So I've finally lit up the darkness...
You ever play mega man or super meat boy? Or ninja gaiden? How about Punch Out?
Tin Foil Hat Hearer »—> Ranger Extraordinaire »—> “Be like water…”
Punch Out…. wow… now that brings back memories. On my now ancient Commodore 128D in C64 emulation, if memory serves.
I’ve played lots of games in the last few decades. Few of them were as bad as Liadri, though :p
Someone should study Miyamoto…
Mega man – every wrong jump is your fault, the camera or not seeing the enemy on screen despite him killing you was never a problem
Meat boy – look at statement above with the twist of it being a platformer thus instant rez.
Ninja gaiden – while a lot of the games in the series were instakill “cheap” they were never unfair in terms of you killing back the enemy and there is no “oh kitten you got 7 crystals on her, but time is up happy fall”
Cannot comment on punch out since i didnt play it.
Seriously Lia needs heavy fixes (not nerfs).
When life gives you lemon, ask if its from a anime or manga.
Liadri needs a complete redesign, but then again, every time they want to add “challenge” the only idea they’ve got is “let’s toss a trillion AoE one shots at the players so they run out of endurance to dodge and we get them”; cfr. Giganticus Lupicus and Subject Alpha. Liadri just takes the cake because they added multiple simultaneous one-shot sources, massive non-one-shot damage, multiple CC sources, and a strict time limit.
Oh and of course having to fight the UI, to run back, to spend tickets, and to wait in a queue after getting killed. Now these ones are pure strokes of genius.
I am sincere when I say this but I wonder if it is possible to even give us a challenging fight without the cheap stuff with how the game itself works.
Yes, all bosses should sling wet noodles at you, or should I say the exact same spot on the ground, over and over again that way if players can’t pick up on not so subtle patterns and sill manage to get themselves hit it won’t hurt too badly. It’d be terrible if we designed a game around observations and practice.
+1 for this thread for sure.
I have played tons of difficult games, from the classic Mega Man games, to the recent Demons Souls and Dark Souls. But Liadri is ridiculous. This boss is everything that is wrong about Guild Wars 2.
I have died dozens of times at this boss, and still haven’t beaten her. But 99% of those deaths was due to camera issues, targeting problems, or performance issues. The game would freeze up during crucial moments, or the game would refuse to target the orbs or Liadri correctly. The targeting is so bad, that people are teaming up with other players, just so they can call targets. This is a band aid to the downright atrocious targeting system that has plagued this game since release. And it still hasn’t been fixed!
The camera does not have enough space to accurately show the fight. The dome is too tiny a space for the camera to work in. Ideally, the camera should always be able to move outside the area where the player is moving. There’s also the issue with the clones sometimes spawning behind the player, or on top of him. And the red circles are hardly visible on the floor. Especially during phase 2 is becomes incredibly difficult to spot the safe zones, and still maintain Liadri as your target.
But keep in mind that the red circles are also a band aid to the poor art direction regarding the game’s visual effects. Any other game would have clear effects that communicate to the player what to dodge. But since this game is mostly lacking in proper boss tells and effects, we have to make due with dodging giant red circles. This is also partially because a lot of the game’s visual effects tend to clutter up the screen, making it otherwise impossible to see the action. The red circles do not make this problem go away.
And don’t get me started on “target closest enemy”, because why that feature does not behave as it did in GW1 baffles me. It is absolutely rubbish as it is now. Just target the closest enemy. How hard can that be to code?!
And someone dares to compare this to the almost perfect Mega Man games? Games in which every enemy and every boss have a unique rhythm and very clear tells, with a camera that never misbehaves? Games in which not a single boss relies on cheap one-shot kills, and where the bosses actually change their behavior based on their distance to the player, and what the player is doing? That is how you make an interesting boss fight.
“Madness is just another way to view reality”
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-On3Ya0_4Y)
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-On3Ya0_4Y)
(edited by Mad Queen Malafide.7512)
Yes, all bosses should sling wet noodles at you, or should I say the exact same spot on the ground, over and over again that way if players can’t pick up on not so subtle patterns and sill manage to get themselves hit it won’t hurt too badly. It’d be terrible if we designed a game around observations and practice.
