Nerf the Half Finished Bone Giant!

[SomeGirl]

50+ dex and 22+ defense is just massive for where he is in the game, and DarkGod agrees...
He is beatable if you cheese the system with temporary points, but that shouldn't be a requirement for a boss at that level!

IRC LOG

[09:48:19] <SomeGirl> Hey DarkGod2: Can we please nerf the Half finished bone giant?
[09:48:37] <SomeGirl> 50+ dex is a bit.. much
[09:49:43] <DarkGod2> it jsut means he can hit you reliably
[09:49:47] <DarkGod2> and is hard to hit
[09:49:52] <SomeGirl> 22 defense
[09:49:52] <DarkGod2> it's part of him
[09:49:56] <DarkGod2> yes
[09:50:12] <SomeGirl> Okay, whatever, he's supposed to be avoided, not fought, got it
[09:50:18] <Koralin> 22 defense means most melee classes use the temporary talent point trick or they can't win
[09:50:23] <Reenen> yes, just drop his defense
[09:50:29] <Koralin> no, its alway sbeatable, with tactics that are really dumb :p.
[09:50:34] <Reenen> though I plan for it ahead of time
[09:51:09] <Reenen> learning combat accuracy as well as ... precise strikes
[09:51:14] <Reenen> then unlearning it afterwards
[09:51:15] <Koralin> I plan to put 3 points in accuracy then take them out!
[09:51:45] <SomeGirl> I guess cheesing him works fine
[09:51:54] <SomeGirl> I just had issues hitting him on my goddamn archer
[09:51:57] <Koralin> it just takes forever and is a silly thing to require
[09:51:59] <Reenen> Koralin: you can't get 3
[09:52:04] <Reenen> you're too low a level
[09:52:10] <Egglet> who?
[09:52:12] <Koralin> hell if I remember
[09:52:18] <Reenen> you're usually lvl 3 when you get to the half finished giant
[09:52:19] <DarkGod2> make a post please so I dont forget

[edge2054]

I'd suggest just lowering his dex to reasonable levels. This would lower both his accuracy and defense as well as cutting into his damage shield (which is like 500 points or something).

Dropping dex down to 10 or 20 should make him a lot more reasonable.

[Trogdor]

Hm, I was just thinking about this the other day.

I found him to be impossible at level 3 on my Bulwark, as he was basically just a better version of me. Precise Strikes helped to hit him, but the def from Shield Wall didn't stop him from hitting me with that 40+ accuracy of his (or whatever it is). He's also immune to the stun from Shield Pummel. I used the stairs to reset the battle quite a few times, redoing my skills each time, or trying slightly different strategies. It just comes down to being a battle of attrition that a Bulwark can't seem to win. Maybe if you get lucky and find a good shield rune or something?

I had a similar problem with my Berserker. He found me immediately upon reaching the last floor, so I tried fighting him on the stairs a few different ways. Once again I found the limited talents at level 3 to not be enough. Fortunately, I had gotten lucky with enemy spawns on the previous floors, and I was almost level 4. I teleported away and killed enough things to reach level 4 before he could find me again. Having access to my own bone shield and other talents like Sunder Armor and Fast Metabolism made him super easy. To be fair though it probably helped that I had effectively fought him well over a dozen times across two melee characters by this point, so I had the whole process down, I just needed the tools to make it possible.

I don't know if he should be nerfed, or if maybe characters could get bumped up to level 4 upon reaching the last floor, or something else entirely. Maybe I'll try it out on some other classes and see how it goes with them.

[edge2054]

He's pretty bad for all melee. Even brawlers who have relatively good accuracy compared to other classes at level 3 have trouble hitting him and even if you invest heavily in defense he'll hit you anyway.

The fight is winnable but it takes a certain amount of luck and investing in combat accuracy. The luck part being you need to basically have a cleared level so you can kite him around while your shield rune is down.

[Trogdor]

Bad luck for me, he always finds me early. Biggest space I had to work with was a large open room, although that might have been enough on my Bulwark if I could have stunned him to put his ranged ability on cooldown. It wasn't doing much damage when I tried kiting, but with no way to heal it was adding up. I might have lost that one due to his bone shield coming off cooldown though, I can't quite remember.

[HunterZ]

Really annoying that I keep running into this guy as a level 2 ghoul. I pretty much have to just skip exploring the top level of the ghoul starting dungeon and hope I can find the exit before the boss gets me.

Maybe that will be my next addon - something that nerfs the half-finished bone giant boss, at least when you're playing as a low-level undead character.

[Davion Fuxa]

Maybe since he is 'Half-finished' he could have a nerf to his Global Speed or Attack Speed.

[HousePet]

Make the dungeon deeper. Then we can be level 3 instead.

[HunterZ]

He's usually a level 7 boss, so I'm not sure being a level 3 player would help much.

I've started working on an addon that will nerf him if your metarace is Undead. Unfortunately I'm not very experienced at writing ToME addons yet, so it's going slowly:

I've figured out how to hook the loading of the half-finished bone giant entity data and modify it, but that's too early to determine the player's metarace because it happens before the game even starts.

I've figured out how to add a function to the entity data that will be called when the half-finished bone giant is spawned, but that may be too late since his stats will probably already have been determined by then. This is probably the only feasible place to do it, though, unless I want to try to figure out how to intercept the level generation parameter code.

[HousePet]

Do you need to check for the playing being Undead?

[HunterZ]

As far as I can tell, he spawns for everyone. I don't think we'd want to nerf him for non-Undead players, as he would probably be level appropriate for them.

Otherwise it would be easy: I could just do something like override his level range to start at something like 3-4 instead of 7.

On the other hand, I suppose I could leave it up to the player to decide whether to globally nerf him by choosing whether to enter the level with the addon enabled.

[HousePet]

Only undead can get to that zone.

[Razakai]

Yeah, just nerf him outright via the addon, seeing as it's undead only. I've never had a massive problem with him myself, but I've usually been lucky and found him on his own, with room to kite around while shielding comes off cooldown. The times he's spawned with another skeleton nearby has been certain death.
Perhaps one solution would be removing his stun immunity (it's only a half finished bone giant after all) to help with melee, and then have the last floor have a set 'boss arena' like Kor'pul, Rhaloren Camp and so on that contains only the giant along with pillars to break LoS, so you can hit and run with your shield rune.

[HunterZ]

Good to know. I'll start by dropping the low end of his level range to 4 or so tonight and see how that goes.

[HunterZ]

Update: Can't figure out how to change his level via load hook. I'm able to override level range or level values, but they don't seem to take effect.

I did figure out how to lower his dex from the default of a whopping 52 to 26 as a test, and that allowed me to just barely beat him as a level 3 ghoul reaver.

I will probably try lowering it to more like 22 (which would be a proportional value based on ratio of my level to his level) tomorrow night and see how that goes.

This does leave his level of 7 as being a bit misleading. I suppose I could try to change level/range by overloading the entire file that he and the necromancer are defined in, instead of using a load hook; I just wanted to try the hook method first because it's more compatible with future game updates.