The cure to Boss Tediumitis

So, something occured to me. That by the end of an RPG, especially a longer one, the player might get a bit tired of boss fights. Or, at least, fall into a particular rhythm of fighting. Attack, magic, heal, buff, boss takes a turn, attack, magic, heal, buff, enemy has turn, ect ect ect. Boss Tediumitis.

What i'm wondering is, what would be good ways to relieve this tedium, with final bosses, or late-game bosses. Something coded into the boss's "A.I" to break the tedium. Make the player have to strategize all of a sudden. Now, the best ideas I could come up with is what is basically a "Status Lottery", where party members get random buffs, possibly bad ones, party member imprisonment for 1 turn, or temporary buff neutralization.

If anyone else has any novel ideas, i'd love to see them.

The boring boss battles happen when your options are limited - not because you repeated it several times now. Adding random debuffs will just add another thing to the queue -> remove debuffs -> buff again, etc.

I'd suggest looking into your combat system if you are suffering from "tediumitis" as you call it. Boring gameplay is usually the root cause of tedious battles. 

With long games you do have to be a bit careful about falling into a "this is boss #2 all over again just with a different name..."

One way I have tried to make my bosses different and challenging in their own ways is to implement ideas that I've borrowed from some of the many MMO's I've played.

For example, I have a boss in my game who will change to 1 of 4 different "stances" every 4 turns, which forces the player to go from playing more defensively or offensively depending on which stance the boss is in. This boss was based off a World of Warcraft boss.

I don't quite think that's the problem i'm foreseeing. Eventually, the player develops a strict strategy to use on enemies. Something that can be done 100 times repetitively until said enemy falls dead. It turns into a routine. It's more along the lines of taking the player's strategy and shaking them out of it. Even if it's a good strategy due to a good combat system.

Interesting. The idea of a more reactive A.I did hit my mind.

I was pondering something similar earlier.... about bringing randomness to battles (even non boss battles) because I believe it's what breathes life into each battle.

the hard question is...How?

Yes a random rebuff could be easily remedied by an item or dispel ability, but what if you had a very limited amount of uses of these effects? like say only 3 uses per battle. Then you have to make decisions. 

Do these random status down effects last 1 turn? 3? till end of battle? How often are they applied to your party? All these questions factor your decision on when to remove the effects and how long you can last with them applied to your group.

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I personally like to make enemies have "end game plans." Where they are building towards a very powerful combo strategy that if you don't disrupt it correctly it will become very difficult to handle once it has reach completion.

Example: Cultists of Demon Bob

Battle is against 2 cult priests and 2 Cult Warriors.

The priests summon more priests (takes 1 turn to cast) and once there are 6 priests in the battle all the priests die and Demon Bob is summoned who is very strong and his powers do damage based on the number of priests that have died the whole battle (even the ones you killed before they managed to actually get 6 out...so maybe 6? 8? 9? 10?)

Easy enough right? just kill the priests ASAP right? Wait, what about those 2 Cult Warriors who get Powerful buffs each time a priest dies ?(random buffs so its not predictable on what your gonna have to deal with) Hmmm now we gotta think a little bit here.

You can try and stun, sleep, paralyze, and silence the priests while other party members try and kill the warriors first and then plow through the priests once the warriors are down. Or kill all the priests and deal with the super charged warriors. Or kill the warriors and deal with Demon Bob...

Or if you really screwed up...you have to deal with Demon Bob and super charged warriors.

Just a  example of how they are building an end game against you. I think all foes even the non-boss ones should have these plans.

That would make a nice late-game enemy idea. Bosses tho. Specifically, the final boss. Not only should it be a test of the player's current party composition altogether, it should also have SOMETHING that makes it stand out against all the other bosses. And not by being the longest or most difficult of them all...

1. I read about a script based on a "sneeze" ability from a final fantasy game.

What it did was to actually throw one of your party members out of the battle. If your game has a lot of party members, that could force the player to use some of the not so much used members in his party.

