The shields of the bosses

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I need to know, what’s the idea of ​​the blue shields? The blue bars that all the bosses have, make the fights incredibly long and repetitive, I don’t understand why they exist, I don’t think they’re bad, but giving a boss 4 instances of shield that should add up to five or six times its maximum health honestly doesn’t make sense, I understand that Aberroth has them because they are part of its mechanics despite being a fight that not all builds have access to complete, anyway, that’s not the problem, that fight is incredible and I think it’s fine but I don’t understand what the need is to make the fights unnecessarily long, it’s a farming game, most of the bosses you kill don’t give you what you want, you need to repeat it, it subtracts too many hours, I like the game and I bought it as soon as I could but it’s incredibly frustrating and tedious to have to repeat a fight 20 times and take so long to do it, I don’t want to be arrogant, but I honestly think they should be removed. It’s quite annoying that I have two or three hours a day of my day after work and it takes me 10-15 minutes in the same fight, that’s if I don’t die because my hands got tired from repeating and repeating the same thing, please keep in mind that not all of us can invest 50 hours killing a single boss so that he gives us a random drop item, with random potential, it’s illogical and yes, the comment can be taken as “you lack hands” and things like that, but the truth is that it’s tedious, it takes away from the fun, the bosses shouldn’t even have a third of the boss’s life and they have, apparently, more than his maximum life. This isn’t frustration, it’s just that I’m tired and I can’t progress fast enough to make the game worth playing, I understand the difficulty settings, that’s fine, literally every boss kills me with one attack, I have to dodge everything and I have no problem with that but repeating and repeating and repeating gets tiring, the boss shouldn’t last me 20 rotations of his skills and I know my build does quite a bit of damage, it’s simply not possible that I have to spend so much time killing a boss and the herald for it to literally give me nothing.

I’m sorry if my post offends anyone, in advance, it’s not my intention, I put it in suggestions because my suggestion is that the blue bars be nerfed a lot or directly reduce the maximum instances of these shields that a boss can have.

I’m not sure of the rules for creating this type of post, so I’m sorry if I break any rules.

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It’s a replacement system for what was known as “Dynamic Damage Reduction”, which reduced player damage based on damage dealt.

These systems are designed to give the bosses a fighting chance.

The new system was designed in a way to give transparency to the player on when the boss is reducing the damage its taking through ward. This ward has a mechanic that makes it Decay faster the longer it exists. This means that if you have high dps, you will still kill the boss faster than if you have low dps, but in theory low dps builds won’t be punished as hard because the boss ward will Decay at increasing speed.

They’re still monitoring the effects of this system and how it impacts players, so it’s not finalized. With the potential for the ward to Decay faster or pop up less frequently.

Essentially, the devs just want the bosses to not be loot pinatas that you click on once and they explode like everything else.

If it’s working as intended is up for debate. Many players want it removed entirely. While I am one of the ones in favor of the system. I like a good boss fight where I have to actually learn and do the mechanics instead of just dpsing it down in seconds.

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Scipo explained it nicely. I think it must be there mainly as an added barrier to hyper-optimized builds. So they can’t crush a boss in seconds, like he said. I’ve never had that kind of experience, of killing a boss in seconds. Probably cause I have never used a build guide. So it must be for the top 1% elite builds.

I’m in agreement with you, they should be removed (or reduced substantially). The elite players should see barriers to their progression in the very high corruption instead (which regular builds can’t attain). If they are afraid of these players farming bosses for uniques to flip on the market, maybe they need to adjust other aspects of the game to address that.

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I like the new ward idea that prevents extremely-high-dps builds from killing bosses in a second to avoid DDR mechanics in old versions.
According to my own experience, too many games nowadays are letting players get extremely-high-dps too easily, which makes everyone goes for high-dps builds in their corresponding communities, at least in my own country.
And this is no good for diversity of builds as well.

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It’s better than previous system in my opinion, because it’s visible.
I think the idea that “boss should have fighting chance” is weird and even if valid, poorly executed. Defenses in LE are quite limited in efficiency and bosses often use DoT abilities that ignore some layers of defenses (block, dodge, armor), therefore pushing players more into DPS race. And then they try to prevent it with DDR and now with its replacement, boss ward. All for lack of balance between offense and defense in builds.
Difficulty should be dictated by corruption level, not weird mechanics.

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Sadly id argue its not, I am also in favor of the system, I feel like its allowed big hard hitting builds to shine more then they did with DDR, but… it is failing to be fine for low DPS builds, it degens way too slowly imo. Big DPS builds break the system and allow you to absolutely demolish bosses like never before.

unfortunately the ward system is way weaker then DDR in my experience so its done the opposite effect, its made high DPS builds my go to, because they get to delete bosses. it feels unchanged or worse for low dps builds.

