We really need it, so just like in battlefield heroes (another diferent game) forums i'm going to say: /sign (In the forums of that game (battlefield heroes) when someone likes a sugestion says this)

This has come up repeatedly and I'm totally against it; they're unnecessary visual clutter and remove an important element of tension and pattern recognition from boss fights.

While I do wish to know when a boss dies, I'm not too much for the idea of a health bar (which is often repeated in too many games).
@Effrul: I don't see how the health bar interferes with pattern recognition, but I do agree with the visual clutter.

Perhaps we can have visual indicators when a boss is weakening? Like the Roarmulus twins, the boss will appear visibly more damaged as they move to they next phase. Perhaps for RJ, for instance, we can see chunks of jelly chewed off as it gets progressively more damaged, or for Snarby, its eyes can start closing one by one?

Except that Darkfire Vanaduke's HP pool is large enough that he needs some intermediate changes between each of his phases. Instead of having to program a bunch more different animations for Duke or changing the fight, they could easily just slap an HP bar over his head or at the bottom of the screen. Sure, if you're just mauling the fight you don't really need to know, but when you're learning the fight and his mask phase lasts 8-10 minutes, you start asking yourself "Is his mask healing every time it lights back up? I don't see any numbers but this is taking a while". It isn't a matter of relaxing, it is a matter of "This is taking forever and is annoying", if anything you let your guard down because you're getting bored, whereas if you knew the end was near you'd put in more effort. Also, it would get more people to burn CE revs if they knew they could actually push for the kill instead of giving up because they don't know how far along they are.

Definitely for HP bars.

Without them, there's very little sense of progression when you're fighting a boss.

As far as HP bars detracting from the "mood", I think that's hardly the case. Firstly, this game's no Monster Hunter. Secondly, the lack of progression makes boss deaths seem downright random sometimes.

Ah, those moments when your party members CE revive halfway across the room, only for you to whack the boss one more time and kill it before they even reach it.. Heh.

Instead of wasting developers' time reviewing yet another thread, please do a simple search to see if your idea has already been hashed to death and if you *really* have something new to contribute.

A quick forum search of "health bar" turned up;

Boss Health Bars
Health Bars?
Health Bar for Bosses
Boss health bar (yeah, someone named their new thread the same as the first on)
Boss health bars... (really, people aren't even creative with new thread titles)
Monster Health Bar??
Enemy Health bars

And that list was from just the first two pages of the search results.

OOO has a tradition of not liking numbers. They feel it causes players to obsess with the wrong things instead of having fun. My gut feel is that OOO much more likely to remove the damage numbers that you currently see before they add health bars to monsters.

Before wasting any more of your energy, find those discussions about why OOO has this tradition, and find some evidence that OOO has changed their minds.

teh subject says it all :D

I am not sure about it, but it appears to me not developers are checking on the threads directly, but there are support people in between devs and users.