BOSS VS enemy hero

[Razorflame]

I have had some thought in this and here is my share of the cookie

During boss fights I think the viking/skald are a bit of a disadvantage compared to the mage. Mainly because the mage can use his spellbook whereas the viking/skald cannot use their rage abilities. Which is once of their stronger points compared to the mage. I am not saying this is good or bad but mages wade through bosses easier due their casting ability.

Difficulty of bosses is also poorly designed because when u know how to kill a boss you won't have any problems with it in future walkthroughs. It only becomes more of an tedious repetively play for that boss. Prime example is the first boss in WOTN where you need trolls to do this no loss. Or suffer some heavy casualties which is quite annoying(nothing saying it's bad to get losses or anything). But it's quite annoying to need a specific unit for it to wade through it doable. Other than that i dislike that bosses get recycled this is the third time we battle the spider. If you even want to put bosses in this game design some new ones PLEASE.


Personally I would like to scrap bosses from any KB and replace them with heroes. Possibly people will think but bosses are stronger? Well no bosses have only 1-4 attacks and a very high HP and some summons. It's more tedious than hard. Whereas if you would have to fight a hero which has some abilities you have too or some specific units boost and some spells it would become alot more interesting for people. Just some examples with what you could do with a enemy hero

A. has some skills your hero also has or fixed skills like higher magic or whatever
B. have a big far army with double than normal(like increased stack size and more stacks on field)
C. a fight vs 2 heroes (like in AP when u and bill fight vs the demon) but then u vs 2 heroes (thus having x4 stack of units/2 casters from enemy)

With this you can also add heroes on the map to give some extra challenge or hero spawns that actually spawn right after u get object or get to person a or b w/e (the suprise element)

since i really miss heroes that are not QUEST related on the map to test your army out i really think this was a bad idea

Your thoughts?

P.S. i forgot to mention
Battling against heroes is more fair to any character you create (viking/skald/soothsayer) Since you will be allowed to use rage and you can make heroes use items and what not to make them stronger

[skycrow]

I think in boss fights warriors/vikings, paladins/skalds are a bit of a disadvantage b/c they cannot use rage. and for the big part this is the warrior his strenght and semi of the paladin


Lead huge troops beyond recent leadership into boss level , and then they can

still defeat bosses easily but in out of control condition.:rolleyes:



Enemy heroes:

Maybe those thoughts can be mod ideas .

I ever had similar thoughts :let enemy ai heroes has some random

spells,skills,items equipped,and rune stones on player position to use in battle.

[Xargon]

Your text is really hard to read.

[Razorflame]

Lead huge troops beyond recent leadership into boss level , and then they can

still defeat bosses easily but in out of control condition.:rolleyes:



Enemy heroes:

Maybe those thoughts can be mod ideas .

I ever had similar thoughts :let enemy ai heroes has some random

spells,skills,items equipped,and rune stones on player position to use in battle.

think it's quite hard to mod new heroes into the game
other than modding the heroes that already exist in this game

and i don't know if it's easy to mod into the game being the enemy hero:p

I assume they have a spellbook and some unit amplifier skills
but using our skills/spells

but then again maybe we can copy that from Tl when u had the battle your mirror image

and at xargon what is hard to read?

[tiberiu]

and at xargon what is hard to read?

You leave too many empty lines between sentences. Try to learn to write more properly so that people can understand what you say. I hope you'll learn.

[Razorflame]

it's easier to read with some space in between instead of writing a huge line of text with no space between it

[Xargon]

and at xargon what is hard to read?

Lots of abbreviations (b/c, u, w/e. I do not find these very intuitive, and there is no character limit which would make them useful), overuse of line breaks and empty lines (those are useful to separate paragraphs, but you use them right in the middle of a sentence, which is irritating), sparse punctuation, typos, and garbled grammar (e.g. the last sentence. I have no idea what it could mean).

[Razorflame]

ok i will edit the post after dinner:)

[Fatt_Shade]

@skycrow
Lead huge troops beyond recent leadership into boss level , and then they can
still defeat bosses easily but in out of control condition.
Not possible , because as soon as you start fight with ONLY units above your lds you lose (expl - you have 10K lds and lead 5 stacks of 11K lds = lose).
But is doable with interesting tactic : take some high initiative unit and in first turn invisibility on it, other stack you lead could be ghost/cursed ghost above your leadership. So as you make your first unit invisible, ghosts will only attack enemy troops betting bigger and bigger with each attack. After enemy army is gone, keep your primary unit invisible (maybe cast chargers spell to get rage/mana because i dont know how rage gain works on units out of control) and cast heal on ghosts to get them under control again. Result you won battle, with no loss = profit :-)

@tiberiu
If you don't have anything interesting to say you know that you can just not write anything, do you?
And here you are doing same thing, you razor doing. Just proving what troll you really are.