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The idea was formerly a Damage Reduction system which went in when you did a bit of damage and it was ‘too much’ and hence ‘deleted’ the bosses swiftly.

Since that felt bad and people couldn’t reliably know how well their character performs against any enemy EHG then went with the current system, which is several - far too slowly - degrading shields to create a buffer.

The task of them is to - theoretically, in practicality it fails entirely for the moment - to allow low-dps characters to wait out the shields and hence achieve a baseline killing time while high-dps characters blast the shields and get a bit of a lower kill-time.
What it really does is making it a un-fun chore for low-dps characters as it seems like you make ‘no progress’ for a specific amount of time while high-dps characters ignore it entirely and just shoot through.

In my eyes a really bad mechanic.
I’ll argument that basic balance removes any need for such a system by design and hence it’s solely a badly executed band-aid that doesn’t do what it should.

Because:

You give bosses a fighting chance by properly balancing. If both your content and your builds are generally aligned it happens automatically.

I see the issue here.

Yes, once more, that’s a balance issue.

Outsourcing it to a badly tacked on system on top is failing the task. It’s ‘lazy design’ in my eyes.

Why?
If you got little dps you’re worse off then before. Your fights are a ‘slog’ and un-fun. You struggled before but the struggle was fun since you got further and further. This mechanic deprives you up to 3 times during the fight of that fun.

If you got high dps you blast enemies to death without giving them a fighting chance anyway. Welcome Wraithlord Arbor, welcome Falconer. And more.

Yes, absolutely better then the last system. I agree with that 100%.

I also find the last system a failure in design. So switching that out hasn’t changed the premise though :slight_smile:

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I think the main problem is in the way that ARPGs are designed. I agree with you 100% that having a properly balanced boss fight is the key to not having them die in 2s, but in any other genre that’s easy as there’s a soft (or hard) cap on player power, where in ARPG’s player power is potentially infinitely scaling. You could balance the campaign bosses around the specific levels you’re supposed to fight them at, but with tens of potential builds at the first boss, and hundreds of potential builds at later bosses you’re going to have builds that completely trivialize the bosses if you just balance around stats, or in the worse case you have builds that just can’t clear the boss period (which is fine for just randomly thrown together skills to kind of incentive players to learn how to make an effective build, but if a good build needs more time to come online you shouldn’t force players to use an op build for half the campaign and then Respec later, imo. I want to level with the build I plan to use at endgame, even if my early game is rougher).

Then we get into Corruption Bosses and it’s even harder to balance with the potential for thousands of builds and higher tiers of corruption requiring higher and higher damage potential. It’s just not feasible to balance 1 boss for the vast amount of player builds and the variety of those builds. Which is likely why most ARPG’s don’t bother with boss balance and let their players with op builds just blow them up.

Edit: I forgot to finish my point. This is what I get for posting while working.

The only way I can see for an ARPG to have boss fights be balanced is to have a general balance based on the campaign level/corruption level to set a baseline “this is how hard the boss should be.” and then scale the boss to the player’s dps. You’ll need to have at least the base survivability, maybe even throw in an “enrage” gimmick like some MMO bosses have that kills you if you can’t kill the boss fast enough. This would force high dps players to still deal with mechanics, mid dps players to kill the boss in a slower, but still possible, time frame, and low dps/bad builds to “try again with a better build/gear”

Edit 2: I don’t think the “enrage” gimmick should be on every boss. Just the pinnacle bosses and like “gatekeeper” bosses. So you’re walled from content you aren’t ready for.

Edit 3: another option instead of a dynamic system is to use the “Desperation Move” mechanics from Kingdom Hearts. Give the bosses attacks at specific health gates (only one or two) where they’re highly damage resistant (or untargetable) for the duration of the attack and the player focuses on dealing with the mechanics of that move. Could be a wave of adds while the boss charges a big attack. Or dodging a barrage of AoEs with a pattern to learn. I’m not a game designer so I’m sure someone could come up with something fun in an ARPG to do for like 10-15s that doesn’t make it feel like a chore. Obviously this would just be on pinnacle bosses, the main campaign bosses, and the gods. Like I can see the Admiral having an move where he wraps himself in a barrier of water and waves of his undead crew charge at you for you to Slaughter. Or the first Osprix boss in the tutorial area with the Drake having a move where he calls down Meteors as the drake breaths a beam of fire and spins so you have to run around the boss and dodge meteors and his fire breath. Idk I’m just spitballing

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No you are not supposed “to wait out”.

