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What's your stance on abusing boss mechanics?


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I am talking mostly about Cademimu and Mando Raiders here, as they have bosses that can be easily abused.

 

I Cademimu both the Wookie and the bonus boss can be outmaneuvered and if you position yourself correctly their main mechanics (adds and aoe pull) will be neglected. In Mando Raiders the bonus boss can be made completely helpless by correct positioning.

 

I do really feel that this is exploiting the game mechanics and I don't like it. Although I do know what could be done to make these fights a cheesy cakewalk, I will not tell the group, but most of the people know anyway at this point and will insist to abuse/exploit.

 

What's your stance to it? Will you propose these exploits yourself to make the run go quicker? Will you just follow the group? Or will you insist to do the fights the "right" way?

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by lvl 55 most people are done doing flashpoints for the story and are now focused on gearing up. i am completely fine with this seeing how it makes things go faster. the faster it is the sooner you get out and get into a new one.
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For Cademimu, it's actually easier, in my experience, to just straight up tank the boss in the middle where the adds spawn. When the boss dies, he explodes, killing any nearby adds. If the adds aren't near him, they have to be killed manually, and they have *way* too much hp to make that an efficient prospect. The only reason you might not want to just do it "normally" is if your DPS is utterly terrible and you think you'll get more than 2-3 add packs.

 

Concerning the bonus bosses, for Cademimu, mechanics like that have been "gamed" by interposing a barrier between yourself and the boss pretty regularly. The boss that the Separatist was based off of (pretty obviously I might add) was the bonus boss of Taral V and most ranged DPS would do the exact same thing for his pull. It's just like tanks and DPS who game KB effects by putting their backs to a wall or standing just outside of range of immobile enemies. For Mando Raider, on the other hand, it skirts the realm of "broken". DPS will still take damage from his special attack, but the boss is simply incapable of attacking the tank. Of course, the bonus bosses are pretty much free loot. They're largely tank and spank with a single mechanic to minutely tweak the fight (Cad bonus has the pull; Mando has the threat drop + AoE, Athiss has the cast that can be interrupted, and Hammer Station has the stun). None of them are particularly difficult so abusing them doesn't really mean much in the long run.

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What would be the abuse on the Wookie boss ? Making him burn his own adds ? That sounds absolutely intended to me. How many other bosses has some sort of "friendly fire" thing ? Red Reaper would be one, where you had to move and stay behind of thsoe acolytes whateves. I don't recall walker-kephess damaging his pakcs of thrandoshians with the aoe stuff (would have been nice though,lol)

 

But what are you going to do ? Positioning yourself so adds are safe and sound ? That's what you do for your group fighting with you :p

Edited by wainot-keel
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What would be the abuse on the Wookie boss ?

 

The "abuse" mechanic on the Wookiee is standing pulling him out from under the ship (generally by hiding either the cargo boxes or the elevator to LoS pull him). The adds won't follow him if you get him far enough away from the ship, so you don't have to deal with the soft enrage derived from having a bazillion remarkably durable ugnaughts beating down upon you. You still have to kill said adds to get out of combat, but it makes the fight easier if you don't have enough DPS to kill him before the third or fourth set of adds spawn. It takes longer though because, after beating him down, you have to go and kill the mass of super durable adds manually instead of just having them die from the boss's death throes.

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The "abuse" mechanic on the Wookiee is standing pulling him out from under the ship (generally by hiding either the cargo boxes or the elevator to LoS pull him). The adds won't follow him if you get him far enough away from the ship, so you don't have to deal with the soft enrage derived from having a bazillion remarkably durable ugnaughts beating down upon you. You still have to kill said adds to get out of combat, but it makes the fight easier if you don't have enough DPS to kill him before the third or fourth set of adds spawn. It takes longer though because, after beating him down, you have to go and kill the mass of super durable adds manually instead of just having them die from the boss's death throes.

 

lol, didn't know that.

 

but that's a really fun, fast fight that can go wrong in seconds or go smoothly to the point of saying "was that a joke ?"

it's rather hilarious and tragic sight seing a dps or healer being chased down by a dozen of little s****** to finally zerg them down in 2 seconds :D

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I am talking mostly about Cademimu and Mando Raiders here, as they have bosses that can be easily abused.

 

I Cademimu both the Wookie and the bonus boss can be outmaneuvered and if you position yourself correctly their main mechanics (adds and aoe pull) will be neglected. In Mando Raiders the bonus boss can be made completely helpless by correct positioning.

 

I do really feel that this is exploiting the game mechanics and I don't like it. Although I do know what could be done to make these fights a cheesy cakewalk, I will not tell the group, but most of the people know anyway at this point and will insist to abuse/exploit.

 

What's your stance to it? Will you propose these exploits yourself to make the run go quicker? Will you just follow the group? Or will you insist to do the fights the "right" way?

