Boss Stat Balancing

jacob3 said:
how would a designer assign that initial stamina value, just based off of feel?

Typically it starts out as a guess (I guess that's the same as feel, or I feel that's the same), and is then refined during testing. Too hard, too easy, too predictable, too random, too different, too typical - testers can tell you.

This depends tremendously on the game.

Early on, while still "finding the fun" we tend to crank everything up to the point of nonsense just to play with it. For example, if at one point we've got an AoE weapon doing damage and knockback, at some point that weapon was basically a nuclear blast with an ENORMOUS blast radius, at another point it was likely almost entirely knockback, and another point it was almost entirely damage, and we've played with all kinds of power levels just because the slider exists. Every weapon gets tested at levels ranging from peashooter to insta-kill. Armor gets tested at levels from hospital paper gown to god-like invulnerability. Bouncing items get tested from a single bounce to an eternal bounce. Stamina levels get tested ranging from numbers where stamina is basically a non-factor to the point where every action consumes all the stamina and every action is a challenge.

During development we've used all kinds of tuning methods to find where the ideal balance points. In some games that has been spreadsheets trying to find balanced power curves. In some games it's just sheer repetition, daily playthroughs by design, weekly playthroughs of maps or levels with the entire dev team with everyone commenting on the balance every week, with comments about feeling too hard by the developers who don't like the game, or feeling too easy when played by the QA folks who could speedrun the game, all of it gets considered.

Starting in the middle and all through the last half of development we bring in outsiders to playtest everything. Watching others play the game is incredibly valuable as they'll play differently and do things that are unexpected. Difficulty gets adjusted based on the experience they describe, and what we observe.

Don't scale to the actual party — scale to the expected party for that tier. That's the key distinction.

What are players expected to do in your boss fights? How many times, and how long, is it fun to do it? Stats should be designed so that in a "normal" game the fights are optimal and in a game where the heroes are lacking some items, bonuses, experience levels etc. the fights are challenging but not degenerate.

Boss hit points have a direct impact on fight duration (how many hits need to connect?), but no impact on fight difficulty unless difficulty is an endurance problem (more repetitions of offensive and defensive maneuvers -> more chances to make a single fatal mistake).

Boss hit points and hero hit points have little to do with each other. The stats that directly oppose each other are hero DPS and boss HP, since scaling up or down both appropriately makes the boss lose after suffering the same number of attacks, and symmetrically boss DPS and hero HP. However, many types of damage reduction, reduced chance to hit, and other simple combat mechanics can complicate such linear scaling, and maybe some complications are useful.