Why the bug I wrote became a core gameplay mechanic?!
Chapter 267 - 276: The Emperor Guards the Nation’s Gate!

Chapter 267: Chapter 276: The Emperor Guards the Nation’s Gate!

"Isn’t the first boss pretty simple? How could it wipe us to the point of disbanding? In reality, all it takes is a bit higher DPS, then when the tank goes down, switch to another tank while reducing the DPS output a bit, and promptly clear the adds to step on the energy circles, right?"

"Yeah, I think the first boss is just a standard gatekeeping boss. Although its mechanics are a bit harder than those of a five-man dungeon, after a few wipes, we should be able to get used to it quickly, right?"

"Brother Ding, don’t be discouraged. Maybe your team has too many weak players. Why don’t you try selecting a new batch of people?"

"You guys didn’t watch Brother Ding’s live stream, did you? What he encountered wasn’t the first boss at all, but the fifth boss! That boss really is tricky. Our guild breezed through the first four bosses quite easily, but now we’re stuck on this one."

"The fifth boss? Our guild has already cleared it, though. Nothing memorable about it, just a lackluster-looking dragon, right? Its mechanics seem pretty straightforward too."

"Lackluster-looking dragon? No, no, no, we’re talking about a humanoid creature that can summon meteorites from the sky and turn into a dragon, with 8 million health, no less!"

Everyone discussed vigorously and soon enough, they identified the issue.

The scenarios they faced were all different!

However, this particular variance seemed to be concentrated only on this special humanoid boss.

If you exclude this boss, then the dungeon boss sequence is correct. The first one is that Fallen Giant Dragon, followed by various other bosses, including Dragonkin, the lackluster Giant Dragon, and Evil Beastman Sorcerers experimenting on dragons, and so on.

The order of these other bosses is essentially consistent and lines up.

But this humanoid boss with a high amount of health seemed to randomly appear in any boss area within the dungeon. It could replace the fifth boss, possibly the third, or even—as in Instructor Ding’s team’s case—directly replace the first boss, turning into a gatekeeper boss!

As for how strong this boss actually is?

Sorry, but other guilds don’t know either, because so far, all the teams that have encountered this boss are stuck on it.

If you can practice and coordinate better with other bosses, then the unique mechanics and overwhelming stats of this boss can be said to have directly and inflexibly stalled everyone.

Instructor Ding began to understand.

So it wasn’t that the team he had formed was bad, but rather that everyone was struggling!

His mood lifted a bit, but soon, Instructor Ding’s spirits plummeted again.

If everyone is stuck, then why do they all encounter it midway or in the latter half of the dungeon, while I, damn it, face it right at the entrance?

If the spawn of this boss is random, then the probability of it appearing as the first boss is just one in eight, right?

And I just had to be the one to run into it?

Instructor Ding was feeling a bit defeated.

This game, like other MMORPGs, has a CD mechanism for raids. Simply put, when a full team enters a raid, they will be automatically bound to that instance. For that week, you can only raid that instance and cannot enter a second raid of the same name and difficulty.

Of course, there are different difficulties for raids in this game; they are currently playing on the lowest, ordinary difficulty. Higher up, there’s Heroic Difficulty, Epic Difficulty, Legend.

But the problem is, the gatekeeper boss at Heroic Difficulty is stronger than the final boss at ordinary difficulty.

That means, for this week, Instructor Ding has no other choice but to keep grinding against this abnormal boss with 8 million health with his team, with no chance of tackling any other raids!

This is utterly frustrating!

If other teams encounter this boss at the fifth or sixth boss, at least they can obtain the equipment dropped by the previous bosses. Assuming three to four pieces of equipment per boss for a 20-person team, over a week’s time, that’s more than a dozen pieces of equipment missed out on.

Can you stand for that?

Absolutely not!

Why should I miss out on more than a dozen pieces of raid equipment without doing anything this week? That’s a substantial boost!

Moreover, what’s the point of this mechanic of the boss randomly swapping places?

The difficulty of a raid’s bosses is supposed to increase gradually. If you toss the final boss right at the beginning and force me to fight it, what’s the point beyond just being annoying?

