Act 10 Kitava fight is absolutely stupid

I died 4 times to Kitava as a 72lvl trap Saboteur with 3khp + 1k ES Those were my first deaths. I didn't bother upgrading my gear since level 50. And I didn't watch any guides or read abut Kitava abilities before fight.
If I prepared myself, I think I could try a deathless run. But as I said, I'm playing a trapper, which is pretty good against bosses. I throw a trap and then have time to dodge stuff. If I had to stand there and attack Kitava on some melee character, then the fight could be pretty ridiculous.

Killed Kitava today with a Lvl 69 SRS+Zombies Necromancer. Like most bosses up to this point Kitava itself wasn't the problem. His ele-resist adds really fck'ed me over. Even with elemental equilibrium and elemental weakness there was close to 0 damage output against the add waves. In the end i just died, reentered, spammed sum srs and died again. Roundabout 20 times.

Just attempted Kitava tonight on my first serious SSF HC character in years, Saydhe. She was a L72 Raider with about 5.2k life, 36% Evade Attacks, 49% Dodge Attacks, 30% Dodge Spells, 10% Physical Damage Reduction while moving, plus the souls of Lunaris and Tukohama, Arctic Armour, a Basalt and Quartz Flask, a Seething and Bubbling life flask, and a mana flask. (Should have brought a third life flask.) Decent enough DPS with a bleed-inducing Siege Ballista and RoA.

I didn't have any trouble with Kitava initially. And never a problem with the enfeebled minions that I danced around. But in the penultimate phase the wheels fell off and I was on the ropes several times. Was excited and trying to cull, always certain Kitava was at the threshold - don't think cull works - and it threw me off balance. In the end, I prevailed. Somehow. Despite my propensity to stand on the likes of spinning swords, Saydhe is now L73 with 5,375 life and nearly capped resists. Feels good.. erm.. mixed..? /shrug

In an expansion of often epic/genius boss design (Act 9!), this boss is absolutely fucking bullshit, in terms of the challenge presented. I'm not angry or anything.. it's just.. wtf?! -.-

I do really like the phases with the heart, the fight definitely got my heart pounding a few times, and I learned a lot preparing for it, which is all good, but it's a serious clusterfuck of a fight that I feel took an unreasonable amount of resources and time. Less clusterfuck, please. Hats off to those who can defeat Kitava with a far weaker build and without breaking stride.. you folks have mad skills.

Kitava may be the final Act boss, but Kitava isn't really the final boss. That goes to Shaper, right? Let Shaper hold the challenge. Uber Atziri. Insanely crafted red maps. It's not like Malachai where we could bypass it and come back later when we had the gear. Kitava is a mountain between The Feeding Trough and Tier 1 maps, both relatively simple. The final act boss has finally been blended into maps in all but difficulty. I don't see how this difficulty spike is necessary. I would expect Kitava to feel of similar difficulty to that of the progression through the preceding bosses.

I wouldn't advocate for setting aside the requirement for doing Kitava before maps though. I think the decision was a great one, as avoiding an act leaves a character's story unfinished (more meaningful with only the one playthrough now) and there are a few accessible zones that are good enough to collect adequate gear and overlevel in (eventually). But I do think the level of difficulty needs to be smoothed out considerably. I hope that's the intent after the pros get their bragging rights at defeating the original version several times. In one attempt, I was several times over extremely lucky getting out alive.

Anyway.. please tone down this fight some. It's at least a little too nuts. :p

All boss fights in this game from act 4 on are trash. Just make a witch, fall down dead, and let your minions kill them. Worst boss battles of any game I have played ever.

Aside from add phase i think act 10 kitava is really easy compared to a lot of the rest of the game.

I think act 5 kitava is harder. His fist slam seems so random never know where to dodge with it. Avarius pretty scary as well as usual. Why does he do the bullet hell attack when there are no statues around in the last phase, forces us to dodge like pros... good thing life flask are OP as fuck.

Act 6 is annoying, gotta get TWO resists for crab. Wow who has the resources for two resists. First time I did it i had like 40 cold res 20 fire res and -16 lightning res, thinking hey its probably a cold dmg fight. Then i almost got oneshot by a lightning circle on the floor. So i immediately ported out and switched rings.

Also shavronne + brutus is far scarier. Empowered brutus is too scary. If not for stibnite flask I think this brutus is like scariest thing ever. He's chain hooking from ends of the room to another like a ninja! Even though the slams don't do that much damage, I feel obligated to never be hit by it ever, and he sort of does have tracking when he triple smashes. Also if your dps is shit like mine was, abberath is hard too I felt. How do i know where his stupid fireballs are gonna land. Meteors are supposed to have delay and be more telegraphed.

act 7 gruthkul is probably the scariest fight in the game. The fk am i supposed to do when i can't see shit, take 90% inc damage, and am getting mauled by a bear like thing, on top of random nearly invisible black stuff shooting around the arena. Spider is easy. only attack that seemed to hit me was the chaos laser directly spewed out of spider's mouth or whatever, and maybe cuz I never learned to recognize it's startup animation if it has one.

Then immediately after entering act 8, doedre is definitely one of the harder fights. Its another fight that gets significantly harder as your dps is worse as you gotta stick out more valves turns, and the debuffs stack higher, and every phase is non-trivial. The Act boss is also sort of bullshit. dodging feels rng based, again maybe I just never learned it's tells and stuff right, but the spew of blue rocks from the side, it literally fell in an S shape. how intuitive is dodging the S shape. And how do I know where it is starting to fall again aside from the blue one being on stage.

