I’ve fought oryx 2 (X.31.0.0) a lot of times now and I thought i’d talk about some things about it. This is just my experience and opinion. My main arguments will be in bold.
Exploding Sun: The main gripe i have with this phase is how tight the opportunities to attack can be. With armor piercing shots, it puts every class in the same playing field in terms of defense. Starting off it seems logical that a ranged class can fight against this since you’ll be taking the same damage as a high defense class anyways but If you think you can take advantage of a ranged class, it won’t be so easy has fighting at a ranged position puts you in the way of the projectiles that come out after the suns explode. Fighting as a melee isn’t much better as even though you can avoid most projectiles spawned by the parent shot by being in towards the middle, it still splits itself in a trajectory that, combined with the rotation pattern, also aims inwards, making it a challenge to avoid since you must constantly keep your pace with the parent shots. This is disadvantageous to melee classes because if they were to retreat after taking inward moving child shots, they would have to come in paths with more of them when retreating, which will more than likely hit them for a few hundred damage unless they pace with the pattern perfectly. No matter which approach you take, you’ll be taking chunks of damage and won’t be on the offensive for long which can drag out for a bit. Overall, the pattern can be hard to adjust to which can be intimidating and leave only a few players attacking throughout the whole phase while the rest wait.
Missile Phase: A little easier than the exploding sun. The Bomb Artifacts are pretty dangerous which will be the main problem for the dance phase. Unlike the exploding sun phase, the bombs and daze shots are mismatched, meaning there will be intervals where they line up perfectly to allow an opening and times where there are no openings which might make players wait for when there is. From what i can tell, the Bombs seems to explode every .5 seconds, that coupled with their 180 damage AoE, can put most classes at high risk. This is even made more cheeky since the bombs move away from oryx, the same direction that a player would move if they were retreating, making it so a player can eat up a lot of damage by mistakenly matching pace with the Bomb Artifact. Overall, it wouldn’t be too bad of a phase if the Bomb Artifacts didn’t deal so much damage since its pattern already designed to catch the player as much as possible.
Dancing Phase: The most notorious phase. The main issue, like mentioned in the Missile Phase, are the Bomb Artifacts. They spin while exploding in a way that there is only a narrow path to get in and out without taking damage. If you try to enter or exit through the bombs, you might take a large chunk of damage as the fast fire rate, high damage and spinning pattern are designed to hit you multiple times. When it comes to being in the circle, it is much less punishing but still dangerous. If you are not a mundane knight, there is a lot of constant movement to be had as the silent bombs alternate pattern while oryx throws Red Bombs randomly, taking even a few shots of either will be heavy damage. I can imagine this phase is more to induce and punish panicking players as if you decide to go in, retreating will be risky and as you try to go out, going in and matching the pace of the silent bombs will be tough leading to a risky and panicked retreat which can be very intimidating. This could be circumvented if players chose to stay in from the get-go and learn the silent bomb/red bomb pattern but with the nature of learning and making mistakes coupled with this phase’s punishment of retreating, leads to intimidation and players choosing to opt out as soon as it starts. This basically makes it so that you are either in the fight or out of it. Overall, the problem are the Bomb Artifact’s damage output; if it were reduced, much more players would be more inclined to get in and get good at the phase as the issue of the Bombs are so prevalent that there will only be literally a couple of players in the circle fighting, dragging the phase to an undesirable amount of time.
Phase 4: The only complaint I have with this phase is how Oryx constantly sends out weakening shots which indirectly buffs his HP. This, the 60 second duration and his moderately high defense of 60, can drag out the fight even longer than it already has. (With a good knight this can be avoided though)
Overall: The fight isn’t impossible to learn or overly difficult and long if you have a good group but it does have a few mechanics that are annoying and drags it longer than it should. It is an “endgame boss” but it doesn’t mean it should force itself to last long. I’ve seen countless comments of things like “All of that for a Vit.”
Tell me what you guys think. It really helps me put things into better perspective.
