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. 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.

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. 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.

Eh, climbing walls is more of a locust thing isn't it? I guess I wouldn't be opposed to it so long as they were changed in other ways to make them more interesting and less of an outlier in terms of difficulty.

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.

I was using a recurve bow with tin bronze arrows, and they bounced off with no hit sound. Okay so you never tried to block on reaction to anything? It doesn't work, because the shield raising animation is too slow.

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. 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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

I looked up how the armor system works since I wanted to know exactly how much armor gets reduced by higher tier attacks. Turns out it's always reduced even against lower tier attacks! That almost directly contradicts the description ingame that says armor is reduced by higher tier damage! I am shocked that it's like this. Because of this, you will NEVER get the listed amount of protection that an armor says it has.

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.

In caves they jump straight over me sometimes with their lunging attack so they wind up behind me, and I think that's pretty obviously a bad thing. There's also no warning for the lunge attack as far as I can tell, so they're just super chaotic and annoying and seem to deal more damage than other enemies. From the data on the wiki it looks like they do about the same damage as Drifters, but they move faster than you so you can't just move backwards to dodge their attacks, which means they're far more lethal despite dealing the same damage. In temporal storms they run away a lot and they move so fast you can't chase them down, which means there's no reason to actually go out in a temporal storm to fight them since you won't get any loot! And that only adds to the problem of players wanting to just hide and not engage with the storms, despite all the mechanics that prevent players from escaping storm danger such as spawn restrictions being ignored and sleep being disabled. Overall, I think they might be better if their damage was reduced (significantly reduced!) and they didn't run away during temporal storms.

I got two Nightmare Shivers at once just now, and all the various types were spawning almost faster than I could kill with an iron falx. Isn't the spawning limit supposed to be 1?

Uh, yeah but Meals and Pies give 50% more saturation per ingredient compared to cooking them directly (or baking into bread in grains' case). Plus the no-hunger period. Regular cooked food does not do that.