Reduce health of bosses in single player

[McFrugal]

Someone said the first boss has 500 hp and I had to look it up to confirm and yeah.  In a game where the strongest melee weapons do 5 to 5.25 damage, the first boss has 500 hp.  That is 90-100 hits!!!  Absolute madness.

Edited February 19, 2025 by McFrugal

[Thorfinn]

And, yet, he can be taken by nothing more than stone spears, improvised armor and a couple stacks of alcohol bandages. Next time, I'm gonna forego the armor. It dies on the fist hit anyway.

[McFrugal]

Yeah, sure, if you know exactly how to reliably avoid all of its attacks, since some of them do 8 damage.  Would you believe that most players can't do that?  And certainly not on their first or second attempt.  And that's ignoring the adds that spawn during the fight, which are a lot harder to avoid.  ...wait, how do you even have multiple stacks of alcohol bandages?  They dry up very quickly, so you have to bring alcohol and soak them right before you use them.  Why would you have alcohol bandages along with improvised armor?  What you're saying doesn't sound like a reasonable situation at all.

Regardless, difficulty should not be designed around the best players.

Edited February 20, 2025 by McFrugal

[Thorfinn]

Despite my glib response, I do agree. I've seen people in MP games charge in wearing steel plate and die, largely because there's no way to heal. It took several tries to learn his patterns. If they change it up, I'll die several more times learning them.

I'm in the process of writing up a mini-guide that condenses the whole process of making a tweak mod so simple that anyone who has a passable understanding of English can adjust things like this. The modding section on the Wiki is good, but there's a reason that they have tech writers do the documentation. Engineers have a habit of thinking that things that are obvious to them are also obvious to the novice. It also is way too generalized, when many or even most suggestions need nothing more that a barebones wikiHow. Get a little confidence in your abilities and the Modding Wiki will be child's play.

[McFrugal]

Okay, let me give you my experience of fighting the stupid thing.  I was a Hunter, and had a Forlorn Hope Rapier, iron chainmail helm, bronze lamellar body, and iron chainmail legs.  I had a nearly-full stack of horsetail poultices.  I didn't know what I was going to be fighting or how to fight it.  I went in, and

Spoiler

got it down to like 70% health before dying, discovering that it was completely immune to arrows.  I was unable to reliably manipulate its AI into only using the melee attack and couldn't use a shield because I needed a lantern in my offhand for light, which meant that the boulder throw always hit me.  I also couldn't figure out how to avoid getting hit by ceiling rubble; I'm guessing it always spawns a rock above your head rather than truly randomly distributing the falling rocks throughout the room.  I still do not know how to avoid getting flung around the room, that part of the fight isn't even in the wiki.  It's not the standard melee attack that does it, it's a kind of slam attack, maybe the same slam attack that drops rocks from the ceiling.

On my second attempt with two stacks of healing items, I got it down to half health.  On my third attempt I gave up and used creative mode to kill it.  I assumed that something was not working right with the fight and asked around but got nothing but people bragging about how they killed it easily with throwing spears.  That led me to believe that it had a huge amount of flat damage reduction so that arrows were reduced to 0, the rapier reduced to like 1 damage, and spears having like 7 base damage were able to deal 3-4 and thus kill it in a reasonable time frame.  Apparently that's not true and people were mainly killing it when spears could hit more than once, which I expect happened all the time against the boss since its hitbox is so big.  Now that spears can't do that, the boss takes twice as long to kill using the throwing spear technique.

Note that I had only ONE stack of healing items on my first attempt.  I had never used that much healing in any fight before, not even in the lead up to the boss so I expected that I wouldn't need more than a stack.

[Thorfinn]

I sympathize. I died a couple dozen times before my first win, that was bronze spears. I died a dozen more times trying out variations on the theme. And I play permadeath, so was trying to figure out how to take him with stuff that I had before the first flax came in. I even went back to Standard playstyle (still with permadeath, though) to get the extra HP and nerfed damage from foes. But like everything else in the game, he telegraphs his next attack, both visually and audibly. You get, I don't know, maybe a second or so of notice?

