Uber Abberoth is the worst pinnacle boss ever created

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I’ve been debating this for a while with everyone I know who loves and plays the game and I feel like I can capture all arguments and still tell you how bad this boss and boss fight is.

Lets start with the counter arguments:

1. Uber is the only way to know I’m truly broken

2. Uber is the only thing separating me from other players

3. Uber isn’t meant to be killed by almost any player (1 percent).

These are fine but completely shallow arguments. Here are my counter arguments

1. The 1 percent isn’t due to the difficulty of the boss or the game, it’s predominately due to the horrible balance of the game and skills/gear within it. It’s not SKILL, TIME or INVESTMENT that beats uber, it’s the finding of broken mechanics that kills uber. Neither Skill Nor time in the build of your choosing will ever match this requirement unless it’s one of these broken mechanics.
2. Most uber killers are using broken mechanics or a specific 1 in 10,000 options build

3. Many uber killers are skipping all the mechanics. One shot isn’t skill at all aside from being able to craft gear.

4. Uber is just bullet storm. The only skills required if you aren’t one shotting him is standing in the spot you don’t insta die while doing damage. That is a skill, but who wanted to play bullet storm games when they start an ARPG? Take a stationary melee character. There are opening all throughout the fight to stand and do dmg to uber, but guess what! Bullet time says you can’t stand there during that time. Every new unique moment in the fight where you could do damage there is ALWAYS a bullet preventing you from staying there.

5. UBER only allows for AOE mobile dmg if not one shotting.

If I was the creator of a fighting game and the final boss could only be killed by 1 of my 20 fighters. Not due to skill or effort, solely that they have the only mechanisms possible to kill him. What person would ever find this sane? Please, PLEASE fix uber being the most important boss in the game while being absurdly broken.

I’ve killed Uber tons of times, so please don’t write this off as someone who just can’t achieve the goal. I want to have fun in the game, and 99 percent of my chars should fall into this “1 percent” as a player with tons of hours and absurd gear. Hitting the same dead end over and over is extremely UNFUN.

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Melee vs Aoe (spin off post)
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Yup. Uber is not a “Dedicate time to your character and gear” benchmark, its a “did you click the specific combo of ingredients that beat him?”

Which to me defeats the entire purpose of a long form boss.

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I disagree, the uber boss mechanics are fine and done well, albeit a bit too flashy and too much is going on. That only AOE mobile dmg, ranged and one-shot’ers can do it is not true.
The first HC kills in S2 shows that (link). This playstyle you mention only emerged in the later seasons, because it is the most-efficient way to kill him. In short, it is not a problem of the boss, but overall balance.

Uber Abberoth is also not the final boss. It is an uber boss. It’s positioned as aspirational, optional content. If more than 1% - the most dedicated players - can do it, it only moves the goalpost further and raises expectations and request for another “true” uber boss. Unfortunately this is already happening, because of said broken skills and interactions being exploited.

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The only issue isn’t just Uber it’s melee and game design. I’ve done Uber over 600 times on my WP this season and it’s a piece of cake due to movespeed and AOE of “melee” same with Erasing Strike to a degree other than no stun while channelling being OP and ES needing a anti-stun mech. Anyway if you compare this to BM’s who have to jump in, literally on top of Uber to get stacks up for their underpowered pets to sort of do damage before Ubers melee, aura, holes and puddles ruin them RIP wolves then it’s BS. True melee has always got a disadvantage it’s with mapping capabilities too. I don’t know why but for some reason a lot of ARPGS/MMos etc it almost feels like a hatered towards actual melee, lol.

This season with all the 1 shot BS of rogue and that being ridiculous (still unsure why they went live with it - shows there is actually no real testing before they go live also shown with imprint nerf then later admitting to over nerfing) it’s made the pinnacle boss a pinnacle joke. Learning the fight and it’s phases becomes very easy after done enough but it will always be much harder for true melee. There are no added extra damage bonus’s or actual DR that’s good enough to balance the difference between them. I have 9k EHP and 3k health on my warpath and kill him every time alone, and have carried in 3 man where as with a primalist with DR out the wazoo and redirection (armor, red rings, aspect of the boar etc etc) you still struggle way more and get slapped hard as heck.

