The Maven Fight...

I finally killed it, I spent 20 ex on writs and after 9 attempts she is dead due entirely to over gearing to the stars and spamming every single conditional damage steroid money can buy...

It makes me really sad...

She manages to breathe this new whimsical life into PoE and manages to be another really interesting character in tandem with the envoy. the story surrounding her is rich and deep but mostly enigmatic still. aesthetically she is really, serving up more of that space magic fantasy I have grown to adore.

Little personal history.

First uber elder took probably 6 weeks of concerted effort, calculated rerolling, and a very level head and steady hand to kill... it was gripping... unbridled joy... swelling, radiating pride upon completion and two this day it is my favorite boss in all of the video games period full stop. classic good vs evil with nuanced subtext that made sense and tied up a loose end of the story.

Sirus... Took about a month to 5 weeks of similar focus, rerolling, a literal LIGHT-bulb epiphany and some palm sweating white knuckle leaps of faith through the 4 way flame geysers to pull that one off and a considerably longer duration to master. A very challenging fight that is absolutely not as unfair as a lot of the critics want to say it is... but that frustration is completely justifiable in the cold light of truth... sirus is a real tough fight if you are on curve so to speak in terms of character progression. A very good fight if you only choose to recognize the "Edge of Death" phase as the true fight... completely cheesable and easily trivialized, but all of the bosses outside of delve are (with the exception of any boss that has map modifiers applied.

The Maven Though...
So as I said, love the character, love her style, lore, baby sitter... all of it. Her "Writ" encounter though...

Ok, "Stand Still" aka finger beams a very cool move and honestly a fresh shape in the "dont stand here" mechanical category. The Brain Squid... Its a compelling feature because it requires the player to track simultaneously two very different threat types that are both persistently moving and both consistently overlapping lethal assaults on the player. it feels pretty overwhelming, but the audio queues can carry a keenly perceptive player (I myself have yet to master this). Cascade of pain... bread and butter... gotta have at least one of these and hers freaking RIPPS so that's fine I guess although the warning and the damage are virtually simultaneous and it feels so awful to spend a move skill charge and be locked into the cooldown and hear A CASCADE, knowing full well you are basically hugging her and wont get to cast a move skill again before you die and that seems to happen a lot and does not seem to be patterned or timed behavior... just dumb bad luck and it can feel very bad.

But the adds though... oh my god the adds are the worst. An N^x cluster Eff of Cluster Effs. you can get nearly any combination of bosses ranging from a whole region of melee chumps to the most frustrating/hilariously unfair god squad of area denial AoE degen and trap bosses imaginable. Imaging the Miner/Trapper boss from whatever the map is that serves as the scepter of god (that isnt dominus) then you get the Geoffry boss with his 360 bone prison, the witch of the cauldron just spamming corpse explode under your feet while you are bear trapped in the bone prison waiting for frost blink to not be dead on arrival even with second wind oh and lets not forget that the gargoyle from lookout is just dripping caustic nastiness on literally every clean pixel of the arena while queen socio-kiddo is just cackling in your ear at around 97 decibels and doing everything she can to fly right in front of your camera. Oh cool! I died again to Daresso's Swords before they even became visible... didnt that get nerfed?

I get unironic Hearthstone levels of just unfair and unfun and virtually impossible to interact with RNG on top of RNG and 99.7% of the time I am so down for a complete and total statistically improbable nightmare of unlucky stacked on unlucky stacked on wtf is even happening right now...

But not in my boss fight.

also the memory game is entirely unrealistic in terms of the cast duration... just entirely. 30% move speed boots, unlimited charges move skill (leap slam sucks I know) and even knowing exactly the pattern and even without getting chilled, stepping in doodoo, walking through melta beams, and even getting a head start you can just barely get a pixel perfect save once the pattern reaches 7-8 tiles and sometimes if you dont get at least 1 or 2 tiles that you can quickly jiggle back and fourth on... well you just aren't gonna make it and I'm sorry because I love AlkaizerX but logging out to avoid a mechanic is cheating in my book (he earned and deserves his prize money I'm not trying to call that into question after all he did in a few days what took me 2 months). His Maven Kill Perfectly personifies my grievance with the encounter and he even says it live while he is killing her for the first time, Just dont play the memory game... that's a bad sign fellas.

