The new healing mechanic makes the RA boss frustrating

[Kiko]

The new mechanic requires the player not to jump or fall for too long to maintain a heal. The archive boss does attacks which moves the player over the y axis enough to cancel the heal. The counter is to jump, which cancels the heal. The boss attacks every 2 seconds, and a poultice takes 3 seconds to apply without armor on. I went in with a chain helm and gambeson, making my healing time roughly 7 seconds. That means I need to successfully dodge or tank 3 attacks from the boss without jumping, which means I either need to bait the boss 3 times into whiffing melee attacks or get lucky with his choice of ranged attack. I could take off my armor and dodge or tank a single attack, but realistically if I was knowledgeable enough about the boss to not use armor I wouldn't need to heal. 

My point is that vertical movement should not be the deciding factor in whether or not your healing cancels, especially when the first boss of the game is almost entirely designed around moving you vertically. While the new system might be compelling in a situation where you're trying to maintain a level path while running away from a wolf, it doesn't fare well when you're being thrown into what is essentially a pinball machine.

The new mechanic does make the boss significantly more difficult, but not in a way that requires skillful management of the game's systems. The strategy I ended up using in lieu of my original plan was to sprint jump in and out of the bosses face while attacking. I do this for literally every other enemy in the game except for shivers, which I just run down. I don't feel like I'm really engaging with the boss when the game's design rewards me for using the same tired technique, and things like hiding from ranged attacks behind the columns placed around the room are punished.

[Teh Pizza Lady]

Yes the healing mechanic certainly does shake things up a bit. Have you tried soaked bandages to see if you can get more healing before you are moved vertically... dunno. I feel like the bosses in this game are supposed to be hard and take a long time to complete. For example, the chapter 2 boss very nearly killed me twice and it did kill my blackguard friend in one hit. Probably for future bosses, they will fine-tune things, but I guarantee you that the heal over time getting cancelled by vertical movement was implemented with the RA boss in mind. I would even wager on it being the reason they added the cancel to the heal over time because before that change, it was kind of an easy fight.

[Lugh Crow-Slave]

If anything this seems more like the boss needs to change as the healing works well everywhere else and is overall an improvement. 

I haven't fought the boss with the changes so I really can't comment on how much that is actually needed. I will say though you should have graduated from poltus by then and if this pushes more players to start investing in that then that's another plus. 

[Kiko]

11 hours ago, traugdor said:

Yes the healing mechanic certainly does shake things up a bit. Have you tried soaked bandages to see if you can get more healing before you are moved vertically... dunno. I feel like the bosses in this game are supposed to be hard and take a long time to complete. For example, the chapter 2 boss very nearly killed me twice and it did kill my blackguard friend in one hit. Probably for future bosses, they will fine-tune things, but I guarantee you that the heal over time getting cancelled by vertical movement was implemented with the RA boss in mind. I would even wager on it being the reason they added the cancel to the heal over time because before that change, it was kind of an easy fight.

I avoided soaked bandages because I was worried about them drying mid combat and leaving me without a healing source. 

I agree that the change was likely implemented with the boss in mind, however the quick attacks just mean it's impossible to use healing items. You also can't disingage and heal a la darksouls. Maybe a solution would be to increase the time between attacks as well as the damage. It would make dodging easier while also significantly more important. It would also mean that you could heal in less cycles and potentially avoid having to jump during a heal if you timed things correctly.

I noticed that the groundpound was actually a directional attack rathther than a straight AOE as I could dodge the attack sometimes by sprinting around the boss, but since there aren't any visual indicators for this I can't reliably use this method. A particle effect or other indicator of the affected tiles would make using that method consistent.

[Teh Pizza Lady]

22 minutes ago, Kiko said:

I avoided soaked bandages because I was worried about them drying mid combat and leaving me without a healing source. 

I haven't done the RA boss on the pre, so I cannot attest to this but on 20.12, it's pretty quick and easy to drop the jug and 2-3 bandages in the crafting grid and soak them RQ. If you have an empty hotbar slot they will go there, you can close the menu and the jug will go back into your bags and you can use the bandages you soaked. I would never pre-soak them before a fight.

[Teh Pizza Lady]

For me, bandages are also the last-minute emergency heal where I might die trying to soak them, but I WILL die if I don't, so I take the risk. 9/10 it works out.

[Kiko]

3 hours ago, traugdor said:

For me, bandages are also the last-minute emergency heal where I might die trying to soak them, but I WILL die if I don't, so I take the risk. 9/10 it works out.

Alcohol bandages are just cheaper honey sulfur poultices. Both have the same healing and application time. The bonus between them is they stack twice as high and the aqua vitae is more easily sourced than sulfur, but as far as boss fights go they wouldn't help.

