The Syndicate Mastermind Bossfight is the worst encounter PoE has had in a long time.
Sirus is the worst. The first 3 phase was a test of dodging attack and escape from maze as well as the tankiness of the build by hitting by die beam, the last phase is hide and seek game and dps check
Mastermind is more manageable after fixing the frequency beat of the totem, just still many player need to be learn it in hard way on explode skeleton
This is the start of forum signature: I am not a GGG employee. About the username: Did you know Kowloon Gundam is made in Neo Hong Kong?
quote from the first page: "Please post one thread per issue, and check the forum for similar posts first"
Sorry, OP, but in a rating of worst designed fights Kat is holding #2d place. I see many mentioned it. Its
1. Sirus
2. Catarina
Also many as Iheard says its worst designed bosses ever they saw. Not only speaking of PoE. Lately poe falling so low at designing gameplay things. Seems like "this is the way".
Good tho we have many other games to play lately! A fresh ones, and even some cool remakes like d2.
Yeah, but they could just redesign those boss fights, they have wrong mechanics because the boss is not strong is just invulnerable and there is nothing that tells what to do, wasting flasks and time, i have about 700 hours on PoE, but for a new player this is even worse, there is no clue to understand the mechanics, before being OBLIGED to rely on the wiki and some guides, you have no idea how many times i have died losing exp and trying in vain to remake syndicate for die again.
it is necessary to destroy the totems, but it is not clear when it can be done, even today not everyone succeeds, but now it is an old content that will no longer be taken into consideration, leaving it with its obvious defects.
Sorry, OP, but in a rating of worst designed fights Kat is holding #2d place. I see many mentioned it. Its
1. Sirus
2. Catarina
Also many as Iheard says its worst designed bosses ever they saw. Not only speaking of PoE. Lately poe falling so low at designing gameplay things. Seems like "this is the way".
Good tho we have many other games to play lately! A fresh ones, and even some cool remakes like d2.
Yeah, but they could just redesign those boss fights, they have wrong mechanics because the boss is not strong is just invulnerable and there is nothing that tells what to do, wasting flasks and time, i have about 700 hours on PoE, but for a new player this is even worse, there is no clue to understand the mechanics, before being OBLIGED to rely on the wiki and some guides, you have no idea how many times i have died losing exp and trying in vain to remake syndicate for die again.
it is necessary to destroy the totems, but it is not clear when it can be done, even today not everyone succeeds, but now it is an old content that will no longer be taken into consideration, leaving it with its obvious defects.
I doubt now they could.
Just because of the latest quality of their releases and overall game gesign choices. Seems like they lost some key figures in dev programming team, and still cannot fill this gap.
Artists part of team is awesome tho.
Its just design and technical ones are bad now.
And maby its management issues too.
Like managers lost actual contact ws the game and actual players community. Im looking at you Chris, yes :)
Top streamers are not those whos worth listening tho. Its their job - playing poe. So listening to them is calling the game to defeat game purpose to be entertaining and fun. Thats the main difference.
Last edited by DarkJen#6961 on Nov 25, 2020, 9:39:03 PM
sirus is far worse than mastermind. i could actually kill mastermind with a budget summoner a few leagues ago. to be fair almost all boss fights in this game are badly designed.
Lol Catarina. She's certainly more janky than previous bosses, but she's far from the worst. Even if she's technically 2nd to Sirus, it's gotta be by an order of magnitude. Her little crawlies can be thwarted by running through them at the right time, similar to managing Shaper's ground degen spheres. It's a clusterfk for sure, but I'd say even metamorph's black volatiles over black ground blood decals over black ground degen is worse design than Catarina.
Play Sirus, then discover a new contempt you immediately regret learning existed.
After wasting time and trying to kill the boss 5-6 times in vain for some mechanics that are not at all intuitive.
Dummy sentence since apparently this is spoiling stuff for most users.
The Caterina final fight was extremely annoying, repetitive, and possibly the worst bossing experience ive played in PoE in a long time. From watching the experiences of others it seems like im not alone in this. In my opinion GGG have taken a massive step backwards in terms of design with this encounter - reverting to all their old tropes that simply do not feel fun to play with and i thought we'd moved past this point in terms of game design.There are several bossfights in the game that feel very well designed, and are extremely fun to do, while also being quite challenging. All of the Delve bosses, Shaper and Elder/Uber Elder are great examples of how ARPG bosses SHOULD be made. Catarina is the total opposite for me.
Disappointing end to the "first time" betrayal experience, im probably not going to ever do this fight again - even though it should be a pisstake once you get the mechanics. Here's why:
Immunity and Phases.
