General Discussion - Game is turning into a glass cannon only builds - Forum - Path of Exile (2024)

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Phrazz wrote:

Another answer, is PoE 2 - where if you die to a boss, you have to start the fight again.

Which is something I'm looking forward to because I'm so sick of the portal system and gatekeeping with fragments and long grinds. A Dark Souls approach I can get behind, because then you can actually "git gud" by being allowed to learn immediately, rather than having to wait XX-XXX maps to try again. The gimmick bosses they have added in recent years are just really bad. OG Shaper and Uber Elder is where they peaked. Sometimes, simple is better and less is more.

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BaumisMagicalWorld wrote:

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Phrazz wrote:

Another answer, is PoE 2 - where if you die to a boss, you have to start the fight again.

Which is something I'm looking forward to because I'm so sick of the portal system and gatekeeping with fragments and long grinds. A Dark Souls approach I can get behind, because then you can actually "git gud" by being allowed to learn immediately, rather than having to wait XX-XXX maps to try again. The gimmick bosses they have added in recent years are just really bad. OG Shaper and Uber Elder is where they peaked. Sometimes, simple is better and less is more.

We don't even know what the endgame looks like so we might also get maps with portals as endgame content. So nothing has changed in this case other than players being unable to death rush content, which is more than welcome and should also be added to poe1. Ruthless has already the boss health reset so it shouldn't be that hard to add the same setting to the normal mode.

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Pashid wrote:

We don't even know what the endgame looks like so we might also get maps with portals as endgame content. So nothing has changed in this case other than players being unable to death rush content

Aye, we don't, but GGG are not stupid. I think they very much understand that having both is a truly terrible idea and will definitely lose them players.

The EXP penalty has been a staple complaint over the years (and I personally despise it), and so is the portal approach in combination with how rare some encounters are and how easy it is to have an instance crash and all portals lost. That penalty is a personal gripe I have with the game, mainly because I most enjoy playing builds that end up being laggy because the game engine can't handle it. That's why it took me far longer than normal to get to level 99 in Affliction on my CWDT character. And it was such a chore that it put me off from going for the home stretch to 100.

The Starfall Crater boss this league is a perfect example of how it should be. Same as Abyss bosses in maps, once that instance spawns, you can die several times without losing a portal; just re-enter the area and learn from your mistakes. The only risk you have left in that scenario is an instance crash, which is rather rare by comparison.

That is how it should be, in my personal opinion. There's nothing wrong with making encounters hard, but you have to make the access to it fair. 1 portal bosses like the other two bosses are a no-go. Thankfully, those are fairly easy after you've fought them at least once.

Let me elaborate (sorry, a bit of a rant incoming):

I have issues with bosses like Maven, that I find poorly designed, mainly due to their gimmicks that have nothing to do with skillful play anymore. The fight is cool until you get to Memory Game. The single mechanic in the fight that makes me loathe it. I have short-term memory loss problems (below average and may be first signs of early dementia), meaning I cannot remember the sequence in phase 2 where she does the longer one. Doesn't matter how many times I practice, I cannot do it. The short one is not a problem. How is that fair design? Everything else in it is about skill and hand-eye coordination.

Then you got Searing Exarch. Stupid ball phase that is ridiculously hard without a totem and probably impossible without a teleport skill (unless you can tank a ball). Even Shaper's bullet hell phase is easier to dodge. And he spawns dark orange runes on the ground while using orange abilities in a dark brown/orange arena. They reduce your maximum Fire Resistance and block your Life Recovery. Nice. Accidentally step on one and it's time to instantly kill myself with Eye of Innocence. Which happens a lot cuz I can't see sh*t due to no layering of skill effects. Fun.

Now, let's take a look at Eater of Worlds. Only issue I have with this fight is the "Energize the spheres!" phase. Completely counterintuitive, going HARD against PoE enemy design, because the game wants you to remain in them for a brief period of time while being chased by a f*cking laser. This reminds me very much of the Crucible stone circle BS, though that one was much more manageable. How they expect your average player getting there for the first time to figure it out is beyond me. And then they feel cheated because of the counterintuitive design and locked access behind dozens of maps.

Infinite Hunger is one of those bosses that just don't make sense. He has a debuff that removes Armour and Evasion Rating. This would be fine if GGG hadn't spent the last couple years removing all other forms of direct Physical Damage defenses from the game. Flat PDR is practically gone, so is Phys taken as Ele now (more or less). That leaves you with Endurance Charges, for the most part. Grace and Determination were nerfed hard, so what is fair about this debuff now? Especially the first couple times you fight him, how can you reasonably expect for this fight to be any kind of enjoyable?