2. Have the boss character change his stance. Whenever he changes his stance, his weaknesses and powers change. You can for instance have a siamese-twin mage-warrior who when he turns around changes stats.

3. The boss calls reinforcements which forces the player to focus on the units before fighting the boss. Chrono trigger had some neat battles like that.

4. When reaching a certain hp, or certain turn, make the boss use another ability to become nastier.

5. Boss reacts to spells cast on him, and changes shields accordingly.

1. Sounds like it'd be more annoying than anything else.

2. Definitely gonna consider this.

3. This just pads out the boss battle.

4. Huehue, I like this one.

5. I had that idea also.

It's only natural for the player to be cautious, plus go all out against a high end boss, I don't know why people see this as something that "needs" fixing.

With that said though, you could always use the troop events to force the boss to take a action, if the player puts up a buff or whatnot,

Perhaps the boss enters a counter attack state, if a char casts a power up buff for instance.

Something I generally like to do and seen done in many games is to make the boss change its strategy a bit after their health has gotten below a certain point. So maybe the player has figured out how to deal with the boss and has done the same strategy for a couple of turns, but suddenly the boss pulls something new out and the player has to alter their strategy to take the new feature into account.

Another thing that I only recently realised and began implementing is to make the boss responsive to what the player does. This really makes them fun and intelligent at the same time. For example the boss might change their behaviour depending on a status effect the player has inflicted upon them. E.g. the player blinded the boss? The boss now intelligently stops using their physical attacks and resorts to powerful magic spells. The player has silenced the boss? Now the boss will stop using magic spells but will begin his nasty barrage of physical attacks. That way it does two things. First of all it stops the player on fully relying on strategies they've been using on all the other bosses. Second thing it gives the player a choice. They might blind the boss for example, but they have to be prepared to deal with his powerful magic spells. And if the player is prepared for that and has taken that into account, they can force the boss to do exactly what they want him to do.

I've played games with final bosses that seem to not live up to the hype. Basically just being a buffed version of a boss they beat the pantaloons off of earlier.

One variable that should influence boss design is the capabilities of your party members. Not every RPG gives the player a SPELL that removes debuffs, for instance. In a game that doesn't let you remove them, debuffs are suddenly much more of a threat than if you could simply have your White Mage have your CURE ALL PARTY MEMBERS OF ANY DEBUFFS spell. The more overpowered your spells, or the more variety of spells your party has, the harder it will be for you to create a difficult boss beyond bolstering his stats. Variety CAN be good if you don't overload them. Having spells that boost elemental resistances for one, gives the Player more counterplay against a boss's elemental attacks. If you don't have those types of spells, the player can do little to react to a boss's heavy reliance on Earth magic.

You can make the boss reactionary, and this can lead to forcing the player to LEARN what the boss reacts to. Boss casts a powerful spell ONLY when you debuff him? Either don't debuff him or find a way to mitigate that powerful spell so that it doesn't cost you TONS of damage if you need to debuff his DEF. Boss debuffs you when you buff yourself? Boss ONLY debuffs you if you buff your STR? There's a lot of potential here.

You can also try and force the player to react to the boss instead. Is the boss using very powerful Fire spells? Hopefully you offer the player a method of some sort to aid against that (Think NulBlaze from Final Fantasy X). Seymour Flux in Final Fantasy X has a combo where he inflicts Zombie on a party member, and then his minion will follow up with Full Life. This FORCES the player to react to what the boss does. You cannot simply mash attack -> heal -> mash attack when bosses force you to react to them in certain ways. Once again, there's a lot of potential here, too.

You can give your Bosses attack patterns, which allows the player to study the boss's rhythms and figure out when he's going to use his most annoying attacks so you can better prepare for them before he actually uses them.

Basically, there a LOT of ways you can prevent boss fights from being beefed up normal encounters.

Forget about mitigating the dmg, instead I would cast Reflect on my char, then debuff the boss :) Serves him right.

