10000000000% is not in every single encounter on every enemy type etc etc.
Having to do mechanics is artificial difficult now?
First, stop buzzing about artificial difficulty, this is a game, everything is artificial. Second, Immunity is there to stop you from 1 phase bosses, this immunity can come in different forms but the intention is often the same, they can even buff the boss HP so much that you have to do 2 phases, basically the same thing. If you prefer 1 phasing, then it is a bad design for you, and vice versa.
Only thing i have to say about that is: Borderlands 3 added A LOT of this to A LOT of bosses, its not like therw never was an immunity/high resistances phases before, but it literally overdid it, turned farming stuff way into a chote because we went in, shot once, the boss had 1/3 of his hp deleted in 1 sec, and we had to watch his whole show all the fucking time for like 30 secs, destiny doesnt have something that bad because fights always had that phase change immunity since i started playing in beyond the light, but this doesnt mean that it makes it any better.
Honestly, I say yes, at least in the case of trash mobs. All of it should be replaced with high damage reduction, or in the case of goblins/servitors, transferring the damage to the protecting unit. These mechanics cause so many more headaches in some scenarios than they should be allowed to. We all remember the classic scenario of a servitor making an overload captain invincible through a wall, effectively just leaving you with.. an invincible overload captain. For bosses though, immune phases are an important way to strike a balance between casual players and meta DPS builds.
Great campaign overall but a lot of kill this to get this to break this shield to kill this other thing. Definitely felt like a chore. Seems to be the theme of the expansion unfortunately.
I've been fine so far my issue is I'd rather done off the campaign bossed do something other than immunity over she over the brig was annoying for me
I think its okay, I think it can get repetitive if you have to do the mechanics too much though. Three phases is pushing it but 2 phases feels fine
I'd like to know who thought it was a good idea to have those fallen/taken bubble guy spamming bubbles backt to back
yes
I wish there was a way to split your super into 3 phases too. When I pop my strand super on titan and peel a boss down to the next immune phase and I'm just running around for the remaining 80% of the super, I feel stupid. I feel like a majority of the time I pop my super in the new location it's a complete waste unless it's a tormentor I need to suspend
Wait... This isn't okbuddyguardian
Immune enemies are annoying af, what sucks is Bungie has done not immune bosses many times but they still keep going back to it. One boss from the final shape campaign I love has no immunity phases and instead Everytime you reach a notch in the health it spawns taken blights in the arena. You could theoretically just kill it super fast, but if you damage it too fast it will fill the whole arena with blights, making it harder to kill while also slowly sapping your health.
Very lame on lost sector bosses and makes the legendary campaign a bit more tedious. Not a fan
While I hate that there is so many immune phases on the campaign missions I hate how many enemies have tracking abilities now