PoE should look at D2 Median XL as an example for reasons to kill bosses

they doubled the hp of rare mobs. now, especially in incursions, the rares are like 5x tankier than the boss. it seems ridiculous.

that being said, you can't just raise the hp or make them "bullet sponge" mobs. why? because GGG hates defense and has nerfed it continually since 1.0 to a point where the best defense is an overpowered offense.

this is why there has been such a crazy focus on killing bosses as fast as possible. because if the fight lasts longer than 1 second and you get hit, you'll get exploded NO MATTER HOW MUCH YOU INVEST IN DEFENSE.

once you start getting some crazy map mods, it literally doesn't matter how tanky you think you are, you'll get demolished before you can react.
so, as has been the mentality for the past 5 years, screw defense. focus on offense and kill before you can be killed.

so no, just raising hp wouldn't do a damn thing. we'd still overcome it with damage stuff and raising the hp would only kill the builds that don't have 20 million dps.


i agree i'd prefer poe to be more epic boss fight centric, but this isn't that game anymore. to get that you gotta go somewhere else, because to make that in poe they'd have to change the whole game all over the place.
this would be great, but theres no possible way they'd redo the whole game.

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Shagsbeard wrote:

The problem with PoE is that there's too great a difference between "good enough" and "really good" in terms of character power. If you make bosses hard for the "really good" characters, you lose the interest of those that simply want to play "good enough" characters. On the flip side, you make things based on "good enough" and the people who play "really good" characters complain that they don't have a challenge.

The problem needs to be solved at that level. The gap between the haves and the have-nots needs to shrink before you start talking about how content should be balanced.

There’s a lot of truth to this here.

They need to nerf the top tier damage mods on items before they start to buff boss health like crazy. Homemade builds and for fun builds would find it near impossible to beat something like shaper with a billion health.

It is a tricky balance though. You want to make high end items desirable but not able to delete the hardest content in seconds. Or maybe that is their design goal at this point. People can see streamers insta deleting shaper and guardians and think ‘id like to do that.’

its why balance is important despite the constant argument that it isn't, nothing works for content difficulty if half the players are using a switch of bamboo and the other half are using a howitzer.

It is where were at though :p

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Shagsbeard wrote:

The problem with PoE is that there's too great a difference between "good enough" and "really good" in terms of character power. If you make bosses hard for the "really good" characters, you lose the interest of those that simply want to play "good enough" characters. On the flip side, you make things based on "good enough" and the people who play "really good" characters complain that they don't have a challenge.

The problem needs to be solved at that level. The gap between the haves and the have-nots needs to shrink before you start talking about how content should be balanced.

BINGO. This is why I always bring up balance when the topic of difficulty comes up, which is essentially what this thread is about, too.

Devs cannot even begin to exert control over how they feel players should experience their game if a tiny group of absurd I-win-easy-mode builds dominate. Difficulty in PoE is so bizarre because there is no coherent developer vision that is being executed in league-by-league balance changes. Instead we get a few examples of absurd powercreep while anyone who wants to play an out-of-fashion (though still sensible and optimized) build is going to have a really tough time.

On the one hand, players who grind hard for currency should indeed feel the power of having great gear while simultaneously having endgame content that challenges them - there needs to be space for those top-tier players. On the other, there also needs to be some baseline for what a "good" build is which GGG balances skills, gear, ascendancies, keystones, etc. around.

"Good" builds should be economical and achievable for dedicated players with a medium amount of currency. They should be seen as the norm. OP screen-exploding zoom-zoom builds should require very expensive gear or come with significant drawbacks, such as low survival (I don't have a problem if players with good manual twitchy sidestepping skills can play this way).

Right now build power is simply determined by whether or not you choose to play the small number of skills GGG has handed to us with the label "easy difficulty" on them. This leads me to another method of tackling the issue, which is essentially a cultural shift in which the playerbase loses all respect for anyone who plays in "easy difficulty" and sees that as an UNDESIRABLE way to play, no matter how rich it gets you.

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demon9675 wrote:

Devs cannot even begin to exert control over how they feel players should experience their game if a tiny group of absurd I-win-easy-mode builds dominate.

Huh.

I thought it was obvious that the Devs wanted players to experience their game with a tiny group of absurd I-win-easy-mode builds.


Every league they massively buff a small handful of things and nerf whatever they buffed the prior league. No surprises. This is why you see long time summoners dreading their play style becoming the "flavor of the month." Inevitable "meta-shifts."

Reminds me a lot of more recent Diablo 3 seasons. This set adds 1000% damage to that one skill. Hurray for options!

