Trying a T3 Julra fight. She’s farming me because this black hole explosion covers the whole screen and I don’t see what “mechanic” I’m supposed to know. This feels like PoE boss design, lmao. Made to have you burn through deaths to figure it out, or you’re EXPECTED to Youtube everything before you do it.
Only time I’ve survived was popping Flame Ward for the damage reduction. Then there’s just a bunch of spell effects flying around and I seem to be perpetually taking damage over time, despite never visibly being hit.
The dungeon teaches you how to beat her. When the thing covers the arena, you use the time warp ability to jump to the other timeline where her attack isn’t. You keep doing that each time she summons it until you beat her.
As @bridgeburner1 said with the timeline travel and then once you get used to it you can just tp back after a few seconds so julra wont come after you and make the void puddle under your feet.
I just want to point out that you also don’t have to “die until you figure it out”. You can just go do T1 Julra but don’t attack at all. Her attacks won’t kill you and you can figure out the mechanics that way.
Then, when you’re ready, go up in difficulty.
New players usually blast the lower tier fights without seeing the patterns and are then surprised when they die in higher ones. And usually they’ll keep dying in that tier, rather than go down a tier where it’s easier to interact with the mechanics safely.
I see @bridgeburner1 addressed the boss you’re talking about so I’m not addressing that specifically. I just like the topic in the title.
I play a lot of games with “die until you figure it out” bosses, and I personally don’t mind them with the caveat that what you need to learn is intuitive and consistent.
To answer your question about “Why do games do this”, I feel like in recent times a lot of games have started putting in random patterns and attacks that are hard for humans to pay attention to in an effort to challenge (or just slow down) gamers who are too good at pattern recognition. It’s padding content, like so many other inane mechanics being added to modern slop games.
My rule is, if I’m not having fun, I stop playing. That’s the only way to punish people for giving me an inferior product. (I don’t think that applies here, I just mean in general.)
Yeah, this is one thing that made me quit playing PoE. I didn’t like researching fights before engaging in them, felt like bad game design (or lack of). I always felt like a good boss fight shows you the mechanics in smaller doses as you work your way to the fight itself, then the fight is some version of it. Maybe I’ve been spoiled by well-designed games like Devil May Cry 3 (the only DMC I’ve played) and Final Fantasy 10, where nothing really surprises you and kills you without warning. Even the Marlboros, for example, are introduced as a less-threatening base type, telling you to watch out in the future, this kind of thing is possible! You know, things like that.
But then PoE is just like… Yeah, so, Atziri has permanent damage reflect on her. We don’t tell you this. We expect you to go research the fight from players that either data mined, or learned it some other way. And then the community backs this up, because they think it’s what makes the game “for elite gamers only” and that’s how they get their rocks off…
-I’ll cut myself off before I rant on and on about PoE and its community.
I’m not a huge fan of having to use Keys in this game to learn a fight off the T1 version, but I guess that seems better than… well, the PoE version of it. Lol. Still enjoying this game right now, and honestly always looking forward to boss fights so that I can actually test my character, compared to trash clearing.
I do appreciate that… (and correct me if I’m wrong) it seems like, IN REPLACEMENT of invulnerability phases, there’s instead “ward” phases to break the fight up into segments, which is still a period where you can and have to deal damage still. (Minus phases where the boss may disappear from the map for a bit, of course.) I think this removes the unnecessary speed bumps of having actual invuln phases everywhere. If you JUST SIMPLY deal that kinda cosmic damage, then so be it, says the devs!
To be fair you’ll absolutely drown in keys before long.
It just postpones doing it a little.
Yes, and it’s a really bad system in my eyes, as are invul phases. Both are the bane of modern ARPGs. ‘Let us show you a shiny sequence!’ is fine in some cases… but in LE it’s prevalent for every large boss.
And yes, you generally are supposed to deal damage still, but for example at uberroth it’s actually rather nonsensical to do that with the sheer ridiculous amounts of Health he has. And for sub-optimal builds it’s also a detriment overall, they already struggle to achieve their goal and to survive, hence focusing on dishing out damage becomes a secondary measure and at times people ‘wait out’ the ward decay… which goes counter to the initial task of DR and Boss Ward, which is to hinder high DPS builds to ‘blast bosses into oblivion’… which is also a nonsensical approach as that’s the literal goal of the genre via the power fantasy
There’s an element to randomness in many of these kinds of bosses recently. There’s really two kinds: One is a kind where two animations look extremely similar and force you to guess which one it is until you’re much better at the game. Sometimes one animation is actually just the other but with a pause built in designed to trick you into reacting too early. The other is where the boss has a choice to do a follow up attack or not, and your only safe choice is to simply do nothing every time you see that animation in order not to get hit, which wastes your time.
I prefer both of those to the situation where bosses just flail around wildly and attack constantly, which has also been becoming a problem in recent game design. Really annoying.
I started seeing a lot of these types of situations in several of the bosses of Bloodborne and Dark Souls 3. It’s become way more common in other games since then.
Ahhh, that’s what you mean! I get where you’re coming form there.
But I also know why they’re done so much nowadays. Generally players have a high reaction time, comes with the segment. So developers have gone over to create patterns which aren’t specifically based on reaction but instead of pattern recognition and timing. They’re basically just another flavor of difficulty and absolutely fine.
Prime example are souls-like games which do that commonly. High wind-up times and sudden attacks from that, 2/3/4 combos which are random, often even switching up the pattern related to the count of attacks. Yeah, I get it.
It’s not a bad direction as long as it’s not overdone, variance in boss-behaviour is actually surprisingly good as it enforces pattern recognition to be at the forefront, only underlined with the timing of action and reaction, makes it into a gaming choreography one could say. Compared to old-school bosses which were more ‘simple’ and hence mostly based on reaction time rather then knowledge.
The downside - as you mentioned - is that it leads to ‘Die until you figure it out’ situations. Which yes, can be frustrating, but also very enjoyable, it’s based on the type of player simply and what they derive their enjoyment from. But it’s more a flavor and not a up- or downside.
