NULL could be a very interesting, challenging boss. Unfortunately, he has some major issues that prevent that. He is now more challenging and punishing than anything else.
1. He can’t be damaged by conditions. Period. While this is nice and good for certain classes and builds, it pretty much is a giantkittento anyone who doesn’t play pure damage. That’s really not cool nor is it fun. It is telling people to only form teams that are pure DPS on the non-condition side or else you won’t be able to complete it very easily. You are literally one or two men down if you have condition users on your team.
Making any boss completely immune to conditions is really just a kick in the face. You don’t make any boss completely immune to normal damage. If you did that, you’d think it was completely silly. So why is this any less? If you plan to make bosses completely immune to condition damage, you should at least have it so that builds that revolve around them have SOMETHING they can do other than be useless or change gear. Not everyone has a second set of gear just lying around. And it’s not like you make condition users vital for any boss. There are no bosses where people are like “Oh, normal damage doesn’t cut it, we need conditions” but there are plenty of instances of the opposite.
2. His prompts are in the chat box. Not everyone is always looking at their chat box and other than that, the visual cue for these prompts are extremely hard to discern. So pretty much it makes it almost impossible to see unless you are paying attention to both screens, which means you are most likely getting your butt kicked while looking.
3. Mines that are armed are explodable by pets and summons. It’s hard enough having to deal with a pet or a summon. It’s even worse when you either can bring them out and they do nothing but hurt your party or you can not bring them out and lose a large portion of your damage because of it. Don’t make pets and summons blow up mines when it’s so hard already to avoid them when you’re being knocked around and trying to avoid sparks.
4. NULL aggros very quickly on to summons and pets. With pets it’s really not all that bad since you can cause them to come back to you. With Summons, you are unable to drag him on to mines as long as he is completely focused on the summon. Again, this makes certain builds completely unviable against him. It’s unfortunate, but these are ALSO the classes most hurt by removing conditions, Elementalists and Necromancers.
5. Sparks destroy your green mines. That’s -really- kind of sick when enemies you can’t target, redirect and can’t damage can destroy mines that take a good chunk of time to respawn, restart and be capturable again.
6. When NULL puts up his shield, he normally destroys all mines within 5-10 seconds. That’s an extremely punishing grace period where the ONLY way you can damage him is wiped completely from the field and you can do nothing but sit there and take damage from him, sparks and his enrage ability if you’re that late in to the fight. You can’t even stun him out of detonating all the mines. It isn’t fun to just sit there and be hit because you couldn’t completely coordinate within a few moments.
I enjoy the concept of the NULL fight. Using traps to your advantage, having to dodge sparks, etc, that seems fun. However, when you have that combined with the inability to actually damage him when you need it, major builds of entire classes eradicated and being unable to actually get mines to work like you want to, it becomes less a fun fight of skill and more a fight of futility against random mechanics.