Kosis is Bullcrap

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bugslayerjohn wrote:

The gaslighting is real. If you're playing heralds, or Hollow Palm, or something else that one-shots all of the content in the game, I absolutely don't understand how it's possible to read my post and then say "well that's not my experience". It IS your experience, you are on the "use a meta-trivialize-all-game-content build and he's killable" side of the spectrum. I totally agree that this works. I contend however that the game should be playable without having to trivialize all game content.

Don't know if this is directed at me, but if so, my only SC build this league was an Earthquake Scion. Look how meta: https://poe.ninja/challenge/builds?type=depthsolo&class=Ascendant&skill=Earthquake . I agree that just piling onto the OP meta thing half the league is running is no fun. Playing a way off-meta melee character, I thought Kosis seemed fair. Not trying to trivialize anyone else's experience, I just take issue with the insinuation of being a meta slave :P

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cgexile wrote:

100% maps and HogM? Yeah I can't do that shit. So the difficulty you are describing on what you can do vs. what you can't is pretty hard to believe there.

You caught me, I came here and explicitly lied about what I can do and my experience with the boss, but you saw right through it. I also faked that screenshot of a cleared 100% guardian map, but that didn't fool you did it? Bravo. /sarcasm

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cgexile wrote:

It sounds like you just need to learn the fight and move around him faster.

Yup, just need to learn the mechanics of a fight that basically has no mechanics other than a hard DPS check. The problem couldn't possibly be the DPS check.

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cgexile wrote:

How do you clear hogm without block redux with all those phis proj spells? I'd believe that when I see it ;) I can clear that map overtuned in standard but I use block redux to get through some of those max block exiles.

Hilariously I was having this argument with someone on Discord just the other day. I was literally clearing HoGM at the time, while he was trying to explain to me in full seriousness with all the energy of his soul that I couldn't possibly be doing what I was actually doing because of those block folks and how you can't kill them that way. You can. Yes, this is dissonant to your personal experience, that doesn't make you right.

The fact that you can't isn't really evidence that I can't so much as evidence that your opinion on the issue is suspect in the first place, but sure, I'll play ball. The easy way through the max block folks is a weapon swap to a scorching ray setup in Searing Touch. A 4 link is adequate, but one or two of the blockers also use scorching ray and if you get them at the end of the hall they will likely kill you before you kill them so a 6 link with spell totems is safer and more reliable for those situations.

The far cooler way through the block folks is to beat them down and show them who's boss. The community wisdom says that this is impossible. The community wisdom is wrong: it's only MOSTLY impossible. There's a big difference between mostly impossible and all impossible. Mostly impossible is slightly possible. Specifically there are a few factors you have to beat to do this. One is the regen/recharge aspect of these builds: you have to deal enough effective damage to get through that. Talking about a DPS check here probably seems odd given my DPS check complaints with Kosis, but remember that PVP damage scaling is in effect in HoGM, so the numbers are not the same and my damage output feels absolutely godly in there. The other factor is that you've got to get through the block somehow. Block reduction is one way, but not the only one. These grandmasters are generally CI and don't mitigate stun (sometimes on purpose), meaning that all of the blocks have a recovery time. This block recovery time is basically a cooldown on block any time you block a stunning hit. They invest in block recovery to mitigate that, but multiple hits extremely close together will let some of those hits get through. With that in mind if you take another look at my build: Blade Fall + Blade Blast. The number of hits per second is impressive. Blade Blast shotguns over separate frames and increased AOE works a miracle for damage output right at the center of your bladefalls. The impressive number of separate hits on different frames (that's important) has the effect of turning block chance into a mere % damage reduction, as well as bypassing that reduction entirely for a substantial portion of those hits because they happen during block recovery. I can chew through most of the blockers just fine, a couple (specifically Demi and Spider Queen) can take me a minute if I encounter them at the end of the hall, I think requiring a lucky string of crits. It's 50/50 whether I choose to use the scorching ray swap for them, but I've also full cleared A8 T16 HoGM more times than I can count without using a weapon swap.

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cgexile wrote:

The fact that you are 99 is respectable but also tells me you are built for facerolling maps and maybe not necessarily setup to go toe to toe with, well, a boss like this one.

