ZZZ Anonymous@ZZZAnonymously
Let us discuss Deadly Assault.
Easily the most egregious and yet least discussed of the ways that 2.X has supposedly enshittified the game-more than it being Chinese, more than everyone wearing the Rupture one-piece, more than Seed having bare feet or Orphie being Orphie instead of Sarah Connor, more than the story supposedly lacking it's original 'Too Cool For School' edge-is the absolute mess that Deadly Assault has become. This is a consequence of a number of overt and covert things, with the overt being HP inflation (which, as a tryhard 'git gud' sweat I will finally concede is getting rather noticeable) and shill buffs as powerful as multiple agent mindscapes.
Those are, as far as I can observe, discussed to death. That is why I want to discuss the more covert ways in which the mode has (in my opinion) been ruined, and it comes down to the formula of boss design.
From 2.0 to 2.4, five bosses have been added to the Deadly Assault roster, Miasma Priest, Miasma Fiend - Unfathomable, The Defiler, Wandering Hunter and now The Thrall. The greatest commonalities between them is that their fights are very scripted. An amount of brawling is undergone, and then the boss enters a Miasma shielded state or outrightly becomes invulnerable, and some series of mechanics and/or general alterations to play must be performed to optimally defeat this phase. Upon defeating it, the boss suffers immense damage, daze, and refreshes your squad's resources.
This abstractly defined, it's hardly a problem. The problem arises from the fact that all of these 'cutscene phases' are exactly that. The hardest part of every Deadly Assault fight is never the parts that make them unique. Priest just wants you to replay his moveset. Fiend wants you to dodge. Defiler wants you to press buttons and run the right agents (more on that later). Hunter wants you to press a SINGLE button on the right thing. And The Thrall is just a mess. None of these mechanics will ever be as difficult as playing a perfect stun window, and so they feel more like breaks to breathe within a fight, but also low points within them as a consequence.
The 2.X DA roster is defined by cinema at the expense of skill expression and often even plain fun. The first time you parry Priest's barrage of parry checks, it feels amazing. The tenth time, it wears thin. Parrying that same barrage from Defiler wears even thinner. The gameplay value of consecutive tight timing challenges comes from the difficulty of being reactive, but that is lost once you realize that every single 2.X DA boss begins their mechanics phase at specific times on the clock. Even if you aren't actively paying attention, your pattern recognition brain is evolved to do it anyway, and subconsciously prepares you whether you wish it or not. It then becomes "Ah, time to start mashing spacebar," and it quickly starts to occupy the same space in our minds where we keep watering the lawn, doing dishes and taking medication.
I think Defiler is the single worst boss in the entire game. I used to hate Marionette, until I started thinking about Marionette as a dance instead of a brawl and realized I couldn't try and play faster than the boss without risking tripping on my own toes. Defiler is the crown jewel of awful 2.X boss design. It has not one, not two, but three phases where you are doing things that are just less engaging than everything else you're doing during the fight. Phase 2 of the Defiler, the giant wave, is easily one of the worst anti-player mechanics I've seen in these games, designed to make clears with certain kinds of teams outrightly impossible. You parry the Defiler to knock her down, then you destroy an object to shield yourself from the Defiler's instant kill mechanic, then you parry the Defiler's beyblade attack, then you parry the Defiler's goons. The entire fight becomes hitting spacebar when she flashes you and letting a dozen ultimates rip because all the parries ensure you're topped off on decibels. It's a fight that is only as fun as your desire to perfectly route a path through it (such as if going for 65k kills) but otherwise it's the same tiresome game of wondering if that ringing in your ears has always been there.
That much is to say that the 2.X DA boss roster lacks spontaneity in their movesets, and the fact you no longer have to be faster or smarter than the boss has made them boring. The least offenders to this are Fiend and Hunter, but that isn't to say that they are good bosses, just that by virtue of having the least obnoxious of the cutscene chores they give you, they are the least bad. Fiend is crippling in how honest it is, as it doesn't even pretend like its cutscene phase is gameplay; you dodge it six times, run to the edge of the arena, and then get back to having actual fun.
It begs the question, why?
For one, cinema sells. "Zenless has amazing bosses!" Is something Hoyo wants you saying to your friends who don't play. Even if you personally are tired of them, you can begrudgingly admit that in a vacuum they are decently cool opponents to fight. However, I also think it stems from making it more apparent when you're fighting the boss 'correctly'. Consider the 1.X boss cast and their scoring requirements of disorder the boss, or dodge the boss, or parry the boss. If you close out the fight with less than 5k performance points, it's easy to deduce "Ah, I should've done more disorders!" The problem comes from then answering the question of "Where could I have been doing disorders that I wasn't?" This is a problem that you'll never have with Defiler or Hunter. If your performance points are incomplete, you simply Failed The Gimmick. Run it back.
This accomplishes a number of things. For one, performance points being as easy to get as they are means that more people with worse teams can now clear Deadly Assault. Depending on who you ask, this is a good or bad thing. On that, I decline to comment. On the other hand, it now makes it very obvious to the score-chaser crowd when they're reaching the upper limit of what they can achieve with their current skills and investment level. Whether you agree with it or not, everything about these games is subtly poised to push your eyes towards a gacha banner. If Thrall is a problem for you, you can simply pull Dialyn. Her shill buff is incredible. If it's still a problem, you're gonna love the solution we're selling in 2.5. This was the case with Yixuan and Priest, Alice and Fiend, Defiler and the Obols, Yidhari and Hunter, and it will be the case with Thrall and Ye Shunguang. This is just how these games are made.
On that note, we reach the 2.4 boss of Thrall, and what can I say about it that you aren't already feeling? It's another helping of More on top of a pile of Enough. It's janky, an endless string of parries (some of which randomly whiff, costing you performance points, resets, and time as a consequence), with a walking, screaming, anti-player cesspool in the middle of it. It has four tutorial text bosses popping up in it. It's made for Stun teams but features an unstunnable damage check in the middle. And after four patches of this, its cinema and spectacle are just expected rather than particularly noteworthy. I'm just not particularly moved by a giant alligator flopping around in the sky. I'd rather have fought the man himself with a moveset of just as many parries, but also a suite of mandatory dodges and mixups in his strings.
Isn't it somewhat demoralizing that Doppelganger Jane is so much more enjoyable to fight than most of these bosses? And Doppel Jane came out in 1.2. We've had the blueprint. Of all of Isolde's incarnations, the fight with the woman herself is the absolute best. I personally consider Shiyu a much more fun gamemode than Deadly Assault, because it still has bosses you can meaningfully interact with, such as canceling Jane's Bladerunner attack with Yuzuha's parry, or stopping Heretic Jester from triggering his Miasma phase with well-timed Shock procs or charged EXes + hold basics from Seth
The sum of all this is that we are now in a position where despite having multiple times more effort put into them, presenting so much more spectacle, and arguably even being more complex bosses, the 2.X roster is inferior to the 1.X roster as a test of skill. As much as we all hated Bringer, MonoIce is still one of the truest expressions of game mastery the game has offered, and it's sad how so much effort has been expended to kill it. In the same vein is cancelling Pompey's bike phase via calculated accumulation of the staggering debuff and Fire Anomaly procs, and cancelling Notorious Butcher's windmill attack with Freeze and Corruption procs.
It used to feel like we actually 'fought' these bosses. Now we just endure them. I'm tired of fights with midroll ads. If you feel similar, ensure you use the feedback forums provided to us. The devs have demonstrated an admirable willingness to both listen to us and action upon what we say. I'll still keep playing the mode, but I used to grind it. Now I take my measly 85k and leave. It is what it is.
