Kitava is still trash-tier design.

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Miathan51 wrote:

How is Kitava even hard? I kill A10 kitava without dying every time. Doedre and Innocence are much harder.

Doedre has some of the same bullshit mechanics that Kitava has (a DPS check being one of them), but Innocence has never given me problems. Though he hits hard, his fight is highly mechanical, and good piloting skills and a bit of patience can finish him off even if you don't have high DPS yet.

That, in my opinion, is the hallmark of good design: A tough boss can be beaten with skill and time, even if your DPS isn't up to snuff yet.

There are a number of bosses (including some map bosses) which are well designed according to the above criteria. A10 Kitava is not one of them.

Incidentally, some people seem to be confused at the nature of my objection. It isn't that Kitava is overtuned per se. It's that he is overtuned relative to the rest of the campaign. Those are two fundamentally different objections, and as such require two fundamentally different solutions (depending on which you choose to address).

I don't recall either Doedre or Act 10 Kitava having DPS checks.

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VolcanoElixir wrote:

I don't recall either Doedre or Act 10 Kitava having DPS checks.

Then please explain how to defeat the heart stage of Kitava without enough DPS. :)

(That's a rhetorical request, but if you can actually explain how, then I am genuinely interested.)

Doedre is debatable. But not a debate I want to have here (too off-topic).

All versions of Innocence can definitely be done with skill instead of DPS, by the way. It's just a question of time. Like I said: Good design. It rewards skill without punishing bad RNG (DPS gear-check).

Kitava is painful only first few times. After you learn his moves - you can actually manage the fight.

Kitava is pretty good fight mechanically. It is example of good boss fight design.

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VolcanoElixir wrote:

I don't recall either Doedre or Act 10 Kitava having DPS checks.

Doedre has weird mechanics in two of her fights that you can ignore to varying degrees if your DPS is high. Her version with the cauldron you will need to cycle through more phases if you can't burn her quickly, though in my experience most builds at that point will have to change it at least once or twice, so you're still engaging with the mechanic to some degree. The pseudo-DPS check that hit me harder the one time I encountered it from having bad DPS was her version leading up to the Trinity encounter. If you have good DPS at that point you just blast her and she goes down without doing shit-all, but if not, she has that mechanic where she screams at you and you're supposed to hide behind one of her totems to avoid it. I've only had low enough DPS to need to engage with this mechanic once, and because it had never happened before I actually had no idea what the mechanic was and died to it, lol.

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Then please explain how to defeat the heart stage of Kitava without enough DPS. :)

Just hit it until it dies? It doesn't have any life regen AFAIK so low DPS would just take longer to kill, and it usually helps to take out the bigger adds first.

The heart phase is harmless - enough spawns to work with Life on hit and getting flasks, plus enough room for maneuvers. My problem is Kitava's hitbox at the border of the walkable space. If you use an interruptible movement skill like Whirling Blades you can get into trouble easily - or, to put it better, not fast enough out of trouble. Yes, that's partly WB's fault. Maybe put some of the changed Pathfinding for Cyclone in 3.0 into WB?

Obviously, lots of boss trouble or no boss trouble depends on what you use to kill it...

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gibbousmoon wrote:

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Anonymous1749704 wrote:

You can learn the fight and outplay everything Kitava does. Not that I ever bothered to do that with the a10 version since the real game begins only after campaign is done.

I did study the t15 version enough to easily avoid all big hits though.

Ironically, I have no problem with that version by the time I get to it.

This criticism is about fundamental imbalances in the campaign.

My experience exactly, I just finished the Lave Lake map and had to use only one health flask in the fight. With the same build (lower level, of course) I died a few times in the A10 Kitava fight.

This is just what GGG always does though. The last big boss fight in the story line is always way over tuned. When they added more content then the old final boss was nerfed and the new final boss is way over tuned. This has been the way it works since what? Piety was the final big boss?

Kitava used to give me fits and I used to bitch about it being so drastically different than everything else in the game up to that point (which it is), but now I just make sure to have 4k or higher hitpoints, and a means to take out the heart hitpoints fast when it drops. I usually don’t die no or if I do it is usually my mistake where I positioned myself.

The fight is no longer a concern for me once you understand it. Now incursions are the real joke!

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VolcanoElixir wrote:

"

Then please explain how to defeat the heart stage of Kitava without enough DPS. :)

Just hit it until it dies? It doesn't have any life regen AFAIK so low DPS would just take longer to kill, and it usually helps to take out the bigger adds first.

I'm going to guess that you have never tried to kill him with a low-dps build because if you had then you would have been swarmed to death and would be singing a different tune now.

But I am happy to be wrong. Which low-DPS skill have you used in that case?

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pmmGarak wrote:

Obviously, lots of boss trouble or no boss trouble depends on what you use to kill it...

Exactly. True for both the big guy and his heart spawns.

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AgentPyye wrote:

Kitava used to give me fits and I used to bitch about it being so drastically different than everything else in the game up to that point (which it is), but now I just make sure to have 4k or higher hitpoints, and a means to take out the heart hitpoints fast when it drops. I usually don’t die no or if I do it is usually my mistake where I positioned myself.

Good illustration of exactly what you need to kill him without abusing portals or zerging. Now if only the content leading up to him required a gradual build-up of exactly that, there wouldn't be a problem.

Some people continue to miss the point, but I guess I shouldn't expect that to change. For the third time in this thread:

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gibbousmoon wrote:

Incidentally, some people seem to be confused at the nature of my objection. It isn't that Kitava is overtuned per se. It's that he is overtuned relative to the rest of the campaign. Those are two fundamentally different objections, and as such require two fundamentally different solutions (depending on which you choose to address).