I'm not facerolling map bosses, if that's what you mean, but I clear them fine, and I can take any of them deathless, I just have to actually engage with the mechanics of the boss fight. You know, play the game the way it was designed. That's pretty much what makes a badly designed fight like this so irritating. The fight isn't capable of being engaged mechanically. The minimal mechanics that it has are either boring and naive or cancer, both of which are bad. There's nothing interesting mechanically about "give the boss 20% of his HP back every 10 seconds while he fills the arena with cancer". That's the fight we have, and either your effective damage per second substantially exceeds 2% of the boss's life (the minimum just to get through that ES before he gets it back), or it doesn't. No interesting mechanic to engage with, no workaround to bring into the build, just a hard DPS check with a pile of cancer on top.

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cgexile wrote:

I'd say you need at least 10k EHP or clsoe to it with MoM. Depending on the mods, yeah I'm not surprised even his small jabs could one-shot you.

Sure, if your intent is to eat any slam from any boss in any map without dying you're gonna need at least that. Of course, now you're back to trivializing all game content by making it so you don't have to engage with any of it. There's literally nothing wrong with Kosis's slams, the advertising on them is adequate, they make sense, when you die you understand what you did wrong and how you might avoid it next time. That's not the problem with the fight. The problem is that the fight will literally go on forever if you don't meet the DPS check, and during that time the arena turns to fairly permanent cancer. Also somewhere in that time he'll eventually land a slam and kill you if the arena doesn't first, but the slam isn't the problem, it's just the finisher.

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PoSTxOffice wrote:

Don't know if this is directed at me, but if so, my only SC build this league was an Earthquake Scion. Look how meta: https://poe.ninja/challenge/builds?type=depthsolo&class=Ascendant&skill=Earthquake . I agree that just piling onto the OP meta thing half the league is running is no fun. Playing a way off-meta melee character, I thought Kosis seemed fair. Not trying to trivialize anyone else's experience, I just take issue with the insinuation of being a meta slave :P

It was directed at the handful of people who had responded by claiming that obviously nothing is wrong because they killed high delirium Kosis easily. Specifically remarks like "hard to believe" or "I'll believe it when I see it" or "your build is bad".

Observing that your own build doesn't appear to be game breaking and didn't struggle is useful, claiming that someone else's observation is invalid because your own didn't struggle (which is what a few people have done) is gaslighting.

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bugslayerjohn wrote:

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cgexile wrote:

100% maps and HogM? Yeah I can't do that shit. So the difficulty you are describing on what you can do vs. what you can't is pretty hard to believe there.

You caught me, I came here and explicitly lied about what I can do and my experience with the boss, but you saw right through it. I also faked that screenshot of a cleared 100% guardian map, but that didn't fool you did it? Bravo. /sarcasm

I didn't accuse you of shit and I did say that maybe you are built for maps. I didn't analyze your build so maybe you blow shit up and the mobs do the work for ya but you struggle one on one. I said that what you said is hard to believe but I didn't say you lied.

Based on your tone, it's pointless for me to respond to the rest of your rant in greater detail. Yeah I'm well aware of SR being another way to take down HogM but you are describing some quirky method where you aren't invested in the skill in any way and I have not seen SR that doesn't do damage kill those block toons. I'm not saying it's impossible but I'm saying it is, again, hard to believe.

PvP scaling is just reduced damage across the board. If you are doing obscene damage to the exiles to land a killing blow that gets through the block, then you should be doing obscene damage to Kosis without scaling who probably has no effective block.

When I look at the assassin I'm thinking here is a good glass canon that's designed around offense being the best defense. Nothing wrong with that but if you don't have the longevity or skill around a specific boss, you failed your mission to assassinate him quickly! ;) I mean based on all the things you said it sounds to me like you are doing plenty of damage so it boils down to survivability and skill as your primary issue and not the boss mechanics.

You're trying to bring up a lot of good points here, but it's important not to get too emotional. You start exaggerating and oversimplifying things like this, and you just kind of sound rant-y and it's very hard to take your arguments seriously, even though I (mostly) agree with you.

As an example of what I'm talking about: "forced to play one of 3 OP builds blah blah blah DA META THO" reads like nonsense because it is. My top Simulacrum farmer this league out of SEVERAL builds I've invested multiple exalts into is Explosive Trapper which isn't even popular enough to SMELL the Meta; last time I checked I think there were like... 6 of them on the ladder. Total. I cleared Wave 20 Kosis with him before the nerfs, on a budget well under the price of a single Voices jewel. Claiming that success in POE is gated behind "the meta" is a ridiculous fallacy that has literally never been true (so far). I'm not saying it can't possibly be true at some point in the future, only that we aren't there yet. Claiming that we are is hyperbole at best and disingenuous at worst; either case completely invalidates everything else you previously said.

