I agree that Snarlbolax starts fun but gets really easy. I think the twins are too easy in that I've never gone and not beaten them from the get go. The most annoying thing about the twins are the levels before them cause i tend to lag a lot in them otherwise the levels are really fun. I think that Vanaduke and the Jelly King are the best and most fun even though Vanaduke is WAY easier than the King. To give number ratings, Snarl 6.5, twins 5, jelly, 7.5 and Vanaduke 8.5. Personally I find things that are difficult more fun than easy cheap things. Vanadukes levels were really fun at first but like all levels become so repetitive and boring. I hope in the future we can get some more difficult bosses and more elaborate and maze like levels.

First time I fought Vanaduke I was in a group with 2 other people who had never fought him and one guy who had. He went on and on about how you NEEDED to watch the youtube video to beat which everyone in the party but me wasted 5 mins doing. They got pretty pissed at me since I told them I'd figure it out when we got there. When the battle came we beat him. I died a couple times and had to use one ce rez. Suffice to say he didn't live up to the hype and wasn't too hard to figure out how to beat. I fought the Jelly King 3 times before I beat him the first time. Jelly King by far hardest boss. Vanaduke, eh way off second.

If I had to translate boss combat into RPG stat checks, I'd say

Snarby: Intelligence
JK: Strength
Roarmulus: Agility
Vanaduke: Endurance

That leaves Wisdom(Undead?) & Charisma(Fiends?).

Snarbolax: 6/10: A very nice introductory boss. The atmospheric qualities of the level add high marks to this stage. The presence of constructs in these woods is a question mark to me.

Royal Jelly: 2/10: The music can get annoying. The stage feels very generic for a special level. The boss requires the right equipment more than it requires skill.

Roarmulus: 8/10: Fun stages, great boss.

Vanaduke: 7/10: See Roarmulus.

snar- Intelligence
rt- timing and foot work
jk- speed and focus
vanaduke- all your skills from pother bosses and battle combined

i want to fight vana....but

Snarble--i rescind my vote, as i fought him after i had reached T3. I didn't find it fun to hack-n-slash mindlessly thru the stage and thru him. i can't give a good asessment, he wasn't made for me. He was made for T1.

Jelly--7/10. Sure, nowadays he's a 5/10 and his palace is a 6/10 a four on fun and an eight on necessity (a little less since crowns/heat was reblalanced). So averages out to a six. But its easy for everyone to forget what he was like BEFORE you grinded him 1 million times for Sealed Swords, Antiguas, and crowns/heat. the first time, the jelly palace is incredibly novel, and the fight, you have to stop and some veteran of numerous battles explains how to use vials, bum rush, and if you don't get it done ASAP its all over. It was fun, new, and exciting. Sure its not quite as skill required as it could be, but it was an experience. (less so the 50th time).

Romulus--7/10. I'm not quite as down on this as most people are. I think the stage is a fairly neat design, i didn't like it at first, but after running it solo a couple times, i appreciate it. Its, again, novel and has interesting mechanics. Its gains a few bonus points for being a change of pace from the other dungeons. sure, i'd like the game less if every dungeon was like the munitions factory, but as an outlier, its pretty neat. The twins themselves, i agree. More fun if you work the switches. Can be annoying when they simply won't cooperate. i like that it involves more skill than jk.

Vana--??/10. Alas, more poor macbook laptop seems to struggle to keep up with many arenas and stages (including FSC!!!) strangely, i don't lag hardly at all in IMF, which everyone says is lagtastic! But in FSC... laaaaaaag. Or perhaps its just more debilitating b/c everything can kill you soo much easier. At any moment, my music may stop, my screen freeze, and then its a guessing game where i'll be when everything comes back too. I haven't tried it since the last update, which i think made some graphics changes to alleviate some lag? I've currently been rebuilding and upgrading all new weapons and am just about ready to give it another attempt.

(my first attempt i felt guilty as i lag died over and over while my guild valiantly carried me on)

Snarby-6/10 good for newbs. Boring for pros
Jelly-3/10 Too generic
Twins- 8/10 It was fun!
vana- never done it

Haven't been able to beat the Jelly King yet.
And I can't even make it to the Roarmulous Twins, the stages leading up to them are just stupidly hard. A lot of it ends up being dumb luck.

Don't really like assigning numbers to any of these, so I'll just post my thoughts.

Snarbolax - I think it's really cool that he follows you around the level, and the boss fight is interesting the first time you do it. But it's a pretty piss easy fight at the end of the day. Kinda cool, but the novelty fades quickly.

Jelly King - The fight is pretty exciting and challenging, but there's no real strategy involved. Just brute force.

Roarmulus Twins - This fight is awesome..... once. Once you figure out the strategy, it's no longer exciting or interesting. Just tedious. It's the kind of boss you might encounter in a console game, and honestly I don't think it's well suited to a game like this where you are expected to kill the boss multiple times. It's not poorly designed, I just don't think OOO really thought about what kind of design was appropriate for the game they were making.

