Reduce health of bosses in single player

[Teh Pizza Lady]

Just now, Thorfinn said:

I've never used a shield long enough to do more than realize I couldn't see around it, so tossed it.

that actually is my main gripe about the shield...

[Zane Mordien]

4 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

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.

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.

Shouldn't be hard to fix. MMOGs you can attack the same creature in raids. I was feeling that pain when I was fighting the 2nd boss. There is such limited time to attack it that we end up attacking at the same time and it just took forever. I'm sure we were doing something wrong but that's just how we were doing the fight.

 

2 hours ago, traugdor said:

busy... doing......    what? 

 

The guy is frustrated. There is no need to antagonize them. Sometimes you just try the wrong strategy and you get stuck in a rut. 

 

2 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

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.

I agree. I've tried the alcohol bandages one time and yeah, never again. Waste of time. You're already using the same amount of linen as the honey sulfur poultice. And the linen is the only thing of value in that recipe. You can buy 4 liters of honey from the AG trader for 1-2 gears and that makes 64 poultices if you are unlucky with bees. That just leaves sulfur which you can find or buy from the commodities trader for not quite as cheap. 

Edited February 25, 2025 by Zane Mordien

[McFrugal]

5 hours ago, traugdor said:

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.

And there we have it.  You were playing on multiplayer where you could get help.  Would you care to look at the title of the thread?

  

5 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

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

It can be a "challenge" without being so hard you're going to just die unless you manage to figure out the exact way to manipulate the AI on your first attempt.  Also, you're likely to run out of all your healing supplies while learning the boss; what are you supposed to do then?  Travel the 3000+ blocks back to base to get more?  It's bad enough that you'd have to take multiple trips if you want to keep the massive amount of lore books at the end, unless you've got a sailboat at that point with chests on it.  Oh, and come to think of it, since you're never really at risk of dying so long as you have healing items, isn't any measure of difficulty regarding the fight just how many healing items it takes to kill it?  It's ultimately a time and resource sink more than a test of skill, assuming you brought enough healing items.  I did not, because I didn't know what I had to fight, and assumed it would be of similar difficulty to other difficult enemies like bells.

Vintage Story is not an action game first and foremost.  You can, in fact, avoid having to fight anything more dangerous than a Deep Drifter and still get to Steel.  Plus, nothing in the dungeon is particularly dangerous until the boss.  The spike in difficulty is out of place even if it was an action game, and it should be adjusted to be in line with the rest of the game.

Edited February 25, 2025 by McFrugal

[McFrugal]

Oh, I just thought of the perfect example.  The Wither in Minecraft.  It was at some point the first "boss" you could fight, and yes, if you approached the fight wrong it could be difficult.  However, if you spawn it in a tunnel you dug in stone or netherrack, it becomes a relatively safe and quick fight because you don't have to worry about the boss flying around so much.  It has 450 hp on Normal and a diamond sword does 7 damage, plus you can enchant the sword with Smite III or more to deal like 15 damage a hit.  So that's 30 hits if you're well prepared for the fight, and I think your swing timer is faster in MInecraft than the attack rate is in VS.

  

On 2/23/2025 at 6:48 PM, LadyWYT said:

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.

I wanted to address this too.  First person view has poor situational awareness because you can only see what's in front of you.  Action games are predominantly third person or top down because that allows you to see what's near you on all sides.  In first person you also can't see your own character model, so you can't intuit your own hitbox, which means you also can't accurately intuit how close you are to the enemy's attack hurtboxes.  I'm guessing the way to reliably manipulate the boss's AI is to stay very close to it while moving from side to side, but I was reluctant to do that because it looked like it had a very large swing on its melee attack.  Backing away from the attack resulted in the boss quite often switching to the boulder or the slam that flings you into the ceiling even if you dodge it and usually makes you take fall damage.