+1 for this thread for sure.
Un-nerfed Mimiron in WoW had a list of skills that 1 shot you or nearly 1 shot you. Amazing and fun fight because of how it worked even though you almost always died instantly if you messed up your movement even once. Again was still fun!
Camera isn’t as bad as people portray it. Yes it’s clunky, yes it should be fixed… but if you use this as a limitation then perhaps you’re just not good enough to work with minor faulty mechanics.
The red on the floor takes some getting used to, and once you pay attention you can clearly tell the difference. As well as it being a completely predetermined pattern.
Yes it’s not ideal, no it’s not limiting you in such a way that you’re going to be prevented from completing it.
And on top of that, there’s a dozen ways to deal with the one shot mechanics. It’s not like ‘’oh I screwed up a little now I die’’. No, you can just evade/block/invulnerable/take no damage out of it… multiple times.
For a simple 1v1 fight, I still think the actual fight is well done. The only thing that needs fixes is the arena itself.
Camera isn’t as bad as people portray it. Yes it’s clunky, yes it should be fixed… but if you use this as a limitation then perhaps you’re just not good enough to work with minor faulty mechanics.
The red on the floor takes some getting used to, and once you pay attention you can clearly tell the difference. As well as it being a completely predetermined pattern.
Yes it’s not ideal, no it’s not limiting you in such a way that you’re going to be prevented from completing it.And on top of that, there’s a dozen ways to deal with the one shot mechanics. It’s not like ‘’oh I screwed up a little now I die’’. No, you can just evade/block/invulnerable/take no damage out of it… multiple times.
For a simple 1v1 fight, I still think the actual fight is well done. The only thing that needs fixes is the arena itself.
Its not “minor” faulty mechanics, its a plain broken system, one that a-net themself have shown to be able to fix (the floating red rings like on deadeye), some that are ui problems (targeting and 30% of options menu not working/a-net thinking that the words they use mean what they actually dont) AND last but definitely the worst thing, the camera spazzes that hacking the dat file (what gets you banned) has shown to be just devs being lazy and not unlocking it (yay for ignoring base rules of let players see the entire playing field and whats behind the camera doesnt exist rules).
When life gives you lemon, ask if its from a anime or manga.
Yes, all bosses should sling wet noodles at you, or should I say the exact same spot on the ground, over and over again that way if players can’t pick up on not so subtle patterns and sill manage to get themselves hit it won’t hurt too badly. It’d be terrible if we designed a game around observations and practice.
+1 for this thread for sure.
Just like nearly everything else in the magical world of coding, designing hard boss fights has lots and lots of possible implementations, 99.9% of which are terribad and a handful of which are good or better.
Putting constant one shots which force the player to move in a specific pattern and then providing the boss with a constant stream of cripples to stop him/her from following that pattern is the epitome of cheapness, and most certainly belongs in the 99.9% of terribad choices.
The Liadri fight (especially the harder version for the achievement) is “unlearnable” in the sense that while there obviously is a pattern to it, the way it’s structured and the number of elements you are forced to take into account requires a precision of execution which is virtually impossible to achieve. You don’t see people repeating the exact same movements in Liadri phase 2, time and time again, until they know them so well that they can finally beat the fight. For example, all it takes is one of the shadows being a millimeter more to the left instead of to the right and you get a different shadow to be killed, making it impossible to develop a specific sequence. Rather, it takes a combination of perfect twitch execution and a bit of luck to finally manage to do it. It’s one of the (innumerable) design mistakes in that fight.
Even if there are some details of the fight that i don’t like, I think that not being able to exactly learn the pattern and master the execution is something positive.
Even if you can still learn a lot by experience (understanding how the AoE pattern works and getting used to AoE timing, and to the pulling orb one if possible, makes a huge difference) Phase 2 is likely to change a lot from one try to another.
You only have a general understanding of the fight and you have to build your charcater around that. No skill for countering some nasty attack at a given time mark or some defensive CD perfectly adjusted to overcome a given threat over and over. Once in the action, you can’t fight a static script, you need to use your resources wisely and constantly adapt as fight goes on, and this is great.
I guess people just refuse to adapt to whatever they’ve given to work with.
