Why 'learning boss fights' is not feasible in Last Epoch

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15

While I think theres probably an argument for it being hard to learn fights, I think making the argument ‘you cant learn boss fights’ followed by a reasoning for this being ‘well you have to clear the dungeon again to get to it’ is just inherently flawed.

Either you cant learn the boss fights, and no matter how easy it is to retry it you still wont, because you cant learn the boss fights. Or you can learn the boss fights, and you’d personally prefer it be less of a grind between each attempt.

I’ve personally learnt all the boss fights, thats my personal experience. There can defintiely be points made towards how punishing it is in terms of time needed to get to the boss again when you make a mistake, but its just clickbaity rubbish to lead off with ‘you cant learn them’.

Also, no offense, but i see in a comment you make the point that you haven’t killed t4 bosses. I’m not sure you can comment on the difficulty of learning bosses in the way you are, i.e. seemingly trying to be objective about it. When you haven’t gone through the entire thing (i.e. learnt the bosses enough to do them on t4). Knowing that you haven’t actually done them it makes your points make a lot more sense however, as your points clearny aren’t ‘i can’t learn the boss fights, so i have to overgear my way through them’. But instead ‘I haven’t learnt the boss fights, so I have to overgear through the first 3 tiers, and now I can’t do tier 4 bosses because I haven’t learn them, and overgearing them requires beating them first’

Now that’s definitely a good point, if you never actually try to learn the fights, or just play the game outside of bosses enough beforehand, you’ll be in a position where you actively have to make the choice to learn the fights so you can do them. And if you don’t make that choice, the games only going to offer you that opportunity, when you’re pushing t4.

However I think it’s fair to say that this design is perfectly fine, it’s more accessible this way than the game forcing that on you.

((A good comparison of this with other games, wow for example, is that if you just ignore mechanics in a normal raid because you overgear it, you then get to that boss on heroic and have a much harder time progging through it, than if you purposefully bring attention to the mechanics in normal, so your raid can learn them in a situation where learning doesnt have the same risk as on the higher difficulties))

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16

I wanted to farm Vessel of Strife and was playing my new Beastmaster approx level 91 who had not done any dungeons, I did T1/2/3 Julra completely fine, while doing T4 I tried to dodge the spinning beam apparently got touched and died immediately, 2.1k HP, 300 resting ward, tried again and when her dropping that void puddle I got hit twice by it whille running out in Spriggan form with 43% movment speed, ded

I loaded my Abomination Necromancer who I had already killed Julra a bunch of times when EHG released them

Defensively I have 4k resting Ward, capped res, 66% crit avoidance, after 5 fights I died 4 times and got one kill

I died to almost every mechanic as basically a one shot, I play on a controller so movement skills are trash in the fight. died to the wave attack which did all my hp, the spinning laser which killed me in 2 ticks as I tried to dodge it, her lightning/cold slam as I was too close and when avoiding her rift puddle I used transplant and nicely dashed me into the corner of the arena and died instantly. In fight #5 I got hit with the wave but I ‘only’ took about 3100 damage

Not really, not unless its T4, you dont learn anything from T1 damage wise. Giving a boss 410% damage is the problem, its hard to know exactly how dangerous something is when it does basically no damage at T1 then immediately starts one shotting you at T4. Maybe its the fact I play on controller but I find this fight pretty difficult, even in PoE on most content you get 6 deaths per attempt so its much easier to practice

Ill fight them more probably tomorrow and practice. Some of the issue as well is the fact you have to farm T4 bosses to even have a chance of obtaining certain uniques, the drop rate could be changed to include T3 at a lower rate

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17

From reading this though, it seems like you knew what to avoid, and the issue was execution? The point OP is trying to make is that learning what to avoid is the issue, and honestly what you’ve said seems like it runs in counter to that and just points out that you can learn these abilities on the lower tiers.

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18

you’re taking it a little bit too literal here, I feel. The overall point is clear, right. I know in one sentence I said you can’t, and that is of course not true, but it’s about the feasibility of learning boss fights. And the lack of opportunities here.

I have killed T4 bosses, Julra so far, and the arena ones, but I can’t be bothered to actively farm them, is what I meant. Reason why I can’t be bothered, is because one little mistake wastes 10 minutes of my time, and that’s not worth it. I probably killed Sirus 100 times by now, in PoE, but I still enjoy the 6 portals, because sometimes you just mess it up. And then it’s nice, and reasonable, you can dive back in.