Like the skill tree... The general game design presents lots of options. But anyone who has played for a little while sees through it and knows how few options there actually are (path of life nodes)!

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SudianX wrote:

I thought it was obvious that the Devs wanted players to experience their game with a tiny group of absurd I-win-easy-mode builds.

I guess you're right but... that's such a crappy, boring, easy game (the only difficulty comes from learning the complex mechanics and keeping up with market trends). And really not what I'm here for.

Simply make each boss drop a specific or specific range of mods on rares that it drops similar to the Iceberg map boss, Its a starting point and fits nicely within the way the game is already setup anyway.

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SilentSymphony wrote:

Simply make each boss drop a specific or specific range of mods on rares that it drops similar to the Iceberg map boss, Its a starting point and fits nicely within the way the game is already setup anyway.

i would be happy if items droped by boses had a minimum level on its mods based on the boss level, nothing like killing a high tier boss and geting super low rolls.

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Nevermind Median XL, they could just look to Diablo 2 period. I was musing the other day how poorly Merveil stacks up to Andariel in terms of a first act boss. If you weren't ready with antidotes, Andariel could wreck your shit even years after the game's release. She had a decent size area and several devastating but well-telegraphed attacks. Merveil has just steadily become more of a joke. It didn't have to be that way. They could easily have left it as incredibly punitive if you didn't max cold resistance and stay on the move. If you need proof of how amateur GGG really were and are, look no further than their boss design and inability to keep those bosses challenging and engaging in the long term.

I think they did it on purpose. Imagine new player being unable to beat Merveil. Many will drop the game as soon as it happens. And GGG has a hard statistics data about that I'm sure.

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Reinhart wrote:

GGG wants players to play PoE with balanced builds not balance the game around overpowered builds.

Actually no, they don't.
There is a deliberate meta-rotation and those options released are by far too overpowered to even remotely be considered 'balanced'. This happened with Winter Orb, with Divine Ire, Cyclone and it'll happen again with Summoners this league sadly.

I would love if they actually put effort towards proper balance... but they don't.

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Reinhart wrote:

I always kill the map boss as they drop the most items and have the highest probability to drop maps. So the incentive is already there to be honest.

Nonetheless they don't feel like a 'boss', they rather feel like an extra mob simply slapped into the map. Could put it in anywhere.. most of them die in a second one way or the other.

Meaningful engagements with as meaningful loot (instead of the increased chance for a map which is the only viable reason to kill it right now) would give more then enough incentive to do them.

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Shagsbeard wrote:

The problem with PoE is that there's too great a difference between "good enough" and "really good" in terms of character power. If you make bosses hard for the "really good" characters, you lose the interest of those that simply want to play "good enough" characters. On the flip side, you make things based on "good enough" and the people who play "really good" characters complain that they don't have a challenge.

Yes, exactly... you basically stated why balancing is not a side-effort to be done (as GGG semeingly sees it) but has to be focused primarily.
You can't implement any sensible mechanic in a game if everything is wonky and completely out of order. Either OP-builds get bored to death or the others all can't handle the content anymore, you can't please both with the current situation.

Hence GGG needs to put major efforts into proper balancing first as well as re-working all the broken mechanics which accumulated over time. Double-dipping into damage via conversion, leech-issues, on-hit mechanics, auto-attack hit issues... and so on. Sadly they only do it gradually... which will introduce more issues with new content presented rather then fix the problems which are already existing properly.


The game is in quite the dire situation at the moment actually. Not by player-numbers... but the simple part that balance is non-existing. I've seen a lot of games tumble after a while when it gets too much out of hand, I guess that point has been reached already... the question is just if their effort to keep people invested via new league-mechanics can offset the missing balance of the game long-term. They wouldn't need to invest so heavily into that if just the progression would be sensible. But well... GGG seems to have chosen the hard way, even if that isn't needed and their resources would be better allocated in another way.

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Filousov wrote:

I think they did it on purpose. Imagine new player being unable to beat Merveil. Many will drop the game as soon as it happens. And GGG has a hard statistics data about that I'm sure.

Well, D2 became a hit despite of it... or rather because of it. Bosses meant something, they were hard, you needed to think a little bit how to kill them (at least until finding out how to cheese them) and they offered the best loot in the game, so being extremely rewarding as well.

On the contrary in PoE a boss is a bother, a stop-gap you want to go by as quickly as possible since they don't drop anything important with a few exceptions (Delve-bosses, Shaper, Elder for example). They are counter to what a boss usually stands for. Bosses in PoE are an utter atrocity sadly.