Bossing Auf Changes Feedback

This new patch introduced a change in a critical mechanic for Auf. Prior to this change, Auf would deaggro/aggro based on certain combination of atks or skills used. For example, if you use thieve's disorder or Sair's hypnotize, it would deaggro the boss. It was a very useful strategy to deal with clones as well as prevent Auf from spamming her orb atk.

With the change however, Auf auto aggros to players leading her to spam her atks constantly. I would say that the auto aggro part isn't really an issue. The bigger issue is that she spams her orb which leads to more dispels. Classes with low avoid (sair/mm/bm) are having to rebuff every 15-20 seconds. I don't think melees are affected too much because of the iframe from hitting Auf's body and I've been told that Nls are having issues too, but not as bad as low avoid classes. I think this is a pretty big flaw in the boss and/or class design. The hitbox of her orb atk is way too big and frequent that it makes it impossible for "reasonable" counter play. I used to have to rebuff probably once every 1-2mins. Now, I feel like I'm playing rebuff story. After talking with a few other sair players(like the 4 of us), the only counter play is bringing 2shad/2bucc and smoking our sairs so that it wont get hit by the orb atk. That is an unreasonable ask imo. Either give the low avoid classes an ability to not get dispelled or change the dispel mechanic.

A side topic I also want to bring up is the concept of damage efficiency and its contribution to multiclient attacking. I'll define damage efficiency as "Actual DPS"/ "Ideal DPS". Now, this efficiency can go up and down based on the boss mechanic as well as the class characteristics. On royals, classes like Shad/bucc/nl have the highest damage efficiency. This is also why they are the most popular classes to multi-atk with. The players that main these 3 classes told me that this auf change hasn't really impacted them "alot" when they run their aufs. On the other hand, the sairs/mm/bm mains all told me how miserable they are with this new change. These 3 classes are also the ones with the lowest damage efficiency and hardest time to multi-atk with.

I would love to hear other folk's thoughts on the matter.

Spoiler: The "real" solution to this issue...

#DeleteSairs

 

My opinion is we shouldn't do any big twists on bosses like this when the classes aren't balanced yet.
The root reason why this change caused more trouble to sair/bm/mm was because thieves got avoid/shifters, and melees, especially buccs, got iframes. Hence, naturally any big twist to the boss would always be less relevant on them and always end up hitting way harder on sair/bm/mm. The same reasoning holds true for when the gargoyle's range stun attack was introduced to vl. The difference here was hsh was utilized to counter play the stun spams in vl, whereas auf dp has no counter play.

I would really like to hear an in-depth response on the goal of this change from the balancing team.
When the patch note came out I immediately asked for the goal of this change in shoutbox because I knew it was going to mess up sair so bad. Tim responded saying "It's a high level boss fight, not a map to relax in."
But auf was never easy nor chill for the non-avoid/non-iframe classes. Classes with bad avoid/iframe gets dped way often than the avoid/iframe classes. The root problem was never about deagroing. It's the avoid and iframes that are making these classes relaxing to play, and that's also encouraging people to abuse these classes to do solo auf.

If the goal was to make auf more challenging and nerf the solo runners then the priority should be instead focusing on class balancing. I think we can all agree soloing contents that were designed for being done in party is very unhealthy for the longevity of the game, but people are always going to do it if it's worth the time and effort. I would suggest either nerf the avoid or nerf the damage of these multiclient-favored-classes to reduce their overall damage output so we can discourage people to abuse these classes for multi-attack solo runs.

 

I would like to formally apologize for myself and the community. The original avoid nerf to thieves was actually a giga brain idea and we weren't worthy of such a change. We cried like little babies, but it honestly should have stayed. Im sorry @Kenny, you can put it back now. Save us my king.

 

#NerfShad

I don't play sair anymore because of how pretty much all the changes being made to the game to punish mulestory / other problematic classes ends up hurting sair as collateral damage. The sair community is really small so there's not much to be done but to take the hits and keep going or just quit. Thief avoid gets reworked, and all hell broke loose over a 10% avoid nerf after factoring shifters increased skill% because just about everyone plays NL and shad. The change ended up getting reverted.

I think dispel should just be full map and on its own timer. Don't have it tied to the orb being fired, there's just no counterplay. It's either you are hugging auf / doing some bs infinite iframe combo with shad or bucc or you're playing NL which doesn't get hit anyways. Though, I see shads getting stunned a lot still . Having it be its own thing like VL dispel would make it more fair for all the classes. I think this is the most elegant solution to the issue for auf. Maybe 90 second timer?

edit: Another, but I'd say really bad solution would be to just flood auf's logic with redundant non-dispel skills so that it picks the orb dispel less often.

 

this is a nitpick that's not too relevant to what this post is mainly addressing, but with a strong party that can keep auf pinned it's not possible for a melee to stand within aufs hitbox while standing on the melee platform, so in that scenario they will also encounter the same debuff spam as sair/se.

