Feeback on design philosophy of bosses and end game in general.

This is going to be meta level feedback which the devs can hopefully take into consideration regarding the end game experience and the design philosophy for bosses and their inspiration from souls likes and how none of this works together to create a frustrating experience that is costly time wise, currency wise, and will turn people off from the game as the devs attempt to balance out end game arbiters per second tier builds.

The dark souls design, or, the design of bosses and enemies such that their attacks need to be avoided such as big telegraphed slams, massive AOEs, and MMO style mechanics such as arbiter's flame waves and safe spots. This is fine on it's own, and in fact, it's really great to see this in PoE2. As many have said, the bosses are the BEST part of the game right now.

The problem comes from the rest of end game and the damage output and investment in defenses that counter this design philosophy. This sort of thing works games like Elden ring and DS because if you fail at a boss... you usually respawn close enough (or in later entries, right in front of) the boss to try again and learn from your mistakes. Also, you can build your defenses alongside your offenses so that even if you mess up, you can take a hit or two and get back to it. In PoE2 building into defenses will sacrifice offense, and moreover many of these encounters are designed to kill you through almost any amount of defense even on the lowest difficulty. In another game you likely won't be deleted by a single mistake unless you are making a glass cannon, whereas in PoE2 most defenses and the low life pools mean even building for defense won't stop the one shot mechanic from killing you for one badly timed dodge. Armor is, by design, only for small hits. Evasion, even with acrobatics, is still just a matter of time before the hit gets passed, same with block. When your pass or fail defense layer fails, only ES can save you and some hits are designed to make sure it can't.

In MMOs, you have healers and other party members to res you and get you back in the fight, in PoE2 not only can you not revive other players in end game but are punished for dying by being unable to rejoin your friends at all despite open portals being there, forcing you to sit out and be bored while they have fun.. which is a baffling design decision to say the least.

Now for Xesht, for example, he opens with what is basically a one shot attack that you need to dodge in order to continue the fight and then deal with again as the fight progresses. Maybe this attack can be soaked if you have stacked ES with like, double digit divs worth of gear and capped chaos resists. This is, by the way, on the lowest difficulty for the fight, so it's expected players who are new to PoE are going to want to try the boss fight and work towards their breach atlas passives and *really* challenge themselves when they up the difficultly. I'm writing this from the perspective of that sort of player who is just grabbing what the game gives them, maybe buying a good piece of gear or two for the few divs they got, and then trying to engage with endgame.

The attack is charged up with a voice line. A new player going into the fight has no clue how long this charge up is or when to dodge. They also don't know what is this, is it a melee attack? A line? A cone? Even one who watched the encounter is probably not 100% certain on exactly when the wind up ends and the attack goes off at least until they can deal with it in game a few times. (Though I think designing an encounter to be near impossible without knowledge before hand via an external source such as youtube is just bad. Period.) If they get hit, they die. If they die, the fight's over and they need to farm 300 more splinters. (I know this will change in the future, but we'll get to that.)

By the time they are back in there again, do you think they will now.. having seen the attack one time, be able to nail the timing not once, but the many times they need to dodge it throughout the fight? More likely, they'll not and will botch the timing again, and it's back to farming splinters, because they haven't been able to fight the boss again and it's been a long time since they last saw it.

Even if they have respawns, it's still a matter of time before they click too early by mistake, or are focused on something else, and are immediately punished with death and everything that entails in this game. Loss of Xp, potentially the loss of the ability to try the boss more, etc..

Even with respawns this remains an issue because, for example on arbiter, you have multiple pass or fail mechanics that go off and each one has repeated randomized stages one after the other. Even with practice, and with six respawns, being a half a second late to see where the blue portion of the flame is results in (again on the lowest difficulty for the fight) instant death. It repeats so often when the mechanic is happening that it ups the chance for a minor error, and the window for those errors is very unforgiving.

In other games, you would be able to soak at least one of these mistakes and get back into it, but failing multiple too quickly will result in a loss. Hell even in PoE1, many of the end game bosses can be more forgiving. Maven's beams don't just insta-kill you when you get hit. they punish you by removing all healing for 10 seconds and IMO this was great design. Botch the beams, and you can stay alive by proving you can handle the rest of the fight near perfectly for 10 seconds. Even screwing up the end of the memory game gives you the smallest grace period to recover.. and the memory game is extremely telegraphed and has easier version earlier in the fight and gets harder the longer the fight goes on. Arbiter doesn't have a "three flame waves only" initial version of the attack he just goes right into making you do the whole thing right out of the gate.

Souls likes work because they challenge you with a wild boss that seems daunting, but allow you the ability to practice, make mistakes, learn and eventually perfect the fight.

PoE2 gives you, again on the lowest difficulty for the fight, a wild and daunting challenge that will delete you with one screw up, then either let you respawn to delete you again a few times if you don't get it perfect or deny you the ability to try again until your grind for dozens of hours. You can't practice, and you can't learn. Because of that, the content is best left to players with meta builds costing dozens if not hundreds of div. If you can't guarantee you'll win by deleting the boss so quickly that you aren't given the option to fail, then it's a numbers game you are much more likely to lose than win. The longer you stay in the fight, the more likely you'll make a mistake and in this game that means instant loss. You should just sell access to this content to someone else.

