Red Wolf of Radagon only has four basic attacks:
- Bite
- Magic Sword
- Delayed Glintblades
- Glintstone Cometshard
...and that last one only shows up deep in its combos. I've seen a bunch of boss fight videos where it doesn't even show up once! Given that, and my own experience fighting this, I didn't expect it to have a particularly complex AI.
Boy was I wrong!
Believe it or not, this combo chart actually elides a lot of the complexity in the boss's AI. The Glintblade Dash and Dash attacks originally each appeared twice, once for each direction, and I merged them to try to mitigate the rat's nest of arrows in the center of the chart. I strategically duplicated and de-duplicated various moves to try to keep everything as local as possible. Many of those combo edges are only actually active if one of the attacks they lead to hasn't been run in the past 10 to 20 seconds.
The latter is pretty interesting from a design standpoint. I've seen a bit of that logic before in the Black Knife Assassin's AI (which leads me to suspect that these two bosses were designed by the same person). But it's more pervasive in Red Wolf's AI, with many different attacks being rate-limited in many different contexts.
This gives the fight a sense of variety and of unpredictability. Although the Red Wolf can't do that many fundamentally different attacks, it will cycle through its variants consistently. Even if the player generally sticks to the same strategy (as players do), they'll see their opponent do more different things than it might otherwise. This also makes it trickier to learn the fight. Even with a combo chart in hand, it's difficult to track exactly which action leads to which result, so imagine trying to learn that on the fly when it'll almost never combo the same way twice in a row.
This is a more subtle and interesting way to increase the challenge of a boss than simply turning up its numbers. It rewards players who can think on their feet and read a fight as it happens, when the natural gravity of the game is always towards rewarding players who find one trick that works and lean on it forever. It's certainly still possible to do that with this boss—it has a couple attacks that leave it wide open afterwards—but the motivation is pushed just enough in the other direction to be interesting or infuriating, depending on how many times the Wolf has wrecked you with Glintblades while you were trying to dodge its bite.