Playing as a character with overcapped fire and physical resists, shielded, with rebuke and ring of shields, I find that this boss can still fry me in a couple of hits. The main issue, I think, is that his three-pronged breath attack will target your position pretty much frame perfect with no delay. If you try to time his attack and move behind (thinking Reaper of Souls boss in D3), he will track your movement and turn just in time to release the bolts. It’s just not fun as melee. When playing as ranged, this attack is much easier to avoid and thus the whole encounter is pretty trivial.
I don’t think I’ve ever noticed him do anything other than his Smite-field that I’ve had to move out of as a melee even in Masochist mode. What kind of build are you palaying (Last Epoch Build Planner)?
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Roughly something like this, with a focus on reflecting damage. Playing on Masochist mode. Unbuffed, I’ve got 137% fire resist and 86% physical resist and 50% block chance with ~750 health. So I didn’t expect that a fire boss would cause me any issues - at least going by how the campaign’s been so far. As I say, the issue is more the mechanics of his attack - virtually unavoidable as melee and its frequency.
If you click on the small up arrow icon in the top left of the build planner you can upload your character to it.
Not sure off the top of my head what a reasonable hp at that level is, but I get the feeling that 750 might be a bit on the low side, plus resists are capped at 75% so you’re way over on fire. But his melee attack really shouldn’t be killing you.
One thing about Masochist mode, its supposed to be brutal and they won’t be balancing anything around it.
I appreciate you’re trying to be helpful, but I feel you’re maybe missing the point I’m making. I find the mechanic of this boss unfun - not necessarily talkig about the numbers (plenty of attacks where standing in a death ray will result in…death, which is normal). Not being able to avoid an attack as a melee character (as opposed to ranged) takes away player agency and reduces the number of viable strategies.
That’s the dev’s stated design intention anyway, as I understand:
Or maybe we say you have to get out of this certain area fast enough in order not to die. We have to assume that players can get out of that area by just walking and not having a movement ability.
…
You can do Lagon without using any movement abilities, and not ever get hit by one of his big attacks. It’s really hard, and it’s way easier with a movement ability but it is possible. We do test most boss fights with this in mind. We try to build characters that are a little bit lacking in some key areas but the mechanics are still functional.
P.S. I don’t understand how people play the campaign on the non-Masochist difficulty because mobs are made of paper there, but that’s a topic for another day (thread).
That’s for normal, for Masochist mode their stated design intention is “good luck with that”.
In normal his melee attack is a non-issue, as, IMO, it’s supposed to be.
Everything is pretty much a non-issue on normal, at least in the campaign so far. Do you consider a boss mechanic that is unavoidable for a certain types of character appropriate provided the damage is low enough?
Yes.
Edit: The campaign is easy, Majasa is somewhat harder.
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A very big portion of the bosses in LE are very mechanical and almost exclusively have attacks that can be entirely avoided, this makes player skill very impactful, but also makes gear progression feel meaningless, if you are a good player. (except maybe upgrading damage).
The last few bosses added to the game, like the lvl 90 MOF Timelines and Majasa are designed in a way, that you will receive some incoming damge if you wanna deal damage for the most part. There is still a lot of avoidable stuff, but a lot of the mechanics will hit you, when you want to stand still and do damage.
All of those abilities are balanced, to be not lethal if you have some decent amount of defense and sustain.
The Problem with mechanics that are avoiadable, is that you could kill a boss completely naked without any gear, except maybe boots (or some other source of movement speed) and a weapon. This completely makes gear progression feel bad.
Now if you are taking some of those mechanics, that are not meant to be lethal and put them into a masochist perspective, some of them very well might be lethal.
Should the devs change them? I don’t think so.
That’s kinda the point of masochist, the game throws outright impossible and unfair mechanics at you and you should try to deal with them.
If the devs start balancing or changing stuff because of masochist, the “normal” game modes will suffer.
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Thank you for your reply. It’s an interesting (if niche) proposition to play the game with only certain slots equipped, but I’m not saying the game should be balanced around the possibility that players can theoritcally avoid all damage all of the time with skillful play - just that they should be able to do it some of the time and one of the major playstyles (melee) shouldn’t be penalised in that regard.