I can definitely see how that kind of experience might dampen spirits.

What you are asking for is a trivial change. Something you could code and bundle into a mod in under 5 minutes. Make your own balance pack. Slow the shivers and nerf the bowtorn as you see fit, as well, in a couple more minutes. But it should be a mod, not base code, in the interests of those of us who want the dev's vision of the game instead of nerfed monsters.

Edited February 20, 2025 by Thorfinn

[McFrugal]

If the dev's vision of the game is like this then I'm just not gonna fucking play it.

[Thorfinn]

Why not? They gave you multiple setup options to make the game easier (and harder). You can set him to 1/4 damage, so instead of a bunch of 8 damage, you are only getting 2, before armor reductions. If that's not enough, they made it easy (I'd argue trivial, though maybe a little more obscure than it might be) to nerf him further. Alternatively you could turn your rapier into a 50 HP per stab Death Needle. In essence, you can make it your vision instead of theirs. And easier to do than any other game I've ever seen.

What's not to like? 

[EDIT]

Incidentally, the only thing I'm seeing that might possibly be damage reduction related is "isMechanical". But locusts also have that, and it seems to me they are 2-shots with spears. Is that about what you are experiencing?

Edited February 20, 2025 by Thorfinn

[LadyWYT]

On 2/19/2025 at 3:45 PM, McFrugal said:

Someone said the first boss has 500 hp and I had to look it up to confirm and yeah.  In a game where the strongest melee weapons do 5 to 5.25 damage, the first boss has 500 hp.  That is 90-100 hits!!!  Absolute madness.

Depends on which class you play. Blackguard is at the strongest advantage for the first boss fight, since that class has a bonus to melee damage and a health boost. Hunter is probably one of the weakest, since ranged weapons aren't as useful there and Hunter having the penalty to melee. The script flips entirely on the next boss battle, as Hunter becomes the strongest class with Blackguard perhaps being the weakest.

In my opinion, the boss fights on default settings have felt fine. They're challenging, yes, but they haven't really felt unfair, and I say that having had my rear paddled by them a time or two. That being said, it probably wouldn't hurt to add a specific damage/health slider for the bosses, so that players who would rather just play the story(with some challenge posed by the regular monsters) without difficult bosses, can.

Or, possibly, add a class that gets a bonus to damage vs. boss monsters instead. It'd be a very niche trait, but one useful for speedrunning/making those fights a little easier.

[McFrugal]

On 2/20/2025 at 12:04 PM, Thorfinn said:

Why not? They gave you multiple setup options to make the game easier (and harder). You can set him to 1/4 damage, so instead of a bunch of 8 damage, you are only getting 2, before armor reductions. If that's not enough, they made it easy (I'd argue trivial, though maybe a little more obscure than it might be) to nerf him further. Alternatively you could turn your rapier into a 50 HP per stab Death Needle. In essence, you can make it your vision instead of theirs. And easier to do than any other game I've ever seen.

What's not to like? 

[EDIT]

Incidentally, the only thing I'm seeing that might possibly be damage reduction related is "isMechanical". But locusts also have that, and it seems to me they are 2-shots with spears. Is that about what you are experiencing?

The main problem with the boss is that it's a huge damage sponge.  In multiplayer this isn't as much of an issue because you can have multiple players attacking it at once.  In single player, there's no way to reduce its HP so it's at best a slog and at worst a brick wall if you didn't bring enough healing items.  No, mods are not the solution.  Think about it for a second, would you?  Yeah, I could mod the game, but I would only know I needed to do that AFTER having bashed my head against the boss until I was too frustrated to engage with it fairly.  And then I'd have to learn how to mod the game, because there is no existing mod that can reduce monster hp.

Let me restate it if that wasn't clear: the boss is not fun to fight alone.  The game should be fun without mods, therefore the base game should be changed so that fighting it solo is more viable.  Mods are for adjusting the game a bit in one direction or the other, not fixing core gameplay problems.

