AMIA ARCHIVE • View topic - Uber-Epic-Boss wanted? I got an idea...

We have a lot of people on the server who love challenges, I am one of these for sure. Now, I always considered it a grand thing to maybe have a boss on the server that is really really -really- tough. Unable to solo and unable to kill even with 1-2 more people. I mean a boss that really needs a group of 5-6 people at -least-. And even that with a good chance to fail.

Now no whining please of the kind "that means everyone needs a power build again to get epic loot" I am not asking for the other bosses to be removed... just for an additional boss that gives you this nervousitiy and tingle before and during the fight even when you have a great build and your companions along.

So... I read a few of these "I would like my EDK to be reskinned to a Dracolich" requests quite a lot. And the typical answer "No way, they are -far- too powerful. Which of course is correct.

It even more disappointed me then to see that the "Dracolichs" of the server (the one in the gauntlet and Manor of Mourn) are real whimps. Especially the first one.

Now here's my idea... some really tough -real- Dracolich. Maybe with even a little challenge to weaken it first to make it possible to even defeat it temporaily.

Of course it's Phylactery is who knows where which even gives us a very plausible reason why the blasted thing always returns after beeing defeated. =^.^=

Oh and maybe there could be a very sweet plot line of how the Dracolich gets (wherever) in the first place. This would maybe be a great opportunity for a new epic area. I heared many people moaning about the need of more or new epic areas.

I would have a few ideas if there is interest in that from the Player and DM base.

Whatcha think?

Bzzzt. No. Roslefusio should be left alone, not slain every reset.

Needing at least 5-6 people kinda puts me off. Six people is 1/4 of the server at times I regularly see, and needing at least that to kill it may as well add an instant-kill to anyone who enters outside peak to be honest.

Apart from that, I like the idea of an exceedingly powerful boss.

I'm not sure about needing 5-6 really strong builds to defeat for the same reason that Yurell said, but perhaps 5-6 above average builds or 3-4 powerful builds.

I do like the idea of having one super-powerful boss, though. Just the exact level of difficulty is what I think needs to be discussed.

@ Numbers: Never said it should be Roslefusio

@ Yurell: Well that's the point about only having one boss that is -that- tough. You don't really -have- to go there but if you go and have some others who like a good fight, you at least get a proper challenge for your Epic chara.

I got an Idea for how it becomes a boss,The Crimson Arcanists try to create a Dracolich in order the help with Valkin's Research, but it gets loose and lairs away somewhere...

((possibly doing some damage to the Characters involved in the ritual and the area its done at, but whats fun with out risks?)):)

It would also create a lot of RP...especially if..oh...I don't know...The Monolith found out and tried to intervene... :twisted:

Of course Val's player (and the DM's and possibly a few other people) would have to agree to doing it first.

I think it's a good idea, moreso for the Dracolich in the Manor than the gauntlet, though Imo.

Is Mylthar (sp? memory's failing me, as usual) not a dracolich?

Or am I way off here, Tormie?

No... he's an evil entity that is posessing dragon bones (edit: Imperator's to be precise).

New Underdark needs SOME epic areas.

I can dig it. I would lean more toward a 4-5 people have about a 50% chance, average, at beating the boss than the 6 people have less than 50% of a chance of beating the boss. But either way, I'm all for one or two really really hard bosses. That sounds cool.

This isn't really a new idea, and I was kind of hoping you had an actual concept to show rather than "Let's just make an.. even more powerful, epic boss!".

Well as said, I do have a few ideas about a new area and the boss itself if the general idea seems to be appealing for the players, aswell as to those who in the end will have a say in weather it will be or could be implented in Amia or not. That probably mainly but not only beeing Disco for the general yes or no and Ruce for the balancing of the critters.

On the condition that an effort is made to move away from "We just killed Mephistopheles, now we gotta wait 20 minutes for him to spawn again".

By that I mean.. make it very hard, but don't make it a Dracolich or anything like that. Maybe a huge golem that is considered one amongst many in the arsenal of his inventor. An apparition that an entertainment-hungry mage conjures up (Ayreon comes to mind). Please, anything but an enemy with an epic reputation that turns into chop-chop meat for every gung-ho band of adventurers.

