Current PVE content is boring

[Leviticus]

NEW Land of Iron got released. Everyone jumps onto hype train and starts grinding that out. That is all great. The game is very grindy so its no surprise the new content will require a lot of grind. That's to be expected. You do around 20-40 hours of grind to get to two end game bosses. When you start to grind the bosses you realize that there is lack of satisfaction from killing them. Why do you think there is this lack of satisfaction in killing some of the strongest bosses in the game? Surely, its something you should be proud of, but it isn't.

In order to see the issue with the current bosses you need to look at similar hardcore games to nin online. I think one of the best games to look at in this scenario is HC Runescape and what they have been through. The games bosses kept on being made stronger by having greater stats points with each new boss release. The problem with this sort of game design is that players that have to play it get bored really easily and there is little satisfaction from killing those bosses. So what did the developers of Runescape do. They decided that instead of bulking the HP numbers on bosses, they lowered health but add mechanics to bosses. The players needed to respect those mechanics in order to be able to defeat the boss. This made the game more fun and and therefore, pulled back a lot of its hard core community back into the game because there was some really good content added to the game. It also created new content like "what is the lowest level I could do xxxx boss?" at.

There are a few ways to go around making end game content more interesting. The following are just my suggestions that I took from other boss fighting games:
1. Making bosses have multiple stages where they use different styles of attacks
2. Add special animations to when a boss will do a special attacks (especially on attacks that can't be subbed) 
3. Make the boss alter the surrounding environment. Example. boss could leave a trail that damages players when they walk through it. Another would be to have rocks drop down and change the area in which player can move (may be more difficult to code though).

I understand that this sounds like a lot of work. However, I strongly believe that it would add a lot of value into the game and more players would be more willing to grind the end game content instead of just stopping at level 50. It would also give hope to current players that this game will grow in size and popularity so that there is point of investing time into becoming better.

[Black Rain]

Even though I'm very happy with the new content, the place becomes kinda empty 2-3 weeks after release.

I think the only other thing I would like to suggest is making bosses extremely difficult in terms of mechanics but also locking the amount of players allowed in to 4 (one party, think of spider boss as an example). This would keep the integrity of the boss. Making a boss that is very hard mechanically to kill and requires tactics with a higher droprate will always be more engaging than just making a giant tank with a very very low droprate IMO

 

tl;dr - i like big sword

[Anna Primal]

Land of iron died  on the 5th day it was release becuase rory added raid points  and  ppl didnt want ot waste xp to unlock the tower. It also died when rory forgot  that pve and pvp dont mix and ppl got spam killed there so of course ppl will leave it alone . TO fine the bosses is simple make them  more rewarding make the drop rate 5% not 0.1  so ppl would risk  farming them and make boss maps no zones .Grinding is fine as long as you dont get sapm killed 24/7 what happens often mixing those things up kills the game.There is a reason why hardly anyody bothers to grind becuase it not a pay off .

 

[Lightheory]

Didn't see land of iron bosses yet, but from my experience with nin "boss" npcs is that they just lack in creativity apart from great looks.
Almost every npc in game that is being count as boss has exact same "mechanics " and stuff

• Flicker
• Use 1 or 2 jutsus that deal ton of dmg - or their melees cuz their jutsus are just stuns that mostly hit everywhere on map
• Have ton of hp
• Have very low drop rate
• Hitbox bugs, targeting bugs
• Feel very very unrewarding 99,9% of time you are killing it with feeling you might as well throw pc out of window after dying to jutsu that is bugged and hits everywhere on map or you died to mob flicking to you, actually managing to hit you even though you run diagonally to save yourself from being hit - hitting you through sub and killing you.

Would be nice to see boss type of NPCs that don't act like summons do (aka stupid chasers with million hp dealing insane dmg) and as Black Rain suggested having bosses that have some stages with actual "mechanics" that are way harder to kill over monsters with lot of hp that have jutsus dealing insane dmg while you have to run diagonal to abuse "feature" that gives you chance to not get hit by flicker.

 

- Manda looks like starting step in good direction.