And the most absurd part is, while this design appears random, it equally disgusts everyone.

No need to mention someone like Instructor Ding, who encounters it as the first boss; that’s definitely the most infuriating situation.

But other guilds, facing their third, fifth, or even seventh boss, wouldn’t feel lucky either; they’d be just as mad!

Why?

Because they had the strength to beat the original bosses and could have pushed all the way to the end. If they encountered this humanoid Flame Dragon at the final boss, they could at least have secured the loot from the previous bosses.

In other words, only those guilds fortuitously encountering this boss at the very end would get a normal gaming experience.

All other guilds were equally nauseated by this, just to varying degrees!

So, these guild leaders immediately allied with Instructor Ding, united in their condemnation. It must be condemned!

But the problem was... where to complain?

This was Nitiandang after all...

As everyone knows, Nitiandang never had customer service, and online public opinions, no matter how fierce, would never receive a response—a roach’s posture that simply couldn’t be squashed.

Especially since Nitiandang players seemed to have been PUA-ed, every time a new game got unplayable, the first reaction wasn’t that there was a problem with the game, but that they hadn’t found some special hidden mechanism.

So, after ranting and raving in the voice channel for a while, everyone eventually went back to their own homes and their own problems.

Instructor Ding was still furious, and the more he thought about it, the angrier he got, but after contemplating, he realized that being angry wouldn’t solve anything. So with resignation, he scratched his head and went to bed.

...

The next day, all the major guilds continued their progression raids!

As more players reached max level, even more ventured into the Lava Mouth raid, with some large guilds simultaneously organizing four or five groups to progress.

But the more players raided, the clearer the instance mechanics became.

Clearly, Instructor Ding and his team’s speculation was correct; this humanoid creature called "Nephalor" was indeed the final boss of the raid, that humanoid Flame Dragon! He was also the final boss of the regional story map.

However, unlike other MMORPGs’ final bosses, he wouldn’t stay put at the end of the raid but would randomly appear in any part of the instance, swapping places with an original boss!

Thus resulting in the dire situation that Instructor Ding encountered, akin to "an emperor guarding his own gate".

Even without clear statistics, based on feedback from various guilds, the probability of this boss appearing in any of the eight possible locations seemed random, without being more likely in one spot.

And precisely because of this, each raid group only had a one in eight chance of experiencing the game normally.

As expected, online public opinion exploded again, but Nitiandang played dead, completely indifferent.

Instructor Ding, on the other hand, in a mix of shutting down and continuing to attempt progression, kept pushing because, aside from this boss, there wasn’t much else for the group to do.

The good news was that after enduring tremendous hardships, they finally conquered the boss’s second stage.

The bad news, however, was that there was a third stage to this boss that was almost impossible to pass!

In the third stage, it continued to use many abilities from the second stage, such as mass fear, random area-of-effect damage skills, and summoning minions. But there was also a new mechanic—target calling!

Nephalor would randomly target a class, and all players of that targeted class would receive different negative effects.

For instance, priests’ healing would cause damage instead; mages would use a skill called "Spelly Thief" to steal teammates’ skills and buffs while casting an enhanced Polymorph on teammates at random; warriors would abandon their shields and wield double weapons; shamans would place totems that buffed the boss.

Each class call was incredibly difficult to handle, and one misstep could lead to a wipeout.

Furthermore, depending on the targeted class, the boss would summon various area-of-effect spells, like if a mage was targeted, Frost Nova or Blizzard would randomly appear on the ground; if a Magician was called, Rain of Fire would occur at random.

The damage from these AoE skills varied but combined with the boss’s own AoE attacks, they further compressed players’ space to dodge.

After struggling to get the boss to the third phase, Instructor Ding became even more despondent!

Under this mechanic, seeing any hope of overcoming this boss was next to impossible.

"Damn it all! Does it feel like the developers never intended for us to clear this raid, and are just tormenting the players?" Instructor Ding pounded on the table, his negative emotions clearly reaching a boiling point, ready to explode at any moment!