Casually going through Ch 9 myself on a force guard with 45%+ armor and 108%+ phys resist (more from certain procs) and while I may only be sitting on 33 health regen (plus health on hits) the alpha spine hunter stacked bleed so fast, and was entirely unescapable thanks to apparently zero cooldown leaping and easily outrunning 35% move speed, it was absolutely impossible not to die. I may be playing Masochist, but I’m overlevel for the chapter having done a few monos. The fact I’m this stacked (using a shield, too, at 37% chance and 32% effectiveness) makes it clear to me things are absolutely overtuned. The effect and damage from stacking dots from mobs (as well as non-hit AoE flamethrower attacks like the soul cages or ice bats for that matter) are stupid overtuned. There’s no strategy to avoid how stupid nasty dot stacks are from rares and uniques and if part of your sustain is either channeling stationary or attacking a mob and I have no means of outpacing the incoming damage, at this much excess defense, is just not going to be acceptable.
I’d like to try my luck at HC Masochist some time, but knowing some enemies like this exist (most dangerous, of course, for melee) I just can’t even bother trying. Doing everything right and still melting through a mountain of defense is just not good balance when it’s unavoidable damage like dot stacks.
Is it overtuned? Damn thing covers the screen in inescapable mess and requires so much kiting it takes a week. Compare this boss to say Lagon. Lagon requires paying attention, Lagon requries careful movement, but is fine if you do these things. This boss is constant screen-eating insanity, with different resists for every idol and poison to boot, and there’s not enough CD reduction in the world to handle it with movement skills. “Enough movement speed” there isn’t enough movement speed if you’re not a super-tank build, and not everyone is. This is not “Oh get some resists it’s fine” stuff, and anyone who’s replying with some variant of “You just need perfect resist 6 layers of defense god himself and chuck norris it’s NP!” you might want to try remembering where this takes place. The story. The same story where people will not have tons of rare shards, amazing gear, and just happen to be running tank monsters. You know - that part that happens before you get all the cool stuff? Remember that? Obviously not.
*: And yes, some builds will be fine with it. That does not make it just fine tuning-wise. We all have to do this, not just Hulk on steroids super-builders or those who happened to choose things that synergize with this fight better. This is not ok. Very disappointed with this boss design - filling the screen with nonsense that has no escape-able pattern etc. just promotes a 'Pick one of the builds that is good at it or bang your head against the wall for an hour with many, many deaths" meta. I thought we weren’t doing that here ;p
Holy fucking shit I finally hit Majasa. Again… 108%+ phys, 45%+ armor, 140% fire res that pylon still can kill me under a second (it nearly did, stun locked me, and I was still low health after mashing 3 pots), I’m 1100 health, her first phase is still like a 6 minute fight and then she has another where you’d THINK all this defense would matter and no, I can’t keep up, even when using Rebuke (doesn’t help that she’s on you faster than Duriel in D2). Monsterously overtuned. She’s worse than Merciless Malakai when Act 4 was end of storyline in PoE.
It is all grossly overtuned. We need damage output and health reduced by a good 30% depending on the enemy, the snake rares that naturally reduce ally damage taken should never get Twinned (or not effect each other), there’s simply too much mob in the final areas given this game’s typical pacing (especially for their health), Majasa needs a health nerf by 30% minimum (Lagon can feel like a chore for how much health he has and how easy his tells are), the poison pools need to fade away a good 1.5 seconds faster, and her second phase… I was on it for about 3 minutes before the relentless barrage of attacks finally broke through and I couldn’t sustain. Hardly a single potion in sight, too.
majasas worst skill is her stone gaze, the issue being it comes out fast and thus sentinel has severe trouble dodgeing it(as they have to lunge into majasa and THEN cycle around, meaning they need to do it at the STARTUP)
Killed by Oblivion spike with max res, 800 health 1500 ward constantly. I’m only level 60 having gone through the campaign with around res 15 off max across. Definitely feels overtuned with the incoming damage and boss health. Can’t get her passed that 60% health mark and yeah I’m casual with 45 hours in game with no monos, but seriously. Needs to be tuned down. Made it to phase 2 finally after 5 deaths, hahahahaha. Boss gets a big NOPE from me.
