Boss fights in POE or: Alkaizerx says Uber Lilith is better than any POE Pinnacle Boss

Personally i just want to say after multiple streams of watching various streamers do the fight that I think Alk is either stoned, or maybe he's just pandering trying to find new viewers or just maybe he's burned out so bad on POE that he's being totally biased about it. It looks like a very basic fight with typical spam of telegraphed one shots that are deliberately overtuned for players with very good eye hand coordination. Which excludes most boomer ARPG players (Including me I"m sure but the games not good enough to keep me interested).

Remember when ARPG's were about how you built and geared your character?

IMO Binary fail state dominated boss fights are lame in an ARPG. Once you have them down you almost can't fail just muscle memory + glass cannon and don't get hit, They test almost nothing about your character (besides maybe "did you get double dash/move speed") the odd hard DPS check is fine, but I really don't feel like boss fights in a game about how you built and leveled and geared up your character should be primarily decided by how good you are at recognizing and clicking the correct direction on the screen. Some of that sure, but hard gated by it?

POE obviously also has many fights with these Pass/Fail eye hand reflex tests, and even a short term memory pattern recognition test. Taken straight from 1980's "Simon" game which I was ALSO fucking terrible at. But thats mostly whatever to me; I personally would love to see more "do you have enough defense", do you have enough potion discipline (attrition fights) and "did you overly specialize in one thing" tests in boss fights. There so much unused design space for aspects like these IMO. These conditions are actually about how you geared and built, and are next to non existent in POE (they didn't used to be but they made it super easy to keep flasks topped off). There's quite a few attrition fights in that other game say what you will about that game, I'll probably agree, but its nice to have more than just "can you get out of the death circle fast enough" tests.

In terms of qualty of the fight, I feel Uber Atziri is just as mechanically difficult (Edit on recollection its not, it has less spammy one shots so UL is probably harder), as U. Lilith. Its just that fight is extremely well known and can be outgeared these days.

Shaper is a better fight if they deleted the lame "do 1/4th of a poorly rolled map in between phases" portions.

Uber Elder is just straight up a way better and more interesting fight that actually tested builds and gear back in the day when it was new. It can be outgeared these days by a lot.

Honestly UL is just a bland boring series of very hard pass/fails no fucking different than Lost Ark typing tests, just different reflexes.

No opinion on D4, but Im wondering why we went from Shaper and Uber Elder to Sirus, memory game, Exarch, and Eater.

Like, quality did go down, right?

Shaper was exhilarating. Uber Elder is maybe my favorite fight in video games.. maybe tied with Fume Knight and Gael, and.. ok a lot But still top tier experience.

This is not a PoE bash, but does anyone feel the same about Eater, Exarch, Maven as they did back in the Shaper/Elder days?

What happened?

The guy is considered one of the best players in the fucking world and literally has done every uber in the entire game in multiple gauntlet in HC but I don't want wow bosses dude get that out outa here if I wanted an mmo boss I'll play an mmo POE bosses are fine and simple.

When it comes to mechanics as I said POE beats it in my opinion the reason why Alk considers it the best is because you can't exactly outgear that boss at the current moment it takes a lot of ''skill'' to do that boss even though I bully D4 including the players that boss is very ''skilled'' base compared to POE I'll agree. You can cheese exploit it but people will bully you for doing that so nobody cares for those type of kills.


It is a better boss in terms of raw mechanics skill but that's the only boss that's remotely comparable and there's no incentive to do it; It's just there.

i ll advocate alkhaizer.

coming from a "weaker" player POV. D4's bosses tends to be catered more towards a more casual audience.

thus the telegraphing is slower and more obvious but much more punishing with one shots what not.

but thats the beauty of d4's philosophy in boss design. pay attention to what you're doing and you dont die.

POE is different. GGG is so damn intent at killing the players it can feel... cheap.

without even going into the ubers. lets take a look at the "base forms" of some of the bosses we have.


shaper. after doing his bullet hell phase he tends to fire a beam. RIGHT AFTER, while some of the bullets are still around. for most players, they (ahem me.. ) tend to run into the remain bullets OR fail to see where the shaper is at and eat the beam. if you somehow get a dot puddle at zana's safe point. you better pray you get to force shaper into a new area soon before he does the bullet hell. tbh i feel shaper is fine except the bullet hell phase. even if we had 2 shapers around it would still be more mechanically feasible for "the average" player to deal with.

elder. his "trapping phase" simply DRAINS your life. as a blood rage user this is infuriating. i sustain via life leech rather than regen as my regen is patethic. i m FORCED to use a potion to heal up. if i dont? prepare to die soon. also you cant move when it happens. good luck if theres some nasty telegraphed attack is happening in the background. speaking of nasty telegraphed attacks. i DONT KNOW WHEN is the huge ass elder attack actually going to trigger. sometimes i dont even realize its happening. besides these 2 issues, i think elder is fine.

