About T4 dungeon difficulty adjustment

Dear developer team, Hello, I am a level 97 wizard player, after 100 hours of play, I feel that the overall quality of the game is amazing, but when my character build is in place, the experience of the T4 dungeon bosses is terrible, the bosses take only one move to kill me, and I need to painstakingly maintain a high level of mental focus for three or four minutes, risking a great death I need to keep my concentration high for three to four minutes, risking a great deal of death to output. Taking the Sanctuary of Time as an example, Jura’s damage and blood have been boosted to 420%, while in T3 her boost is only about 180%, I can easily pass T3, while the difficulty of T4 is still out of my reach, even though I have a Dragon Heart and a 3000 shield, which is very annoying, is it possible to appropriately nerf the difficulty of the T4 dungeon, may I know if it is possible to properly nerf the difficulty of the T4 dungeon? Thank you very much.

Welcome to the forums!!!

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that this is precisely how t4 dungeons are by design. I doubt that ‘difficulty’ is going to change much.

That said, a lot of folks will also tell you, and rightfully so, there’s a big debate about the lead up to t4 dungeons and not having to really properly learn the mechanics of each fight because t1-t3 can often times be face tanked and not have to worry, which makes t4 all the more surprising.

Check out https://www.youtube.com/@heavygaming8742.
He’s got some great tutorials about each of the three main t4 dungeons including dealing with various iterations of Orobyss. Very handy.

Hopefully these will be helpful.

Also, if you’re using a self-made build, you might consider throwing that up on the forum and folks can help you who are knowledgeable about some tweaks that might make it more ‘comfortable.’

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As CaiusMartius said, that is the entire point of the T4 dungeons, they are designed to be challenging and require strict adherence to the mechanics, which as Caius also says, is part of the problem 'cause at lower tiers you can just face tank them.

If anything, the devs are going to add more difficult content in the form of “pinnacle” bosses.

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The issue with

really means your defensive mechanics are now virtually useless and may as well not be used as you need to play the fight exactly as the devs intended or just…die

This started I think with Shaper in PoE and they added these mechanics to every major boss that you have to do some cancerous stuff in the fight. Now devs just copy this

Shaper ball Phase, Sirus Meteor maze, Maven Memory game, Eater of Worlds Inescapable Doom. Thing is in PoE 99.9% will die if they get hit by this but you can make a character tanky enough to survive these.

Quin69 cant do the Memory Maven game everytime so he built a character that could survive the Maven Bomb which is around 120k raw elemental damage, he would take forever to do the fight but its possible

D4 has uber Lillith which is a shit fight, she does little damage or just one shots you. EHP is completely pointless there, the devs made the fight based on 0MS connection so when you do it on 90ms you get hit by waves that didnt touch you (but on the server it did)

The other factor is in PoE you get 6 attempts per boss, thats why these bullshit mechanics exist. Even in Dark Souls games you can get auto protection from death (second life) if you invested into Faith

The fact LE doesnt even have difficulty for most of the time and doesnt even market itself as a difficult game yet the Dungeon bosses are actually more difficult than most PoE bosses being similair geared

I would be very interested in hearing which of Julra’s mechanics you are struggling the most with.

I personally really like that bosses have you to

I wouldn’t call it painstakingly, but I like when a boss keeps me on the edge of my seat. That is exciting.

Because if you reach the point where playing these endgame encounters and it has become a boring repetitive task, that is when the fun for me diminishes.

I personally thing all 3 dungeon bosses are very well designed and are all very fair.

I think Lightless Arbor is probably the most unfair of them all, but it’s still ok.

Julra in particular is very interesting and fair IMO.
The only thing that is a little bit weird is, that one of her abilities is only used, when you use a melee attack and that ability is very hard to see and Dodge (it’s the void rectangular shaped attack)

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Yup, all valid points/concerns/annoyances. How one balances the hardest content around both tanky/glass cannon builds I don’t know.

It’s different for different people. I’ve never tried T4 dungeons but from my experience of SWTOR raids I can get how someone might view a dungeon boss as “painstaking” if they haven’t developed the necessary skill/mechanical understanding/whatever yet.

