The only example I can think of that the fight plays out extremely differently between builds is minions, and that’s mostly due to poor AI and not fight design.
What other builds significantly struggle on this boss? You can dodge every single mechanic the boss has with 10% movement speed. And for the claw slams you just need at least like 800 health.
While I do agree that Lagon is usually a big bump for new players, that usually reach it undergeared and with poor defenses, it’s as good a place as any to place a gate and make them aware that they need to improve their build. After all, if the lagon fight was easier (which it pretty much already is) they would still have trouble keeping up with the next few monos anyway.
And it’s not like they’re actually stuck. They can keep farming the monos for better gear, just not the monos after Lagon.
But I do agree that there should be another gate in between. New players go from breezing through enemies to being one shot without being much aware that the issue lies in their build and just assume it’s because it’s a tough fight.
How does Lagon block progression in monoliths? I keep seeing it mentioned. Campaign - sure, although i never reach him on alts, because i go for monoliths. In monoliths i skip 75 mono (Lagon) and go from 70 to 80, from 80 to 85 and then to final 3 to unlock empowered. Maybe then i return for Lagon. What am i missing?
The shortest way is the one on the right, which brings you to Lagon. You could go all the way around, but that would probably be more time than simply farming to improve your build. Plus, you have less useful blessings on the way.
Lagon is a 100% pure skill check not a build check.
You can defeat him by not getting hit once. Every single of his attacks is avoidable.
The moonboom and most of his other attacks have visible queues before they happen. Givign the player tiem to react. You definitely need to learn the boss.
The moonbeam as you can it, is 100% controallable by the player. So where lagon aims this ability is within the players agency.
Outside of proper bugs such as minion AI & the hit box pre-change-to-tentacles, no, I don’t think it needs changing just because someone hasn’t got their head around the mechanics. It took me a long time to do that & probably watching a video explaining the mechanics.
If a person thinks a boss is too difficult and needs to be changed because they don’t understand the mechanics yet (& I fully believe it’s a yet & that they have the capacity to learn if it’s explained properly, it’s not like I’m being elitist & dismissively telling the scrub to git gud), why should the mechanics be changed? Players being challenged by game mechanics is the entire point of the mechanics
Indeed. That and I don’t believe it needs changing.
I disagree, I think the fight plays out differently based on the skill set of the player (bugs notwithstanding). I’m not aware of any builds that aren’t capable of doing the fight if the player understands it, except maybe zdps builds.
You don’t even need to do the fight to get to monos, so how can it be a roadblock?
Well in that case I apologise for having the temerity to have my own opinion. Real life must suck sometimes.
Sure, it’s a skill challenge. It’s not even that difficult after some repetition. But even if the complaints are sometimes focusing on the wrong thing, it’s not like they’re coming out of nowhere - the fight is not well-designed in regard to its context imo.
Managing the beam is a matter of knowing what to do & that isn’t obvious at first, so you have to run the fight several times just to understand what the correct pattern even is. It’s not like there’s no games that make this kind of thing work well, but those that do tend to a) have a lot more going on visually and mechanically to make repeating and learning the fight feel interesting b) introduce the concept of trial-and-error more gradually, typically starting earlier than the 8th act.
The heavy use of oneshot mechanics is effective at achieving a target level of difficulty, but not necessarily that fun. Dying instantly after one mistake is very jarring due to the lack of buildup. It also violates the expectation that your build should matter somehow as tanks tend to die just as easily as everyone else.
The moonbeam instagibbing through dash skills is annoying because the game has got the player used to reflexively dashing around everywhere (which is fun), then out of nowhere they get hard-punished. It does also create a class disparity as teleport skills basically trivialise the fight.
I’m broadly in favour of hard-ish bossfights, but imo to be really fun the mechanics should tend to be individually more forgiving but there should be more of them. There’s nothing to build up tension and excitement like getting yourself in a corner with 1 or 2 mistakes then clutching through the next several mechanics to win the fight by the skin of your teeth. It’s difficult to fit that kind of gameplay around abundant lifesteal and recovery, but it would be interesting if EHG could find a way to control those systems in order to enable more diverse & fun fight designs in the future.
How should a game explain/teach the boss mechanic? Should a game pause & have some graphics pop up on screen to explain the mechanic?
Edit: I’m also not sure I agree with the premise that there aren’t any telegraphed attacks before Lagon. The Emperor’s Remains fight at the end of chapter 2(?) has big purple areas where it’s going to do big hits though they’re generally not oneshots. The Lotus mobs is chapter 1 have big AoEs to warn you about incoming fire (though they never target on the player, ever), the bug floaty champion thing in the divine era (can’t remember what it’s called, it uses fire attacks & can spawn as monolith bosses) has telegraphs, as do Pannion’s Students in the Ruined era and the Splitting Frost boss in Heoborea with its big charged attack & lets not forget Admiral Harton or the Soul Cages, and the 2 Putrid Flesh mobs (can’t remember the name of the second one).