Take Megaman as an example, in the very first versions (as compared to later and more advanced ones) he can’t charge his attack, can’t slide but still people beat the game.
Camera isn’t as bad as people portray it. Yes it’s clunky, yes it should be fixed… but if you use this as a limitation then perhaps you’re just not good enough to work with minor faulty mechanics.
Yes it is that bad. Often the white whirlpools will spawn near the outer edge of the arena, and the camera simply cannot deal with being this close to a wall. It’s a serious design flaw, they should have given the camera a wider space to move in. The camera also a nasty habit of randomly turning your character 180 degrees, which drives me insane.
The red on the floor takes some getting used to, and once you pay attention you can clearly tell the difference. As well as it being a completely predetermined pattern.
Yes it’s not ideal, no it’s not limiting you in such a way that you’re going to be prevented from completing it.
The red circles don’t get any more visible the more you do it. They are always hard to see. Especially during phase 2, when things get especially chaotic. It becomes really hard to see where the circles are, and then you also need to target the boss, and turn the camera to face her, and hit her. It is as if all the bad mechanics are conspiring to get you killed.
And on top of that, there’s a dozen ways to deal with the one shot mechanics. It’s not like ‘’oh I screwed up a little now I die’’. No, you can just evade/block/invulnerable/take no damage out of it… multiple times.
No I can’t. I play a necromancer. We can only dodge twice. That’s it.
For a simple 1v1 fight, I still think the actual fight is well done. The only thing that needs fixes is the arena itself.
One-shot mechanics are a terrible way to add artificial difficulty to a boss fight. None of the bosses in Demons Souls use one-hit kills, yet they are still difficult. Why do you think that is? It’s not due to bad camera or targeting, because Demons Souls has none of those issues.
No, they are difficult because they have complex patterns, require fast reflexes, and demand that the player positions carefully. There’s a finely crafted balanced in which distance between player and boss matters, and affect the behavior of the boss. Again, this is also what Mega Man’s bosses did. And the player has to manage his stamina, which is used for blocking, dodging and attacking. So it becomes important for the player not to exhaust himself. The player never has to battle the camera or the controls.
THIS is a good boss fight:
No insta-kills. Just understanding the mechanics, the moves, and keeping the right distance. Also notice how there are no red rings of death. Because Demons Souls does not need red rings to indicate danger zones. Everything is perfectly visible without some band aid like the red circles. Every attack is perfectly telegraphed, and has unique sounds as well.
“Madness is just another way to view reality”
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-On3Ya0_4Y)
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-On3Ya0_4Y)
(edited by Mad Queen Malafide.7512)
I guess people just refuse to adapt to whatever they’ve given to work with.
Take Megaman as an example, in the very first versions (as compared to later and more advanced ones) he can’t charge his attack, can’t slide but still people beat the game.
And the games were balanced with those limitations in mind.
Here the camera is supposed to work well, yet it doesn’t. And so there are problems.
THIS is a good boss fight:
No insta-kills. Just understanding the mechanics, the moves, and keeping the right distance. Also notice how there are no red rings of death. Because Demons Souls does not need red rings to indicate danger zones. Everything is perfectly visible without some band aid like the red circles. Every attack is perfectly telegraphed, and has unique sounds as well.
Just wanted to quote this to say that GW2 has always been terrible with feedback and it hasn’t gotten any better. That’s one thing ANet really needs to sit down and improve.
Even in Demon’s Souls bosses weren’t killing you at 1 hit, you could’ve beat this game with a beginner items and dodging was properly made.
Brilliant voice acting and music:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9piElENpvmM
If you want something much better like these arenas you should play it.
i log on to relax, liadri is not relaxing at all…
if anything this has severely turned me off from the game i don’t even feel like doing dungeons anymore..
i hate liadri and i tried about 70+ times, i had around 120 now i got 48, i hate her and if I would get both achievements i would still hate the fight because it’s just too hard and not fun at all…i stopped trying and i feel like quitting the game, in fact i’m playing it less and less because i couldn’t get those two achievements that i wanted…
not to mention she’s a sadist that whipps people with a horsewhip like we’re slaves or something… un.cool.
Are you Shpongled?
(edited by Shpongle.6025)