I’ll never stop crying about the injustice but it won’t change. EHG harp on about balance and have some how gotten worse? Makes no sense. In a game thats struggling to keep players interested and a company I guess struggling for funding you would think they would try harder to make things better and they would actually push for making the game known and trying to draw players. Instead they “appear” to not listen to the players constant feed back about the same things (see forums, reddit and discord) and instead change random things, nerf random fun classes, introduce stupid untested new skills that break the game etc it’s just mind boggling. The RNG in the game too has gotten worse everything is just pure luck now there is nothing determanistic about crafting anymore (or was there ever?) - you get an item with 50FP , its got 3 affixs, it has 2 prefixs you want, there are 2 x T7’s one on prefix, one on suffix - I know just just add a new suffix - you could discover and hope or you could choose - you choose - it randomly rolls 15FP ouch! now all you need to do is havoc to the 2 prefixs - this is all luck, 3 moves later you’re done, both tiers are on things you don’t want. Crafting is not skill, lol. It’s all luck based on how you roll forging potential for a rune and how lucky you are with a havoc. There is no dopamine in luck, no brain firing. It’s just mindlessly hoping you don’t brick yet another pre-sealed Nem item.

Anyways back to POE2 - it’s been great actually needing to evade attacks during the campaign!

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But this happened on literally the first season we had him. there was 1 minute falconer clears the very first season he came out. I knew people who never played the game who followed a guide and beat him.

Because it again has nothing to do with dedication to your character/being the 1%. it involved putting the correct ingredients into the pot from the get go.

people just rolled judgement paladin and beat him, wow so hard.

The issue isnt really his mechanics as much as he is a massive turbo bullet sponge, so the best answer to winning is just having insanely broken combos that allow you to either ignore the mechanics or skip them with damage.

To me, aspirational content should be something you spend the whole season chasing and finally winning with your character finally geared up to the maximum.

Which is not how it works, people are killing uberroth on day 1/2 with broken meta builds. and have been since it came out. Because its balanced around them.

in my eyes defending uberroth is just admiting this game will never have correct balance because this content was designed for unbalanced game elements from the very beginning.

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There’s no hatred. It’s just an inevitable consequence of each playstyle. If you look at the ARPGs out there, the only way to “balance” melee is by either giving it an AoE so now you’re clearing screens (which isn’t “true melee” anymore) or by giving it so much leech that they can ignore ground DoTs and are pretty much immortal.

Other than those 2 extremes, ranged builds will always, inevitably, have the advantage when doing bosses.

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Not just bosses in LE though is it - check the current corr leader board my mate invan when I last logged in was 80k - he’s working next 2 weeks so might stall but I think number 1 is the same build - bow using ranged and he has like 1100 hp and minus 200 resistances lol thats insane but the damage and clear is so huge its off screen. When I use WP with him I can’t spin and collect essences to refresh mana cos I don’t get to hit anything haha! I believe there are also builds like Jessraberts flameweave non-stop blinking at 5k corr clearing the whole screen, some builds by frozensent as well that look hectic.

You know what would be wild - simply introducing some nodes and weapons to balance it out “While within 1.5 meters of an enemy you take 25% less damage” - now before you get your wingtips in a fussy check BD - low life gets 24% and 8000+ ward. Primalist has a DR when you’re low health too but I tried to make a build using the more melee damage and it’s actually terrible. Survival wise it’ll save you for all of 2 seconds.

Weapon node “close range mastery” - when using attacks within 1.5 meters your attacks penetrate 15% of all resistances, 10% more attack speed, 50% MORE melee dmg and 75% crit multi

You know whats wild? Adding those 2 examples together wouldnt actually get you close to ES or WP builds haha! There are some pretty crazy melee builds this season using str/vit stack with the ammy good enough to exploit on bosses but mapping variants still weaker than my WP - tested them. Pure bossing ones you can snip off 10 or so seconds on my WP which isn’t maxed at all - wearing 7/5 ring, helm is average, gloves are 7/6 etc

Point is there are definitely ways they could TRY balance melee but they won’t the funny thing to me is why they bother having a range stat on weapons? 1.2 meters and my lil char is spinning up clearing up 4-5 meters around him either side with his attack while some poor smuck, heaven forbid wants to NOT play a meta build using vengeance has to ride on the back of a monster just to hit him so his “ranged” iron blades can shoot off haha

But yeah - big aoe is what the majority seem to want so game makers just neglect the poor few who wanna stand and bang close range :frowning:

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That is simply bad balance. It’s broken ranged builds that can kill screens away so they (almost) never die. It has nothing to do with melee/ranged balance itself. There are plenty of melee builds in PoE that also do the same thing (clearing whole screens).

Well, the problem with this is always the same and has been discussed before: how do you define that a build is melee or ranged? All masteries have both possibilities. Some skills even have both options as well.

For example, your BM example isn’t a melee build. It’s a minion build that uses a melee skill to buff them. That is a completely different thing.