[FlareUKCS]

Wouldn't it be better if the effect of the boss was more pronounced, as in a wave that you could dodge ? A pulse on the ground you could jump over ? I think this could be better than healing over the damage a means to avoid the damage instead, a pulse of damage you can jump over that you can see ?

It seems bad when one can heal over a boss, it seems more 'fun' to learn to avoid a boss attack, rather than simply 'tank' it ?

[Kiko]

17 hours ago, FlareUKCS said:

Wouldn't it be better if the effect of the boss was more pronounced, as in a wave that you could dodge ? A pulse on the ground you could jump over ? I think this could be better than healing over the damage a means to avoid the damage instead, a pulse of damage you can jump over that you can see ?

It seems bad when one can heal over a boss, it seems more 'fun' to learn to avoid a boss attack, rather than simply 'tank' it ?

That would be cool, it would certainly help with being able to dodge the attack horizontaly but i think it would also add a lot aesthetically. Maybe if the crush attack had a different cooldown it would also break up the attack pattern rather than having it be 2 seconds for each attack

[Lugh Crow-Slave]

On 7/25/2025 at 2:51 PM, Kiko said:

Alcohol bandages are just cheaper honey sulfur poultices. Both have the same healing and application time. The bonus between them is they stack twice as high and the aqua vitae is more easily sourced than sulfur, but as far as boss fights go they wouldn't help.

They are also pretty solid in mp as one player can apply and toss them around as needed. 

Personally I think they dry a little too fast but at the same time I'm not sure they were intended to be used in combat at all. They feel the something you're meant to use post fight to get going faster. Where the honey and sulfur are meant to be your in combat option. 

[Thorfinn]

Wow. That has the effect of buffing him immensely. He can still be taken in one life with no armor, cattail poultices and flint spears, but I had to savescum a dozen times or so to do it. Everything depends on what attack form he chooses when you are healing. I'll have to work on it some more. Maybe there's some cue I haven't noticed yet that tells me running away is not going to work; that I should abort the heal and jump.

Edited July 28, 2025 by Thorfinn

[Kiko]

13 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

Wow. That has the effect of buffing him immensely. He can still be taken in one life with no armor, cattail poultices and flint spears, but I had to savescum a dozen times or so to do it. Everything depends on what attack form he chooses when you are healing. I'll have to work on it some more. Maybe there's some cue I haven't noticed yet that tells me running away is not going to work; that I should abort the heal and jump.

I think that melee is the meta right now, since baiting his melee attack avoids the rock throw and ground pound. If timed correctly all damage could be avoided. Still, I don't like the idea of using a metronome to fight a boss in a game like this. If the bosses become too technical it's going to end up like runescape where everyone is using third party mods to mark tiles and add helper timers and such to get really efficient, and that kind of kills the whole point of the dungeon IMO. I'd prefer to see the combat become more fluid rather than rigidly timed.

[LadyWYT]

13 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

Maybe there's some cue I haven't noticed yet that tells me running away is not going to work; that I should abort the heal and jump.

He has different animations depending on which attack he's going to do. The windup on the attacks are fairly slow, so you have a couple of seconds to react to whatever he's about to do.

 

On 7/24/2025 at 9:27 PM, Kiko said:

The strategy I ended up using in lieu of my original plan was to sprint jump in and out of the bosses face while attacking.

This is my general strategy--there's a sweet spot where you can stay close enough to him that he won't throw a tantrum and pound the ground very often, but just out of range of his swings. It's a delicate dance back and forth, and it's still somewhat a fight of attrition, especially towards the end where you need to effectively burn down the rest of his health bar before you're overwhelmed. I will also note that you can't use that strategy on the second boss.

Overall, I'm inclined to agree with what @traugdor and others have said--it sounds like a change meant specifically to make this fight a bit more challenging since it was something of a joke previously. It might need a little more fine-tuning depending on how many players start dying to it after the change, but it's a fight that definitely needed a little love.

[Thorfinn]

32 minutes ago, Kiko said:

IIf the bosses become too technical it's going to end up like runescape where everyone is using third party mods to mark tiles and add helper timers and such to get really efficient, and that kind of kills the whole point of the dungeon IMO. I'd prefer to see the combat become more fluid rather than rigidly timed.

That's always been my critique of bosses, clear back to Doom in '93. You have to cultivate a whole different set set of skills, or at least apply them in a vastly different way, compared to anything you have done in the rest of the game. For whatever reason, they couldn't make the game interesting and challenging, so said, "OK, we'll make a cyberdemon who does 10x the damage and has 200x the hp of anything else you have encountered." In comparison, the rest of the game became mundane, even trite. To keep things interesting, you made self-challenges like "fists and chainsaw only" runs. Or "flint spear only" runs.

