Public Testing: O3 Changes Part 2

Development Update

Realmers!

Last week you were able to test the O3 Changes. We have done some adjustments by now and the Design Team will answer some of the major questions about the changes down below. You will find O3 and Moonlight Village Portals in the Nexus.

Oryx 3 Adjustments

The Oryx 3 fight has shown a lot of issues as time progressed, generally as time goes on we expect for bosses to get more optimized. Oryx 3 however has in some cases been optimized to the point where the boss is incapable of attacking for the majority of the fight. The primary culprit of this is the counter/stagger system, as it currently exists dealing enough damage quick enough will instantly cancel any attack oryx is doing and force him into a reset. Coupled with many instances where O3 is vulnerable to damage while not doing anything and you can blow away most of the fight with oryx barely shooting a single bullet. The following changes should keep the majority of the fight intact while still rewarding good gameplay and patching up a lot of the above issues.

The O3 counter/stagger system has been fully retooled, now instead of getting the counter or stagger at the end of an attack, O3 will fully complete all of the attacks in a combo chain. When you hit a certain threshold of damage in each phase, o3 will go invulnerable for the remainder of the attack and add to a tally of times the threshold was reached in the combo, at the end of the combo O3 will enter a stagger state with a duration depending on how many of these thresholds was reached over the course of the combo. When hitting a threshold an attack will end a little bit faster than if that threshold was not hit and the attack fully played out.

The thresholds have been normalized to 3.5% for all o3 attacks, this is not a final value, but was chosen to hopefully allow well played solos to still hit these thresholds on occasion. Additionally if you happen to have a stagger occur near the bosses next phase transition, the stagger will allow you to push up to 5% of Oryx’s hp into the next phase. If you hit a phase transition with a stagger count of 2 or higher a stagger will automatically occur as if the combo chain ended there.

Oryx now only does combos of length 2 or 3 before he becomes exalted, and will only do combo chains of length 4 or 5 while exalted. This should allow you to get staggers more often in the earlier parts of the fight but need to last through longer attack chains in the later parts.

O3 has had some of his phase transition points changed in order to shift a little more of the fight into later phases and speed up the portions that players generally find less engaging.

The threshold changes are as follows:
Portals 80% -> 85%
Dance 60% -> 70%
Exalted 50% -> 55%
Celestial Unchanged – 40%
Heavens 20% -> 15%
Death 5% -> 1%

Counters have been entirely removed from the fight.

Invulnerability has been added to the windows at the start of attacks and between combos as o3 is resetting to the center. This should cut down on the “free” damage windows present in the fight as they had previously been contributing to the fight being steamrolled in higher dps groups.

The hp scaling for player counts 2-5 has been increased from 25% to 35%

Celestial caps damage dealt at 20% of O3’s HP during that phase, this will not longer let you kill him entirely during that phase but, coupled with the stagger at the end, will let you push all the way into heavens and even cut into its hp pool a bit.

Oryx now has a 50% chance to grant an additional Life Exaltation when defeated.

We have seen a lot of feedback since the initial PT patch notes for these changes were put up and would like to address some of it here.

Many of the main complaints have been about the increase in the time it takes to complete an o3, which is already a rather long commitment of time to complete. These changes have been carefully done to impact the time of the boss fight as little as possible, we believe if you go and try the changes out you will find that the fight length is not increased by a significant amount, you might not even notice the time difference. Having said that, the overall time it takes to run an O3 is already long enough to deserve a little more reward. Because of this we have added the above additional exalt chance, we did not believe a full second exalt in the dungeon was warranted, but do think that only 1 per long o3 run is too little.

Other complaints focus on the bad feeling nature of damage caps with invulnerability times. This is completely understandable, however in the case of o3 these invulnerability windows are very short. If you are hitting the damage cap, the longest attack is 7 seconds, factoring in the time it may take you to hit that damage cap, we believe you should never be waiting for too long before getting to actively deal damage again. While we do agree that hitting damage caps in phases does not particularly feel good, we also believe they are currently the only way to prevent the issue of O3 being steamrolled by optimal groups, without impacting the less optimal groups, which something like hp increases would do very heavily. Changes have been made to make this system feel as good as it can, while still enforcing the damage caps to prevent total steamrolling of o3.

Finally we have seen some feedback about removing “Skill Expression” in the fight by removing the pre attack and reset damage windows. While there is a bit of potential skill expression lost in these phases, no longer being able to run the risk/reward of pre-ep, the phases also provided just free windows of damage for everyone present, regardless of if they were actually taking risks or not. While one player may run the risk of death by standing on O3 with an ep or similar weapon, others could stand back at a full weapon range and just hit a boss that is providing no threat to them. Completely free damage windows like this generally shouldn’t exist in boss design, much less for O3, the boss that is dropping some of the best items in the game and supposed to be a pinnacle endgame fight. While there is some loss of risk/reward gameplay through this change, we believe there are still plenty of ways to express skill during O3s attacks, and we have not intentionally removed any techniques people use to make phases easier for the group or deal more damage.

Please do go and try these changes out for yourself, we will be watching feedback channels to look for any ideas or improvements on these systems you have. We intend to make these changes feel as good as possible to play while still fixing the problems that O3 has as a fight that allows him to be trivialized.

Moonlight Village Fixes

  • Fixed multiple typos in text from NPCs.
  • Fixed all Fishing Rods to have proper cooldowns.
  • Increased the lifetime of the summons from Flowering Kimono, Sage’s Wakibiki, and Ethereal Happi by 3 seconds.
  • Removed player scaling on the Moonlit Shrine lantern mechanic.
  • Umi flames now flash white before exploding.
  • General improvements to stability and performance.
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