Boss design - have you guys reached a creative dead end?

"

johnKeys wrote:

"

Reinhart wrote:

"

Phrazz wrote:

GGG have funneled themselves into bullet-hell boss design. I fear there's no way out of it, unless they greatly reduce player speed and recovery in PoE2.

I hope we don't get any of these bullet-hell bosses ...

The early bosses were good because of the slow pace of early PoE.
...

Well said, JohnKeys.

I loved the new fights and killed all 4 first try.

Just gonna drop my casual's gripe here: Doedre is the Mother of all Curses. Yet whenever I have to fight her in the Acts (several gorramed times!) her curses aren't mitigatable by flasks or Ascendancy mechanics. That's BS. If I prepare to face her, I should be rewarded with a better fight, not a fight in which I get curse-spammed as if I had never given a single thought toward her powers.

And aside from Doedre? Real curses are pretty much trivial. So why do those mitigation abilities even exist? Not cool! =0[.]o=

"

Raycheetah wrote:

Just gonna drop my casual's gripe here: Doedre is the Mother of all Curses. Yet whenever I have to fight her in the Acts (several gorramed times!) her curses aren't mitigatable by flasks or Ascendancy mechanics. That's BS. If I prepare to face her, I should be rewarded with a better fight, not a fight in which I get curse-spammed as if I had never given a single thought toward her powers.

And aside from Doedre? Real curses are pretty much trivial. So why do those mitigation abilities even exist? Not cool! =0[.]o=

I just noticed this last night, she was stacking curses on me, and my curse flask would only remove one curse (from what I could tell)

"

Johny_Snow wrote:

Traps are not puzzles. Figuring out how to abuse the league mechanic is more of a puzzle than traps.

When killing monsters traps don't bother me. That is still kill-monster-get-loot gameplay. Puzzles like traverse this maze in the middle of a boss fight is a big detraction and irritation. Catrina (the boss of the syndicate) was kind of a pain, for example. I kept forgetting I was supposed to touch or attack the corner monuments (or something?) during the fight. So before I'd fight her I'd have to refresh my memory and review a video of the fight.

I think part of the difficulty is designing fights that are challenging, but still fair to a wide variety of builds and players. That isn't always the case either as some fights *are* very difficult for specific archetypes of otherwise equal power level to other builds. But it must be challenging to take into account such a wide variety of builds and create a fight that at appropriate breakpoints isn't borderline absurd mechanically for a chunk of them, trivial for others, and is appropriately difficult for the majority.

I dont like how much it punishes slower and low dps players. Shaper had the beam of death but you could avoid it and if you failed, you knew you messed up and what to improve on. These new bosses are more rng and a damage check than a real challenge. Im rather slow so back then I could make a tanky jugg and tank most of the damage, take it slow and actually learn the mechanics but now it hurts me more than just going full dps. I rather see the 5 sec boss killers be rewarded with a frenzied version of the boss or something instead of the already struggling be punished.

"

Walltrigger wrote:

I dont like how much it punishes slower and low dps players. Shaper had the beam of death but you could avoid it and if you failed, you knew you messed up and what to improve on. These new bosses are more rng and a damage check than a real challenge. Im rather slow so back then I could make a tanky jugg and tank most of the damage, take it slow and actually learn the mechanics but now it hurts me more than just going full dps. I rather see the 5 sec boss killers be rewarded with a frenzied version of the boss or something instead of the already struggling be punished.

That's a good point.
PoE already has a global modifier-stacking system to turn fair fights into insane ones.
I couldn't handle an extra AoE, extra fast, extra damage Guardian Of The Phoenix, but Mathil or team Empy probably can.
I wouldn't go up against The Shaper while The Maven is there shouting "twin!"... but the best players can do it. In HC.

Heck, give the frenzied version a swapped color palette, golden glow and giant wings with the Twitch logo on them - so it looks better on stream or in YouTube.

Every time GGG think about balancing and designing stuff around Streamers, they should instead design intricate ways and modifiers to challenge Streamers, based on a core that's fair and well-made.

I only fought Infinite Hunger and Black Star so far.

Infinite hunger is definitely a good fight in regards of telegraphs and the arena is big enough.

But where i died most was the drowning phase where you need to get back to the arena. The sludge in the drown phase needs more prevalent visual indicators to point you to the portal.


Black Star is nice as well but the Avalanche in combination with the (cold or fire buffed) clones will be a bad combination.

I have now experienced (and finished) all four fights in league, and I must say that I'm pleasantly surprised. I think they all provide a healthy balance between gear-checks, telegraphed heavy attacks/spells and phases. The two things I like the most, are the sound queues and the boss "uptime", where you actually feel that you're fighting the boss, and not avoiding/chasing it constantly (read: Sirus).