synth map boss: wut?

so i just had a zana mission, synth map, done a few of these.

this time new boss, some kind of big metal golem monster.

what is this fight?

literally the entire area was area denied. I dont get it, i just dont understand what the fight is supposed to be. I went in with a char i didnt give a shit about because it was a new one and i was happy to die on it however much to learn it as its a t16 and generally the synth bosses have been pretty 1 shot bullshitty.

nope, 6 portals ripped to the boss, dont understand the mechanic of it at all. Ive got pools of shaper inky black degen shit on the floor. ok, fair enough. Then ive got floating things with area circles around them that seem to be saying dont stand in the circles. Ok. So between these 2 things they take up the entire area...? there is basically no space in the entire room that isnt a 'dont stand here' floor denial.

?

what am i supposed to do? Im was on a cyclone, every time i got in cyclone distance of the boss he did a massive ground slam, and theres nowhere i can go elsewhere out of it that isnt area denied, and im probably in area denial while fighting him. 20k+ base unflasked armour with 7 endurance charges + granite of iron skin (so what, 40k armour when popped?) + basalt flask + 8k life + 15k evasion. When he slammed im going down to 1k life and im bleeding, and i cant move anywhere, and im in area denial already, and i have 20 gmp monsters firing projectiles at me that explode with aoe, and hes slamming every time i go into melee range, and if im not in melee range he leap slams me and then slams again.


?


I dont get it. if theres something that is supposed to be done here that im missing youve done an absolute shit job of communicating what it is that is to be done. Im running around constantly bleeding and literally every inch of the arena is some area denial trap im standing in... its just fking stupid tbh. This is a character than can just facetank a 3 damage mod minotaur all day with essentially 0 chance of death.


why is the game either me piss easy 1 shotting everything or then once in a blue moon its just impossible bullshit? Neither of these situations should ever be the case, and the game is always one of these 2. your difficulty and combat damage back and forth design is absolute garbage, just the worst.

Only found him twice this league, but basically all synth bosses have a intrinsic DPS check and mechanics that can't be avoided at melee range. So either you have the damage and you are range or its close to impossible to complete the fight (unless you can insta kill them of course).

In synth league i killed the cold and the lightning guys with a melee wildstriker (but i killed them in like 10 seconds), the fat guy has a lot more HP and has one skill that shotguns, so melee is screwed in that fight.

Yeah, from my experience, the Synth bosses are definitely DPS checks... And specifically, the check calls for a number scaling well into the millions by T16.

In that regard, statistically, these fights are substantially nastier than Uber Elder; for Uber, your DPS being merely in the upper 6-figures still lets you burn through plenty fast enough that you won't be doomed by clutter; if you know what you're doing, (read: can run around in a circle, weaving out briefly to pop anomalies) you can comfortably manage the Uber Elder fight for several minutes. By contrast, the synth bosses feel like they give you 60 seconds or well less.

it was just silly.

oh im doing a big slam, heres some gold aoe circle so dont stand in this!!!

ok ill move then, ill move to...

oh wait, every single inch of the arena i can move to is either a black pool that is telling me dont stand here or some floating mine with a circle around it saying dont stand here. theres nowhere to move to.



sometimes i just get the feeling that GGG have no idea how to construct gameplay. We all want the game to be harder right? its just stupidly easy atm. but whenever they make something 'hard' everyone wants it nerfed because its almost always just bullshit, its not really difficult, just idiotic and cheep feeling.

ziz wants the game harder. when he played the devour boss in the demo hes like yeah u need to nerf this. why if he wants the game hard? because it was just bullshit 1 shotting people in melee range with no way to realistically escape it.



I dont even know at this point, why am I still even here posting threads? why am i even playing this game, is there really any light at the end of this tunnel in regards to game difficulty and actually having something fun and engaging to play in poe? Ive got till the 13th to try an farm watchers eyes, and thats the only reason im even in the game playing, long term am I going to use them? i dont even know, im kind of betting my time against ggg seeing sense and doing something but stuff like this gives me little faith.

"

Snorkle_uk wrote:

sometimes i just get the feeling that GGG have no idea how to construct gameplay. We all want the game to be harder right? its just stupidly easy atm. but whenever they make something 'hard' everyone wants it nerfed because its almost always just bullshit, its not really difficult, just idiotic and cheep feeling.

