Enough with Boss immunity phases

DuskShard

Delves, incursions, overland, raid...In this chapter, it seems like bosses in every type of content have an immunity phase. It is so annoying. New players will just struggle more during the phase and veterans will see it as a waste of time. It serves literally no other purpose than making the fight longer when it shouldn't be if the group is good enough.

Xarc

can't agree more

MidniteOwl1913

Agree, so very pointless and annoying!

alpha_synuclein

Indeed.

amig186

I think the Mirrormoor incursion is the best example, the boss becomes immune, then the valks show up, then they become immune and you can attack the boss, then the boss becomes immune again and the valks appear again.. it's just padding. It's especially annoying when you're trying to set up your dots and debuffs and have to switch targets and do it over again, because it just became immune. That said, I got used to it and just go for quick damage instead.

Tra_Lalan

Yeah hate this too. ESO combat is one of the best things in this game. Those phases break its expierience.

Whenever that happens I feel like I got booted from the game. Is it over yet? Was this the last mob? Do we go back to boss now? No? Am I playing a video game or waiting to play it?

There are many other interesting ways to create fight mechanics (many of them are already in the game), please don't use this anymore.

Jacul

Yep, annoying!

Jaimeh

I agree with the OP. And after the Deadlands portals they became more and more ubiquitous in the game. I was meaning to make a post about this because I also find them very annoying, especially for world events, like Oblivion portals or incursions, because if there are lots of people around they are completely meaningless since everything burns down fast anyways, but if there are few people they are incredibly tedious to get through. For this kind of fight where there aren't any other mechanics, they don't bring anything intersting to the encounter, they are just annoying. In trial bosses when there are more complicated mechanics associated with the invulnerable phase it makes more sense to have them (but again in moderation).

LucyferLightbringer

Couldn't agree more, get rid of stupid immunity phases, everywhere.

Quackery

Agreed, it's insanely irritating to just stand there and wait for the immunity phase to end, over and over again. It's just stupid mechanics!

Jaraal

Fight extenders. Artificial engagement mechanics. Manufactured 'flavor.'

The worst example of this is the final boss of the Oblivion portals. It's literally 90% trash fights while the boss is immune to damage, and 10% boss engagement. It's the same theory as the cliffs that have been used since the original base game zones. Walk 1/4 mile to get to a place 50 feet away. It's designed to keep you spending time moving around between objectives, rather that going straight to the goal and finishing it quickly.

The one good thing about the new 10 minute incursions is that you can at least loot some of the trash mobs, even though nothing really good drops from them. They had this mechanic with the geysers, then went away from it starting with the dragons and the rest of the incursions. But finally there's more reason to kill the minibosses. It would be cool if they had even a small chance to drop furnishing plans and the like, though.

ShadowPaladin

Yeah, I too find this annoying.

BUT!

I must say that at the end this is nothing more than creating new mechanics and dynamics for fights, people (players) need to adapt to. Which is also quite logical from the point of view of the game devs. They would be stupid to let players develope rotations, perfect them and let them use them WITHOUT(!) interference through the whole game ! After some time the whole game would become boring, since players could and would use the same rotations for everything .

Sync01

I don't mind the occasional immunity phase, but this chapter has taken it to the extreme.

So many fights now just feel like it's the same thing over and over again - world bosses, mirrormoor, delves and even the trial all have the same mechanic where you fight an enemy, it becomes invulnerable, you have to kill adds/do some mechanic, it becomes vulnerable again

Calastir

Combined with the often unresponsive controls, lag spikes, stun spamming and massive insta-kill damage enemies deal it feels like the engine is just plain cheating.

jaws343

Jaraal wrote: »

Fight extenders. Artificial engagement mechanics. Manufactured 'flavor.'

The worst example of this is the final boss of the Oblivion portals. It's literally 90% trash fights while the boss is immune to damage, and 10% boss engagement. It's the same theory as the cliffs that have been used since the original base game zones. Walk 1/4 mile to get to a place 50 feet away. It's designed to keep you spending time moving around between objectives, rather that going straight to the goal and finishing it quickly.

The one good thing about the new 10 minute incursions is that you can at least loot some of the trash mobs, even though nothing really good drops from them. They had this mechanic with the geysers, then went away from it starting with the dragons and the rest of the incursions. But finally there's more reason to kill the minibosses. It would be cool if they had even a small chance to drop furnishing plans and the like, though.

To be fair, that immunity phase in oblivion portals is 100% player activated.

