Road to Ziggurat 2 - Guardians

We're going to do a series of articles focusing on specific parts of the game's development, explaining a bit how they work and their changes compared to the previous game.

Today we'll be talking about guardians, the bosses you'll be facing at the end of each dungeon.

[h3]Guardians[/h3]

Guardians are the final challenge in every floor of the dungeon. Waiting to overwhelm you with their powers and might, on top of bringing their minions to aid them.

While the Early Access release features a limited amount of guardians, they still pose a threat even when you learn their patterns.

[h3]Changes from Ziggurat 1[/h3]

In Ziggurat 1, most guardians had a weakness in the form of "one-shotting": With specific builds an amulets tailored for burst damage, you could deplete the life of guardians before they could even start their attack. On top of that, they spend some time spawning minions before attacking, so this could be also exploited.

On Ziggurat 2, minions show up by their own, without any special cast animation from the guardian. On top of that, when reaching specific thresholds of health, guardians will cast a shield preventing additional damage, until the spawned minions are dealt with. While this shield is active, the guardian can still attack you, so you better deal with those minions quickly!

To compensate for all that, minions are only spawned once: They won't come back once you deal with them, so clearing the arena of the smaller enemies before heading for the big guy is a perfectly valid tactic.

We've also removed their "personal rooms", and "spawn level" (at least for now), so now there's no way to know which boss you'll face until it's in front of you. Of course their health, damage and number of minions spawned will vary depending on the dungeon's threat level, the current floor and difficulty setting.