OK on topic : I advertised this mode many ties, but I`ll said some things about it that apply here. KB-The Legend/HoMM3 babies mod from MattC. There he changed mechanics for enemy heroes, so that they have similar skills like player. Expl - if main stats is attack then that enemy hero will lower your army initiative for -1 in first turn, or have +1 speed for his units (something like tactics skill). If main stats is intellect enemy will have higher magic skill, allowing for double spell/turn or lowering your army resistances to take more dmg from spells. For main defense enemy army will have higher resistances, or bonus hp . . .
Also all enemy heroes have 10% mana regen/turn, so for late game heroes like elf/demon/undead heroes with 300 mana it means 30 mana/turn regen, it`s like he/she have concentration/transmutate skills. Expl - Xeona fight, she have double spell casting fire rain/fireball AND lowers your enemy fire resistance AND bonus physical resistance for her units. That is interesting fight, to survive.
Also there are some changes in intellect bonus in this mod, like for high enough int for mass weakness spell you do dmg below minimal (mass weakness spell make all units do minimial dmg, but here it goes even below that) , or bonus turns for blind/sheep/doom spells (like they did to creator skill here).
So it`s doable to make enemy heroes fights more challenging and very easy since only 1 man did it in this mod, so professional programing studio should have no prob at all.

About boss fights, top of my head idea would be to lower some of your stats(you`re in terror of such huge creature and lose some mana and/or primary attribute for that fight (20 - 30% maybe)

[ckdamascus]

I think it depends. It can be problematic if you are playing in Impossible and you haven't pre-planned a build to beat a boss and relied heavily on Rage Centric strategies as a Viking/Warrior.

A Soothsayer/Mage can also have similar problems if he relies on winning early on without any method of mana regeneration mid battle. Oops.

I had to take fairly severe losses as a mage against the spider boss, even with the 'trolls'. Heck, I almost simply didn't win the battle because I don't do enough damage with units or with spells. (this was a huge concern of mine in Armored Princess that a Mage could never spell nuke a boss effectively as a Warrior using sheer leadership/damage to wipe out a boss in a fraction of the time).

Incidentally, I won by using Polar Bears and Ancient Bears, using the jacket that gave me -15% leadership for bears. :) Trolls for consistent damage (and ultimately one of the last survivors) Jarls/Maidens for some damage control.

But then again, this only seems to be a 'problem' in Impossible mode so significant pre-planning and game experience is expected.

[Razorflame]

I edited my main post so now it's better to read:)

@ fatt_shade

I am personally not very fond of boss fights Since it just leaves alot of strat out. If i compare this to AP you needed some items to get a high phys res and/or magic resistance. So your unit adjacent to the boss would survive the damage he would get. While the rest of your army is killing spawns and/or support the unit adjacent to the boss.

[Razorflame]

I think it depends. It can be problematic if you are playing in Impossible and you haven't pre-planned a build to beat a boss and relied heavily on Rage Centric strategies as a Viking/Warrior.

A Soothsayer/Mage can also have similar problems if he relies on winning early on without any method of mana regeneration mid battle. Oops.

I had to take fairly severe losses as a mage against the spider boss, even with the 'trolls'. Heck, I almost simply didn't win the battle because I don't do enough damage with units or with spells. (this was a huge concern of mine in Armored Princess that a Mage could never spell nuke a boss effectively as a Warrior using sheer leadership/damage to wipe out a boss in a fraction of the time).

Incidentally, I won by using Polar Bears and Ancient Bears, using the jacket that gave me -15% leadership for bears. :) Trolls for consistent damage (and ultimately one of the last survivors) Jarls/Maidens for some damage control.

But then again, this only seems to be a 'problem' in Impossible mode so significant pre-planning and game experience is expected.

yes that is also another problem with boss fights that it takes very long to take like 30k HP down. IN ap the bosses came a bit later so u could plan them a bit more carefully. But in WOTN u can't and are forced to use less good units. Which will take quite some time to get him down. The longer a round takes the less chance u have of winning vs a boss

Since u cannot use rage and your mana will deplete eventually unless u have some kind of mana regen. Which isn't always there.