So there are lots of telegraphs throughout the game that teach the new player that Telegraphed Things are Bad ™.
there are literally hundreds of games exploring the possibilities here, plenty of solutions that don’t suck. The simplest is just to make the animation cue for the beam cast way flashier and more obvious (this kind of thing would do double-work by making the fight more visually interesting too).
besides making the fights more intuitive to learn, it’s also valid to make the trial and error element more enjoyable by making the fight a spectacle that feels worth repeating. Lagon is quite old content by now so maybe a redo at EHG’s current standard would deliver better in this respect.
A slightly out there “fix” I’d be tempted to try is adding more bullshit mechanics, and eg. different mechanics for the second phase. If you’re gonna have players retrying the same fight several times in a row there should be some variety and unpredictability. 10 deaths to 5 different mechanics may be more fun in some respects than 4 deaths to the same one.
everything before Lagon is either trivially easy to dodge or unnecessary to dodge, most often both.
It’s not about introducing the player to the concept of a telegraph, it’s about having a consistent difficulty ramp. If the Lagon difficulty spike wasn’t catching players outside their expectations, why would the fight ever get so many complaints?
I have another small problem with Lagon’s oneshots. I can’t always see them “telegraphed”, because other things in that fight obscure them. Sometimes it’s not even my doing.
Another idea, make those oneshots scale with time in fight. Let them happen once or twice before going full power, so they don’t kill players in the first shot, but maybe on second or third. That’s going to teach to watch out for them saving some frustration.
Side note, my personal opinion is that “oneshot mechanics” are just a lazy attempt to add cheap thrills to a fight. There is a difference for me between strong attack that will kill some builds and a guaranteed oneshotting everybody regardless of build unless they do a proper rain dance. But that’s just a side note i had to vent at that moment. 
If all skills hit the boss everything is fine. If some skills never conect or are unusable against him (outside of movement skills for obvious reasons) then the bossfight is a mess that should be thought out asap. Imaging going live with a game and you know you go live with bugged or broken content. It’s a shame if it happens. Sure if something breaks on the fly shit happens but going live knowing you messed up is another topic.
Which is why they added the tentacles to Lagon.
So a few things.
Firstly, this fight is the end of the road for many players because its different to every other fight. Doing a specific dance or being one shot is not a mechanic that appears elsewhere, so this is new and different. And then it isn’t the start of that being normal, it’s just this one anomalous fight.
Secondly, not all the one shot attacks are telegraphed. Lots of people saying “everything is telegraphed just learn to dance”, but the eyebeam is not templated and telegraphed in the same design language that is used for all other major boss attacks. The circle template is used for the overhead blast, but the eyebeam you have to judge from his posture and facerolling yourself into learning its boundaries.
Thirdly, the penalty for failure is that you need to go mash through more boring echoes and avoid overly harsh modifiers until you have enough stability to try again. If you could try again without penalty, the learning curve wouldn’t be so bad, even though you’re learning skills for just this one fight and not the game in general. But with the extra bullshit to farm your way back to trying again, it’s not fun at all.
Lastly, the fight just takes too damn long. You get the dance steps right, dodge the telegraphed and untelegraphed attacks, and you have to keep doing it for ages longer than other bosses. He’s a sponge, and it’s not helped by the constant dancing preventing many primary DPS moves from being used.
ETA: I guess the main thing is, this fight is not the same kind of game as the rest of it. You can make this kind of game, but it will attract a different playerbase. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it should be a conscious decision. Alternately, separate this kind of gameplay into a specific mode so it’s not a roadblock on the main run and players can opt whether or not to do it. This would be similar to how not everyone is chasing the high corruption that requires specific builds and skillsets, but there is endless play without going there for those that don’t want to.
New player perspective. I like the Lagon fight. Lagon 75 stopped me in my tracks for about three days and was the first thing that really challenged me. I had to research a better build and respec into something similar that fit with my current gear. I think the fight is fair because you can go around it up through Blood Frost and Death if you can’t handle it.
If anything, I’d like to see similar bosses throughout the game rather than see him nerfed since a fight like Lagon gives you a test to see how good your character is at the point in the game that you face it. But it is really important that hard bosses like that be in some way optional and not completely stop you from progressing.