The ward clearly decays and get lower even faster if you dps. So you can see clear progress.

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I don’t think so actually, and I’ll even give you examples:

In Torchlight Infinite you get your map bosses… your bosses for the specific area and you get your main boss for all areas together.

I don’t see an issue in ‘deleting’ a map boss. You won’t at the start after all, right? The first time you go in that boss… is a struggle maybe, you have a decent fight and then you beat it.
But by time 50 you’ll have gotten stronger! Vaporize it! Nice! Feels great!

Then the area boss… same thing. It’s hard, you might fail actually but get there again. After 2-3 times you get the gist and win the fight. After 20 times doing it your character has progressed and this former struggle just falls down like a wet noodle… nice! Feels great!

And then we get to the boss of all areas. He’s really hard! You might want to farm for a while to handle that boss, fail repeatedly, but you might kill him after a while if you’re good enough or farmed enough. Great!
That guy ‘can’t be deleted’ though, or is only possibly ‘deleted’ by extremely strong characters.

My goal is to build that character, isn’t it? It shows me my progress.

Why would deleting enemies be bad?
What in the world goes in the mind of a developer in a diablo-clone game saying ‘Oh no… I got all those cool things my boss does… but after 5 times the players just evaporate him before he can showcase those! I need to do something!’

It’s dumb as a premise. That’s our feeling of progression we - as players - *want to evaporate the boss. That’s our damn goal! :stuck_out_tongue:
Don’t take it away. Work on balancing stuff so we have to work for it.

That’s all.

And it’s done in Torchlight Infinite and PoE both. Also D4 does it with uber lillith. It can be done, it is done, nice!
Whatever they got in their mind for that argument is nonsensical, it’s solely a balance issue. Always was, always will be.

How it’s achieved in detail is not important, it’s done after all already, we have examples of ‘it can work’. Now the goal of the devs is to make it happen.

As a low dps I only have the option to ‘wait it out’ :slight_smile:
If I do 5% damage per minute and need hence 20 minutes to fight a boss… but can survive it… then my choice is ‘wait’ since it’s too big not to do that. You can hit the boss but you won’t change that bar, it’s a simple frustration for someone in this situation, no progress… gotta wait for degen, a minute extra! Sucks.

Oh, does his health reduce during that?
No?
No progress in my mind. I wanna kill the boss, that’s my goal. My goal is not to get through a shield.

As bad as some mechanics of Lost Ark for example are… their boss life-bars are amazing! You always feel like you’re doing a boatload as it empties repeatedly, reducing the number (numbers go brrrr is a big big mental aspect of a human) of how many are left… changing even the color of that bar to showcase you make progress.
You don’t see shields being used there. They have invul phases with specific mechanics, no shields.

You also don’t see shields in PoE, you got invul phases where a boss does something specific. That’s it.

I dislike invul phases but for some mechanics they make sense. Like… killing 4 totems which create a shield! (Yes, shield, but with a reason and with a goal), doing a puzzle while being under attack. Full-scale positioning minigame to not get hit. Such stuff all works fine. Some are frustrating, some are a bit annoying… but they have a reason which is directly visible for the player.

If you want your boss not to feel like shit then give that boss a reason to do stuff and showcase it, not shove it down the throat of the player with asinine mechanics.
It’s not a novel concept.

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I intensely agree with this, especially when this aggressively unfun, tedious mechanic has been indiscriminately firehosed onto campaign bosses, quest minibosses (including when they spawn as normal mobs in echoes), and echo bosses. The kind of ham handed DPS gating they’re doing is MMO game design that does not belong in an ARPG, and it should at most be on timeline and pinnacle bosses. We shouldn’t be having long fights with trash mobs when Ruby Captain Arjani et al spawn in our echoes. It turned the game into a slog every time I encountered it before I stopped playing this cycle because of it.

Players blowing up irrelevant bosses with high damage builds is a made up problem. It doesn’t need to be solved. EHG is being surprisingly fingers-in-my-ears-balalala-can’t-hear-you about this and needs to come back to reality.

No matter how many times people say “But the Ward decays!”, it is not going to change my mind or feelings, because in my experience the decay that allegedly exists is so slow it may as well not exist. I don’t care what anyone says the math is, I don’t care what anyone says the numbers are. It was completely unnoticeable to me even with full DPS stoppage and I never at any point felt like it was actually decaying. What I actually experienced was a tedious grind through multiple bars of blue bullshit on “bosses” that even low damage builds should have < 30s fights with.