I'd love to see this, but a boss that doesnt drop epic loot, instead perhaps a bit of its skin or even a chip of bone. Something to show you beat it anyway, in saying that i personally would want something implemented that couldnt be beat by amias 6 strongest powerbuilds in one party. If we are to set a challange, lets make it something that will have people think "why bother its just a waste of time we will be slaughtered".

Something that doesnt just require brute force, but brains as well.

I like the idea of having a severely powerful Boss, that would require group effort to kill and no powerbuilder whatsoever would be able to kill alone.

Of course, only one. I think a red dragon layer filled with gold and loots that could be sold. Maybe, an slight higher chance of receiving an epic loot. Make the baby murderous, the layer dangerous and place even a idol of Tiamat with a trap around it that would free poisonous gases of high level.

Maybe the dangerous beast wouldn't not be a permanent one, so one day it decides to leave the layer and attack some close buy town and be killed on it. Then, we create another murderous beast and have a new challenge.

what you think?

Well, Ayreon would be just the type of psycho to create abysmally insanely hard things as an "Ultimate Challenge" for adventurers, for his own entertainment.

So IC, there's no reason why he wouldn't set up an arena, in which a crazy hard boss might spawn. Though, he'd be more likely to have a selection of various hardcore bosses, one of which he'd release at random once you enter, AND he'd be exactly the type to reward you highly for success.

For example, a Dracolich, an uber-golem, a summoned demon. Or even just a magically enhanced creature that you wouldn't even think would be insanely abysmally hard.

Quote:

Or even just a magically enhanced creature that you wouldn't even think would be insanely abysmally hard.

like a badger with infinite SR and 50/- DR?

I think yes

Not really anything else I can say that hasn't been added here already, so..

I like. :3

There's an idea I was working with -long- ago, for an epic area to give a big-arse challenge to players. General setup;

3 different sets of creatures. One set that is just about immune to mages. One that's effectively immune to fighters. And one that's effectively immune to rogues.

Add in randomized mazes (4 different maze areas, one randomly selected, with random start/endpoints and the occasional map-clear), resetting traps with unique effects, and a requirement for 4 individual player characters to proceed to the next area.

The boss? Uh. There isn't one. There's four - One of each of the above types (Antimage, Antifighter, Antirogue), all of which must be defeated by beating the final Head Honcho - who this entire time is pegging you with spells and immunity to damage until the other three are dead.

Of course. Each of these four would all be Epic Loot Droppers. Likely with a higher percentage each, too.

That said - never got it finished. -Alot- of work.

How do you make something immune to fighters, but not to rogues?

Fighters = Damage/Crit
Rogues = Damage/Hit (via Sneak)

High-Ass DR + Regen. Fighter Crits will still get through, but they'll be infrequent enough to make them superceded by a Rogue's higher damage per hit and hits/round if dual-wielding.

Hence the 'effectively'. You can't actually make them immune, but you can certainly make it next to suicidal for them.

xordae wrote:

How do you make something immune to fighters, but not to rogues?

Something that endures a lot of damage and can kill in one blow, able to see invisible/HiPS'ed creatures?

EDIT: Sheesh... Ron posted while I was posting. >_>;

WonWon wrote:

There's an idea I was working with -long- ago, for an epic area to give a big-arse challenge to players. General setup;

3 different sets of creatures. One set that is just about immune to mages. One that's effectively immune to fighters. And one that's effectively immune to rogues.

Add in randomized mazes (4 different maze areas, one randomly selected, with random start/endpoints and the occasional map-clear), resetting traps with unique effects, and a requirement for 4 individual player characters to proceed to the next area.

The boss? Uh. There isn't one. There's four - One of each of the above types (Antimage, Antifighter, Antirogue), all of which must be defeated by beating the final Head Honcho - who this entire time is pegging you with spells and immunity to damage until the other three are dead.

Of course. Each of these four would all be Epic Loot Droppers. Likely with a higher percentage each, too.

That said - never got it finished. -Alot- of work.

Lord Chicken's random dungeon generator (which I'm supposed to decorate one design of, but haven't really had a chance to due to moving) would work well for the random maze thing.

