Thanos Boss Design is so terrible imo.
Isman1998
Member Posts: 520 ★★★
First of all I would like to say I like the ambition for the Thanos fight. The 15 energy it takes to get to him is probably the best designed thing in this whole quest, but the actual design of the Thanos boss fight is terrible.
My first problem is the cutscenes that play in the middle of the fight. YOU DO NOT PUT CUTSCENES IN THE MIDDLE OF A MATCH IN A FIGHTING GAME!!!!! I can't count the amount of times I got screwed over by the dang cutscenes of Thanos flexing his infinity gauntlet and I died because I thought I was blocking put rather the game ate my input because of the cutscene. Next time please use an ANIMATION not a cutscene. If you're going to do cutscenes only put them at the beginning and end of a fight. No where in the middle.
Someone is gonna bring up Special 3's are basically a cutscene and to that I say you are correct. The thing about special 3's in this game or any other fighting game that has them, if they connect and hit they push you a safe distance away from the opponent and usually have an effect that hinders you enemy like stun or something.
Thanos infinity flex cutscene leaves you in striking distance of Thanos so that last fight where he gets that dumb, stupid Deathtouch BS (which is another problem in of itself because its lazy, cheap game design) you just get absoulety destroyed and you cant do anything about it.
Another thing that makes this boss fight so bad is the reversed controls. I can deal with reversed controls in other games where controls work. In MCOC the controls dont work regularly half the time and then the game team has the nerve to reverse the controls? Seriously? I shouldn't even have to explain how goofy and ridiculous that is.
When I beat Thanos I dont feel accomplished I relieve a sigh and I'm glad that its over. This bosses design, combined with the problems MCOC has had for over months now like dropping blocks, inconsistent parries, dexterity not working, etc, easily makes this one of the games worst designed boss fights imo.
Yes I've seen the guides and stuff on how to beat this purple meathead. But those don't mean anything when core gameplay mechanics don't work.
My first problem is the cutscenes that play in the middle of the fight. YOU DO NOT PUT CUTSCENES IN THE MIDDLE OF A MATCH IN A FIGHTING GAME!!!!! I can't count the amount of times I got screwed over by the dang cutscenes of Thanos flexing his infinity gauntlet and I died because I thought I was blocking put rather the game ate my input because of the cutscene. Next time please use an ANIMATION not a cutscene. If you're going to do cutscenes only put them at the beginning and end of a fight. No where in the middle.
Someone is gonna bring up Special 3's are basically a cutscene and to that I say you are correct. The thing about special 3's in this game or any other fighting game that has them, if they connect and hit they push you a safe distance away from the opponent and usually have an effect that hinders you enemy like stun or something.
Thanos infinity flex cutscene leaves you in striking distance of Thanos so that last fight where he gets that dumb, stupid Deathtouch BS (which is another problem in of itself because its lazy, cheap game design) you just get absoulety destroyed and you cant do anything about it.
Another thing that makes this boss fight so bad is the reversed controls. I can deal with reversed controls in other games where controls work. In MCOC the controls dont work regularly half the time and then the game team has the nerve to reverse the controls? Seriously? I shouldn't even have to explain how goofy and ridiculous that is.
When I beat Thanos I dont feel accomplished I relieve a sigh and I'm glad that its over. This bosses design, combined with the problems MCOC has had for over months now like dropping blocks, inconsistent parries, dexterity not working, etc, easily makes this one of the games worst designed boss fights imo.
Yes I've seen the guides and stuff on how to beat this purple meathead. But those don't mean anything when core gameplay mechanics don't work.
22
Comments
I don't have a video. But everytime the cutscene would finish Thanos would be right next to me and was able to just do a quick light attack to finish me off. Probably some sort of glitch.
And I disagree with the Deathtouch being BS. You say there's nothing you can do, but that's simply not true. You have the option of evading until it wears off. However, doing that doesn't give you much time until his L3 goes off. What you're supposed to do is intercept him. It's a high-risk, high reward deal that seems suitable for a boss fight such as this. If you mess up, you die. However, if you intercept him (as his description would tell you is your #1 goal at this stage of the fight), you get a safeguard charge, capping your damage from his L3 to 25%. This means if done properly, you can eat 3 of his L3's with any champ and still live to tell the tale. This is plenty of time to finish him off.
I hope for more creativity in boss fights in the future and please Kabam Netmarble who ever, please continue to give us the 18 total energy boss levels. I may actually get to work on Act 5 this month
If I'm understanding this correctly, you want the completion/exploration rewards of 3.2 in the EQ (The Thanos Fights) to make up the bulk of the rewards? It sounds like you want this as a way to skip the need to explore the rest of the EQ without missing much in terms of rewards. Correct?
The problem comes when the game itself is laggy on most devices and combine it with the fast AI reactions, you CANNOT dodge perfectly. I have only tried the Thanos fight once and having watched Infinty war just this weekend, it really feels like a great boss fight. I only reached Phase 2 on 1st Thanos, but there's a lot of time to practice. I am also close to Ranking up a lot of my 5 stars and getting blade this week, I hope all that helps when I fight Thanos later in the month.
I really like the boss design and it makes people think and improve their skills (except for the lagging part).
