SO YOU SAY YOUR GAME HAS STRATEGY

Yes, I agree with LDanarkos; status effects should be used in moderation, or even not at all. It's no fun discovering you have run out of poison antidotes and having to limp all the way out of the dungeon back to town to buy more, just as it is no fun to watch your party be immobilized for five turns before receiving a game over.

Granted, some status effects can be useful ways to add spice to a combat system; the ever-popular attack up/down and defense up/down, elemental shields, status effect shields, speed and slow skills and regeneration and auto life, to name a few common ones.

But to avoid getting to specific about how the mechanics of a boss fight can work, since those will be different for each game engine, I will instead post a series of archetypal boss fights I have come across in my years of playing RPGs.

1) The Countdown Boss Everybody knows this one. It's a boss like Bahamut for Final Fantasy 4, or Hecatonchires from Digital Devil Saga 2. The player either has to defeat the boss before it does a devastating attack, or else buff up before that attack to weather its effects before getting back on the offensive. I personally think this kind of fight can work well at any point in the game, as coding such a boss is easy and the fight always has some tension. Heck, Tiamat from Final Fantasy VIII can ONLY do one super attack, and she's one of the last bosses in the game!

2) The 'Rainbow' Boss This is a boss that defies the conventional RPG wisdom of having just one elemental weakness, and instead rotates its elemental weakness to various different things. Variations on this can also be using different elemental attacks in a certain order to win, such as with the Time Devourer in Chrono Cross (a very apt name for a boss). I don't recommend this kind of boss for anything but the end boss or late in the game bosses, and never for regular enemies. Even if the party has all the elemental attacks it needs to win, the fight is still tedious, and if the party doesn't you force the player to go back to their last save and figure it out before the fight. So, I advise using this one sparingly.

3) The Minion Boss We've already talked about this one in the thread; it's the boss with a lot of minions surrounding it which it may or may not be necessary to kill in order to win the fight. Many, many boss fights do this, and variations can include a boss with 'mirror forms', such as Stoker from Final Fantasy V, where you have to hit the real boss or get punished with a powerful counterattack. These kinds of fights can be fun or frustrating depending on how they are set up, and to make them enjoyable I recommend reducing the randomness factor. In a case where a boss resurrects a minion, don't have the boss sometimes be able to resurrect more than one or all the minions at once. You want the player to feel smart and reward them for following a clever strategy, not frustrate them at the least minute with a cheap comeback that repeats the entire fight over again.

4. The Guard Down Boss The boss that is usually extremely tough but has a window of opportunity to be attacked 'for massive damage' at some point in the fight. Every boss in the Xenosaga series has a pattern like this, due to the various turn order systems those games have. The inversion of this boss if of course the 'Guard Up" Boss, which is something like Guard Scorpion from Final Fantasy VII, where there is a window where the player shouldn't attack. I recommend this kind of fight, since it rewards the player for paying attention and not just 'button mashing' through a fight. I advise keeping the tension up for a boss fight all the way through whenever possible, as the player will feel rewarded for claiming victory due to their own observations and conclusions.

5. The Status Effect Boss Ugh. You know this one; it's a boss that spams poison, stone, drain, death WHATEVER! As you can tell, I don't like this kind of boss, because usually there is only one way to beat it; have something that blocks against negative status effects and whack away. Granted, a boss with a status effect attack or two can add an extra bit of strategy to a fight, but when you make status effects the focus of a battle you end up with fights like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPL4EG-8xv8

6. The Form Change Boss As its name implies, this is a boss that changes its form, and with it most if not all of its stats, during the fight. Most final bosses do this, but it is also fairly common for regular bosses to have this feature. Variations include things like the famous/infamous 'second winds' from Breath of Fire 1, where a boss would come back just before it dies and the player would have to fight it again (seriously, what was the point of bosses even having a life bar in that game?). Sometimes designers get very clever with this idea and have a boss's second form reflect how the first form was defeated, such as in the case of Lost Number from Final Fantasy VII, whose second form will either be a magical or a physical monster, his first form being a balance of the two. I recommend this kind of boss, just so long as the boss doesn't have too many forms to the point where the fight drags and gets ridiculous.

7. The Gimmick Boss To an extent, all of these bosses have gimmicks, but this one takes things further. It's the kind of boss which has a really high attack and a low defense, or vice versa, the kind of boss that casts shield on itself and reflects attacks against the party, the kind of boss that uses only magical or physical attacks or is immune to one or the other, the kind of boss you fight on a timer, etc. There is no limit to what you can do with a gimmick boss, and the success or failure of this kind of boss rests solely on how much fun the gimmick turns out to be. If the gimmick is easy to figure out, then there isn't much else to the boss, but if the gimmick is really obtuse then things become frustrating. I think its good to have at least a few gimmick bosses in an RPG, but I don't think they should be the focus; if the player is just figuring out gimmicks and not actually fighting a boss with their weapons, skills, and combat strategies, then the actual mechanics of the game will seem superfluous.

8. The Auto-Heal Boss A boss which auto-heals when it is low on health, forcing the player to finish it off quickly before it gains back all of its life. DON'T. DO. THIS. This boss is far more common than it should be, and it is in my opinion the absolute worst kind of boss (yes, even worse than The Status Effect Boss). The reason this boss stinks is that, most often, the only thing it rewards is level grinding. For example, the Hydra from Grandia III (which isn't really a 'boss' boss, but it does guard a treasure) regenerates a huge amount of health each turn, meaning that the only way to beat it is to never let up with powerful attacks. It's very easy to beat if you are high enough level, but virtually impossible to beat for a party which is too low level, no matter how clever a player is with the fight. By itself, this boss requires no strategy at all, and that's why it stinks. However, while still frustrating, this kind of boss can be a rewarding challenge for a player in a game which has buff stats, as then a player has to buff up enough to kill a boss before it regenerates back to full. Even in such a situation however, I don't recommend using this kind of boss. If you're going to give a boss healing, don't give it the power to heal back to full in one turn. It's just cheap.

