Act 10 Kitava fight is absolutely stupid

This fight does feel like an unnecessarily difficult gate to mapping. The other day I did manage to unofficially kill him deathless (thank you, cat, for running across my keyboard twice during the fight) but that was after killing him with 3, maybe 4 other characters. My very first time was a soul-crushing bodyroll that lasted at least 45 minutes. After killing the A9 boss with frightening ease, A10 Kitava felt like he was designed specifically by GGG to destroy my soul in particular.

As I was a noob that had no idea what mapping was all about, my thought process the whole time was 'If this is just the final act boss, what the fuck is mapping going to be like? Am I simply just too much of a scrub to even play this game? Maybe I should quit right here and right now.'

Fortunately for me, I toughed it out, and I actually look forward to testing a build against A10 Kitava now. Even when I die, it's only a couple of times, which is a hell of an improvement over my very first attempt. Oddly enough, my big nemesis that I hate is Innocence, who can kindly play a delightful game of 'hide and go fuck yourself'. If I played Hardcore and you told me I had to choose between fighting A10 Kitava or Innocence to continue, I'd pick Kitava in a heartbeat.

But that's the thing, not everyone is going to want to tough it out when they reach this point. Someone who actually has a life and a job, unlike me, may very well get to A10 Kitava, get brutalized over and over, and decide they just don't have time for this bullshit, and they sure as hell don't have time to go farming subpar areas for more gear when the siren song of mapping is locked right behind that big bastard.

I've been telling other noobs that started playing after me that this game has a knack for lulling you into a false sense of security before abruptly shoving it in without lube. To someone like me who can play all day and only does softcore, that's ... more or less acceptable, even part of the game's charm in a way. One of those 'love to hate' things. But to people who don't have a lot of time to play, and ESPECIALLY Hardcore players, these boss fights that are wild, inconsistent spikes in difficulty are a recipe for rage-quit levels of frustration indeed.

While a primal, arrogant part of me could just yell 'git gud' from the rooftops all day because it knows I have little problem with the fight, I merely need remind myself that only weeks ago I was actually thinking about quitting over this fight. I bet there are some of you in this thread who can roflstomp Innocence and would be laughing your asses off watching me try to fight him. At the end of the day, no matter who's good and who's bad on which of these major 'problem bosses', the fact remains that there is a problem. An obvious problem. You don't need to read very much on the forums to know exactly who the problem children are in the pantheon, because there are hundreds and hundreds of angry posts about them in particular.

The problem children are like mile-high speedbumps in the surrounding content, and I think that really, really, really sucks for, especially, Hardcore players. Someone could go through the game doing absolutely everything right but just get abysmally unlucky on drops, and then they're just stuck farming until they have the gear to confidently try to get over that speedbump.

I think the main problem is that while for the most part, the acts seem pretty nicely balanced around the average softcore player, the huge spikes in difficulty seem to indicate otherwise. Fights like Innocence and Kitava appear balanced heavily in favor of three categories: masochists; people who don't mind grinding low level content for gear; elites who just seem to be naturally godly at whatever they play.

These fights completely fuck over people who fall into other categories, such as hardcore players (especially SSF - those of you who succeed are truly gods among men) and casual players who really just don't want to bother with working out how to get over the speed bump. "I could be doing literally anything other than throwing my corpses at Kitava for 45 minutes right now." The 'git gud' crowd can laugh at those people all they want, but it's issues like this that can cause people to stop playing altogether in favor of games with smoother progression. Like I said, I almost did, simply because I figured in simple newbie ignorance that if I couldn't kill Kitava, I sure as hell wasn't going to be able to survive mapping.

My first thought as to how to fix the problem was 'just let people start mapping without having to kill him'. But that makes it slightly cheesy to be able to just map for a while, overlevel/overgear him, and then be able to go back and roflstomp his face in for your 2 passive points. 2 passive points at once deserves to be a reward for a pretty challenging objective.

Then I thought 'make it so he doesn't give passive points, put the reward somewhere in the first foray into mapping'. But then people would just skip him and wouldn't bother to fight him, ever, unless they simply happened to enjoy the fight.

There are various ways to deal with this, I think, but they may be unnecessarily complex. I thought of a system that could be applied to all Act bosses where their default state is fairly easy, something that can be learned and beaten without too much fuss by the average newbie, but they don't really give any rewards. They'd give a little something, like the rare gear that's given for a few of the quests in the game, but the easy mode wouldn't give the permanent rewards like passive points. The purpose of fighting the bosses in this 'easy mode' state would be to just be able to progress in the Acts, so you could do something other than having to go back and farm in areas that you've already cleared.

In order to get the bigger, permanent rewards we know now, you have to activate something (either an item that you're given, or a switch in the boss arena itself) that powers the boss up to the state we know them in now. When you kill them in this empowered state, then you get your passive points or unique jewel or whatever.

But like I said, I feel like that system may be needlessly complex. And it's honestly just a different way of saying 'hey, let's let people start mapping before they kill A10 Kitava,' now that I think about it.

In the end, the simplest solution is simply to make the fights easier. There will no doubt be many tears shed by the 'git gud' crowd sobbing that the game is now destroyed because casuals can actually progress past problem fights without having their souls crushed, but I think the forum speaks for itself. When you have even some veterans with lots of posts and supporter icons saying they still think the fights are a problem, I think the fights are a problem.