I agree here. Yes there are frustrating bosses and easier bosses but that is how they should be. By I have to say their design is great. What makes me say that is the following…
Lagon
I used to loathe him and fear him and die repeatedly to him. However I’ve now fought him enough that I am fairly confident I will never die to him again. That’s good boss design in my book.
What is not good design is the fact that you cannot just keep trying to beat the boss once you get there. Losing the Stability and thus having to run one or more standard echoes to build it up again is very bad design. It breaks the “vibe”. Letting players have as many attempts at the boss as they need (once they get there) is a much more satisfying way to do it. This allows players to focus entirely on what they did wrong last time, and try to fix it as soon as possible, without the interruption of a trivial echo or two between boss fights.
Preemptively doing echoes before doing a boss fight isn’t really a solution, you end up doing more echoes as a result either way.
I think a simple solution would be to reduce the boss defeat penalty so that one echo would be enough for 2-3 tries. That way you get enough stability, have a few shots at the boss before having to do another echo.
And dungeons should have some similar system where you can try to beat them a few times without having to redo the whole dungeon. But dungeons are being redone/rebalanced anyway, so maybe that will be a thing.
And now I will add my more controversial thoughts on this…
It’s all about the build.
Let me elaborate… I see the builds in this game falling into 3 main categories: minion, ranged, melee. However not all these types are created equal. In fact I believe there is a major tier list of build archetypes that goes like this:
S Tier: Minion
Mid-tier: Ranged
Rock bottom (weak) tier: melee
Why do I say that? Well main reason is I am old and slow and thus find the more twitchy gameplay of melee builds too much effort, and surviving is problematic. This is why I said at the onset this was a controversial opinion.
However there is another argument… LE bosses make the player MOVE. A lot. In fact quite a lot. You are constantly being challenged with dodging some attack or other. So the strongest builds in the game are those which can keep their damage output maxed while 100% focused on dodging all the attacks. Which archetype is the master of doing that? Minion builds. Ranged builds are second because they can keep their damage up more or less because they can deal it from anywhere. But poor old melee. A melee build that has to dodge stuff is much more likely to have to stop damage output to do so (face-tanking aside).
So bottom line, melee builds are weak in boss fights. (only my opinion remember)
I have a lot of Alts pushing corruption right now, but only two of them are melee (out of 20). That’s no accident. Furthermore those two melee classes I am levelling have a very hard and unsatisfying time on corruption-fuelled boss fights. They feel orders of magnitude weaker than my various Minion and ranged builds.
For me (as an old duffer with failing reflexes), melee builds are just too much effort, and too weak against the bosses, with poor survivability. Whenever I hear a player complaining about LE bosses, I often wonder if they are playing melee.
This is where I prefer D4’s method of # of resurrects. I’m not a huge fan of 1 lag hiccup, or mouse fart (where the mouse just decides to jump the point 1/2way across the screen) can ruin 10-20 minutes worth of dungeon grind. I’m also not a fan of zerging bosses either, so having a limited # of attempts, and a boss fully healing between attempts is better than the one-and-done we have now. Could even adjust it so you get more attempts early on, and less in the harder content… 5 attempts in T1/2 dungeons and 3 attempts in T3/4. Could also do that in monoliths as well, 5 attempts in normal, 3 in empowered – but dying still removes the rewards and bonuses, as it is now…but at least you could get completion of that echo still, and not have to run it all from the beginning again.
That’s not controversial. If all builds do comparable damage when they don’t need to worry about mechanics or taking damage then melee will always come off worse if taking damage is a concern (unless they’re tanky enough for it to be a non-issue, in which case they either do less damage or the minion/ranged builds are also tanky enough & we’re back to square one). Assuming the boss can do damage/has mechanics that affect melee.
Anybody here has played Undecember?
I really enjoyed the bosses fights in that game.
They are really, really hard, at least 2-3 mini bosses and 1 final boss in each chapter, all of them deadly (making-PoE-bosses-look-like-teddy-bears deadly).
But you respawn just outside their room, you can retry them as many times as you want, with them back at full health.
Or if one is really too hard, you can cheese it by using a rare item allowing you to revive mid-fight, without the boss healing.
My point: if you give more tries to the player, you can afford to have much harder and more interesting bosses.
Fights where you get only one chance will always have to remain relatively easy and telegraphed, otherwise the game becomes unplayable.
I much agree with Ghostlight. I am also old and slow, so I heavily favor minion builds and DoT ranged builds. Melee builds are okay for clearing but very tedious for bosses because as soon as I get an attack rhythm going, I have to stop and move out of something.
In mono end boss fights, I’ve noticed that the stability actually seems to edge slightly up after each try, so as long as the attempts are in the same play session, I don’t have to do extra monos. When I come into a fresh session, I always have to do a non-story echo before a story echo, otherwise the story echo never loads. That bug has been around for almost a year, even after verifying files many times, and through multiple versions.
