Note: fair warning this is long, even by my standards, as this covers the basics of my thought process for the design of my Boss Rush fight.
I was asked by Kabam to participate in the current Content Creator Boss Rush. Although I'm not an official Content Creator, the design team was interested in a forum post I made regarding "interesting challenges" (
https://forums.playcontestofchampions.com/en/discussion/143545/what-makes-challenges-interesting) and thought I might be able to design something interesting here. I took the invitation as a personal challenge: could I "put up or shut up" and follow my own rules to make something interesting. The Content Creators were limited in how they could design the fights (I'm assuming everyone operated under the same limitations). We were asked to pick a champion and two buffs from a supplied list to apply to that champion to create the boss fight. Presumably Kabam would add basic buffs like champion (attack/health) buffs to scale the fight appropriately.
After thinking about it for a while and looking over the buffs, my first question was how firm Kabam was on the two-buff limit? It seemed to me from looking at the available buffs that what I wanted to do in rough concept would require at least three buffs. I wanted the fight to be more skill based and less random based, and I wanted to both provide for the possibility that some champions would be better than others, without creating situations that made some champions simply unworkable. I also wanted to know how difficult the fight was supposed to be.
I presented an option to the devs that I thought addressed both questions. This fight isn't in the Boss Rush: Power Struggle, Power Shield, Destructive Feedback, Korg. The idea behind this combination is that Power Shield means normal attacks deal no damage only special attacks do. But Power Struggle means you can't gain power, except by giving power, so you have to attack with normal attacks. The moment you get enough power to use a special you have to use it very quickly: Power Struggle will cost you all your power if the target uses its special before you do. That's already tricky. But Destructive Feedback makes this much harder: the DF shield will absorb any damage you deal, and if the target makes contact with you then you'll get your own damage reflected back. So to beat this combination you have to attack into the target generating power, but when you give the target a bar of power you have to use your special quickly to deal Power Shield damage. Then you have to make sure the target doesn't hit you until the shield expires, whereupon the target takes your Power Shield boosted damage. Wrap all this around any champion and you have a very high skill fight. Wrap this around Korg, and you have a real nightmare.
Kabam said, and I quote: "this would be the meanest combo ever." Also: "no." But, having heard how I wanted the buffs to interact, they gave me the option to try to convince them to find a three buff combo that was reasonable for what they wanted to do. So knowing I might be able to break the two buff rule if I came up with something interesting enough, and knowing they were not trying to assassinate the players with the bosses, I went looking for a more moderate challenge option.
I really like the idea of Life Transfer. Life Transfer is a buff that both hurts the players (you degenerate) and helps them (you heal). The player's skill in attacking aggressively without pushing the target to SP3 determines whether LT is a blessing or a curse. I wanted that kind of element to the fight. But Life Transfer has been around for a while and most experienced players are sufficiently good at managing Life Transfer that it is almost all benefit and no deficit. It's so good it can erase challenges. I needed a fight where even experienced players couldn't necessarily just spam their way to victory.
I wasn't going to use an Evade champ or the Mesmerize node. I don't think those are wrong, but I did think if I was going to try to make a skill-based challenge, I should use randomness sparingly if at all. This would be the easy way out to make Life Transfer harder to leverage, and it just forced most players to bring True Strike, which then limited their options.
I thought about Hood. Hood has a less random, more skill-oriented way to avoid attacks with invisibility. It is possible to try to prevent him from activating it, which would add a measure of difficulty to leveraging Life Transfer. And then I thought about Invisible Woman. IW was relatively new when I was designing this encounter, and I had some knowledge about her because I pulled her from a crystal. I could study her description and test how she worked, above and beyond the content she was in. IW invisibility was a newer, slightly more intricate version of Hood invisibility, and that seemed to be a good ability to combine with the Life Transfer node. IW offers some challenges to pacing the fight the way the player wants to make best use of Life Transfer.
The obvious way to neuter IW's invisibility is with bleed. When she's bleeding invisibility falls away after a few seconds. So if you bring a bleed champ you can shift the equation back to where Life Transfer probably makes the fight a little too easy. So IW needed some defense against this. Giving her bleed immunity was the obvious option, but then that completely neuters bleed champs, and the tactic of using bleed to deactivate invisibility. I wanted something "softer" that didn't destroy the tactic, but made it harder to use "for free." Basically, instead of bleed making the fight much easier, I wanted bleed to trade one challenge for another. That led me to Cornered.