If you do not use a skill that interrupts the boss, he never goes into his immunity phase. I've burned him solo using hard cast frags as my spammable instead of crushing shock, with zero immunity phases.

xylena_lazarow

Great post, this is a big reason I never got into this game's PvE. Boss immunity only works if the player is given tools to skillfully remove the immunity. If you're just making players wait, that's not a video game, that's a waste of time.

AzuraFan

Yeah, they're annoying. And often the non-immunity phase lasts 3 seconds before they go immune again.

A little variety goes a long way.

katanagirl1

jaws343 wrote: »

Jaraal wrote: »

Fight extenders. Artificial engagement mechanics. Manufactured 'flavor.'

The worst example of this is the final boss of the Oblivion portals. It's literally 90% trash fights while the boss is immune to damage, and 10% boss engagement. It's the same theory as the cliffs that have been used since the original base game zones. Walk 1/4 mile to get to a place 50 feet away. It's designed to keep you spending time moving around between objectives, rather that going straight to the goal and finishing it quickly.

The one good thing about the new 10 minute incursions is that you can at least loot some of the trash mobs, even though nothing really good drops from them. They had this mechanic with the geysers, then went away from it starting with the dragons and the rest of the incursions. But finally there's more reason to kill the minibosses. It would be cool if they had even a small chance to drop furnishing plans and the like, though.

To be fair, that immunity phase in oblivion portals is 100% player activated.

If you do not use a skill that interrupts the boss, he never goes into his immunity phase. I've burned him solo using hard cast frags as my spammable instead of crushing shock, with zero immunity phases.

Interesting, I thought it was a mechanic that was triggered by hitting a threshold of a certain amount of damage. The few times I have been there with only one other player he went into that phase much less often.

Necrotech_Master

katanagirl1 wrote: »

jaws343 wrote: »

Jaraal wrote: »

Fight extenders. Artificial engagement mechanics. Manufactured 'flavor.'

The worst example of this is the final boss of the Oblivion portals. It's literally 90% trash fights while the boss is immune to damage, and 10% boss engagement. It's the same theory as the cliffs that have been used since the original base game zones. Walk 1/4 mile to get to a place 50 feet away. It's designed to keep you spending time moving around between objectives, rather that going straight to the goal and finishing it quickly.

The one good thing about the new 10 minute incursions is that you can at least loot some of the trash mobs, even though nothing really good drops from them. They had this mechanic with the geysers, then went away from it starting with the dragons and the rest of the incursions. But finally there's more reason to kill the minibosses. It would be cool if they had even a small chance to drop furnishing plans and the like, though.

To be fair, that immunity phase in oblivion portals is 100% player activated.

If you do not use a skill that interrupts the boss, he never goes into his immunity phase. I've burned him solo using hard cast frags as my spammable instead of crushing shock, with zero immunity phases.

Interesting, I thought it was a mechanic that was triggered by hitting a threshold of a certain amount of damage. The few times I have been there with only one other player he went into that phase much less often.

its a bit of both

once he hits thresholds of hp (i think 75, 50, 25), he goes to the middle and starts channeling, if the channel is interrupted that is usually when the invulnerability happens

if its not interrupted he just continues channeling lol

theres a few times where you usually do not want to interrupt things (another example is when your going for a burn strat on the atro boss in the cauldron on vet, you dont interrupt it, it wont move and you can just burn it down)

tsaescishoeshiner

I don't mind the Mirrormoor Incursion ones because they give you something to do while the boss invulnerable. There seems to be a "buffer" between when invulnerability starts and a new target becomes attackable, maybe for clarity?

Flight phases during dragon fights are technically invulnerability phases, but they're short, cool, and don't have a damage-sponge target in front of you. Or when the daedric titan bosses knock everyone back in an unblockable stun, that also pauses combat. I wouldn't mind if they somehow found a way to work in more things like that.

I wonder if it would feel different if all the boss health at an Incursion were on the boss health bar. So that when you killed the minis, the boss bar health would go down, too, instead of pausing.

kargen27

amig186 wrote: »

I think the Mirrormoor incursion is the best example, the boss becomes immune, then the valks show up, then they become immune and you can attack the boss, then the boss becomes immune again and the valks appear again.. it's just padding. It's especially annoying when you're trying to set up your dots and debuffs and have to switch targets and do it over again, because it just became immune. That said, I got used to it and just go for quick damage instead.

I don't mind the immunity because there needs to be something to extend the fight and the other answer seems to be layer upon layer of AOEs and one shots. At least this way a melee character can contribute.

FelisCatus

It doesn't even make the combat more difficult just annoying. I get it makes it feel a little more deep with almost a phase. However the combat in this game unless it's vet isn't designed to be hard, so why timegate us when we're doing dailies?