[ckdamascus]

yes that is also another problem with boss fights that it takes very long to take like 30k HP down. IN ap the bosses came a bit later so u could plan them a bit more carefully. But in WOTN u can't and are forced to use less good units. Which will take quite some time to get him down. The longer a round takes the less chance u have of winning vs a boss

Since u cannot use rage and your mana will deplete eventually unless u have some kind of mana regen. Which isn't always there.

Well, not just later, but you could skip them.

In Armored Princess, I was able to skip Driller until I had a better setup to no-loss him really fast rather than no-lossing him after taking a LONG time.

I think if people accept losses, it doesn't seem so bad.

You are completely right on the general strategy to beat bosses (hitter who can resist retaliation). It is hard to make a challenging single player game that doesn't feel like "bullcrap". :)

[Razorflame]

I know but that's why I said that by giving heroes some abilities of your own it could be way more interesting than just plain boss fights

[Nirual]

I've never been much of a fan of boss fights for exactly that reason.

On the upside, they provide an unique type of battle which can be interesting, at least the first time. But I've seen enough of that damn spider they keep reusing. At least in AP it was optional (and replenishing your troops afterwards not as painful).
But the rage restriction just feels really arbitrary and doesn't really make the fight more interesting.

WotN excuses not being able to use rage to "make it fairer for the boss" but considering rage abilities are usually better against groups rather than one guy, I really doubt that's actually the problem. Its probably more that the rage abilities just aren't coded to work properly against a boss.
If that is the case, they should've just made the boss immune to rage abilities and allowed the use to thin out the summons, which most bosses have plenty of anyway.

[dainbramage]

In WotN it feels like warriors get kinda shafted against bosses. Not using rage skills I expected having played the prequels, but at least in those warriors had the highest leadership. It really makes focusing on rage skills a bad idea in the first 4 islands because the spider then becomes quite a wall if you don't have frenzy or the +50% crit dam.

EDIT: I do like the wider range of abilities that enemy heroes have in WotN though. Like Guilford having higher magic.

[Fatt_Shade]

@Nirual
It would be nice to make so you cant target bosses with rage skills, but can use them on summons. It`s on wish list i guess.

@dainbramage
This is among turn based strategy also role playing type of game, and you decide what role your hero do. So making high spell dmg mage or mass buff/debuff , or high rage dmg warrior, or high unit dmg/crit% is your pick. Sure for first boss fight warrior is last place, but in previous games paladin held that place and no1 asked him if he likes it :-) So now warrior is warming bench in boss fights comparing to pala/mage.

For your statement enemy heroes have high magic and some other skills, that is old news. Year ago that was implemented in the Legend mod, devs of WotN didnt invent anything new here.

[Razorflame]

the only thing that changed was that heroes got insane amount of mana like 200+

and could cast geyser/armageddon and stuff:P

[Bunnle]

People seem to assume that Soothsayers have unlimited mana in boss fights. The undead spider boss took me about 15 rounds to defeat as a soothsayer the first time and I barely got by. Remember that it's the first boss in the game, and concentration (mana regen skill) is deep in the magic tree and takes a lot of magic runes to max out. Unless you are really lucky and find the rage to mana conversion spell before that, but that still uses up a turn of the book to use.

Soothsayers have a smaller army, and their stats aren't tailored around attack/defense. So I'd disagree with the fact that mages have an easier time with boss fights. Much later in the game however, when mana isn't an issue that balance may shift. But I doubt Skalds and Vikings have much of an issue either with the ridiculous damage they can produce with their much bigger army and higher attack/defense stats, which makes it much easier to dispatch all the summons that bosses throw at you better than a mage can until the spell Geysers at rank 3 comes into play.

Both the Skald and Viking aren't excluded from using magic either in boss fights. It's never "useless" to buff your whole army to deal max damage, or give them extra speed or teleport for example. Mages excel at dealing damage, but the utility spells like Bless and Berserker are still very powerful for non-mages to use.

[Razorflame]

yes but mage doesn't need an big army

since the spell selection allows for 1 stack victories

and the more units you have the more challenging a battle becomes(regarding losses etc)

A very simple trick to beat bosses with mage used to be
EGD(emerald geen dragon)
cast invisiblity first turn then cast offensive spells or w/e
keep doing this until u run out of mana then use the dragon's ability to generate mana and w/e you want and just run down the boss with spells
;D