The introduction and dialogue was pretty epic and the way the camera moves is kinda cool.
Unfortunately gotta say I disagree on the actual fight.
Just had my first few attempts at Aberoth and it is not a great fight. The fight is heavily baked in RNG. Apart from the first few deaths learning his abilities, most of my actual deaths were from either the boss having poor positioning or abilities overlapping leaving no room to move.
Reading below will contain some major spoilers for the fight so those who are wanting to go in raw dog I reccommend not reading.
First off I am playing a Torment Warlock. I am resist capped, 45% armor and sit on around 1400 HP and consitently have 6kish ward in combat. (3.5k Ward static) I am probably lacking a little bit of damage but nothing really hurts me unless I get stuck on a ground effect or smashed by a few skills in a row.
Some major points.
I died twice at 20% ish mark due to multiple beams spawning on the free space during his slam at the end (the Arena shrinks down to maybe 30% of its normal size) so I literally had to try and run through them. With about a second to actually see the map after the darkness is gone you have little to no time to position yourself in the very small free space between each beam.
A few times I tried to move him out of the big bad, especially when he spawns the sand pools and he just does not follow you, he will sit and spam attacks for 15ish seconds from the other side of the map, then he might start to move but will then sometimes stop to cast a few more attacks after taking a few steps. Most of the ground effects won’t kill me very easily but it is not possible for me currently to stand in them directly.
Had quite a few near misses with the floating blackholes during his slam phase, literally had beam + black holes spawn at the beginning of a slam phase, getting hit by 1 is not death but it leaves a pool of AoE that is almost the size of the safe space you have to stand in.
I think there is too much going on. He has SO MANY abilities and most of them, at least for me were a non-issue.
He really only has 3 or so dangerous attacks.
First one is the obvious slam.
This is clearly the one shot ability and is the only REAL mechanic in the fight.
Second one is the blue water waves.
This is a wide frontal wave that he stands still and casts, it has a fairly large area but is reasonbly easy to avoid if you are not caught unawares.
Third would be the Purple Final Flash.
This is easy to spot as he does a major triangular slam that lights the floor in a mini galaxy beforehand. After he does this singular galaxy (Not to be confused with the early multi galaxy) he will then turn to your current position and try to Purple Final Flash you to death.
The rest of his attacks are more nuisance than anything and can hinder you getting out of the way of these abilities. The randomness of this is mostly what makes this fight unintuitive. No matter how good you get at memorising, something can always go wrong.
The mechanics are not really engaging at all, I just feel like I am constantly moving out of the way of SOMETHING. Not really paying much attention to what is actually happening until one of the Big 3 come out.
The slam I believe is HP based, so if the other abilities are on a timer then you MIGHT be able to time it so that you can have an uninterupted slam however there is also a chance that during one of these other abilities he might put a pool of death on a spot that you need as well.
A minor point which is more of a personal preference I guess is the constantly changing colour scheme. I found this very jarring, also some skills are pretty hard to see, like the green wall during nature phase.
I guess the only major thing to do would be to make it so that other abilities cannot spawn during the slam phase, this seems to me to be the biggest hurdle and due to its randomness it is not something that can really be overcome by skill or knowledge as in some cases it is an instant loss.
I did not find him overly difficult (This might be due to my class, Torment Warlock has been easy mode the entire way through) and while I wouldn’t overly enjoy the fight even if they made this change it would at least make it more mechanicaly minded as currently it feels like a gamble.
Overall I will eventually try him again just to say I have beaten him but I will not be interested in doing this on multiple toons.
My feedback was focused on the setting and visuals, and I compare Aberroth to the ARPG “uber” bosses. I do agree with you that it needs some fine tuning and balance. For example, the fight was a LOT harder for me with a melee character than a ranged. Many of the mechanics can overlap, and that can cause a very swift death. The boss in general was a big and positive surprise for me, but I am sure they will work on it and change some things in the near future. 