Lord Vanaduke - Challenging, requires the right good gear, and good strategy. Well suited to repeated playthroughs. More bosses in the game need to be like this. The only problem is that OOO can't seem to get his balance right and he bugs out more than any other boss. The slag guards are just TOO MUCH so everybody just ends up punting the zombies out of the way. Every time I do this fight it feels like I'm not doing the fight it the way it was intended. But it's not like punting the zombies makes the fight easy mode. Just makes it... doable.

Snarbolax - Generic stage leading up to the boss (I seriously thought it was a wolver den the first time, and I was lagging enough to not actually spot the snarbolax appearances) with nothing much of interest. Boss fight itself, while not especially hard, introduces the concepts of problem solving and aggro that later bosses need and forces groups to understand teamwork. Snarbolax and Vanaduke are the only bosses I feel fit the current boss music intro.

The issue with snarbolax is that the boss fight is only fun in two instances - when you don't know how to beat him, or when everybody knows what they're doing. But most players are going to fight him with random groups, where players that are the former are common and make it unfun for the players that know how to win the fight. Chances are we've all been there - you get the newbie that doesn't understand when to hit the bell, or pulls aggro from snarb but leads him away from it.

I'd give the snarbolax fight a 7/10 on a player's first run, if they're smart enough to work it out for themselves. It quickly degrades to 3/10 simply because when you know what you're doing, it's either boring or plain stressful depending on your team.

Royal Jelly - Simple stage with no new puzzles or game mechanics introduced, but has a decent challenge level for the tier. Simple boss with no real strategy involved - actually trying to use a strategy beyond 'hit it until it dies' and 'use status vials if you have them' causes parties to fail. Unfortunately, because the best method to win this fight is to essentially suicide rush the boss until he dies, it's teaching players things they shouldn't be taught. Players that think they're good for beating royal jelly consistently before reaching tier 3 try to rush monsters there in the same way, which doesn't work out for them (I'm looking at you, those 3 guys on my friend list)

Royal Jelly gets a 4/10 from me - nothing in the stage does anything interesting, the boss doesn't do anything interesting. It only gets higher than snarbolax because it has a decent challenge level.

Roarmulus Twins - Now, this is probably my favorite boss level, so I might be a bit biased towards it. Ignoring the framerate issues throughout the area, it's a very solid experience overall. It introduces a gameplay element, and proceeds to use it in several ways throughout the dungeon, essentially teaching players how to use the polarity wall to defeat the boss before they reach it. Survival in the area relies on players predicting the environment, or manipulating it to protect themselves; defeating the boss likewise requires players to pay attention to the entire arena and make adequate timing calls. The area forces groups to use teamwork on a high level, but by providing health boxes regularly helps out players still learning the ropes.

The boss fight here takes the player's skills they've learnt throughout the area relating to the polarity walls, and makes them use most of them; the final puzzle in the dungeon teaches players how to switch the walls to make missiles reach the far end, with the final puzzle the player has to work out being how to force waves of missiles to actually hit the opposing twin without being wasted. It's a fun battle to play solo, bt a little rage-inducing in public groups. I'll give it a 6/10, but easily bump it up to 8/10 if the framerate issues are fixed completely. Even after 16 runs, I still enjoy this strata.

Lord Vanaduke - High challenge, but every single room is either avoid traps, kill monsters or both. Most people I've played with here frequently abuse the zombie glitch, trick trojans to do some of the work for them or create walls that monsters can't pass; while the latter two are merely intelligent, if abusive use of game features, the former makes certain sections far easier than they should be, and even removes an entire element from the boss fight itself.

The boss fight only has one truely unique element - wait for it - using a game mechanic introduced in the dungeon to make the boss vulnerable. Vanaduke himself starts out acting like an oversized trojan; attacks in front of himself, or charges, or charges and then attacks. In phase 2 and 4, the target is... essentially a mobile gun puppy that needs to be stunned with an item provided by the arena. Phases 3 and 5 are essentially the same as phase 1, with additional dangers being added to the arena over time. Phase 3 introduces lava blocks already seen through the dungeon, Phase 5 has Vanaduke acting like a giant flamethrower enemy on occasion and adds smaller trojans that only charge, assuming the players didn't glitch a zombie into the corner. The method of fighting him doesn't change in either subgroup of phases, except for practically obsoleting swords in 3 and 5.

While the fight does require players to make constant use of their skills at the game, it's not particularly interesting apart from a high challenge level (that's easily subverted by decent gear setups and abusing glitches). It also takes too long and so gets very repetitive, imo. Especially in runs with shivermists and glitching the zombies, I just plain get bored. I wouldn't rate the fight above a 5/10.

Dear god this was a long post.

Edit: So, half an hour after I post this, they release a bugfix patch which, among other things, is supposedly going to prevent the zombie glitch I complained about in the vanaduke section. That'll make things somewhat more interesting there.