 

Clever use of your surroundings and the weaknesses of your adversary(s) have been staples of RPGs since the genre came into being. One of the most engaging and fun aspects of tabletop RPGs is for players to come up with solutions to encounters that the Game Master (GM) did not anticipate. And a good GM rewards the players for their cleverness, but also learns from the experience.

 

These so called "abuses" of boss mechanics in MMOs are no different. The developers are the GMs - they have created an encounter that the players need to overcome. Somewhere along the line a group of players, whether by accident or on purpose, use their surroundings or "exploit" a weakness making the encounter easier than the developers intended. And then that "strategy" is propagated to all who play the game. The "reward" is that those who use it save time.

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I thought adds spawned based on his life percentage, not based on how long it takes to kill him?

 

because I distinctly remember ending up with I'm not sure how many of those ugnaughts beating me (healer) into a pulp, because tank didn't even have a chance to pick them up, since dps burned the boss down fairly quickly, 3 groups spawned within seconds of each other which tanks AoE was on CD... but apparently not quickly enough to finish him off before we all died...

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I thought adds spawned based on his life percentage, not based on how long it takes to kill him?

 

I've had 4 sets of adds spawn once. Every other time it's either 2 or 3 sets of adds.

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I am talking mostly about Cademimu and Mando Raiders here, as they have bosses that can be easily abused.

 

I Cademimu both the Wookie and the bonus boss can be outmaneuvered and if you position yourself correctly their main mechanics (adds and aoe pull) will be neglected. In Mando Raiders the bonus boss can be made completely helpless by correct positioning.

 

I do really feel that this is exploiting the game mechanics and I don't like it. Although I do know what could be done to make these fights a cheesy cakewalk, I will not tell the group, but most of the people know anyway at this point and will insist to abuse/exploit.

 

What's your stance to it? Will you propose these exploits yourself to make the run go quicker? Will you just follow the group? Or will you insist to do the fights the "right" way?

 

As I'll mention below (in response to other replies), I don't think this would be considered abusing boss mechanics, nor should it be prevented. I also feel as though the dev's also feel this way about some of these items as they have not been fixed. Something that would be an abuse (which has been fixed) was the sarlacc pit in SV to kill thresher.

 

The "abuse" mechanic on the Wookiee is standing pulling him out from under the ship (generally by hiding either the cargo boxes or the elevator to LoS pull him). The adds won't follow him if you get him far enough away from the ship, so you don't have to deal with the soft enrage derived from having a bazillion remarkably durable ugnaughts beating down upon you. You still have to kill said adds to get out of combat, but it makes the fight easier if you don't have enough DPS to kill him before the third or fourth set of adds spawn. It takes longer though because, after beating him down, you have to go and kill the mass of super durable adds manually instead of just having them die from the boss's death throes.

 

This isn't the worst one, there is a place you can stand (if you have ranged dps) where the boss just stands there. The ugnaughts gather around him and die when he explodes.

 

Clever use of your surroundings and the weaknesses of your adversary(s) have been staples of RPGs since the genre came into being. One of the most engaging and fun aspects of tabletop RPGs is for players to come up with solutions to encounters that the Game Master (GM) did not anticipate. And a good GM rewards the players for their cleverness, but also learns from the experience.

 

These so called "abuses" of boss mechanics in MMOs are no different. The developers are the GMs - they have created an encounter that the players need to overcome. Somewhere along the line a group of players, whether by accident or on purpose, use their surroundings or "exploit" a weakness making the encounter easier than the developers intended. And then that "strategy" is propagated to all who play the game. The "reward" is that those who use it save time.

 

it's not an exploit, it's using the environment to your advantage.

no different than taking cover behind something if you are getting shot at.

 

As both of these people point out, these are just clever uses of environment, not an exploit or abuse.

 

All said and done, dev's may go back and change the ability to do these things in the future. However, supplemental discipline would not be warranted due to the fact that players are not breaking the game (hacking) to make these fights easier. Trivializing a fight using your environment is just smart playing.

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It's funny that when people exploit mobs it's clever use of environment, but when a mob shoots you through solid wall that you cannot hit through which they are actually perfectly capable of doing, like say HK-47 often does in Foundry, people complain that's a bug.

 

I think the flamethrower still does significant damage to the adds on hard mode, because I saw the adds die quite a few times while we're making no attempt to AE them before the unstable fuel. The adds have 80K HP a piece so it's pretty much impossible to kill them with just AEs anyway as if you can do that kind of AE damage, you'd be able to AE every trash pack in the game in hard FP.

Edited by Astarica
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It's funny that when people exploit mobs it's clever use of environment, but when a mob shoots you through solid wall that you cannot hit through which they are actually perfectly capable of doing, like say HK-47 often does in Foundry, people complain that's a bug.