Neither of these are inherently bad things on their own. Uber Elder has immunity mechanics. Delve bosses (eg Krugal) have phases. These are somewhat required to stop the fight being totally trivialised by having a good enough build. The problem is when these Phases require non-intuitive player input to progress the bossfight (ie, not just kill shit) - AND the boss is not only completely immune to damage but is still DPSing at her maximum potential and will one shot you if you arent careful. This just feels terrible. Its a combination of the two worst crutches in boss design, implemented in just about the worst way possible. It turns the fight into something from a puzzle quest game - with some brief interludes to actually play an ARPG.
Un-intuitive mechanics.
You simply have zero clue what to do in the fight if you've never seen it before. At all. My first portal i did the first 1/8 of her HP bar really quickly, then spent the next 5 minutes wandering around the bossfight arena wondering what on earth im meant to do for her to stop being invulnerable. I thought it was a bug, then i went and watched streamers play it - and universally this seems to be what everyone does their first go. Just wander about aimlessly, with no clue what to do, gradually dying to the fully immune boss. With how much the boss moves and pisses about it took some streamers full minutes and all their flasks to even realise she's immune to begin with.
What takes the cake for me is that what you are meant to do with the totems - let them attach their spooky bond to your character - is not only hard to see through the visual clutter of the general shit on screen, but looks exactly like something that should hurt you. Not the way to progress the fight.
The game does a piss poor job of actually expressing what the central fight mechanic actually even is.
Player communication
The fight in general gives me really bad memories of trying to figure out Atziri for the first time way back when, wondering why sometimes id one-shot her phases and other times id just randomly die for no reason. Its the same shit - other than a minor visual clue that you'd never assume is actually relevant to the fight if you didnt already know about it, there is NO indication of what you are meant to do.
In Uber Elder/Shaper these things are expressed really clearly - when one Shaper does his bullet hell, Zana lets you fucking know. In Uber elder when one dude is immune, there is an obvious visual indication that is inkeeping with the rest of the game. If you followed this logic with this fight - you would assume that the totem in the centre is important - as that is what Caterina's old mechanic used to be centred around. Nope. Shit doesnt do anything in the fight whatsoever. Instead the core mechanic is the scenery in the outside of the area, which can't be interacted with and has no indication that it is in fact the core mechanic. We've taken a massive step backwards it seems, from even content as recent as Delve.
There is no intuitive indication when Cat is or isnt immune, there is no indication of what you are meant to do, and even when you do know what to do the fight is janky as shit and a total clusterfuck. Not hard, just tedious.
Just to show that this isnt just me being dumb - here's Tarke's https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7kmAw6G9r0&t=7s first go around with it. At 2 mins he enters the boss. Breezes through the first phase, like i assume any semi-competent build would do. He then spends 2 minutes trying to dps an immune target - realising its not going well assumes its a failing of his build in various ways. Once he figures out she's invulnerable, he tries wandering about, clinking on all the things, even intentionally taking damage to see if that's what triggered the fight progression. After 5 minutes of nothing happening but him slowly dying, he's beginning to think (as i did) that the fight was bugged and that his particular skill was causing a bad interaction, preventing progression. He then spends another 2 and 1/2 minutes arguing with his chat, convincing himself and them the fight is just bugged. Finally - after an eternity in the area with no clue what to do - Tarke decides to Let the boss Kill him intentionally, to see if this fixes the supposed bug. This accidentally triggered the progression. And he didnt even realise how it happened, just that eventually the game decided to let him play again. So he continued to believe that the game was bugged - and it just magically fixed itself - instead of actually working out the mechanic.
I dont blame him. I had an extremely similar first experience, except i didnt accidentally trigger the progression.
GGG: Your experienced, staple players should not be assuming that the game is bugged, and spend nearly 7 minutes in an arena with nothing happening, before they realise the central mechanic to a fight BY ACCIDENT. This is a failure of the design team, the game does not communicate the goal of the fight well enough. Its not fun to have to look up the fight on the Wiki, its doesnt add to the depth or the complexity of the fight to make core mechanics so obscure you either have to look it up or stumble upon them, and it has actively detracted from my enjoyment of Betrayal league to have the final boss be so frustrating and anti-climactic. And i beat the fight eventually - i cant imagine what id feel like if these BS mechanics caused me to fail out of it, and spend another eternity doing safehouses and building my syndicate back up. Or even worse if i had this happen as a new player.
Good feedback. A good read in comparison to pure vent two liners with a lot of exclamation marks.