Then there’s AoD, for example. It’s not a melee build, but it has to stay within melee range.

So how do you define a melee build? One that only has melee skills and buff skills? One that has ANY melee skill? Or simply one that gets close to the boss?

Whichever you choose I can guarantee you that you’ll get a ranged and/or minion build that will abuse it to become extra tanky while still keeping 100% of DPS uptime.

Besides the difficulty of defining what actually is a melee build in a way the game will know, there is only one way I can see where bosses/ubers can be balanced and that is to have a mixture of attacks that each target a different playstyle:

-Barrage attacks to force ranged to move to avoid them.

-Ground DoT attacks to force melee builds to reposition.

-Big AoE attacks to target multiple minions as well as the player.

Big slams would be a threat to all, of course.

This is what the devs try to do, both in LE and PoE. The problem is that you end up just soaking a bunch of these and the DoT pools end up being a lot more punishing because they stack.

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Currently playing through campaign again in POE2 but its still the same there with ranged vs melee vs “melee ranged” with some of the monk skills being called melee but clearing the whole screen. Warrior is basically now shield + warcry or no ones playing end game because you get rolled lol. Huntress lightning spear / twisters again ranged. I am actually playing druid wyvern which is melee but you eat a corpse and your wingslash gets buffed to become a BIG melee lol.

I know what you’re saying about what is melee and that question will always be around I guess it would need to be something that someone important goes you know what? We should have melee catergories BUT based on the fact ol’ mate Mike is always on an archer when he’s streaming means that builds like falconer/ballista will never get touched. I mean a guy played it to 100k corr last season and it got NO nerfs, infact seems stronger yet warpath which devs dont play got a pretty noticable buff, lol favourtism much?

The example of melee in ground effects, yep true but you can explode those with fire and move around its the melee attacks on top of those puddles - you don’t get touched by his melee stuff as ranged/warpath or ES or other attacks but if you’re close in you have to navigate potential black hole with balls being sucked in - ground puddle and melee attacks. With ranged/melee ranged the balls being sucked into the holes dont matter because you have massive gaps between them - if you try run to the gaps as melee while doing that he also charges you due to the way his mechanics work when he’s not being hit but because you are hitting with ranged he stays there. You can also basically tell him where to charge and when using ranged/melee ranged to make his positioning VERY simple as I do in my YT vid. With melee when youre up close because you’re doing that he will continually hop backwards until he’s awkwardly against a wall and the fights all but done lol

Anyways if someone figured a way to make melee on a balanced play field I would buy the most expensive support pack and never leave. My money is safe lol

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The whole concept of uberbosses is flawed. Yes adding a new boss in new content is all well and fine but intentionaly designing it as an uber is uber silly from my point of view.

Okay LE isn’t in a good state and everyone can copy a build to instagib uber because EHG can’t balance even a scale as it seems. In every more or less balanced game ubers make no sense at all because 99% of the playerbase won’t interact with them at all. Look at D4 how much they needed to overbuff classes and make the lilith fight easier untill a lot of people were able to go in there an beat her without a broken/buged build. She was utter useless as an uber for years.

Same goes for uberroth or every other pinacle boss. Make it a normal variant and be done with it. Let people who want uber versions scale Corruption until everything is uber.

Creating content for a game outside of riddles or eastereggs most players will never interact with is a lost cause.I think the “pick your poison” approach of MMO’s is rather nice so people can choose the difficulty they want to play and still encounter the same content just in a more managable variant.

It’s kind of a shame that so many games cater to the 1% while neglecting the 99% mostly. Then again I don’t know if my approach would help at all I just think the state of uberbosses is flawed by design. They are either so easy and dumped down everyone can do them (aka D4) or so out of range most players don’t do them in a game that is more or less balanced and uberbosses are intended as beeing uber like in PoE 1 for example Atziri or Nethol who just kill everyone who has no op gear and skilltree that is worked out well. At least in my friendgroup I know 2 persons who killed them from 148 players with the role for the game on discord. Then again no proplayers arround ^^.

It’s just sad from my point of view and shows what kind of quality a game has to offer and how quality the work of devs is.

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Outside of all the crappy balance EHG has done lately, this is not what Ubers are. A game that wants to be successful has to provide challenges to its players. And I mean all their players.

Campaign is supposed to be the challenge for the casuals. The ones that usually play a couple hours a day for a week or two and then leave. That is why when you add new mechanics you also add them to the campaign, so it feels a bit different for these players and they have a reason to return.

