Let us retry our voidstone fights if we fail.

So I watched the exilecon online. You said you want the player to learn the fights as the reason you made the bosses regain HP in PoE2 (and i assume ruthless), so they can't beat the bosses by wearing them down while repeatedly dying, but i feel we are facing the opposite problem with some of these endgame bosses.

You get 6 portals every time, which is fine. but also you must use a tradable ticket item (uber elder set, maven writ) per attempt, this is also fine, since otherwise the drops wouldn't be valuable, the encounter wouldn't feel special, no stakes, no excitement.

But the problem from these two individually good design creates is, it feels really bad when someone work all their way up, and fail their voidstone fights, because this is also when they are weak, poor, and have little knowledge and almost no experience of the fight. It's not like they allocated the uber node on their atlas tree for the extra challenge. The game told them to beat this boss.

Back to the PoE2 and ruthless example. I think what's worse than people not learning how to beat the boss is when they simply gave up, either postponing the challenge indefinitely, or to a time when they have so much character power they can essentially skip the mechanics, or worse, getting someone to do it for them, just so they could get the voidstone.

The entry ticket design made those choices much more reasonable logically or psychologically for players in that situation, because it feels really, really bad to not only lose to the boss after dying 6 times, but also lose the ticket that is both valuable, and something players probably worked hard for, and get shut out of what they have been building up to during their entire league.

In the grand scheme of things, having this design also punishes newer players while rewarding enfranchised ones, since the price of tickets are going to be set by the people who can guarantee a kill. For newer players it is logically more sound to grind for currency to buy boss drops, while selling the tickets, whenever they get one.

This is made worse with the addition of ubers. if you can't do uber, you might as well not do it at all, since again the price is set by those most efficient at it. And that's fine, it's trade league, people specialize in things should be more efficient.

I guess what I'm trying to arrive at, is the title of this post. There should be a middle ground, a compromise, that allow everyone to learn how to defeat an endgame boss on their own, if they want to, without either grinding for tickets or character power, while preserving the trade economy.

Let us get 6 fresh portals if we fail, however many times, if it's our first time fighting that boss. It doesn't have to work on every boss or the level 85 versions, or the invitations, but if it's a quest, let us retry if we fail. Let us learn the fight.

The voidstone invitation should drop after every tier 16 map completion until the boss is defeated.

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The voidstone invitation should drop after every tier 16 map completion until the boss is defeated.

that sounds easy to abuse.(saying this as a former game dev)

it would require they be made untradable to prevent people farming and selling them, and remove all invitations once the boss is defeated, or not giving player new ones if they have one, to prevent people farming the loot by stockpiling 100 invitations or something, but that kind of creates, once again, the heist quest contract situation where they either become a nuisance to delete or rot in your inventory if you dont want to do them

Edit: that might be the case for the exarch or eater -- i had no idea since i was able to do those on my first try -- what i had in mind was uber elder and maven (and sirus, before he retired to become just another regular boss more or less like cortex)

Quest invitations are untradeable. And they do have something in place to prevent exactly that abuse. I can't remember exactly what it is but I believe if the instance owner is not present for quest invites then no loot drops.

FWIW im not opposed to some system that allows practice of boss fights but they do have a decent system in place to get the first two void stones which is really all a new player at the game needs. Once they get deeper into the game getting the last two voidstones is pretty easy.

you cant store a quest item outside of your inventory and if you have the quest item in your inventory it cant drop

so you will only get 1 bosskill from the quest and outside of a possible bug,there is no way to change that

*edit

if you let someone else kill the boss and dont enter the area the quest still gets complet because its your map device
not picking up the voidstone at that point only means you miss out on it until you use a real invitation

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ciel289 wrote:

you cant store a quest item outside of your inventory and if you have the quest item in your inventory it cant drop

so you will only get 1 bosskill from the quest and outside of a possible bug,there is no way to change that

*edit

if you let someone else kill the boss and dont enter the area the quest still gets complet because its your map device
not picking up the voidstone at that point only means you miss out on it until you use a real invitation

I do a lot of boss carries for voidstones, whenever they don't pick up the voidstone, kirac has it. Afaik they have to be in the arena at the time though. The situation your describing causes the boss to drop nothing at all, this includes maven invitations. they have to be in there for any loot to drop.

This may be different for bosses that arent in mavens arena idk. like i said i always have them in when i kill.

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gladiatorpie wrote:

Once they get deeper into the game getting the last two voidstones is pretty easy.

No disagreement there.

I feel to a degree, these entry tickets are balanced around people who could do them pretty easily, hence having people refarm the ticket when they've lost their first attempt is an extra feel-bad.

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ciel289 wrote:

you cant store a quest item outside of your inventory

Actually, you can store one in your Crafting Bench and one in your Horticrafting Station. Very useful at times.