[Malachai] This is not a MMO.......

Curious, what kinds of builds were you guys using to do the boss?

My build has had little to no problems with Malachai and completed the fight in both Normal and Cruel in less than 5 minutes each time.

I only used two flask charges in the cruel fight.

If you guys were playing casters with no armor, I think I could see the fight lasting a long time.
This just speaks to me of what I see is probably poor balance in the game right now.

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zSavage wrote:

Curious, what kinds of builds were you guys using to do the boss?

My build has had little to no problems with Malachai and completed the fight in both Normal and Cruel in less than 5 minutes each time.

I only used two flask charges in the cruel fight.

If you guys were playing casters with no armor, I think I could see the fight lasting a long time.
This just speaks to me of what I see is probably poor balance in the game right now.

I did it with different chars.
Cheesing it with Flame totems, but even then the fight is fairly long and just not fun.
Melee was a fucking nightmare because Malachai was more interested in teleporting from one end of the arena to the other 24/7 whilst all his shit was flying around.

The issue is just it's too long and way too repetitive, together with people who wish to focus on ES will get screwed over since there's constant damage in there with one misstep, which is easy to do.

Therenext people are reporting that the fight is really FPS heavy, we don't all have top-end PCs at our disposal.

I know this is beating a dead horse here but these stratospheric difficulty spikes, uncalled-for nerfing and constant mechanics revisions suggests a fundamental dysfunctionality going on with the current design team. I'm sure there's been lots of staff turnover since this game first launched but the gameplay decisions made in this expansion are downright amateurish. It's like they've struggled so hard to find that sweet spot of balance that at some point, they just threw their hands up in despair and are now just trying random shit and crudely mimicking conventions from other genres just to see what clicks.

Prior to this expansion, I always considered PoE to be an easier-than-average action RPG where you were expected to earn your challenge in the endgame content. I accepted that.
But now the game is recklessly breaking its own rules that the community have taken for granted and this makes me speculate that something is foul in the state of GGG.

I was really happy with the state of the game in 1.3, personally. It allowed a wide variety of builds to flourish and do well.

Now it seems like (from some of the feedback and my own experience) that a few builds work really well and others struggle significantly more.

Something else I've noticed is that most of if not all of the new monsters don't have descriptions of what they do or what kind of damage they do (like all the earlier monsters).

Sure, there's a few graphical queues to help you guess what the damage type is, but it's unclear most of the time.

Anyways, a lot of the new things remind me of some of the things said in this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ea6UuRTjkKs
(About Challenge/Difficulty vs Punishment in games)
Someone linked that in the beta feedback, and I'll link it again here.

You are wrong this is a MMORPG.

I am bashing the game since 2013 for becoming MMOesque.

My problem isn't so much the difficulty and length of the fight. (although those could certainly use adjustments) My issue is with how chaotic the fight is. You're in a tiny area with stuff flying around literally everywhere. I really like bosses with mechanics, but there is too much going on to feel like i'm even being tactical with my movements/actions. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad if my frames didn't drop like mad, but probably not. (what's up with the poor optimization btw, I have a great gaming rig and still stutter on this fight)

I just killed Doedre and that was a legitimately fun battle. The arena was fairly spacious. There was cover from her vomit balls. The "curse fields" were easy to follow. Maybe she could use a bit more HP and DPS but the intuitive mechanics in that fight is what the team should have been striving for across the board.

This is the lack of cohesion that I mentioned in my earlier comment.
It's like 2 people were in charge of the boss battles in this expansion: One was grounded in the principles of challenging-but-not-punishing encounters while the other was a self-indulgent child who aspires to be the Michael Bay of action rpgs.

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AviKohl wrote:

I just killed Doedre and that was a legitimately fun battle. The arena was fairly spacious. There was cover from her vomit balls. The "curse fields" were easy to follow. Maybe she could use a bit more HP and DPS but the intuitive mechanics in that fight is what the team should have been striving for across the board.

This is the lack of cohesion that I mentioned in my earlier comment.
It's like 2 people were in charge of the boss battles in this expansion: One was grounded in the principles of challenging-but-not-punishing encounters while the other was a self-indulgent child who aspires to be the Michael Bay of action rpgs.

Her battle is boring, all you do is pick what curse you want to stand in. I actually like Malachai's better, just needs a little less going on at once.

"

My problem isn't so much the difficulty and length of the fight. (although those could certainly use adjustments) My issue is with how chaotic the fight is. You're in a tiny area with stuff flying around literally everywhere. I really like bosses with mechanics, but there is too much going on to feel like i'm even being tactical with my movements/actions. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad if my frames didn't drop like mad, but probably not. (what's up with the poor optimization btw, I have a great gaming rig and still stutter on this fight)

I think Chaotic vs Difficulty vs Length are all faces of the same coin.
Make the fight shorter (i.e. less hp) the chaos becomes more bearable.
Make the fight less chaotic (i.e less shit on screen) the length becomes bearable.
Make all the shit do less damage => more room for error => more bearable.

The problem is the fight has a lot of 1 shot mechanics and damage spikes where 1 mis-step cam mean the death of your character. It's hard to keep this up for 20+ minutes

The fight is too chaotic with no mechanics.

Simply put, you have probably 14 things to avoid all while running around on top of an area the size of a cookie and trying to dps.

Granted not all of the effects are life threatening but, it just feels like you're in a blender of garbage.

For a boss encounter to be successful, the fight needs to have some sort of mechanic to figure out in order to claim victory. This current fight doesn't have that, so most players (my guess) are taking multiple deaths and wading through the garbage blender just to progress.