Take this feedback with a grain of salt (obviously). But here’s my experience of the Abberoth fight, which I tried 4 times, I think. I’m playing a sorcerer with ward if you’re curious, but that probably doesn’t really matter for this.
First attempt - fight the two intro harbingers for like 5 minutes to get them out of the way. Then start Abberoth … who immediately does a big black wave thing that kills me. Fight lasts about 1 second.
Second attempt - fight the two intro harbingers for like 5 minutes to get them out of the way. Figured out the big black wave thing - gotta stay in the area in the middle to survive that. Then he does that attack where he whirls his weapon overhead and 1 shots me. Fight lasts about 10 seconds.
Third attempt - was already getting bored fighting the two harbingers so got lazy and died lol
Fourth attempt - fight the two intro harbingers for like 5 minutes to get them out of the way. Figured out to avoid that attack only to find that it also does a big black wave that … looks like you maybe have to run to the edge to survive? Not sure. But suffice to say, I died.
I have like 6 more of the harbinger eye things, so I could keep going to figure it out. But the truth is, it just bores me too much to have to repeat the 5 minutes of harbinger fight at the beginning every time just to spend a minute in the fight to learn it.
Given this is end game, I think I’ll call it good and uninstall at this point. The game is fun overall, I think the dev team built a good game. But I’m going to find something new at this point.
Maybe the devs will find this feedback helpful and decide to remove the 5 minutes of harbinger at the start so that players can spend their time fighting the boss to learn it. Repeating the same boring sequence after semi-frustrating deaths kinda ruins it.
Had a look at your character and your EHP is very low, hence all the one shots. If it takes 5 mind to kill the harbingers then your damage is way too low as well.
I don’t have a lot of experience playing mage so can’t really make suggestions on how to improve your build, but your build just isn’t ready for abberoth and needs improvements.
I think the main issue here is the indicated/perceived difficulty of the fight.
I assume you started trying the fight out almost immediately when you gained access to it?
Because you said you need 5 minutes for the two Harbingers?
That sounds an awful lot like your build simply isn’t ready for the fight yet.
Because from a average difficulty the fight is much harder than 300 corr, the point in where you unlock him. Much more in the ~500 corr range.
Fighting the two Harbigners before the fight does become almost trivial at some point, but I think its fine if you have to deal with them until you defeated Aberroth once and then you can skip them.
Doing all these attempts and failing over and over again is not that bad IMO as I think Aberroth is very well designed and balanced. But yeah the two Harbingers can kill the fun of repeatedly attempting and learning.
I really don’t want to take this into a too negative direction, but even with a decent build that can handle 300 corruption needing 5 minutes for the Harbingers sounds A LOT like your build is not very well optimized yet.
Even on some other regular builds that I immediately attempted Aberroth once unlocking that fight never took me more than 2-3 minutes at max.
Yea, I haven’t really experimented much with the build. I built an electric mage with ward as defense. I enjoyed using wrong warp wand for the fun of it. He has a ton of lightning penetration, which seems like a good thing to have for damage in end game.
I’m not going to reinstall, so not much point in getting too deep into the build analysis. But if an experienced mage reads this and has thought, I’d be interested to read them.
If it takes you 5 minutes to kill the 2 harbingers, your character is definitely way too weak to try Aby. You should first improve it (by a lot). When you can kill both in under 30s (preferably less) or a minute at most, then you might give it a try.
OK everybody seems to be emphasizing the “5 minutes to kill the two harbingers” comment. Honestly, not sure if it really took 5. It might have been 3. But it felt like 5. I think the sense of time gets exaggerated when you get beat up by the boss and feel frustrated by that.
Not sure how good my mage’s damage output is - he can handle the 300 corruption stuff just fine in monolith, but I would not say it’s trivial.
If that is @epicrpg’s Character that explains a lot.
That character is all over the place with no coherency in a lot of places and legendaries for the sake of legendaries.
I don’t want to derail the thread into other direction and OP made it clear that they won’t return anyway. I think the feedback with the Harbinger Intro Fight is valid, I felt that way too on a lot of chars where I wanted to chain farm Aberroth. Even when it only takes a minute or less.
