This is a part of the issue I wanted to address originally when feeling that one-taps come too fast - not enough warning, especially in the chaos of totems, pools., rotating beams and that not.
In general, a good fight involves chip damage from random (chaotic) sources and lethal damage from well-telegraphed or well-patterned attacks. Lethal damage should not come from random or feels-like-random soruces.
Julra is intended by design to have hard hitting attacks and to be challenging side content. The boss is balanced around your ability to endlessly use Temporal Shift to essentially dodge any mechanic the boss has with a small downside, a void rift at your feet.
You aren’t supposed to tank any of the damage Julra does, it’s more of a fight based on if you can do the mechanics correctly and strategize your void rift placements between the two eras.
Thank you for the reply Kissingaiur. However, the issue of being able to reliably notice when she is about to do something still remains. It takes just once to be hit.
However, Temporal Shift is only used against the screenwide aoe. If you use it at other times on tier 3/4 it is more likely to get you killed than anything. So dodging any mechanic with Temporal Shift is effectively an overstatement.
While I do also have a Bow-Mage, this was with one of my other Rogues which is a simple Phys Marksman. Feels a bit stronger and durable than my Bow-Mage and is also my highest level character. Has the same issue as most dodge based characters… if you get hit you really feel it.
I wanted to beat the T3 version with my Dodge based Beastmaster, but this fight completely counters that style of play. Beastmasters have a lot of defensive layers that are dependent on hitting the enemy (Aspect of the Boar, Dodge increases from Serpent Strike, Haste from hitting the enemy, offensive buffs like Aspect of the Shark / Viper). Each time you switch eras, she doesn’t become hittable for 5+ seconds, which removes all of your temporary buffs.
Then she throws a bunch of hard-hitting attacks at you in a way that makes it hard to notice all of them, and that doesn’t include the “whack the fountains or they become invulnerable and hit you with even harder projectiles”. That makes it a lot harder to stack the necessary offensive buffs to make this fight tolerable.
I’m still learning the ins and outs, but I get tired of having to farm keys just to have the opportunity to fight her. Especially since I want to learn all my timings to avoid getting one-shot because I can’t hit her often enough to get the buffs I need.
I am really happy with the fight mechanically, but the thing you mentioned here also bothers me.
It takes to long for her to follow you into the different Era.
As a Reaper Form Lich that relies on Leech, you always start low health until you can finally leech again.
Speaking of the Lich, the Reaper form has worked as “two lives” for me during the rest of the gamer. Although rarely, I’d receive fatal damage sometimes and will be bounced off Reaper into human form. With Julra, a hit against the Reaper kills you entirely with no human form.
That’s just because Reaper Form just gives you a “2nd health bar”, damage that overkills you goes into the hp pool of human form.
You can survive the big aoe with enough eHP, but it’s just not meant to be in T4^^
There are certainly ways to achieve it anyway xD
I like that they made a boss that only some certain builds can do it. It just kill the build diversity.
Who want to play a build that can’t kill tier 4 dungeon boss.
There is a moment where the technicity of the boss fight ruins the fun.
For me (and this is very personal), Julra has reached this moment.
First a labyrinth, then a too technical fight. No fun at all for me.
But I still like and support the concept!
Ive only done the fight on my Abomination Necro with 3.5k Ward. I just run in circles around them and timeshift at the last moment when the explosion hits to maximize damage uptime, the only damage I take is from those void beams and its not dramatic.
Never noticed damaged from the Void floor rift but I havent stood in it
The fight is kind of boring. It takes a long time. too long infact and my Abomination hits for 350-500k on the dummy and barely scratches her and my Abomination can maintain 5-6 armor shred stacks at 100% so they hit fast enough
Ive fallen asleep fighting Sirus and Maven before this fight is different as one death and you lose but theres also little risk. Its one key that drops frequently
When she casts the explosion I time shift right before it hits then immediately time shift back to the fight, I dont wait for her to chase me anywhere
Yes… she does take too long to follow…
@Tree post above also makes me wonder how much this particular fight is going to separate builds in a similar fashion as Arena Vs Mono build favourites… It seems like this will add another Dungeon ready build type… I.e. a build that is purely tailored to Dungeons because the Boss fights are very technical and benefit a certain build or playstyle more than any other…
To me this is would be unfortunate - while some builds will always be better at mob farming or single target killing, I have always found that its unfortunate that some builds suffer and as such people tend to gravitate to using a few time tested builds instead of just enjoying something from the beginning to end of the game in any build… I realise that player skill comes into play here but there should be a way for each type of build to progress in their own specific way… And it seems that beating Julra currently favours a specific playstyle…
I realise that this is just one Dungeon so far… and there are more to come with presumably different bosses? with different technical focussed fights… but it does make me wonder where this is going…
What bothers me is, that it always takes a pretty long time until she follows you, regardless of how “good” you time the era shift, even if you switch era’s in the last millisecond it still takes seconds until she follows you.
It definitely make the fight “less stressful”, because you get those big downtimes, but those are bad for some builds.