Gods....I'd LOVE to see something like this done with the Electric Castle. Quite honestly, it's sort of what I had in mind originally, but couldn't come up with a way to do, hence doing the Mirror Maze zone how it is instead.

Turn Ayreon back into his pre-nerf absurdly overpowered self, or rather, a Rucified version, bring back the Dracolich that used to be outside the castle gate for a while back when the castle was new (as one of the 4 bosses perhaps? With Ayreon as head honcho?). Have The Mirror Maze become more mazelike with teh random generator bit. Oh yes. I'd be very very happy to turn that zone into what I always wanted it to be.

I used to spend a lot of time thinking about a new epic area... that's truly epic, and goes beyond "let's just kill things, even though they're hard to kill".

Haven't got the time for it atm though.

Sure, put in an uber boss. Just don't give it any extra special loot for defeating them.

I have a real problem with the "epic builds" issue. There are plenty of people who have no idea how to create a good character build, and requiring a level of knowledge and expertise (in an OOC way) that only a portion of the population have seems to be pretty unfair to me. Furthermore, those of us who kinda screwed up their character build a little would be totally ineligible to join in unless they started all over again or paid valuable Dream Coins for a re...stat thing.

I live in Australia. From what I can see, that means most of the DMs (aside from the epic DM who I generally know as Crowsterf), fun events and players are sleeping or busy at work/school etc whenever I'm on. That not only makes gaining DCs for me almost impossible, it also means that finding a group of 5-6 people is going to be very hard as well. Not that I mind the idea of needing a large group. I just think that if you're going to require a large group, you should focus the challenge on teamwork, not uber builds.

For example, having a huge boss that requires 2-3 members of the group to run crowd control on minions it spawns, while at the same time hitting switches or killing barrier-generating enemies creates a tense atmosphere where everyone's job is vital. Even though the other members might be busy wailing on the boss itself, ther job may be equally hard, since they need to stay alive AND keep the boss' attention while the others make it possible to kill it. You could probably even have multiple stages, where each certain part of the boss' life has some different thing you need to do to beat it. All the while of course the players have to work together and do stuff that requires more co-ordination and less ridiculously strong stats.

That's a very rough example of course, but I'm sure you get the gist of it.

Well, there's a few points in there:

1) It's absurd to say "Don't make something *extra* that a lot of players would enjoy and find cool, because some people wouldn't be able to build well enough to enjoy it."

Amia is a pretty friendly place. Build help is freely available on the forum, and even if it wasn't, the way NWN works, if you have a large group, you don't all have to be powerbuilds to accomplish anything. Just because a small number of players cannot get enough people together to run something hard, is not a reason to refrain from HAVING something hard. That's like saying "I don't have the time or build expertise to get to 30 in under 5 years (This would refer to me, incidentally), so don't make Epic hunting areas at all, nor put shops in places I'm not able to easily reach". Ridiculous notion.

2) NWN isn't as sophisticated as a game like World of Warcraft, where you can have fancy multi-stage enemies with all kinds of crazy scripted attacks, and take 30 minutes even with 25+ people to kill the thing. Really, most bossfights are pretty cut and dry - hit it until it's dead. Aggro doesn't work like in WoW and most other games of that sort, so things liek crowd control and other WoW-like notions....just don't work well in NWN. Basically....making a boss uber-hard and uber powerful is pretty close to all you can do, to make a real challenge, in this sort of game. With unlimited heal potions in everyones hands....even uber hard and uber poewrful doesn't necessarily mean "Challenge", either.

3) I agree with no "Special" loot. But having such a boss(es) as epic loot droppers wouldn't be any more "special" than what already exists, save that with Ron's idea there'd be multiple
potential-epic-loot-droppers in one fight. Which shouldn't be a problem if multiple players are virtually essential to winning in the first place.

I'm not for making this super hard area more attractive epic loot wise than a regular boss. This should be about the challenge, not about powerbuilders being able to get more epic loot than others.

If this were to come in to effect, I'd like to see the regular epic bosses become harder too, so as to make the new area more tantalizing. As it stands, I think the area wouldn't see much if any use. People would rather breeze through the normal epic bosses.