GGG still has this indy-quality mentality in designing majority of boss fights, even after all this years where you would assume there would be some sorts of learning experience from past mistakes.
Anyways this is how they make hard boss fights. Any of these will apply.
- extra small arenas (this really started with Malachai / PoE 2.0)
- a lof of area-denial zones
- bad visual cues of denial zones or skills: like metamorph,sirus, catty
- immunity phases while area-denial zones spam/fill the arena
Masterpiece of 3.16 lore
"A mysterious figure appears out of nowhere, trying to escape from something you can't see. She hands you a rusty-looking device called the Blood Crucible and urges you to implant it into your body."
IMO, Cat is the most mechanical fight in the game. Not saying she has a lot of mechanics*, but you can't brute force your way through it. Even if you can tank everything including the volatile skeletons, there are a few puzzles in the arena that must be solved else the fight cannot progress. In fact, I'm actually more surprised about why I couldn't find more discussions about this fight recently. Even after I fully understood the mechanics, I would still rank her somewhere above Shaper. Having "It That Fled" or Tora as her lieutenants could also make the fights slightly harder since these two have very hard hitting skills.
*Basically, look for the green pointer below your character indicating to you on which corner you need to stand to break the pylons that are making her invulnerable. Number two, step on the raising skeletons when she says "Rise my children!" or something like that.
Last edited by jeerinho#7997 on Nov 26, 2020, 3:28:10 AM
Admittedly, when I did Mastermind's fight in Betrayal, I sheeply died a lot of times. Mostly because I did not understand why the heck they got immune to damage and what to do after that moment. Then, after my 3rd attempt, I noticed there was a big pointer under by feet which was the same pointer they used back with Forsaken Master in order to show the player where the target was. So I just followed it, I noticed the beam, the tower exploded then I died from the fire DoT while thinking "Oh, so that's how I make her - oh, I've died again. Ok."
After that, I've learnt a bit the fight. I've started taking precautions:
> When in Kulemak mode (when she teleports after killing one of the safehouse leader) always fight with an eye on the Tower and don't frigging jump over her like a sexual harasser when she cleverly teleport in the arm where the Tower is charging its wave,
> When she start spitting the skulls ("Arise my children.") She is vulnerable. Also for the love of Innocence pop up all those skulls because the children are slow crawlers that will start an explody chain reaction on you if one touches you.
> If you actually die because of the chain reaction DO STAY DEAD! The children will explode on your dead corspe and you can respawn in safety
> black+green fire = bad bad DoT don't go there
You know, lots of little things that make the battle quite easier. And without going with a safe build like a Block Gladiator or something.
Frankly after so much time I find it odd that a lv83 Mastermind is a "Deadly encounter" like Shaper. That said, perhaps I feel Shaper difficult because I've never actually done the fight. Perhaps, just like Sirus, just like Mastermind, it only needs some practice - actual practice, not just watching videos - and the battle gets easier.
That said, OP is right in the fact that most boss battles in PoE are not intuitive at all. Wherever you are going against a boss for the first time, even with an almost immortal build you can risk to screw it because of some odd DoT mechanic (thinking about Heart of the Grove's Sacred Suffering) or oneshots aided by unluck (thinking about Sirus' Meteor Maze, or Shaper/Elder's Hammer). We should feel already blessed some of the newest bosses have the decency of telegraphing - Elder is ominously silent the whole time, Delve bosses too, Atziri does not like the chat...
EDIT: that said, indeed:
"
dachoppa wrote:
can't wait for the next post when he discovers that Sirus exists
Path of Exile does not expect the players to understand. It expects them to die. Multiple times. While they try to understand. It's a battle of wits - ragequit or experience: what will come first?
Last edited by Maxtrux#0762 on Nov 26, 2020, 3:46:15 AM
GGG still has this indy-quality mentality in designing majority of boss fights, even after all this years where you would assume there would be some sorts of learning experience from past mistakes.
Anyways this is how they make hard boss fights. Any of these will apply.
- extra small arenas (this really started with Malachai / PoE 2.0)
- a lof of area-denial zones
- bad visual cues of denial zones or skills: like metamorph,sirus, catty
- immunity phases while area-denial zones spam/fill the arena
You forgot
- boss leaves the area entirely or becomes totally invisible and then offscreens you with a hitscan random sudden death event
- auditory cues suffer almost twice the latency as visual cues due to the time it takes the sound clip to play
- spawn shit on player location rather than inside the arena or the boss' weapon range
[19:36]#Mirror_stacking_clown: try smoke ganja every day for 10 years and do memory game
