Pinnacle Bosses Sequential One-shot mechanics feel cheap
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Let me explain
TLDR; Bossing during the campaign feels fulfilling and engaging, but that feeling does not carry through to pinnacle bosses. The feeling of it being a battle of attrition is lost primarily due to unforgiving one-shots and strings of one-shot mechanics; I am looking at you Arbiter. Difficulty is something that can vastly enhance the feeling of satisfaction and achievement, but how difficulty is implemented into Pinnacle bosses does not feel fun... for me at least. Throughout each of the end of Act bosses, the encounters presented unique challenges and it felt fair. You were allowed to make some mistakes within the fight and be able to recover the run. Getting hit by a telegraphed one-shot and getting chunked or outright killed felt punishing, but I knew I just needed to dodge better next time and I could progress the fight. When you reach the Pinnacle bosses, everything that made bossing fun in the campaign no longer exists. Bosses carry an arsenal of one-shot mechanics that they love to spam and in the case of Arbiter, it is not just a single one-shot, but a string of one-shots that come in several forms. I get wanting things to be difficult and I am a pro difficulty, but having your attempt be completely wiped because you messed up once on a 16-string (hyperbolic, but damn near feels like it) one-shot fiesta because the Arbiter decided to do two of his one-shot sequences back to back feels extremely cheap. I am not asking for the removal of the mechanics themselves, but I do think sequential one-shots are a problem that does not feel rewarding for the player. Some solutions off the top of my head that retain difficulty while being more forgiving might be: 1. A debuff that stacks based on getting hit by certain mechanics and will instantly kill the player once it hits a certain count. 2. Have the mechanics hit players hard (60-75%) and force players to use recovery resources (flasks, ES regen, Meditate, etc). These are by no means the best solution, but I feel like they are more engaging and fair than what we have currently. Solution 1 opens up the opportunity for a gameplay feature that could be implemented into the fight that allows players to remove some/all stacks. Solution 2 relies on the idea that recovery resources are limited in fights and should be used to help you continue the fight. As it stands, what even is the point of a health pot if a player never gets the opportunity to use it? Last bumped on Jan 22, 2025, 12:56:57 AM
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" A hack, but the easiest option to address the problem while still forcing players to respect the mechanics. Which is why D4 did it. " This is the way it SHOULD work, but this game (like, to be fair, most loot ARPGs) gives the player way too much and way too easy recovery for this to be effective. Especially Energy Shield. Any boss that can't follow up with equivalent dangerous attacks in 2-3 seconds is just hitting the same section of shield over and over, so the designer has no choice but to up the damage, eventually turning into one-shots regardless of defences. There would need to be pretty massive changes to HP/shield sustain (or some boss-specific mechanics with similar effect) to be able to have reasonably balanced late game boss attacks. |
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" Yeah, but you're a PoE 1 player, you know that's always been a thing with all pinnacle bosses. I'm with you, though. Everything should be tankable. |
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Chill. They cant nerf op builds for a month. IF they start nerfing OP sh%t with instant hotfixes THEN we can talk about bosses balance. But atm any player who follows OP meta builds - oneshot all bosses, thats truth :(
PS:i did max lvl arbitr with 150div setup - i didnt even see 2nd phase and THIS IS AFTER PATCH. Meanwhile my second character is 30-50ish and i had to go through all phases where i saw A LOT OF RANDOM cringe. For example i couldnt take some fire spheres without blink, this is really bad gamedisign (i had 35 ms boots). So u have 2 choices. Follow op meta cuz they won't nerf it for months and months or suffer if u want to do some bosses without op staff. Ur choice IMO devs have to nerf all op to the ground so the bosses will be fine (maybe add 1 more try for last lvl arbitr) or buff bosses to the sky and force people to build mirror setup to defeat them. Otherwise i see no logic here. As for me i leave this project untill i see where it goes. Basicly i agree with author at some takes, but not in reality when poe2 is a copy of poe1. For poe1 people can just log into poe1. lol |
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" One thing to keep in mind, I am only referring to sequenced one-shot mechanics like Arbiter meteors. There is no good reason those should one-shot when there are several of them you need to dodge consecutively. Those could easily be made to chunk health bars and unless your recovery is insane, you can only mess up once or twice before you wipe. Big brain idea, combine both the stacking mechanic and heavy hits. Force players to dodge mechanic out of fear for the stacking debuff while also defence checking players so they can't face tank too many in a row. | |
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yeah one shot mechanic is not fun, it's force the player to just copy OP build that can melt the boss in 2 secs, which is not a fun way to fight, specially the pinnacle bosses. For me, player must experience this beautifully crafted choreography of movement and skills of the pinnacle bosses but without this bs one shot mechanic.
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