ZiggyD's Guardian of the Hydra Showcase

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johnKeys wrote:

yet another clusterfuck fight and huge-damage attacks with zero warning or time to react.
*sigh*
.... did you just fire the guy who designed Vaal Oversoul in Beta?
because I think you should give him a call.

Malachai syndrome.

My thoughts exactly, altough in all fairness i think the Vaal Oversoul is very underpowered for an act boss. Or do i just think that because my FPS isn't 2 when i face him?

New spam+particle boss coming out bundled up with multithreading is somewhat of a mitigating factor, but i'm just not a firm believer that improvements will happen to me. They never do.
Please prove me wrong GGG, because in my current state this abomination of a boss could not be playable on my end, at alllll.

OMG! look that bow!!!!!

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DisposableIdentity wrote:

I was about to write some cynical BS about how cool it is to have more content and even more powerful gear for like the top 5% of the playerbase, but on a second thought I'd like to ask how many players/accounts actually do manage to get to and/or actually play and beat T15 content?
Is there a statistics page or do we have to wait for you to post something like this?

I'd be really interested in these numbers :)

On Topic:
Good job Ziggy *thumbsup*

Very true :) I wouldn't want to see those stats because they'd probably make me feel like a pathetic n00b (i never even had a tier 15 drop, let alone beat it).

Buuuuut, with the new Atlas system, i am hoping things might change, and i won't get stuck doing Waste Pools for all of eternity because of unfair map drops (or lack of drops altogether). (Hint, hint, GGG, fix?)

HC melee ;-)))

look at that boss battle,look so fun!
hype new difficult fight!

now..THAT Hydra bow MTX ...that's what I call a proper bow MTX...gimme gimme gimme!!!

While i enjoy new challenges and hard bosses greatly i am not a fan of the design of the last 2 bosses shown and the recently introduced bosses with act 4 and here is way.



What i really dislike about GGG's boss design:


High effective live pools and quick recovery over everything:
Nearly all boss fights (currently in the game and the 2 shown guardian fights) favour ES builds greatly.
Higher effective pools and high burst attacks without rapid succession small attacks in between can be trivialized by having a huge ES pool and a high recharge rate - life builds can't do this.
I am fine with fights existing where ES builds are clearly favoured, but currently there are so few fights out there where other playstyles would shine and ES builds have a big disadvantage.

My suggestions to fix this: just add some small amounts of DoT damage here and there.

Secondary defenses don't matter that much:
A high life pool/ES pool without secondary mitigation is much more effective against those design of fights than stacking secondary mitigation at the cost of some life. A 10k ES build with investment in ES recharge recovery without any further mitigation will do 10 times better in those kind of fights than a 6k life build with Puritiy of Ice and fortify just to gave an example.

My suggestion to fix this: gave the bosses multiple different type of attacks. The Hydra for example could have one pure cold attack/spell, one pure physical attack and one hybrid (50%cold/50%phys) attack/spell. Such a design choice would impact players choices of builds more and make the fight less trivial and harder.

Melee is always at an disadvantage:
There is no bossfight in this game where playing melee is strictly favoured. The latest shown boss designs reflect that trend. Against the Hydra you are favoured when you have a ranged, highly mobile, fast character. Against the Minotaur, high physical mitigation might help but being ranged, highly mobile and fast works too and does the same job faster and saver (when the rockslide starts just back of and attack from range - what is melee supposed to do in that case besides tanking all of it while trying to apply damage to the boss?)

My suggestion to fix this: design at least some bosses where ranged has a great disadvantage and beeing highly mobile doesn't give you any benefit. Introduce now mechanics that favour melee gameplay (like you did once with proximity shield)

Extremly high DPS builds do trivialize ALL boss encounters in the game currently:
When i am looking at the mechanics of those new fights im am afraid that some builds like bladefall mine can oneshot them without any risk or other builds like CoC or Mjolner variants can just sit on top of the bosses and kill them within 10sec without beeing at any risk because of infinite sustainability mechanics.

My thoughts on this: We don't know the balance changes for 2.4 yet so i can't comment on this topic further (please GGG, i beg you, do something about that, it is a huge problem)

Vaal Pact/instant leech mechanics:
Those mechanic can trivialize any boss encounter in the game currently - don't get me wrong, vaal pact is nice cool mechanic but it should be balanced against boss encounters imho.

My suggestion to fix this: Reduced leech effectiveness or for some encounters "can not leech life from you" modifier on specific bosses would be challenging.

Clusterf*ck encounters
Not beeing humanly able to avoid mechanics and multiple overlapping grafics to the point where you can not possible see what is going on anymore is just bad gamedesign - sry. The Hydra fight might be a borderline example of it, Malachai is definitly too much in it's current state - you can't see anything at some point of the second phase of the fight when mines, blood, projectiles, ground effects, animation grafics, minion adds and the DoT AoE circle are overlapping all together.




What i really enjoy about the shown fight:


Over all the fight looks cool and engaging. I like the 2sec wind up one shot attack (rip summoners because it can fork/chain of minions :D) where you quickly have to get behind the boss to avoid it. Hopefully temporal chains doesn't trivialize this fight too much where you can doge everything without much effort.

I like the overall high burst cold damage approach: beeing chilled and frozen is a huge threat (rip melee) which you have to counter in some way or another. Maybe you have to modify/temporarly ajust your build/items for this fight which would be great

I like the choice of various boss skill typs (attacks/spells/AoE secondary damage. All attacks can be mitigated with evasion/dodge which favours EV characters a bit, but their EV/dodge is useless against spell based attacks and Blast Rains secondary damage which is great design imho.

cool
but one question is all for 1% players who will be able to achieve this?

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I_NO wrote:

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AdFinitum wrote:

Is ProjectPT here ? This is ZiggyD fighting Hydra with a 6 link doing almost no damage to the boss and getting one shot. Refering to Powercreep : Not enough powercreep for you to progress past Hydra I think. I am very curious if you will even be able to reach the center of Atlas next season with 3 more bosses of this magnitude to defeat.

Easy game with too much power creep lul ( how irrational ). Power creep is adding power without appropriate content - I cant see this happen in PoE to the exaggerated degree some veteran players pretend it to happen. Can only hope not too many people fall for your pseudo elaborate attitude while swearing being your most used argument. I can only assume you are looking for ways to justify your rage about some previous changes you don't like.

Either his build is fucking terrible or the boss has a billion health whichever the case is.

Hey stated that he is using his crafted Harbinger bow from the testing realm posted on reddit (>500 DPS)
with Tornado shot, a skill he is more than familier with.
Ziggy's favourit class is Ranger and his favourit type of build is ranged bow - i think he knows how to build a good crit bow character.

ergo: the boss has a shitload of HP :D

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johnKeys wrote:

yet another clusterfuck fight and huge-damage attacks with zero warning or time to react.
*sigh*
.... did you just fire the guy who designed Vaal Oversoul in Beta?
because I think you should give him a call.

Malachai syndrome.

You're coloring the past with a shiny glow it never really had. Back then the only ways to die to Vaal Oversoul if you were not sleeping on your keyboard were either to be RNG'd out by a rock fall quickly followed by a laser shot (nice skill requirement) or getting dsycn'd and slammed to death when you thought the Oversoul was 5 miles away from you. The fight was hard because DPS was way lower back then so you had to stay longer in that unfair environment.