Yeah, now instead of one shotting him you have to one shot him 3x and run around in circles for his mandatory phases. Pure excitement. Pure challenge! … Ugh. I thought killing him 50x in a row was boring before… this upped the ante on boring.
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The problem isn’t playing 2 more minutes.
The problem is that it drags out the fight unnecessarily.
Instead of wasting 2 minutes to kill it, I could kill it multiple times in that same period.
Which, in the long run, increases my chances of getting an item.
To me, it’s not fun to waste all that time (the total sum of all those 2+ minutes) and end up getting absolutely nothing.
Right now, I think it’s better to spam Pits (finding the right balance between time and Obols) and just try my luck with the NPC.
And just keep creating new characters and leveling their reputation for the Spark.
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They could have just massively increased his heath but that would have been boring too. Either way you don’t get to kill a boss in a couple seconds anymore. I still don’t think it takes you two minutes but even if it did. You have to play a video game for 2 minutes. The horror.
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let switch the scenario bit, let say your glyph are full and you are running pits, hoping to get upgrade from drop or from obols.
Doing that for an hour, 60 minutes. But at the end you didn’t get any upgrade at all, just a mere 2 level increase. would you consider the time spend wasted?
if yes, then is it different from the 60minute spend on duriel (lets say keys are dirt cheap which cost is neglectable) but getting nothing?
This is purely for behavioral research and academic purpose.
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I wouldn’t consider it a waste of time.
Or rather, these are activities that can’t really be compared.
I know—or I like to think I know—what to expect from one activity versus the other.
I can’t offer a solution.
I can only say that Season 7 respected my time more, and I also found it more fun.
What could I accept?
Something in the middle.
The bosses are harder, but they have a guaranteed drop.
And by harder, I mean something like Elden Ring.
I know that after dying 400 times and learning the choreography, I’ll walk away grinning from ear to ear with the satisfaction of beating it and getting an item that actually changes my gameplay.
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There is actually a little time window when you can kill him at first unburrow.
The forced mechanics in S8 are disgusting.
When you want to play mechanics, play PoE 2.
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I’ve not been able to skip the second burrow phase. He is always left with a sliver and then dies immediately once he pops up from the ground.
Been doing something similar with Andariel as well. Push her to phase one than back to back totem phases and killing her just as she spawns back in. The weird part is she still shoots the large rotating red beam at me when she spawns.
I’m carefully scanning the range of arguments about whether it’s ‘good’ ‘bad’ or ‘the same’ that what prolongs the fight several times over is a forced invulnerability phase…
Emphasis (haven’t played S8 yet)… these preferences are about no-kill phases that prolong the fight several times over (vs effective damage to health pool) right?
This is a no-brainer. That’s poor design. (Again, I’m relying on what looks like agreement that these forced phases make the fight several times longer.)
If this consensus is accurate, it means they couldn’t design a fight that was challenging enough to last an ‘appropriate’ minimum length of time… without these phases dominating the clock. In a well-designed arpg fight such phases add time, but not more time than it would take to kill the gd boss. (The exception should be when the player char is BiS everywhere, & the cheesy mechanic might last longer than the actual boss fight only b/c boss then gets consistently 1- to 3-shot… i.e. the total fight is now back to a few seconds b/c the player is at the end of the journey & massively OP.)
The type of fight where that artificial lopsidedness is “appropriate” is called a soulslike. 
Aside from specific combat conventions like parry being common in one genre & not the other, that’s literally what distinguishes the two types of boss fight: the stupid dance with the boss taking up a larger amount of time than the actual damaging of the boss. 
Especially if it’s several times more.
There’s NO WAY the devs don’t agree with this - even if some players are confused by it (because they like running around in an obstacle course for longer than it takes to damage the boss’s hp bar until it’s zero).
The developers plainly said they are bosses and meant to be a challenge not a one and done personally I think everyone has been spoiled and thinks that should be the normal while I would love to see them increase or guarantee drops it’s a process most players don’t have any knowledge of the inner workings and how much time is spent making these bosses who are supposed to be the hardest in the game maybe Belial is easier because of the rate of the keys dropping there is not really any need to do them that many times in my opinion just get the gear needed and move on what people want is the mythics which again are supposed to be the arrest in the game and not easy to get idk why it is so hard to understand this maybe the current state isn’t perfect but you can’t please everyone every time if they made it too hard casuals couldn’t complete them with imperfect builds these checks they have now make it harder but not impossible without trillions of damage and I think that’s what they were going for
They tried nothing and this is the best they could come up with!
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Two notes:
Punctuation is kindness. 
And using the word “challenge” as a stand-in for specific boss mechanics that you could instead describe by name, isn’t good enough. It means your argument is too vague to be useful.
The reason the bosses are the way they are is simple, that was the cheapest, easiest way to “fix” the bosses. Actually working on the mechanics would take dev time and resources and they aren’t going to do that without the players giving them more money.
Ok I just want to point out that in your 1 edit so far, not only did you not add punctuation, but you doubled the length of the punctuation-free paragraph. 
Summary
That’s not kindness bro.
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Whatever I’m not an English major!!!
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I agree with the first part…
…but the 2nd part is probably not right. The money is there aplenty, and even if they had double the money this corner-cutting would persist. It’s there b/c leadership has insisted on it. https://archive.ph/6GCSH.
It’s a conscious choice about ‘process’.
I encourage you all to go play something else if you don’t like it or perhaps even make your own games since you’re experts in the field. I however am not and don’t pretend to be I will play the game as it is now and continue to play as they continue to fine tune it in the future.
Your recommendation is misplaced & irrelevant, b/c the player (including yourself) can have valid input as to whether a mechanic or boss design feels right in a game. Devs take these inputs (including from players that agree with you) into consideration when changing things. Live service game yadda yadda. This is how it goes.
You’re objecting for no reason that I can suss out - except maybe to preserve what you feel is a fun situation - but then you should make that more explicit & then stick to that line of argumentation, it’s more useful.
If you were doing just that in your punctuation-free paragraph earlier - couldn’t read it, sorry.
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Forcing players to waste time on a ARPG is a sympthom that Blizzard don’t know what they are doing. More power = less time farming. Now it’s the oposite and it’s dumb.
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Not to mention 2 minutes fighting is a lot different than 2 minutes waiting. They should have streamlined his entrance, doesn’t need to be 10-15 seconds anymore. Streamline the spawn of adds in the burrow phase, should come out much quicker. Chest should spawn on kill not after death animation then wait then spawn. Reduce wasted time where you can if going to artificially prolong the fight for mechanics that don’t matter in the least.
1 Like