Welcome to our thirty-fifth blog post!

In this one, we’d like to go over the Kollusk Barragers, spellcasters based around rapid-fire, slow-moving spells that can rapidly burst down all who stand in their line of fire.

With this boss design, we wanted to design a group of foes one must defeat, with these foes being thematically based around rapid-fire yet slow-moving spells. This means that you can never stop moving during this fight, else you’ll be quickly taken down.

We began with a small sampling- we didn’t want this fight to be too complicated; we just wanted it to be keyed into movement. So we began with merely an ‘army’ of 5 Kollusks. In the next battle against the Kollusks, the fight won’t go nearly as easily. We definitely want to expand upon the current structure, likely increasing the enemy-count to 15, and add some more diversity plus strengthen up the units so there’s more dynamic to the fight. But for now, given that we want this to be a lower-level boss fight, 5 will suffice.

As of right now, the fight is fairly straightforward. Let’s begin by going over the army composition.

Its best to comprise your army primarily of Apprentices of Air, spellcasters of Lightning. The Kollusks have a quick movement speed and ability to Teleport around, so a quick-striking spell like Lightning is ideal. In addition, its incredibly important to note that the primary Kollusks that will be encountered are susceptible to Air, so that is the second reason Apprentices of Air are necessary.

We also comprise the army of a few support Units- basic buffing and healing Units, but also support Apprentices of Mystic. We don’t have a need for a second healer, nor do we have a need for a debuffer, so adding in 2 Apprentices of Mystic will be good as the other types of Kollusks have high resistance to Air, but not so much resistance to Mystic (this is useful so long as we can keep them alive, of course!).

With that, our army is defined.

Now, onto what we’ll be facing.

The Kollusks are separated into 3 main components: the Burning Kollusk Barrager, a close-range, rapid-fire spellcaster. It can also cast a high-damage flame spell, alongside its unique spell, a fireball cast off in a random direction, inflicting a healing deprivation status ailment to those hit, making them unable to be healed for a short while. As this Kollusk’s name indicates, its primary element is Fire.

Next, the Freezing Kollusk Barrager. Oriented around Water, this spellcaster casts a longer-range, Water variant of the Burning’s primary attack. It can also send off a ball of frost in a random direction, inflicting a freezing effect upon those who are hit, making them unable to move.

Finally, the Frostfire Kollusk Barrager. This creature is exclusively based around healing. It casts a slow moving healing spell that hits in an AOE. Left unattended, it can rapidly heal up all its nearby allies. So its best to focus-fire on a single Kollusk at a time, else this healer will restore that Kollusk to full HP in a matter of moments.

Onward to the fight- this battle is broken up into 3 major parts, each based around the respective Kollusk.

With our Air warriors in great supply, our first task is to eliminate all the Burning Kollusk Barragers, indicated as the ones casting the red fireballs. These Kollusks are weak to Air, are in the greatest quantity, and our greatest threat. They are quite easy to kill, so eliminating them first makes this fight much much safer from here out.

Next, the Freezing Kollusk Barrager. While only one exists in this battle, simply standing still for more than a few moments is enough for one of our warriors to be slain. So, while moving around it in a clockwise motion, we can dodge its spells while still attacking it. Its important to note that during this phase, if we lost too many warriors during the previous phase, we’ll need to switch up our strategy. That is because the healer will out-heal our damage if our DPS is too low during this phase; if we find that our DPS is too low, we’ll need to switch to attacking the healer, maintaining dodging the Freezing Kollusk in the process.

However, if all goes according to plan, we’ll be in the final phase of the fight without any further worries. The healer has no way of healing itself, nor any way to damage us, so we can safely defeat it without any possibility to us being defeated in the process.

And that ends the fight, with the reward now being ours for the taking.

---

Thank you for viewing our post! Support and interest for the project has been rapidly growing ever since we began posting here, and we're incredibly grateful for all the wonderful feedback so far! We hope this project interests you as much as we love developing for it, and please look forward to more updates coming in the very near future!

If you’re brand new, consider checking out our trailer and overall description of the game here.