Then you get endgame. It’s supposed to be the challenge for the semi-casuals (those that stick around longer and return every season but don’t play 10h a day every day). Most casuals will never interact with it.

Then you have Ubers, which are supposed to be the challenge for the grinders.

The semi-casuals and the grinders will barely interact with the campaign. They will mostly speed through it. Likewise, most grinders will spend their time in the pinnacle of endgame, where almost no semi-casual will be.

If we talk about “wasted” development time, the campaign is the only thing all players will go through, at least once, so anything you develop outside the campaign is already aiming at less than 100% players.

And given the complexity of things being added, adding an Uber version of an existing boss is kinda low effort as it is. It keeps the top players busy without having to invest a lot into it.

So yes, Ubers are supposed to be for the top 1% of players. Most players won’t even interact with it or even show a desire to do so. But it’s a necessary part of the game to keep a necessary part of your playerbase engaged.

Saying that you shouldn’t have Ubers in a game because most players won’t engage with them is like saying that you shouldn’t have endgame mechanics because most players won’t engage with them. And you should only have the campaign because that’s what everyone plays.

And, to be fair, GGG’s Ubers are a lot worse lately. They all require outside knowledge to succeed. You get memory games, puzzles and similar mechanics that you wouldn’t naturally find out about as a normal player. At least Uby is pretty straight-forward in what he does.

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I have always hated “uber” bosses, to me it personally just seemed like a shortcut to add a “challenge” to keep some players happy when really most people would prefer an entirely new boss even if its not harder, content is king.

Problem in LE is that that 1% of players who maybe used to be able to do uber is a hugeeee percentage now with broken builds just following guides seeing “thank you finally killed my first uber” all over YT pages. The other thing is people just get carried and this is because they need the gear because the shattered world and vise combo are wicked. This season with sets for rogues being 100x better than shattered world and providing mechanics to break the game with shadows and ward generation they don’t need it so it’s left to falcs and ethical builds (seperated that because falcs are not ethical theyre an ongoing EHG joke from since way before I started, I will never get it)

ANYWAYS the lack of bosses is crazy with the time between seasons these guys have. This season they put shade in a new area gave him a minion and a fire aoe and said “this is a new boss called Tim the fractured prison boss” they also said “hes going to drop 1 over tuned ammy that’s great for exploiting builds and then crap rings and a bunch of useless idols BUT if you kill him 600 times you might get 1 ok, sub rolled idol”

Now I know its a bigger company but GGG added something like 40 new uniques and 15 new bosses, reworked entire systems and interfaces and added tons more stuff in 5.5 months as well as their new season mechanic, map stuff, ascendancies etc etc it was HUGE. LE added 1 boss - already mentioned, it’s Shade. Corruption and Omen stuff - taken from the forementioned game. Rogue skills that were obviously not really tested, buffed a few old uniques, idol layouts/enchanting and thats about it. That was with an extra month between as well. I feel they spent more time nerfing imprints, explosiv traps and shurikens than they did on anything else.

I really don’t want to keep playing POE2 it’s been ok for the weekend but I feel like I’m going to have to try D4 next because despite telling people to give it time… I don’t think time is on EHGs side.

edit - Just read this back I dont stay on track very well aye haha sorry

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Yeah but they could make it optional for people who seek challange and bump up the loot rates for ubers while the normal version has the same loot table with the crap chances to get loot that are in place already. No harm done and everyone can enjoy the content.

Making content “Most casuals will never interact with (it).” is stupid from my point of view. Making expert versions for the 1% helps far more then throwing roadblocks in front of the biggest part of the playerbase.

Low effort but quality content isn’t bad. Look at WoW for example. I know 2 people who have health issues, like huge health issues, and they still enjoy the game and run LFR raids because they can handle it. They would completely go under in a normal Raid and they don’t want to hurt other peoples experiences so they are happy with the option to do LFR. So nothing is lost there and it’s an option on the other side of the spectrum.

People should be able to pick their poison instead of knowing there is content they don’t even have to bother to strive for. But that’s just old silly me who want’s a good experience for everyone.

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I find all the boss battles to be a matter of build style rather than power. My VERY powerful minion zoo build can’t dream of going high level omi windows or Uber abby because while I can dodge and move my army gets wiped out by Area Effects and my build can’t resummon literally 20+ minions every few seconds in a hard fight. Its not a question of my build not being strong enough, its a question of my build style will never beat one shot AOE bosses because my minions can’t get out of the way. In omen windows my issue is that my entire build is based on my minions doing the damage while i hang back, but the challenge requires me to stay in a stupide circle so my necro, who should be no where near monsters, is eaten. Again its a build style issue not a power issue.

