I decided to rebalance some of the boss fights while I was at it. There were too many enemies in the first encounter which made it a lot longer and more difficult than it should have been so I removed around 7 of them, reduced both armor stats of the boss, reduced both of it's attack stats, greatly reduced it's dodge chance, and increased it's health. I also removed a few enemies in some of the other encounters as well buffing the stats of the 2 easiest bosses so that they are as difficult as the others. Buffed the strongest boss of the mod so that she was still the strongest, but it was nothing too extreme. I was able to barely beat her on the first try when testing.

Awesome, I look forward to failing to cheese it lol

Also, I repositioned the enemies so that now there is almost no way you can stealth sense past them. This also probably makes the first fight much more difficult, since now 4 of the enemies can close in on you much faster. I will test to make sure, but I think it is still bearable for most late game builds. It is just going to be more difficult than before.

@Deason Red Yeah they are supposed to be some of the most difficult in game. I recommend only coming back to fight them if you think you can win any fight in the game. To the best of my knowledge, these fights are by far the most difficult of all vanilla and modded boss fights, but I have not tried some of the quest mods that came after January of this year so that may not be the case anymore. In fact, I had to heavily nerf one of the bosses earlier this year because the fight was almost impossible on ruin mode. Just from looking at the new mods, I think Paul's final boss overhaul would be the only one that might be just as or more difficult.

I just updated it. Now you do not get much without fighting. I think the best thing you can get now is an ancient pistol and a single piece of mythril.

I mostly got mithril, but there were some items like a dagger bayonet and a few other misc weapons. Some of the fights looked very scary though :D

Well after looking at the map again, I definitely left too good of items that you can get for little to no work. Sorry it has been a while since I played Horizon's Gate. I guess I will move them and reupload.

True, I did not really think about stealth sense at the time. So you could get some decent loot for little work if you look around with it active. I don't think it is anything op though. I think it is a nice little reward for stealth sense since I doubt very few are going to pick up that passive otherwise. It is mainly just really good for early game. I think the best thing you can pick up without fighting right now is a blunderbuss, and if memory serves correctly, that is kind of hidden.

Oof with stealth sense you can get tons of mithril with no combat

Well I guess Blunderbusses can be used late game too if you have a ton of them. They do a little more damage than I thought and the area effect damage is actually really good against big bosses that take up more than one square. You are definitely going to want the Heavy Bandolier passive from the Swashbuckler Class though so you can switch them out at will though so that you can skip the reloading.

Blunderbusses are really early to mid game weapons. They get out classed by elemental and unique bows and rifles later on since most elemental bows get damage bonuses from both your elemental skill and bow skill. As for augments you will probably want to pick either an elemental trigger stone (which also scales with your elemental ability) or a good utility one like spidest fang for status effects.I usually pick crossbows myself, but I know Multishot and Multiblast from the Sharpshooter and Stormshot classes are very strong multi target abilities for late game. Spell Archon and Rogue classes can give you some powerful status effects. For passives the Augment Charger from the Mechanist class is crazy strong after the first turn.

That is because you are not in combat and even though there are enemies nearby they are completely hidden. They do not spawn in until you get too close, and as long as you don't get too close to them you can take what you want. I made it that way on purpose. The idea is that is how people get lured in to their death. Even though the gear is really good for early game I don't think it will give you that big of an advantage if you are playing on expert difficulty or higher.

For whatever reason you can grab items from an absurd distance away on your map. I managed to pilfer way too much without alerting the monsters. Maybe i should come back to this area with gate hand and realmsense? Or I could instead grab the shield and send one guy running to the exit to get an endgame equipment piece straight away

That is on ruin mode. On lower difficulties it will be a lot less. It has around the same base stats as the dragon head and the final boss, but he has back up that will sort of get into the fight by the 2nd to 4th round of combat as well so the fight is a good bit more difficult. Also that is not the only boss fight. There are 5 difficult fights in this location.