Edited February 22, 2025 by McFrugal

[Thorfinn]

1 hour ago, McFrugal said:

In multiplayer this isn't as much of an issue because you can have multiple players attacking it at once.

Except multiplayer adjusts the number of HP to account for the number of players.

 

1 hour ago, McFrugal said:

Let me restate it if that wasn't clear: the boss is not fun to fight alone. 

I thought it was fine. Challenging but fun. And I'm not a fan of boss battles, generally.

Don't take this the wrong way, but have you played many games with bosses? In standard difficulty Terraria, probably the toughest creature you will encounter before you take on the first boss is the Demon Eye, at 60 HP. There are a few others about the same. King Slime has 2000. Eye of Cthulhu, the first boss before they added King Slime has 2800. Most likely, your best weapon is one of the early bows with fire arrows, doing about 13 damage, plus, on average, a little over 2 points of fire damage.

Doom was much worse.

Compare that to VS. By the time you are going to the RA, you have likely encountered at least two nightmare creatures at a time. 45 HP a pop, and do 20 points of tier 4 damage. Plus all the rest of the storm spawns. Or mining spawns, if you sleep through storms. And the boss does only 12, tier 3 I believe, and only 500 HP? I was pleasantly surprised he had so few.

[McFrugal]

21 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

Except multiplayer adjusts the number of HP to account for the number of players.

Disgusting.  Is that stated anywhere ingame?  How does that work exactly?  Does it increase enemy HP globally or only when multiple players are near enemies?  Is it all enemies or just bosses?  There are so many edge cases with that approach and so many ways it could make everything worse.  Horrible design decision, probably an attempt at copying how Dark Souls does co-op.

21 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

I thought it was fine. Challenging but fun. And I'm not a fan of boss battles, generally.

Don't take this the wrong way, but have you played many games with bosses? In standard difficulty Terraria, probably the toughest creature you will encounter before you take on the first boss is the Demon Eye, at 60 HP. There are a few others about the same. King Slime has 2000. Eye of Cthulhu, the first boss before they added King Slime has 2800. Most likely, your best weapon is one of the early bows with fire arrows, doing about 13 damage, plus, on average, a little over 2 points of fire damage.

Doom was much worse.

Compare that to VS. By the time you are going to the RA, you have likely encountered at least two nightmare creatures at a time. 45 HP a pop, and do 20 points of tier 4 damage. Plus all the rest of the storm spawns. Or mining spawns, if you sleep through storms. And the boss does only 12, tier 3 I believe, and only 500 HP? I was pleasantly surprised he had so few.

Yeah I beat the first two Dark Souls games and most of Elden Ring.  I know how to fight bosses.  The problem is, Vintage Story is not a game that is structured properly for boss fights, or even combat in general.  You do not have a moveset at all for evasion OR attacking.  Healing gets worse the more armored you are.  Holding a light prevents holding a shield.  You are generally restricted to melee in extended fights yet it's first person so your situational awareness is poor.  There are no checkpoints and no boss signposting, yet dying is extremely punishing unless you change the default settings.  In general, the player character sucks at fighting.  There should not be challenging combat in a game where your character is not good at fighting.

You have lots of movement and even terrain manipulation options in Terraria-- you are allowed to build boss arenas, and there's a lot of other mechanics for prepping for bosses such as potions and beneficial furniture.  You can also heal at full effectiveness without taking off your armor, constantly (attempt to) damage the boss while dodging it, mine stronger metals to make the boss easier if you can't beat it when it first spawns, vastly increase your max health, etc etc.  There's options.

