Praise for the league bosses, finally some well designed boss fights !

Hello,

I don't know if other share my pleasure at fighting the new league bosses, but seeing at how much the design evolved from previous boss fight, I wanted to congratulate the team.

My take is that most pinnacle boss in path of exile are poorly designed :

The "old ones" like shaper, elder or atziri are pretty much irrelevant nowadays and the boss fights are tedious because of all the waiting / running around you're forced to do. But the boss themselve are okayish.

We had the "dark ages of bosses" with both Maven and Sirus

Sirius can teleport you and you have a split second to react as to where to run, and that's when the red bubble let you enter the arena. Too much visual clutter on the arena itself, the uber version is even worse somehow ?

Maven has a mini game of "simon sais" in it and well... that's just bad game design. To this day, these two are still top 2 in my "worst boss in history" hall of fame.

But over the years, we've seen the team growing and learning from its mistakes, all the Guards in Sanctum and Lycia were okay. You have enough time to react to their attack, you can see where they were aiming and move accordingly. Playing sanctum with a melee character isn't great but it's doable.

Both the exarch and eater of worlds are on the same level or so (still hates the magma bubble of uber exarch with the demon but that's uber so it's okay).

Now in 3.25 we clearly see the POE2 influence and that's great, we have time to read stuff happening to us, I never had to search for a video that tells me what to do at any point... and overall it felt GOOD to fight them. It's not a contest of "my dps burst outmatch yours" but there's little choregraphy involved.

We can even read what's happening in the arena ! I was really surprised to see the black knight not showering me with thousands of meteors with 15 different colours and also hidden ground effect.

I was a bit scared to see so much focus on boss fight in each and every POE2 showcase, but it seems the team is handling boss fight better than before and again, I just wanted to congratulate the design team for these.

The whole post is “if it’s difficult to me, then it’s bad”.

The league bosses are fine early game, at endgame it becomes “stand and press 1 button, ignoring all the mechanics”. It is not a good design for bosses.
Maven, Elder, Shaper and Sirus are still the best bosses in the game.
You should be frightened when you approach a boss otherwise it’s not a boss. It’s a loot pinjata.

Looking at the league bosses, poe goes d4 way. A bad sign.