Everything To Do With The King In The Mists Is Poorly Designed

First off, red light/green light mechanics are bad, don't do them. That means movement yes/no. Don't do it. It's not fun. I can't stress this enough. It is NOT fun. Or engaging. It's bad. NOBODY wants to have to deal with that. I am sure some designers at GGG thought it might be engaging, it hasn't been done before, but there's a reason for that. Don't do it.

Don't force players to listen for a very specific audio cue that can be different each time linked to a debuff that you only see in a tiny corner of the screen unless somehow you can see through the ten billion different particle effects all covering the screen and overlapping.

Don't ever have the boss GIVE audio cues in a way that is difficult to understand, this boss in particular has several different lines of dialogue to indicate his attacks and they're all different and some aren't even in English, this wouldn't even be a problem necessarily if it was at least the same cue every time but it's always different.

I would argue that other areas of POE have these kinds of problems already but that's a whole other discussion so I'm going to continue focusing only on, the King in the Mists.

You can't store back to back fights which greatly impedes learning, you only get to fight him, ONCE, every so many, (many, many, many) maps, so you're going to forget everything that you learned.

And, why is he so hard in the first place? WHY in the name of Innocence is he a boss you really need a super overtuned build to even beat? It's the League mechanic, why is it on par with some pinnacle bosses or even harder in the sense that if you mess up you die? No, it's definitely harder because at least with Uber Sirus (or insert your favourite pinnacle boss here) you get six portals.

I thought this was supposed to be FUN?

Off-topic but that has been my experience with Affliction in general, even interacting with it is a death sentence for many many builds. Even my 300+ divine flicker build has only a reasonable time clearing out Affliction-juiced maps. It's unplayable for many builds.

Is this game about build variety, or not? It should be doable on all builds.

Why is almost every one of his attacks some miscellaneous waving of a staff followed by a completely un-telegraphed and difficult to see something-or-other? That's his slam, you just need to know it's coming or else you hear/see something kind of maybe happen and go wait is he doing something and bam it comes out, why isn't there a telegraph ring or SOMETHING?

Why are the degens in this fight so aggressively damaging and spawn constantly in the second phase? Why are the actual visual effects so difficult to see? Everything is black on black or the darkest deepest purples on black and even on a relatively nice monitor it's very difficult to even tell what damages you.

By the way, this fight TANKS my FPS, I go from like maybe 70fps to 35 or less maybe during it, it's insane. What the heck? Didn't have time for an optimization pass?

And on top of all of this you only see him... once a month every couple hundred maps by my reckoning, by my own experiences, even when you're deliberately doing nothing but searching for him. Seriously. I am not joking.

I just want to stress that, like literally at least 100 or more T16s over the span of the past month and a half of playing, and I've seen the Crux of Nothingness spawn once. What.

I don't want to hear ohhh well that's just bad RNG right there, I know that, it's obvious, but there should never be a situation where I get put into just the 'bad RNG' bin and trashed because I guess it's expected some players are just abjectly miserable during their playtime.

Why is his spawn rate so vastly insignificant? Why isn't it buffed until you actually clear the quest? I mean, what's to be afraid of if it WERE a guaranteed fight until you get your first clear? You don't get any rewards for failing, so why is he so hard to even reach!?

It's just ridiculous.

It's just frustrating.

And it's not fun.

I feel very similarly to you and just want to add that limiting movement in the way the did doesn't really jive with poe when standing still usually means instant death for a lot of builds. Even very very tanky builds like RF love to keep dodging and weaving around things instead of getting hit by telegraphed moves.

I also feel if he had 6 portals than it would alleviate some of the issues, especially the bugs in phase 2 and 3.

I also feel the boss fight is too rare, affliction way to rippy, and the reward practically nonexistent for a lot of league mechanics. It works very well with some, and doesn't like mixing with others.

The layers of RNG finding him are extreme. It is possible for a player to find him multiple times in a row, and completely possible a player playing everyday has yet to find him.

There is a limit to how many events you can find before you get booted out and telling directions and what path to take is dubious at best.

Although some players say otherwise, its pretty RNG heavy at best.