The worst World Boss of them all

DivineKitty

So, this has probably been brought up before, but I feel it needs to be talked about again. It's not a secret that World Bosses in DLC zones are a fair bit tougher than in other, larger zones, to make up for there only being 2 of them. Most of these I don't have a problem with , but there is one boss that stands out from all the other ones for being just the worst thing ever. I am talking, of course, about the boss of Echoing Hollow, Walks-Like-Thunder.

In case some people have not fought it, or more likely, their traumatised minds have blocked out the memory of it, Walks-like-thunder is a Miregaunt, basically a walking tree. Most of it's attacks are pretty weak, and easy to avoid, but what makes it so terrible is it's ability to drop totems which heal it an incredible amount in a very short time. These totems have the ability to heal massive amounts of it's health in mere seconds, and The amount that it drops at once make it difficult to kill them before it heals back to full health.

This ability to heal makes it almost impossible to kill with a smaller group, or even a larger one if the group members are inexperienced. Adding to this is the fact that Murkmire generally has very little traffic, as there's really not many reasons to be there at all, so asking for help in the Zone chat is often a futile effort outside the most active hours. In my opinion, this boss really needs to be fixed to make it possible to kill it with anything less than an entire legion of soldiers. Either limit the amount of times it can drop the healing totems or, Ideally, just seriously nerf the amount of healing it does.

rbfrgsp

It was a good post until you asked for a nerf. There is a dire shortage of challenging content in this game. Most is designed to be entry level. Let it be.

SeaGtGruff

I really enjoy trying to solo world bosses, especially the more challenging ones, and it's always frustrating when there's one I can't solo. But I understand that they're meant to be "group bosses"-- group content-- so I accept that there will likely be quite a few that I can't solo.

Sometimes I eventually figure out how to successfully solo bosses that I once found impossible, which can change a boss from one I hate to get a daily for to one I love to get a daily for. And sometimes balancing changes to things like skill costs can make it impossible for me to solo a boss I used to be able to solo, which can be extremely frustrating.

Anyway, while I sympathize with anyone's desire to be able to solo a given world boss, I think it's okay for there to be some world bosses which are more or less impossible for most players to solo.

DivineKitty

rbfrgsp wrote: »

It was a good post until you asked for a nerf. There is a dire shortage of challenging content in this game. Most is designed to be entry level. Let it be.

While I do appreciate a challenge, there needs to be a line between "Challenging" and 'Impossible." Especially when there are multiple daily quests that have you killing it, which can be a real pain if you don't play at Prime time for your server.

But alright, even without Nerfing the heals themselves, Just reducing the amount of totems, or having a limit to how many times it can drop the totems would still be an immense improvement. If they wanted to still make it challenging, they could always give it more health, make it tougher in other ways. Or, and this is just probably not going to happen unless all World Bosses get a significant Update, which is a massive undertaking that is most certainly not on the cards at the moment, but having a separately activated "Challenge Mode" similar to Hard Mode Vet Dungeons.

EF321

You can solo him, it just takes time. As long as you can consistently make him have (a bit) less hp than last time after totems spawned, you can make it eventually.

Molydeus

NO. Stop asking to nerf everything you can't handle. If you can't beat the content get better or find another way. I'm so tired of nerfs being everyone's solution to challenging content. Overland is already so stupid easy it's sad.

MasterSpatula

The number of totems should scale to the number of players present.

Although even with that, not sure it would good enough. I get really, really annoyed by bosses that you can't complete if nearby PUGs/randos that you have nothing to do with and have no control over don't know what they're doing. (i.e. Walks-Like_Thunder, Ri'atahrashi, or duoing The Unmaker with someone who doesn't know to bash). I just don't think that's very good design. Depending on randos to know what they're doing isn't a challenge; it's dumb luck.

SammyKhajit

The shamen ogre in Wrothgar is the worst (or rather, the best in smiting and decimating). Sammy always implore players nearby to join in the fight. Otherwise, no hope

Lailaamell

This wb is not hars if anything it needs a buff

BretonMage

MasterSpatula wrote: »

...or duoing The Unmaker with someone who doesn't know to bash....

Oh, I had no idea. I had to google that one, and then only found out about his CC through some thread on Reddit. I wish there was a quick resource for WBs, like Alcast or Xynode for dungeons.

Vaoh

Ironically the one world boss I want changed is the other Murkmire world boss. I believe it’s called Bok-Xul?

The boss summons huge amounts of NPCs. They are weak so it is not a difficulty complaint, but rather a game performance complaint. My FPS on PS5 starts at 50-60, but during the fight it drops to 10-20 or so due to the accumulated dead bodies. If I let the fight drag on longer it might even get worse.