In Vintage Story, however, 5 damage a hit is the most you can ever hope for, and you're attacking like once a second.  You're also probably not going to have more than 26 max hp, the boss will do around 1.6-2.5 damage to you with its attacks if you have iron chainmail (probably the best possible option at that point), and half its attacks are very hard to dodge.  I think the boulder throw is actually *impossible* to dodge, and using a shield requires fighting without a light.. but the boulder throw comes out too fast so you're not going to be able to react to it to block it anyway.  Yeah, sure, I've fought Nightmare Drifters, and they're damage sponges too compared to how common they are in deep caves, BUT they're still better to fight because you don't have to dodge a lot while fighting them so your damage per second is pretty consistent and even hitting them helps avoid damage since you knock them back.  Against the dungeon boss, I wasn't attacking for like 75% of the fight because I was either trying to dodge its attacks, waiting to fall back down after it flung me up to the ceiling, or trying to hide behind something to heal.  Meanwhile, the boss attacks CONSTANTLY.  Since I wasn't able to attack all the time, then it's more like it had 2000 HP and it's thus comparable to fighting Eye of Cthulhu while doing like 5 damage a shot with a slow weapon, and also where it had some un-dodgeable ranged attack if you got too far away from it.  If you think THAT's fun then you must be a masochist.

Lastly, what are you trying to accomplish here?  I said I didn't have fun with the boss, you're not gonna convince me I actually had fun.  Certainly not by bringing up games that are designed around combat.  Vintage Story is absolutely not designed around combat.  Every combat-related mechanic in the game is either copying minecraft or doesn't work in a fun way.  Example: the armor system.  You'd think that tier-based damage reduction would be something important to pay attention to but it turns out that gambeson still reduces nightmare drifter damage by 63.11%, and steel platemail reduces nightmare drifter damage by 86.86%.  Thus, damage reduction was reduced by about -10% in each case and platemail doesn't give nearly as much protection as you'd expect.

[LadyWYT]

22 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

Except multiplayer adjusts the number of HP to account for the number of players.

It's supposed to, I think, however I'm not sure by how much it adjusts, or if the adjustment is working as intended. On a recent playthrough with a friend, the boss fights went a lot faster than they typically do in singleplayer, so I'm not sure that the health boost is that noticeable. HOWEVER, we were also playing with mods, and had access to skills and weapons that allowed us to do more damage per hit(though nothing insane--it still took two hits for my Blackguard to kill a surface drifter). Iron tier gear for chapters one and two. So the mods may have been a contributing factor as well.

I'd also wager that the boss fights may be a little easier with two people purely because there is one person to keep the boss occupied, leaving the other free to deal out damage. That's essentially what happened when we faced off with the eidolon; my Blackguard soaked up most of the punishment, leaving the hunter free to chip away at the thing from relative safety. The second chapter worked much the same way, although in that case I was purely bait and the hunter did pretty much all of the damage.

21 minutes ago, McFrugal said:

You'd think that tier-based damage reduction would be something important to pay attention to but it turns out that gambeson still reduces nightmare drifter damage by 63.11%, and steel platemail reduces nightmare drifter damage by 86.86%.  Thus, damage reduction was reduced by about -10% in each case and platemail doesn't give nearly as much protection as you'd expect.

Steel plate makes you nearly invincible, not totally. It will soak up most incoming damage, even without using a shield, so unless you're getting swarmed by tier 4 enemies you should be able to stay in the fight for a long time, if necessary. However, the drawback is that you'll not only be slower and require more calories to function, but you'll also be unable to heal. Such is the price for that kind of protection, however, there are also few scenarios where that level of protection is really warranted. Temporal storms and diving into the deepest caves are probably the chief scenarios that you'd want steel plate.

For surface work, gambeson is perfectly fine, and for most work underground iron is just fine as well. Iron is also quite serviceable for both of the story chapters so far, though when it comes to chapter two I'd say it's the armor style that matters most, and perhaps not as much what it's made out of.

27 minutes ago, McFrugal said:

How does that work exactly?  Does it increase enemy HP globally or only when multiple players are near enemies?

