Act 8 Doedre the Vile fight is utter garbage

I had no idea this boss was so hard. If it wasn't for the obvious room, I wouldn't have even noticed she was a boss.

And that's on all my builds, which includes a squishy self caster. Never died so far in the new acts, even on Kitava. You just have to pay attention for once.

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Xavathos wrote:

You just have to pay attention for once.

If players aren't supposed to "pay attention"(read: look for some shiet hidden in decoration with pixel-hunting level thoroughness) in other fights, then it is absurd to presume they'll do it in that one fight. Which isn't even an act boss, ffs.

Yeah that fight is the worse of the bunch.

On my characters with Life Leech/are melee I just keep her on the minion phase because fuck dealing with the red ball hell. It turns a boss fight into a literal tank and spank as I just stand there smacking her for 5 minutes leeching.

Very well designed, GGG please add more fights I can eat during.

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Syvaris wrote:

with Life Leech/are melee

Did the same .. sadly got spoiled about interactable object, would have been interesting how long it would have taken to notice the clickable Valve.

It was really prominently displayed when you don't switch off visible items.

really not that hard...

even without turning the valve

Actually Hargan comments on how it's strange that Doedre even fought the Exile and that death obviously seems to make one less smart, for the lore people.

The valve is not the only problem with the Doedre fight, guys. It may not even be the biggest.

Players who are slightly gimped, especially in the DPS category, by slightly less effective gear or (as in my case) by the choice of an underpowered skill such as non-meta melee, can use personal skill to work around this handicap during most of the game, including most of the bosses. It simply takes longer to beat them. But that's OK, we enjoy a challenge; otherwise we'd have switched to a meta skill long ago.

Doedre is the first true DPS check this game has, where your gear or (more importantly) your skill choice makes or breaks you. (Kitava2 is the second one. All other bosses can be defeated with skill and/or mechanics knowledge regardless of your primary DPS type, though it will of course take much longer.) Generally speaking, even with an intimate familiarity with Doedre's mechanics and how each valve turn changes them, personal skill will not be enough to save you here.

Therefore, players who have been using personal skill to compensate for their non-meta choices and/or gear restrictions will suddenly hit a wall.

Furthermore, if you are using totems or some other overpowered meta ability, your skill is far less relevant, so the opposite is true: Unskilled players bypass the content easily, and post in this and similar threads with nonsense such as, "What's the big deal? I beat her easily. You guys just need to git gud." This is not a solution. Bosses which can be trivialized are not much more fun than those which are excessively difficult. The balance problem is simply reversed.

This points to a larger problem with the GGG team failing (over multiple patches, for years) to buff certain skills so that they are anything other than noobtraps, but it also points to poor boss design, as the only way past this wall for certain character types is

A) go farm the prior area a few dozen times and hope for a really good drop,
B) return to Twilight Strand with a brand-new character type, play through the entire game with that character, get some good drops in maps, and then twink the underpowered character with those drops,
C) use all your passive resets and orbs of regret as necessary to change your build, and go grind in an earlier level to level up those necessary gems, or
D) zerg the fucker (cheat).

None of these solutions is appealing or satisfying to many. Is it any wonder that people get angry and want to quit (or even uninstall) upon reaching this point in the game?

Both Doedre1 and Kitava2 require a mechanical rework, which would solve the problem completely. Alternatively, they could simply be nerfed (a much more common tactic in GGG's playbook), but I really hope they are not, because that is not a real solution but rather just another band-aid. This game has enough band-aids to restore modesty to a sumo wrestler as it is. We certainly don't need more.

I believe doedre 1 not much of a dps check.

I had very low dps on one of my characters and fairly low survivability as well, and solo'd it because of mobility. I just never let my stacks go above 3 in any stage (so LOTS of valve use, literally clicking valve almost immediately after available) and it was a VERY long fight, but almost any reasonable level of dps should be able to do it. She doesn't have an insane energy shield pool either that makes it unbearable.

To give compare to how bad my dmg was, I was using spell echo bladefall, and couldn't couldn't reliably oneshot (including the repeated cast) white monsters in the first zone of the act (before town) with concentrated effect.

Doedre 2 is closer to a true dps check. If you cannot kill the pillars or doedre fast enough and aren't some god tank who can survive 10 stack red or speed god who can still dodge with 10 stack purple, the fight is bricked.
Basically what it means to be a true dps check is the above: all boss fights basically check a combination of dps, defences, mechanical play, mobility. If you cannot win the fight with lack of dps even with (reasonably) high defences and mobility and playing well, then it is a real dps check.

I was duoing with a friend and both our leveling builds had bad single target/dps, and in the end i had to port in on my map character to finish the fight for us...

Kitava's (both 1 and 2) dps check is mainly the adds, and as a property of adds, you can pass those dps checks just by being sufficiently tanky and/or having forms of recovery

I used lgoh+cyclone with only acro and saw my life drop from 3.4k to about 500 and almost instantly to full several times... don't tank the mortars. If i spin perimeters around the kitava's champions and stuff probably only the flicker strikes would hit me. It would take a long time but dps not that required if you have other stuff. But likewise if you don't have great defences or mobility/speed, then if you port out, it is hard to regain momentum to beat the heart... my friend playing crit blade vortex and I playing non-crit blade vortex encountered this problem our first kitava 2 try and he died to the adds.

Anyways I think doedre 1 fight is fine.

We can agree to disagree. I was able to defeat Doedre2 just fine, using skill to bypass my lack of DPS.

Also, I wouldn't consider Bladefall to be equivalent in power to a non-meta melee skill. Not even close. Go fight Doedre1 with Frenzy/FS and then come back and tell me decent DPS is not hugely important.

I do agree, however, that DPS checks for the bosses we are talking about primarily come in the form of adds. If you cannot keep up, you eventually die. No amount of mechanical skill will compensate for that inability.