IMO, this needs to change. If you want to have the "souls of aRPGS" then do it right. Drop the damage on these mechanics so you can survive a hit or two.. specifically for the lower difficulties, so players can learn and practice. Maybe add a permanent debuff that makes the player take more damage from a boss' abilities each time they get hit, so that if they are not learning and getting the hang of it those attacks will soon lead to death. Then after they learn and beat the content, they can assign their two points to the tree which can make it easier for them to farm access to that content again but this time the kids gloves are off.

Secondly, design from the perspective of a new player doing the boss for the first time: don't punish them for not knowing what's happening in a fight they've never done in the harshest way possible. Punish them reasonably so they not only can learn, but more importantly want to learn how to do this content. Most players don't want to read a guide, watch a video, and memorize the timings of all mechanics before trying a boss for the very first time.

Most of all, you don't want players to farm access to some of the best content in the game.. cool bosses.. and come the conclusion that it's better to get sell this for divs/ex because it's just not worth it in it's current state. They won't be able to enjoy the best content you guys put out there because it's just not something they can reasonably learn how to do.

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An example of deranged boss damage is Xesht. Xesht has attacks that hit for upwards of 200,000 pre-mitigation damage. The physical ones even have 30% overwhelm too! Hard to survive should not mean impossible. Those abilities could do a tenth of the damage and not bypass player defenses and they would still be formidable.

In other games with engaging and punishing bosses the 1-shot attacks are survivable through various defensive player stats and mechanics. In PoE2 there is no "proper" way to play boss fights besides 1-shotting them before you make a mistake. Damage and defense scaling both for players and bosses is a mess.

Players being incentivized to not do risky and challenging content is also just plain awful and anti-fun.

Don't forget that by the time you farm all your splinters you've probably already forgotten most of the fight. Xesh is easy if you don't have to deal with the ground fists, and lightning pyre. Thank goodness for acrobatics.

Arbiter is just bs right now. Doing his beam DURING his solar explosion. Guess I'll die then. Also, thank goodness for acrobatics. Dodges the explosions :). Although they need a hit counter for evasion, so I can properly time when, where, and how I get hit.

They have no idea how to balance or manage scaling. The game starts so good and turns to slop by the time you're in cruel. This had to be an intentional rug pull, no way they could be this off.

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inspecktadeck#3108 wrote:

They have no idea how to balance or manage scaling. The game starts so good and turns to slop by the time you're in cruel. This had to be an intentional rug pull, no way they could be this off.

That's because it sort of is. :)

They had planned on releasing Acts 1-6 for EA, then decided that it would be best to have something in place for the end game, so they put Acts 4-6 on hold and threw in a Cruel 1-3 as a placeholder. It seems this was done somewhat close to EA release, since the end game was the least tested part of the game (and it shows).

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inspecktadeck#3108 wrote:

They have no idea how to balance or manage scaling. The game starts so good and turns to slop by the time you're in cruel. This had to be an intentional rug pull, no way they could be this off.

Endgame is the least tested part of the game right now. This is why we are giving feedback.

I want to express, and hopefully GGG understands, that we want content that is difficult and adheres to the combo based and excellent gameplay in the first acts, and though we do want to feel as though we've gained power, we still want challenging and fun bosses and content.

Right now, however, endgame is way off base. it's easy extremely easy with the usual one button builds, or your combo based gameplay is just not comparable to a one button build in terms of DPS and survivability. The bosses are really well designed and fun OUTSIDE OF the problems with one shots, scaling, and the "one portal" mentality that has completely shaped the endgame in a bad way.

One Portal is responsible for:
--Someone dying in multiplayer and then sitting around bored waiting for their friends to finish up.
--It being impossible to learn bosses because you die to an attack you haven't yet learned and practiced and lose the ability to... learn and practice.
--Making map nodes boring and shitty because of one mistake or an unseen rare teleporting next to you and hitting you with a one shot aoe you couldn't see through the fog.
--bugs like the exploding corpses in the copper citadel making fragment prices skyrocket cause people die trying to finish the fight due to issues.

I am still a MASSIVE advocate of letting us use six portals. When an instance is empty (everyone leaves or everyone dies) just full heal all rares and restart all unique encounters from the checkpoints of their combat if it's something like Xesht and the unique isn't dead. Leave all already killed enemies dead and loot on the floor. Remove league mecahnics from maps when all portals have run out.

This way, you can't throw your corpses at a boss to widdle it's health pool failing your way to victory.. but you aren't punished because you mistimed a dodge or fat fingered the wrong direction with losing everything.

Dial down the damage from base difficulty pinnacle bosses to let players learn the fights with their six portals. Scale pinnacle boss abilities at the start of fights so you can learn like Searing Exarch's initial slow fire orb phase and Maven's memory game scaling up over time.

Get endgame in a better state please. I dragged quite a few friends into this EA release and some of them are losing hope because of these rather baffling design decisions.