Dominus is badly implemented

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Caessa wrote:

Dominus has always been... relatively easy for me. As a Summoner my DPS was absurd and he melted to death.

As a Glacial Hammer, path of life nodes Scion he was a joke.

But I've come to realize that Dominus is really not "fun" and skill-orientated. How did this come about? When I made a CI Wander.

Now hear me out, this isn't "QQ" and leave the "lel u scrbc0or y u care if welcum 2 die?!" out.

I ended up killing him though I did it... by abusing the Portal system (i.e. went on scion, smacked his ass around until he was 1 shot from death, went on Wander, hit him once. Boom-dayada).

What I've come to discuss is simply: Dominus' movesets aren't fully skill oriented. They are tank-oriented. If you can't facetank him, you're in a heap of trouble.

What do I mean?

Dominus' 1st Form: If you suffer from FPS issues like me, gg, expect to die a lot.

His ghost beam thingy: it's probably his 2nd most balanced skill after his searing totems. The problem here is that, in my opinion, the stun on it is absurd. It is a homing attack, dominus will aim right at you, and if you don't get behind cover fast enough, you get stunlocked as a CI character. But that's a minor point, there's skill here. You just have to read his moves really fast. So I can give this move a pass as acceptable.

His "tuch of gawd" move. In most cases it's a great move. It's like Vaal's smash where if you're stupid you die in 1 shot (unless you're tanky enough). My problem here lies with the absurd FPS drops which causes him to "strike" earlier than his animation. What it means is, the attack will come out of nowhere thanks to latency or FPS drops. Only "Fix" for this is to help improve FPS. Otherwise it's simply no fun to fight against.

Flicker strike was never a good move to give minions. Having a move you cannot dodge is no way to create a boss or monster.

All in all, Dominus' 1st form is justifiably fair for most. Melee players without high attack speed will suffer a bit but that just means it'll take longer to kill him.

Dominus' 2nd Form: This is where I have a problem. His blood rain, aside from tanking FPS, takes all the fucking skill away from the fight. If you're a spellcaster, ranged character, etc... there is no kiting. You stand there and take his punches and pray that the summoned minions don't mow you down faster than your pots can recharge.

It's stupid. On my tanky Scion I can stand in his bubble just fine trading blow for blow. But if you're a CI character without all those potions and armor, good luck not getting thrown around. Your only other option is to run into the rain and hope you have enough bleed flasks.

The problem with that, however, is unlike the fight with Piety where her portals can be destroyed. Dominus' minion portals can't. Shit just keeps pouring out and there's no longer any skill. It's just shoot and pray you can kill them and leech off them fast enough to stay alive.

What I'm saying, overall, is that Dominus' 2nd form is restricting. There is no longer skill involved. You're forced to take it in the face too much and if you're not going a tanky build or are twinked out with your tens of exalts worth of gear, you're going to be frustrated.

Lucky me, I could abuse a glitch.

Solutions:

I would create more "bubbles". Maybe have "safe points" scattered on the map where you could run to to escape the rain and not have to stand face to face with Dominus.

Allow us to destroy the portals (if we already can then I apologize for my stupidity).

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TL;DR: Dominus' fight needs fixing. Up the FPS, lower the forced facetanking.

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ConanTheGamebarian wrote:

Those are some very well written points, Caessa, I will really look forward to seeing what the kind folks at GGG will say to address this :P.

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Malice wrote:

My problems with dominus:

...the blood rain is really poorly introduced. It's a completely new mechanic introduced out of nowhere, which is trivial to counter (stand in the bubble) once you know wtf is going on, but there is no attempt made to inform the player what to do...

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xxxmarok84xxx wrote:

I have an older PC like 7 or 8 years old and thats why I dont play HC neither in parties.
I have problems running this game smooth enough and when fighting Dominus I die like 20x times due to lag and slow pc performance. But it runs great when I play solo even on an older PC like mine. ( To save you a question and time, I refuse to buy a new gaming PC because I'm more into console gaming in the last 3 years. I play only oldschool games from my time like Baldurs Gate, System shock, Deux ex etc and this pc serves well for old games like these )
But yeah, maybe he is badly implemented because on my friends top high end pc this game lags sometimes and also has framedrop issues even if he plays the newest games on full details without having any problems.