Merveil's coldsnap

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or you can get in her face. in melee distance she won't cast cold snap.

Again, it's not about how to easily defeat her, but to make her more fun to fight to.
For this type of game you have a variety of ways to approach a situation. And when it forces you to do it in one way, you're doing it wrong.

My opinion of course.

Well, there ARE a variety of ways.

For example:
Straight up melee (As mentioned, no cold snaps in melee)
Kiting (aka running around, hiding to recover health/mana. Traps work well for this since she tends to stand still)
Skeletons with Minion Instability (Skeletons stick in melee range, and snapped skeletons damage her and means you aren't snapped yourself)
Totems (more targets for her to choose from)
Flat out ice resists and health regen (aka just take the pain and outlast her)

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Psaakyrn wrote:

Well, there ARE a variety of ways.

For example:
Straight up melee (As mentioned, no cold snaps in melee)
Kiting (aka running around, hiding to recover health/mana. Traps work well for this since she tends to stand still)
Skeletons with Minion Instability (Skeletons stick in melee range, and snapped skeletons damage her and means you aren't snapped yourself)
Totems (more targets for her to choose from)
Flat out ice resists and health regen (aka just take the pain and outlast her)

Well, yeah, you've got a point there, but as a witch in normal there are problems:
Straight up melee - I'm dead in 3 hits
Kiting - the annoyance of her coldsnap still persists
Traps - I am no where near a dexterity build
Skeletons - I had none (yet)
Totems - Hadn't got it either
Ice res & health regen - As a witch you rely on ES, rather than health and you need a break to recover it, ice res agreed

So, yeah, I see what you mean, and the problem is probably because you're still a low level in normal. I have not yet defeated her in the other difficulties, maybe it won't be such a pain then.

One thing I am however convinced about is that she has to have more variety in her attacks. But that's something else.

Merveil is a poorly designed encounter.

Why is her 2nd phase (if you would even call it that) 100x easier than her 1st phase?

Why is she basically just a cold resist gear-check? No other boss is designed like to be this way.

Why does she deal ~20-30% of your HP per hit, with the ability to almost permanently freeze you and slow you?

The main problem is her cold snap. No cooldown ~2 second stun with a ~2 second slow afterwards. How on earth is that balanced? Currently it is about 10 times easier to kill Merveil in a party than solo. Having her stunlock 1 person while the rest DPS her, is a lot better strategy than getting stunlocked alone and doing nothing while you die.

The only way to beat her solo without dying is to abuse her AI with line of sight, and constantly go into a town portal to replenish your HP/MP and potions. It takes a while though.

Well, on normal I mostly kited her with a lv 4 fire trap (max level without more points in dex). I recall skeletons was a reward skill before that too, though at that level skeletons die too fast to do anything without minion instability (zombies should work better, but they'd have to fix the issue of minions not properly transferring between levels).. Still, if not fire trap or skeletons, using direct damage should still work, so long as it's fast cast (aka fireball instead of firestorm). But admittedly it'd still take a little while.

The fact that people say the way to handle this nonoptional boss is to stack resistance is a hint that the encounter is broken.

There's no way to just turn on cold resistance. It's easy to get to her with no significant amount of such gear having ever turned up in drops, and probably not in the store either.

Meanwhile her attack timings with the spears are way faster than most player spells, and the cold snaps are instantaneous. This is just a bad encounter.

There're cold resist rings as a recipe (Resistance Ring = Iron Ring + Skill Gem). And it's meant as a wake up boss (after all, Final boss of Act 1). And people have done it with minimal resists via kiting anyway on normal (and other methods in higher difficulties when more skills are available). It's not like she's the first cold-snap spamming enemy you meet...

And all the other cold snapping enemies taught me that positioning and avoidance were far more useful than resistance.

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Huh, I'm not sure how players could be expected to know, from the game, that recipes exist at all.

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Hah, The game mocks me. I got the loadscreen saying I can trade for resistance rings for the first time today.

And you can fight Merveil with positioning and avoidance (aka kiting, hiding behind the pillars after each attack, moving around to dodge the coldsnap spam until she pauses..), it just takes longer.

With the character I had and the skills I had, kiting definitely was not viable. Even dodging her spears successfully pretty much constantly, her energy shield rebuld was faster than my mana regeneration. It just wasn't going to work.

The point is valid, regardless your view from experience as an expert.