I'm SURE everyone's already used to him but

as a new player who only played Hardcore, I am extremely frustrated by the 'boss' Argus in Mercenary Labyrinth. I had over 16000 armour and 4k hp and completely obliterated kitava and Izario himself without using my basalt/granite flasks to get my armour that high.

Walk in and fight this dude for a millisecond and die instantly. Extremely poor design to have what seems to be a random encounter do more damage than your end boss to be honest.

Completely killed any motivation I had to continue playing the game. I'm sure there's more examples of this where something just unexpectedly completely erases your character despite putting in time and effort and being invulnerable 95% of the time.

Guess its completely balanced around those that purchase kills from other players and boost their character by purchasing exalted orbs or something.


When I play a game I fully expect to be able to kill something as every type of character I choose; Obviously this fight is extremely one sided to melee skills like cyclone, etc.

If thats how the games designed then it won't see any money from me.

Argus has an ability called Enrage, while Enraged he has increased damage and hits really hard. There's a cooldown and you can visibly see when he's enraged. I normally dodge him during this state and engage once it's over.

Sorry you died, always feels bad in HC.

Argus enraged hits way harder than Izaro, but at least he's easier to avoid, and btw shouldn't be enraged at the beginning of the fight.
Oh and 4k HP is kinda low for Merciless Lab, keeping also in mind that armor is not so useful against big hits, like Argus'...

And regarding

"

I'm sure there's more examples of this where something just unexpectedly completely erases your character despite putting in time and effort and being invulnerable 95% of the time.

there are a lot of overtuned encounters -in the main storyline and after. For example I just did Innocence fight with my berserker. I survived, but had to portal out a couple times, and had a few close calls; while nothing could scratch me for more than 20% of my life up to him. Not good design imo.
And sorry for your death.

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MedicMortal wrote:

When I play a game I fully expect to be able to kill something as every type of character I choose;

well in this game there is potential to make good choices and bad choices. Every 'type' of character can probably kill argus, that doesnt mean that every character will kill argus. A cyclone character can completely destroy him with 0 risk, but another cyclone character built differently might be destroyed by him.

Its not balanced around buying anything, if you pay someone to clear the lab for you then they obviously managed to make a character who can do it.

Argus is a fairly serious foe but a build with good mitigation against attacks can trivialize him. Theres far stronger versions of argus in maps and in uber lab, and people trivialise those too. Theres gonna be stuff in the game that will take fairly hefty stats to survive, and as a fairly new player you probably wont know what they are until they kill you or leave you running away smashing all your potions. If you chose to play in hardcore then youre gonna learn some lessons the hard way.

In my opinion act10 kitava is 10x more scary than merc argus. I think its just a case of styles make fights, you found something that was a particularly hard counter to the way you built your character. I wouldnt completely dismiss the idea that there was different choices you could have made with your defenses that would have resulted in a different fight.

Argus hits a lot, hes just throwing punches non stop, theyre hard physical damage attacks and hes relentless with them. the first presumption may be that the counter to hard physical hits like that is armour, and if he were a slow hitter that would be true, but the volume of attacks he throws can be quickly overwhelming even if you have decent physical damage reduction. A strong defense against this type of incoming attack damage is either attack block or evasion, if you make him miss a lot of his shots then thats gives you breathing room between getting hit, then what you want is some decent life recovery, be it leech, regen, really fast hands on the life potions, some way to exploit these gaps where hes missing to recover from the hits that get through. Physical reduction is still important to make sure the hits that get through are not catastrophic. Another way to avoid getting hit so much is stuff like a decoy totem or a warchief totem to distract him.

Dealing with incoming attacks you have 4 basic forms of defense, hp to absorb them, damage reduction to reduce the size of the hits, attack avoidance to completely avoid a certain % of the attacks from landing and recovery to recover the life you lose before the cumulative incoming damage can kill you. The strongest defense setup to combat attacks will employ a certain amount of all 4. Theres many mechanics you can employ to help with these


* HP: life nodes, life on gear, levels, energy shield, mind over matter

* DMG Reduction: Armour, basalt, endurance charges, resists, arctic armour, enfeeble curse, reduced damage taken

* DMG avoidance: Evasion, block, dodge, blind, enfeeble curse, chance to avoid

* Recovery: Leech, life regen, es regen, es recharge, life on hit, life on block, life flasks


thats obviously not a full list but these are some of the tools out there. You dont HAVE to use something from each basic type of defense, but you can, and some of them are going to work well against one type of encounter and badly against another. Whatever the sum total of your defenses was, they did not come together to make an effective defense against this monster it would seem.

Dont lose hope, everything is a learning curve in this game. If nothing was hard then nothing would be rewarding.

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MedicMortal wrote:

Walk in and fight this dude for a millisecond and die instantly. Extremely poor design to have what seems to be a random encounter do more damage than your end boss to be honest.

There is a unique door to Argus' room. It's in no way designed to appear random. Special door and special sounds from Izaro let you know it's coming.

LOL REKT

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Completely killed any motivation I had to continue playing the game.

Dying or staying alive is very reliant to your game knowledge. As a new hardcore player , unless you check a video of any boss before fighting them you'll probably have to endure multiples other deaths to punishing mechanics or raw damage your char can't sustain. If you are not ready for this maybe you should play SC for a while before switching to HC.

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MedicMortal wrote:

Completely killed any motivation I had to continue playing the game. I'm sure there's more examples of this where something just unexpectedly completely erases your character despite putting in time and effort and being invulnerable 95% of the time.

To be honest, what you just described is the game. Be invincible god moving down everything 95% of the time, then die to random BS that you realistically had no way of predicting or countering, unless you play in full paranoid mode and avoid difficult map mods.
This is it! The whole challenge of the game! Congrats on you solving the puzzle early, hopefully saved you hours of frustration and wasted time on a HC character in game balanced around damage spikes like this.

The number of posts I read where players (for some unknown reason) think that 4K life is okay for end game.

What makes 4K the right number to you?

I don't feel comfortable in T15/Uber lab/Shaper with less 6K life. Even with 6K i feel pretty glassy.

This is the second post I read today where people are convinced this game is balanced around 4k life...how is this possible when there are end game bosses that can easily hit you for 5K??

"

The number of posts I read where players (for some unknown reason) think that 4K life is okay for end game.

What makes 4K the right number to you?

I don't feel comfortable in T15/Uber lab/Shaper with less 6K life. Even with 6K i feel pretty glassy.

This is the second post I read today where people are convinced this game is balanced around 4k life...how is this possible when there are end game bosses that can easily hit you for 5K??

Merc lab is not end game.