My take on T4 Jura as Warpath.
I struggled on T3 dota was hard to react… but got this with VERY good gear.
And then T4 come xD… after big brain time I [upgraded all my gear as high as I could] and I strugled even more than with T3…
I didnt like how in PoE im forced to play trap/mine/summon for bosses. Last Epoch was diffrent but now its no fun to fight against this overtuned boss.
She should teleport out this dota puddle instantly and T4 dota damage should be tonned down a lot!.
(also 460-480%dmg at T4 is just absurd with base boss damage).
Mod note: a section of this post has been changed to adhere to forum rules.
A Super Boss shouldn’t need super buffs nor should it need permanent DoT pools on the ground that pretty much insta-kill if you happen to tp back into it and have no non-targeting movement skill like Warpath. Sure you could use the Shield Rush, but then you lose out on the utility of Shield bash defensively, and since Shield Rush and Lunge share cooldowns, that kinda sucks also. I think the whole point of the OP was that this boss is unbalanced for pure melee builds like Warpath, and forcing players to play ranged against this boss is not so fair of a boss design, which is why I have yet to see any video anywhere of anyone killing Julra on Warpath on T4, which isn’t particularly a strong damage dealing build for a single-target boss with rotating laser beams, and very little windows of time to actually get in a few hits before she defaults to her nuke again. I imagine for Warpath on T4 would look like an arena filled with DoT puddles everywhere, and that is if somehow it could even survive that long because the damage wont be there consistently enough to bring her down. Kudos to the OP for at least killing her on T3 with it. I can’t imagine how difficult those encounters would be, as I have only faced her 2x and got clobbered with all the crap going on screen at the same time.
The problem with super bosses is that they trivialize 99% of the game by comparison. I’d rather design a game without them and spread the challenge across the regular maps, mobs, and bosses.
Part of the post? Though to be fair, that does kinda just make the OP’s point (that he couldn’t do the hardest boss in the game without “totally legit gear”).
The devs have always shown themselves willing to tweak bosses/mechanics but I’d think they’d probably want to wait for more time to pass for more people to get to that point before doing that.
Yep T4 boss with warpath is totally unfair on melee, however until its tweaked , i dont need to do it, as i can craft all my Legendaries just by doing T3 boss.
So now I’ve run through all 4 degrees.
1 to 3 are fair.
On 4, I went into extra melee with my Void Knight and was fatally hit once each [who is wondering - I let myself be hit by everything deliberately] by the black bullets spinning around Julra (if the little black things don’t hit you, nothing happens) and once by his white chaff (looks like sticky snuff).
Everything else was well bearable.
[This Void Knight has nothing really good to wear.]
What I want to say:
If you dodge the big snuffle, the big white light on the ground and the small black-ball carousel reasonably well (gladly also with “key D”) this fight is well manageable.
But I can now also understand that other, more on glass cannon designed characters / players will get there row by row heavy problems and also widespread T7 brings nothing if there are no useful defense suffixes.
So I guess this is what the majority would consider a (slightly?) overtuned fight.
The never-ending struggle of ARPG/MMORPGs… balancing encounters around both melee and ranged. You can get away with making sub-bosses harder/easier for one or the other. But you can’t ever really get away with making an end-boss, or gate-keeper boss that way, because you cockblock certain builds simply with game design.
With lighter armored characters, I’m more likely to die than make it so far.
Even some characters with much more EHP get some problems [Dead] with the above attacks.
Maybe it’s just a matter of practice, it could be.
And since it’s the current “endgame”, there’s nothing wrong with it.
I think at the moment just hardly that more than 10% of the players will manage this.
Who knows.
I believe she does the aoe puddle mechanic when you swap the timeline and she shows up, I’m sure she did one everytime in tier 2 when I did that, I just stood on the edge of the arena then and it made it much easier as melee
I think the main problem with this fight with melee is that range of beams during the spinning mechanic prevents you from dealing damage if boss is in the middle (it is extremely hard to not get hit as melee near center). Dungeon clearly favors range and i don’t mind if future dungeons will be created also with melee in mind. I get their philosophy of some classes being better at some dungeons, i just hope not all new dungeons will be melee unfriendly.