If it works(I'm not entirely convinced that it does), it should only apply to bosses specifically, not mini-bosses or other standard enemies. I would assume it simply makes a note of how many players are in the specified boss area when the fight begins, and applies an appropriate HP boost. As for why you might want to make that a feature of a boss fight--it's to make sure the boss doesn't die too fast when you have multiple players.

On 2/22/2025 at 5:13 PM, McFrugal said:

The main problem with the boss is that it's a huge damage sponge. 

I mean...both bosses so far have been giant metal constructs, which I would expect to be pretty durable. The timing of the fights also feels like it's in a good spot, in my opinion, at least for singleplayer. For multiplayer it might need a bit of tuning.

I'd also note that it's technically not out of the question that we'll see a boss in the future that's able to be defeated much more quickly, provided one has the correct equipment and attacks at just the right times. However...it's also not something I expect to see either. Boss fights should take a few minutes, on average, because bosses are entities that are much stronger than the average enemy. If the fight is able to be ended quickly, then the boss either doesn't feel like a credible threat, or it's a glass cannon fight in which the boss WILL one-shot you if it hits you. Which is its own brand of unenjoyable.

40 minutes ago, McFrugal said:

The problem is, Vintage Story is not a game that is structured properly for boss fights, or even combat in general.  You do not have a moveset at all for evasion OR attacking.  Healing gets worse the more armored you are.  Holding a light prevents holding a shield.  You are generally restricted to melee in extended fights yet it's first person so your situational awareness is poor.  There are no checkpoints and no boss signposting, yet dying is extremely punishing unless you change the default settings.  In general, the player character sucks at fighting.  There should not be challenging combat in a game where your character is not good at fighting.

It is actually possible to forgo heavier armor and still win against enemies, without taking a lot of damage. If you're familiar enough with attack patterns, aren't too outnumbered, and time things correctly, you can go toe-to-toe with a brown bear with nothing but a falx, a shield, and a gambeson chestpiece. Is it the best of ideas? Not really, but you can do it relatively easily with enough practice.

The healing penalty when wearing armor is one of the tradeoffs for opting for more protection. The more armor you have, the less damage you take and the longer you can remain in the fight. However, you also can't keep fighting indefinitely--you'll eventually need to seek respite, or else be bludgeoned to death.

Regarding first-person view and situational awareness...that really shouldn't affect your situational awareness that much. Now, it would be nice if entities had proper footsteps, so you could hear them coming a lot easier, sure. However, it's a good idea anyway to keep an eye on your surroundings and take a look around every so often to make sure nothing sneaks up on you. In the case of working underground, you're not able to see very much, so it's good to either bring a bunch of torches for temporary lighting, block off passages, or otherwise keep an ear out for hostile noises.

Regarding checkpoints--temporal gears can be used to reset your spawnpoint, and if you intend to travel far from home and expect trouble, it's a good idea to bring a couple with you. There's also a fair amount of clues to indicate that you're approaching a boss battle, however, a lot of those clues also rely on the player examining their surroundings carefully and paying attention to things like notes and NPC dialogue.

Whether or not the player character is good at fighting or not will depend on equipment, class choice, fight context, and of course player skill. Stone age weapons and armor are better than nothing, but you'll need quality equipment if you expect to get anything done. More experienced players will have an easier time in combat than less experienced ones. As for class choice, some classes are much better at fighting than others, however, it also depends on the nature of the fight. A Blackguard will be the champion in any kind of melee, but will struggle at range. A Hunter excels at range but will really struggle when it comes to melee. Clockmakers are perhaps even worse when it comes to melee, as they both suffer a penalty to health in addition to melee damage.

1 hour ago, McFrugal said:

Lastly, what are you trying to accomplish here?  I said I didn't have fun with the boss, you're not gonna convince me I actually had fun.

Wasn't aimed at me, but I'll make it clear anyway: I'm absolutely not claiming that you had fun with the boss fights/combat of Vintage Story. It's very clear you did not. Simply making some counterpoints to other things posted in the thread.

[Teh Pizza Lady]

1 hour ago, McFrugal said:

In Vintage Story, however, 5 damage a hit is the most you can ever hope for, and you're attacking like once a second.