I have yet to try T4 dungeons because I keep switching character builds before they’re ready for it. Gearing up for that kind of challenge is hard and, at the moment, boring to me.
However, it seems that most of the issues people have are about the difficulty curve: T3 is easy, T4 is really hard. You could try to fix that curve so people become more aware of the fight mechanics, but I don’t think that would fix it.

I think this is more of a perception issue. If you compare with PoE, Sirus or the Shaper or the rest of the endgame bosses don’t have a difficulty curve. There’s no real way to prepare other than watching some video to know what the mechanics are and then going for it and starting to practice your muscle memory for these fights.

Now, it’s true that for each boss in PoE you have 6 tries. LE only gives you one. I think this should change and we should have some way to mitigate an error, or even just a lag spike from the server, so we don’t have to do the dungeon all over again.

However, it’s also true that, looking at PoE, not every build will be able to do endgame bosses. In fact, many builds can’t do bosses. They can do maps or delve or sanctum or whatever but they can’t do bosses. Not realiably anyway. I think this is the same for LE. You have some builds which are really good for monos but aren’t that great against bosses. Likewise, you have some builds which are great against bosses but which are pretty slow to do monos.

This, to me, feels like the natural way of things. The only issue is that LE doesn’t have much endgame variety yet, so it feels like a waste when your build can’t do bosses properly. Especially if you need the gear they (sometimes) drop. I expect that 1.0 and factions might help with this, especially trading for julra/shade drops, but I don’t think just any build can do all endgame content.

In PoE, the only time I did bosses was around Heist league where I made an insane BL miner that had truly insane defenses and regen. That league I even did boss carries. It was really fun. However, it wasn’t a great mapper. And no other build I did was ever a good bosser (because I never focused on that endgame content).

In short, I don’t think there’s anything really wrong with T4 bosses. They should be like in PoE: they’re for players that make builds for them and know their mechanics. New players can make builds for them and learn their mechanics and become good at them. That seems fine to me.

The only real issue I have with this is that you only get one shot at the boss per key, which can make learning their fights really long and frustrating, and you don’t really have (yet) a diverse endgame to offset not being able to do these bosses properly.

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Few retries for bosses sounds like a good idea, especially considering lag spikes.
I haven’t played dungeons much, because getting to boss is just so boring. I see no point in those trash mobs there, no challenge, no value, they’re just there to annoy me or decorate the maze to next door before i get a chance to fight the boss.
As for difficulty, so far i got only to T2 or T3, not going to bother with T4, because my builds are always too weak. So no idea about T4 :slight_smile: Although i accept they are meant to be difficult, i don’t like “mechanics” like “dodge this attack or you get bazillion of damage or unconditional death”. It forces all gameplay to be jumping monkey, because defense becomes irrevelant. Wanna be slow, heavy hitting melee knight? No! Be jumping mokney! Wanna be sniper mage or bowman? No! Be jumping monkey! Wanna protect yourself with big shield? No! Be jumping monkey! Somebody somehere invented this and it got old very fast.
I stick to monoliths.

That might have gone a bit off topic, end of rant.

All very valid. Agreed.

I’m torn with these. I’m a terrible player. I’m old(ish). My reflexes aren’t great. My hand/eye coordination has plummeted over the last decade. So t4s are REALLY challenging for me. In fact, the only t4 build I have been even remotely consistently successful with is STOMP!.

That said, I also kind of like that these are challenges like this. My biggest pet peeve is you run through two giant levels and then 10 seconds into the boss fight. your dead. Making t2/t3 a more ‘linear’ progression (t2 33% harder, t3 66% harder, t4 full on) would help with learning the fight but the frustration of having to redo two levels every time you fail I think is a big hurdle. Multiple tries, even at a moderate ‘gold’ cost, is one possible solution, though they’re may be others.

Whatever happens or occurs in the tweaking of these I hope they maintain the unique battle that requires more than just stack survival points so you can fast tank it. Maybe something in the attacks just needs to be a little less one-shotish, like a ramp up on an ability as it hits that still gives a second or two of reaction time to get out of it.

Honestly, I don’t have the answer for stuff like this. Just thoughts about what makes it feel ‘not great.’

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You gave me an idea. Lower modifiers/bonuses with each death in boss fight. This way you get to learn the tricks and get extra reward for not dying.

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