19

So what threshold of defence do you need to survive a single attack, if everything like that kills me whats the points of having defence

People play on a controller, they dont have precise movement abilities and will get hit easier

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20

I mean, if you want a discussion about the difficulty of fights, or the progression of the game itself as it pertains to going through tiers, then make that point. Otherwise you just sound clickbaity and that generally always leads to a pointless discussion, because people are talking from different places, and moving goalposts all the time.

As it stands I’m not really sure what point you’re actually trying to make. If you can learn the bosses, then what is the issue? That you have to spend 5-10 minutes clearing the dungeon on the way? That t4 abilities are too one-shotty relative to t3? That the fights in general rely on one shot stuff too much? That you don’t get to die at 50%, and go back in with the boss still at 50%? That you don’t get to use multiple portals to cheese through mechanics?

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I mean this is why if you watch races in arpgs, the builds being used dont worry about surviving certain specific boss stuff, but instead build to survive stuff leading up to that. Because as you say, if you can’t super overgear it, your defenses wont matter to certain abilities.

Also the point about controller is an entirely different point, i have no idea how the games balance feels on controller because I don’t use it, but it’s probably good feedback for the devs to be contained in its own thread.

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my 2 points are clear from the video, that the game doesn’t do a good job teaching you the fights, and that it doesn’t give you enough opportunities to learn a fight. I think what automatically follows from point 2, is that if T4 fights have oneshot mechanics, and they do, that a single mistake ends up costing you 10 minutes and you need to do the whole dungeon again. Clearly, that is true, but not the original point. Sorry for deviating, I didn’t know it upset people.

You can disagree with the 2 points, and you have, and you have valid arguments, and that’s fine. I don’t agree with your arguments, and that’s fine too.

I feel it is a rather nuanced video actually, but in order to make a point you can’t highlight every single angle either, because the video would be way too long, and I just want to get 2 points across here. And then it’s up to the devs what they do with it, that is how I view my videos, in that light. Just my small contribution and 2 cents. I won’t be angry if this doesn’t get changed or anything.

And ye, clickbaity, I mean, that is subjective. I’m aware it has a negative connotation, but honestly, this is how media works. Any media, for that matter, the newspaper included. I think it’s an accurate description of the video content that entices people to click the video, which is what you need to do on YouTube. The forum title seems perfectly accurate to me too.

23

clickbaits fine, when it doesn’t just make a point that isn’t true or even argued. And especially if you’re going to bring it to the forums, it’s a complete waste of time to have that same thing here, because its only effect is to muddy the discussions and arguments made.

As for the title, I learnt the dungeon bosses on a hardcore character, and did them on t4 on the sme character. I didn’t watch video guides, I didn’t read up on them before. I just learnt the bosses with what the game has availible. I.e. I got hit by stuff in earlier tiers to figure out what could be tanked later on (by looking at damage done relative to other things in the game), and I actively didn’t just throw all my damage at the boss, but instead waited to see its casts. And if something looked too spicy I just used the portal to leave before I died. So personally I extremely disagree with the title, it is feasible to learn the bosses, I’ve done, many other people have done it, last epoch bosses aren’t some super hard boss design relative to other games, and they do an awful lot of things very well. But if someone doesn’t pay attention to anything, then sure, you wont learn anything, same as other games.

When you’re doing the dungeon bosses while overgeared, are you just hard pumping into the boss, or are you standing in stuff to see how much damage it does to you relative to other things? Both those points you’ve made are easily solved by the player just taking the choice to actively learn the fight, and in my opinion if you aren’t taking that choice, then its not the games fault when you havent learnt the fight. You aren’t forced to do damage, you can stand there and see its cast rotation, you can see the timing between things, you can see how much movement you’ll need at various points, and where you have free dps phases. The game offers an awful lot to teaching you the fights, especially comapred to other arpgs, because you can access these boss fights at a super low level which means you can literally just go into the t1 ones once you’re geared at lvl 90+, and stand there the entire time and look at what happens. No need to record anything, no need to watchback at a slowed down playback rate.