The only clues I saw regarding the boss fight were: 1, seeing it through a barred off passage, and 2, reading a note where they described an eidolon having bloodstains on it.  However, 1 isn't much of a clue because it looks like it's already dead and 2 is useless because there's no indication of what an eidolon even IS.  The treasure hunter says they saw a "figure" in the darkness, and the big thing in the center of the complex looked like a figure to me so that's what I thought they were talking about.  Also the treasure hunter could not have possibly gotten as far as the boss, since it's blocked off.  And yeah taking a temporal gear would've let me respawn closer to it, sure would've made it faster to get back there instead of having to fly or teleport over every time.  I was stuck on my spawn point being at my base though.  Definitely going to do that on the second lore location, if I ever pick the game back up again.  Since it looks like the devs aren't going to make combat easier again after making it so much harder with the extra mobs, I probably won't.  I'm very very disappointed.

 

I'm going to reiterate that this is an experience that I had as a relatively new player.  It is not a good experience, and adjusting the fight to be easier would mean that others will not have the same experience.

Edited February 25, 2025 by McFrugal

[Thorfinn]

1 hour ago, McFrugal said:

Oh, and come to think of it, since you're never really at risk of dying so long as you have healing items, isn't any measure of difficulty regarding the fight just how many healing items it takes to kill it?

Oh, are you pausing the game? Then just take a crapton of horsetail poultices. No need to go for the faster healing. Horsetail is do-able if you don't pause, you have to do a lot better job of dodging. I end up cutting it a little close sometimes, so prefer some better healing. Alcohol heals 21 in the same time horsetail heals 6.

 

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

At a guess, you were probably missing. His hit box is smaller than his image.

 

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[Stuff about games I have never played.]

Nuff said.

 

1 hour ago, McFrugal said:

Action games are predominantly third person or top down because that allows you to see what's near you on all sides.

All except the massive market for FPS, the aptly named First Person Shooter genre.

 

1 hour ago, McFrugal said:

I'm going to reiterate that this is an experience that I had as a relatively new player.  It is not a good experience, and adjusting the fight to be easier would mean that others will not have the same experience.

You have the option to choose easier settings. I'm aware that you can get to steel without caving, though caving gives you invaluable combat experience.

You are not the only one who found him a tough nut to crack. But eventually most figure out how to do it. The frustration, the lying awake in bed thinking about what you could do differently, is part and parcel of a boss battle. It's what gives you the exhilarating feeling of accomplishment the first time you win.

[Zane Mordien]

9 hours ago, McFrugal said:

And there we have it.  You were playing on multiplayer where you could get help.  Would you care to look at the title of the thread?

  

It can be a "challenge" without being so hard you're going to just die unless you manage to figure out the exact way to manipulate the AI on your first attempt. 

I've done it multi-player and alone. I didn't notice a difference myself.  My 9 yr old just made it harder to be honest. He just consumed resources. Although the knockback has been ramped up a little crazy IMO which made the fight harder. I feel like 1.20 they were chasing after making it harder in general. 

 

I feel like you just got really unlucky using plate and not being able to heal yourself.  Converse to your experience I had a harder time with the bell workshop. I used more healing in the 1.20 version of the boss fight. 

 

Anyway good luck. You should make a new world and skip to the archive with a new set up and try it again. If you are into that type of thing. I'm going to try boss 2 one more time then that is my plan just to try some different tactics without spending 100 hrs to get there again. Cheating? Maybe, but after 2 times the normal way I just need to speed up the process before I pull the last of my hair out.

[Teh Pizza Lady]

11 hours ago, McFrugal said:

And there we have it.  You were playing on multiplayer where you could get help.  Would you care to look at the title of the thread?

Yes... I was fighting it with help and I still died. The health of the boss is fine where it is. If you don't like it, change it, but requiring EVERYONE ELSE to play the same way is nonsense. If I were to make the same caliber of requests you are, I would require VS to be a 2-player game so that it's impossible to beat without help. Everyone plays different. Everyone has different preferences. You can tweak the game to your liking just like you can with Minecraft. Also because you compared the game to Minecraft I feel it prudent to point out...

