Skyrim Battles - The Ebony Warrior vs. Lord Harkon - Boss Battle with Auriel's Bow

Описание: This is the first episode on my channel that features Harkon's boss fight. In previous videos, he had his stats and spells, but not his other unique mechanics.
Setting up Harkon's boss fight for my battles was a major challenge. Harkon has always been terrible to work with, being among the most frustrating NPCs in the whole game, even without his boss mechanics. I have avoided trying a full boss fight for a long time.
By now, I felt like I had developed the skills to try this task. Aside from "simply" making a boss battle video, there were two more main things I wanted to accomplish: Get NPCs to use Auriel's Bow to destroy Harkon's shield, as well as reproduce Harkon's bat teleport effect to work on other maps, so he can use those in other random battles even when he's not in his boss room.

Both of those challenges needed a good amount of scripting and creative ideas. As for the shield, I couldn't get NPCs to shoot it directly. It's not an opponent they can target, and when Harkon is hidden behind it, they know they can't hit him with ranged weapons either, so they won't try to shoot. I came up with my own workaround by making Harkon's script place an invisible NPC with no hitbox in front of the shield while it's active. The Ebony Warrior can then target and shoot at this NPC, while the arrow goes through and hits the shield.
The Ebony Warrior wasn't shooting at this target consistently until I optimized it through many hours of testing. He might also go for melee instead if he's close enough, which means I'll have to try the whole fight again. This happened way too many times, and those are just two of many issues, but it's good enough for this video.

On a side note: I did not modify the shield or the bow. Even when shot by an NPC, it breaks the shield if the arrow hits. An opponent can sometimes do this accidentally as Harkon is just charging the shield, even with no changes to his script or anyone's behavior. I've even seen this happen multiple times, but it's too rare for good battles.

Just like the player, the Ebony Warrior doesn't even need Auriel's Bow in order to kill Harkon. One can simply wait for his shield to time out eventually (although Harkon will have a lot of time to regenerate health). I gave the Ebony Warrior the bow just because it makes for a much cooler video, similar to how the player fights Harkon.
In fact, aside from being able to break the shield, the Ebony Warrior doesn't get any benefits from using Auriel's Bow instead of his default one. He actually does less damage with it, even against vampires that resist frost and are weak to Auriel's Bow's enchantment.

I imagine some people would prefer the Ebony Warrior just having his regular bow to see how he handles that. An example of him fighting Harkon with his default equipment is here:
   • The Ebony Warrior vs. Lord Harkon - Boss F...  

The first round in this episode is much less balanced than my usual content, just like my previous video (The Ebony Warrior vs. Arch-Curate Vyrthur). There are 2 main reasons for that:

1. It's a proof of concept. I often use the Ebony Warrior for tests because he's very strong and versatile, extremely resilient, and can use both melee and ranged attacks. Since he frequently uses a bow, he was perfect for testing the Harkon battle, and I turned this into a video. Other NPCs are definitely an option for the future, although I'm not sure if I should make them use Auriel's Bow, and if yes, what to do if they can't use bows in general.

2. I have done The Ebony Warrior vs. Miraak in Apocrypha, featuring his boss mechanics as well. This makes for a good comparison between how difficult Harkon's and Miraak's battles are at the highest level. Some people might have been curious how the Ebony Warrior deals with Harkon if he has his boss phases and his allies. Well, I was a bit disappointed that it was still so one-sided. 😂

I also managed to make Harkon's bat ability usable on other maps by changing his boss script to skip the shrine phases (he would get stuck as he can't go to his shrine on other maps), and setting up custom destinations for his teleport effect. Further testing is needed, but it's looking promising at the time of writing this.

Overall, this episode was very hard, but also interesting to make. The map was particularly difficult to work with, as all the pillars easily block the view if Harkon or the Ebony Warrior are moving around quickly (which both of them do often). It's also fairly dark and I made everything a bit brighter for better quality.
It's a bit different from my other content, but this setup is pretty cool to see! More boss battles with Harkons are planned.

Well, that's a lot of text.

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