CrashTest

So true. Anything that stops the flow of the fight is irritating.

Vulkunne

The problem is you have too many cats out there just trying to boss burn and charlie out. While there is a time and place for this, they probably feel like the mechanics are no longer having their desired effect during the fight, so it does make sense to make the boss immune to force the mechanics. Otherwise, people would probably mostly ignore the mechanics and just burn the boss and not think twice, especially with all the newer Mythics and skill adjustments and so on.

Boss immunity is the price you pay for modern day conveniences. *shrugs*

Tommy_The_Gun

Yep, it is unnecessary.

I would also add other very annoying part - Every single mob & boss does not respect player's CC immunity from previous stun & crowd control effect. I can understand why they ignore regular CC immunity skills (like Race against time) as stuff would be abused, but not respecting CC immunity after using break free means that very often player is basically chain-cc-ed and being thrown left & right like a ball lol. It is especially annoying when you do harder solo content like arenas or Infinite Archive, or you just try to solo some easier dungeon.

Armanie

Jaraal wrote: »

It's the same theory as the cliffs that have been used since the original base game zones. Walk 1/4 mile to get to a place 50 feet away. It's designed to keep you spending time moving around between objectives, rather that going straight to the goal and finishing it quickly.

So true. It looks like almost every god damn place in this game is designed to make you waste time: delves, public dungeons... even some towns are like labyrinths.

Mathius_Mordred

Totally agree. My DK gets all his dots down and bam, immune, rinse and repeat, lucky if I'm pulling 10% of the damage. I now use my arcanist on Mirromoor stuff as I can just sweep the beam to whatever is taking damage, that usually gets me up to around 40% of the damage.

ArchangelIsraphel

FelisCatus wrote: »

It doesn't even make the combat more difficult just annoying. I get it makes it feel a little more deep with almost a phase. However the combat in this game unless it's vet isn't designed to be hard, so why timegate us when we're doing dailies?

This ^ Couldn't agree more.

Also, when players asked for more challenging overland, immunity phases on bosses for dailies was not what they meant. What a lot of us wanted was a SOLO challenge mode for quests that wouldn't interfere with anyone else's ability to play the game normally. Now we just have...slower dalies and a few weird anti-soloing mechanics aside from the immunity phases that are just going to be a nuisance once the chapter loses popularity. (Like, seriously zos, self-healing immunity phases if you don't kill adds fast enough on some bosses? Nobody wanted that.)

Necrotech_Master

ArchangelIsraphel wrote: »

FelisCatus wrote: »

It doesn't even make the combat more difficult just annoying. I get it makes it feel a little more deep with almost a phase. However the combat in this game unless it's vet isn't designed to be hard, so why timegate us when we're doing dailies?

This ^ Couldn't agree more.

Also, when players asked for more challenging overland, immunity phases on bosses for dailies was not what they meant. What a lot of us wanted was a SOLO challenge mode for quests that wouldn't interfere with anyone else's ability to play the game normally. Now we just have...slower dalies and a few weird anti-soloing mechanics aside from the immunity phases that are just going to be a nuisance once the chapter loses popularity. (Like, seriously zos, self-healing immunity phases if you don't kill adds fast enough on some bosses? Nobody wanted that.)

at least the healing mechanics on those are not egregiously overtuned like walks-like-thunder WB in murkmire

Elsonso

DuskShard wrote: »

Delves, incursions, overland, raid...In this chapter, it seems like bosses in every type of content have an immunity phase. It is so annoying. New players will just struggle more during the phase and veterans will see it as a waste of time. It serves literally no other purpose than making the fight longer when it shouldn't be if the group is good enough.

If you can't hit them, it is harder to kill them.

Some people want harder content, and bosses that are more challenging. I guess immunity is the way to achieve that? I am fine with it, to a point. If the boss cannot strike and do damage while they are invulnerable, and do not regain health, I am less concerned.

If the boss heals, or can do damage, while immune to my damage, then I consider it cheating at the developer level. Unless we get the same, of course.

Carcamongus

I remember complaining about the same thing last year. Necrom introduced a lot of immunity mechanics that quite often caused the fights to become annoying. Remember Walkingass Dek and his obnoxious immunity that didn't make the fight harder, it just made it boring and much longer? Or that insufferable seeker that vanishes and the adds you need to kill to bring it back are immune?

There's a difference between hard and annoying. I don't like immunity mechanics, but if used sparingly, they can be fine. Their overuse just looks like lack of creativity to me.