This is the consequence of a development team that, by 2019, really has little to no connection with how the endgame actually plays. I honestly don't know if Chris Wilson, for instance, has ever actually gotten around to even attempting Uber Elder, (I do recall that like two leagues after his introduction, he'd famously mentioned still never attempting him) and it appears most of the GGG staff spends even less time actually trying to "playtest" the game than even him.

Reading from what's been posted, it's clear that GGG relies almost exclusively upon external information for how their game handles: they listen to a handful of pro streamers, but mostly it's just checking cold "telemetry" numbers their server spits out: how many times a map was run, how many player deaths occurred... Barely better info than what we can already see at sites like poe.ninja.

Hence, GGG has, for a few years now, had a pretty inaccurate take on how the game actually feels from the seat of a player. Listening to what some players are saying is good, yes, but... Exactly how much of an expert at PoE does it make you to listen to Zizeran, Mathil, etc.? These streamers have thousands upon thousands of people who listen to them fervently, and you wouldn't exactly ask any random one of them how to balance the game, now would you?

"

Snorkle_uk wrote:

I dont even know at this point, why am I still even here posting threads? why am i even playing this game, is there really any light at the end of this tunnel in regards to game difficulty and actually having something fun and engaging to play in poe? Ive got till the 13th to try an farm watchers eyes, and thats the only reason im even in the game playing, long term am I going to use them? i dont even know, im kind of betting my time against ggg seeing sense and doing something but stuff like this gives me little faith.

I'll admit that you do not appear to be alone. For any of a number of reasons, it does distinctly appear that Path of Exile has definitely stopped growing as a game... Which means it's now shrinking. There's a lot of poor decision-making on GGG's part that are causing fatigue amongst the players; an endless stream of new side-games that don't mesh with the main content, every new encounter being over-tuned, a merciless march of power creep, (often getting converted to a power GAP) new content going core with a silly RNG-based method to encounter it leaving players with little choice on what content they play, balance that is increasingly becoming a joke, progressively worse performance in a game that looks little better than it did years ago...

...Yes, there's also that the game is definitely ageing, but even an old game can hold on well if it's handled well, (see: stuff like FF XIV and Minecraft) and it's more that a game can be punished harder for its mis-steps over the years. And GGG is definitely making a lot of errors.

Truth be told, the game's future is very much up in the air; I won't say it's doomed, but I definitely can't say "it will be fine for years" without that being disingenuous. And what happens largely remains up to GGG's leadership, now.

:(

i cant say i disagree with anything uve said. chris said he hasnt got to red maps on the live server, 98% of my time spent playing is in red maps. His highest hc char I think hasnt hit 90 he said? I have chars in sc that are in the mid 90s with 0 deaths, its not even a case of being a better player than him its just time invested, Ive probably played like 40x as many hours.


Sure I get the sort of game he plays, its throw away, you make a char in hc, itll be dead before 90, none of ur gear and stuff really matters because its so easy come easy go, moment by moment its got tension simply because 1 death is the end. eventually u die to something and it doesnt really matter if what killed you was bullshit because you just dont care, you dont care about your character really or your items or anything because you made the char 5 days ago and spent 20 hours on it, theres no real connection there, its all just casual fun.

thats cool man, i totally get it and i respect it, im not knocking it at all. If thats the kind of game poe wants to be then sure, Ill play it that way. But that game is a game I invest about 50-100 hours in per year and I dont buy mtx etc. Its not the game I play right now where I put in 10k, 15k+ hours, support the game to the tune of $1000+, actually give a shit about my characters, items etc, give a shit about the game as a result.





i dunno man, whatever, just roll on diablo 4, i guarantee you that game will have actual engaging gameplay. If it wasnt for these watchers eyes id be in diablo 3 right now, and Im half feeling to just go play it anyway, i dunno why im even bothering.

"

Snorkle_uk wrote:

:(

Sure I get the sort of game he plays, its throw away, you make a char in hc, itll be dead before 90, none of ur gear and stuff really matters because its so easy come easy go, moment by moment its got tension simply because 1 death is the end. eventually u die to something and it doesnt really matter if what killed you was bullshit because you just dont care, you dont care about your character really or your items or anything because you made the char 5 days ago and spent 20 hours on it, theres no real connection there, its all just casual fun.