If you fight her in melee range it’s easy to run to the side to avoid that.
The cold meteor that sends out a line of damage if it misses? Also very easy to “dodge” if you’re paying attention, but you’ll need to run in a circle so you don’t get hit by the second bit of it.
Easily avoidable by not standing in the red circles.
I was able to facetank that on my block paladin (only ~50% chance to block & 50% DR on block) but I did have a decent amount of life on hit/block.
It’s a mechanic-heavy fight which isn’t too difficult when you’re used to them & know what to do, just like Lagon, Rahyeh, etc.
LE has always been about not dieing rather than out DPS-ing content, not like PoE/D3, it requires a change in mindset.
Hyperbole aside, all of the “inescapable mess” is … fairly easily escapable just by running out of it & decent awareness of what #### is on the ground. IMO, the fight feels not too bad in melee range. Paying attention & learning what goes where & you’ll be fine. Don’t forget that we’ve had Lagon for a very long time now so the community as a whole knows how to deal with him, I don’t expect Majasa to be any different, though she is harder.
Having done it on a Paladin with Lunge, I only ever used my movement skill to get back into range to attack, you’ll be able to do fine by just running with decent movement speed
And people throwing the hyperbole at it saying it’s too dificult (“covers the screen in inescapable mess”, “equires so much kiting it takes a week”, “not enough CD reduction in the world to handle it”, “there isn’t enough movement speed if you’re not a super-tank build”, for a few examples of the last two posts), isn’t any better than those who you’re calling out. That particular door goes both ways.
Is it “perfectly tuned”, probably not, it’s just been introduced, it’s a step up in difficulty & part of the community is loosing their collective #### about it given the difficulty of the earlier campaign (though the devs did try & smooth things out a little in chapter 8/9/early mono).
And some won’t, but that doesn’t mean balancing around the lowest common denominator makes sense either. The devs want the difficulty to increase as the campaign goes along, which it does but not smoothly & they need to work on that so you don’t get difficulty spikes at certain points. Plus it’s a boss so they don’t want it to be a facewalk that anyone can just roll their face over the keyboard and complete.
I’d be surprised if the devs didn’t tweak it down a little over the next few patches, which is fine, but they’re not going to change it so much that you can do it blindfolded with a nekkid lvl 1 character (which is what some of the hyperbole seems to want it to be, see how useful that feedback is? No?).
I don’t think they stack but I’ve never noticed either way. And no I’m not playing with some diabolical uber-build.
For bosses I think that’s based on % health lost, so if you’re struggling to make progress, that’ll be an issue. It also doesn’t help that they nerfed access to leech at the same time. We need to adapt (and complain feedback, without the hyperbole).
Start off in melee & you won’t have any issues with that. And it’s not as if her melee is particularly bad.
Llama is proficient in the non-meta just above worthless build category. The primary issue I saw with most of the complaints is twofold: 1) not a large enough hp pool to take multiple hits and being under-geared only compounds these problems. 2) no video guides showing the mechanics for people to practice or show them how it is done before they try it.
Until she shred your armor and phys res, and you need to run only to get into her wide cone AOE with slow.
Being able to tank her with the tankiest class and tankiest build doesn’t prove that anything other than that would be able to survive a few hits by her.
I died multiple times to Lagon my first time fighting him. I did not ever feel that he is overtuned. His damage is huge but the mechanic learnable. Majasa is however overtuned in term of damage from her unavoidable/hard to avoid mechanic.
Neither should they balance around the highest common denominator (see PoE)
I don’t see anyone asking to nerf her to the ground. I agre that there are people that emphasize things to vehemently but, Hyperbole-ing does not mean asking for major nerf but more on expressing frustration
If you are a block paladin, you are going for the one of the tankiest end game build. Majasa in ch9 is like 40% into the whole game. So, you might feel more comfortable against her. Other classes might struggle more. The difficulty with the balance would be for other class to feel that Majasa is still fair for camapign boss. Frankly if Majasa is a mono boss, I believe there would be less complaint on her.
