Boss-Rush RPG Challenge! A House of Champions

After fighting the 5th boss, the stone boss, I have no idea how someone would go undefeated in the run. I tried, but after 30 minutes and not bringing him down to even 50% I just gave up (I also was out of items and had little MP/power left). That or I suspect I don't fully understand the mechanics of that fight. I hope it isn't a fight meant to last > 45 minutes! Anyone who found a good tactic without requiring any retries, I'm interested in hearing it. PM me or spoiler it here. Thanksssss!

From my experience, being terrified noticeably lowers the damage you deal. May also increase damage taken, but I don't know.

I don't really remember the Stone boss fight that well, but I do think you had to chip away at him. I don't remember having too much of a problem with him though.

I think the string of bosses in the 4-6 range are way too easy.
Hammer seemed like it would be a somewhat challenging fight, as I expected I'd have to go through 3-4 rounds of him being vulnerable. Had him down to about 75% with a good amount of mana left, and he just up and died on me.
Alexi was just a complete cakewalk given the proper armor.
Alexandra wasn't hard, but certainly annoying with the constant freezing. Still, I was never really in danger, even with 3 of my party members frozen.

I really liked the three fights before and after Envictus; most of them had something really cool going for them. Znu was probably my favorite; wasn't really hard, but it was nice to deal with a constant stream of damage and having some options in how you wanted to go about it.

Is there any difference between the fight if you steal away the blue corner?

There's a specific ability one of your characters gets at level 6 that does a massive amount of damage to him in particular. The damage is high enough where it's worth holding off attacking except to use it on him in the way one of the NPCs tells you to.

The Alexandra fight can be REALLY hard if she keeps freezing your healer/debuffremoval ability, as can alexi if he gets some good ability rolls. Alexi also seems a bit easier since he's a pretty 'quick' kill in comparison to the rest of them.

#3 was easy the second time around. I used a lot of SP in her first phase, which turned out not to be the smartest thing. After that, it became a pretty easy fight. Just pure attack for the first phase, attack/heal in the hard phase, and cool off/light attack in the easy phase.

Yeah, she's a bit easier once you realize you've just gotta use your resting periods well and burst out of them.

I actually had this happen a few times, but it wasn't that big of a deal. She was never really a one-shot like danger to a particular character, and was more about chipping away all characters at the same time. I basically just saved the all purpose ailment cure and freezing cure items until my healer was frozen, then used them. There was a time or two when I'd use it, and he'd just be frozen again. But as I said, it wasn't the biggest deal as long as I was able to get a heal off every now and then, and just bandage/first aid kit a character if really necessary.

Damn, those last two bosses were great. Seriously, easily the best two in the game mechanic-wise.

+ Show Spoiler [more detailed on bosses 1/2] +.

he randomly one hit ko'd himself

with the blue elephant net being used to catch the red elephant joke

The original design required you to kill him, but recieved a bit of "well, once you know what you're doing it just feels REALLY long" from testers, and I agreed. So I actually INCREASED his abilities a bunch and turned it into a bit of a survival thing. The other issue was that previous to changing it, he seemed very plain in comparison to other bosses. While I wanted a couple of the bosses to feel very 'standard', Hammer wasn't one of them.

Regardless of all this it seems you guys are weathering his storm a bit easier than expected. I think the skill levels of my playtesters was simply lacking. During testing, the best performing tester had to replay 10 of the bosses, many of those multiple times, to get through it undefeated.

Despite this, I hope you guys are still feeling relatively challenged, and are enjoying the fights still.

With the last 10 bosses I was losing interest. I only had to retry once in those last 10-12 when I realized I REALLY needed to wear some Ice elemental gear. Otherwise I pretty much just stuck with gear that benefitted each members stats the best.

I think part of the problem was with the combat system as is, there is limited options you can do to increase the challenges of the game. For additional challenges and complexity, there would need to be a revamped combat system. If it is going to stick as a turn-based menu-style combat like this, there could be more options to choose from during battle to allow for greater variety. Otherwise, a real-time, or semi-real-time battle system revamp would make it much more interesting (though require a LOT more time, and dunno how expansive the RPG designer is).

I also think instead of NPCs simply telling you the tactic to use, it could require solving a puzzle-type-quest thingy. It would make the game a little less tedious and offer some additional mental challenges. As is, after every battle, you walk around and talk to everyone, check for new gear, take out whatever is new, restock on items, "spend" xp to level your characters, and then just fight again.

When you lose a battle, I think you gain too much XP from it. It really lowers the difficulty of the game. I had my healer up to level 15 very early on in the game because of XP gained from a few early deaths. I figured levelling up my healer would allow me more survivability while I hone in on the mechanics for the new fights. It worked out even better than I could imagine!

Sorry if this seems entirely negative. Take it as constructive feedback if you decide to update the game, or for future releases? If you update it, let us know and I would be happy to try it out.

-Added a prompt at the start of a new game which informs the player of the game's controls.
-Slight difficulty tweaks for most Champions. (Nothing major.)
-A couple (very minor) bugfixes.

Unzip, grab the files and paste them over the installation. Your saved games should be fine, but it wouldn't hurt to back up the original files.

If someone's feeling up to a task, going through all 20 undefeated, and taking detailed notes (specifically on difficulty, while levelling characters equally) would be helpful for future patches.

I feel that the game is great how it is, but as us SC fans know, balance can almost always be improved upon. =)

With testing, we quickly found that the game was MORE difficult if you tried to stack one character, but considering you weren't going undefeated, perhaps you hit some sort of sweet spot with your strategy. Although others have been mentioning the difficulty thing, I feel that your beginning game losses probably compounded into creating your pretty good run towards the end.

I've been taking notes. =)

Lisa(Blue), Alexi(Honor), Envictus(Faith), Nafarious(Friendly), Arcturus(Troubled), Vandorian(Insane), etc. etc.

"blah blah blah, something about blue," and "blah blah blah something about royalty/honor/hisfather."

If you still can't seem to beat him, try to pay close attention to his debuff status manually (since you don't get the luxury of seeing his hp bar / debuffs), and try to keep 'ATK Down' on him.