Difficulty spikes and poor boss design

For me, the biggest spikes in difficulty in the new acts are as follows:

- Mud Flats scorching totems and especially archer spike damage, can easily almost one shot you.
- Animated Reefs in Brine King's Reef (in 3.0 beta, just replayed and seemed much easier)
- Brine King fight is terribly annoying. It isn't hard, but when you have a massive body of the Brine King covering 80% of the area, it is impossible to predict where the Storms will hit. I die in this fight a lot, and not because I suck as a player, but because I cannot dodge something I don't even see. Brine King should not be passable for the player, and area should be increased so we could have more space to manouver. Storms area could be increased to compensate, but the main difficulty in this fight comes not from boss mechanics or area hazard, but from his massive body obstructing the view in the most crucial moments.

Do you experience sudden difficulty spikes in some encounters? Is it a particular monster, or a boss? Leave a reply and let's make a list of things that GGG needs to look into.

I feel all the new boss fights have been over tuned way too much. Should not be forcing people to play builds that are good at killing bosses, just to progress through the game. Its a problem when you can get hit by bosses in act 4 and not die instantly, then act 5 hits and you get hit by anything and you are dead no matter what.

Yeah, us beta testers identified a LOT of balance inconsistencies in the game... Seems they weren't really touched.

Even if players with meta builds just wanna say "git gud," there's a lot of things they CAN'T try to dismiss, where content that should be HARDER than what's before winds up EASIER:

Some bosses are stupidly overtuned. Most of the game has been a cakewalk so far. The only times I'm even remotely in danger of dying (aside from a ridiculous lab trap bug that killed me) is when I'm fighting the new bosses. For context, I've had good life, dodge, high evasion, and a Stibnite for all of these. I had 30% spell dodge for everything except the Innocence fight.

Innocence killed me three times with his bullet hell phase. One time I was hiding behind a statue, but apparently not well enough.

Abberath killed me with some fiery meteor swarm spell. The fight was pretty easy, then I went from full life to dead in about a second. I had time to mash a seething Hallowed flask once before I hit zero. I had 62% fire res, which seemed good for when you fight him (equivalent of old early cruel).

Gruthkul is insane. I died once and had no idea what the hell happened. I wasn't taking damage for while, then I just fell over dead. The boss for some reason has nearly invisible, absurdly high damage ground effects (like a Sunder) going all across the room during the fight. Even knowing about them, though, I think two invisible Sunders overlapped on me again, since I fell over dead a second time while Gruthkul was fighting my golem.

Ridiculously high life plus ridiculously high, spiky, hard to avoid damage is a fucking terrible combination. I've been burning a fair number of portals in boss fights, which feels like shit. It's a terrible mechanic that GGG seems to have balanced tons of boss fights around. Some, I'm pretty sure, are just balanced so that they kill you.

I can't imagine being a new player with low DPS and low defenses against something like Innocence. That fucker had an insane about of life. Those players will either throw corpses at him for an hour until he finally falls over or just give up and uninstall the game. Neither of those options is non-shitty.

I almost never die while leveling a character. I was really surprised to die seven times by the time I got to act 10. The deaths here aren't just about being unfamiliar with the content, either. The Abberath and Gruthkul deaths in particular felt like they would have happened no matter what. These bosses just have ridiculously hard to avoid instant kill mechanics.

my first time playing through acts 5-10, and the first real difficulty spike Ive encountered is beginning of act 10 with the shield chargers (if you have no phys defenses like I do, beware). theyre chunking me for a lot with 3k hp and ~750 mana MoM and blasphemy enfeeble.

only time Ive died so far was to the goat god, and that honestly was avoidable by porting out to refresh flasks (which I wouldve done in HC).

I cant really say any of the bosses in 5-9 are overtuned. there are plenty that are undertuned (the final boss in act 9 is a joke).

of course Im a bit overleveled (since Im almost playing blind with content), and I tend to build defensively, ie every boss gets enfeebled, I have AA, fortify, and chill with glacial cascade.

I actually like a lot of the boss design though. doedre's fight in a7 is really well made.

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Yeah, us beta testers identified a LOT of balance inconsistencies in the game... Seems they weren't really touched.

They nerfed the final Act 5 boss and an infamous Act 8 boss, but Bring King felt buffed.

I think a problem I noticed so far isn't so much the difficulty of the bosses on their own, most of them are perfectly fine solo, but in a group party play they become VERY RIPey, and I'm not sure why because I thought enemies didn't gain damage in party play.

I agree on that the brine king fight is kinda annoying. Played with a friend, and combined with him and my 2 golems it was quite hard to see the water shooting across the screen. The mechanics of this fight is easy to learn and the boss is in a good spot, but the fight is not good for party play i'd say.

Yugul still was by far harder than even brine king and Arakaali.

And for those who struggle on a5 bosses, GL in act 10 :D
This is the second time i can understand and accept that people need to buy boss kill.

I also think that the spectral throw used in act 10 is overtuned, its barely visible with any other animation going and it does a good chunk of damage.

People in PoE are fickle, they want the game to be challenging but not actually ever really die. They want bosses to be hard and challenging but at the same thing not be able to be killed by them. If you make them easy enough that anyone basically not naked and a half decent build made using a brain can beat them without dying 1st character then the game would be an extreme cakewalk.

on topic of well made boss fights, I liked the certain fight in a9 against a certain kidnapper, but it could've used a smaller arena. most time people don't like small arenas where you can't see anything, but this arena is so huge its inviting you to kite an otherwise extremely well designed fight

Gruthkul is a freaking joke. If you can't oneshot the boss (and now you just can't) you will get these stacks so you can't move and receive too much damage. Just got oneshot from him with 2k hp, no other boss could do such thing until him. Same was for my RF character with 3k hp and 1.5k armor, couldn't kill him because I couldn't even move there (bought the kill).