Cornered changed the equation again: if you used bleed on IW you'd significantly reduce the threat of IW's invisibility causing problems for Life Transfer, but then you'd be giving IW a ton of power, causing problems for Life Transfer. If you give IW too much power, have to slow down, and Life Transfer slides back towards hurting the player rather than helping. I felt the balance had tipped back in the other direction, with the combination being a little too punishing. To "nudge" the power control fight slightly back towards the player I decided to couple Cornered with Power Struggle. If you give the target a lot of power, at least you'd be getting a lot of power in return. This sounded like the fight would be slightly more "fair." And it also had the side effect that you couldn't use huge power gain champs like Hyperion or Vision to "bypass" the Life Transfer/power control interplay. Those champs work, but they don't have the same large advantage.
Taking a step back, I considered the final combination: IW + Cornered + Power Struggle + Life Transfer. Was there anything in here that demanded one or a small set of counters? It didn't seem so. Was there anything in here that couldn't be overcome with reasonable skill? It didn't seem so. Was there any node or combination in here that the players tended to hate with a vengeance, like Mesmerize? Not that I was aware of. There were nuances to the fight beyond the primary design points above, which was fine: that left the door open for players to find ways to tackle the fight beyond what I had considered and designed for, which makes for a more interesting fight in my opinion.
My design goal of the fight was to meet a set of criteria. They were, basically:
* Do make the fight as skill-oriented as possible
* Do not mandate a specific counter or effect (like heal block/reverse, or a tiny set of champs that work)
* Do not rely on random effects (no chaos, no evade, things like that)
* Do give advantages and disadvantages to as wide a set of champions as possible
* Do make the fight doable with any champ in theory
* Do try to avoid nodes players hate (mesmerize)
* Do encourage the players to use strategy (thinking about how the champ and nodes work) and tactics (how do I deal with invisibility, how do I deal with power management)
And one last one: try to give the players the feeling they beat the fight, rather than just survived the fight. This one is a bit abstract and difficult to really "design" for. If you're fighting a 500 hit Sentinel with safeguard, it can seem less like you beat the Sentinel, and more that you just outlasted it. If you fight a mesmerize node without true strike, it can seem less like you beat the fight and more like you just got lucky. I wanted players to feel like the reason they won was that they knew how the nodes worked, they knew how Invisible Woman worked, and they *beat* the fight with knowledge and skill. I wanted them to feel good about winning.
How would I take on this challenge? Well, champions that bleed are obvious, if not optimal options. Bleed causes IW's invisibility to expire, and without invisibility IW is less of a threat. But you have to deal with the Cornered power gain, which can be problematic. If you can control bleed and only use it at the right times, it can work for you. Power control is also a possibility, if you can power drain or power control with special one attacks. Power Struggle would make it hard to get to higher specials. But if you can keep draining a target that has Life Transfer, you're mostly home free. Hawkeye seems especially good here. But if you're sufficiently skilled, there's an option that allows almost any champ to work. IW's invisibility decays under two conditions: she's bleeding, or you miss her with an attack. It is dangerous to miss a normal attack because you can be countered. But you can get a "free miss" if you attack after she uses a special attack, trying to "punish" SP1. You'll miss, but you can back out after the miss without getting counter attacked. It is potentially slow and much harder to perform, but it is a skillful way to counter the fight. Give her power, bait SP1, go in as if you're punishing SP1 to trigger a miss, and then let invisibility expire. When not invisible, go to town. Just be careful about being too aggressive and stacking up too much exhaustion or pushing her to SP3.
It would have been all kinds of fun to design a fight completely from scratch, but game designers have to work under all sorts of limitations all the time. You have to do the best with what you have. I tried to find an interesting champion to fight, and a set of buffs that both hinder and help the player in a way that the more skill you have leveraging the situation the better off you'll be and the easier the fight will be. Also I used three buffs instead of two, which is
kind of cheating good negotiating. I'm very interested to see how players deal with this fight, and what options they come up with. Also, do people like the fight, do they hate the fight, do they think it could have been improved.
Comments, questions, suggestions, critiques on the fight, are welcome.