Just make the NPCs disappear when they are killed.

tomfant

If Walks-like-Thunder is your target, simply ask in zone chat for help. When I was doing the dailies in this zone and got his quest there were always players around that came and helped. It just takes a while until they appear because its a bit of a ride from the closest wayshrine.

Tesman85

That sounds rather frustrating, but I don't know about the worst. I'd award that distinction to Menhir Stoneskin, as it's not only frustrating but also humiliating. I have one character built to solo pve (and that works in Cyrodiil reasonably, too) and have soloed dozens of world bosses with few problems. But Menhir royally kicked my ass. The gargoyle itself is bad enough, but manageable, but combined with the adds it summons it's downright deadly. The stone mages and warriors just do too much damage that one could outheal and outfight them at the same time. Once I tried killing the adds first without aggroing the gargoyle, but it just summoned more. After an hour and half a dozen tries I had to give up, since every time things ended with me getting thoroughly trounced. The thing is almost impossible to solo, at least for a CP 700-something.

I haven't fought Walks-Like-Thunder yet, though. Maybe I'll give it a try, but I doubt it could evoke the kind of frustrated rage Menhir does.

xilfxlegion

i would list the unfinished dolmen in wrothgar as a close second. hate that blue sob

freespirit

The guy that has the rice sacks to collect in Southern Elsweyr, can't remember his name....

If in a there are multiple players there's not enough rice sacks you need to wait for respawns, just make them stay after collecting pls!!

I've only tried to solo him a couple of times whilst passing by, so not necessarily wearing optimum gear but my god that guy hits hard! 🤣

Necrotech_Master

Vaoh wrote: »

Ironically the one world boss I want changed is the other Murkmire world boss. I believe it’s called Bok-Xul?

The boss summons huge amounts of NPCs. They are weak so it is not a difficulty complaint, but rather a game performance complaint. My FPS on PS5 starts at 50-60, but during the fight it drops to 10-20 or so due to the accumulated dead bodies. If I let the fight drag on longer it might even get worse.

Just make the NPCs disappear when they are killed.

i enjoy that boss and getting 50k dmg cleaves on my tank with masters 2h lol

for a necromancer you can basically get a full ult everytime he summons the mobs lol

as for the OP, i also dislike the miregaunt WB, its not hard to fight but impossible to kill because of the healing when dealing with it solo, adding a stupid amount of healing doesnt make the fight harder just annoying, its worse than running direfrost keep with people who cant cc break the final boss drain/heal

Kisakee

The boss can be done solo, i already achieved that. If anything all other World Bosses need a buff to be at the same strength which would make it more interesting to me.

A similar experience has been doing the group content in Craglorn just on my own, it was fun and challenging and i wish there would be more of this by the measure of difficulty.

Vaoh

On the topic of World Bosses, they really don’t deserve that title. I would think renaming them to “Zone Bosses” would be more appropriate.

Create a separate event for a very powerful enemy (Vet HM trial difficulty/health) which is located on the map of Tamriel for all players to see, called a “World Boss”. You can run over there and fight alongside 50+ players in an attempt to take it down. There would be different instances of the same boss so you don’t have the entire server attacking the same boss. Looting the bosses grants unique rewards and possibly even their specific monster set items.

Sounds a lot more fun to me 😬

xiphactinus

Walks like thunder is one of the easier world bosses once everyone is on the same page. Simply as soon as the totems drop either all focus a corner of the arena and kill all totems or split group for roles but you can completely ignore thunder when the totems initially drop and the ones that need prioritising kinda glimmer. Did it earlier just two of us, Took a little while but its defo a tricky one if not impossible to solo with average deeps like myself. Does not need nerfing in the slightest. Even with low dps the trick to killing thunder is obeying the mechs but obviously the longer the totems stay up the more he heals so I like to keep one dps on him whilst the others focus the totems. Most definitely a balancing act sometimes.

FluffyReachWitch

Normally I like a good fight with a gimmicky boss, but the nature of Walks-Like-Thunder's extreme healing makes it pretty inconsistent with other world bosses in terms of general difficulty. On par with B'Korgen and his orb shield spam.

Number_51

Vaoh wrote: »

On the topic of World Bosses, they really don’t deserve that title. I would think renaming them to “Zone Bosses” would be more appropriate.

