I’m currently working on fighting Uber Aberroth and the fight just feels bad with his ward phases being the same incredibly unfun experience of fighting bosses in the 1.1 patch. Going from slowly chunking down his health to just having a crazy massive amount of ward multiple times in the fight feels bad to me. I’d much prefer if he had a higher amount of percent damage reduction like other bosses while the ward ticks down faster.
Overall, the changes in 1.2 to boss ward were amazing right up until I started to fight Uber Aberroth. Even though a lot of fights didn’t take much less time, they felt significantly better because I felt like I was actually making progress through their ward bar instead of running into a brick wall like what the 1.1 experience was.
I liked the ward change from dynamic DR since it was much better for big hit builds and also for stuff like leech and stun.
But there are problems with the ward mechanic and I think it is still not resolved with 1.2 changes. I really don’t feel much difference with the decay rates although the reduced ocurrence is nice.
The issue with Ward is that it is based on boss health. Uber Aberroth for example has 50 million health this is good IMO as it makes his health bar actually relevant in a fight. But this means he has around 50 million Ward bar which is ridiculous and the decay rate is pretty much irrelevant. It feels especially bad since Uber Aberroth is a cluster fuck of a fight which gets messier as time goes on.
The biggest problem with ward bars is that they make boss health irrelevant as by the time you reach a level of damage that can significantly chunk ward bars, you are essentially instantly deleting boss health.
I’m not suggesting dynamic DR, I mean just straight DR or more health. For me, the fight currently goes with me chunking off 20% (10M damage) of his health in the wind-up to the first two attacks that he does. I dodge out of the way, and then I fight into an annoying 50M ward bar that decays at a rate much slower than other boss ward bars in the game (I died and calculated the percent decrease rate and then compared it to a different boss). The ward on Uber Aberroth appears to decay at half the rate or maybe even slower compared to other bosses in this patch.
That makes it just feel very, very, very unfun to fight. I would much rather my attack rounds do a smaller portion of his total health pool (let’s say, 1-3% instead of 10%) than have the incredibly unfun ward bar.
Boss Ward should be reliant on the position of the Boss in the progression and not on Boss HP directly.
20-30% Ward for Aberroth is a good example… 100%? Nonsense, utter and absolute nonsense.
The same goes for many other Ward instances, 100% Ward is just nonsensical.
And yes, ‘punching through and invalidating it’ is the outcome which will happen. The alternative is extreme decay which makes it useless as well… or removal. Failed system anyway, DR also was a failed system from the get-go.
Boss Ward isn’t overall better. It’s just worse in other ways.
I would even argue worse in some seriously impacting ways where DR was relatively fine.
I’ll agree on the visibility-for-players part and that that feels better… but actively gameplay wise it’s a worse outcome and the system is a failed one design-wise. All the system does is giving a bad experience while a proper balancing to bring lackluster build directions (and there’s still enough of em) upwards accordingly while adjusting boss HP to the general baseline then.
The comparison between ‘a awful system’ and ‘another slightly different awful system’ is not making either ‘good’… both stay ‘awful and unecessary’ anyway
That’s rise tinted glasses for you, “everybody” screamed about who much they hated the old DR system and the higher dps your build the more you hated it, so “certain persons” (you know who) probably went into anaphylactic shock whenever they got to a boss because they couldn’t one shot it.
The issues I had with boss ward personaly got better. I’m not tilted from the face of earth anymore encountering it on every other mob.
Then again if Ward reasambles the old Boss DR and they simply artificaly increase boss HP 5 fold they could simply increase the bosses HP 5 times without putting it behind a ward mechanic.
It don’t bother me that much. On the other hand I realy want bosses Ward decay because it looks like they loose very little. If I stop building ward mine is gone almost instantly ^^.
I mean… yeah… people complained about it, absolutely. On the top-end, so the thing did the job decently at least. To a degree, since the absolutely top-end just went along to burst the boss down before DR kicked in. Leech also was a mess.
The new system is nice for those people complaining beforehand. You can still more or less burst down bosses… so to avoid that has entirely failed Leech has been handled but on the other hand the people already lacking DPS have a vastly harder time in fights… since the decay is useless, since it feels like a wasted amount of time, since it feels unfitting to happen overall.
So yes, still… both systems are crap, simple as that But you don’t hear those types of complaints in other games, they don’t have those systems and hence it’s overall ‘fine’. PoE 1? Bosses are good. PoE 2? Bosses are good as well. Torchlight? Bosses also nice. D4? They got bosses? But yes, they are also ‘ok’. Only in LE this issue exists, and because of utterly arbitrary reasons. ‘People should never kill a boss in sheer moments’… which is utter BS plainly spoken, always was, always will be… and as we can see not even remotely an issue at the top-end anyway.