And it's frustrating for me to read posts like this because I 100% agree that Kosis's shield-regen-channel ability is absolute trash tier enemy design. The fact that counterplay to it simply cannot exist on many builds, by definition, kills build diversity within the Simulacrum. Tanky, sustained-DPS builds either cannot kill Wave 20 Kosis at all, or can only kill him after a grueling 20+ minute slog through gameplay which is neither interesting nor fun. On the other hand, high-burst-damage builds (such as Explosive Trap) can absolutely annihilate him effortlessly. My trapper at this point can literally 100-0 Kosis during a single use of his shield channel.

The problem with this isn't "explosive trap is overpowered," the problem is that Kosis has vastly different amounts of life when I fight him with Explosive Trap and he gets ONE channel than he does when I use my Assailum Gladiator and he gets 7 channels. Bosses should NEVER have different base amounts of life for different builds, but that's exactly what the lack of counterplay to Kosis's shield regen gives him.

Solutions?

The obvious one, by which I mean "so obvious it's insane that it wasn't what GGG went with when they designed the boss," is to not give him the shield charge ability at all, and simply give him substantially more (I think 10 times as much would be fine) base life instead. This balances Kosis out so that builds like my Sab actually have to play the game instead of blowing him to Narnia the moment he stops moving, whereas builds like my Gladiator (and presumably your character, I didn't bother looking it up) aren't being arbitrarily punished simply as a function of their core build design.

Barring that optimal solution, counterplay NEEDS to exist in some form. Maybe they allow Frost Bomb and Void Beacon to work on Kosis. Maybe his shield charges much faster but is interrupted by hit damage. Maybe the shield stops charging if you can land a hit which stuns/freezes him. Maybe he only gains shield based on a percentage of damage he deals to you with his channeled beam attack, similar to Elder Siphon. SOMETHING. Because the current system of "Boss gains X life every Y seconds and there's nothing you can do to stop it" is just garbage.

True that GGG likes to generally make bosses tough then nerf them down later using in game collected statistics. But this set of conqueror bosses are generally caustic not fun bad content. not fun bad content. not fun bad content. I will end my post here to try to avoid being put on probation.

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cgexile wrote:

PvP scaling is just reduced damage across the board. If you are doing obscene damage to the exiles to land a killing blow that gets through the block, then you should be doing obscene damage to Kosis without scaling who probably has no effective block.

It's not a flat or linear reduction, it is logarithmic and based on both the damage of a hit and the cast/attack/cooldown speed of the skill causing the hit. This means that skills with a low per-hit value and a rate of hits elevated beyond the system's ability to anticipate (such as what Blade Blast manages to do) will deal loads more damage under a PVP scaling situation than something with significantly higher per hit value.

For example, a 30k per hit blade blast with an assumed cast rate of 0.35 seconds will deal ~1500 damage per hit with PVP scaling on. Now let's say we can land, on average, 10 of those blasts per cast, this gives us ~45k effective DPS after damage scaling.

Comparably some other 300k per hit spell with a cast speed of 0.35 seconds (the same average effective DPS without PVP scaling) will deal a bit under 6k damage per hit, less than a 4x increase for a 10x increase in the base hit. All told the math on this works out to just under 17k DPS.

So PVP damage scaling is not linear, and particularly works out in favor of certain types of shotgunning mechanics, such as traps, mines, or in my case spellslinger with blade blast, because those mechanics can improve effective overall damage output without changing either D or T in the PVP scaling calculations. There's even more to this, but this isn't really the thread to dive down that rabbit hole.

Hopefully this is enough to put to rest at least some of your concerns about how "believable" this is. If you want to check the math, look at https://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Player_versus_player.

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cgexile wrote:

When I look at the assassin I'm thinking here is a good glass canon that's designed around offense being the best defense.

But again, defenses are neither my problem here nor the specific concern raised with the fight. The overwhelming majority of his hits I avoid manually by kiting or position (I.E. engaging with the meager fight mechanics that do exist). Those I screw up on my character dodges via evasion, dodge, blind, etc. Those that hit can't crit because of Assassin ascendancy, have further mitigation like physical damage taken as cold, capped chaos res, etc., and frequently can't take out my entire life pool alone (additional prior damage from the bubbles for example is usually required.)

