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Cryomancer -> RE: =DF= September 2nd Design Notes: Arena at the Edge of Time: Alteon & Corvak (9/3/2022 1:55:25)
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In my opinion, I think this is probably the best executed Chaos Lord to date on a mechanical level. The fact that the player can influence the rotation of both bosses renders it by far the most interactive out of any Chaos Lord fight, and whilst the damage output of Alteon's second phase is overwhelming, the player is at least given some counterplay in breaking one or two body parts and delaying his second phase for a while. In a similar vein, I also appreciate the fact that the player is able to determine whether Corvak uses a defensive or an offensive rotation depending on which element they hit him with, which both adds interactivity to the fight and keeps it from wearing out its welcome by acting as a soft enrage of sorts, as the player can lower its damage output by hitting it with Nature whilst Alteon is still alive, but going on the offensive will require the player to hit it with Energy which in turn increases the damage of its attacks.
That being said, I do have two criticisms of the fight. Firstly, Alteon's Chaos accumulates a bit too quickly for how much health he has and how much damage he does in phase 2 - as even if a player does destroy 2 body parts of his eventually, they will still only have around 15-20 turns before Alteon's second phase starts. I think this is a bit too restrictive for most defensive classes which will need to survive against Alteon's second phase for an extended period of time. The second, albeit less pressing, criticism I have is that I think Alteon's transition nuke does too much damage for what seems to be an attack that seems to have enough hidden Bonus to render shield ineffective, though the fact that this only occurs once does alleviate matters a bit.
quote:
I was a bit confused by Alteon at first; because the mechanic is framed as breaking an enemy's individual body parts, my first thought as a player was that I was supposed to break all of them (this is actually the opposite of what you want to do) and thought something was wrong when breaking all of them didn't do anything. In actuality, breaking each body part gives him a unique buff (True Science Fact: breaking an enemy's sword actually causes them to deal more damage) and you are strictly punished for breaking more than one of them. Once I realized the framing/flavor was a trick, I thought it was kinda neat that different classes could choose which body part to break depending on which buff would be least harmful to them - but it's just an illusion of choice and entering Phase 2 automatically breaks all of his body parts anyway (without setting their HP to 0, which was another source of confusion as it made me think I should still be attacking them). What you really want to do here is spread out damage between all three body parts so he can enter Phase 2 without breaking anything, which keeps the buffs out of Phase 1 at least.
Breaking the body parts slows down the rate which Alteon's Chaos builds up, which buys you extra turns before phase 2 begins.
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