Things to make the Hardest boss fight...

[Zack Alklazaris]

Since most people hit the annoying ones, AKA instant kills, rage timers, stuns, god like health, what about a scenario?

Location: A boss that is on a floating platform overlooking a hazard (lava?)

The boss randomly stuns a player, the only way to get them unstunned is to destroy the stunning device next to the player.

The boss also has a knockback threatening to knock ranged players into the hazard. The knockback also destroys part of the platform each time it is used. This is the bosses "Rage" timer.

At 50% health the boss becomes immune to everything. The boss starts spawning mini versions of itself each taking a bit of the bosses health to support the mini bosses. The trick for the players is to stun and defend itself from the mini bosses, but not kill them or the health will return to the boss.

This continues until the boss reaches critical heal (10%) at that point the bosses must be kited towards a launcher where the boss can then be launched into the lava and die.

But the fights not over, the player must then survive the clean up of the mini bosses.

 

[Lil_Rimmy]

Missiles/Some kind of homing projectile that requires you to shoot it down, and being annoying whilst doing that e.g. really small or fast. To make it worse - Have the boss spam these and while you are distracted by flying missiles, hit you with another attack.

 

[deathninja]

The ungodly combination of stunlock, one-shots and regenning back to full health when you respawn (unlike every other enemy).

Rage-inducing stuff.

 

[Autumnflame]

Team work. when your playing something like a MMO and you need everyone on their interupts and taunts.

miss one and its a party wipe. team work is the hardest factor

 

[themind]

When the boss is 150 storey's high, and it takes twenty minutes to climb up to the vulnerable spot, you get three hits maximum that takes about 1/500th of it's health, and then you get to climb the 150 storey boss again... and when you finally defeat the boss, there are 15 more just like him.

God damn, I love Shadow of the Collosus.

 

[Yokillernick]

This would make any boss fight a true nightmare:

-Regen Health: Nothing is more annoying that the dozy fuck regening his health while you run around dodging his attacks.

-Around 2-3 bars of health a.k.a multiple forms- As if taking one bar down is not hard enough you have to repeat that 3 times and most time on an evolved version of the first boss which has more powerful attacks.

-Minions. Hard to win an 20 vs 1 fight.

-Platforms. Stunning the boss just so you have to climb a hard wall, then side jump, climb another wall, pull a lever and do a tribal dance in under 10 seconds to do damage all this while having minions follow you around. This timed platforming in boss fights would make you rage quit.

-OP attacks. It's funny how you need 100 attacks to take him down when he would need just 1.

-Missile/Ranged attack so you can't regen health.

-No mid-fight checkpoints. Pretty annoying when you're almost there 1 hit till you kill the boss and he one hits KO's you. Then you start again with boss full health and you try to look for a reason why the past 3 hours of your life have not been wasted.

 

[WhiteFangofWhoa]

Team work. when your playing something like a MMO and you need everyone on their interupts and taunts.

miss one and its a party wipe. team work is the hardest factor

This. A single-player boss can be mastered, no matter how difficult or long. But you can't say the same for a group of 15-25 people of varying competence who may be interrupted by lag at any moment. In my time on WoW I never faced the notorious Heigan the Unclean, but just from hearsay I can tell that's one boss where people will forgive you for being caught by his Area attack- the slightest misstep or lag spike can get you killed, and the entire party along with you. I do remember one such boss whose seismic pounding created a maze of fallen stalactites, randomly-generated each time. If you can't get out in time, rocks fall and everyone dies. Or just you. SWTOR, to my alternating pleasure and terror, has lots of these.

An MMORPG boss requiring absolute precision is harder than any other, though not necessarily for good reasons.

 

[neil1990]

Someone has already sort of mentioned it before but when you have a super effective attack that you have been using frequently throughout the game and maybe levelled up fully, that either doesn't work or can't hit the boss

 

[Guffe]

Fire.
If there's a boss that uses fire I am so screwed.

 

[soes757]

Multi-bosses are pretty hard, especially in games like Dark Souls where being surrounded basically means death.

The Bell Gargoyles kicked my ass endlessly when I first played the game, since I was still unfamiliar with the mechanics. Then I summoned Solaire and killed them in short order.

Ornstein and Smough are even harder, since all the damage you do to one is undone when you kill the other one.

The Four Kings aren't so bad as long as you kill them quickly, since they spawn one at a time.

Yet you can kill Gwyn all easy....

