Being that Raid Boss is very boring and oftentimes irritating as hell I find that I have to have something else going on to keep me interested in slogging through match after match after boring match.
Things I have tried:
Music - Pandora or Amazon Music, upbeat channels
Comedy specials from Netflix
Binge watching Married with Children from the 90’s
Talk on the phone to someone
What do you do during Raid Boss to keep it interesting and/or fun that allows you to do it for long periods of time without gouging your eyes out with a dull rusty spoon?
The first thing I did to make it better for me is remember I don’t have to play ALL of my sigils on the first day. The first 10 sigils or so are spent just getting Zuul’goth to the “fun” phases. That goes quickly. I found the last 5 or 6 sigils on day 1 were boring, because I was already burned out. So next week, I stop as soon as I’m bored. It’s not until Sunday that I “need” to spend my sigils, and by then I can tell if it’s even worth it to try.
The battles themselves are more fun if I go in not salty and quit as soon as I’m salty. 4/day is less than Guild Wars made me do. The stats mean I’m going to see things that make me mad. It feels like the RNG is tuned a little cruel, too. So I stop when I get mad.
That’s kind of the theme of this week for me. “I stop when I’m mad.” The last thing I want to do is be standing in a pile of horse manure whining about how much it stinks. I’d rather be standing in a candy shop complaining that the pile of horse manure outside stinks. So as soon as I’m able I go back to PvP and Traitstone farming. Those are the things I like to do. It makes me happy.
This is a very good skill that took me too long to learn as an adult. Don’t do things you hate if you can find a way around them.
Exactly, and especially since most of us probably buy most or all of our shop tiers on day 1 as well. We might end up with 10, 15, 20+ sigils to spend, plus all the ones from the Valravens that we encounter in those battles. If you chug through the minion battles and then do a few boss battles on day 1, then do your daily sigils plus a couple extra battles in the rest of the days, it evens things out a lot more and makes the whole experience more palatable.
It is the later matches that take the fun out of the game anyways. Mang being an absolute must to basically half the Bosses effective health and to get rid of the trash mobs and relying on skulls to drop down in your favor and not the enemy’s’ is the least fun experiencen about the Raid.
I once compared raids/invasions to old arcade games: you play until it’s too hard to progress, then you die. Insert coin and try again.
But in old arcade games, you started over when you died. So every quarter was worth a few minutes, and if you had a favorite phase of the game you got to do it again. In Raids/Invasions, your quarter puts you right back at the phase where you died. You’ll probably die again. If you don’t, your “reward” is it gets harder.
Bounties had a nice flavor. I could always go back to a previous level if I felt like I’d hit my limit. Or, if I feel salty, I can go wail on some weak troops. It’s nice to feel like I have agency.
Shame that Mang trivialises things. It might be better if the boss had custom monsters as minions and more tactical things to work around than just sheer daft numbers…
I was surprised they didn’t do a quick fix by either nerfing mang so it takes max 80-100 armour, or simply making the boss have more life and less armour.
But I still enjoy getting as far as I can. I don’t find the games too long except if I am stuck at the end with Winter Knight and Freya or Mab, versus Fallen Hero and one other (not Obsidian Golem, or I’m dead for sure). That can be a bit of a war of attrition. But it only happened about twice this week.
I don’t think Mang being effective is the problem, i think everything else stopping to be effective at a certain level is.
I am currently at 260 and the game now has degraded to praying that i get skullmatches and the enemy gets none.
If my manged’ed up hero dies i might aswell retreat. Mab can cast 10 times (that’s 150 collected blue/purple mana, chances of the enemy not getting any skullmatches in that time are slim to none) and still not kill anything. Freya as useful as she is to kill the boss is completely useless for the trash troops.
At that point Mang doesn’t trivialize things, it is the only thing doing anything of significance at all.
So we would achieve our maxlevel possible without Mang at let’s say tuesday maybe wednesday and fail finishing the same battle for the complete rest of the week not progressing in eventlevels at all with our tokens and merely racking up bossdamage for the event rewards. How is that a good and/or fun system by any measure?
I would like to be able to pay for something else than sigils. Like making battles easier in some ways. I mean who likes to pay for a possibility to waste their time in a boring, lackluster mode? Right now I would love to be able to buy for Freya a modification that would allow her to explode some gems. Or do more dmg against minions. Or even just Sentinels that would allow me to up my magic to get some more “regular” dmg. And I mean not paying for BOTH sigils and additional options but being able to play for free (with a counter of X battles allowed for each player) but getting “extra” fireworks for a right price. Even if that meant making the battles even harder (like by removing mang from equation etc.) for non-paying players. Oh well, wishful thinking.
Well, if we topped out by Tuesday that would not be ideal. But it would be okay if we were losing many battles and so did not top out until the end of the week.
For sure, a bit more balancing might be needed. But a nerfed Mang would still be usable, say you had to hit the boss twice with it and once with Freya to get all his armour off.