Edited July 28, 2025 by Thorfinn

[Thorfinn]

1 minute ago, LadyWYT said:

He has different animations depending on which attack he's going to do. The windup on the attacks are fairly slow, so you have a couple of seconds to react to whatever he's about to do.

I can see the windup, but not in time to make the decision to get far enough out of the way if it is ground pound. Whatever the timing is, and I don't think it's a couple seconds, it's inside my OODA. Darting in to retrieve spears and draw the melee turned out to be the most effective for getting the heal to go through. Which means before too long the IE battle is going to need yet more love. There will be plenty of 'tubes showing how easy he is to defeat.

[Echo Weaver]

2 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

I can see the windup, but not in time to make the decision to get far enough out of the way if it is ground pound. Whatever the timing is, and I don't think it's a couple seconds, it's inside my OODA. Darting in to retrieve spears and draw the melee turned out to be the most effective for getting the heal to go through. Which means before too long the IE battle is going to need yet more love. There will be plenty of 'tubes showing how easy he is to defeat.

FWIW, I think if you're studying YouTube for the precise strategy, you've earned an easy fight. I prefer to be able to learn through gameplay, which is much slower. I'm not sure it's possible to balance both the YouTube-study style and the gameplay-discovery style into a boss that is satisfying for both.

[LadyWYT]

13 minutes ago, Echo Weaver said:

FWIW, I think if you're studying YouTube for the precise strategy, you've earned an easy fight. I prefer to be able to learn through gameplay, which is much slower. I'm not sure it's possible to balance both the YouTube-study style and the gameplay-discovery style into a boss that is satisfying for both.

I don't think it is possible, personally, though I also think that "study YouTube" has perhaps become the unfortunate default for any sort of game challenge in general, not just for Vintage Story. As a result, the moment something gets a little hard, players will go look it up online, instead of putting in a little more time and effort to figure it out themselves. That's not to say that looking things up is bad(I do this frequently), however, I do think that's probably why a lot of videogame features/challenges get complained about if they can't be solved in the first attempt.

If I had to choose between the two, I'd opt for balancing around the player actually figuring things out for themselves in the gameplay. The player might make several mistakes and die a few times, but I think that's okay--it's just part of the learning process, provided that the player can easily learn from the mistakes. Vintage Story has done a really good job of balancing in that regard.

[Echo Weaver]

21 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

I don't think it is possible, personally, though I also think that "study YouTube" has perhaps become the unfortunate default for any sort of game challenge in general, not just for Vintage Story. As a result, the moment something gets a little hard, players will go look it up online, instead of putting in a little more time and effort to figure it out themselves. That's not to say that looking things up is bad(I do this frequently), however, I do think that's probably why a lot of videogame features/challenges get complained about if they can't be solved in the first attempt.

If I had to choose between the two, I'd opt for balancing around the player actually figuring things out for themselves in the gameplay. The player might make several mistakes and die a few times, but I think that's okay--it's just part of the learning process, provided that the player can easily learn from the mistakes. Vintage Story has done a really good job of balancing in that regard.

Yes. I look up strategy on YouTube after I've tried and failed enough times for it to not be fun, but it always feels like a letdown. It really bugs me to see stuff tuned for folks with out-of-game knowledge.

[Zane Mordien]

Well I had to try the RA boss since we were talking about it. I was able to beat it first try with my typical set up (blackguard chest and legs with a scale helm), although I did rely more on melee. I tried to do it with as little strategy as possible with just hacking/spearing and healing, but I had to back off and figure out healing and that required some strategy. Healing was annoying but I was able to find a rhythm with his damage and found ways to heal myself as long as it could "hit" me. If it was my first playthrough I would have died. Maybe I should have done it with iron chainmail to be the minimum I would do.

I don't know that the boss really needs to be any harder though. This is meant to be chapter 1 out of 8. 

2 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

That's always been my critique of bosses,

I really hope they don't make VS a game about boss battles, although it seems to be headed that way.

Spoiler

Speaking of '93, the 2nd boss reminds me of the boss battles in Final Fantasy II (US) where you beat it and then have to beat it again later.. and again later.. and again later. I did not like that concept of that game and ever since I did the 2nd boss that is what I think about.. Oh boy, I can't wait to fight that again in a later chapter.

 

[Thorfinn]

I think it would have gone better had I not tried to do it with only 4 spears. Too much time spent re-equipping, not enough doing damage. Wilderness adds a bit more excitement, because I attempted it with only 14.25 HP, and he hits for 12 with either of the ranged attacks, so I had to heal successfully at least 5 times between the first and second hit, and 6 times between all the rest. By comparison, the 3 from his melee attack was like a reprieve. Still burned through a lot of stacks of poultices, but since I had about 5 stacks left over, I could have gone into it with at least 4 and maybe 8 more spears.

It's nice to know that going in properly prepared isn't much different.

Edited July 28, 2025 by Thorfinn