The problem is they stopped balancing around hardcore a long time ago. I only played hardcore until delve and it was fun, but having to redo my delve from scratch each time i died(it was this way in the past) made it clear that they were not thinking about hardcore anymore. And playing in hardcore a game that is balanced around softcore is not a sane idea in my mind lol.
So there is this gap between the lead developer and the actual team that pushes content, he seems to favor hardcore but everything that is added into the game approach the softcore crowd and most of the time trows a middle finger to hardcore lol.

"

Snorkle_uk wrote:

literally the entire area was area denied.

Was there increased area map mod? I did it fairly easy on t16 with ~75% block chance, and I'm almost 95% sure it had increased area map mod for me so I had to facetank.

i miss the synthesis league =(

"

Nomancs wrote:

"

Snorkle_uk wrote:

literally the entire area was area denied.

Was there increased area map mod? I did it fairly easy on t16 with ~75% block chance, and I'm almost 95% sure it had increased area map mod for me so I had to facetank.

i couldnt tell u mate, not sure, its a unique synth map right? so the map mods are fixed i think? it had whatever that map has on it as far as im aware, maybe the mods are still random i dunno.

"

Mortyx wrote:

"

Snorkle_uk wrote:

:(

Sure I get the sort of game he plays, its throw away, you make a char in hc, itll be dead before 90, none of ur gear and stuff really matters because its so easy come easy go, moment by moment its got tension simply because 1 death is the end. eventually u die to something and it doesnt really matter if what killed you was bullshit because you just dont care, you dont care about your character really or your items or anything because you made the char 5 days ago and spent 20 hours on it, theres no real connection there, its all just casual fun.

The problem is they stopped balancing around hardcore a long time ago. I only played hardcore until delve and it was fun, but having to redo my delve from scratch each time i died(it was this way in the past) made it clear that they were not thinking about hardcore anymore. And playing in hardcore a game that is balanced around softcore is not a sane idea in my mind lol.
So there is this gap between the lead developer and the actual team that pushes content, he seems to favor hardcore but everything that is added into the game approach the softcore crowd and most of the time trows a middle finger to hardcore lol.

I hear you.


heres the thing tho, from the perspective i posted its still balanced to be fine for hardcore right? If you look at hardcore as "Im not supposed to die in this game mode and Im supposed to grind to 95-100 somewhere and do all the stuff in the game" then its fucked, its not really a hc viable game in a lot of ways now, its absurd.

If however you look at it as "you are supposed to die in hc, this is a game mode where you will die, the game will kill you, hopefully before lvl90 as an intentional design and if you get past there and can manage to do some of these things in the real deep endgame beyond that then go you, but you will die to something, we will get you and the idea is that you go AGGHHHH!!!!! and then laugh".... if that sort of throw away way of looking at the game is how you see it then its fine for hc right? you kind of see what im saying?

its a mindset that is also reflected in the way u used to be able to grief people and kill their hc chars in parties at the bandit boss battles while leveling, its reflected in the initial idea of free for all loot, no allocation, not even having allocation timers like it had when it went open beta. Just pure FFA loot, you steal all the loot and laugh, and ur friend calls u a fucktard because he didnt get anything and you laugh at him even more and then he laughs and its all good because the game is throw away. Youll both die to something bullshit within the next 20 hours play and scream and laugh again so who cares who got the exalt really, its all just throw away, its super casual, no one really cares.

I think certain elements at GGG love hardcore, but they love it in a way that most hardcore players dont, they see it differently, its a very meh, whatever, relaxed lolathon casual mode hardcore, and from that perspective theres nothing wrong with some absolute bullshit player death mechanics late game, the game wants you to die, its not doing its job properly if 99.99999% of characters dont die to something before they hit 100.




chris has magic cards that are super expensive, i think he gets feeling very invested in something to the point where its gonna ruin your entire month if you lose it somehow. I just dont think thats how he sees this game, at all, in a remote way i think hes happy and he wants some other people to feel that way about it, and they seem to so thats all good, but hes playing it like a game of magic where your cards are all thrown in the bin at the end of the night anyway so everythings kind of 'whatever'.