9. The 'Max' Boss A boss that an average party doesn't have a chance of beating due to overwhelming defense, offense, or ability. This kind of boss is almost always optional, for obvious reasons (it would make a terrible final boss, for example, at least in the normal game). Examples include the Weapons from Final Fantasy VII, Lucifer from Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne, Chronodia from Final Fantasy I's 20th Anniversary, and too many others to count. Since this sort of boss is for the die-hard player, it should be a decent challenge even when a player has access to all of the most powerful abilities in the game, and shouldn't just be an over-powered normal boss. A gimmick or two in this fight is forgivable, as is even an auto-heal on the part of the boss. Just make certain the player feels as though they have earned victory, instead of feeling like they have trudged through a drawn-out fight with 'just another boss.' This is an optional fight, so don't be afraid to pull out all the stops with making the boss a brain teaser. A player is only doing this fight because they want a challenge.

There are probably others I'm leaving out, but this post has gone on long enough.

In an old project of mine, one boss used illusion based skills. He was able to summon up to eight "minions", and could resurrect himself. One player build featured a skill that made the boss's deception a non-issue, since the "see through illusion" skill insta-killed all the doppelganger and minion spawns and left only the illusionist enemy. Of course, in that instance I switched to an alternate version that had higher damage potential than the normal one, and a faster turn rate (justified, since he was no longer dividing up his concentration by running a ton of illusions in parallel). Other players just had to use enemy all attacks, or pay attention to see that the false enemies always did less damage then the real ones, and focus their attacks accordingly, since destroying one of the illusionist's duplicates killed off all the minions present at the time, or at least switched them back to "dark energy" enemies that had no attack function. It was partially to discourage "just freestyle on the enter button = win" gameplay, since I nested the real versions of the boss deep in the list of "Dark Energy" units.

In another game, the first boss was a robot bodyguard that had insane speed, defense, and attack. By that point, the player would have at least one grenade. Of course, before the battle, I had an event that swapped out the actual grenade inventory items with a switch version. When the player threw their grenade, the robot disabled it with onboard electronics. This added "Dud grenade" to the enemy list. By targeting the grenade, the player was able to blow it up, doing damage to the boss and frying his sensors. The boss's attacks were still deadly, but his turns were halved and his accuracy went through the floor. Of course, I realized that it would be possible for a player to reach him without having any grenades left, so I made a duplicate version of the encounter that featured entries for a pair of barrels in the backdrop in the enemy list. If the player targeted them, explosion animations played, doing the same armor drop/sensor fry to the boss and switching the background out for one with blast damage.

My western has been tricky to write up boss encounters for. Any normal enemy can be extremely deadly, with some able to wipe out an entire party in the first round if taken as a straight fight. The angle I'm going for is to try and encounter the enemies in different circumstances. If you have to get into a fortified mill to rescue someone, the best approach is to single out a couple of the guards when they are drinking in town during the day shift. If you take enough out, they'll be understaffed at night, or a specific entry point will be left unguarded, and the player will have a much easier time of it. Also, combat can be initiated in a couple of ways. Once an enemy is in range, the player gets an icon (with the requisite feat taken at level up) that lets them engage at range, gaining the drop on the enemy. The trick is that it also tracks what other enemy units are in range, so you could end up with more of a fight than you were expecting if you're not watching patrol routes carefully. Initiating combat from close range/behind an enemy lets melee characters land a first round hit that deals double damage with a high chance to stun, so even with ranged initiative, there is still a benefit to getting close. Enemies can also engage at range though, since they are built from the same templates as the players. If an enemy actually manages to initiate combat from behind via the "on touch enemy/player" tree, any party that doesn't include someone with boosted initiative skills is pretty much destined for boot hill.

The main hiccup is that I was planning on having unique names and stats for all of the enemy units, so it would never be "Gun Thug" but "Burt McCall" or whatever. The player will be able to overhear things about the individuals they will have to fight, sometimes even from the enemies themselves if the player catches them in a social situation and buys them enough liquor, that will help them in any future encounters. I'm trying to make the social skills for each class as viable as their combat counterparts, so I'm also toying with the idea of using information you obtain as a way of turning some of the enemies against each other during combat. Of course, there is a high price for all of this: The sheer number of redundant groupings I'm going to have to make encounters for is bordering on the ridiculous. I may have to change the name of the game to Schrödinger's Gun.

author=Lucidstillness
Yes, I agree with LDanarkos; status effects should be used in moderation, or even not at all. It's no fun discovering you have run out of poison antidotes and having to limp all the way out of the dungeon back to town to buy more, just as it is no fun to watch your party be immobilized for five turns before receiving a game over.

Granted, some status effects can be useful ways to add spice to a combat system; the ever-popular attack up/down and defense up/down, elemental shields, status effect shields, speed and slow skills and regeneration and auto life, to name a few common ones.

I'm only talking about the status changes that don't let you choose commands. Like the ones that stun you, paralyze you, put you to sleep, berserk you, confuse you, etc.. Players don't want to just sit there, unable to control their characters.

(LucidStillness) :
Granted, some status effects can be useful ways to add spice to a combat system; the ever-popular attack up/down and defense up/down, elemental shields, status effect shields, speed and slow skills and regeneration and auto life, to name a few common ones."

Yes, but those, to me, are the salt of rpg battles, what, on either sides, makes boss battles intelligent and interesting instead of an obligatory fatidious event, this sais, I haven't read much of this thread (too tired).