So it's an easy 2-minute fight. maybe 4-5 minutes if you don't know what you're doing. I sure he does a fair bit of damage to you, but it's easy enough to heal up, especially with alcohol bandages (I recommend regrouping them into stacks of 4 so you can shiftclick to soak all at once without soaking *all* your bandages at once). Anyway by your own measurements it should be a pretty quick fight.

I'm not sure what your complaint is now...

[Teh Pizza Lady]

Also I don't buy that you were doing zero damage to it with arrows. Unless maybe you were using a crude bow and makeshift arrows.  I play hunter in VS and I took a recurve bow and bronze arrows in there and was able to deal plenty of damage to it.

[Thorfinn]

2 hours ago, McFrugal said:

Is that stated anywhere ingame?

I don't know. I haven't verified it. That's just what the OG said after Chap 1 dropped. Wouldn't surprise me. I've seen 2 of the 4 characters drop in the battle, though, to be fair, they weren't all that good. The other guy and I finished him off maybe 30 seconds after the second one died.

BTW, for lighting, there's no reason you can't just spam-throw torches. Lot easier than trying to place them, and vastly easier to retrieve them at end of battle.

Look, I agree that the combat system is  lot like Avalon Hill stuff, but where you are not facing a human opponent. You are facing a script. I don't think there's any randomness involved. If you do X, he responds with y. Learn the patterns and you are golden.

 

3 hours ago, McFrugal said:

but the boulder throw comes out too fast so you're not going to be able to react to it to block it anyway.

So learn what his windup looks like. I don't know that you have a full second to lollygag, but you have a good half second of time t react.

 

3 hours ago, McFrugal said:

Lastly, what are you trying to accomplish here?

I'm not trying to convince you of anything. After one glib response, I then said you are more than capable of changing it. Go to .\assets\survival\entities\land and use a text editor to open up whatever his name is. eidolon-immobilized.json, if memory serves. Search the file for the key, "health". Replace 500 with whatever you like. Save. Happy days are here again.

[Wolf builds]

I set my respawnpoint in front of the enterence. Wasted 5 respawns trying to find a strategy to avoid the falling rocks.
12 respawns with half health and steelplate just hacking away at his face and it's done. No good boss design in my opinion.

[Zane Mordien]

37 minutes ago, Wolf builds said:

I set my respawnpoint in front of the enterence. Wasted 5 respawns trying to find a strategy to avoid the falling rocks.
12 respawns with half health and steelplate just hacking away at his face and it's done. No good boss design in my opinion.

Steel or any player made plate is a deathtrap in my opinion, which excludes the blackguard and forlorn armor sets since they let you heal. With player made plate armor you can't heal and he does enough damage as you noted to kill you over and over.

Spoiler

I personally just chuck spears at him while standing next to a column and duck behind it from time to time to heal up. I'm playing a blackguard even, but up close and personal he does a lot of damage. 

Don't mistake this for judgement, because the 2nd boss fight I was pulling my hair out and dying over and over. 

 

On 2/22/2025 at 8:25 PM, Thorfinn said:

Except multiplayer adjusts the number of HP to account for the number of players.

I cheated and turned this off for the second boss fight after beating my head on the wall for a long time and I feel like it had few HPs after that. I couldn't dent the stupid things HPs with this turned on. Is it me or does VS still not let multiple people hurt the same mob at one time still? I know that used to be a thing but wasn't sure if it was still a restriction.

 

11 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

I'd also wager that the boss fights may be a little easier with two people purely because there is one person to keep the boss occupied, leaving the other free to deal out damage. That's essentially what happened when we faced off with the eidolon; my Blackguard soaked up most of the punishment, leaving the hunter free to chip away at the thing from relative safety. The second chapter worked much the same way, although in that case I was purely bait and the hunter did pretty much all of the damage.

 

I've really got to find some videos on how other people fought that thing.

