Inflamed Sephotep Changes Discussion

Community
#6

Fundamental Design Flaws

  • Adds – This fight is an add fight and not a boss fight (as already stated and probably will be stated again). It takes over 1/2 the party to deal with the adds. Which is, boring.
    —> Suggestion: I think it would be fun to have the adds spawn from an interrupt you do on the boss. Aka if you dont do enough interrupts you get adds, but sometimes you want adds so you dont want to interrupt. It would add some more nuance so you could make the fight what you want for the different phases.
  • Tanking – Not sure how it was intended to tank this boss but having sickness stacks, and having the off tank do all of the mechanics is too much.
    —> Suggestion: Don’t have an orb go to an off tank. I think this is the case in normal mode already so I’m confused why it is different in hard mode at all. Edit: Also don’t have a red circle but I’m less convinced of that need. Tanks main job is to keep targets still so even if they’re tanking the adds and jumping circles it’s a lot.

Major Technical Issues

  1. Invisible Tank Busters & Red Circles – Every time we do a raid, we restart the instance between bosses 3 and 4. This is because if we don’t, boss 4 has invisible tank busters and red circles. This one may not be specific? Boss 3 has issues after awhile which can culminate in needing to restart the instance but this is almost a guarantee that if you dont restart the instance you’ll get an invisible tank buster at some point.
  2. Red phase – if someone is partially desynced it won’t open. I know this is a larger issue also, but its very annoying to not be able to do that mechanic with someone desynced.
  3. Blue Phase Opening – If one, or both, of the portal orbs are going to 0,0 we have to open blue phase by having someone log out and back in. They’ll log in at 0,0, pop the orbs and open blue phase (and most likely but not always die). This is easier than doing the mechanics because someone just has to relog but ya. Would be nice to do the mechanics.
  4. Boss leashing on returning from hell. This one is rare but incredibly infuriating. I believe it happens if the main aggro dies after the portal has opened and then they go to hell. . If we had 2 tanks that were on boss and wanted to alternate who goes to hell, thats possible. And a tank could very well die after the portal opens from an orb and get rezed. We now resort to if you had aggro you stay out of portal.

Other
I would like the red circles dropping size to be reduced by a like 10%. Still make them bigger than boss 1 but not like… huge. Or have it differ depending on amount of aggro you have on the boss or something. Because With 10 people in that space. It leads to people being VERY spread out, which makes it very difficult for anyone to heal reliably. And I dont think reducing circle size by like 10% would make red phase any harder. (unless its reduced by like 50%) Just seems slightly too big.

#uncapraids
#uncaprap

3 Likes
Hardmode boss 4 rebalancing
#7

Like Leon and duckyy said, adds are a big problem. Currently, the ones that spawn are a normal melee, an elite melee, and an elite pistoler. The two elites are pretty beefy and hit hard too, so they can’t really be held on to for opening the green phase portal either, and it becomes a game of separating out the single non-elite over five or more spawns, which takes several minutes to do.

Opening the portal for red phase is very inconsistent. In an “everyone attacks the boss” setting, it is impossible to tell where the circles will spawn. You can’t really do much except form two groups in advance and hope the circles appear in the right spots, and retry the fight if they don’t. Even in the simplified state of “only a tank and two DPS attacking the boss”, where there are only three possible positions the circles can appear, there’s still RNG involved - in 33% of the attempts both circles still appear on the same group, which is lethal if you get hit, and the chance that people die because they can’t jump out in time is pretty high.

Blue is fine, except for the bug that makes the orbs fly off into the distance sometimes. I feel like it happens more often if the person who was supposed to get the orb has died and was revived before.

Another thing - the things you have to do to open the portals seem kind of unintuitive, and I would never have been able to figure out what to do. Maybe add a lore book somewhere in the citadel that tells people in a cryptic way how the portal mechanics work?

3 Likes
#8

I always thought it would be fun for circles to form on highest non tank agro. It would force them to dodge lowering their dps so they might not get the circle next time. It would remove the luck element from this portal open too.

From a lore perspective it would make sense that sepoteph would want to kill the biggest threat

2 Likes
#9

There already is a way to remove the luck and that’s doing Sheikah method. The circle group ups are closer to the boss and when first circle drops there is a jumper who jumps in and the tank jumps in the second circle area, this guarantees the portal opens unless someone is desynced.

3 Likes
#10

Again, ensuring only 3 people ever touch the boss. The rest of the team is still just doing an add fight, not a boss fight.

2 Likes
#11

I was told to go ham so ham I will go.

First off roles,

Tank-
It seems to be a general rule of thumb that if a boss gives anti-heal stacks on hit it will require two tanks to tank him, unless, given a long enough down phase to clear anti heal stacks, such as boss 3 and 5 in guild city. We get around this now by having one boss tank, who clears their anti-heal stacks by stun locking them off after every 1-2 tankbusters. Heres a video of boss tanking, Boss 4 time stamps start at 9:13, each phase is time stamped https://youtu.be/fuNWs9WllX0
This really sucks to do, boss tank is a very long and tedious job. not to mention once you get over the initial learning curve of stunning and jumping our of circles, it’s just plain boring.

