Construct Quarter – Bosses

Patchwerk

Patchwerk was the first boss I implemented. His relative simplicity makes him a perfect first boss. I was worried that the initial state of the hero values would lead to this fight being too difficult and it would take a while to tune the difficulty. However, I was pleasantly surprised with how well it worked. I could iterate very quickly and it didn’t take long at all to get it to a point where I felt it wasn’t too difficult, but still had some challenge.

Grobbulus

Grobbulus was a bit harder to implement. In World of Warcraft, there’s a technique called “Kiting” where a character keeps a monster’s attention but constantly runs away from it, and the monster follows that character like a kite on a string. It can also be used more generally to mean moving a monster to a specific point by keeping its attention. Grobbulus needs to be kited because he drops growing Poison Clouds at his feet. If you don’t move him, your party will be killed by the poison. However, outside of Taunt, there aren’t great ways to control a monster’s attention in Warcraft 3. If a Tank tries to move a boss to a certain location without using Taunt, the boss will just switch targets once the Tank moves too far away. Even if the Tank Taunts, the boss will switch targets as soon as the Taunt wears off if the Tank is too far away. All of this makes moving Grobbulus a little awkward. It took some extra time tweaking the fight’s numbers to get it to a good overall difficulty with respect to the extra difficulty added by Grobbulus’ mechanics.

Gluth

Gluth wasn’t all that bad to implement. I originally planned to require a Tank to kite the Zombie Chow, but as I mentioned above, kiting doesn’t work that well in Warcraft 3. Therefore, I decreased the difficulty of that mechanic by leaving the Zombies stationary until Gluth casts Decimate. I was also happy with Decimate. Quickly dealing with Gluth setting everyone to low health initially seems like a very steep challenge, but the party has all the tools needed to overcome it.

Thaddius

Thaddius is a decent step up in complexity from the other bosses. He has two phases and two minibosses that precede him. There were a fair amount of edge and corner cases associated with those that could lead to bugs. The party dying right before a miniboss would be revived or dying right as Thaddius powers up are two scenarios that initially led to problems. The key mechanic, Polarity Shift, can completely destroy your party if handled really wrong, but doesn’t need to be done perfectly to beat the fight. This is the level of difficulty I was shooting for, and overall I was pleased with how Thaddius turned out.