1) Like someone said, the cutscenes place you and Thanos at opposite ends of the screen. Since you mentioned about L3 having a cutscene, let me tell you that an L3 actually places your opponent right next to you MOST of the times, you have to either evade or block real quick.
2) Death Touch - haven't reached there yet, but I guess the only issue would be the lag and somewhat I am still improving my intercept skills. It's a continuous process, no matter how good I get, Kabam always keeps putting out harder intercept content.
3) Reversed controls - Again, practiced only once but I was able to dodge back and also hit him with a combo. Check the youtube videos on how to time those actions, even if you learn the phase, you can blindly swipe back (dash forward), do a combo, then swipe forward (dex back twice). Hope for the best and you might be able to do a combo, I did it in my first try. Or you can simply hold block and hope for the best
It is really fun and frustrating to fight him at the same time. The fight is fun, the dying is not.
Reverse controls can be changed back to normal by landing a hit.. when the cut scene for reverse controls comes up swipe backwards as soon as it ends.. This lands a hit and normal controls.. As soon as you swipe forwards to avoid the second fireball (sp2) swipe backwards (9 out of 10 times this will land a hit and give normal controls) key point is don't be afraid of him his sp is an explotable opening.. Use it!..
He doesn't stand next to you after the cut scene..
With him standing next to you, plus death touch.. Sounds like he's just used sp3.. as soon as the animation ends start swinging and get your 5 hits in.. then it comes down to who you're using.. you either intercept or if you're using GP you avoid him and let him build his sp3 rinse and repeat..
The fact that the cutscene can happen in the middle of my combo
The fact that his sp3 leaves me right next to him when it ends, causing him to finish me off with a light attack with Deathtouch the second it finishes.
You need to get used to beating him to it mate.. You can literally start hitting him as soon as it ends.. The only painful thing I found about the cut scenes is when they happen in the middle of your special attack.. the rest of your sp does no damage.. (although it was funny with KP instead of thanos flexing his glove the cut scene just had a close up of him dazed with his head swinging side to side lol)
The cutscenes are there because the activation of the infinity stones alters the nature of the fight. The cutscenes reset the fight to a relatively safe state: if they were not there and you were in the middle of executing a combo when they activated you'd stand a good chance of dying. When you say "YOU DO NOT PUT CUTSCENES IN THE MIDDLE OF A MATCH IN A FIGHTING GAME" you say that like that's some rule everyone should know, but in fact there's no such rule. The more important rule is if you're going to alter the way combat works you should never do that in the middle of a fight without giving the players an opportunity to notice and adjust to the change. The cut scenes serve that purpose. If they were not there, I'd be asking the developers to put them there.
I'm not sure I would call it especially constructive. Your post basically comes down to saying a) cutscenes are bad in the middle of the fight, b) the special three leaves you vulnerable to being unavoidably killed by death touch, and c) reverse controls mechanic is bad because the controls are buggy to begin with.
The problem is that for the most part, no one else is seeing (a) or (b), and while many people have complained about buggy controls that has nothing directly to do with the Thanos fight. If you're saying your controls are completely unreliable, I don't know how reversing them would even hurt you. You mostly seem to be venting, and while that's your right, there's nothing specifically constructive to apply to the Thanos fight from a vent.
1) Thanos should only be able to activate his 95/60/30% cut-scenes as if it was a SP3 after those thresholds are crossed. This allows you to finish your combo, special attack, etc. He should not be able to activate a stone if he's getting punched in the face. An exploit to this would be chain-stunning from the beginning, but I'm sure Kabam can create a one-off buff to prevent that.
2)10 seconds between specials is not enough time. We end up spending the majority of the fight simply evading.
3) Master Thanos was way too passive. If the buff requires you to intercept in order to get safeguard, then he needs to actually dash attack so we can intercept. Too often he would block his way to the next special attack.
4) There needs to be a way to get completion without the full explore of this map. Perhaps grant completion if you beat the first one, then grant exploration if you beat both (in the same session).
Why? To put it another way, suppose there was just one Thanos, and killing him granted both completion and exploration. Would you be advocating adding another Thanos to ensure that you did not get completion and exploration at the same time? Alternatively, would you be okay with Kabam requiring you to complete the map twice, once for completion and once for exploration? Both of those satisfy the requirement that completion and exploration aren't awarded at the same time.
No matter how strong he is, I'm not sure if it is reasonable to expect the completion rewards for both the map and the entire difficulty run to hinge on only a single fight. I look at it as getting completion for fighting two fights, and getting exploration automatically. From that perspective, I don't need anything added to extend full exploration beyond that.
Except that as it sits now, it literally is an all-or-nothing reward system. You can 100% complete the rest of the EQ for minimal cost, but will only get the rewards for Chp 1&2 if you can't get past Thanos. And to be honest, those two fights in Uncollected are hands-down some of the hardest in the game outside of LOL. Even the Master version was a bit of a challenge.
Last month, players were able to "cut their losses" against Guilly and only had to beat her once to get completion rewards. They then had the option to spend the additional cost/effort to go for full exploration or simply stop with completion.
Now, we are forced to doing the full effort of exploration just to get completion rewards.
For players well into their end-game period of their gameplay, this is a non-issue because they're going for 100% regardless. However, for those players who are newer to the game (or even recently Uncollected) and who are content with completion of an EQ are then put in a horrible position.