...that the hunter in Vintage story actually gets a debuff to melee damage so whacking the Eidolon with the Forlorn Hope rapier (i have no clue how you obtained it without getting at least *some* combat experience in the game and a full set of matching armor that didn't completely neuter your ranged damage) is actually an exercise in futility because you are doing -15% damage with every hit. so about 4.25 damage per hit with a weapon that better serves as a museum piece. With a TinBronze spear you're doing 7.5 damage per attack + the 20% from your hunter perks is an even 9 damage per hit. that's exactly 56 hits needed to take him down. Roughly 28 hits to bring him to half health and spawn the adds, and another 28 to finish him off.

*MY RECOMMENDATION* should you decide to try again is to make at least Black Bronze spears and make about 4 of them so you can get multiple hits in before having to recover them. Make an iron falx (steel if you're feeling spicy) for dealing with the adds because that forlorn hope blade has awful durability and can't be repaired. Prepare for a long fight. get 4 stacks of poultices if you need. Practice removing your armor and quickly bandaging yourself and then putting it back on, just understand that the armor is going to reduce the healing item's effectiveness. You could also install expanded foods mod and make Jello which not only heals but also restores Satiety. Focus on dodging the boss attacks. Stay moving. Throw your spears from behind the pillars so the boss can't pelt you with boulders. Watch videos of how other people tackled it. You can do it! or just cheat.... The story gets easier to manage from here. The 2nd boss is best suited for the hunter for reasons that will become very obvious once you get there. But don't give up... the game isn't even finished yet so you're missing out on a LOT of potential by quitting.

[LadyWYT]

16 hours ago, McFrugal said:

Plus, nothing in the dungeon is particularly dangerous until the boss.

The sawblades, locusts, higher tier drifters, and the bell can all easily mess a player up if they don't have particularly good reflexes or gear, especially if there's more than one or two after the player at the same time. Generally speaking though, the Resonance Archive isn't a place that the player is going to get swarmed. That's a different location.

16 hours ago, McFrugal said:

Vintage Story is not an action game first and foremost.

This is true, it's an uncompromising survival game with elements of eldritch horror.

16 hours ago, McFrugal said:

The spike in difficulty is out of place even if it was an action game, and it should be adjusted to be in line with the rest of the game.

In my opinion, the difficulty matches the rest of the game. Bears, wolves, and some large herbivores will easily rip a new player to shreds, as will the monsters. It's easy to die, even for veteran players. The Resonance Archive isn't much different in what it expects from the player. In fact I'd argue it's actually the easiest part of the story so far.

15 hours ago, McFrugal said:

Oh, I just thought of the perfect example.  The Wither in Minecraft.  It was at some point the first "boss" you could fight, and yes, if you approached the fight wrong it could be difficult.  However, if you spawn it in a tunnel you dug in stone or netherrack, it becomes a relatively safe and quick fight because you don't have to worry about the boss flying around so much.  It has 450 hp on Normal and a diamond sword does 7 damage, plus you can enchant the sword with Smite III or more to deal like 15 damage a hit.  So that's 30 hits if you're well prepared for the fight, and I think your swing timer is faster in MInecraft than the attack rate is in VS.

I disagree--the Wither is actually a pretty bad example of what a boss fight should be. As an entity, the design is fine--it has a cool appearance, and the overall mechanics work. For those who don't know, the Wither triggers an explosion near itself when you spawn it, dealing a lot of damage and destroying blocks. It then flies into the air and attacks the player at range until it's knocked to half health, in which case it grounds itself and you'll need to finish it off with melee as ranged attacks will no longer damage it. The Wither's attacks do quite a bit of damage, complete with extra damage over a few seconds. That's for Java edition; the Bedrock version is a lot harder, but I've never played Bedrock and don't care to: I always go by Java.

