Vaal Oversoul on Merciless

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DeF46 wrote:

My 67 melee Ranger just died to Merciless Vaal in Hardcore.

The rocks and adds are a joke. You can heal through it.

His single "smash" attack is pretty shitty design. I had 2500 HP and was one shotted with 42% base damage reduction, and 80% resists. Chances are I was benefiting from some auras as well as I was not alone. (I had a reasonable 2500 HP effective after auras), then it will simply be a throwing of the dice. Maybe I will be able to see the smash attack in time, maybe not. Just RNG. Just this one encounter. Play sixty fucking levels doing really good, and then throw a dice.

:/

2500 is not reasonable for Merciless Vaal at level 67. I have a few friends in game who play melee Rangers and have about 3k at level 60, closer to 3700 at your level. I'm sorry that you lost your character and died, but you were not prepared and you were punished for that. You basically went into the fight with the mentality "I like my build and I want this to work, I'm gonna go try it out and if it fails, it's not my fault, it's the game's design".

People who are prepared for the fight can survive ground slams from Vaal, they don't get two shotted by falling rocks. I've done the fight many times and never come close to death. You need at least two Granites, pop them as soon as rocks begin falling. Pop them when you run into melee range to deal damage depending on which arm he's about to use. As a melee, you should be intimately familiar with his arms basically telling you what he's going to do. If you don't know how to look for this information, that's your own fault and you died because of it.

I don't mean to come off like an ass, but you're acting very confident like you shouldn't have died, and I don't care if you desynced, lagged or whatever, even if you ran perfectly smooth the entire fight I'd feel comfortable betting on Vaal over you. It's nothing personal, just your stats weren't enough.

Right so that's what I was saying. I consider it feedback for the game btw.

What I was saying is that regardless of skills, I had a "gear check" of 3000+ HP.

That means pretty limited choices in the skill tree. "preparation" here meaning stacking on the life nodes in the passive tree. Kripp's builds are based on being in the favourable part of the tree. It's pretty ridiculous how you can hit all the base life bonuses, plus a bunch of 34% life node grapes by going all the way from templar to shadow.

In Diablo II the Amazon had excellent evasion skills to make up for the lack of the Barbarian's life. That's what made it interesting.

Here no matter what "class" you play you have to stack life nodes and then hope you have enough skill points left, and be on the good side of the skill tree, to make an effective build DPS wise.

Your friends probably played with auras and Haste and some rapier and life leech their way through endgame. All melee Rangers/Duelists end up looking the same. I wanted to try and make a viable Lightning Strike Ranger, some compromises had to be made.

There is no excuse for having a one shot skill like that when everything else prior to it can be dealt with skillful reactions to the events. When you get one shot, there is no reaction time involved. It severely limits the gameplay. What you call preparation is only skill at adding numbers and making sure it passes the "gear check", and resigning to use builds that will be effective. So please don't diss my choice of character by estimating that the game is balanced when your preferred characters are passing the gear check.

You absolutely can react to the start-up of his melee smash animation (provided there's no desync). I only ever feel safe in melee range when I see him already engaged in a different animation. I do agree that abilities like this and the lack of chaos mitigation make HP stacking mandatory, but sacrificing flexibility and damage for survivability makes sense. Hardcore's always been about finding that balance, and surviving long enough to find the gear that makes some of the less tanky builds work well. That smash isn't an unavoidable hp/gear check, though it's awfully close.

Guys, this thread is 2 weeks old... I've long since passed on and completed merciless, lvl 75 Witch currently.

As for the people saying they had way more HP at that level or that you need 3k HP by that time, I'd like to remind you how the starting class in combination with the amount of strength said class accumulates, greatly impacts how much HP you get along the way.

It was also default league, not HC, which means I didn't just go for HP only as is mandated in HC, yet I didn't ignore it either since I had taken about 12 HP nodes at the time of making this thread.

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bitedefer wrote:

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SeikenZ wrote:

I just attempted this boss on my lvl 60 Witch, died about 4 times in total of which 3 times were due to falling rocks which practically 2-shot me at 1500 hp (and then got disconnected to boot after losing nearly half a level in exp). It seems to me, that these rocks do a bit too much damage when you're not having a high armor value, but I'm interested in hearing what others think about it.

If you were saying normal and dying to rocks i would have told you well before the big rocks falls down there are smaller rocks falling before the big ones.

But you are in merciless and thus must know the mechanics of this fight pretty well. Therefore suck it out and if you do not want to avoid rocks then die all you want.

If you don't feel the need to read the entire thread, then please don't respond. I already passed this boss 2 weeks ago with the advice of posters on page 1 and 2.

I just want to inform you that the melee hit CAN'T be tanked unless you are 84+ level and gear.
For those "Oh i had 2500 hp when i did Vaal Oversoul i died in 1 hit to the melee attack".
You are not even close to know by how much you got overkilled. 45% physical reduction or 3400 armor is basically reduced to nothing vs that hit. With a granite i assume if ur tank u get to 20 000 armor. The armor formula is %reduction=armor /(damage *12+armor).
That melee hit in merciless does around i think 6000 physical and 6000 fire.
With 80 % fire resist you take 1200 damage fire.
To the melee hit with granite assuming u have 100% increase armor + 4000 + nodes of armour.
Lets say a generous 20 000 armor. 20 000/ (6900*12 + 20000) = 20 000/ 92000= 21.7% reduction!
So without endurance charge with granite and high armor, you will take : 1200 fire + 4698= 5898 damage.
If you have 7 endurance charges + granite armor that is reduced to (35%flat + 21.7%): 1200+ 2598= 3798 damage.
So basically if you are not 85+ with more than 7000 k health i would suggest not to take that hit at all without Immortal call(to immune the physical part which is the bulk of the damage).