Act 9: kira/garukhan is a bit harder if you have no mobility. But aside from that, I feel like every one of kira's attacks should do more damage. I had like 2000 evasion only so there's no way that her combo hits just all missed, but each time she fancily swung at my face its like every hit did like 50 damage. It's like physically impossible to be hit by her charge attack too, never saw a more telegraphed, lacking in tracking, and small aoe "charged" attack ever. the tornadoes did much more damage.

Act 9 final boss is a joke, the doedre fight leading to it was way harder. Again because it is a fight that requires dps. Eventually my friend and I had 10 stacks of everything and we just ported out, i brought my mapper blade vortex character to kill doedre and the debuff totems. Having 10 stack increased dmg taken, slow, less dmg dealt, made the fight completely unrecoverable for our characters. You instantly get all stacks of debuffs when you re-enter, can't kill any totem to reset buffs, can't move fast enough to dodge shit, each dinky hits chunk us because of the red debuff. Fuck that fight.

Also shav is a bit unfairly misleading, she uses regular lightning projectiles in act 4, but in act 9 she uses the channeled storm burst and all the balls explode at once so if you sidestep each one thinking you'll be safe and they all blow up beside you you can get pretty fucked.

tl;dr most a lot of bosses are more challenging than kitava act 10, despite how large scale a fight it is, it's not really that dangerous. Unfortunately you only only fight it once usually, so you don't get much opportunity to practise and learn the attacks.

Come to think of it I've yet to die this league and my characters are shit

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Durentis wrote:

I didn't have any trouble with Kitava initially. And never a problem with the enfeebled minions that I danced around. But in the penultimate phase the wheels fell off and I was on the ropes several times. Was excited and trying to cull, always certain Kitava was at the threshold - don't think cull works - and it threw me off balance.

You can't cull kitava but you can cull his heart.

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Shockwave1812 wrote:

All boss fights in this game from act 4 on are trash. Just make a witch, fall down dead, and let your minions kill them. Worst boss battles of any game I have played ever.

Good to know, thanks.

Seems kinda arbitrary to make Culling Strike not trigger on a life bar at less than 10% presumably just because there's another phase afterwards. It should set Kitava's life bar to 0 and trigger the next phase.

Are there other bosses in the game that can't be culled?

Kitava can be quite unforgiving for any build that needs to stand still in order to really dish out solid dps. I died 2 times with my TS Ranger simply because i didn't know the fight and was taken by surprise. I honestly found Doedre the Vile to be way way way harder. That was the only fight where i had to zerg through with multiple deaths.
Of course, now i know that you can simply click the valve when shit hits the fan...but i wasn't aware of that during my first encounter and simply couldn't wrap my head around how this fight was even remotely fair.
Plus, i had severe FPS issues in that fight too, for whatever reason. But you can imagine being inside that area, with shitty FPS and 95% of space covered with shit that's slowing you to the point where you basically can't move at all anymore.

Funny how different builds can make for different first impressions. Someone mentioned the Shavronne+Brutus fight. I had no problem with it whatsoever. Didn't even feel like a challenge.

I went into this fight thinking I had everything figured out:

- 3.3k HP
- 1.1k ES
- resists at 75%
- 42% to block
- 10% to evade
- regen from Consecrated Ground
- regen from Ambu's Charge
- Soul of Aberath passive (which doesn't work in this fight)
- Soul of Solaris for extra phys dmg and AoE mitigation

Despite dodging his hard-hitting attacks, I still died like 15-20 times during the battle. The worst part, in my opinion, were his adds that slaughter everything in their way (and I had tons of AoE with ~10k DPS frostbolt (spell echo) + Frozen Trail).

Too many ground hazards and too much visual clutter to clearly see what's going on.

EDIT - to be fair, the battle was probably more difficult than it had to be on account of my no-trading policy

3500 life, 264 life regen, 4.2% leech, just under 6k dps with 2hander plus bleed proc/Crimson Dance, at 54% armor and 27% evasion, 5 end charges, Fortify on hit, maxed resist, Merc lab completed as a Juggernaut with Unyielding and Unrelenting, along with flasks for life, granite, sulphur, and basalt. I only died once to Doedre because I got lazy, and once to Kitava because I didn't realize how his arena filling fire worked (as it strangely lasted the longest where he starts his breath versus where he ends it, was taking damage and the flaming ground had dissipated). I'm playing SSF Harbinger.

Overall, for my particular build, this was straight forward fight as most have been. Simply leaping or moving appropriately out of the way of any given attack tell meant I was generally fine. A couple of times, though, some of the hardest hitting tells got me, primarily that was due to the obnoxious amount of camouflage from all the other dark, red black blood effects going off. Having built for a proper mix of damage and defenses it seemed a perfectly appropriate fight. I am playing using Sunder but I purposefully made sure I attacked him point blank often as possible to make sure I don't cheat the feel of it so I doubt target lock melee skills would feel different than what I did.

I can perfectly see where some people were having issues, and it primarily seems to me that there is a bit too much stuff happening that makes it very difficult to safely attack or safely evade. Certainly, the hardest hitting ground tells need a better indicator, one that isn't getting obfuscated by the humongous black blood mist piles. Aside from that, probably a life reduction by about 25% on his adds (especially heart phase, just respawn them more quickly?) and a slightly higher global cooldown on his attacks (maybe random between about 0.5 and 1.5 seconds between, higher chance of it closer to 0.5) he would likely be just right. A few too many people I feel like are complaining about the fight when it is their build or gear giving them the most trouble. You really should be maxed resists by act 8 for example.