Even Uber boss fights are balanced towards insta-nuking

He is not nuking them. 1 divine does not get you anywhere near the level of dps you need to nuke the ubers. If you actually watch the fights they are fairly long. Certainly not a 10-second win.

I'm not as good as these people. Not even close. But I've killed Uber Shaper on my league start gear using my glass cannon (who wasn't much of a cannon at that point). Was it deathless, no. I did lose 1 portal to it. But it's not that hard to simply not get hit in that fight. There's a ton of people out there who can do more than just that boss.

I don't dispute that it is MUCH easier to just nuke them. Anyone with no skill can do that. But it isn't true that you CANNOT defeat them with some skill and low gear. Can the vast majority of players do that? No. But it is doable and it is NOT mandatory to have crazy defenses to do it.

People need to understand there is a difference between "YOU personally cannot do it" and "it cannot be done."

Yeah, i guess to nuke them would a bit faster than what he did but he phases uber shaper in like 30 seconds in the seismic trap video. That's still really fast, well, by my standards anyway.

As for just dodging everything. Sure, that can be done if you are good enough at the fights but i'd say there aren't many people overall who can. I won't bother throwing made up numbers around but it's likely a tiny minority who can pull that off.

Personally i can't do it. If i can't tank at least 2 or 3 balls during bullet hell AND stand in degen pools for several seconds without dying i won't be able to win the fight. I've beaten him dozens of times by now but i still can't avoid everything like Jungroan does and i doubt i'll be able to even if i do it a hundred or a thousand times.

I agree it's not mandatory to nuke them but with how absurd their damage output is and how difficult their mechanics are as well as all the ground degen everywhere there is a big incentive to do so as the fights are exponentially harder if you don't. And unlike normal pinnacle bosses they feel borderline impossible to do otherwise. Some people can overcome that with play skill, i can overcome it with turtle mode but most people will just give up. I was about to do just that when i first tried them so i can relate.

TL/DR nuking being mandatory is exaggerated but i can't blame people for feeling that way.

"

sdfesdfe wrote:

That's basically a programmer saying "it worked on my computer". Ignoring.

No idea what this even means.

Still did it on a non insta nuking build. Tr is incapable of insta nuking

So nope to your silly ramble.

"

Baharoth15 wrote:

Yeah, i guess to nuke them would a bit faster than what he did but he phases uber shaper in like 30 seconds in the seismic trap video. That's still really fast, well, by my standards anyway.

As for just dodging everything. Sure, that can be done if you are good enough at the fights but i'd say there aren't many people overall who can. I won't bother throwing made up numbers around but it's likely a tiny minority who can pull that off.

Personally i can't do it. If i can't tank at least 2 or 3 balls during bullet hell AND stand in degen pools for several seconds without dying i won't be able to win the fight. I've beaten him dozens of times by now but i still can't avoid everything like Jungroan does and i doubt i'll be able to even if i do it a hundred or a thousand times.

I agree it's not mandatory to nuke them but with how absurd their damage output is and how difficult their mechanics are as well as all the ground degen everywhere there is a big incentive to do so as the fights are exponentially harder if you don't. And unlike normal pinnacle bosses they feel borderline impossible to do otherwise. Some people can overcome that with play skill, i can overcome it with turtle mode but most people will just give up. I was about to do just that when i first tried them so i can relate.

TL/DR nuking being mandatory is exaggerated but i can't blame people for feeling that way.

That seismic video you saw is his absolute fastest kill (and he made it to complain about how busted seismic still is). He has other videos with other skills that take a lot longer.

Let me ask you this then: GGG's goal is literally to make ubers so hard that only a tiny fraction of the players even have a chance of winning the fight. How would you propose they tune the fights for that then? The entire point is NOT for these fights to be accessible to pretty much any kind of build out there and for people to simply be able to just tank all the hits and eventually win.