Sirus. If they removed the storms, it would be a far better fight. Everything else in that arena is imo completely fine. It has, once again, very much counterintuitive design, because you have to wait for the storm to pass and then walk directly underneath him so he gets down from his chair. Just... no.

And yeah, I've killed all of these bosses, by the way, feel free to check my profile. I'm not complaining because I couldn't beat them or something. I am complaining because I beat them and find the fights suck.

IMO they did, in fact, peak with Uber Elder. You get to experience both bosses separately beforehand and become familiar with their own mechanics, and then they are both used in that fight, but some mechanics are skipped. Nothing about that boss fight is unfair in any way. Literally nothing. Even Zana says "Come to me, Exile! Quickly!", so that's another very clear sound cue.

And this is not a matter of me being bad at the game or something. I'm a huge fan of the Souls series. I played through every Souls game (Sekiro, Demon's Souls and Bloodborne excluded -> but I watched Let's Plays and streams) and Elden Ring. I have close to 900 hours in Elden Ring alone. Over 1500 hours in all of them combined. I beat every boss and collected everything in all games. So, this is also not a matter of "uh, too hard" - no, I don't mind it when it's difficult content. But I absolutely despise random unfair bullsh*t.

GGG really needs to step up their game in boss design. When Chris said "we are good at designing bosses" - those times are long gone. Iirc he said that when we had Shaper and Uber Elder as pinnacle content. They have introduced backwards designed bosses since. And I cannot fathom why they continue to refuse to tweak these fights to be more fair. Instead, they did another 180 from "Uber bosses are designed to be for the players who seek the extra challenge to test their builds, with no extra rewards over their regular boss encounters" (paraphrasing from an interview before they added Uber bosses). Now, S-tier rewards are locked behind Uber bosses, among other things.

So, yes, I am, in fact, very much looking forward to PoE 2 and I hope it comes with improvements.

/rant XD

Hard agree with every part of that rant. Everything that came after Uber Elder was worse, that encounter is the peak of boss design in this game by a landslide.

I think GGG moving to "not so fun" boss designs is a matter of powercreep. Bosses that attack you while not invulnerable and that have add phases to keep your flask up will just get trivialized by the absurd amounts of damage players can get and GGG doesn't want to fix that or is, understandably i guess, afraid of doing so for the backlash it might yield.

There is a similar trend with t17 maps. Aside from build bricking mods the most dangerous thing about those maps are area effects. Volatile cores, eater spheres, exarch/sirus ground degens, instabile tentacle fiends etc. As a rule of thumb, the most dangerous stuff isn't the monsters, it's the sh*t they leave behind while dying. It's not an issue per se but it feels a little weird design wise. You'd suspect to fight monsters in an ARPG but then monsters are the least threatening thing around...

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Baharoth15 wrote:

You'd suspect to fight monsters in an ARPG but then monsters are the least threatening thing around...

Unless they have proximity shield

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Johny_Snow wrote:

Why do you need 10 mirrors to enjoy the game?

Because some people only seem to have fun with characters that one-shot everything and never die. They dislike any other aspect of the game, and if they could they would just buy an off-the-shelf character and play that.

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Johny_Snow wrote:

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Baharoth15 wrote:

You'd suspect to fight monsters in an ARPG but then monsters are the least threatening thing around...

Unless they have proximity shield

I play melee like 80% of the time so i couldn't care less.

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Johny_Snow wrote:

Why do you need 10 mirrors to enjoy the game?

If you can hoard that much mirrors, why not use them? That's literally the point of the game too, to get the best gear, not to do your best Jeff Bezos impression.

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BaumisMagicalWorld wrote:

Aye, we don't, but GGG are not stupid. I think they very much understand that having both is a truly terrible idea and will definitely lose them players.

The EXP penalty has been a staple complaint over the years (and I personally despise it), and so is the portal approach in combination with how rare some encounters are and how easy it is to have an instance crash and all portals lost. That penalty is a personal gripe I have with the game, mainly because I most enjoy playing builds that end up being laggy because the game engine can't handle it. That's why it took me far longer than normal to get to level 99 in Affliction on my CWDT character. And it was such a chore that it put me off from going for the home stretch to 100.

The Starfall Crater boss this league is a perfect example of how it should be. Same as Abyss bosses in maps, once that instance spawns, you can die several times without losing a portal; just re-enter the area and learn from your mistakes. The only risk you have left in that scenario is an instance crash, which is rather rare by comparison.

That is how it should be, in my personal opinion. There's nothing wrong with making encounters hard, but you have to make the access to it fair. 1 portal bosses like the other two bosses are a no-go. Thankfully, those are fairly easy after you've fought them at least once.

