Welcome to our sixteenth blog post!
The Nightdrake is a dragon of transparency; it hides deep into the landscape, awaiting the first unsuspecting soul it sees for a deliberate ambush.
The best approach is with stealth of your own: if you can sneak up on it undetected, you can get an easy counter-ambush, gaining a huge tactical edge in the beginning of the fight.
Being able to strike first may be key, but its not the whole fight. At some point, you’ll see it, and it’ll see you. So having a plan for that point in the fight is critical.
It can summon some very formidable foes.
Starting on the left, the Necromancer Kasjowa is a strong enemy with lifestealing capabilities, alongside being able to Poison anything its acid touches.
The Galf Spider is a summoner; its spells may not be too strong, but it can continuously summon spider underlings. These underlings may be weak, but they are quite powerful in numbers, especially when they surround you and don’t let you escape. On top of that, as the weak spiders die, the Galf summons even stronger spiders in its place.
The last of the summons is the powerful Skeletal Ossuria. Strong physically, a formidable spellcaster, and a wicked summoner, the Ossuria is the worst of the Nightdrake’s summons. The Ossuria rapidly casts Fireball, a quick spell with great damage. Its health and durability is excellent; this foe will not go down without a fight. And its ability to spawn its underlings is its deadliest of spells: take down the Ossuria first before it creates too many of its lessers.
The final thing to worry about when it comes to the Nightdrake is its Life Siphon- dealing massive damage to both health and mana, and fully stealing it for its own. It also inflicts deadly status ailments: poison, a vision deprivation, and a resistance reduction. All those whom are struck by Life Siphon begin to rapidly lose health due to Poison, lose the ability to see as far as they could originally via Vision Deprivation, and suffer from even more damage than before with the Resistance Reduction. When this attack is coming towards you, its best to rapidly move out of the way.
The best plan for this fight is get in, get out. You’ll quickly be swarmed with adversaries, so its best to strike down the Nightdrake before you get too overwhelmed, then make for your escape.
Our video below details the fight; it consists of two-parts: the first being a regular engagement with the fiend. The second shows off an alternative strategy, the ambush, utilizing the high damage output of our Apprentices of Mysticism to strike down the foe before it can lay down substantial damage upon us.
Development behind this boss has been quite interesting- the original version of the Nightdrake was abhorrently powerful, and received a considerable amount of nerfs unto its current state. It originally had all its attacks strike in an area, and all of them had half their normal cooldown rates. With the game’s code, this meant that as player’s warriors stood in the AOE, particularly when it summoned things, that a separate creature would be summoned for each warrior there (alongside inflicting player’s warriors with a status ailment). This resulted in dozens of summons cropping up as the fight went underway, and given that the Nightdrake initially had 3000 HP (now, only 1000), this dragon quickly became a very scary boss, in need of a lot of changes. Our current plan is to bring this version of the boss back, likely to be referred to as the Elite Nightdrake, but this time as an end-game boss. One in which the player has an opportunity to fully advance their fighters, and truly hone their skills, before they have to engage.
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