665 hp 23 phy. defense 20 mag. defense wtf this is going to be interesting to fight

After replacing toolbox with misc weapons it works now~
Thanks for the starting gear got any suggestions for a blunderbuss build

It will not hurt anything if you have both of them running. I have already played 40 hours on a save file with both of them running before I realized that he claimed on his mod page that misc weapons was in P-toolbox which evidently is not the case anymore.

That's odd. Paul said in his description that misc weapons was in that mod. He must have taken it out with the new update or something. I guess just run them both.

Tried starting a new game with just this and p-toolbox. The game simply will not work

You can also just substitute that for P-toolbox since misc weapons is included in that mod and P-toolbox has a ton of new features in it that it adds to the base game. I think I am going to add that to the recommendations. That is a very well done mod that adds a lot of lore friendly stuff to the game that people don't realize like reinforced plate material for armor and airships.

Thanks for pointing that out. That was a mix up on my part.

Why does the sidebar claim this requires the misc weapon shop while the description says it only needs misc weapons

Well I say their time to act was normal. Its still really good, but they were not moving 4 times a turn like medusa was.

I ended up not changing the other boss monsters though. The were really tough with all of those stat buffs but due to their time to act being normal they were far from invincible.

Okay, you were right about medusa being a little too difficult for most players. For some reason whenever I increased her stats slightly in build mode it increased them again in the mod file so she had around 1.5 times the stats that I tested her at. Either I put my game into normal mode and did not realize it or when the new update came out it put my game back into normal mode instead of ruin and I ended up making the bosses a lot stronger than thought I was. I could still beat her with those stats but I had to cheese her each time with crazy powerful combos. If you did not have the right team comp she would kill you every single time. I increased her time to act to around 16 lowered her move to 5, decreased her overall stats slightly, and moved her up closer to where she was before in version one. She should not interfere with anymore fights.

Yeah, I did test it on ruin mode and won with 2 different teams, but I know that she is difficult(she is supposed to be). It is even possible to kill her in a single turn with a particular modded combo that is not overpowered at all. I did come at her from the bottom left everytime so I never had an issue of the maskheads joining the fight though, and I tested the maskheads before I moved her and tested her so I did not realize that they were in range if you started a fight with them first. Back when I tested this she did not have any dialogue. I am guessing that the Fareem npc must have gotten an update since I made this update that added that. I guess I can move her to bottom left side of the map so that she wont get in the way of any fights anymore.

If you convince Medusa to not attack you (via various dialogue options) she assists in the Maskhead fight, resulting in a potentially onsided victory since she can kill everything by herself.

I tried fighting Medusa and she seems almost impossible to kill. She has Drain and 9 time to act, so she can just spam Drain whenever she gets hurt and there's no way to land anything that has a cast time so mages are crippled. She also tends to just run out of range since she has 7 Move. Did you test it on Ruin at all? Her defense stats are way too high so you can only do damage with Burn and Poison or things that pierce defense like hammers and Whirl.
On top of this, the maskheads are within aggro range!

I also relocated some of the bosses because it was kind of annoying to target them at the top of the map if you came at them from certain angles because the ui would get in the way.

Update released. I relocated the location north a few degrees, increase the difficulty dramatically so these fights would be more difficult than the strongest fights in vanilla on ruin mode, and rebalanced the loot by adding more unique items on bosses and removing a lot of exp crystals, stat items, and gems.

Sounds good.

I will probably just make it a new mod with the changes called The Ackbar Desert Version 2 or something like that and it will probably be ready very soon.

Thanks for the feedback McFrugal. I think I might overhaul the mod some based on some other feedback while I am at it since it does not look like I am going to be finishing the arena tower mod any time soon.

It is a little close. I honestly did not even think about how it would appear on the map when you pulled it up on that level of zoom since my map is almost always max size. I guess I could move it a little so it looks a little more tidy on the default zoom level of the map.

I feel it's a bit too close to gulver wastes. The selection boxes on the map overlap at the default zoom level.

Glad you enjoyed it.

Great mod! :)