Kiko

I figured that was the case when i saw them selling creative mode items lol

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.

The story content really has me burnt out. It was especially frustrating to get to the village expecting to be able to purchase supplies only to find out that the inn only sells goats and ore, and that despite every other villager telling me I can rent a room there the inn keeper says to come back in a week. I know I can just sleep wherever i want, but still, it's kind of stupid. I had to spend a day hunting in the woods nearby before going to Tobias. By the time I got there I didn't want to continue because there's a bossfight that I need to prep for, which means i need to go aaaaaalll the way back home to resupply, then aaaaalll the way back to the boss fight. This game really needs some kind of airship or something because spending 10 hours playing walking simulator is not fun. In the early game it's not a big deal because I can always map out valuable resources, but getting to story locations feels like I'm playing the first elder scrolls with no fast travel. Honestly the worst part is thinking "holy shit i have to walk back." I think it would be more engaging if the store items in the village were more consistent. If I could cash out loot and items I got elsewhere then I could avoid having to go back to my base to by trading in the village for additional supplies. Right now the trading system is very limited in terms of what you can sell. Maybe something like the runescape general store would be a good idea. A guy who buys things at low prices but he'll buy practically anything of value. It's still trash. It'll increase the time it takes for you to heal and the boss is guaranteed to cancel your heal by doing a ground pound in that time. Extremely annoying mechanic overall

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

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.

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.

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.

I have chests for specific operations I'm working on. everything I need for steelmaking goes in the steel ops chest, everything I need for that building goes in the chest near the building, etc.

If you really wanted to change the overall feel of the game I think that you could do a lot by changing the palette used on the enemies to include more color, especially between enemy versions. I did a lazy recolor of some black and white versions of the drifters but I feel like even that adds a lot of variety. Palette swaps are really good bang for your buck in that regard. I also feel like you could really go crazy with the shiver given that it has elements that open up for attacks. A surface variant could be shades of green and then open up to a bright red mouth when chasing, maybe subsurface variants include shades of purple. Unfortunately I couldn't find an image of a shiver with it's mouth open online.

It would be nice to play in a world that isn't so depressing. It's exciting initially and the first few times you encounter the enemies is creepy, but after a couple hundred hours it's just sad and desolate. Especially so since there isn't a real enemy spawning mechanic besides depth and lighting. It would be cool to go into a new area and find a new type of enemy that isn't just some sad abomination from the past. Vintage story is fun but it's really gritty, and after a hundred hours that grit gets stuck in my teeth. It would be nice to find a forest full of goblins or a cave of troglodytes, maybe some kind of insect monsters in the jungle. Just something a little less grey and brown than the usual suspects. As it stand I generally just ignore combat entirely because it's boring and doesn't benefit me.