See, that comes back to my very first point: the capabilities of your party members. Not every RPG has a Reflect spell. The very presence of it allows more strategies, but also nullifies the threat of some boss potential. The lack of a Reflect spell can add as much strategy as it can add by being there IMO.

Yea true.

Harmill here raises a good point. 

Usually when I see people talk about tedious boss battles, first thing I check is what can the player do during combat. Interesting battles happen when the player has many options to counter boss strategies. If for some reason the player can just use ONE STRATEGY all the time on every boss -> that is a problem with the combat system being incredibly shallow or out of tune. (We are assuming that bosses have different strategies here)

I would probably suggest a more holistic approach here to battles than just "boss ideas". Its usually easier to come up with interesting bosses when you know what the player can and cannot do. For example - its hard for me to determine what the boss "should" do, if I plan for a standard RPG party and you suddenly say there are no healers in your game. Or vice versa - everyone has heals. 

It is always good to have differant mechanics for every boss you encounter, if all the bosses are just the same then the game will become tedious, always experiment of what sort of mechanic you can give a boss so that the player will have to try and adapt to the bosses mechanic so they can make up a strategy to defeat it.

Maybe what you can also do is give bosses hidden skills that will really disrupt your strategy so that you have to re-adapt to the situation, the possibilities are endless.

The smarter the computer AI the more fun and challenging the battles are for me. If they foe can see my strategy and try and stop me the better.

• Healing moves generate large TRG for the user so foes will learn to take out the healer after they do a few cures.
• Heavy status effects like Sleep, Paralyze, and Stun generate larger TRG because of how crippling it is to foes.
• Abilities that target multiple targets can generate more TRG 

You can use these mechanics to even help a more defensive character stay the target of the enemies as a strategy by itself like maybe a heavy armored Paladin that keeps healing allies and after 3-4 heals the foes just keep attacking the paladin instead of the leather and cloth armored friends.

But i guess this just goes back to battle systems in general then just boss battles in particular so I may just be rambling a bit lol

I like boss battles where bosses require unique strategies to be beaten. This way every boss is a unique puzzle that requires you to put your problem-solving skills to the test, rather than it becoming a numbers game (just spamming my strongest attacks, and healing/buffing whenever I need to).

The first boss in my main project, consist of three robots. There is the main guy, and two support guys. One of the support guys heals the main, and the other is a fast attacker. The main guy has a powerful missile attack that launches when he has lost 25% of his health, or whenever one of his supporters is killed. He can also use it at random, but whenever he uses it at random, he has to recharge before he can use it again. He also has to charge the actual attack, so you have about one turn for each member to either heal or defend.

To defeat the boss you essentially have to be careful about how you attack, in relation to maintaining health and buffs, so you don't just go all out in the beginning and get destroyed by the bosses counter-attacks.

The boss is also pretty strong, and has relatively high HP. You have to rely on "limit breaks" to deal large damage, and to restore party's MP, so you can keep on healing and buffing in-between your attack volleys.

If you don't kill the healing support robot, you won't get anywhere.

If you attack too much, and try to kill both support robots in fast succession, you'll die.

If you heal and buff too much out of paranoia of the bosses missile attack without attacking, you'll run out of MP too fast, and the boss will kill you with regular attacks.

If you follow the pattern though, the boss is actually quite easy (as an early boss should be).

All my bosses are similar in principle. They require the player to analyze the boss, set up an attack pattern, and then win. You can't win just by throwing out your "best skills", and healing a bit.

What I like to do is play games, then try to replicate different things that are done in the games, then try to put a twist on it. Take, for instance, Magus from Chrono Trigger. When he casts a spell, his barrier changes, but he becomes weak to the element of the spell he used, plus if you have the character Frog in your party, he can use a sword gained earlier on to force the barrier to change. With enough patience, a person could replicate that and make a few changes to create something similar, but with an interesting twist.