is someone going to break it to game devs that no player wants to use status effects in random encounters and as such making them stop affecting bosses mid-late game just means they’re useless
Boss fights are about using every tool at your disposal to beat a hugely powerful enemy.
Random encounter fights are about dealing with each fresh annoyance as quickly and efficiently as possible.
I’m sorry, but a 10% miss chance debuff isn’t worth its animation time when it’s standing between me and actually getting shit done.
What we’re looking at here is a perfect example of cargo cult game design - i.e., doing things the way you’ve seen them done before without really thinking about why it’s set up that way in the first place.
In order to get to the root of the problem, we’re going to have go way back to games like Wizardry and Final Fantasy (yes, the first one). Like most CRPGs of their generation, these games were directly based on old-school Dungeons & Dragons (or OD&D, for short) - and the thing about OD&D is that, when you break it down, combat isn’t really about strategy or tactics: it’s about logistics.
In this gameplay model, a dungeon is basically a resource management problem. Is it worth using one of my rare and expensive healing items to stay in this fight, or should I cut my losses and run? Is it worth fighting this particular critter at all, or does the risk outweigh the reward? This treasure chest might contain an item that will extend my survival, or it might be a mimic that will take a chomp out of my precious hit points - do I roll the dice, or pass it by? Every encounter is a high-tension calculus of risk versus reward in an environment of ferociously limited resources, with the ultimate goal of ensuring that you make it to the end of the dungeon with enough juice left to give the giant sack of hit points guarding the big prize a run for its money.
In this context, the way that status ailments are typically implemented is entirely sensible. Sure, they’re a gamble, but so is everything else - and to make up for that risk, status ailments in such games are hugely powerful. Landing one is often going to end the fight right there, no matter how nasty your opponent is.
Of course, most modern CRPGs don’t work that way. Long-haul resource management is de-emphasised in favour of treating each encounter as a standalone tactical set-piece. In particular, care is taken to ensure that you’re usually able to completely top up your resources before heading into a boss fight, thus rendering careful resource management largely pointless. This approach isn’t better or worse - certainly, there are a lot of awesome things you can do with boss fights when you’re treating then as standalone tactical set-pieces that just plain don’t work when you’re treating the boss as the final gate of a logistics-driven obstacle course.
And therein lies the problem: in spite of the fact that most modern CRPGs adhere to a completely different gameplay model, status ailments remain stuck in the paradigm established by those OD&D-inspired logistical meat-grinders. In fact, it’s worse, because allowing status ailments to be as ungodly powerful as they are in their original context would short-circuit the tactical set-pieces that are all the rage nowadays, so they’re typically powered way, way down to boot.
Basically, what I’m saying is that the answer isn’t “let status ailments work on bosses”. The answer is to re-think the role that status ailments play in your gameplay model, with the recognition that the way they’re traditionally implemented is a game-mechanical artefact of a very specific mode of play that your game probably doesn’t adhere to.