Alongside that, the bosses dont have random projectiles that you have a split second to see, the stuff that one shots you is stuff that is clearly telegraphed, it’s really really good design for learning by yourself and without guides. But again, you arent being handheld, the games just presenting you the opportunity to learn this stuff. And in my opinion, and from what I can gather a lot of the playerbases opinion, it’s fine that t4 isn’t just a free kill the first time you go into it unless you put in the work beforehand. Because it rewards the plyers skill, the players progress, and the players preparation. That final bit being something that very few arpgs have ever got right.

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24

you’re clearly a better player than I am, which is likely true for a lot of forum users here, because we’re on the forum to begin with. The true LE players reside here.

There are however also non-hardcore players that don’t take this approach to learning. For me, doing what you did, is not feasible. Just because you learn a fight like that and get all the abilities, relative to total damage and whatnot, I mean… Is that really a good thing? Do you expect me to extrapolate all those numbers to figure out what is going to kill me in T4? Seems a bit much, honestly… I don’t think that Last Epoch can expect the majority of the player base to learn a fight like this, and for me that definitely doesn’t work. Even if I know all the mechanics, it is still about being in the fight yourself, taking actual damage, trying to survive, anticipating to mechanics, dealing damage, the whole thing. That whole symphony for me is learning a boss fight. The mechanics are only part of the equation. Only when I’m actually in the fight itself with the encounter I’m trying to defeat, meaning T3 or T4, meaning my life is at risk, I learn the fight. And for that, I need some practice, which is really true for a lot of people. Doing a tier 1 boss in level 90 gear isn’t good enough for me, it’s not the same thing. If you can learn a fight like that, great. For me, not so much. I want some tries on the real thing. I think that would help a lot of people.

So, with that premise, let’s say, I’m making my comments.

I could have done a better job laying out that premise, but until I posted about it, it didn’t cross my mind to be honest. However, with this premise in mind, I think my arguments make a lot of sense.

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25

It’s very valid to want to approach a game that way for sure. But I don’t think it’s fair to make the assesment that the games boss design is bad, if you’re specifically not learning how the fights work by your own actions. That roads extreme final point is literally just the game giving you a video tutorial, or a written description, of how to kill the boss.

If you don’t want to put the time in to learning how a fight works until you’re doing it on the hardest difficulty you can, then thats fine. But I think you need to really reevaluate what you expect to get from the game in that case, you aren’t going to be doing the hardest content if you explicitly aren’t going to practice the content when its easier to learn it. This is the same for nearly every single game. You wont be doing harder raids in wow with this approach, you wont be doing uber bosses in poe, you wont be doing anything in a souls like, you wont be completing near any crpg.

This also makes it more clear and apparent what your issues with the design is though, your approach to the game is to effectively do as little as neccacary, and in that regard I can understand why the design doesn’t work very well for you, because needing to do any of the content on repeat obviously doesnt fit when your approach isn’t to learn the content until you’re at the highest difficulty. And of course learning only at the highest difficulty isn’t gonna mesh well with any gamde design that punishes you for mistakes, as you haven’t done anything to mitigate those mistakes yet.

However the solution to that would absolutely ruin any single arpg, at least as how they’re viewed currently. People have some level of expectation of a grind that keeps on going for a while, various breakpoints as to measuring build strength, and certain level of reward for skill over gear. If the design starting leaning more towards people like you, who would rather not have all this grind and repetition, and would rather mistakes be less punished in fights, then an awful lot of what people are expecting would quickly evaporate.

And to put it kinda bluntly, if that’s how you want to approach games, I feel like the arpg genre in general is a terrible choice, as at its core it’s about repetition (even more so when looking at diablo-likes).

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Why don’t you get off your hardcore horse for a minute. I chose the wrong genre? My approach is to do as little as necessary? Really? That is your thought process when someone is asking for a game to be a little bit more accessible, and by doing that being on par with all the other games you mentioned?

You couldn’t be more wrong about how I approach games. And you’re making a lot of assumptions here about me as well. Just because I don’t play hardcore doesn’t mean I want everything to be easy-mode. There is a middle ground there.

I’m willing to put in the time and effort, as with many other games. But I feel Last Epoch doesn’t let me, unless I take your approach, which is convoluted to say the least, extrapolating numbers and whatnot. So I want some tries. So I can put in the time. And effort. It’s that simple. It’s not a shortcut, it’s offering some opportunity for repetition. I’m not asking for infinite tries, but there should be something at least.

