This is a sidenote, but I have never actually fought both at once. If you simply head to the left before they actually spawn, you’ll fight Harton and Zerrick won’t come near you. Once Harton is dead, you can go kill Zerrick.
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Now that I’m into monos, here’s another observation:
When fighting timeline bosses, it has consistently taken me less time to burn through each health segment than it has to burn through the bursts of Ward. It really annoying.
The goal of this was to slow down really high DPS builds without negatively impacting lower DPS builds, but what’s actually happened in my experience is the exact opposite.
Dear EHG, can you please realize that killing bosses in the non-challenging content too quickly is not actually a problem that needs to be solved and relegate this insufferable feature to Pinnacle content?
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I actually do agree here as much as I like the new system more from a design point.
The ward needs to decay way faster. the idea behind adaptive DR was it made it so you couldnt just run over bosses, while not punishing weak builds. Bosses in the past actually took more damage then normal enemies unless you procced DR, which if you were truly weak, helped.
Now ive played a couple high damage builds including the one I beat the new pinnacle content with, and uhhh the ward just got evaporated. I could legit kill shades in 2-4 seconds.
Now im playing a less damage focused build, while I still dont mind the ward, it certainly is different, it should begin decaying right away and ramp faster.
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Yeah, exactly why this is such a crock. If your DPS was on the lower side, you never got throttled by the DR. The Ward burst throttles you every time, multiple times per fight, regardless of your DPS.
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I think the system is fine-ish. DR was horrible and I’m very glad they got rid of it. For now I think they should just adjust what mobs get the ward system. Quite a lot of mobs that I consider “small” get it, which feels weird.
I don’t mind it on the big bosses with an arena.
The next step - and I think this is something where the system would really be able to shine - is to make the bosses interact more with the system.
I.e. moveset changes or powerful one time moves that proc when the break points are reached.
The break points provide a clear visual indicator for stuff like that. Of course this would be a huge amount of reworking existing bosses to do that, but I think this would make the system really good.
I think it’s a decent base they can make something fun with. Not really there yet, but I’m hopeful for what they make out of it.
True, it was a really bad system.
And nonetheless… they managed to achieve the opposite of the goal.
Low damage builds get punished by the new ward system.
High damage builds don’t mind it.
Makes no sense.
So it’s fundamentally flawed in design.
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That might be true, but high damage leech builds love it.
So part of the problem has been solved (DR screwed those).
All you need is to tweak it now so that ward decay starts sooner and faster and low damage builds won’t mind it much.
Maybe? I honestly don’t know how the math plays out. And ward decay can still be adjusted. I wouldn’t rule out the existence for a sweet spot that makes the system feel better.
So far I haven’t felt overly “punished” for playing a low damage build (I think new shield bash without any meaningful gear as a forge guard counts?). Sometimes encounters with “small” mono “bosses” like Wenagari Patriarch/Matriarchs take a while - maybe longer than before. These are the only spots where I feel the new system is not in a good spot.
So no, I would not say it is a failed/flawed system by design. Not yet at least.
This is pretty much the only thing I think really needs to change (as in, actually change, rather than just tweak numbers). There are way too many mobs that count as bosses and shouldn’t.
For example, the soul repositories in the campaign have ward, however the ones for the abomination don’t (thankfully).
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I personally think that next to nothing should have any mechanic that tries to enforce a TTK or engagement with mechanics on it. Bosses like Julra that gate creating the most powerful gear or Pinnacle bosses that are specifically meant to be hard, yes, those make sense. Julra in particular actually makes a lot of sense because of how badly people tend to get stomped when they try T4 after blasting down T1-3 in seconds and never seeing half the mechanics.
But campaign bosses? Timeline bosses? No. Echo bosses and campaign mini-bosses fuck no. That level of prevalence is something I’d expect in an MMO, not an ARPG.
True… and all people already struggling with the bosses are in a nightmare now 
I dunno if that’s better or worse, I think they shifted one issue with another, at best it did nothing and worst-case it was a overall detriment.
The decay needs to wane much much faster and then we still have the issue that the system actually was supposed to hinder bosses to simply be burned into the ground in seconds. Ward does fail with that, I pulled out my Wraithlord Arbor build which had some short but decent fights 1.0 and in 1.1 stuff just… falls down because of those massive hits.
One way or the other the new system is in no way better then the old, it just shifts the goalposts around, formerly the post itself was in the way of leech builds so they ran head-first against it. Now the pulled it over a little bit so instead low-damage build get the concussion.
Can’t say ‘solved’ or even ‘better’ yet I would even argue that the design - as is - is a failed thing as numerical adjustments won’t deal with all the goals at once.
Edit:
Well, to be fair the DR system itself also was a failed design in my eyes.
If you make a build and get powerful you want to see that and feel that. It’s a mark of success to evaporate a boss and manage it when there’s proper balance (which we haven’t remotely achieved yet). So the existence of it in itself was something where I scratched my head.
I disagree that it did nothing at best. Let’s break down into the generalizations leech/non-leech and high/mid/low damage tiers.
-High damage non-leech doesn’t really care. Maybe they take 2s more to kill the bosses now.
-Mid damage non-leech prefers ward. They don’t get DR’ed and they can still mow down ward pretty fast
-Low damage non-leech is now slower. Although they can now simply focus on defense and wait for ward to decay (more on that later)
-Low damage leech is like the above.
-Mid and high level leech both prefer ward, since they can now survive.
So we get that 3 out of 6 variations have an easier time now and 1 doesn’t care.
Which only leaves low damage builds. And for these you just need to adjust it so that ward starts to immediately decay as soon as it goes up and it decays faster.
Because the other 4 builds already tear down the ward anyway, so it’s not relevant if it starts decaying right away or not, they’ll still keep hitting to take it down faster. And this way the low damage builds don’t have to wait too long until they get back to health chipping.
