Later today I messed around with Terminus in the test room. Gave me some trouble tbh, took some time to actually master the patterns (also noticed he actually has 4, not 3). So I think what happened in that run was a combination of:
-bullet cancel drone helping through the patterns
-bullet canel drone helping with lag + shorter fight time (compared to test chamber) ->much easier to keep focus
-massive adrenaline rush for final boss after ~1.5h play time
So I still think he's a bit to easy -tlb should be really epic- but not all that much. Maybe just give him even more hp so the phases are really long. Makes all the difference if you have to keep up the pattern for minutes instead of some seconds. Especially with the new drone which allows you to breathe every few seconds.
On the other hand I also breezed through lvls 6 and 7, so maybe the problem is still more towards player damage progression.
Are you SURE you really want to tempt me to make bosses HARDER? I'll do it, you just see if I don't.
Anyway, the TLB (well, the normal one anyway...) of a game like this isn't going to be THAT epic; this isn't a pure bullet-hell game, remember, it's an Isaac-ish game + some bullet-hell. Besides.... later on he wont BE the TLB. I'm saving the "epic" for that nightmare (though that wont be fought on every run). That's for much later on though and I haven't started on the damn thing because I dread the testing of it.
He *probably* doesn't need that much of an HP boost though. Terminus by itself... as in, not counting the two guardians... has 10000 HP. That's a lot in this game. 4000 in his first phase, 6000 in the second. The two guardians then have 2500 each. I have to watch how much HP things have in this; obviously bosses need to last long enough to generate threat, but I *don't* want them lasting ultra-long and becoming a chore if the player is having bad luck with damage upgrades, you know. If you've played Isaac enough, and had to go up against, say, Gurdy, with a bad damage stat, then you probably know just what I mean. I love Isaac, but when THAT happens, the fun drains out of it really fast.
I'm also not going to rebalance enemy patterns based on the existence of defensive drones; it may prove that the drone itself needs a bit of a nerf later on (to have more time between flares), we'll see what happens with feedback along that line. That specific drone though is going to be more effective against certain types of attacks (for example, it's particularly strong against the blue orbs that Terminus uses, as it tends to be good against bullets that spawn other bullets). Players wont have those drones every time though. But also Normal mode just isn't meant to be all that hard.
That being said I'm still open to making changes if it does indeed prove necessary. One issue with Terminus is that I didn't get much feedback related to him; players were stomping him after all, with the bad balance we had before, so I had no idea if he was difficult enough (or too difficult). So he may indeed be a bit off.
Now, all of that being said.... how long would you say it took you to get through that fight? It shouldn't be ending THAT fast. Though, the occaisional high-power run is to be expected; it's not that we don't want OP or high-power runs to happen at all... in this genre, they're part of the fun.... it's that they were happening EVERY SINGLE TIME before, they should be fairly rare. If you run through the game a few more times and you think things are still just dying too fast every time, let us know. It may be that some late-game stuff (floors 6-7) needs HP tweaks. Nobody really tested the late-game enemies other than myself, so.... yeah, it wouldn't be that surprising if their HP needs a few tweaks. Need more feedback and of course I'm continuing with my own testing
Anyway, all that feedback is appreciated! Feel free to drop more here if you should have any later.