In any case, it's an easy fight if you have good enchanted armor, enchanted weapons, and some sort of healing items...which is also fine because it's more of a kids' game. However, the real problem with the fight is that the previously mentioned stuff...doesn't actually matter, because you can just abuse the game mechanics to the point that you can avoid the Wither's attacks entirely. Just shove it into a bedrock ceiling in the Nether via redstone sorcery and it'll suffocate itself, or do like the OP said and just spawn it in a tiny room deep underground so it can never really do much of anything. 

Other bosses and puzzles in Minecraft suffer from similar issues--there's no need to actually deal with the mechanics, since you can just place/break blocks at your leisure and otherwise abuse game mechanics to circumvent the intended way to do things. Is that bad? For Minecraft, not really...it's part of the charm, I would argue. But it's not a design that works for a game like Vintage Story, hence why all the story locations have protections in place to prevent players from tampering with most things.

15 hours ago, McFrugal said:

First person view has poor situational awareness because you can only see what's in front of you.

Which is why you keep an ear out for sounds that are suspicious, or otherwise out of place. Also why you should take a look around you every so often, to make sure that nothing is sneaking up on you.

15 hours ago, McFrugal said:

Action games are predominantly third person or top down because that allows you to see what's near you on all sides.

16 hours ago, McFrugal said:

Vintage Story is not an action game first and foremost.

Couldn't have said it better myself.

15 hours ago, McFrugal said:

In first person you also can't see your own character model, so you can't intuit your own hitbox, which means you also can't accurately intuit how close you are to the enemy's attack hurtboxes.

You actually can, if you go into the settings and switch on the immersive first person mode. It's still experimental.

I'll also point out that you can use F5 to cycle through a couple of third person views as well, though I'll also point out that most of what you'll be seeing at any given time...is still right in front of you. You'll still need to actually stop and look around to get the full scope of your surroundings.

15 hours ago, McFrugal said:

I'm guessing the way to reliably manipulate the boss's AI is to stay very close to it while moving from side to side, but I was reluctant to do that because it looked like it had a very large swing on its melee attack.  Backing away from the attack resulted in the boss quite often switching to the boulder or the slam that flings you into the ceiling even if you dodge it and usually makes you take fall damage.

Yes and no. My general strategy is to keep close enough to it that it'll focus more on melee swings, but far enough away to be just out of reach--darting in after it swings in order to deal my own damage. It also helps to keep more to the eidolon's sides, towards the back, as those aren't prime areas for boulder-throwing. Last but not least, I always try to make sure I stay on the move; a moving target is harder to hit, and when it slams the ground(you WILL go flying whenever it does this) it makes it easier to get back into position.

If I need to heal, I run circles around the boss while burning through a stack of poultices, or otherwise try to keep to its backside/behind a pillar while I heal. If armor is too much of a setback for healing, you can try just removing one piece of armor, so you get more healing while still having a fair amount of protection.

Last but not least, once the eidolon hits about 1/4 health, locusts will start spawning, so you'll need to focus on burning through the rest of the boss's health rather than dealing with them, as they respawn quickly. It's also one of the reasons that staying on the move is so important, since locusts have a hard time keeping up with a running target.

16 hours ago, McFrugal said:

The only clues I saw regarding the boss fight were: 1, seeing it through a barred off passage, and 2, reading a note where they described an eidolon having bloodstains on it.  However, 1 isn't much of a clue because it looks like it's already dead and 2 is useless because there's no indication of what an eidolon even IS.  The treasure hunter says they saw a "figure" in the darkness, and the big thing in the center of the complex looked like a figure to me so that's what I thought they were talking about.  Also the treasure hunter could not have possibly gotten as far as the boss, since it's blocked off.  And yeah taking a temporal gear would've let me respawn closer to it, sure would've made it faster to get back there instead of having to fly or teleport over every time.