Cori wrote:

Well, there's a few points in there:

1) It's absurd to say "Don't make something *extra* that a lot of players would enjoy and find cool, because some people wouldn't be able to build well enough to enjoy it."

I kinda disagree with you there, Cori, because I believe that the majority of Amia players don't have epic builds, and the ones that do seem to be veterans who have been playing a long, long time and have earned plenty of dream coins and the like to be able to do it that way. I meet a lot of players who are kind of midway between bad builds and great builds and if you make the bosses so hard that only people who are half-godlike already can win, you would cut out a large proportion of the population from the fun.

Not to mention that I get the impression that Amia is supposed to be about role-play rather than perfect builds, some of which basically screw with the mechanics of NWN rather than being "fair" or interesting. For example I heard something about combining monks and... shifters I think it was, back when I was playing a year ago, and how that was unfair and game-breaking. As for me personally, I took 6 levels of Ranger for my main character (who's a Fighter, mostly). It wasn't because Ranger had any statistical bonuses for me, it was so I could deepen the RP that my character was involved in by involving the animal companion and stuff. Should I be punished for that because it means my stats aren't necessarily as awesome as everyone else's?

Cori wrote:

2) NWN isn't as sophisticated as a game like World of Warcraft, where you can have fancy multi-stage enemies with all kinds of crazy scripted attacks, and take 30 minutes even with 25+ people to kill the thing.

Well... I figure that there's a line drawn somewhere, but exactly where depends on the system itself as well as the developers. I haven't played around with the NWN toolset thing enough to make a definitive statement about it, but I've seen mobs such as the Yuan-Ti boss who requires specific conditions in order to beat it and I seem to recall a Gauntlet with scripted bosses too. Maybe they can't do really advanced stuff, but I'm pretty sure the developer DMs could make things more interesting than just "this boss is immune to everything and every attack it does casts a 'Harm' spell on the target."

Cori wrote:

3) I agree with no "Special" loot. But having such a boss(es) as epic loot droppers wouldn't be any more "special" than what already exists, save that with Ron's idea there'd be multiple
potential-epic-loot-droppers in one fight. Which shouldn't be a problem if multiple players are virtually essential to winning in the first place.

I know this part wasn't directed at me, but it made me think a little so I just wanna add my 2 cents. I think having awesome loot is a fitting reward for slaying a boss of that caliber, though I do worry about it unbalancing the game's economy, particularly if players kind of camp that boss and dungeon and do it over and over just to get the best stuff. So I guess that part has to be considered carefully, then.

Spyonline8000 wrote:

I kinda disagree with you there, Cori, because I believe that the majority of Amia players don't have epic builds, and the ones that do seem to be veterans who have been playing a long, long time and have earned plenty of dream coins and the like to be able to do it that way. I meet a lot of players who are kind of midway between bad builds and great builds and if you make the bosses so hard that only people who are half-godlike already can win, you would cut out a large proportion of the population from the fun.

This isn't entirely true. I dunno if I count as Vet, or nearso, but I've been playing for around 4 years now.. and have got worst build two years in a running. And I think I've eaten every dream coin i've ever gotten (Used it for xp) except for one rebuild of Lila. Which didn't really help.

As it is, I too will have that problem of probably never getting to fight it, being a rerrible builder and in Oz so emptyish server my times.. etcetera, but I still think this is a great idea. But yeah, you would want it to be a group thing and tough..

Although unfortunately the whole "Rewarding epic builds with loot blahblah" does come to mind, but you'd wanna hope it didn't end up like that and would have lots of rp oppurtunity.

DCs have nothing to do with your build.

I think he meant more in the way of items/equipment when he said Dcs.. Though that's true.

People figure bosses out and develop systems to beat them. If there were a really, really REALLY tough boss, that presumably dropped epic loot often, it would not be long before 6 opportunistic people figured out how to milk it to death.

Having said that, I voted yes, there should be a super-boss. And it should be human!

TormakSaber wrote:

DCs have nothing to do with your build.

Can you not use them to rebuild your character? I thought that was one of the options they gave you... though I guess I have been gone for a long time and it could have changed.