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No you still can do dmg and reduce the ward faster than it naturally would.

If oyu are hitting the boss and the ward bar doesn’t change your build has other issues and even triggering the first ward threshold should already feel like a pain.

You can see the ward as part of the bosses natural health. Without the system jsut adding that ward to the health of the boss would be even worse for your low dps builds.

I absolutely hate this style of displaying health bars and I am glad only asian-style games use that.
This way of displaying health doesn’t give you a real sense how close to defeating the boss you are or how far you have come in the fight already.

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Great! Let me reduce this 70% of max HP ward by 3-6% of it’s total value before it naturally runs out!

Doesn’t work this way. Nice argument in theory, math it out and you see you’ve got an issue.
Especially since ward takes long to decay, it’s more then a minute, I think 2?

Here:
5% damage per minute = 20 minutes.
Ward = 70% max HP, happens 3 times = 210% max hp.
Each ward we say lasts 2 minutes.
So without decay speed we chip off 10% total damage… which relates to making ward last 6/7th as long.
This causes each ward section to add ~100 seconds to my fight.

My fight now takes 5 minutes longer for a total of 25 minutes.

Great plan! Screwing over low dps builds is a fantastic mechanic! Right?
DR was made so this doesn’t happen, and the new system fails at this

Plain and simple.

All it does is cause it to feel like shit and nothing else.
DR was a failed mechanic and Ward is another differently failed mechanic.

My brain doesn’t. Quite simple.
And adding more health is actually better. You know why? Because you can change the low damage builds to be balanced for it simply instead :slight_smile:

You know… hinders high dps builds but not the low dps builds anymore?
We call that ‘balancing’ nowadays. Novel concept seemingly.

Absolutely! But it fulfills a nice desire in our monkey-brain.
It’s why those methods are so well enjoyed over there, they’re addicting.

And if you don’t want em… showcase actual progress instead of hindering it through some tacked on shoddy mechanic :slight_smile: Where’s the problem with that?

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I think this is the disconnect in what some players, like you, want and what players like me (and possibly the devs) want. Which is fine! You’re not wrong any more than I am. It’s just a difference in wants.

While you want a sense of progression where the bosses eventually become trivial but start difficult (which still is hard to balance across every possible build.) I want bosses to stay relevant, and maybe that comes from my background as an MMO player. Just because I’ve killed a raid boss 80 times and now have BiS gear doesn’t mean I should be able to kill him in a matter of seconds. Of course MMOs handle that with level sync because you can absolutely delete lv 50 bosses at lv 100 if you go in unsynced lol. But I’m talking level relevant content, after all I can easily go back and kill Elder Pannion when I’m lv 75 and he melts, even with Boss Ward.

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I’m going to say a couple of things

This is a pve game, it’s not a game where you compete for tops, what do I mean by this, there’s too much talk about optimized builds, people with high damage and high survivability builds still see just a little extra time in each fight, this “ward” problem mainly affects more casual people, I understand the idea of ​​"giving the boss a chance" but do you really give it to him? Simply with a build with a lot of healing and a lot of life and damage you tank all the damage from the mechanics, you just make the fight longer, I watch guide videos every time I can to understand, in my build I dodge everything because everything kills me, I respect the boss mechanics, in the guides, with optimized builds they barely respect mechanics, they tank a lot and only avoid certain skills, so what chance are you giving the boss? You’re just dragging out the fight for no reason, if you want to give the boss a chance, make his mechanics more respectable, so casual players can just respect the fight and not waste so much time, that argument just falls apart in my opinion

The other thing, I’m not against the system, my problem is that it’s too tedious and it’s not like a boss is going to have different mechanics, it’s always just repeating and repeating, with exceptions of course, I repeat, I don’t think I have to spend 5-10 minutes on a boss that does the same thing over and over again, it tires the mind and the hands, maybe my build isn’t the best and that’s why it lasted so long, but come on, I’m not playing at 1000 corruption, I’m playing at 200, I’m not even in the merchant faction because I’m not trying to get gold, I’m not interested, and yes, I eliminate all the bosses and heralds, at 300 corruption With a 1200 HP hunter and no ward, I just don’t see the point in having to farm 800 stability and then spend a ton of time killing the boss and the herald too, it’s too much time for bosses that you have to kill hundreds of times.

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Lemme re-frame this:

Do you want your Act 1 boss to stay relevant?
Why?

Do you want your unempowered timeline boss to stay relevant?
Why?

Tier 1 dungeon? 2?.. 3?.. Only 4?

Which ones are you talking about? We delete them each and every time.