You also mention that, “the point of masochist, the game throws outright impossible and unfair mechanics at you and you should try to deal with them.” But that’s not what masochist mode does; it simply tweaks two numbers - damage dealt and damage received. It doesn’t add any extra mechanics. So you compensate with better gear / more efficient point and skill allocation. Just like in Grim Dawn’s difficulties where the player’s resists are reduced as you move through the difficulties.
What I’m highlighting here is that even with the appropriate defences, this encounter is not fun for a melee character. It’s doable and also cheesable (boss doesn’t reset health when you exit the room), just not fun, like other parts of the game.
I never claimed it does add extra mechanics.
It just changes the “balancing” in such a grave way, that some mechanics become unfair or almost impossible.
Just to be clear, I do think that Pontifex Aurelius is one of the more boring “mini-bosses”, but he is one of those mob types ,where you just need enough defense to not be one shot and have enough sustain, to get full HP between his attacks, besides the triple projectile fire wave thingy and his meteors he doesn’t do anything else.
So once you survive that attack, you can basically facetank him.
It’s not particular interesting, but also not really hard or unfair if you defenses are in a good place.
Heavy is not a native English speaker so his English can be a bit off at times. He said mechanics but he meant the same mechanics with different damage dealt/received balance.
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That’s fair enough. I don’t want to belabour this point (especially seeing as not many others share this view), but it doesn’t bode well for future balancing of the campaign difficulty if a simple increase in damage dealt to player severely hampers certain playstyles. The masochist difficulty isn’t some outlandish challenge with grave consequences. It’s “normal” Grim Dawn diffulty (not elite and certainly not ultimate).
Incidentally, are there items or affixes that increase the max resists? Or you can’t go over 75% ever and the only further damage mitigation is minus % damage dealt?
There are only 3 persons participating in this discussion so far, that’s not a lot of different opinions about this.
I highly disagree with this. While Grim Dawn gets a little bit more challenging during the campaign already, compared to LE it’s not that difficult.
LE masochist mode is ridiculous at certain points in the campaign already, epsecially on a solo character that can’t craft unlimited.
There currently is nothing to increase the resistance cap, but it wouldn’t do that much anyway, that’s how resistances work in LE.
Increasing your maximum resistance by 5% would lead to 5% less damage taken in LE, not 20% less damage taken like in PoE or GD compared to having 75% resistances.
But LE offers several other defensive layer, resistance is not “the main” defense layer, like in all those other games. Some of those, that are available to all classes would be: Armour, Block, Dodge, Endurance. There are obviously even more defensive layers, that don’t mitigate damage, but increase your eHP, like Health and Ward.
And % less damage taken from various sources, that you already mentioned.
If you scale up Pontifex Aurelius to 500+ corruption with some decent damage modifiers, he is very dangerous, especially, when combined with several other mobs attacking you, but he still doesn’t one-shot build that are capable of doing this high corruption level.
His mechanic is not “severly hampering certain playstyles”, if you just increase his numbers.
He is just one of those mobs, that forces you to get enough eHP to survive his attack, which you can achieve in several different ways.
Are you saying that dealing with this mini-boss as a ranged character is an equivalent experience? Because it clearly, self-evidently isn’t. As for whether it’s severe enough for a balancing pass, that’s subjective so I don’t think we’ll agree on that. To my mind, it can be addressed easily by adding a small delay after the direction of the attack is “locked” so that melee could move out of the way instead of eating all the waves. Not everything has to be as easy or hard for melee as it is for ranged, of course, but returning to the subject of the thread, I just don’t think this particular mini-boss offers fun experience for a melee, that’s all. It’s just a feedback data point for the devs.
Thanks for the clarification on the resistances. I assumed they worked similar to GD so good to know it works differently here.
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Not all enemies are supposed to be equally difficult/dangerous to all build archetypes. You also can’t base a judgement as to whether something is too easy/difficult on how it is in Masochist mode since that mode is supposed to be substantially harder than normal. Masochist isn’t supposed to be balanced.
That is a general issue with mobs tracking the player which the devs need to address.
The difficulty can vary quite a lot throughout the normal/elite/ultimate campaigns, with veteran, IMO, being harder than ultimate (due to gear & character development).
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