While I think enemies absolutely should have more visual variety, there’s nothing stopping from them using adds in boss fight mechanics and creating challenging/interesting clearing packs in raids… if they were going to just reskin the necromancer mobs for example they could have placed them in more reasonable/expected areas. Also, why not make them shoot black/dark purple bolts(literally a color change)? A ghostly-blue smash attack that leaves an AoE pool(literally a color change + adding a second ability trigger that activates via a timer going off after the duration the smash attack animation - so simple!). Etc… still the old green bolt… They have other assets they could re-use and combine and I mean it literally would take minutes, but it’s instead identical attack patterns. Necromancers could summon undead from nearby dead allies like the lich boss does, making you want to prioritize them first (and so-on). Some low-hp skeletons could explode (with a ghastly blue or green coloring, and ghostly sound effect that lingers as the animation players) when they reach you, or maybe slower zombies that damage your stamina when they attack you making it harder to get away from their allies projectile attacks so you want to actively keep distance, use pushback/frost, etc. This creates a certain variety of elements to every fight that keeps the player on their toes. It requires movement and awareness of your surroundings. It makes you learn about new enemies, what they do, how to fight them, and remember it for later. To think about deadly enemy combinations & have threats to fear.
Why not make their cast & projectile speed faster(more dangerous, as expected of higher level mobs)? Make the bolts AoE explode(threatens your teammates if you make a mistake) or life-steal on hit(extra punishing for getting hit) - or both! Something. There are some pretty extremely simple alterations they could do to atleast add some low hanging fruit types of attack-variation. Also new animations for spell effects would be nice.
How hard is it to add a new ability, for example, a channeled very large AoE life drain spell for the necromancers? They could even just re-use their pool effect, or the last few seconds of the smash attack and slow down the animation, recolor it, increase the size of the animation, and all damage done returns HP to enemy mobs in the area or something. You could create thousands of ideas. Only a handful from those thousands are needed.
How about the runemage scav effect where they put affliction on you? Take a look at the floating red devil. Recolor this spell to red. Loop it. You explode after X seconds damaging nearby allies & yourself. What did we do? Took an animation. Recolored it. Looped it. Animation centers around the player (perhaps the hardest part? Maybe not?). Maybe slowed the animation down. Maybe the animation speeds up over time & pulses (expands out/in around the player) as the timer runs out to represent a clock. Maybe a SFX is going off that also speeds up. Added a timer to do a delayed damage effect. When the timer activates it looks at nearby allies and adds them to a list. Plays an animation (like the fireball effect going off, maybe scaled up in size). Plays a sound effect. Damages everyone on the list. Difficult? Much to ask for? They already possess the other tools for the underlying networking in addition to all the animations & technical ability to create small snippets of new code. They already have sound effects but yes they could expand it a bit (and should) as well as new models/animations.
The teleporty shard guys that basically have the tiger’s old leap ability don’t even make hit-sounds… I’ve nearly died looking at my inventory while one was hitting me lol (music disabled). The teleport animation is kind of weak too, and also has no sound effects. To give it some life, it needs SOUND lmao. Even with the weak animation having sound would make it immensely better. They could easily replicate the worm abilities of preborn too where they disappear/re-appear behind you via some portal or enderman-type of effect rather than just dodge to the side like the sticks do. This makes them more dangerous, difficult, time consuming (thus warranted for increased rewards) to kill.
Eye candy was nice in preborn, yes. Infinitely better than reborn. Reborn has added some attack animations / projectiles which is nice, but they also discarded some variation of attacks (that were just simple telegraphed patterns) that preborn had. It’d be nice if they had attack, visual, and sound variety.
Their mob placement in the world is also highly unusual sometimes. I just don’t really get the world design tbh. But I guess that’s out of scope for this.