You can do a self rebuild though for free, and we're going to be giving free rebuilds per quarter that don't cost DCs.

There's also the option of "doing it right the first time." Meaning you don't ever need to rebuild at all.

TormakSaber wrote:

...we're going to be giving free rebuilds per quarter that don't cost DCs.

Oh really? That's pretty neat! Though, I guess it also means a lot of work for the DMs...

In any case, I guess that makes DCs less of a factor in what I was saying earlier, though I think the other stuff still stands.

D-Finitiy wrote:

it would not be long before 6 opportunistic people figured out how to milk it to death.

It should spawn only once a reset? Why 6 people btw?

Milking it to death wouldn't be an issue if it only gave loot avaliable from other bosses, and at the same rate. People want a powerbuild directed boss to test themselves against because they find other bosses easy, then it shouldn't bother them not receiving any different reward from defeating said boss. You get the challenge wanted.

Solves the issue of milking the boss, and solves the issue of powerbuilders get a bonus over anyone else.

Only comment is thus: As has already been mentioned, Underdark needs EPIC areas.

Underdark also has ALOT of non-represented monsters here. So you can go nutz. Perfect would be a VERY old Shadow Dragon, and it's legion of Dragonborn Dhoom Kobolds

555444333 wrote:

Only comment is thus: As has already been mentioned, Underdark needs EPIC areas.

Illithids and eyeballs are not in the Underdark?

It has been noticed, and you are right. There's the minor detail that they need to be made, including critters. Which costs time, and there is the problem.

hendrack wrote:

555444333 wrote:

Only comment is thus: As has already been mentioned, Underdark needs EPIC areas.

Illithids and eyeballs are not in the Underdark?

Thids and Eyeballs aren't that tough. 2 people can go through the thids like a knife through hot butter. Like I said, I'm thinking shadow dragon, evil kobolds and Orog shock troops.

I like the idea... but I have a little twist...

Make it UBER scary too.. like death there is perma death... or die and the epic boss eats all of your items up and sends you home with just your birthday suit on :twisted:

But then that's just MHO

No dragons no dragons no dragons

Quote:

Not to mention that I get the impression that Amia is supposed to be about role-play rather than perfect builds, some of which basically screw with the mechanics of NWN rather than being "fair" or interesting. For example I heard something about combining monks and... shifters I think it was, back when I was playing a year ago, and how that was unfair and game-breaking. As for me personally, I took 6 levels of Ranger for my main character (who's a Fighter, mostly). It wasn't because Ranger had any statistical bonuses for me, it was so I could deepen the RP that my character was involved in by involving the animal companion and stuff. Should I be punished for that because it means my stats aren't necessarily as awesome as everyone else's?

I've heard this "punishment" arguement before, and respond with two things: The first being....exactly what I already wrote.

The second being, That it would be "Punishment" if there was something you could ONLY get from this "new" boss, which would not be the case, and hasn't even really been suggested.

I've been here since mid 2005. I've never hit 30. I can't solo any epic boss. I can barely even survive a spires trip solo. I never had a chance to fight the dragons that Tormak killed off....am I being punished by that fact? No, of course not. So why would it be a punishment to not be able to kill a new boss, if it's not a punishment to not have been able to kill an old boss?

Note that whether or not you could kill said "uber" boss would not mean you couldn't get to it, and enjoy teh zone, and even try fighting it. Just means you *maybe* wouldn't be able to kill it. So, I assume from your comment, that you cannot solo many if any of the current epic bosses....are you being punished because they are too hard for you? Should they all be nerfed so that you can kill them?

I stand by the statement that there is nothing wrong with an uber boss that is super tough to kill, so long as there's players who'd enjoy it. If you don't enjoy it, don't fight it. Simple, really. Just like you already would with anything else you don't enjoy in the game.

Plus if you can't kill it alone you can always wrangle some buddies.

You know topics with that start or end with "got an idea" give Disco nightmares?

You could if you want make it so tough that it takes six hours to defeat. Which is great, if its hitpoint total persists between resets.

Uber-Epic-Boss wanted? I got an idea...

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