Arbiter of Ash's one shot mechanics forces you to play glasscanon. It feels terrible.

The core problem of pinnacle fights in general is that the idea behind them by the devs (actual encounters that last a couple of minutes and have mechanics that should be respected) is at clear odds with another core philosophy of PoE that is the harsh punishment of death at endgame and I´m not talking about Exp loss here but the opportunity cost of even having attempts.

This is even more true for SSF player as they can´t just buy their tickets with currency but have to engage for hours with the league mechanics to gain another attempt.

Adding more portals to Arbiter is a step in the right direction but more of a bandaid solution that anything else. Increasing the margin of error in individual attempts is still far too valuable given the cost of failure and the most effective way of doing this is to outright skip mechanics via more DPS.

PoE 2 fights do not promote to learn their hardest encounters, but to exploit and break them.

This is also where this "git gud" mentality of many people in the communtiy falls apart.

I admittedly do not come from a big ARPG background. My big live service game for many years now is Final Fantasy XIV and I´m an Ultimate raider, clearing content that is far more complex than anything GGG will probably ever come up with, where fights don´t last 3-4 minutes (in the ideal world the devs envision) but 15+ and don´t feature 2 or 3 one shot mechanics but 20.

The absolute crucial difference here is that a failure by yourself or a teammate in an attempt costs you exactly the time you put into it and a negligable amount of their gold equivalent for consumables. Thats it.

GGG can´t expect players to respect their mechanics if they don´t respect the players time in the process. Until that happens the playerbase will use everything at their disposal to not engage with their fights, but break them in every way imaginable to get the rewards and render all the work of fight design null and void.

I'd be fine with the oneshots in higher difficulty, but in base difficulty the damage needs to be toned down so we can learn the fight

this is the way

Malenia, Blade of Miquella's one shot mechanics forces you to play glasscannon. It feels terrible.

PoE players when they have to interact with mechanics.

Or actually play the boss mechanics? He has 2 oneshots. With a bit of practice they're easy to avoid

The most frustrating part is, you lose your exp everytime you die

you need to get better and understand this is THE endgame boss,it should not be easy or do-able for most of the people,yet, i've faced him 4 times, died once in my 1st atempt before the patch,lvl 94 ,6200 hp shockwave titan,380-400 k dps

GGG If you want to do one shot mechanic, do it like zarokh, i really like this boss. you have to do something to not get one shot.

Pretty much the entire endgame forces you to play glass cannon lmao

Given the servers in Australia are touchy at best, one-shot mechanics are rough. Especially when the connection jitters kick in.

I had the same experience. The first of the flame waves needs to have a longer delay. Afaik they are all equally timed, but it's super hard to react to the first one because you don't see it coming.

Don’t fight the boss, be the boss. 1 shot the fucker

Agree. Even if the boss is very cool, it forces glass cannon builds, because you are either a glass (tanky build that gets oneshotted anyways) or a glass cannon that survives (the quicker you kill it the less times you risk to get oneshotted).

Tankiness needs a rebalance for sure, right now is way more "practical tankiness" to just kill all at sight, DPS works like evasion, the more you have the less things hit you, because dead things can't hit. So for now the best defense is a good offense.

The only oneshots that this boss has is the falling orb with a safespot in a circle and a first phase flame attack with a line safespot. You can mitigate others pretty easily.

I have yet to fight this boss. Let me get this straight

So, me building ES and Evasion and painstakingly optimising my build to have a balance of defence and offence on my monk will have no benefit at all?

Damn, thats awesome.....

The only way I die in maps is if I run a really tough map with the hasted modifier and it's usually because of being swarmed, body blocked and stun locked, it's a long death, not an insta kill.

You can just hit Esc, leave and re-enter the map if it's slow enough.

GGG doesn't seem to realize that "Don't get hit, deal damage" isn't the only kind of skill expression. Sometimes, especially in games that allow for tankier builds, it is just as skilled to know when you can take advantage of taking a hit. What's the point of inflating your health bar, if you're not supposed to use any of it?

Cannot zoom out to see all solar orb safe spaces, so you don't know if this attack is finished.

Linear safespace has blue edges which are not safe, very hard to know if you are safe.

30 movespeed is not enough to always get to safe spots.

Every skill is one shot.

OG Sirus level of BS?

A list of my gripes with this boss is you losing your xp on death and now with the respawns, you can lose your entire bar if you do it with xp. The mechanics come out too fast, you barely have time to react, and even if you can react your character needs movespeed. I hate how boss mechanics seem to be balanced on the assumption you have 30% movespeed boots(Think Zarokh and Arbiter).

I could kill +0 arbiter because I either skip the mechanics or only have to do the circles once. On +1 I am just dying nonstop bc I can’t get into the circles fast enough or move fast enough with the fire waves in which the color is also almost indistinguishable from each other. I usually can’t even tell where the safe zone is unless I’m already dead.

A big issue is that tanky builds have hidden movement penalties. I straight up can’t do it no matter how fast I react. Will need to get some movement speed

Spending hours collecting fragments, walking into a boss room, and dying from a oneshots turning your time into nothing.
Gj GGG, the more I play this the more I realize how lousy the gamedesign.

When you said other games, I immediately thought of PoE.

How to design a boss fight is not new to GGG. Hell, even in PoE 2 the Boss fights (especially in the acts) are interesting and appropriately designed, for the most part.

Arbiter's fight is just bull.

While I agree you should probably study the mechanics on YouTube if you can't figure it out in 18 fights yourself...