Now, does this fix things? No. But it does get close to everything they want.
Low damage builds now get just a smaller inconvenience, everyone else is either better or kinda the same.
Because the only other real alternative that actually does everything they want is to introduce immune phase changes. And players hate those even more than they hate DR or ward. Not to mention it would require changing all boss fights.
I agree with campaign bosses and with echo bosses and mini-bosses. I don’t agree with monolith bosses or dungeon/arena bosses.
If a boss has something desirable that can be farmed, they should have the same system.
If a boss/miniboss doesn’t have this and is just a progression barrier, like campaign and echo bosses/mini bosses, then they shouldn’t.
Otherwise high damage builds will have an even higher advantage on this as well. And they want to make it so that you don’t feel like you have to stick with 10-20 builds that do high damage to farm effectively.
And that’s the thing which is all based on, absolutely true… and a notion I find actually a bit baffling for 2 reasons.
The first is that halfway decent balancing is meant to ensure that the discrepancy between the ‘core builds’ at least isn’t too massive. So generally all of them feel ‘ok’ or even ‘good’, not a single one feeling actively ‘bad’. Which is a status which hasn’t arrived yet and a status which is important to achieve, simply for the aforementioned reason from your side alone plus a dozen more.
The second is that it’s a mentality issue from players and not something your game is supposed to 100% supply. We already have 10-20 builds which are massively stronger and/or faster then the other builds, which are objectively superior to get through the game. It’s a given they exist and the magnitude of those being in the forefront is plainly spoken ridiculous. I don’t have a Wraithlord Arbour build without reason for when I wanna farm casually.
So we already have that, DR or Ward don’t matter for that. Which is why I don’t quite understand it existing in the first place.
And the argument ‘but it would be so much worse!’ is also not viable, Path of Exile has a ton of people ‘optimizing the fun out of it’ and hence pushing towards the most effective builds. Which comes by design with the very… veeeery long ‘second campaign’ (Ability to kill Maven or even get close to it as a goal) which enforces that. LE doesn’t have that yet, the Harbinger is definitely the first step towards that… but when it happens that’s the main driving point for those things to shift. If you play 500 hours and you can save in 100 of those by being efficient then many more people do it compared to playing 50 hours and saving 10.
To be fair, I’m mostly just “defending” ward vs DR from the devs’ viewpoint.
My personal opinion is actually that you simply shouldn’t have either. Bosses should just have their health/defenses and if a few builds kill the boss in 5s, they need to get their damage more in line with the rest.
I feel like both DR and now ward are both just a patch to try to solve the issue of the huge imbalance between builds. If all of them are properly balanced around a 300-600c range, then there isn’t much issue if some builds are faster at bosses, because they usually tend to be slower at clearing monos, so it evens out.
But when you still have builds doing 1k+ (and I’m surprised wraithlord didn’t get more nerfed) then the gap becomes really noticeable.
If they do manage to get balance in check so the discrepancies aren’t as big and every mastery can have a viable “boss killer”, then I say we should just get rid of any form of boss “protection”.
If too many builds wipe Julra or Abberroth easily, bump up their health/defenses so few can.
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After doing absolutly no damage in 1.0 with a Paladin and at least okay damage with the Runemaster I started as a Falconer in 1.1. I’m okay with being a glass cannon - thanks to Rüstungsbruch (amor break?) nearly everything can kill me in two hits, but the clear speed is awesome.
Everything special (mini bosses, nemesis, magicans, bosses) has these three or four ward phases now. It’s just a boring mechanic to force all fight phases/attack patterns on you.
If it can kill me with just one hit, just let me one-shot it too, if my build is strong enough.
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Agreed there, absolutely.
Exactly that, it feels like a band-aid… and like most band-aids they come with being clunky and not properly fixing the issues.
I would like for EHG to focus more on actually getting their classes more in line with each other as a baseline rather then putting resources in plugging holes like that.
Yeah, absolutely. The damage is baffling and that’s been known. Why they haven’t culled that down to a strong degree is beyond me, I would’ve expected my build to feel a lot weaker this cycle, instead it feels… the same. Barely any investment and nonetheless I one shot most things and bosses loose 25% per crit.
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While I actually really, really like the new mechanic because I can visually feel it, I do agree with most of this. I think echo bosses can have it to a lesser extinct because it would help to train you for pinnacle bosses but if they removed it from everything else, I’d totally be behind that. It is rather “funny” 
to run through an echo with a bunch of Ruby Captain Arjani’s spawning every few hundred meters.
Having more experience with the boss ward mechanic now that I’m doing empowered monoliths, I’m pretty sure it just bugs out at times. I have seen bosses who are being killed too fast heal up 25% of their life and then gain a massive amount of ward to counteract the high damage. Which there is no mention in any patch notes of being something that is supposed to happen. I’m pretty sure the ward gained will refresh or increase as well if the incoming damage is still deemed too high. So, it’s not like high damage builds are having a smooth experience with a perfectly functional mechanic.
We will always have a mechanic that throttles player dps in arpgs moving forward. Wanting it to be fully removed is just fantasy. My 2 cents. It fixes too many problems regarding players ignoring mechanics and just brute forcing through content.
PoE does it well with their newer bosses. Multi-phase and causing a stop there for a moment to change form or re-summon.
Those are definitely fine… but you can still ‘delete’ them during their phases at least and it’s a sign of having made your build powerful. A sort of personal achievement.
I agree. 3 ward phases for bosses, and 2 phases for mini bosses? Complete rubbish. I also have a suspicion that trash mobs still get drs system. I seen my damage just drop to a crawl after dumping a lot of mana on a pack. So i think, they may still added it via stealth.