I have personally never liked melee builds ever since D1. Some ARPGs get the balance right for them, but in almost all of them melee is the weakest link. They tend to be tankier but usually not enough and they almost always lack AoE.
Though, to be fair, this is not only a fault of ARPGs. Ever since D&D almost every RPG has this flaw. Melee tends to be stronger in earlier levels and falls off a lot in higher levels.
The only time I’ve enjoyed melee builds were in D2 mods like PD2 that rebalance and change things. And even then I still enjoy minions/ranged more, especially minions. I’ve always been a coward in RPGs
The main issue is that, as a rule, melee builds will only be competitive if they deal a lot more damage, and that’s almost never true. Historically, ranged/caster have been the high damage dealers to offset their usually lower survivability.
Melee tends to be “balanced” solely regarding tankiness and damage and not the DPS loss of having to constantly reposition.
I think after not playing aRPGs for a while and playing other games, simply put aRPGs have trashy boss fights and they all have their own issues
Most memorable aRPG boss fight for me in the last year was the Stronghold D4 Malnok boss on the second beta at lvl 20 and trash gear, had to perfectly dodge most attacks to actually deal damage and the boss did a lot of damage
Last 2 months ive played Dark Souls 2 > Sands of Aura (nice game) > Nioh 2 (crazy difficult in early game) > Salt and Sacrifice, these games kick the shit out of you in some instances but one thing they have in common is generally ‘short’ run backs to retry the bosses
LE needs a built in dodge roll like D4, I think D4 engine has the potential for the best boss fights they just need more tuning and overall a complete rebalance of their game. They need to add in leech/other recovery and make enemies do much more damage and it seems GGG agree as PoE2 is very much like D4
Dungeons in LE are on the moon or something as it takes a ridiculous amount of time to load an instance, then you have to run 2 massive screens just to fight a boss and I didnt really think about it until I fought Uber Lillith; LE’s server doesnt comprehend properly with having to dodge precisely, you stand in the opening of Julras beam and you take damage because of some sort of desync because you arent in that spot really according to the server
Grim Dawn boss fights are garbage and the worst that any aRPG has. I can explain why:
Every boss simply default attacks you paired with spammable cooldowns that hit you ultra fast and just repeats this pattern, the way to beat any boss in Grim Dawn is to simply have higher base numbers than them, tank all their damage and kill them or just run in circles around them
I once fought Calladagra? the superboss for over 10 mins just throwing a shield at them, running around the big stone in the area and engaging them when my defensive cooldowns were ready, look at the Ravager fight its just a tight boxing match until one dies, even ranged builds just facetank
I dont play melee much but sometimes I want to play something different, even though PoE’s melee is kinda shit ive had the most fun there because of the incredible attack speed/overall speed you can get that it generally masks the faults late game. Berserker for example is so damn fast you just feel good leaping around with 15 attacks per second
If you want a hybrid Melee/Minion build try Scorpion Beastmaster. I played it prior to Runemaster release and seemed pretty strong overall but I stopped playing and didnt push it at all, using Swipe to proc Scorps ability. When I rolled a Runemaster someone in chat was saying they hit Arena wave 500 on a Scorpion BM, we talked and generally had the same setup
However, playing first Undecember, then Diablo 4 has led me to believe the landscape is changing, and ARPGs are moving towards much more dynamic fights, with built in dodge, lots of movement from the boss, and really fast pace overall (as opposed to the traditional static choregraphy-learning).
Inspired more by soul-like stuff than by old fashioned MMOs.
I haven’t looked at it, but if you tell me PoE2 is taking the same direction, it gives me even more faith in the future! (I probably won’t play it, I am done with PoE, but they have an enormous influence on other developpers).
They released some more footage today but I havent looked, there is a new league releasing on the 8th
Issue with their videos is they use awful gear to make everything seem tankier, but a few PoE vets were struggling at exilecon
They are splitting PoE into two games and if they do it right they will potentially decimate the competition as you can just play fast paced PoE for a few weeks then go to slow paced methodical PoE for a few weeks and loop it
Personally im not keen on PoE2 but they have a way of luring you in with mechanics that no one else does
I one shot Searing exarch the first week it was in the game . . . I can doge shit.
But this game is just not worth my time and money if this shitty boss desgin is how the game is balanced.
So you killed it so fast, that boss mechanics are irrelevant? That is what I call good game design
Without giving more specific examples of what you don’t like about bosses, there is not much the devs can do about it.
While I would disagree with you that boss design in LE is shitty I could definitely agree on some specifics if you would be so kind and share some deeper thoughts than “boss design sucks in LE, I could kill a boss in another game”