Yeah, the big white cone. When I got lots of stacks, I ran around her, or maybe to the other side of the arena, till the stacks fell off.
The converse is also true, not being able to survive on the squishiest build after going full DPS 'cause that works fine for PoE/etc isn’t cause to nerf her into the ground.
That’s not what the threads on the forum were about at the time… I’m not saying that she’s not a bit overtuned, but at the very least some of this thread is due to her being new & people not being prepared for her 'cause the campaign is a cakewalk. That’s not cause for nerfing her either. Bosses shouldn’t be easy (though the devil is in the detail & it’s difficult to balance for a wide variety of player skill & build capability).
And they generally don’t. But it’d suck to be on the “wrong” side of that line, I’ll not deny.
But with the galactic amounts of hyperbole in this thread, how can you tell?
Edit:
Some of it absolutely is fair, as I’ve said. Knowing which parts & how to tweak it so it’s the fine line between easy/challenging/impossible for so many different builds/player skill levels is the difficult bit.
My VK Caster/hybrid did just fine here. The only “panic” point was when I made a mistake and had to hammer off 3 potions in a row after she dropped me to 24%. Part of the problem is the post have a tone of attempting to blame someone/something for something that we screw up by making a bad decision. I knew the pattern I wanted to run that fight with. I saw and analyzed the mechanics enough to know which ones were deadly and one that I could regen through. This is a counter clockwise edge-center-edge repeat fight based on where the AoE or cones are at.
My impression is that her high move speed, attck speed and turn rate does not make running around near her quite viable to avoid her claw attack that shreds res. On a separate note, that lunge of her feels just prolong the need to keep kiting. I can experiment more if I feel like booting up LE again currently. The ch9 mobs in mono kills my motivation at the moment.
I agree that there are some unwarranted offensive hyperbole here, but commenting on those with another emotional reply (not you) could make the whole discussion into a brawl where the devs will have difficulty picking out valid feedback.
I don’t think it needs to be hugely nerfed but I do think it is a bit overtuned. My char that had rolled through the campaign with relative ease is suddenly being one-shot by almost every attack this boss does. This in itself isn’t an issue and in fact I’m totally fine with big-damage attacks that can one-shot you but this boss is absolutely relentless with filling the arena with attacks. Sure, they’re dodgeable but that means your DPS plummets, meaning the fight lasts longer, meaning there are more opportunities for a slight mistake to kill you.
There isn’t really anything else in the campaign that feels like this. Liath (mechanically a more difficult fight than Lagon IMO if you’re underlevelled or poorly geared) is usually fought at a point where you can tank most of the attacks and have enough DPS to get through the fight really quickly. Lagon has one-shot attacks but they’re clearly telegraphed and give you ample time to move out of the way. Arguably the Wengari boss with the lightning leap is a one-shot with little wind up and other attacks being spammed in the arena but it still gives you long enough to dodge and enough room that you have safe areas to dodge to. Again, it’s not really any one thing about this boss that is the problem, it’s kinda the sum of everything.
I’m not looking for build advice here, I fully accept that builds exist that have an easier time with this boss but up until this point pretty much every build is campaign viable and it feels weird to suddenly lose that. I would be very interested to know what the dev’s intentions are here though - it could be that this marks a point where they expect players to have been levelling and optimising their builds and there is always the option of going and doing monoliths for a while to grind some levels and gear. If, however, they’re envisioning players starting a character and taking it through the entire campaign as a starting point then I think this boss does need a bit of rebalancing.
I just bought this game, but coming from PoE, I can see this is just wrong, the entire 9th chapter. You go from telegraphing attacks to steroid abusing sand people and snakes. Damage is way overtuned for the entire thing.
But for the boss. It’s fine Majasa is not overtuned (maybe slightly, after all she’s not a final boss), what’s overtuned is her damn pylons. Weak to melee? No. I’m playing a DoT build so that’s not happening. Cut their health and damage in half and you have a fair fight. Or better yet, get rid of them. I’m sick of starting at the screen saying “you died to essence of X” instead of fighting the actual boss.
