Atziri fight (and temple in general) is another frustration engine

The fight itself is interesting, but visually and mechanically cluttered.
There are at least three varieties of "big red thing that you have to avoid" that have very similar visual tells, including one that you're not supposed to avoid at all and are supposed to DPS through(?) Nearly every one is lethal. On top of that, there are blood droplet novas that constantly spawn that ALSO need to be avoided WHILE you're trying to figure out which pattern of red is on the floor.

Honestly, did you (GGG) ever think about introducing less lethal versions of these mechanics in other parts of the temple? So that maybe players could learn these patterns before they put hours or days worth of progress on the line?

And this is yet another fight where I slogged my way up to the engagement, and since I didn't beat it on the first attempt I'm are set back fucking AGES of progress, as it punitively deletes the key room, nearly all constructed paths, and many of your my rooms as a special private "fuck you".

I didn't play 0.2, after in 0.1 getting to the point of finally getting my last ascendency point, fighting Zarokh, and having him instadeath boop me because I didn't collect the little hourglasses, because I THOUGHT THEY WERE BOMBS that I was supposed to avoid. So my entire trial got wiped, I lost the entry token, didn't ascend, and basically got kicked out and told to go pound sand. I uninstalled the game and didn't come back for a full season, but when I read the patch notes that said you'd get another shot at Zarokh and that the parameters had been balanced better, I thought maybe GGG had heard the feedback.

Yet we're back to a pattern of game design that GGG engages in where they punish the me to a brutal degree for a single "mistake" while simultaneously giving me almost no opportunity to LEARN the mechanics, and it happens OVER and OVER again. The limited portals on maps. The Trials of Sekhimas and Chaos. The Act 4 boss that has three phases that you have to do over again if you get hit by a piece of screen spam.

GGG, if you want me to actively engage with your combat mechanics and appreciate your fight design, you HAVE to ratchet the consequences for failure DOWN, and/or you HAVE to give me an opportunity to learn where the consequences for failure are not multiple hours of progress wiped in an instant.

I'm tired to the point where I'm ready to either stop playing (again) or to hunt down a cheesy one-shot build so that I can finally see what's on the other end without having to sit through all of the bullshit.

While we're at it, I'd really prefer it if respecs (especially during the beta) didn't cost so damn much. I'm trying to figure out multiple extraordinarily DENSE and interwoven systems, frequently through trial and error since the game doesn't explain any of them to me, and yet if I make a mistake (like picking the "wrong" passive tree point) I'm punished for my exploration. It acts as a pretty heavy impediment to experimentation.

Maybe do the same for skill gems. I cannot tell you how often I've regretted cutting a particular skill gem after realizing it didn't do what I thought it would do, or interact the way I thought it would interact, or that I didn't have the right balance of stats to even USE the damn thing, or worst of all it DIDN'T EVEN DO WHAT IT SAID IT WOULD.

There are so many great aspects of this game, but the sheer amount of user-hostile design is EXHAUSTING, and I'm reaching the point where I have to decide if these are MISTAKES or if they are a statement of INTENT. If it's the latter, I bought the wrong game, and I just wish I'd realized sooner.

Welcome to GGG boss/game design. Unfortunately they seem to think this is good design. But tbh it's fundamentally bad game design imho.

- Single attempts at bosses without prior teaching of mechanics
- Delirately poor visual clues combined with one-shot mechanics
- Ridiculously long boss runbacks
- Rng gated access

etc.

You know what I, and most people I know, do before engaging any new boss? Watch a youtube video, because I don't want to waste my hours and hours of grinding rng to have access to the boss be wasted on being one-shot with hardly any visual clues. And if the majority of your player base does this, then there is a fundamental flaw with your game design.

I doubt anything will change about this. Seems to be part of the vision.