Bosses hold this game back.

Disclaimer: I'm well aware this community is masochistic. But that doesn't mean this game has to stay bad.

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GGG doesn't know how to do boss fights. I don't hate ALL of them. But I hate the ones that devolve into immune-phase bullet hells. This is an ARPG, not a bullet hell game. You can have a boss fight with a little bit of this kind of mechanic. But the game loses the ARPG identity when the only actual challenging part of the fight is an immunity-phase bullet hell. If I wanted to play THAT kinda game, then I would. It's the same as if the fight just pauses the game, and now you gotta win a game of Minesweeper real quick. What are we doin'???

Never even mind the issue with this game's sheer numbers. You can make a character with 20+ million DPS, and 90k+ EHP for an incoming type of damage. That's still not even close to enough to take some instantaneous, unavoidable hit from an Uber boss.

And never even mind the fact that this game embraces going full RNG. Nothing is regulated, you can get totally screwed and die just because of some bad RNG. Everybody knows you gotta regulate RNG, you don't just let it cut loose.



Never even mind that looting is miserable in this game. It's never safe to loot. Oh, you killed every enemy? Okay, you're still dead if you try to loot, because you have to wait out all of the after-death effects, or slow-moving effects that are still chasing you? The game encourages fast killing and fast movement (like how monster pack density can be so high, there's always something aggroing from the edge of the screen). But then what? You gotta go BACK and loot the entire map? Or you constantly break the pacing, and loot every screen at a time. Why are we still doing this? We see that you can do mechanics where the loot is saved until the end of an event. Why not implement that to every damn map??? Just another example of incompetence. There's no excuse.




Never even mind ALL of that. Right now, I'm just focusing on... why on earth every boss fight devolves into bullet hell slop. Diablo 2 bosses were just fine. And, listen, I know, they do become trivial, and I do understand that there needs to be MEANING to a win or else it's empty. But this game has so drastically escaped your grasp YEARS ago, that you have no idea how to fix it - or you don't have the balls to regain control of your game by making everyone's numbers more controlled. You also have ENEMIES with uncontrolled numbers, so the same problem exists on the other side too. Just like how you let RNG cut loose, you also let player and enemy numbers cut loose, too, and you just pissed into the wind and let it all unfold however it does. But the problem with that is that you arbitrarily nerf certain things, while letting other things remain king. You let a player clear through a map without ever losing HP, then a random skeleton archer 1-shots you when you thought the coast was clear to loot that Chaos Orb. You have boss fights that you have to Google and Youtube in order to know what's going on, and you have fully accepted that as the method of players learning. And some player builds are forcibly super cluttery on the screen - which can even be enjoyable for the player, until it gets them killed because they can't see ANYTHING that's going on.

And I know I said I'm going to focus on the bullet hell slop, but what can I say; when I talk about PoE, I just go on a full tangent stream of consciousness about all of the things that plague this game and make it unfun. This game has been so close for so many years. I was even enjoying this game more than ever, having coming back to it maybe a couple weeks ago. Lots of improvements here and there, and the Atlas (minus some maps just not existing right now) lets you play whatever map you like, constantly. And that's great!

But then I started doing the upper-level boss fights, and just like EVERY time when I come back to this game, it ALL came crashing down at this very moment. All of this game's biggest issues get a giant spotlight shone on them when you start doing bosses that are above the T16 map tier level. Nightmare bosses are slop: Catarina is just terrible. The Citadel boss has a lot of laser beams that you can't do anything about. And the Sanctuary boss's shockwave flickering thing is so hard to see that it's a direct punishment for, say, color blind people... And the Uber bosses are slop, because they hard-gatekeep a lot of characters from playing the real endgame of... the GAME that we're all playing. Imagine playing Diablo 2, and the game was just like... "Sorry, you can't play past Act 4. Your class isn't good enough to clear Act 5. Try again with a different character."




This game is just... ... ... held back. It's just held back. And like I said at the top; I know you're all a bunch of conditioned masochists. Or you think defending bad game design makes you look hardcore or something. But this game could be better. Hell, it could be GOOD. But you guys gotta... want it. Wake up from the slumber, lol. You guys don't even like this game enough to play Standard, you only stomach this game if you constantly reset in League Mode, what does that tell you???

Come on.




... Okay. Anyway, peace, fellas. Not trying to bash you if you like this game EXACTLY the way it is. (Although that would be a bizarre sentiment to me.) I myself always come back to it, to see what's going on. But it just always lets me down, every single time.

I'm sure most of my issues come from the fact that I play Cospri's Malice, but that's exactly what a lot of my complaint is. GGG has let this game slip away from their grasp, totally left in the dust of their own creation. And yet, from within that dust, they still poke and nerf things that are already struggling, while allowing other things to totally blow everything else out of the water. It's just senseless and asinine.

Oh well. Whatever. Nothing ever changes around here.

-OH, but hey, they finally did the Auction House thing! And, wouldn't you know it, it made this game a million times better. Crazy how that worked, right? All those nay-sayers that gatekept its addition for YEARS with their non-arguments all Homer Simpson'd into the shadows of the Wildwood, didn't they?