The first is a pretty big clue, really, if you pay attention to the layout of the Archive. At a glance it might only look like set dressing, but the room happens to be situated right underneath the passage to the Library...exactly where the hole leads. As for the note, the note is what clues the player in on the rusty old robot perhaps having some malicious life left in it still. Well, that, and videogame logic dictates that there's usually a boss battle before you get the treasure.

As for what the treasure hunter tells you about the place, it's worth noting that when an NPC tells you something is dangerous, it's a good idea to heed the warning. Better to overprepare, than brush it off and find yourself in trouble later. Vintage Story is not a game that will pull its punches.

It's also a very good idea to take an extra temporal gear or two with you if you're going far from home. Alternately, you can just turn the "keep inventory on death" rule on, and not need to worry about losing your stuff either.

16 hours ago, McFrugal said:

I'm going to reiterate that this is an experience that I had as a relatively new player.  It is not a good experience, and adjusting the fight to be easier would mean that others will not have the same experience.

Sure, but it would also mean that those who come after such a change...don't get the satisfaction that comes with finishing a tough challenge either, and the content wouldn't really hold as much replay value. Vintage Story constantly challenges players and encourages them to improve their skills--it's one of the main appeals of the game. It's rough on new players, yes, because the learning curve is steep and like I said before it doesn't pull punches, but it will also happily punish veteran players who get complacent. And if something isn't to one's liking, Vintage Story is also very customizable, so if there isn't a setting for a thing, there's probably a mod that will handle it, and if there's no mod it's relatively easy to make one(when compared to making a mod for other games).

7 hours ago, Zane Mordien said:

Anyway good luck. You should make a new world and skip to the archive with a new set up and try it again.

This is what I would recommend too, at least when you feel ready to tackle the Archive again OP. The eidolon does eventually respawn, so you can take a crack at it again on your hunter in the same world if you wish. However, I would recommend starting a new world and trying one of the other classes instead for a change of pace...preferably one that does not have a penalty to melee damage.

16 hours ago, McFrugal said:

Definitely going to do that on the second lore location, if I ever pick the game back up again.  Since it looks like the devs aren't going to make combat easier again after making it so much harder with the extra mobs, I probably won't.  I'm very very disappointed.

It's worth a look, as there's a lot of cool stuff and lore to discover. Without spoiling too much, there is another boss fight in chapter two, and in some ways it's easier than the first boss, as it's a lot easier to avoid incoming damage entirely. However, with that being said...I would also say that the second boss fight is MUCH more unforgiving than the first; if you make a mistake on the second boss, it likely means your death. You will be wanting to bring a temporal gear or two to reset your spawn, if you don't have access to a terminus teleporter.

[VaelophisNyx]

I'm going to side with the OP on this one. The boss fights are overtuned for players who don't sit there and min-max after studying it for hours. Most folk are there for the survival and story, not the boss fights. If you want intense boss fights in a survival-ish game, terraria is right there. But the point of this not being an action game is actually important, because the goal supposedly isn't a game centered around combat, and yet that's EXACTLY WHERE WE ARE.

 

There's Boss fights, temporal storms that force you to go out and fight for no real rewards or just hide in a 1x2 AFKing for a while, entire new classes of enemy that make the game even MORE centered on combat in recent updates. Frankly if the goal was survival game with occasional combat, that goal has long since been failed.

[Thorfinn]

Do it, then.

Like I told the OP, 

Quote

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. 

The specific line is 

			{ code: "health", currenthealth: 500, maxhealth: 500 },

If you feel particularly community-minded, fire up ModMaker.exe and package it into a mod. Upload it so everyone who agrees with you can nerf the boss.

[VaelophisNyx]

10 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

Do it, then.

Like I told the OP, 

The specific line is 

			{ code: "health", currenthealth: 500, maxhealth: 500 },

If you feel particularly community-minded, fire up ModMaker.exe and package it into a mod. Upload it so everyone who agrees with you can nerf the boss.

Due to recent events, I probably won't be interacting much with the mod portal, but power to whomever wants to