Create a separate event for a very powerful enemy (Vet HM trial difficulty/health) which is located on the map of Tamriel for all players to see, called a “World Boss”. You can run over there and fight alongside 50+ players in an attempt to take it down. There would be different instances of the same boss so you don’t have the entire server attacking the same boss. Looting the bosses grants unique rewards and possibly even their specific monster set items.

Sounds a lot more fun to me 😬

Isn't calling them "World Boss" a player thing? It may have been different in the past, but to my knowledge the game calls them "Group Boss" (not that that's a better title really, since most don't require a group). Though, if it was "World Boss" in the past I wouldn't put it past ZoS that it hasn't been consistently renamed everywhere.

Love your idea of a true "World Boss" though.

Blinx

I agree he's a pain in the guar, I simply don't do the dailies that include him anymore, there's plenty of other dailies in the game.

Arthtur

I tried to solo him one day. It wasnt possible.... there was too many players

I think its one of the bosses that actually isnt a joke. Thats the reason why i want HM banners added to WB. For "good" players WB are a joke. For more casual players some WB are just a pain.

Tsar_Gekkou

I soloed him and it was annoying. I thought I was doing something wrong but I guess that's just how it is. Dropping his health a bit lower and lower between his healing sucks and takes a while, but it can be done.

IsharaMeradin

All I can say about this boss is that it was easier at one point but then it changed.
More info

Gray_howling_parrot

DivineKitty wrote: »

So, this has probably been brought up before, but I feel it needs to be talked about again. It's not a secret that World Bosses in DLC zones are a fair bit tougher than in other, larger zones, to make up for there only being 2 of them. Most of these I don't have a problem with , but there is one boss that stands out from all the other ones for being just the worst thing ever. I am talking, of course, about the boss of Echoing Hollow, Walks-Like-Thunder.

In case some people have not fought it, or more likely, their traumatised minds have blocked out the memory of it, Walks-like-thunder is a Miregaunt, basically a walking tree. Most of it's attacks are pretty weak, and easy to avoid, but what makes it so terrible is it's ability to drop totems which heal it an incredible amount in a very short time. These totems have the ability to heal massive amounts of it's health in mere seconds, and The amount that it drops at once make it difficult to kill them before it heals back to full health.

This ability to heal makes it almost impossible to kill with a smaller group, or even a larger one if the group members are inexperienced. Adding to this is the fact that Murkmire generally has very little traffic, as there's really not many reasons to be there at all, so asking for help in the Zone chat is often a futile effort outside the most active hours. In my opinion, this boss really needs to be fixed to make it possible to kill it with anything less than an entire legion of soldiers. Either limit the amount of times it can drop the healing totems or, Ideally, just seriously nerf the amount of healing it does.

This is an MMO sir. While you should be able to solo lots of stuff, there should absolutely be mechanics in all aspects of the game that are not doable by a single player but require grouping up. ESO has so much solo content it’s insane. Let’s leave the stuff that requires groups alone because part of an MMO is socializing. If you can’t bear the sight of another human being in your group, then I’d recommend playing the Witcher 3 or skyrim cheers!

xaraan

I agree with you. Despite anyone saying this is "group" content, if there isn't enough population doing the content to support it, then it's a problem IMO.

This boss in particular is almost impossible to fight, especially on certain builds, due just to the healing. Takes forever. And the biggest problem with this (or any other boss or zone event) is that the rewards aren't really worth the time or consumable use to do it as a "daily."

The other problem is that due to the pain of doing these type of bosses, you'll rarely find anyone else doing them even if there are some people in a relatively quiet zone. AND if you do, 99% of the time, they will know nothing about the mechanics because when there is an event (or something just launched) it's so easy to do the bosses or events that everyone mostly ignores mechanics. So even if a random shows up and "helps" you are still essentially doing it solo.

Is this zos' problem? Yes. They've designed the game this way, they've encouraged players to be able to play the basic game with little challenge, do old dungeon pledges with little challenge, power through bosses and zone events during launch or special events when populations are high, etc. Also, ZoS created the imbalanced world bosses from zone to zone (same as unbalanced dungeons from launch to dlc to dlc), they created the concept of doing a "daily" where someone is being asked to go kill this boss by themselves possibly and they've created things to "farm" (as in do over and over and over) to make doing the daily a desire.

I guess I wish there was some sort of better scaling, so alone bosses were possible, just challenging, but if a zerg of players is there, it scales up to where players still have to learn the mechanics to get through them. This might only be possible if they instance bosses though, because for some events, there are dozens upon dozens of players swarming a boss or other challenge. But it's the same for zone events as well, outside of anchors, the newer ones can be almost impossible to solo with probably harrowstorms and dragons as the hardest. I guess it's not a crazy idea that it would require a group to fight these things, but it's not my fault that one of their zones is dead. It's not my fault that there are rewards tied to doing them like dailies, antiquity drops, etc. And it's not my fault that one boss or event in one zone is a cakewalk and the next is almost impossible.