Should we cause them all to have minute long shields based upon top-tier end-game builds so they can repeatedly show is what they can do?
It makes no sense. Never did.

If you design a boss you design it in a position and in a way that it is relevant related to the power level which is to be expected at the time.
That’s all which has to be done and is generally done.

If your character passes that power level there’s another challenge ahead. You can re-use the boss with a higher difficulty there, it’s still relevant there, not before.

You reach a natural end-line anyway, so balance accordingly. Make sure the basic builds stay in line to each other.

No method provided for now has avoided the situation, all of them did nothing. They’re non-mechanics, they’re fluff.

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Agreed to both main topics from you.

That’s my points spoken out well.

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This is where I agree with you that the relevancy needs to only last as long as you’re roughly on par with the boss and it becomes easier as you get stronger. Hence my Elder Pannion reference. When you first fight him, he’s a pain and requires you to actually deal with his mechanics, but if you come back later at a higher level the ward is irrelevant and you melt through him in under 10s. He’s no longer relevant to you at that level.

But now there’s a new boss that’s around your power level that is relevant and you can’t just burst down, and there’s bosses more powerful than you that you may take more time breaking through the ward to kill.

But eventually you’ll be far more powerful than either of them, and they’ll no longer be relevant and you’ll burst them down.

Edit: and I completely agree with everyone who hates the “boss ward” being on anything that can, with Olympic level mental gymnastics, be considered a boss.

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And hence we’re 100% on the same page.

If content is made for the respective stage then you have a relevant boss. That’s all that’s needed.

Why?
What brings you to that conclusion?

Sure, there’s some specific builds in every game which can do that. Those are exceptions.

If your baseline ‘me barbarian, me got axe, me slash’ character progresses accordingly through it then it’s fine. You can have smart build outliers, but your core premises of a build need to be in line, mandatorily.
This is simply not the case.

If it’s the case you don’t need the system at all.

Your utmost pinnacle boss in a properly set up game with relevant content density (nice word btw.) will always need you to put attention onto it then.

Why? Because in a properly balanced game your end-result of a character won’t have the potential ability to even burst it down, you can’t upgrade your gear enough to make it happen in any timeframe ever.

That’s the end-point of such a system. And by the time - which takes looong - there’s the need to raise the power level you create new end-game bosses which uphold this rule.

Aberroth will become a speck of dust over time, if not then the devs messed it up.
Every boss will become a speck of dust the longer the game exists and the more it expands.

When you reach that boss though… it is a obstacle to overcome, and should be. After? It’s exactly that, an afterthought.

That’s what the core progression for a player is like in a diablo-clone. Ever has been, remove it and it’s a different type of game entirely or it simply fails.

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Elder Pannion is relevant around lv 10-15, by lv 50 he’s definitely no longer relevant, but there’s new lv 50 bosses that are relevant. By lv 75 those lv 50 bosses are no longer relevant, but there’s new lv 75 bosses that are.

When you’re clearing 100c those bosses are relevant, by the time you’re clearing 300c, those 100c bosses are no longer relevant and lowering your corruption back down to 100c would have you melting those bosses even with boss ward.

This continues ad infinum in ARPG’s, which is why i said “eventually those bosses will no longer be relevant.”

Which is the devs intention behind the current system. As I said in my initial post: “does it work as intended? That’s up for debate.” they want to handle any outliers and keep higher tier builds more in line with lower tier builds during relevant boss fights. So Wraithlord doesn’t curbstomp the same boss that Me Barbarian, Me Smash fights normally.

You keep referencing a “properly balanced game” but in every other arpg ever, bosses are very quickly irrelevant. Farming act bosses in Hell difficulty (the maximum difficulty) on D2 is literally a snoozefest once you have decent gear. The Ubers are the same they’re only a challenge once, and LE wants to change that standard and keep those types of bosses relevant.

As player power increases the boss ward will become less and less relevant to your clear speed. With the ideal setup being something like “an under powered build may take 3 minutes, an average build may take 2 minutes, and a strong build may take 1 minute.” eventually those weaker builds will get better and the stronger builds will cut down the time as they continue to grow until the current pinnacle boss is irrelevant and a new boss is relevant.

Ultimately this comes down to a matter of preference and the devs intentions. You, and many others, see it as fluff and a non-mechanic. I, and many others, see the potential in the mechanic as a balancing tool. Even if it’s not quite there yet and needs polished.

And as I said, the mechanic is definitely too wide spread and should only apply to act/chapter bosses, pinnacle bosses, and their equals. Jeweled Scorpion or the three stooges in Act 1 don’t need it for example.

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