Oak fight on Normal with Ranger

So, I just had the most boring few minutes of Path of Exile, otherwise an awesome game, and I thought I'd give my feedback.

TL;DR - Oak continually Leap Slammed at me for five straight minutes before I portaled to town out of sheer boredom. I came back and literally stood in place and let him wail on me while I shot him full of arrows and drowned in flask whatever-is-in-those-things. Pls fix unlimited enemy skill usage.

I love how this game works most of the time - if you pay attention and use your skills smartly, you can defeat just about anything. Stop paying attention and start spamming random skills and you're dead, at level 60 or at level 6 (I assume it's the same at 60, haven't reached nowhere near that yet).

That said, every so often I encounter something that makes me go "bull-[censored]-[censored again]". Oak with Ranger with next to no ES is one of those things.

First I went how I usually go - I have all of the elemental arrow skills (plus rain of arrows) so I use whatever is doing the most damage (and rain of arrows when they clump up or I have mana to waste). But Oak takes very little physical damage. Which I'm perfectly OK with. And his Leap Slam does a ton of damage, and with no rapidly regenerating ES, I really need to avoid getting hit. I'm OK with that, too. So I run around, stopping to fire an arrow or rain and I get Leap Slammed. And it hits. Every. Single. Time.

But whatever. He has eleventy hundred accuracy with Leap Slam. Deal with it. Eventually I run out of flask charges so I resort to running in a circle confusing poor Oak with navigating the tents, while I wait for my pitiful health regen to get me back up to full. So I'm running around in circles for five minutes. And he's Leap Slamming every second he has line of sight on me. Since I'll be running around like a moron for a while I decide to make an experiment. I fetch him from the tent he was stuck behind and start running circles in the middle of the camp. And he still Leap Slams at me continually for five minutes. Continually. For five minutes.

What the flying orangutans? Either he has several thousand mana or crazy mana regen, or (as it seemed to me) he has no limit on how much he can Leap Slam.

Eventually (seeing that the poison cloud from Poison Arrow does nothing to him) I portaled back to town, got an extra health flask in my belt and got back. And just stood in place, because every other skill he's got does heaps less damage than Leap Slam and I can evade them almost half the time (unlike Leap Slam, which, as I said, hit me every single time despite not being a spell). So I stood in place and let him wail on me for a minute while I shot him full of elemental and regular arrows. It was the most boring fight I've ever had in PoE.

So I guess my suggestion is, can we please have skill using enemies not be able to continually use them until the end of time?

P.S. I know my build and/or skill usage is probably totally wrong for Oak and there's probably a smarter way to fight against him (my high ES Which tore him a new one easily with, IIRC, Firestorm). And, in fact, he might be a Str hero with a ton of mana/mana regen. What I'm saying is, the guy continually Leap Slammed me for five straight minutes. Even if it's perfectly within the game's rules, it feels like being cheated.

I agree... posted something similar in a different thread, imo good solution would be to add a new skill to Oak's skillset and introduce cooldowns to all his skills.

Have you tried with Bear Trap? (Dunno if it works on boss, but could be the solution).

Still, Oak is a Gear-check boss.

IMO, thats what makes it better. If Oak would be easier then it wouldnt recommend people to party up. Last night i had to, literally had to party with people to kill Kraytin in Cruelty mode. It was fun for me. Its just my 2 cents.

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Bea5T wrote:

IMO, thats what makes it better. If Oak would be easier then it wouldnt recommend people to party up. Last night i had to, literally had to party with people to kill Kraytin in Cruelty mode. It was fun for me. Its just my 2 cents.

All content in an aRPG is supposed to be soloable, being forced to group is really bad. And I think the point here really isn't that Oak is too hard and needs a nerf, it's the way the fight vs. Oak looks and feels.. and it looks extremely silly/ridiculous and I really think making the fight more tactical would be an improvement to the game.

This is primarily why Flicker-strike mobs are stupid to fight against. I really hope they change the way mob skills work.

As for the suggestion someone gave to use beartrap; since oak keeps spamming leap slam, he just jumps over the beartrap, or directly on top of it, destroying it or ignoring it. In either case it does no damage to him.

I understand your point, but every char has its own weaknesses. I destroy packed of mobs with melee attacks, but flicker strike and Oaks "Humping" ability is my weakness. Idk about you guys but if i were able to kill everything, then it kind of breaks the point of strengths and weaknesses? I assume that Melee fighters want flickering strike mobs or Oaks "Hump" because then they dont have to run around killing archer mobs who run away (Their weakness).

If we were to talk about Oak spamming that ability, maybe thats a bit too harsh, i agree, but its NOT IMPSSOBILE :).

As a shadow, playing on normal, Oak didn't give me too much trouble. Challenging enough that I felt I was tested but I didn't need to portal during the fight. He didn't seem to spam his leap against me from what I can remember.

Were bows your only option? I'm not too far past that point, and I'm finding I can't just rely on my claws. Have started using a bow for picking off the nastier range monsters / vaal totems, using the claw damage for focussing down the higher tier monsters. Using just one weapon set isn't viable for me now, and I think that's actually rather engaging.

For any boss enemy though, spamming the same attack constantly doesn't sound good from the "fun" perspective. I can't really comment on the balance side though - I'm not yet experienced enough to give accurate input.

Use the tents to your advantage, he cant really leap slam well around them, run around the corner, shoot him, run back around corner hide from the leap slam.

Totally soloable, just takes a few minutes of being careful to take him down.

It's pretty much the same for a summoner witch (I posted about this already). I'm sick of leap slam enemies overuse of this skill. The goat men also use this when they are standing right next to you but just out of range of normal melee. In addition to causing dsync it just looks retarded.

In Oak's case he uses the skill so much, combined with lag and dsync, that you can't really hit him with single target ranged attacks especially if you are the only target. Agree with the OP completely, cool downs for enemy skills plz.