Overall, she is a very compelling character, I get authentically excited learning new things about the story through her and the envoy ( I love him btw... everything about him, it, them... oh god don't cancel me). The Writ encounter is for the most part really kick ass and I just cannot convey that enough... without the dumb and at times just completely unrealistic RNG of the add phase I would have a considerably greater level of appreciation for that fight too.

Bossing is why I am here... It is the most compelling part of PoE for me, and it is my honestly held opinion, GGG make some of the most compelling, blistering, difficult, engaging, and mechanically demanding boss fights in gaming right now provided you haven't completely over geared and are actively face rolling the game, which can also be fun.

My Perception of the Mavens Writ is a step away from what I have come to Expect from GGG and a step towards that silly casino RNG that just sucks the fun out of a game for me. Uber elder, Atziri, Kurgal, Aul, Sirus, Every Guardian... all about skillful and precise and informed gameplay and victory is 100% through skill, knowledge and execution alone. The Maven deviates from this rule.

She takes me back to the D3 Launch days with those Turbo vacuum arcane infernal flayer packs (10000% move speed constantly pulling you into melee tossing out hundreds of instant death lazers and basically having both a 10 million dps righteous fire and a 10million dps active plague bearer) simply seeing it was 100% inescapable death.

She is here now to stay... so be it. I don't want her gone, I don't even Care if she gets changed... I just don't want the "Nomad" to have the same flaw... Or the Watcher, or whatever other fun name the next ones will have...

The Architect... whom ever.

There are my 2c thanks the the sextant and this stupid hat.

TL:DR RNG on RNG can be loads of fun but never when its in a Major Boss Encounter

Overall, I find the Maven to be a MASSIVE improvement compared to Sirus. From combat mechanics standpoint, all of her moves are generously telegraphed and don't travel instantly. The only exception is the big laser the Nucleus can sometimes fire, but again it has a good telegraph. She teleports around the arena, but since she doesn't have anything like Sirus's "Die" laser, you're not prone to getting wrecked by offscreen 1shots. Everytime I've died to her, it's because I knew it was my fault and not because of something that hit me offscreen before I could react.

And let's not forget the arena. It's not a mess, not busy and all colored the same as the boss. Everything is very easy to differentiate.

The only thing I dislike about the Maven is her memory puzzle. I have ADHD and while I can do the first puzzle just fine, the others are almost impossible unless they get an easy pattern (ex. ABCABABAB).

The reward is kind of mediocre, as in there's really only one thing worth the effort, but at least it's still something to make her worth farming for. It's a lot more than I can say for the poor Shaper.

I like the Maven, and I hope GGG makes her the standard of future end bosses.

Congrats on the kill, it can be a really fun fight.

I didn't have the same difficulty with the random boss phase during my 40 kills for End Game Grinds, only one boss combination really felt memorably rough. But that could be down to either the build or luck.

The fight does feel like it represents a mastery of map bosses, as you've presumably finished multiple high tier maven-assisted fights, and 10-way invitations. So in theory there shouldn't be anything there that is more difficult than the maven herself.

I think it might be intended as a soft power check, not unlike The Hidden or The Feared. (Boss order RNG on The Feared is huge) Where you aren't reasonably going to be able to deal with every bosses mechanics cleanly. It starts becoming about the characters raw offense and defense in combination with player skill.

It's certainly questionable whether its good design to make so many mechanics ignorable with high damage, but here we are.

That cascade can be pretty nasty, yep.

With practice the memory game gets a lot smoother. Dropping the degen in the middle of the arena helps so you don't need to dodge it while entering the sequence and dodging coil beams. It's somewhat tight, but with clean play you can consistently end it with 2-3 character widths left open on the ring in the final phase memory game. I do wish the panels lighting up were a tiny bit more visible though, it takes a lot of focus just to see what's going on.

The flavor of it all was wonderful though, it was so cool to see her interactions change as you progressed the atlas. And it's nice to have a final fight that doesn't feel as buggy as Sirus.