Spoiler

It just flies around 80% of the time which just makes for a painfully slow fight at least for me, but I was a blackguard trying to kill it with range attacks. My kid was playing as a clockmaker and I kept begging him to switch classes, but he was determined to see it through.

 

[LadyWYT]

9 hours ago, Zane Mordien said:

Is it me or does VS still not let multiple people hurt the same mob at one time still? I know that used to be a thing but wasn't sure if it was still a restriction.

Multiple people should be able to hurt the same target, but I think it heavily depends on the timing of the attacks. There's a very short window of time after hitting a target, where it's "immune" to being hit again. So if you have multiple players after one target, you'll want to stagger your attacks a bit to make sure that multiple attacks aren't landing at the exact same time. Definitely a bit wonky, but I'm not sure how one would go about fixing it.

9 hours ago, Zane Mordien said:

Steel or any player made plate is a deathtrap in my opinion, which excludes the blackguard and forlorn armor sets since they let you heal. With player made plate armor you can't heal and he does enough damage as you noted to kill you over and over.

It kinda depends. I'd say plate armor is a stronger choice if you have a friend or two to bring with you, and a weaker choice if you're by yourself. Typically I go for brigandine, myself, as it's easy to make and provides decent protection. Plate armor generally comes much later, and I generally use it to deal with late-game temporal storms.

[McFrugal]

21 hours ago, traugdor said:

Also I don't buy that you were doing zero damage to it with arrows. Unless maybe you were using a crude bow and makeshift arrows.  I play hunter in VS and I took a recurve bow and bronze arrows in there and was able to deal plenty of damage to it.

I was using a recurve bow with tin bronze arrows, and they bounced off with no hit sound.

 

19 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

So learn what his windup looks like. I don't know that you have a full second to lollygag, but you have a good half second of time t react.

 

Okay so you never tried to block on reaction to anything?  It doesn't work, because the shield raising animation is too slow.

Edited February 24, 2025 by McFrugal

[McFrugal]

21 hours ago, traugdor said:

So it's an easy 2-minute fight. maybe 4-5 minutes if you don't know what you're doing. I sure he does a fair bit of damage to you, but it's easy enough to heal up, especially with alcohol bandages (I recommend regrouping them into stacks of 4 so you can shiftclick to soak all at once without soaking *all* your bandages at once). Anyway by your own measurements it should be a pretty quick fight.

I'm not sure what your complaint is now...

You didn't read my post did you?  I was too busy for the vast majority of the fight to attack it constantly, so yeah it would've taken 5 minutes or more to beat if I hadn't run out of healing items.  Why would you think that was a good length for a fight that consists of attacking a stationary target and either manipulating its AI or trying futilely to dodge rocks or massive knockback?  And give me a break with that alcohol bandages nonsense.  Nobody at that stage of the game is going to have them to begin with-- I sure didn't!-- and I don't know how you think you're gonna do all the necessary inventory management while dodging the boss.

I feel like most of the reasonable players have stopped playing the game at this point, that's why I keep running into ridiculous arguments like this.  Well, that and there are probably a lot of players that had already been playing for a long time before fighting the boss and thus were already pros at the game, not to mention an advanced game state where they had so much of the strongest healing option to be able to bring two whole stacks to the fight.  Plus they could have had forewarning because of other players talking about it in discord.  Me?  None of that.  It's the FIRST BOSS, remember?  Trying to fight it without a lot of preparation and foreknowledge results in a long fight where you're likely to die, which means then you drop a full inventory of loot in the boss chamber and you have to scramble to get down there before it all despawns...  Like I said, the game is not structured around boss fights.

It is the first boss.  It should not be hard for a new player.  Also, yeah, it's made of metal.  It's ALSO extremely old, and had been heavily damaged long before.  I'm not chipping down a freshly minted robot here.  It would, in fact, make sense for the fight to be short, or for the boss to have slow or weak attacks.