What would I do to fix it?

The biggest thing I would do: Remove world boss dailies and any dailies tied to doing events like harrowstorms or other zone events. I would instead create temporary dailies as part of something like an anniversary event, or something similar where players would already be doing this type of content. I would then create a different type of daily to replace those for players that like to farm the basic dailies. In addition to that, I would offer another undaunted pledge that sent players after a world boss, then you would have a rotating ongoing sort of daily that pointed players toward similar goals and offered the chance to at least form up in a 4 man if you didn't want to go solo. The undaunted can be used to really expand upon group play IMO, I'd even consolidate things like FG/dragon/horrowstorm dailies under undaunted and have them rotate.

I would also rebalance all the world bosses and zone events. I think horrowstorms and dragons are the toughest, but do-able with a few good players easily enough, MAYBE scale those down if you aren't going to offer better rewards. BUT, at least make anchors and geysers and deadric portals, etc. all have the same relative difficulty, so bump those up. Same with bosses, there are a couple that are over-tuned a little, but it's not that noticeable if you can get more than one player to help that knows mechanics. The key thing here is to make them all about the same challenge, so players always know what they are in for. Even in DLC zones, some are still easy and the next almost impossible, let's just keep them in the same category. If we are doing things like above to encourage more players to do certain bosses or events.

TL;DR: 1. Create new undaunted dailies that allow group queues to do bosses and world events (Remove solo dailies for world bosses and create a different daily for that zone more fitting for solo play). Also, create unique dailies for those bosses and zone events for things like Anniversary Events and the like. 2. Rebalance world bosses, zone events (and old dungeons) to make them all relatively equal in difficulty (making old content more challenging) so players don't experience such a wide swing of expectations from doing similar content.

EF321

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

its worse than running direfrost keep with people who cant cc break the final boss drain/heal

I've been told you can use cleanse on these type of people. Never tried myself tho.

Merforum

That boss is super hard and annoying to solo but the more people you have the easier it is. Being a mostly solo player, I don't mind some content that can't be done solo but very limited. One of the best things about ESO is how solo friendly it is. Unlike New world were you can't even finish the main quest solo, or any endgame content solo. Why I quit also the insane gear grind.

skayl

I'm amazed to see how the reaction to this post has been to complain about you 'asking for a nerf' to this world boss... Those who dismiss you outright have fought Walks before, right? I did Murkmire dailies every day for a few months at the end of 2021/the start of 2022 as part of an effort to farm all of the Elder Argonian and Dead-Water Crafting Style pages. I fought Walks many, many times during this period. I've soloed the vast majority of base game world bosses and a fair number of DLC ones too; despite many efforts, I've never soloed Walks. I'm completely fine with bosses that are 'unsoloable,' that's not the problem. I completely agree with everything that you've said in your initial post about how incredibly punishing Walks' mechs are.

The issue with Walks Like Thunder is that he is often nigh unkillable solo and in small groups. The threshold for a successful Walks kill is hard to judge, but the smallest group I've ever seen do it managed with 3 people all doing a pretty tremendous amount of DPS (killing Walks before he spawned totems, this is by far the easiest way to kill him). I've seen larger groups struggle badly, I once spent 21 minutes killing Walks in a group of 8. While there are definitely some groups that just go and parse on Walks while ignoring mechs, the majority are trying to follow the mechs: they go and take down those totems the moment they come up. But there are so many totems, with so much health, that need to go down so quickly, that without scaling the number of totems, their health, or the amount of healing that they do to the amount of people present (or even how much damage is being done to Walks) it is very easy for a group to find themselves in a stalemate. I think that it would be easy to adjust this encounter to be 'easier' (read: 'feasible for groups lacking the dps to burst him before totems') and still have it be very challenging for most, requiring a lot of attention to mechanics.

kypranb14_ESO

Vaoh wrote: »

Ironically the one world boss I want changed is the other Murkmire world boss. I believe it’s called Bok-Xul?

The boss summons huge amounts of NPCs. They are weak so it is not a difficulty complaint, but rather a game performance complaint. My FPS on PS5 starts at 50-60, but during the fight it drops to 10-20 or so due to the accumulated dead bodies. If I let the fight drag on longer it might even get worse.

Just make the NPCs disappear when they are killed.

This boss is a blast to fight solo on a Templar with Pale Order!