You're trying to school me like I'm running around on 4k life complaining that a boss hit me too hard. That's not even adjacent to either the reality of my build or the specific concerns raised with this fight.

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cgexile wrote:

If you don't have the longevity or skill around a specific boss, you failed your mission to assassinate him quickly! ;) I mean based on all the things you said it sounds to me like you are doing plenty of damage so it boils down to survivability and skill as your primary issue and not the boss mechanics.

This, right here, is the actual problem. You can't see the issue with Kosis because in your mind the mission is to assassinate him quickly. You are trying to tell me that the only right build is the one that deals high enough damage to dispatch him before he hits me. I'm saying that if someone can fight Kosis for 15 minutes doing low damage but never ever taking a hit large enough to kill them, they should be able to clear him. They've EARNED the kill at that point. Right now that is NOT the case with Kosis. The mechanical part of this is easy, his mechanics are naively simple. The problem is the way the boss design scales with player damage output. Below a particular damage threshold he's effectively invincible because of the ES recovery, and as he approaches that invincibility his ability to permanently choke out the play area also goes up. It's a terrible fight design that does not, as you said "boil down to survivability and skill". It boils down to a hard DPS check with little margin between "impossible" and "trivial".

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ARealLifeCaribbeanPirate wrote:

You're trying to bring up a lot of good points here, but it's important not to get too emotional. You start exaggerating and oversimplifying things like this, and you just kind of sound rant-y and it's very hard to take your arguments seriously, even though I (mostly) agree with you.

As an example of what I'm talking about: "forced to play one of 3 OP builds blah blah blah DA META THO" reads like nonsense because it is.

You're right. I have an overall recurring frustration that GGG appears to tune everything for 10M DPS 10k life nonsense, and while I think that this factors into the Kosis design flaws, and will continue to be a factor in the future until they address their gap in design and testing, I should have constrained my focus to Kosis specifically and avoided hyperbole about what builds can take him reliably.

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bugslayerjohn wrote:

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cgexile wrote:

If you don't have the longevity or skill around a specific boss, you failed your mission to assassinate him quickly! ;) I mean based on all the things you said it sounds to me like you are doing plenty of damage so it boils down to survivability and skill as your primary issue and not the boss mechanics.

This, right here, is the actual problem. You can't see the issue with Kosis because in your mind the mission is to assassinate him quickly. You are trying to tell me that the only right build is the one that deals high enough damage to dispatch him before he hits me. I'm saying that if someone can fight Kosis for 15 minutes doing low damage but never ever taking a hit large enough to kill them, they should be able to clear him. They've EARNED the kill at that point. Right now that is NOT the case with Kosis.

You sound a little more reserved - thanks.

No I am not trying to school you.

Where did I say anything about what is or is not the right build vs this boss? The portion you quoted was in the context of what the Assassin class specifically is designed for and not me suggesting anything about other classes being right or wrong for Kosis. You somehow overreached for that conclusion and went on another rant. Me saying that you failed to assassinate him was more of a joke with you being an Assassin and all; hence the simple wink ;)

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bugslayerjohn wrote:

The gaslighting is real. If you're playing heralds, or Hollow Palm, or something else that one-shots all of the content in the game, I absolutely don't understand how it's possible to read my post and then say "well that's not my experience". It IS your experience, you are on the "use a meta-trivialize-all-game-content build and he's killable" side of the spectrum. I totally agree that this works. I contend however that the game should be playable without having to trivialize all game content.

I've played those builds, I know they exist, I wanted to play something else this league. My build is fine, it's not outrageous, but it's no pushover. It perfectly straddles that line where the game is fully playable, but I do have to actually PLAY it. Heresy, I know. When was the last time you actually played the fight on a map boss? I have all league, and it's awesome.

I had no intention of running hollow palm this league. At the time I started in that direction it made sense from a budget perspective, since weapons were going to cost a lot more than I had.

And I thought I made it pretty clear that it hasn't always been easy. Running white 100% delirium guardian maps is a result of failing typical rares before that.

The dps check is definitely up there, but as you said you're actually fighting the bosses. The problem is that balance is currently focused on making them massive bags of hitpoints. It's not specific to kosis, or at least limited to.

Fighting plain 100% delirium Kosis is surprisingly serene. But fighting a modded Kosis can range between a breeze to nigh unkillable.