Besides changing up a lot of bosses to allow for more than 10 ways to fight and win in a boss fight, allowing for jobs to both have beneficial and detrimental outcomes between doing really well in a boss fight or being terrible in that boss fight - and this changes who is good and bad at what boss from a boss to boss basis based on each job's unique mechanics, strengths, and weakness.
And move away from forced gimmicks that completely removes a job's unique skill kit to thrive.
Allow players to play how they want to play, and have boss fights about dealing with their unique boss mechanics.
Example of this is the Mega Man X Super Nintendo trilogy of games and how the bosses were designed in these games where the bosses can be defeated using any strategy and weapon you want as long as you overcome the boss attack patterns and mechanics, but there is also a clear weakness weapon for each boss - in MapleStory's case this would be some jobs do a lot better against that specific boss than others and vice-versa, the jobs will function like the different weapon types in the Mega Man X games.
Now this post's focus is more on changing the direction of all bosses to allow for both:
1. Freedom of choice to let the players choose how they want to play the game.
2. Offer a graduation system from weekly bosses with a boss skip function, gaining all of the rewards like you fought the boss normally.
Start with freedom of choice for bossing styles.
Instead of trying to make the game all about burst damage, but the worst way possible, force solo only play, remove party play, remove supports, and remove long boss fights, etc. How about we make it where players can choose how they want to play?
This will be focused on weekly bosses only.
Changes to the bosses directly and overall changes to the game direction to bring back party play and for the first time ever make relevant, strong, and many powerful supports.
Boss Timers:
~ Maximum Weekly Boss Timers increase this to 60 minutes from 30 minutes for every single boss fight.
~ Balance around Weekly Boss Timers as the intended clear time to be maximum of 15 minutes, but players can still try to go for the marathon runs (up to 60 minutes) if they wanted to. Fast clear and long clear can support two radically different gameplay styles simultaneously.
~ Every boss is designed in a way that it can be soloed still, but the maximum party size for EVERY boss fight is increased to 6 people. Just let players choose how big of a party they want to fight bosses as. There is better content we can add into the game for player engagement, but this part is a topic for another day.
~ Boss fights between 0-15 minutes function like normal for party bossing. If you are solo, you gain a final damage boost for the first 15 minutes of the fight.
- Boss fights between 15-60 minutes, the final damage you deal is cut in half (solo and party) and supportive effects for everyone except for the caster is doubled (caster gets double effects if soloing) - party buffs, party healing, party defensive effects, other party effects, etc. are all double in potency when applicable.
- Supports are both drastically increased in potency at their default state, not including their long run boost, and significantly more supports are introduced to the game - which includes dialing up existing characters and/or adding in more supportive effects to their skills - examples being Battle Mage and Paladin gaining a boost and adding on more supportive effects to skills, especially for Paladin's case.
With the goal is have the support role be equal or stronger than what Bishop and Lynn is currently at (with Bishop needing quality of life improvements and changes to make her support skills more usable).
~ Boss challenges, every single one no matter what it is, is increased from solo-only to solo or duo.
- Final damage is no longer halved for current duo-challenges since solo will offer a final damage boost; all duo-challenges deal normal damage.
FEEDBACK: The goal here is since solo bossing is the same every week and is dull with long runs as a solo, to position it as the quick bossing route.
While those that want to go for the marathon route with squadding up and taking down the raid boss fantasy, can do that in a long fight with support jobs helping them survive the marathon boss fight. Or solo players that just want to test their limits with a hard full timer run.
Add in a true boss skip feature to graduate from bosses.
To start, an important change to this is to completely remove the Weekly Boss Crystal sell limit!
(The overall boss sell limit for all boss crystals per week would still be around.)
The change is if you have soloed a boss and on that difficulty for 10 times on that particular character and did this under 15 minutes each time, then the option to auto-clear the boss fight is introduced, granting you all of the rewards of the highest applicable difficulty of the boss that you achieve this on.
~ With an auto-clear all applicable weekly bosses button too for further convenience. Auto-clearing all bosses you achieved the under 15 minutes, 10 times solo clears for on the highest difficulty of the boss that was achieved for this.
This will allow for a graduation system from certain bosses that you shown you know how to consistently clear and clear quickly, freeing the player with more time to do other things with no longer needing to waste their time on their one-shot bosses.
How the rewards are handed out for the boss skip will introduce a new map that you can enter into and a chest boss to take down.
When you take down the chest, every single reward you would have gotten collectively from every boss that you auto-cleared that week will be within that chest, including the boss crystals.
Doing it this way is purely for inventory limitation reasons. You can pick up whatever you want and if you are inventory full, then can drop items you don't care about to pick up the new items that dropped that you do care about.
Plus has the satisfying feel of a massive explosion of items that come flying out of the boss chest!