What I would like to see is some challenges that a zoo minion build might actually be able to take on.

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That’s exactly my original point though. What’s the point of the final challenge boss being incredibly limited to the number of builds/classes that can fight it. To some earlier points, maybe if there were more bosses with more variety catered to different build types and classes then we’d be fine. That’s not what we have. We have one final achievement with the best gear in the game locked to it, and an extremely limited number of builds/classes can have access to it. I find the excuse that it’s supposed to be hard as a really lazy explanation. It isn’t even about hard or not hard. It’s about possible or impossible.

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So if you have ever played other games with infinite scaling, this isnt really a melee issue. lets say corruption capped at 1000, melee would be fine.

There was a game called chronicon that at one point before the dev changed the monster scaling formula to cap monster damage was the same deal, ignore defense scale avoid(Dodge)

At some point you just dont live a hit, that is a mathematical given at infinite scaling. You can have 99.9% reduction, if hte hit does enough damage you will die. And many of the reduction mechanics are capped(Armor is capped for example) you simply wont be able to build enough mitigation for it to matter.

When a hit does 1 billion damage, and you are a mitigation build? you die 100% of the time, when you are a dodge build, you live 95% of the time simple as.

This isnt to say they cant improve melee, but i think a better first step would be all the anti melee design

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I don’t understand exactly what you’re getting at with the mitagation/capping thing - people still get hit for 5000+ dmg at 300 corruption in LE. I got hit for 500k by shade at 40k corr, I mean the numbers in LE are pretty bonkers, capped or not. I don’t know off the top of my head any current builds that can tank ubers first big slam for example - the melee issue is nothing to do with capped armor, resistances etc you can’t just stand and bang, last season’s judgement pally might have been able to but it’s generating 1000s and 1000s of ward and the quick fights would take 8 minutes on a season with “high powered we have to nerf them immediately” imprints.

I agree with your first step 100% however - a lot of the mechanics are seemingly designed to hinder melee over anything which is weird given how weak melee is comparitively. Even shade’s melee attacks slap you when you’re in close. I actually stand by my comment earlier when I said its like the devs hate melee. Watch Mike on stream he only ever plays his little marksman.

PS there is no dodge build rogue that is actual melee lol. Rend is ranged shooting these ugly 4 year old drawn self images. Shadow Cascade is giant bounce around aoe. Shurikens around you is probably the closest you get and thats a movement where you shift through the bosses and mobs and big shock you’re invulnerable while shifting.

Joke city~ lol

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I disagree with that.
Plainly spoken Uber Aberroth is absolutely garbage tier game-design.

To design a good bossfight you have to scrutinize against the existing archetypes of your game and see if it upholds. And a good design is to push those archetypes close to their limits then, but with each having a clear-cut way of success being possible.

Uberroth is a minion-killer, hence minion builds suck.
Uberroth is a one-shot boss, hence melee tanks suck.
Uberroth is designed in a way to endanger overall tanky characters, hence glasscannons suck.

Which leaves for any of those builds only ‘burst it down before it can do anything’ as an option.

That’s absolute atrocious design and a lack of understanding from your side why that’s the case.

And to be entirely clear hear: Nobody gives a shit about statistics which don’t showcase the necessary metrics when it’s a question of the design-basis already. It’s not a balance issue, it’s a design issue.

Much like Sirus was a atrociously designed pinnacle boss in PoE and is still one of the worse bosses existing there since several mechanics simply dismantled whole archetypes. Storms caused minions to die while traversing. Storms blocked your way. The timing for the meteorite drop was based on 30% MS minimum when several character types didn’t use that and it was on top a ‘general’ boss unlike Atziri which is distinct specified ‘gimmick’ boss.

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I think that is VERY hard to do. I would be satisfied if EHG would implement more challenges designed to play to different play styles. I just want some top tier challenges my zoo necro might be able to adress.

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What they need is a bunch more content and bosses and with each boss have it be harder for a different type of build, also areas. POE1 - Delve was is a great example with your build needing different resistances and weapons that do different damage. Variation and content is king, everyone likes different things which is what will keep players engaged. If we all have to go for uber to get the best gloves or best relic then the fight shouldn’t be designed to be easier for big ranged/aoe attacks it should be “even” but it’s not. It’s pretty trash and it’s just an over tuned normal boss - I feel like it was almost a year between seasons when it came out too, lol. A year to tune up an existing boss is pretty sub par. This season was 7 months and they just put shade behind bars in a prison. I really don’t know what the guys are working on because it isnt bug fixing.