One attempt on rare bosses sucks

Feeling a lot of gaming fatigue from trying to learn rare boss encounters that only give you 1 attempt.

Just tried the expedition boss Olroth for the first time and im pretty bummed out. Did the fight, was fun and not too difficult for my character. Or so I thought.

Olroth's HP hit 0 and he kneeled down for a dramatic death pose. I opened up my inventory to check if it had space for anything that might drop- and then Olroth stood back up and a laser beam killed me in half a second. Apparantly a boss you've never encountered before falling over dead is an indicator of "GET READY FOR PHASE TWO", but only sometimes.

I've been targeting expedition on the atlas and have only found 4 expedition logbooks so far, and this was the only one with the boss. GGG said they want dark souls-like bosses, but most souls-like games let you run into the boss room over and over and over again. That's how people learn the fights so well they can do it on a naked character, level 1, with a broken shortsword.

I feel like the single attempt mechanic is antithetical to the 'souls-like' bosses they've created.

Yeah, it kinda feels currently like it's either you one shot the boss or the boss one shots you. Which both feel terrible, and I feel honestly more shitty when I'm the one doing one shotting because I didn't even get the chance to see boss, oh well but cannot risk it, massive currency on the line :(. I honestly would prefer these bosses to be even 10 times harder, but be able to repeat them until completion. You actually earned that entrance.

Right now the difficulty seems to be mainly in time spend to get materials and currency and over level and overgear, so you can just skip game mechanics. I crave difficulty don't get me wrong, but right now the game punishes you for engaging with it's bosses mechanics. Especially those that require big time investment to get to them.

The other issue this creates, it is sort of gating end game content if you don't play BS one shot build, you would always want to sell materials to enter. Again I don't want these fights to be easier, just be able to repeat them as you rightfully earned the entrance.

Exactly, I feel encouraged to overgear/overpower enemies rather than learn real tactics for the fight.

Anytime a situation gets precarious the smart move is to log out rather than play it through and potentially lose the entry cost.

Just bumping this to highlight how much of an issue this is.
Two weeks of farming expedition and still havent seen Olroth again.

How are we expected to learn these freaking fights

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Niszczyciel#1619 wrote:

Yeah, it kinda feels currently like it's either you one shot the boss or the boss one shots you. Which both feel terrible, and I feel honestly more shitty when I'm the one doing one shotting because I didn't even get the chance to see boss, oh well but cannot risk it, massive currency on the line :(. I honestly would prefer these bosses to be even 10 times harder, but be able to repeat them until completion. You actually earned that entrance.

I couldn't help but laugh when Jonathan complained about players one-shotting the bosses during the interview.

I mean, I get it, but holy shit, what did he expect would happen if bosses regularly one-shot players? Of course nobody is willing to sit around that bastard any longer than necessary and therefore gear their build for max damage, because most defense mechanics simply don't work well enough and are way harder to get to high levels.
That already starts in act 1 with Geonor. Yes, you can learn the mechanics, but if you take too long to kill him, eventually you'll make mistakes so you ramp up that DPS so he doesn't even get the chance to use his skills too often.
Attack is the best means of defense.

Great news! I finally found Olroth again.

https://imgur.com/a/JiUcufr

Apparantly his abilities don't disappear even when you kill him for real. So, so fun learning this boss 1 attempt every 2 weeks at a time.

*okay having Dannig shouting "The hero hath returned!" is just an extra bit of salt in the wound.

The good news is they will be adding multiple attempts to these bosses as well soon.

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KaosuRyoko#1633 wrote:

The good news is they will be adding multiple attempts to these bosses as well soon.

ya, im looking forward to that. But that still wouldn't help with what happened on my most recent attempt. Boss dead, player dead, no re-attempt, no loot.

I agree with the posters statement:

The encounters should be 10 times harder with unlimited attempts when unlocked. The real barrier is farming the key. The reward is beating a well balanced several minute boss fight with peak gear. This is what the devs say the want and envision but actively prevent it.

Current balance is dumb. Overgear, use a meta guide, research the phases and attacks before entry and trivialize the encounter cause the penalty for failure is too much wasted time.

6 attempts is really not enough learn a fight if it were actually a real well balanced challenge. As is you can only attempt fights at level up due to the 10% xp loss once you get to 40% level at 91 or 92 you have to grind 3 days to the next level or loose all that progress due to learning a boss.

In dark souls/elden ring it was not necessary to use a guide or 6 shot either melania or consort radahn. Few ppl cleared these encounter in 6 attempts, most people took hours or days to beat. The reward of figuring out an encounter is just not there because the endgame prohibits it.