Harton’s lunge attack is telegraphed in a similar way (almost identical in fact), as is the golden elemental bigbfist attack (though to be fair that’s after Lagon). The Void Pennance (last mob before the Council Chambers) has a big stabby attack that isn’t telegraphed on the floor & I don’t think Emberwing’s conal AoE is either.
At some point there will always be a new thing added in to combat that the player needs to be aware of & a certain segment of the playerbase will always cry bullshit because they weren’t capable/willing/able/aware enough/whatever to get their heads round it & got killed.
So you think it should be introduced earlier in the game, perhaps towards the end of the campaign? TBH, the loss of mono stability is the only death penalty we have (except for the loss of the deathless tag, but that would require reading).
It’s about 1-2 monos. Not exactly what I would call farming, but if that’s what you call farming then I guess you don’t want to try increaing the corruption in empowered monos…
You never have to fight Lagon. Ever. In the campaign you can just stop before you encounter him & switch to monos and in monos you can take a different path so you can still get to empowered without doing his mono.
Are you sure? You can enter dungeons before you come across Lagon and have oneshot mechanics in there. On top of it: Other bosses beeing pushovers don’t make Lagon automaticly that hard tbf.
Yeah but it’s so obvious something will start and if you died to it once you should’ve get it because the only way to make it more obvious is a screen promt, sirens in the backround and a telegraph showing something obvious will happen.
Yeah this feels always bad. I like the PoE approach more where you have a certain ammount of trys.
It’s one of the longer fights for sure but with a well rounded build and a bear setup that makes sense the fight is done rather quick.
That’s a fair take because the fight IS setup differently. Then again it’s not that different to write home about.
That’s just my view of it and maybe it killed Lagon to many times to see issues with it.
You forgot the sarcasm tag again, most readers will miss it. 
Yes, people should have learnt how to avoid Lagon’s beam in chapter 8. Once you can do that the mono version is not that much harder.
(To be fair, if we could have a portal closer to Lagon at this stage and not have to run through the entire temple when we die, that would be great).
Yes, that’s fair.
Sorry, I, once again, forgot that most gamers don’t read & probably just go through the game with their eyes closed. Or at least not looking at the screen, possibly assuming that the game will give them a participation medal on the “hardest difficulty” because the devs have recognised that they are special.
So there’s a bunch of inconsistent design lying throughout the game, that makes sense how games evolve through dev before launch. It should be on the list of things to fix up. Either you are using templates to telegraph attacks, or you’re not. Consistency is good. Nice of you to use your obvious experience with the game in detail make a list.
[quote=“Llama8, post:76, topic:54691”] So you think it should be introduced earlier in the game, perhaps towards the end of the campaign? TBH, the loss of mono stability is the only death penalty we have (except for the loss of the deathless tag, but that would require reading).
…
It’s about 1-2 monos. Not exactly what I would call farming, but if that’s what you call farming then… [/quote]
Honestly I have no idea man, it’s not my game, I’m just some noob playing it for the first time. I just think it should be separated from other bosses as a thing of it’s own - “here’s where to go for the boss fights you missed if you never saw molten chore twenty years ago.” That way “filthy casuals” like me can take the obvious signpost the other way and continue enjoying the fun where we personally find it.
I don’t mind grinding through echoes to move the dial a little ahead on gearing. But when I’m trying to do a boss fight, having to stop every attempt to go do make-work before I can continue learning, it’s tedious. It’s the same grind, but the context matters.
[quote=“Llama8, post:76, topic:54691”] You never have to fight Lagon. Ever. In the campaign you can just stop before you encounter him & switch to monos and in monos you can take a different path so you can still get to empowered without doing his mono.
[/quote]
OK hard disagree on telling people they can skip the campaign if they don’t like the fight. The campaign should be the most accessible part of the game. But I had no idea I could skip lagon until I read the two comments here that mentioned it, so thanks for that. Never doing mono lagon when I don’t feel like it again.
Also, I dont know if it’s just how my builds were, but campaign lagon wasn’t that much harder than any other boss in the campaign for me. It was only mono lagon that interfered with smooth progression.
Mono lagon was also where i discovered that binding any ability to left click is a bad bad idea, despite the signposting in the UI that you can do that. Don’t do that if you need to move.
Disagreed
Having a mix of telegraphed attacks and animation/sound cues is way cooler than having literally everything telegraphed.
While I really do like telegraphed attacks having all dangerous things telegraphed would homogenize things too much for me.
Keeping the player on their toe with different cues is way more interesting.
Lagons Eyebeam is definitely one of the most punishing abilities, but it is also one of the abilities that the player has the most agency over. You as a player are in full control where the beam goes.