 

Bad analogy. If through using the environment a player discovers that they can attack a mob and the mob cannot attack him/her then that is an exploit/bug and needs to be fixed. Dragging a mob far away from its spawn point so that the adds that spawn at that same point take longer to engage the group and/or backing yourself against a wall so that a mob's knockback does not affect you as much is clever use of your surroundings and does not need to be fixed.

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I hate it, and generally object to doing the fights in any way other than executing the mechanics as designed. Because what happens then is people get so used to the exploit, they forget how to do the fight correctly, and the fight has to be nerfed into oblivion.

 

Plus, none of the HM FPs are really that hard to begin with.

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I thought adds spawned based on his life percentage, not based on how long it takes to kill him?

 

I don't have fraps to confirm this, but I am almost positive you are correct and that they spawn based on his life. At least what we did before we got geared is DPS the boss until the second set of adds came, then DPS only the adds until they all died. No more adds come during that time. Once all the adds are dead, and the healer has energy, we resumed DPSing the boss and kept on him until he died, ignoring the adds that spawn at that point.

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I don't have fraps to confirm this, but I am almost positive you are correct and that they spawn based on his life. At least what we did before we got geared is DPS the boss until the second set of adds came, then DPS only the adds until they all died. No more adds come during that time. Once all the adds are dead, and the healer has energy, we resumed DPSing the boss and kept on him until he died, ignoring the adds that spawn at that point.

 

Not sure about that. Could be a hybrid trigger, though I'm not sure they have those in this game. I've definitely seen way more than 4 groups before. So maybe there is a timer which spawns and resets every certain amount of hp?

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I don't have fraps to confirm this, but I am almost positive you are correct and that they spawn based on his life. At least what we did before we got geared is DPS the boss until the second set of adds came, then DPS only the adds until they all died. No more adds come during that time. Once all the adds are dead, and the healer has energy, we resumed DPSing the boss and kept on him until he died, ignoring the adds that spawn at that point.

 

I've straight up burned the boss down and only 2 packs of adds spawned. I've only seen the "full" 4 packs one time, when the group had absolutely terrible DPS. It's not based on life. If it were, the same number of packs would spawn every time.

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I do not mind them in a general sense. What I do not like is when people insist on doing some that are really not worth the hassle.

 

The one on Athiss with the Beast of Vodal Kresh where you drag him down to the "lake" so the adds do not come to you is one of those. The adds die quick and it is a pain to drag him down there and sometimes he evades. So not worth it.

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i have cleared and killed all of the 55 hms without any exploits or shenanigans to remove/not engage certain boss mechanics. but a few of my guildies like to use a few here and there not really knowing it is a exploit.

 

personally i really dont let it bother me as i know i can bet the instances without them. but part of me thinks you should know how to beat these encounters before you use such. at least for your first time through them you should.

 

perhaps this mindset would be different if i only ran pugs, had to spend lots on repair bills and get frustrated on unneeded wipes.

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i have cleared and killed all of the 55 hms without any exploits or shenanigans to remove/not engage certain boss mechanics. but a few of my guildies like to use a few here and there not really knowing it is a exploit.

 

personally i really dont let it bother me as i know i can bet the instances without them. but part of me thinks you should know how to beat these encounters before you use such. at least for your first time through them you should.

 

perhaps this mindset would be different if i only ran pugs, had to spend lots on repair bills and get frustrated on unneeded wipes.

 

I have to agree with you on the "Do it right at least one time" mentality. Another part of me doesn't like abusing boss mechanics that are clearly borderline exploits because eventually these will get fixed and then people will complain about an encounter being "too hard" or something.

 

I think this is also why Lost Island (pre 2.0) was so difficult for people to complete. There were no mechanics people could cheese. They had to learn the mechanics, learn the fights, and execute them correctly.

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A mechanic is a mechanic. Why can't the Ugnaught adds get up onto the vehicle? Simple. They are too short to jump up on it. Makes sense.

 

What you are asking is if this is intended. Only a dev can respond to that. Even if it was not intended I very much doubt they are going to put a fix in for it.

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A mechanic is a mechanic. Why can't the Ugnaught adds get up onto the vehicle? Simple. They are too short to jump up on it. Makes sense.

 

What you are asking is if this is intended. Only a dev can respond to that. Even if it was not intended I very much doubt they are going to put a fix in for it.

 

Actually the reason the Ugnaught's can't get onto the ship is because they follow the same type of code that your companions do. (or at least very similar to it). Your companions can't jump onto the ship either. Ever try to get the datacron on Hoth with the moving containers? Your companion will follow you around from below because he cannot get up to those areas.

 

This is a limitation of the engine, not lore, nor an intended mechanic; despite whatever excuse you try to come up with to validate it; it's most likely not intended; but will probably not get fixed either.

 

We may agree that it wasn't intended; but don't try to sugarcoat a situation for your own internal validation.

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