I’m playing Elden Ring atm, 60 hours in, I’m loving that game. Know what I love most? The stakes and sites. Know why? Because they give me more tries. So I can put in the time. And effort. Like you want me to. And then when I kill those bosses, it feels really good. Just like you probably felt when you killed your T4 on hardcore. But I think it’s reasonable that more people get to experience that after putting in time and effort. I don’t think everyone should be able to kill T4 bosses, and aspirational content is good, but there are limits and this way of learning boss fights doesn’t fit with LE at all, in my opinion.

I play PoE a lot, SSF, and last league I killed all the new bosses, did all uber content, the whole shebang, and I put 250h in the league. Like I do most leagues. And I learned those fights because PoE gives me 6 attempt to a boss fight. Which seems very reasonable to me. Which is why I want something similar in Last Epoch. So I can have fun learning fights here as well. Using the repetition.

The ARPG genre, and the CRPG genre, and even the souls-genre with Elden Ring, are all great choices for me. They’re my most played games, the ARPG and CRPG. And in all of those genres and games I’m completely fine. In Last Epoch however, I’m not, and the reason why is in the video. I think it’s very fair, actually, to have these criticisms, because there is a clear distinction in how Last Epoch approaches learning fights, versus all the other games you mentioned.

Your final point in repetition is the entire point here. Last Epoch doesn’t allow for repetition. Can’t you see you are just making my point here, that repetition is key to learning, and that LE doesn’t let us repeat fights?

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27

At no point did I specify hardcore as being a prerequisite for anything here.

You stated that you don’t take the time to learn what the boss is doing on earlier difficulties, and previously stated that you don’t want to keep redoing the dungeons to get to the boss. You then also stated that doing the boss on lower difficulties isn’t good enough for you, which taken in context with everything else you said implied that you wanted to only learn the bosses stuff on t4. Which I did say was a fair way to want to engage with the game. But the things you’d pointed out as issues you had with the current implementation were very specifically talking about not wanting as much grind, and not wanting as much need for preparation.

The repeition in last epoch is how you learn like in other good games of the genre, but again you’re making the very specific point that you don’t want that here. If you’re doing the feared in poe and you dont manage it with the portals you have, which is something that can happen, and does happen to a lot of people, because of the possibility of bricking your attempt to a pretty severe degree, you then have a potentially huge grind to do it again. Last epoch doesn’t have anything to that degree yet, and the actual push through the dungeon ‘grind’ is the bare minimum of the word, as you can zoom through the dungeons very quickly. And much like learning how to map effectively in poe, learning how to zoom through dungeons effectively in last epoch is part of the skillset.

However as you have stated the same point again, you are explicitly saying you dont want that grind to be as much of a factor. So I don’t think its unfair to make the assumption that you want less of a grind in the game, and less punishment in mistakes in boss fights (as they’re tied together).

I also extremely disagree with the idea that its convoluted to get hit by something and go ‘so that did roughly x% of my health in damage, and this non-boss enemy does y% of my health when i get hit by its ability, so i can infer that this bosses ability will probably do z% of my health at minimum on the hardest difficulty as that’s equivalent to that non-bosses ability’ That’s not really that complicated, and is honestly a large part of learning bosses in most games with scaling difficulty or tiered difficulty.

I also definitely agree that its reasonable that more people get the experience of killing a hard boss after putting in the time and effort, I just feel like removing the effort and time needed to achieve that kinda goes against that specific statement. Because as soon as changes are made to reduce the time and effort required, well people then aren’t getting that experience after putting in that time and effort.

And like to be honest, I think Last epoch enables more repetition than poe (as your bringing this up as an example). The time required to engage with the bosses is just incredibly lower, and the time required to access them at the highest difficulty is vastly smaller than the hardest bosses in poe; because you just need a key, not multiple points of rng.

Also I don’t think your comments about making the lower tier bosses have more one shots is good for accessibility, t1-t3 is super accessible right now, because of the ability to overgear for them, with t4 being the one that requires (in general) you to actually deal with mechanics properly. Making t1-t3 not able to be overcome with just over gearing inherently reduces accessibility. And you yourself just made the comment that T4 shouldn’t be defeatable by anyone, which I disagree with. Anyone should be able to with an average time investment, and I think right now that’s 100% possible. The abilities are telegraphed very well, and soulfire bastion is the only one with something close to a gearcheck (though that can kind of be overcome with skill). It also just really doesnt make sense with the rest of your points, to now also say that you don’t think everyone should be able to kill t4 bosses. If that were to be the case, and there were to be multiple portals/attempts, the bosses would have to be significantly harder than they currently are.

