I have no gear, no build, and am doing no damage. The boss ward change needs to be disabled until later acts or possibly even monos. Leveling is so much slower with this change. I have to take an extra couple minutes per boss that have boring simple mechanics that I have previously killed 50 times. The way things are right now the game is actually dead to me. Seriously, I have better things to do with my time. I am not coming back as long as every single boss takes this long early game.
To be clear this is not a post about the mechanic later in the game, only early on before you have a build or gear. I have no idea how this works later on and I may never find out.
So far during the campaign, I am finding it tiresome and annoying to have this extra Ward repeatedly thrown up as a barrier to my ability to kill bosses that feels completely arbitrary. It doesnât feel good, and I also donât agree with the goal of the system to begin with. IMO, enforcing an arbitrary TTK on bosses through any mechanic is lame, and they always feel to me like a solution looking for a problem that doesnât exist.
At the very least, I wish it were toned down significantly (or removed) during the campaign, where your damage is already plenty low that youâre forced to experience the boss mechanics. As-is itâs just tedious, and the Ward does not decay fast enough to, as Kain said, âgive bosses a chance to fight back without punishing lower DPSâ.
Iâve only tried it on a few echo bosses and a couple campaign ones and overall I found that I actually kill them faster now because of no DR.
They get ward at certain breakpoints but it goes away fast and the total time I spent fighting them seems to be shorter.
itâs just not fun I donât like it. I just store mana and do a spell or two when i cap mana, then go back to doing my lap around the boss. Maybe its not so bad at higher levels.
In that case, the new system should actually be better for you, because their ward decays while youâre getting your mana back.
In the old system there would be no ward but it would take you a longer time to kill. So youâd end up having to do more laps.
I can understand that, but that is a limitation of the build youâre using, not the ward system. As I said, youâd do less damage with the old system and it would take longer, thus more laps.
So far, to me it feels slower in the campaign. It may be faster. It may be the same. I have no idea. But it feels slower.
Even if it is technically/mathematically faster, unless the difference is enormous I am not going to notice it. By way of comparison, I so didnât notice the adaptive DR that this replaced that if I didnât read the forums I would never have known it was a mechanic. What I will always notice, though, is a big extra blue health bar popping up that blocks me from continuing to damage the boss. The natural decay is also totally indistinguishable to me from the damage I am doing to the Ward. And the fact that itâs on everything that even smells like a boss - including completely silly stuff like Soul Repositories for that last immortal army dude quest - makes it even more obnoxious to me.
Having my ability to damage the boss forcibly interrupted or blocked will never not feel lame to me - it feels the same as Heorotâs damage immunity phases and Lagonâs arena phase. Iâve hated that kind of encounter design since my days in vanilla WoW.
If EHG is convinced that âplayer kills boss too fastâ is a real problem (I disagree that it is), I hope they will continue experimenting with different ways of addressing that and find one that doesnât feel as crappy as this one does.
I agree I have no issue with immune phases I think they actually add to the game, because the immune phases show a cool animation and the fight changes a lot of times. idk make the boss jump over grab a log use that as a weapon have it stand in mid with a immune and do some aoe you have to avoid. Anything is more engaging for me than seeing a blue bar that absorbs dmg. The dr just felt like oh I guess I didnât crit was easy for me to write off, it wasnât even really that noticeable for me. But I understand having phases or transitions youâd have to make animations and that takes development time.
If the DR mechanic that was there before wasnât noticeable to you then your build didnât do much damage. You absolutely notice on a build that is doing 500k to millions of dps when it goes down to 63 damage hits for several seconds.
Ive found it way better personally. I feel like its faster.
But to me if they are gonna have the mechanic, this one is atleast transparent and there is notches/giant blue bar saying âokay dps now not blow big cooldownsâ it feels way more organic then trying to explain to people âyeah the reason you died here, is your leech got fucked over by this obscure invisible mechanic you would only ever know about if someone explained it to you.â
I played to mid 60âs with chaos bolt and fissure my own talents and build not optimized, I was learning the game I was aiming for a debuff build. I wanted to play the game without looking up a build or guide and see how far I could go. I was killing things very quickly I thought at least. The dr never annoyed me but my build involved ramped. I think I phased Lagon after 1.5 mins If I recall itâs been a couple of months now. So yea my build was probably awful. I remember going to a wraith build later and the boss transitioned after 10 secs I was 10 levels higher tbf but I quit shortly after testing i wanted to see the difference. Now Iâm back Iâll be following a guide.
I agree, i also like the new mechanic pretty much. It took a few fights to get used to it tho. Itâs as you say much more transparent, which makes it feel way less like a random difficulty,- or rather spongy-spike. It feels much more telegraphed and as such, as you mentioned, more organic. And as someone who isnât a huge fan of being able to âone-shotâ bosses even in Games liek this, i appreciate that bosses also get an breather.
I actually much prefer it to the DR stuff we had. I like being able to see the progress almost constantly as it feels like Iâm doing something. Does it slow down boss fights, sure. On a very first character of the season with no gear Iâm not trying to get to 300 mono by hour 6.
Not to say it probably canât be tweaked and dialed in better, but Iâve been kinda liking it.
I am just in the campaign so far. Decided to run void smite spellcaster, and so far, i have been able to avoid the ward changes by blasting enemies while kitting. With that said:
Personally do i like it? No. I hate being throttled for any reason, same reason i hated lack of mana pots, if i want to run full glass cannon and be dumping loads of mana. No exceptions
Is it more clear when enemies havd it? No. I find enemies will go into a similar ward state where the damage drops off. So i think either its bugged and its applying to standard mobs also or my eyes are hallucinating