Stunlocking, and regenerating health always anger me, I like to take things slow.

 

[kommando367]

Generally speaking, the tactics that usually make up the cheapest enemies.
1 hit kill attacks
The ability to stunlock you to death
Hard to avoid powerful attacks
Fast attack speed
Attack patterns that severely punish you for the slightest mistakes
The forced use of a previously unused or rarely used game mechanic during the fight.

 

[Fappy]

QTE's when you don't realize it, I guess. Makes it tedious.

Yeah, fuck that noise. If there is going to be a surprise QTE at least give me some wiggle room. I hate failing one that comes out of the blue and needing to start over the whole fight.

 

[MercurySteam]

Surprised that lack of checkpoints where death results in starting at the very beginning hasn't been mentioned yet.

 

[NooNameLeft]

Dark Souls pretty much mastered the consept of bosses that can be hard in a fair and not annoying way.


- Every hit is possible to dodge but hurt like hell.

- Some bosses can dodge\block just like you to avoid getting hit.

- Most bosses don't have massive health bars, but you have a very small window when its safe to attack.

- The best thing in my opinion is that the bosses don't just repeat the same attacks in the same order, instead they try to do what is best in the corrent situation much like the player. So you must be ready to react to everything they might throw at you at any given time.

 

[BoredWalker]

When a boss has spastic, rapid movements (that count as attacks), a very small window that it can be attacked in, rapid high-damage attacks, and a massive amount of health all at once. Basically, I'm looking at Beastman from MMBN3 and Pheonix Mignon from Zero 2.

 

[Lunar Templar]

attacks that aren't technical, but might as well be a one hit kill.

you know the kind, the hit really hard and have some status effect to finish you of that's hard to shake off in time, hate those -.-

 

[Kuurion]

So, how about something that's difficult but not impossible anr/or rage-quit inducing?

Something TWEWY did (since it's on peoples' minds right now) that I loved was making attacks simply hard to dodge. Every attack WAS dodgeable, and you knew it, but with the sheer amount of shit happening on-screen you just can't dodge them all. But you know you COULD, if you just got a little bit better.

This was the most impossible thing about Sanae at the end (I think it was in the bonus chapter?)
If you did nothing but focus on one side of the screen, you could dodge everything. But only then. As soon as you start attacking or looking up top, your shit gets fucked.

 

[xplosive59]

- Awkward Terrain, platforms
- Stages, the boss gets harder the more you hurt it
- Can counter attacks/Block
- When you die you respawn very far away
- Regeneration
- Can only be hurt by one kind of attack
- 1 hit kill attacks
- A godly ammount of health

 

[Shinsei-J]

Cheap mechanics:
One shot kills
Stunlocks
Unavoidable attacks

Fun and engaging hard mechanics:
Having to change strategy mid way
Minions
Sutle tells, Eg. Slight colour change before frenzying.
Environmental hazards

If any of these are played to an extreme they suck but some games do everything right.
Much like Dark Souls and Monster Hunter, bosses are meant to be a challenge.

I'm just going to also add that it sucks when you change the difficulty on a game and all it does is give bosses more health and damage for OP one shot kills. Maybe cut the down time between attacks or make it's attacks more presice, you don't just make it able to one shot kill a player.

 

[Charli]

There's a ....difference for me, between hard and tedious.


I guess World of Warcraft holds both for me because the most aggravating thing in a boss fight is having to put up with OTHER PEOPLE FAILING. And when you fail, it's just embarrassing and coming up with a good excuse as to why you brain was flying with fairies at the worst possible moment is a task in of itself.

So naming 2 from that game:


Hard: Algalon the Observer (25man, when it was new, downing it was euphoric) One shot mechanic - Dodge-able by all but one person, Timed, Add damage, Positioning, Large Truck-like Melee Hits, Exceptionally hard to heal.

Aggravating: Spine of Deathwing (Heroic, Horrible add mechanics, but somehow managed to be dull as shit, A BOSS ON THE BACK OF A FLYING DRAGON. BORING. Yes, I know.) Add Damage from hell, One shot mechanic, not timed but if you left it too long the adds would multiply by 100 and eat you all, possibility of being thrown off the encounter (another one shot), horrific reliance on one person to hit everything and then run/be moved around the encounter like a headless chicken, debuffs that limited healing until you spam healed the player enough to make it fall off (these would be applied every 10seconds roughly).