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28

it’s not repetition when there’s 5 or 10 minutes in between each try.

29

This is absolutely brilliant.
Straightforward, simple, makes the campaign more diversified, links the dungeons to the story (they are a bit out-of-the-world at the moment), and a great incentive to try the dungeons at least once.
You have my vote. I hope some devs are reading this.

Would have to be a no-key tier 1 version I guess, only linked to the quest. Accessible as many times as you want as long as quest is in your log. Turn in the quest, you can’t access anymore.
Maybe quest reward could even be a key?

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30

This is one of the better suggestions I have seen. T1 = no key, then go for key palooza at the end chest for all dungeons. This allows for everyone to experience the basics gain some rewards, find out if it is content they like/dislike, and not clutter up inventory or stash room for keys until they really become necessary. I find gated content an extremely poor way to regulate content.

In D&D for example if you had a sadistic enough DM you could be playing a campaign in the planes at the first level.

31

I too am finding the learning process for the bosses unenjoyable.
with the scarcity of the keys, I of course did not attempt the dungeons until overleveled.
The current implementation encourages this; why would I use this rare key to run this dungeon now, when I can save it for when I am more powerful and also get a chance at some of the best endgame rewards? Yes there is the tier lockouts that require you to do each one before the next, but these alone are not a sufficient incentive to run the dungeon tiers on-curve while leveling - which I think should be the goal.

Tier specific keys might solve this, but introduce their own issues (inventory management). if the devs are not against a ‘keychain’ type storage this might be a good solution, as running the dungeons while leveling would make sense…

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32

That would present many issues, not least of which is people creating new characters to farm the quest for a key (for the Lightless Arbour at least).

IMO, a set number of respawns before the boss would make sense given dungeons have a cost of entry unlike monos.

I’d also like the lower tier bosses to, somehow, do more damage to higher geared characters while not one shotting the on-level characters. That said, I really don’t think the t1 dungeons should be balanced around being done on a high level, well geared character.

Also, the dungeons aren’t like PoE’s league content where you, ideally, want to be doing them constantly. They are content that is intended to be relatively rare, though that does make it significantly harder to learn the mechanics and pushes many players into a must-do-this-massively-over-geared-because-the-keys-are-relatively-rare.

33

I don’t see that as an issue.
I guess by your post that Lightless Arbour is the one at level 20, right?
That would be the only one for which the alt-spamming strategy makes sense. It is also the only one for which having many keys is completely useless, because you need a lot of gold to make it worth running, and while you are busy spamming alts, you are not farming gold…
I suppose people could farm the boss’ uniques this way, but that sounds like an incredibly fastidious way to get a chance at a unique…

Anyway, as far as I am concerned we don’t need a key, just a cookie (*) as a reward would work just fine, what I like is doing quests. :smiley:
Plus I don’t really see why dungeons have to be so rare, if we don’t want people playing them why bother with all the coding and work? (I am biaised, I don’t like dungeons)

(*) I blame @queermathsgirl , she started talking about cookies, now I can’t get them out of my mind.

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34

I don’t like the idea of removing content for turning in a quest.
It’s a psychological thing, I don’t like the idea of locking myself out of doing something in the future, even if rationally I have no reason to want to do that in the foreseeable future.

Personally I would just make the first time accessing a dungeon free until you have beaten the boss for the first time.
Then the t1 still exist but you need a key for that.

If the devs are so inclined, they could even add an AI companion during the first dungeon clear and make it a quest about exploring the dungeon with the guy that discovered it.

Since we are there, I would also wish for tier 3 to be unlocked upon reaching empowered content automatically. without the need of doing T2. Not sure about T4 since a character that just reached empowered would probably not be able to do it.

With regards to the reward, the normal dungeon rewards are nice, not sure why giving a key (instead, in addition?).

Peple seem to be worried about giving out free keys, but I am unsure what is the reason, it does take time to get to the point you would be given the free key, and it would be soulcrushingly boring.
Requiring to complete the dungeon also means that you would need to gear up your alt since as we discussed at the very start of this thread t1 with an underlevelled char is not a walk in the park.
Is this a botting issue?

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