Just wanted to clarify that bit. I agree with everything else you said.

 

Haven't had a chance to try these changes yet on my mm, but everything I'm reading above concerns me. Keep in mind that SEs don't just need to rebuff whenever *we* get hit with dispel. We need to rebuff SE whenever *anyone* in the party gets hit with dispel, especially the NL. So whatever pain you're feeling on sair/NL, we feel it multiplied. I can give further thoughts once I try it out for myself though.

This sounds good to me but I'd prefer it to be randomized rather than be on a predictable timer. Tbh, I like the fact that bs mules have a hard time surviving auf. Being forced to survive without the safety net of having res makes the fight much more exciting. So I want to make it harder to keep those mules alive.

 

Would you be able to make another type of attack dp ball without the dp without having to set cooldowns for attacks?(So overall it would do less DP) It would do the damage as intended but less impact on those with less avoid.

I do like this attempt, but feel like getting rid of DP in the orb will make the boss even "easier". Since the only time you actually die in auf is sed + X, a slow animation of gene during sed wont achieve anything unless its insta kill(given that higher % of failing a run or dying constitues to a content being harder). The fast ORB + DP cast is what makes auf actually "dangerous", especially for people who brings bishops/characters with reletively low HP. Although the motives of the changes were unclear, I agree that it did make auf "harder", but the changes were much more impactful on non avoid classes (If auf starts spamming orbs, try attacking the boss before you rebuff it did kinda help).

On a side note, I really don't understand the motives of trying to make a content released more than 2 years ago "harder". Auf is already pretty hard, since all other bosses other than AUF + VL require no skill. It does kinda worry me becuase it seems that there is no content that are in development, and trying to compensate by "recreating" old content.

 

Thanks for the explanation! Seeing the thought processes really helped a lot on understanding why the changes were done.

I like this approach too. Making the dp's dodge-able sounds like a fair alternative, though it really requires some testing. My concern here is considering how often auf spams orbs/genesis, it might just end up changing from rebuff-story to dodging-story, leaving very minimum chance for sair/bm/mm to actually do damage. If there's is a way to also tune down how often auf uses the dp attack, then making it dodge-able could be a fair fix. Though, I would like to point out once again, shad/bucc/nl would still be op with this solution since they barely get hit so don't need to dodge anyways.

I agree with this. In fact, I feel like the current clones really isn't well designed. Currently the clones are only dangerous when someone doesn't have enough hp to tank all the hits in one sed duration (something like 3 orbs ~24k). This just creates another hp check situation which I think is quite boring.
I would rather see some change around their dr's. For example, let the clones start casting lethal dr's that last for a few seconds each time if they weren't killed within 60 seconds after summoned, being a risk factor on the map that can disrupt the run. This kind of mechanism are less affected by avoid/iframes and shifts the hp requirement more to actual gameplay. Also encourages people to use stronger attack pot than stopper/gizer and encourages recruitment of actual attackers rather than using mule attackers with secondary sets.

 

I have a few questions before I share my thoughts on potential skill changes for Auf.

1.What is the end goal for these changes?

• The current state of Auf is that it's a highly profitable(b/c of the high drop chance for mir) boss for folks to solo/duo. Weaker parties can easily do trio to clear. Are we trying to make it harder so people have to bring bigger parties(parties meaning active players not mules) or are we trying to match the difficulty to its profitability? Depending on the answer, you can do different things to achieve that goal.

2.Will there be a back-and-forth process for these changes based on future class balancing patches?

• It's hard for me to grasp what changes will be theoretically good if I'm not sure what the class changes are. Even if we make a suggestion now to fit our current meta, it might not work in the future meta.

Here are some random thoughts I cooked up to make the boss harder in general.

• Make gene like VL rocks will 100% make it hard for people to solo and duo especially since they have to dodge on so many characters
• Make clones like vl golems where you have to kill it within a certain time frame or it will heal?
• Change seduce mechanic so that avoid/shifter/guardian doesn't work so only a bishop healing or HW can save you.
• Remove Auf hitbox so melees can't get iframes(the shads/bucc/warriors are going to hate me)
• Make gene an map wide 1hko atk that requires the players to move all their characters to the top right plat. Maybe just add an charge up animation so people can have time to move. You can make this cd every 3-5 mins.

 

How viable would it be to add an extra copy of her non-orb attacks to her list (does same damage, same animation, so pretty much same attack) in order to reduce the chance that she uses an orb attack? That might not fix the fundamental problem but I'd guess it should be reasonably simple to implement so could act as a stopgap measure while working on a more advanced solution.

 

From what I recall, mobs have a limit to the number of attacks they can have. If I remember correctly, that number is 6, which is the number of attacks Auf has. I don't know how true this is today.