As far as I cant tell from my time add tanking and talking with other add tanks there seems to be no issues on add tanking side other than opening blue, coordinating opening blue portal with the two red circles makes it to where anytime a group wants to open blue phase intendedly it usually results in two dead boss dps, and a dead add tank.

Dps-
Firstly, Boss dps. the way we work around the double red circles killing the party is we only have 2 dps in boss combat at all times. them dps-ing the boss and dodging their red circles. This causes a few problems. Some groups don’t have high dps or only have a few high dps, so either phases take much longer due to lower dps on boss, or add get out of control due to a lack of dps on add side.

Add DPS, The way we kill boss 4 currently is a long and grueling fight for everyone, add dps especially. 16-30+ minutes of doing your maximum dps and trying your hardest, unlike boss tank/dps they dont get a break when the portal opens. they just have to go do max dps in another arena. add dps is easily the hardest job or one of the hardest jobs in boss 4.

Healers-
Boss bard, another way we dealt with the red circle and pink orb issues is in order to have a healer for the boss tank/boss dps, we put an out of combat bard near the boss tank, who’s only job is to provide passives and to decurse the tank every tankbuster. This results the boss tank and boss dps pretty much doing this fight without a healer, we’ve resulted to carrying legendary lvl 30 healing pots on us during the fight to sorta, replace what would be a musky or active healing bard.

Add musky, If add dps isn’t the hardest job in the fight its definitely add musky. Add musky is responsible for making sure all of the add side is healed through the adds damage, which isn’t easy by any means since the pistoler shreds the any class their focusing, and if the elite melee hits anyone other than a tank that elite melee hits like a truck. they are also responsible for opening green phase, they will gravity orb the non elite melee and musky-tank up to 5-6 of them in order to burn to open the green portal. Here’s a video of it https://youtu.be/NcdSzXK0gSo

Okay cool, that’s all the roles addressed, now the gross mechanics. Everything I addressed in terms of mechanics above applies here as well.

Pink boss orbs-
Sephoteps pink forehead orbs are kinda a problem. As right now we are only running with only 2 boss dps each of them get an orb. if one of them goes down and boss tank isn’t quick enoough to react they instantly get domed and the fights over.

There is also a very common bug were when a orb is knocked down, and then someone jumps to where it was, as late to 5 seconds after I’ve seen it happen, the player who jumped into the spot will be treated as if they were hit with the orb, they’ll take the damage, die, get the affliction, despite knocking down the orb.

Red Circles-
Despite the name this is mainly going to focus on red phase opening, opening red phase is going to be the part of the fight most groups struggle on, we’ve found a way around this with what most people know as SHEIKAH method, which can be seen done in the add musky video earlier in this post, there is a time stamp for SHEIKAH jump in the chapters of that video as well. But for groups using Thrive method or anything other than SHEIKAH jump double circles are always a possibility and usually a run ender.

Not to mention the damage, if everyone isn’t at full health before the red circles drop red phase is opened with most if not everyone on the verge of death, and a dead body or two.

Adds-
The adds tend to be very glitchy, their health bars/elite symbol, not showing up. there was a post a while ago about making the elite melee a different color which i think is still an amazing idea, here’s the post Boss 4 elites ads
I dont think that is out of the realm of possibilities since we have Captain Jethin in Lamavora, which is just a light blue raid smasher.

The pistolers are also a problem for some people, getting hit with a poison shouldn’t be a death sentence. there are methods where the add dps stand in the rubble around the arena to avoid being hit. Making it so the poison on the pistoler is toned down a bit might not be a bad idea, but out of everything in this raid the pistoler issue is probably the least offender on this list.

Green Portal-
Green portal is mostly fine compared to the rest of the fight aside for one huge issue, it has two smasher knights in the green portal add group, and more often than not their smash castbar is invisible for most of the party. Most green portal fights have 1 or more deaths because of not seeing the smash castbar or animation.

Loot-
More often than not our 20, 30, 40 minute boss 4 kills always end in tired groans and sigs of disbelief when everyone in our party sees a purple chest. it is a long grueling fight and the more kills and the more weeks a player has killed it and only gotten a purple chest to show for it is awful. Since I typically host a SHEIKAH raids it really does suck to watch all of my guild members become tired and sick of doing this boss fight week after week because they think it isn’t worth the effort.

Lastly, @Jake_E I would be more than happy to have you or any of the other devs come and sit in on a Boss 4 weather it be in game or in our discord call, and watching the stream of us do it. I know i post alot of boss 4 videos and have sent alot of them in this thread alone, but nothing really shows off the bugs better than watching it all unfold, all the videos are highly edited to just show the kill, none of the failed or bugged attempts.

