Designing Encounters, Part 4: Elites

Let's review:

A mook is your standard generic foe who derives most of their strength from numbers and composition.
A boss is generally a single epic fight consisting of multi-part enemies that form a single encounter.

So what is an elite?

An elite encounter is somewhere between a mook and a boss. This makes them hard to balance and makes their role slightly unconventional.

From a designer's point of view, the idea of an Elite is to do three things:

1) Challenge a specific aspect of the player - "Enhanced" mookery.
2) Change up the player's gameplay
3) Show off.

but these things can be generally reduced to one axiom: Extend the player's boundaries

Wait.. what?

1. Challenge a specific aspect of the player - Stress the player in a specific way.

An enemy whose attacks are more difficult to dodge than others of his class. An enemy you need to change up your heal rotation. An enemy that recovers a little faster from your attack.

The goal behind this is simple: Give the player the opportunity to stretch his playing boundaries. If he has become complacent in his combo usage, give him an enemy in which he will need to fight a little harder to win.

It is okay if these Elites don't stand out very much. Their goal is to appear in earlier levels to expose the player to mechanics that the game hasn't forced him to learn quite yet. Jumping over enemy attacks. Using strong flinch moves.

These Elites are used to encourage the use of subtler abilities or not as pronounced abilities that your character has. Provide your players the window of opportunity to show off or "step" to the plate.

Example: Let's suppose our 'Elite' flinches less than other monsters. He's faster overall. If this monster flinches less, then the player will have to learn to speed up the timing on his hits if he's flinch dependent. Suppose our Elite doesn't flinch at all to regular attacks, but will flinch on powerful hits that the player hasn't needed to use thus far.

Our 'Elite' brandishes a wide club attack that players need to learn to jump over.

Or quite possibly, all of these things, together. Testing various aspects of the players own abilities, dodging, attacking with speed, force, etc. Providing him an incentive to learn these skills.

On the flip side: The Elite shouldn't be more dangerous than monsters of it's class. This type of elite wants the player to fight harder but it shouldn't be so dangerous as to make the player afraid to experiment. The goal of this type of Elite is to encourage the player to try new things with his own set of abilities, not punish the player for doing it wrong.

A common sign that your 'Elite' really isn't beneficial is when players start to repeatedly use one single safe move against them over and over and over again, taking them down slowly and safely. This is the exact opposite effect.

2. Change up the Player's gameplay

You could have the best normal gameplay experience in the world but it would still get stale after a while for players who aren't out to perfect a single style of play.

Elites can provide alternative experiences for players or demand a different style of play altogether. This is usually the type of enemy whose primary weakness revolves around a "trick" to defeating him, such as reflecting his own attacks back at him or separating the two attackers.

These types of Elites are easily destroyed when you are following the right "method", and thus have to ben planned heavily as opposed to Elites from #1. Monsters that can only be seriously damaged when they are attacked from behind, for example. These tend to be "staged" fights.

Examples:

An monster that is found around cliffsides who is knocked back when you hit it. The only way to end the threat is to knock it of a building.
Monsters that are strong next to each other but weak when far apart.
A monster only hurt by a specific type of move or by beneficial spells.
A monster that charges and is hurt mostly by environmental effects like knocking obstacles into him or luring him into headbutting himself into walls.

None of the player's abilities are tested here. What is being offered is an entirely new method of playing. Ideally, you do not want to make his weakness the only method of defeating him, but generally, you want the weakness to account for the majority of the player's effort.

Note: Being weak to a specific element does not constitute a gameplay change. This type of elite makes the player do different things, not equip different weapons or use a similar but entirely different type of skill.

3. Showing Off

You can't show off with regular monsters. They are too common. You also can't show off with bosses that much either because they are far too rare to show off specific things.

Therefore Elite encounters are great times to show off the graphical side or the engine side of your game. All the subtle awesome ways you have thought of to make monster's attack? That can be part of an elite encounter. A monster that breathes circling icicles that split and fill up the room with richochets? Badass. If that were a generic enemy encounter? Less so, because the entire screen would be full of them. If that were a boss? Cool, but then they'd never see it again.

Recap

'Elite' monsters are a step above mooks and a step below bosses. They are more common than bosses and show up in nomal levels with some frequency. Their primary goal is to broaden the player experience by:

1. Forcing the player to fight harder - Broadening the player's own use of his character.
2. Forcing the player to fight differently - Broadening the type of challenges the game can throw.
3. Showing off - Broadening the events that the player can experience.