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AstralCodex -> RE: =DF= June 4th Design Notes: Arena at the Edge of Time : Doomed Reality (6/23/2021 19:28:24)
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Forgive me if I'm frank, but I feel like the way Fallen Purpose has been handled shows a misunderstanding of how to make fights interesting. IE was beloved because not only was it hard, but it was hard in an interesting and engaging way, while the numbers weren't very high outside of a few nukes, meaning that you had time to interact with the mechanics. Ditto Pandora EX, which forced classes into weird and contorted strategies to get around Sloth and inversion, but still has relatively low damage (outside of Pride phase) and no coinflips to boot.
FP is not like that. Either your class has an intrinsically great matchup vs it due to good shields, heal spam, and decent hitcount (Like Ranger or Pyro, or you're Paladin and have high +Dark uptime), or you're at the mercy of Draco coinflips. And the recent changes to buff the fight have just led to a significantly more frustrating experience overall, as someone who's been trying to do the fight without Ranger, Pyro, or Paladin.
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As the mechanics don't have much depth in FP, the only real way to make it harder is to up the numbers while removing whatever little counterplay from the player. For example, Draco's antipolarity numbers were increased, and now his +health bite now does ~450 damage and the other bites do ~300 damage through 80 dark res, meaning that losing a coinflip on a class without hitcount represents almost 1k additional damage, even if you saved a high hitcount move to not instantly die to the evil nuke. If your class was going to use a 2 turn defensive skill (like scales) on SMUDD's, then you'll take even more damage from not being able to shield the evil nuke (which still does a bit more damage than the dark nuke even after the res stack change.) Even for classes with enough hitcount, you can't always hit Draco's Antipolarity anyways due to the fight basically requiring you to grind them both down to 50% together, meaning the coinflips are worse even on those classes. Counterplay from the -dark rend was also removed by making it overlap with the -180 MPM. The result isn't that classes like Paladin or Pyromancer or Ranger can no longer do the fight or must adopt more interesting strategies, but instead that classes that had to do interesting things or struggle a bit to win get filtered out. Paladin, Pyromancer, and Ranger still do the fight relatively fine. DoomKnight, DragonMage, Technomancer, etc, now must endure many more coinflips.
(As an aside, I will say that the auto kill claw no longer critting through BPD is a great change, and one I wholly endorse.)
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We saw similar issues with Wolfwing and Ice and Dragons, where the fights were challenging not because of complicated mechanics with counterplay but instead because of absurd damage vomit and mandatory shield turns.
Yes, a fight that is too easy won't be engaging. But even though some level of difficulty is required for engagement, difficulty is not, in itself, engagement. A fight where everything works without any adjustment is not interesting. A fight where a few strategies are greatly favored over others is also not.
As an analogy, consider Duty and Rebellion. I postulate that making this fight harder without redesigning the mechanics entirely is a fool's errand. What difficulty knobs are there to be touched, exactly, without redesigning the fight from scratch or introducing new mechanics? You'd up the numbers on Illumina's MPM build up, maybe increase the When shield to 700 to prevent CDE from going past it, increase the heal on both enemies, and then maybe increase intaym's damage. But these changes don't make the fight more interesting - if anything, they just mean the few strategies (ignore Illumina's shield entirely with Necro or IBR or stack 300+ bonus to get around her MPM with Techno) that are already good become the only viable strategies. (And Intaym's damage increase would make his coinflip rotation worse.)
I think this is related to FP's overall meh reception, and also why the fight has gotten so many revamps. If a fight is too easy thanks to a few classes having good matchups, just scaling up the numbers doesn't make it any more engaging, but instead just walls out other classes. The same classes do the fight just fine, necessitating more adjustments, which then walls out even more classes.
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All in all, I think it would've been better if FP was not touched after release night (including by the res stack change, which I have another essay on). Or perhaps FP should've not been touched after Verly said he'd stop touching it two weeks ago after the second adjustment. But FP got a whopping three more adjustments after that. (And if I'm not incorrect, three out of those five adjustments were in response to people ****posting on discord?) Yes, had FP not been touched more times, FP would not be as hard as it is now, but it would've been more interesting. The result of these changes and the way they were handled isn't a fight that's hard but fair, but instead one where player effort to use worse classes is discouraged.
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