3 Likes
#12

I believe to make the boss fight as fair as possible is to have a mechanic to force everyone to be in combat. Using the 1 tank and 2 DPS in combat strat feels like making the boss fight extremely easy and feels sort of like taking a detour from the actual mechanics.

I think something that could work is that every player lowers the multiplier for the speed that the circles drop at. For example the current speed would let’s say be 1.00x. If this mechanic would be added the circles would at 10.00x the speed and every player would lower it by -1.00 so if we would have 3 players in combat with the boss the circles will drop at 7.00x the speed making it basically instant

Something else is to just force everyone to be in combat when one person actually enters combat but I think the above is cooler

Even tho I have done the method myself too I for sure hope to see that forcing everyone in combat will make the fight more harder and more fairer ( If most of the bugs will be fixed of course).
Hardmode Sephoptep - YouTube here is a video of the method I’m talking about with the 3 People only in combat.

After the adds got nerfed with one of the updates we got I feel like the adds are pretty much fair. The circles should also be fine. I think invisible circles will be more often because of more people in the fight so if there would be something for that that would be great.
The orbs are pretty often a problem. They will almost always go to the coordinates 0.0.0 and makes the mechanic of getting hit by 2 orbs to open blue phase pretty much useless.

This deserves it special mention too. The boss has always a chance to leash for some reason. It might be because of 1 of the people dies that are in combat with the boss or something else but it is insanely annoying to see the boss leash for no reason. And with atleast the groups that I ran with it is always after we open blue phase and it makes it more annoying because you already did everything then.

Just a short summary I guess

  • Add mechanic to force everyone in combat
    -Fix the bugs first before making the fight harder
    -Fix the server to where people desync less. For some reason a lot of people desync way more often then normal in the fight which gives me the assumption it has something to do with the instance or the boss.

I hope this helps tbh since I’d love to see the boss get harder and more fairer

#13

Looking at the posts the ads seem to be one of the biggest problems. So perhaps a tweak of the mechanic?

I was reading through the lore on the discord “orbus vr lore” and had a mechanic idea (which is a great collection btw. Made me nostalgic for old game)

Seith became sephotep by sacrificing his master to nodenghast for power. So perhaps a retweak of the mechanic could be ads spawn, run to sephotep where he sacrifices them for a damage buff. Either temporary engagement (ie Boss 1 cit) or stacks the build up over time (kettle boss, boss 2 guild city).

Similar to the pots in the guild city raid, with the spawn randomness of boss 5 guild city.

Would need to consider if all adds spawn at once at same location, 3 different locations. Or just one ad at a time in random location. Also if stacks reset on portal or permanent.

The green portal mechanic would need to work into this. It would be impossible to collect ads as they don’t agro. Killing a few ads at the same time might be a bit too easy unless they don’t spawn at same time/location. Maybe a mechanic where you need to drop a circle on an ad (one per circle) to kill it. Similar to Skav world boss enragement.

1 Like
#14

We have found work arounds for most of the bugs already listed above.

The things peeps still have huge issues with are:

  1. Ghost casting: the boss side dps can die to this bug because they cannot kill the orbs with ghost spells!!
  2. The drop rate of the +7’s: This could be bumped up a bit, or some sort of pity system built in something like 8 = +6 (as current), and 24 (or more) = +7.
  3. Desyncs: it is very frustrating to have to redo the beginning of the fight just because a player is desynced and no longer counts as a ‘body’ in the circle.
#15

we don’t want work arounds tho, we want the boss fixed.

4 Likes
#16

And with any luck the devs will be able to do it! :sparkles:

At the same time, no sense my rehashing what has already been gone over above.

#17

There is a bug with the boss where he will leash even when people are in combat with him. Happened with blue phase yesterday when he had less than 5% health when the tank. It’s really demoralising as we had a back up tank on the way to take over when it happened

#18

New main aggro player was probably standing on a leashing point.

#19

Not unless the have a hidden leash point somewhere in the main area haha. It was during final burn

No one was desynced either

#20

Happened to us before. Is why the boss tank does not get to pally-rez die/swap at the end anymore. :sweat_smile:

To much chance of a leash.

#21

I think it has something to do with the portal because it’s never happened on red. If primary agro dies it doesn’t automatically go to secondary agro, I haven’t tested though

#22

I am pretty sure its the only reason the boss leashes on aggro switch (on that part of the fight). And I can imagine that the new main aggro was standing on some hidden leash point indeed.

Maybe the new main aggro was the 0 0 ball target. Did you have 0 0 balls that fight?

#23

I have been just reading through all the replies and comments, gathering information for when I see that boss for the first time.
Soon, PinkCrafter. Soon. Keep hopes up.

3 Likes
#24

Can’t remember the last time I didn’t have 0,0 lol. So that might be the issue

#25

There is a bug where if a player desynced in portal and portal closes they will stay there for the rest of the fight because there is no way out. I believe this could be fixed by adding a portal out after adds are killed.