However, I took some time to look into this and it may be possible that the dispel chance can be lowered. I checked other mobs that use the same dispel as Auf, such as Manon and Griffey. This particular dispel seems to have a certain % chance. I then confirmed with Manon that the dispel is not a 100% chance in game (just like Auf). So, if I'm correct, one could adjust the value corresponding to the dispel chance. Only a very small handful of mobs use the same dispel, so it's easy to keep track of the change, or one can pick 'another dispel' to pull from.

I kept my post vague on the details (e.g. not explicitly saying what Auf's dispel chance is), as I don't want to get dinged for harvesting the game files and posting the info without permission.

I like the ideas brought up about making clones more interesting. I would expect that straight copying of VL concepts into Auf is off-putting, but I feel that some inspiration is okay. So for example, rather than killing clones in time before a heal, instead perhaps the clones cast a heal and other buffs on Auf every x seconds.

 

Hope you guys consider Warriors in the fight too. People see how Shadowers/Buccaneers are just untouchable due to their high avoid/iframes and assume the same for Warriors. Rangeds have ~2-3x more avoid than Warriors and Buccs have roughly ~2x their avoid. 1H Warriors have the option for Guardian which makes their overall 'avoid' better but isn't on the same level as the iframes/avoid of Bucc & Shad. If we get dispelled, then we have to rebuff longer than others depending on the class & if 1h/2h (Paladins suffering the most).

1H Warrs can technically take touch damage to avoid DP but there's a possible chance of getting SED and knocking the boss into yourself + your teammates while in SED. This has almost happened to me on a few occasions

Also, restore Rush in Auf...

Spoiler: ...

and reduce accuracy needed to hit Royal Guard

 

So far only the increased number of DP has been talked about in this thread, however I want to make sure there is some attention to the huge increase of stun spam as well. The stun spam seems to specifically target ranged attackers and is in my experience at least as toxic if not more than the DP spam. Yes a good bs will mitigate this to some extend with hsh, but the stun spam is still way too much in it's current state and it would be insane to bring multiple bs (we already got bga for that).

I vividly remember this nice sequence of events running my sair: dp -> stun -> stun -> buff -> sed -> stun -> stun -> dp. All without being able to put in a single attack. If if wasn't for my party members I would've rage quit at that point.

The only reason I am currently still running on my sair is because I'm actively looking for a circlet to scroll, I would've ran solely on my bucc otherwise as gameplay for bucc has not changed a bit. This boss used to be fun to run, but it is far from that right now.

The most telling point that the current state of auf is not in a good place became clear during a run where both of my party members died/dc'ed quite early during the main fight. For some reason I decided to torture myself and try to complete the run solo (as sair, no multi clienting). It quickly became clear after the first clone spawned that the clone is actually helpful, as long as the clone was hitting me, chances of getting dp'ed/stunned decreased greatly. The clones are supposed to make the fight harder, they are supposed to be a priority to clear, but the sheer amount of dp and stun makes them nice to have around.

I understand why the changes have been made, but it is pretty cleared that the changes failed miserably to achieve what they were supposed to do. The bucc+shad combo has been untouched, which was arguably the main problem.

I would suggest to revert the changes until a proper fix for the problem exists. And keep in mind that the current problem is not just the DP spam.

 

I've now run this boss 4-5 times on my marksman since the changes were made. The dp/stun is horrible, agreed But I think enough has already been said on that.

The other thing worth mentioning is that the boss is just generally much easier now. Across all these runs I never needed to HW even once. Because of how Auf now spams attacks, she doesn't really wander at all anymore even if you're all in sed. That means you don't really have to worry about touch damage.

Pinning is easier now too which opens up new possibilities for party comps. We even tried a run with 2x shad + 1 MM. Seems like you can get away with not even having a bucc/warrior anymore. Once she's in the corner she stays there. As long as you can smoke the corner during left sed.

You can also manipulate Auf with puppet now too, but I haven't found a way to make it do anything really beneficial (and soloing auf on an SE wouldn't be too fun anyways).

 

As much as I agree on how Sair is unplayable in auf with all the dp/stun/sed, I'll have to say the stun is a relatively manageable part if you know how to counter it.
When auf dashes toward you there's a short window for you to dismount and walk forward to tank her touch dmg, which gives you an iframe to avoid the following stun attack.
This would require a bit of a good reaction but I would still consider her dash/stun a counter-able attack. A rework might not be necessary but toning down the frequency would be nice if possible.

Strongly agree with reverting the agro change until there's a viable solution on the table. Auf was the only good endgame boss for Sairs and now its gone. There's no point playing the class anymore after this agro change.

 

Did auf haven since the new update and it seems reverting it back to the old state has not happened yet?

 

yea its not fixed, probably unintentional, should make some bug report on it so they're aware

 

Can confirm auf isn’t fixed and this so called “fix” has broken this boss even further making it unplayable for select classes. Before all the recent changes auf was in a good state. Now it’s just unbearable. Please consider this when making changes as it’s been months now. Thank you for your time.