In fact, I would argue they didn't go far enough. When ubers were first announced, Chris's wording suggested he was only expecting a couple of dozen players at most out of the six figures in the player base to be able to defeat these fights. And if you only count people who don't just nuke the bosses instantly, that figure may actually be accurate (I don't count myself as one as I can only do Uber Shaper on low gear). The intention is that it takes super high player skill to win when using normal gear. The ability to bypass that by nuking the bosses is just an unfortunate consequence of the game.

People need to stop treating ubers as something everyone should be able to beat.

if they want Ubers to be that aspirational they have to balance their game enough that it's a reality rather than some copium objective, they are numerical bosses and aren't that far beyond the regular variety.

I'd pose a separate statement which is its next to impossible to develop aspirational content for PoE because players have so much scope for growth after a regular developed character. Can't be done until they address that and players would hate it anyway :p

Personally i think the goal is already off. Desperately trying to make stuff that's completely out of whack in terms of balance just to somehow satisfy their "our game is SUUUPPPERRR difficult and only for pros" fetisch is questionable already. The goal when designing content should be to make it fun and engaging. Difficulty is a part of that and it can be high if done right but problems arise when you just focus on making things difficult without giving a single thought to whether it's actually fun or not and that's what happened with some of the ubers.

So if you ask me what GGG should do to make really difficult fights that don't feel like DPS checks and don't invalidate dozens of skill choices then the answer is simple. No random everlasting area denial that is impossible to endure.
Uber Shaper is imo a case they got just right. The mechanics are lethal but dodgeable, the ground degen can be actively managed by the player and even if you missmanage you aren't out of the fight immediately.
Uber Eater is also well done aside from the invulnerbility beam phase that heavily punishes any build without a shit ton of regen.
Uber Maven is good aside from the randomness generated by the spawned bosses.
Uber uber Elder is also ok aside from poop squids which aren't 100% manageable by the player and have an rng factor to them. (You don't know when and where they spawn and if you spot them a second to late because you happened to be on the other side of the arena when they spawned the floor is already fucked up.)

On the other hand Cortex is pretty much a gamble, either cake walk or borderline impossible depending on luck -> shit design.
In the later stages of the fight Exarch covers 70-80% of the arena in degen ground that disables recovery, increases cooldown recovery for movement skills, deals a ton of damage and reduces resists. No counterplay available to any of it and the placement can't be influenced by the player, it's just random. You either make the last half of his life pool really short or you are just fucked. The Minotaurs he summons are also bascially a DPS check, if you can't kill the first before the second or third shows up you get heavily punished. -> shit design².
Sirus is in the same boat. Fills almost the entire arena with degen that's impossible to endure as it disables recovery while dealing damage among other things. Placement here is also random. -> shit design³.

Exarch and Sirus are only "harder" than their normal versions in that you need more DPS if you want to have any chance of doing them. Their mechanics are pretty much the same. The good examples i mentioned add additional things to take care off and increase the punishment for failing them to some extent but ultimately they challenge your ability to manage the mechanics, not your ability to stack DPS.

You say people shouldn't treat ubers as something anyone can beat, and i agree with that.
But GGG takes a good amount of blame for why that's the case. They put the Uber fights in competition with the normal version by being accessed through the same keys which makes running the normal version essentially a waste from an efficiency perspective. They also gave them exclusive drops and or increased droprates for important drops from the normal version. They could have just left the second part entirely and make every pinnacle boss drop an uber key and be done with it.
Certainly there would still be people whining about not being able to do it but it would be way less and they wouldn't have a justified reason for it.

You know, I actually don't disagree with any of that. What you said is reasonable and well thought out.

I can kill all of them. I can kill them deathless sometimes. I can survive Sirus' death beam with 8 beam stacks on me with half health.

But that doesn't change the fact that the game is taking the floor away from you if you take more than 10 second to kill the supposedly Uber bosses. The game's once again actively encouraging instakilling rather than having a balanced build. Why do they keep doing this?