But going in with this kind of character makes it clear that the character is not build as a very well thoguht out character and just slapped together random pieces of gear.
A bad Set Item without using the 2 piece setbonus, just a regualr rare item would be better
Fragment with no Spark Charge Investment
Weaver’s Will Items just for some shiny legendary stats but the item doesn’t provide much value
And here is the crux of it. But how did you manage to get levle 99? Did you just grind out 300 corr and then at some point decided to try Aberroth? Did your character improve at all between reaching 300 corr and grinding levle 99?
But if you think about it, the damage output is probably not the issue here. I never got far enough into the fight to see how good my damage was against the boss. I’m pretty sure I could kill him if I learn the mechanics of how to avoid the black waves, and special attacks.
The character has like 3500 health and 7500 ward, one would think that would be enough to take a shot or two. But I did notice tier 4 Julra was pretty hard as well, it took several attempts to kill her so I could put affixes on my wand & relic.
Unless you can handle 300-400c monos trivially (as in, looking away and not worrying you might die), you shouldn’t be trying to kill Aby.
Aby is a very mechanical fight where you have to learn the mechanics thrown at you. If any simple small thing will kill you immediately then you don’t have much chance. There are plenty of attacks where you are supposed to be tanky enough to not die.
If you’re dying to Aby before the expanding black pool shows up, then you’re definitely way too squishy to try it out just yet.
Aby is a pinnacle boss (even if there’s a stronger version of him later on) and drops some good loot. You’re not supposed to simply run him blindly. You’re supposed to prepare for it by making your character stronger and tanky enough that he can handle a few slaps.
There is a lot more to defences than just hp+ward. You need to invest into armor, resistances (your poison and necrotic are way too low), damage reduction, block, etc. You need crit reduction/avoidance, which you have 0 of.
I’m sure someone else can give you more specific pointers on what to improve, but your character is far from ready for Aby.
I hit 300 corruption right about the time I hit 99, then tried Abberoth. It was a bit of a struggle to get to 300 tbh.
My char did improve when I got the primeval body armor with 1 legendary potential on it so I could put the 37% heath affix. My ward increase depends on HP, which is why I also use the rings & belt with HP on them (they have HP and ward gain with mana spent, which seems like a good idea for a mage using ward).
Overall, pretty fun mage build. But sadly he seems to have hit a brick wall.
Theoretically you can kill Aberroth with very low damage, but if the Harbinger fight takes a few minutes your single target damage is definitely on the very low end and Aberroth gives you way less opportunities to actually dps than the Harbingers.
So yes, learning the mechanics would allow you to progress deeper into the fight and Aberroth does “only” has one soft enrage mechanic. So very low damage will make it so you have to play all mechanics longer/more often and the soft enrage will make it so you need to play the mechanic even better to compensate for the length of the fight.
You can outgear certain mechancis but some boss mechanics are meant to be play correctly and not face tanked.
From the two mechanics you explained dying from only the Shattering Slam is virtually untankable unless you have invul + insane recovery. Frontal Flail Slam can be face tanked, but is very easily avoidable as well and should be avoided because there is no reason to facetank it.
What class are you playing Beardus? Tanking the slam thing doesn’t seem like a mage would ever be able to do … but then maybe there is a build that can.
And the harbingers were definitely taking me more than 30 seconds. It was a few minutes for sure.
Wow, that’ s crazy. You spent a lot of time leveling in empowered I guess.
Your defensive setup doesn’t seem to be an issues anyway, it is only your damage output.
Well Aberroth is the one and only pinnacle boss atm and hitting a wall here isn’t something unusual. The fight is very fair though so once you learned it you can outmanoveur it very well.
And I want to emphasize again that I totally agree with the Harbinger fight getting annoying on successive tries. But your character is simply not doing a good amount of damage.
Bottom line (which I agree with): this character was not ready for Abberoth.
I guess I just don’t have the patience to try to build him up further. Maybe I’ll come back to the game next season to try a new character and get my revenge on Abberoth.
