I’ve played ARPGs for decades, and I tend to play in a way that avoids things that either seem too powerful or that I’ve seen developers outright state are too powerful. Don’t want to get accustomed to things that are going to be reigned in, or that make the game unfun for me by removing too much of the challenge.
Decided to try some T4 Julra today deliberately without abusing things such as low life ward generation, frost claw ward and stun/freeze lock, etc. Annnd, is this the expected experience? I’m going in with 1.6K health, 5K standing ward, and just under 500 health for endurance threshold. All resistances are capped, armor is giving somewhere around 30% IIRC. Julra can blow through all of this with incredible ease.
From watching EHG Mike’s streams, 200-300 corruption is around where the developers desire the true end game power level to be and 4 digit corruption builds are to be considered outliers they’re going to reign in. This same build can truck through these corruption levels without issue, but Julra can cut it down almost just as easily.
Julra can be steam rolled with outlier builds, but that’s kinda the point. Wondering if I’m missing something when trying to reconcile the differing experience from a T4 dungeon boss with 2-300 corruption monoliths? Or is the tuning really as ummm odd as it seems?
I believe there are other threads on this; if you search them you may get more insight. But T4 Julra, on top of being a challenge, which is good, also requires far more mechanics than doing high corruption echoes. There are some good videos around that go through Julra mechanics, if you’re having trouble.
There are many builds that aren’t OP/broken that can handle Julra fairly quickly.
I’d stay away from Falconer and Warlock in your case, since those are most likely getting heavily nerfed in 1.1.
Necros flame wraith turret does a good job of dealing with Julra, but there are many builds that can kill her under a minute that aren’t in the “broken build” territory.
Basically, search for builds, if they can clear 1k+, use a different one. You’ll still find lots of them.
It’s not any trouble, I have other builds that can run through her like she’s not there. It’s more so looking at it on the surface of if T4 bosses are endgame, the challenge level of fighting one is wildly different from the 2-300 corruption value that was also thrown out as a measuring stick.
Trying to take something that doesn’t make 1K corruption a cakewalk and then running a T4 dungeon boss on it presents such a noticeably different play experience. Or put another way if, making it to 300 corruption and not able to go higher is a target, then the bosses seem unreasonably powerful for that expectation.
You hit the nail on the head regarding specs like Falconer and some Warlock builds. I think most of us know the builds that are outliers this far into Cycle 1, but it also seems that the upper tiers of these bosses (I just used Julra as one obvious example) are skewed towards that end of the power spectrum. Unless I’m missing something.
To be fair, from what I got from Mike’s chat was that 300-350 corruption means you have a good build. Double digits are overperforming, and I don’t remember him ever mentioning 200 corruption, but then my memory isn’t what it used to be.
Don’t know which builds you don’t have problems with, but at least in my opinion, the boss that gatekeeps creating the best gear in the game should be the most difficult. And I don’t want to sound like a jerk, but if the builds you don’t have trouble with are overpowered, maybe you’re skipping some of the mechanics, or at least not having to worry about them more than once? Not saying that I don’t mess up plenty on T4 Julra (along with memory, my reflexes aren’t what they used to be!)
This is not what Mike has said. He said that 300 is the low goal for a successful build. But it’s not expected that all builds will stay at 300. 300-600 is a reasonable interval, and maybe a bit more. Mike didn’t really talk about their upper limit goals (other than 1k being too much).
As for you needing the upper tier of corruption builds to handle the bosses, this isn’t always the case. Yes, if a build can do 500 or 600c, it has a better chance of dealing with Julra more easily. But there are also builds that aren’t good for high corruption because they don’t have great AoE but have good single target damage that can do better.
It’s not that these builds couldn’t really push high corruption, but being mostly ST, pushing corruption on these is a lot slower.
The same applies for builds that are very defensive in nature and with lower damage outputs. They can survive Julra and eventually kill her over time, but they’re way way waaaay too slow and annoying to farm monos with. An example of this was a retaliation build I had. It was fine for bosses, since it was almost immortal, but it took a long time to clear echoes.
I think 200 was the number Mike used to give pre-1.0, but I’m not sure. I haven’t directly heard him say it, but I know he said it in the past.
You don’t sound like a jerk, but I didn’t say the builds I don’t have trouble with are owerpowered. I said I have other builds I don’t have problems with. Anything I feel is “overpowered” I stop playing, it feels off.
To be fair, had the developers not outright stated a corruption target, this topic wouldn’t have even come to mind. Prior to hearing that, when I knew the game had an effectively infinite corruption system I treated it in my mind like D3 greater rifts. Anything goes, get as strong as you can. Once I heard that, the wheels started turning on some fun experimentation on builds that started to either have survivability issues at around 300 corruption or started to have bad clear times for me. Then today I said, let me go through these dungeons and see how this feels. The jarring difference brought more questions.
The initial intention of Julra (being the hardest of the 3 dungeon bosses) was to effectively take the place of a “pinnacle” boss. Before 0.9.2 (probably way before, but that’s when I got LE), most builds did 300-600 corruption, with very few builds even getting to 1k+.
So Julra was a very hard boss for the lower end of the builds (300c) and an accessible one for the higher ones (500+). It was meant to be a real obstacle to furthering your power, since she’s gating legendaries.
That didn’t mean that there weren’t builds that killed her in 10 or 15 seconds, because there were. Turret flame wraiths being one of them, and some bleed build (VK?) being another.