Also for this boss there is a real learning curve, now I can do it almost certainly without dying tiers 4 but that took me like 10 key to really understand what’s going on. Also a little things, that’s not as bad as melee but minions have also some disadvantages here cause they eat all air no matter how good you try to place them. And doing it so with totem and stuff while managing the rest it’s fun!!! But again that’s vreally fine for me cause that the big boss. And a little of topic but I LOVE the audio soundtrack of this donjon, I have it always in mind now
If everything is hard then players will struggle to even get past the campaign, and then you have PoE where only the top tier builds are even viable.
It is much preferable to make it so that most of the content is clearable by lower tier builds, but have parts of the content that is much harder than the rest. Superbosses and empowered monos for example.
Didnt read through every comment but i initially had the same impression as OP playing as a companion beastmaster. Couldnt keep my companions alive, hard to get time to do my own dps as melee, sucks not having a quick movement ability. I thought wow this fight really sucks for beastmaster. Then I did some T3 Julra and purposly didnt kill her in 2 seconds and actually learned all her stuff. Went back to T4 and got her on the 3rd attempt after learning her moveset AND IT FELT SO GOOD. Now I kill her 90% of the attempts with no change in gear. I thought i wanted it nerfed/changed for melee, or for pets, now im SO GLAD it wasnt cause it was FUN LEARNING IT. I had the same expirience with empowered Heorot when that was instroduced. I still think the 3 fire druids are the worse for melee cause sometimes the other people just stand in the death aoe for several minutes which just sucks. i still want a better movement ability though
As a former WoW player who’s done a fair amount of mythic+ dungeons (mostly as ranged than melee) I can attest that whenever I tried to do them on melee chars it was much harder and less enjoyable. Groups would always be looking mostly for mages or hunters or boomkins or shadow priests. Warriors, death knights, rogues etc…were less common to see, apart from the tank.
Never tried T4 boss yet in LE as melee so will be interesting to judge how similar it feels for my old WoW melee chars in mythic dungeons.
When a player first fights Julra, there needs to be a much more clear warning, literally flashing text on the screen or something, to tell the player to shift.
The shift mechanic is introduced literally minutes before the fight, and the player is expected to connect the dots immediately in the fight and intuit that they should be shifting when the room fills up, and you have 4 seconds to figure that out.
This isn’t fun. At no point is the player given a chance to understand because in this situation everything happens so fast. I play games hardcore only, and it took me two deaths of trying different things to understand this extremely trivial mechanic that is only hidden by poor timing.
Other than that, the sanctum itself is kind of a slough in general. For example, using shift to circumvent locked doors could instead be circumventing dangerous pools on the ground or something. If the player outplays the situation (by dashing across the puddles for example), they shouldn’t need to shift, because shifting in the temple arbitrary anyway and doesn’t impact the player’s survivability. If the player can’t outplay the situation, then they can shift. This example is absolutely less frustrating than re-pathing your way around the dungeon multiple times on the same floor because of bad RNG door openings (no one wants to backtrack in arpgs).
All constructive I hope. I absolutely love this game.
T3 and T4 Julra are really not well designed for melees. I struggled alot with Multstrike Smite on t3 and im not even “full melee” but the fact that you don’t even have a movement skill to dodge decently is even more a pain.
The biggest problem about the boss is that the puddles are permanent and there is no way to control it that she will move away from them.
So I have some ideas to make the boss still challenging but more fair for melee:
The Boss always facetanks you
I think this is the best change you can make with the boss. You get much more control over the battle and you are finally able to deal conistent damage to the boss like ranged do.
placing the puddles correctly will be a crucial part of the fight. like placing them in a circle around the arena so you still have enough space to move the boss around and be punished if your damage is bad because in the end the whole arena is full of puddles.
One problem is, that you need decent movement skill which doesn’t requier a target. Imo lunge should not require a target because mobility is a central component in ARPGs to make the gameplay more skillfull
another options would be:
puddles are not permanent and the materialization of the aoe is a bit delayed to you are not forced to get damage instead you have a short window to dode the skill with a movement ability if your timing is good. Of course the puddle should deal more damage but they should only be on the ground for like 4-5 seconds.
I think this would make the boss much more enjoyable for melees.