Let me elaborate (sorry, a bit of a rant incoming):

I have issues with bosses like Maven, that I find poorly designed, mainly due to their gimmicks that have nothing to do with skillful play anymore. The fight is cool until you get to Memory Game. The single mechanic in the fight that makes me loathe it. I have short-term memory loss problems (below average and may be first signs of early dementia), meaning I cannot remember the sequence in phase 2 where she does the longer one. Doesn't matter how many times I practice, I cannot do it. The short one is not a problem. How is that fair design? Everything else in it is about skill and hand-eye coordination.

Then you got Searing Exarch. Stupid ball phase that is ridiculously hard without a totem and probably impossible without a teleport skill (unless you can tank a ball). Even Shaper's bullet hell phase is easier to dodge. And he spawns dark orange runes on the ground while using orange abilities in a dark brown/orange arena. They reduce your maximum Fire Resistance and block your Life Recovery. Nice. Accidentally step on one and it's time to instantly kill myself with Eye of Innocence. Which happens a lot cuz I can't see sh*t due to no layering of skill effects. Fun.

Now, let's take a look at Eater of Worlds. Only issue I have with this fight is the "Energize the spheres!" phase. Completely counterintuitive, going HARD against PoE enemy design, because the game wants you to remain in them for a brief period of time while being chased by a f*cking laser. This reminds me very much of the Crucible stone circle BS, though that one was much more manageable. How they expect your average player getting there for the first time to figure it out is beyond me. And then they feel cheated because of the counterintuitive design and locked access behind dozens of maps.

Infinite Hunger is one of those bosses that just don't make sense. He has a debuff that removes Armour and Evasion Rating. This would be fine if GGG hadn't spent the last couple years removing all other forms of direct Physical Damage defenses from the game. Flat PDR is practically gone, so is Phys taken as Ele now (more or less). That leaves you with Endurance Charges, for the most part. Grace and Determination were nerfed hard, so what is fair about this debuff now? Especially the first couple times you fight him, how can you reasonably expect for this fight to be any kind of enjoyable?

Sirus. If they removed the storms, it would be a far better fight. Everything else in that arena is imo completely fine. It has, once again, very much counterintuitive design, because you have to wait for the storm to pass and then walk directly underneath him so he gets down from his chair. Just... no.

And yeah, I've killed all of these bosses, by the way, feel free to check my profile. I'm not complaining because I couldn't beat them or something. I am complaining because I beat them and find the fights suck.

IMO they did, in fact, peak with Uber Elder. You get to experience both bosses separately beforehand and become familiar with their own mechanics, and then they are both used in that fight, but some mechanics are skipped. Nothing about that boss fight is unfair in any way. Literally nothing. Even Zana says "Come to me, Exile! Quickly!", so that's another very clear sound cue.

And this is not a matter of me being bad at the game or something. I'm a huge fan of the Souls series. I played through every Souls game (Sekiro, Demon's Souls and Bloodborne excluded -> but I watched Let's Plays and streams) and Elden Ring. I have close to 900 hours in Elden Ring alone. Over 1500 hours in all of them combined. I beat every boss and collected everything in all games. So, this is also not a matter of "uh, too hard" - no, I don't mind it when it's difficult content. But I absolutely despise random unfair bullsh*t.

GGG really needs to step up their game in boss design. When Chris said "we are good at designing bosses" - those times are long gone. Iirc he said that when we had Shaper and Uber Elder as pinnacle content. They have introduced backwards designed bosses since. And I cannot fathom why they continue to refuse to tweak these fights to be more fair. Instead, they did another 180 from "Uber bosses are designed to be for the players who seek the extra challenge to test their builds, with no extra rewards over their regular boss encounters" (paraphrasing from an interview before they added Uber bosses). Now, S-tier rewards are locked behind Uber bosses, among other things.

So, yes, I am, in fact, very much looking forward to PoE 2 and I hope it comes with improvements.

/rant XD

No

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BaumisMagicalWorld wrote:

Instead, they did another 180 from "Uber bosses are designed to be for the players who seek the extra challenge to test their builds, with no extra rewards over their regular boss encounters" (paraphrasing from an interview before they added Uber bosses). Now, S-tier rewards are locked behind Uber bosses, among other things.

To be fair it's a good approach as this sort of system has been proven as good across many games even in different games genres with the normal fights being just a "learn the fight" tutorial mode and Ubers being the real rewarding content.
You can always work your way up to if you want to make your build even more busted with the Uber exclusive drops but those are often not mandatory.

I feel like they should top it up even more and make Uber related challenges and loot a solo achievement to encourage more players to get to the level of either skill or character power to run the content themselves instead of buying challenges or Uber exclusive loot all over again.