For the rest of your post, I don’t necessarly agree, that it’s bad that some builds excell at different things.
Especially when multipler hits, it’s super interesting for me, when you can specialize and now do a “well-rounded” build.
But if Player A has insane singletarge, but bad AoE
And Player B has great AoE, but his sustained single target sucks
Some of the most funs builds I play, are builds that would fit very well into some of these multiplayer settings.
Having meta builds, that kinda “can do it all” is not appealing to me, from a co-op perspective, because then everybody can run around doing their own business, even in a MP setting.
Multiplayer is an entirely different kettle of fish… There specialisation and the strengths of the team override any individual build and there will DEFINITELY be specialisation of builds for MP… no doubt about it.
But Singleplayer is entirely different… If you cannot respec on the fly for each coming battle/boss like LE doesnt want you to do, then you have to have a generalised build that is pretty good at one thing but generally good at anything the game could throw at it… Its already challenging to make a build that isnt too weighted against either mobs/single targets because then you fly through a map, only to take 20 minutes to kill the boss or vice versa.
Things like technical bosses that favour a specific playstyle then force you to build a character for that… what I am saying is that there should be a way for each type of build to progress… there should be a way for Julra to be beaten by melee, ranged, mage, fighter rogue, acolyte with relatively equal difficulty… If not, then everyone is going to have a Julra farming build and its likely to be the same two or three builds…
Yeah, I get it, but have in mind, this boss is designed for level 100 characters with close to bis gear. My Multishot Marksman also has 2.2k hp and is basically the best you can have prepatch with a T5 Flat phys legendary bow. She is not strong enough to kill that boss easily. However my BD , who is also dodge/GB based defencively eats the boss, chews it and spits it out in the span of 80 seconds.
Nerfing the boss would mean nerfing the rewards, because I’m literally getting 20 exalted items per run.
What level (out of the four) are you taking about?
And there is another issue that I have with particularly difficult bosses, whether optional or not. They make the rest of the content feel bland as if non-existent. I’d rather see challenging map mobbing, spiced with slightly more challenging boss encounters as opposed to “fall asleep” 95% of the game, and challenge concentrated on the remaining 5. In the latter scenario, the “easy” part of the game feels non-existent and not worth playing. Why pour countless hours in design for content that players will breeze through once and then forged about?
I might have to correct my first statement about instantly dying in the void pool.
Yesterday I tried the T4 Sanctum with the same char and noticed that I got hit twice and died on the third hit from the void pool. If I remember correctly the two paths I took in the T4 Sanctum both each had 120% more damage/health modifiers.
Now I don’t know what happened in the T3 Sanctum but I suspect that when I did the time lapse I got hit by someting else at the same time, maybe even got crit. At least that could maybe explain how I can survive two hits on T4 Sanctum with those modifiers but instantly died in T3 Sanctum. I feel like even if I did get glancing blows on both hits in the T4 sanctum and none in the T3 Sanctum, the damage difference would have been enough to have the same result. Both times I had full health before getting hit by the void pool (or void rift, not sure what her ability is called).
The only thing that I don’t really like is that she marks you after you time lapse and it follows you making it very hard to escape the first hit. I didn’t check if she marks you again if you time lapse to avoid the current mark basically making you end up in an endless cycle of getting marked → time lapse to evade → get marked because you time lapsed. Maybe someone who knows the fight better than me can elaborate.
Anyway, there is something else that I noticed quite some time ago and maybe someone can confirm this. I always felt like there is a certain range of damage from enemies and for some enemies that range seems rather high. Not I don’t know if this is true but when I was reading the patch notes for 8.4 when it was released I was confused by the following line: “Ascendant Embermages deal 11% less damage, have 5% less range, have slightly greater cast speed randomisation, and arena pack size scaling has 85% reduced effect on them (from 40%).”
Does this mean that enemies do indeed have randomized stats (not in an unlimited range of course). I have never really noticed that in terms of like attack/cast speed, health, movespeed, etc. but in damage for sure. Sometimes the same enemy (non magic/rare) in the same echo feel like they don’t do the same damage. Most of my chars use multiple layers of defense but even with characters that have no block or glancing blow I seem to notice this. Like sometimes I get hit by the Embermage Meteor and it deals 200 damage and then I get hit by another one and it deals like 400 damage or more (of course I know it might have been a crit). Now I know that a lot of factors play into enemy damage but I was just wondering if in general enemies do indeed have randomized damage in a certain range and if that range is higher for some enemies than it is for others.
Tried (and died) multiple more times against the T3. My build’s definite weakness is low health; even then, War Cry’s invincibility helps tremendously against those Void pools, which allows me to focus my attention on her other attacks. It’s definitely PITA if you don’t have a movement skill, but now that I clearly know the range of those spinning orb things, it’s now a much more fun battle instead of panick fighting.
Now at least I can focus on improving specific parts of my build instead of worrying about constant death pools. I also have a Druid that I’m leveling up until I have decent health to fight her T3 form. With it being much tankier than the Beastmaster, I’m hoping for a more balanced fight.