Edited February 24, 2025 by McFrugal

[LadyWYT]

I just want to note that one doesn't need alcohol-soaked bandages for the first boss. The basic horsetail poultices will do just fine, and if you pack the raw materials and only craft the poultices as you need them(after taking damage, prior to entering the boss area) you use your inventory slots more efficiently.

Overall, I would say the honey-linen bandages are the best choice for first aid when adventuring. Like the alcohol bandages, they heal 7 hp per bandage, but don't dry out, meaning that you can use them at-will instead of needing to stop and prepare them. The drawback is that they're a bit more of a resource investment.

[Teh Pizza Lady]

1 hour ago, McFrugal said:

I was too busy for the vast majority of the fight to attack it constantly

busy... doing......    what? 

1 hour ago, McFrugal said:

And give me a break with that alcohol bandages nonsense.  Nobody at that stage of the game is going to have them to begin with

Give me a break with your nasty attitude. Nobody on these forums appreciates it. As for having the bandages? I did. It was all of ... maybe 30 minutes to make all the alcohol I needed to make them I even put it in a handy little jug that I crafted myself out of clay and fired in a pit kiln.

1 hour ago, McFrugal said:

and I don't know how you think you're gonna do all the necessary inventory management while dodging the boss.

I think it's possible because... *again* ...I did it. I even had time to take off my armor so the bandages would be fully effective, soak them in alcohol, apply them, and put the armor back on before the Eidolon attacked again.

1 hour ago, McFrugal said:

I feel like most of the reasonable players have stopped playing the game at this point, that's why I keep running into ridiculous arguments like this.  Well, that and there are probably a lot of players that had already been playing for a long time before fighting the boss and thus were already pros at the game, not to mention an advanced game state where they had so much of the strongest healing option to be able to bring two whole stacks to the fight.  Plus they could have had forewarning because of other players talking about it in discord.  Me?  None of that.  It's the FIRST BOSS, remember?

Oh, sure, clearly everyone in this thread is wrong, except you. And all of us are just bitter veterans gatekeeping this wonderful game from new players. Just little ol' you against all of us big bads with our stacks of linen bandages from our flax gardens and jugs of alcohol that we got after spending an hour crafting a still and using it to make alcohol. I'm not even in the VS discord. I play Hunter. Somehow I won the fight and you didn't. It couldn't have been your lack of preparation despite everything in the game screaming at you that the archives were dangerous. Nope it was just my pro skill and insane gameplay like I wasn't panicking the whole time I fought it for the first time. Guess what? I died. I had to get a friend to come bail me out. You know what my reaction was? "Guess I need to quit being a scrub and git gud."

So like calm down, chill out, grab a bowl or two (or more) and just relax. Listen to what the big meany veterans are saying here and you might learn something. And who knows you might even get better at the game.

Edited February 25, 2025 by traugdor

[Thorfinn]

1 hour ago, McFrugal said:

Okay so you never tried to block on reaction to anything?

Honestly, no. I've never used a shield long enough to do more than realize I couldn't see around it, so tossed it.

 

1 hour ago, McFrugal said:

Nobody at that stage of the game is going to have them to begin with

You can get double-distilled spirits surprisingly quickly. The longest time is the initial fermenting stage, and if you plan ahead, that's only 7 days from whenever you have an anvil. The only tricky part is the lead, so keep your eyes peeled. Sometimes there are enough nuggets on the surface. You really only need about 20 nuggets.

 

1 hour ago, McFrugal said:

Like I said, the game is not structured around boss fights.

I agree there. They had to abuse the claims system to make it possible, but had they not done so, it would have been relatively easy to cheese him.

 

1 hour ago, McFrugal said:

It is the first boss.  It should not be hard for a new player.

There I disagree. If you are going to bother with having bosses and all, it should be a challenge.

[Teh Pizza Lady]

Like what, did you just stand there and let the Eidolon punch you senseless in makeshift armor with a crude bow and arrows, or did you actually attempt to dodge while wearing real armor and using at least a Longbow with at least bronze arrows?