Long story short, yes, Julra is supposed to be hard. If you have a 300c build, you’re supposed to learn all of her mechanics and avoid them all and the fight will last a longer time, which will increase the probability of you making mistakes and dying.
But you can always make the fight easier by making a build that’s better specced for boss fights, and these don’t necessarily mean that you’ll be able to do high corruption.
I’ve read the other discussions, many have gone on long enough that the topic has shifted and I didn’t get what I was looking for so I made my own. Apologies if this bothered you, wasn’t my intention.
I think you guys give EHG too much credit when discussing intricacies of gameplay design. Enemy design and balance is just as busted as skill and class balance.
T4 Julra is super unbalanced for melee builds if she happens to stand away from the empty spaces in her rotation beam. Moreover, I died many times due to the inconsistencies in her time teleport timing (might have been connection issues or memory leaks, though). Other people might be having many different issues.
If your build can’t tank the turrets and her tsunami attack and you can’t stand still during her rotation beams, it gets really unbalanced. Moving a millimeter can be instadeath due to wild hitboxes and constant issues and hiccups.
Just because they failed in what they intended to do doesn’t mean that they didn’t have an objective when doing it. That’s why I used terms like “intention” and “supposed to”.
To be fair, this is more of a problem with melee builds than Julra. Meaning that melee builds in general have a harder time doing anything in the game compared to ranged.
Again, this isn’t so much an issue with Julra but with the game stability. You should take into account that Julra was introduced before MP was a thing and most of those issues weren’t a thing. I expect they still aren’t if you play true offline.
To finish this off, I just want to note that, according to Mike, they will be taking a new approach for the new pinnacle boss. Supposedly it will work differently, maybe less mechanically, maybe without the DR. We’ll see how it goes. But if it’s a good boss design and players enjoy it, it’s possible that previous bosses might see changes as well.
I see your point and I agree with most of it. Boss design itself isn’t the only reason why some people struggle. Also, there’s always the people factor. Many players just suck and blame it on things.
However, boss design is also a part of it. Or more precisely, I think the main problem is enemy DoTs. They are way unbalanced in relation to how player defenses work and how (un)available DoT mitigation is. Most builds can tank Julra’s turrets and tsunamis. You maybe could’ve tanked the tsunami even if she spammed it. But stand in the pool for half a second and you’re dead.
It’s not just Julra. Hulking Overgrowth is my current nemesis. I’ll take T4 Julra over a pack of 600+ corruption Overgrowths every time. This is why people come here and whine about getting one-shot with 4000 armor, 100% resistances, 85% dodge, etc. The game sets you up into stacking multiple defense layers and then cranks up the one mechanic all those defenses are useless against.
Yeah, I know what you mean and I even partly agree. I think boss design was initially based on PoE where bosses have mechanics that one shoot you no matter what your defenses. I believe their intention was that you would have to learn those mechanics and actually do stuff in the fight besides just facetanking and spamming your damage skill.
Some players like that design, some don’t. Some have an easier time with it, some have a harder time. As I mentioned, it seems they have changed their design philosophy for the new pinnacle boss. Mike even said that they took melee into account when designing it. So let’s wait and see what they come up with, if it’s more enjoyable or not and if they might make those changes to previous bosses, or, at least, to further bosses they make.
To be fair, 600c is close to the top ceiling they were aiming for. It’s just that the balance being all over the place and some builds doing 5k corruption easily that skews our perception of things.
In an infinitely scaling system, there will always come a point where you will be one-shot, no matter how many defenses you have. In fact, at high corruption, it’s more effective to simply be a glass cannon and kill stuff before they have a chance to kill you.
This is what actually happens in PoE’s delve. Players that do deep delving will always have glass cannons that do ridiculous amounts of damage so they can kill everything immediately, because if a mob so much as sneezes in their direction they will die.
In games like these, the player decides on how his build is supposed to perform. So, do you want to delete the boss as fast as possible? Or do you want to be able to not get blown through like that?
From your post it sounds like it’s the latter. If you want to tank T4 Julra, then 5k standing Ward and 30% armor DR won’t be enough
It’s honestly neither. The question wasn’t about the boss itself, her mechanics, or even her damage output at T4. The question was about the drastic difference in those factors relative to the game feel at corruption 300 and the developers intentions for the boss encounter. There is a disconnect that is felt in the play experience there, though @DJSamhein explanation of T4 Julra being a stand in Pinnacle boss makes some the encounter at that relative build power make more sense for me.
Not sure where the notion keeps coming from that I’m asking for help or insight on beating the boss, because I never asked that question and it was not my intention. I can stomp her with relative ease on multiple builds, and I don’t copy builds from sites or YouTube (nothing against people that do, it’s just counter to why I enjoy ARPGs/RPGs).
What led to this post was me deliberately reducing the power of one of my builds (minion necro) and running Julra to see how it felt. It felt off, so wondered if there was a different intent behind it. Turns out there was.
I agree with a fair bit of this. The play experience between ranged and melee is wildly different, and not in the usual situations from other games where there are clear tradeoffs between either playstyle but they both come out feeling relatively balanced in the end. Ranged has a clear advantage here, and multiple encounters feel like melee wasn’t even slightly considered in their design.
Some of the inconsistencies you mention in the Julra encounter persist in full offline mode as well. I’ve shifted to that being my primary play mode for reasons not germane to this post (quality of life things that mods fix).
I did an experiment. I wanted to see how high in Corruption I can get using only free gear (0 gold listings in the bazaar), playing a health-based melee build.
