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Grace Xisthrith -> Boss Fight Discussion (8/24/2025 15:14:44)
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One of my favorite things to do in AQ is boss fights, sometimes with restrictions sometimes not, and I wanted to provide some feedback / open a discussion on potentially easy ways to make boss fights more entertaining. Some of this is a ramble, and I strongly encourage other players who like bossing to add their thoughts, disagree, or build on any of these ideas.
First main point: Bosses aren't threatening enough.
With very few exceptions, bosses don't do any significant amount of damage. I define significant as threatening / getting close to killing me. The two most recent bosses in the Final Solstice saga I fought with only neutral lean armors using basic attacks, and both did about 50% of my HP having trained END during the entire fight. For this reason, I was able to completely ignore both bosses mechanics, because their base performance wasn't threatening enough to make me need to deal with their statuses, or work around the offensive / defensive modes in this case. While I don't think general story week bosses need to be super challenging, my opinion is that if they can be basic attacked in a neutral armor and not prove any threat to the player, they need to be more substantial.
This critique isn't limited to generic weekly quest bosses though. Pestilence and War Reforged (whatever the most recent fight where we played as Artix was) both deal a very low amount of damage per turn, and they are the bosses of final quests in sagas. Pestilence is infamously weak, dealing low damage with attacks, dealing low status damage, and giving the player a very easy to access massive heal for only lightly interacting with his mechanics. War Reforged was so easy that I was able to kill it with only one health potion without using the final stand ability, just basic attacking the single digit damage, his damage was so low that I could completely ignore his main mechanic. A much older example, but shadowscythe virophage's basic attacks are absolutely weak without any shadow armor, the only threat comes from its SP attacks, you can pretty much indefinitely tank it with a healing pet in any armor with a defensive misc.
Second main point: Just bump the numbers and make it a challenge battle.
It seems as though often the biggest issue with creating interesting / deep content is dev time, so it would seem like making challenging bosses could be harder / a waste of time for a team that already has a lot to do. I think that the solution to this is to use simple modifications to make the same boss much harder. The reason I suggest adding challenge battles to quests is because they all seem to use the same boss fight framework that Medea and Entropy used (I forget which came first) so presumably it wouldn't be any code hassle to add a challenge fight, if the code already exists.
One example of this is Uncle Krenos and Chronocroaker. These two when found in random battles have double the HP (and roughly double damage) compared to their painting versions. I suspect this is because of some invisible modifier like Monster Power, but I'm not a coder. Whatever the mechanism though, they made one monster fight but gave it two dramatically different difficulties. This kind of concept could easily be applied to story bosses, at least I hope.
Another way to simply increase monster difficulty would be to apply a multiplier to monster stats in a challenge battle. Stats are key for statuses, base damage, accuracy, so multiplying stats by 1.5 or doubling them would be a significant increase in power, presumably at very little time cost to any coders.
Another way could be to bump the levels. I'm not sure if level scaling code goes much higher than 150, but we do have level 165 war mobs, so I assume the scaling code can continue. Make a level 200 or 300 Dreamless Gatekeeper or Flayer, and throw that in the challenge mode battle.
Of course, combining some of these could also work. Overall TLDR for this section is: use simple modifiers to easily increase fight difficulty so bosses don't just get rolled
Third main point: Unbeatables
This is not necessarily for general weekly quest bosses (although I'd love to fight a level 500 Dreamless Gatekeeper and try and figure out a way to deal with 2k regen and 2k damage bleeds), but I'd love to see some extreme high number fights, semi unbeatables or unbeatables, created, particularly on saga finales. We only get one saga finale each year, and when the bosses are underwhelming from a gameplay perspective, like Pestilence or War Reforged, we have a long time to wait until the next one. Having a pestilence that drowned the player in statuses or a war reforged that did huge damage would've been exciting (although war reforged might not be beatable unless we are able to fight as the player and not as artix realistically). This could also be accomplished, in theory, with the same methods as above, just with highly inflated numbers. Instead of scaling a boss fight to level 200, scale it to level 400 and see if anyone can beat it. Make it monster power 8 instead of 2, quadruple its stats (maybe they're capped?). Many unbeatables don't have complicated mechanics, Carnax hits big, Nightbane hits big, Safira and Loco are really the only ones I can think of with significant depth. I'd love to see more modern unbeatable bosses created, especially if they can be done with little extra work for staff.
Fourth main point: Story fights.
AQ is a game that's probably only been around for this long because of its incredible story written by so many writers over so many years. So I don't want to say that the story doesn't matter, or isn't important. At the same time, I love being able to use my own items and gear to figure out a strategy for bosses, and being locked to an NPC form like War fighting the giant obsiidan tree (dragonlorn saga I think?) or artix fighting war limits gameplay options. I'd personally love if wherever possible, there was a non cannon challenge battle added, so that we the player could try out these goliath challenges. Or they could be added as void challenge fights where the avian trio is. Or something.
These are my main thoughts. Biggest hope is that we just bump up the base performance of bosses in general, multiply their damage by 1.5 or so in one way or another because they just feel really, really weak.
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