This whole game forces you to play glass cannon.

Yup the Arbiter has really BS mechanics especially the "wave" where you need to be in the safe zone but how can you be there when you don't have enough time to be there? Using blink sometimes overshoot you so meh

Watching Alkaizer basically practicing that fight with his monk and then his warrior on the max dif made me change my mind on the matter of that fight. I am fine with the oneshots now that we can consistently farm the fragments thro the change of the last patch. The one thing I dont like is that his mechanics can be bugged to be undodgable (chill plus temp chains) or are not visible at all like I saw in some clips with his firewaves phase. The problem is that the player dmg is too extreme atm so going tanky is not really the efficient way to play this fight. In that regard you are right and I am pretty sure next reset that won't be the case anymore.

I wouldnt mind if the flame waves didnt have god awful visual clarity

GGG said in the interview that most of players (or a lot of them? The number wasn't entirely clear) going into higher tier maps to fast and have underpowered gear as a result. Maybe that's one of the problems?

Being able to one shot bosses and skipping mechs is just stupid in general. I don't care if it's an arpg and supposedly "part of the power progression".

Doesn’t force to play you nothing… just learn how to play the mechanics instead of trying to avoid phases . Pretty easy fight with my Stormweaver.

I would love if we can get rid of the one-shot and replace it with something like 'you take more damage when you play carelessly' i.e you take lower damage the first time you fail the mechanics but if you keep getting hit, you take more damage for each hit afterwards by the same mechanics.

All the 1shot mechanics can be reliably avoided, practice is required. 6 tries on +0 go a long way to accomplish that. Being tanky is rewarded as well, you can survive the overlapping beam over fire bomb if you're tanky, which is like the only mechanic that's borderline bullshit.

Protip for the firestorm phase: stand still after each wave goes through until you see where the new safe zone is, as the zone seems to calculated to be reachable based on your position then, so you can screw yourself over if you keep walking around.

He is probably worst designed boss in this game. Not scary in actual combat, uses invulnerability phases, unintuitive mechanics, at least 2 one shot phases that he uses constantly. And fire ring phase is full of bugs, like circles being too far from each other and other bs.

They just need to adjust the speed of a mechanic, the flame wave is a bit too fast, a slight error which direction you move to will insta gib you. All other mechanics are fine.

I don't mind the 1 shots as long as they give us a chance to game it.

My main issue with him is the laser beam attack into stand in the circle at the very last 0,2sec. It feels horrible, they really need to rework/rebalance that attack. The rest Im actually kind of fine with.

His flame attack covering whole screen needs to be more visible, cause sometimes I cannot see safe place, also circle attacks are sometimes too far away of each other. Also circle flame attack in second phase needs to be little slower I think. Fight is good but it need more balance.

It seems that the only way for devs to make boss somewhat dangerous is to ignore your defenses.

And to make the fight last longer they gonna ignore your DPS as well by making him invulnerable 90% of the time or something.

Peak game design right there. Simply disregard fundamental game mechanics to fuck with the player. It's like you're about to checkmate the king, but he flies off the board on jetpack while shooting at your figures with laser. Brilliant.

I can tank the arbiters supposed 1 shots without dying.

Welcome to literally every PoE boss fight.

It's not the oneshot mechanics, it's everything else.

It's the fact that the damage difference between builds is so high you can oneshot bosses. When you can skip the whole fight with damage, everything else is just worse.

It's the opportunity cost. The keys cost so much that failing is not an option, so you resort to the most effective strategy. Also the keys usually reach such a price that running bosses is not profitable. Usually, as long as you don't drop the chase item from them, you're not getting the money back and over many attempts you're simply losing money.

Arbiter only has 2 oneshot mechanics really. The corridor and the circle. Laser beam is tankable with omen of resurgence, and you can spam chug instant life flask when you anticipate getting hit.

True problem i was thinking of chaning my rarity gear to bossing gear but then relised that if i die it would be bc of one shoot mechanic and not body armor

My pathfinder has 1.8HP and 3k ES(without grim feast stacks) + 87% Evasion. Somehow the act2 citadel boss one shots me at the start with the lightning attack. Died twice in 3 days, very annoying

I like that there is a boss where you have to do mechanics. Having a tankier build doesn't matter if you can do the mechanics. Git gudder

Building defense allows you to make more mistakes, but you still need to learn the mech. Instead of 10 skills can one shot you, now only 1 skills can one shot you.

Without one shot, tank build would just play with one hand, holding one button until it dies.

MMOs figured this out decades ago (i think FFXIV made it the standard first) in easy to mid tier difficulty raiding content. If you want to have a punishment for fucking up a mechanic just make it add a stacking damage taken up debuff that stays on for the rest of the fight. That way it wont one shot you at first, but will eventually if you continue to play like a donkey.

Yea im already used to those things but my bro stopped playing becuase of oneshots generally.

do mechanics = dont die

People felt that end game Boss is to powerfull comparing to normal map bosses, in next Patch we are buffing damage of normal Monsters by 300%, damage from Magic monsters 350% and damage feom rare Monsters by 500% in Addition to prevent people think that they have to play glass Cannon we are additionaly making rare Monsters to reduce damage taken by 50%. Because people need more time to react we are reducing attack speed of Magic Monsters by 2% and rare Monsters by 5%. Normal Monsters Remain they attack speed

This game compared to POE1 will punish mistakes, either you play perfect or you build on DPS, you can not tank mechanics like POE1 (Example armor stacker)

EDit: also dont even run this boss without blink or other oh shit button