sirus. DIE BEAMS. if you dont see sirus, you're blind and can eat an offscreen die beam. TOTAL BULLSHIT. i also find it BS that its 2023 and GGG is fine with it and not doing ANYTHING to address it. there are times where i die, get back into the area, while getting back to the fighting area, eat an offscreen diebeam. i m NOT even in same screen with sirus yet. thats really bad.

maven. i have 2 issues with maven. the first being the memory game. the second being the degen pools. its either very trivial OR very punishing depending on who you ask.

exarch. ball hell phase. admittedly its better than shaper's bullet hell by a huge margin but i hate it. either i cheese it with totems or just eat one and die. very rarely do i avoid all of em.

eater. just the "stand on the circles" phase. i find it bullshit that the circles dont provide protection from the beam. if i stand on the circle the beam will kill me. if i dont stand on the circle the explosion will kill me. guess i ll just die then.

these are all BASE forms and i can already pin point some of the BS that will outright seem unfair to weaker players.

d4 boss battles are WAAAAAY easier than POE. but is that bad?

i honestly have come to terms that i m getting older, my memory and reflexes are failing me. whenever i do maven for a voidstone. i accept that whenever she does a memory game i will try to complete it but with a high chance of just dying. i know that uber shaper has bullet hell phase without zana to help. i've ACCEPTED that i will NEVER clear uber elder because of that. uber sirus spawns death areas everywhere and even at your feet. it can be hard to notice. its worse when he decides to stand in the middle of one (for meleeers).

i consider myself a completionist but i allow myself some liberties. in POE the uber pinnacle bosses are BS that i know i will not be able to overcome mechanically. the barrier for entry is also damn high, how can i even practice?

d4's uber lilith has one shot mechanics all around. but for the "regular player, you still could clear the content if you pay SOME attention and GTFO of the way when required.

sure it may seem comical that you can see things telegraphed in slow motion with AMPLE dodge time. but at the same time i NEVER feel like i died a bullshit death. i could have easily dodged it. it is totally my fault and i accept the loss.

POE? have an offscreen die beam

While off topic I feel poe's best boss design is in heist, expedition, in game. betrayal. They may be easy, but they are very nice. They clear telegraphs, not overly punishing. They are climatic in a way that poe bosses typical aren't.

Pinnacle bosses are a little too healthy and their incisive to grundy for me. But the best pinnacle boss in my opinion is probably black star if we count it as a pinnacle.

On that note, is Uber atziri a pinnacle boss, Or the gaurdians? GahG should really last these out at some point ingame.

Honestly the boss fight looks like the average lost ark boss.
Decently okay designed but not the innovation for a great or good boss fight by any meaning.

Mmorpgs like FFXIV and GW2 are still the king genre if you are all after boss fights, cause not a single hack and slay arpg will ever get to the point of to offer "great" boss fights, including pseudo arpgs hack and slay games like D4 and lost ark.

But quite funny how people start to compare years old content with something in a new game lol.

I know it's pretty old now but maven is my favorite big bad boss fight. Maybe uber elder also but that's really old.

I don't know how that Uber Lilith fight looks like so i can't really comment on how good it is. What i do want to say is that POEs boss design has taken a MASSIVE nosedive since 3.09.

Looking at the recent bosses it is very clear to me that GGG just stopped trying to make interesting and balanced fights and instead just tries to get players killed by whatever means neccessary.
You can't refill flasks anymore a core game mechanic, there is no consideration for archetype balance with all fights heavily favoring high mobility ranged builds if you want to be able to avoid the mechanics while doing damage and all of them have debuff mechanics that outright disable a vital point of character defense AND can't be removed by any means to have a 100% chance of killing you no matter how well made your build is (Sirus degen pudddles disabling regen, Exarch degen fields doing the same, Eater balls killing you out right no matter what while also slowing you to a halt, Maven beams disabling recovery and so on).
Those things are still somewhat within reason for the regular versions but on the uber versions... balance? What's that? GGG is obsessed with their idea of making a "hardcore" game and they seem to think that a certain amount of player deaths is neccessary to qualify as that, no matter how, players must die as much as possible. Good design? Balance? Visual clarity? Fuck all of those as long as we can kill players somehow.

back in the day of diablo 3 i was running "alkaizer route"
on my wotb barbarian before i knew it. than i saw that girly hair dude with annoying memeing attitude. from now on i don give a f what streamer say.

uber lilith attacks are badly telegraphed and melee means nothing
most of the ground efects are too dark and not clear enough
fight is designed kind of shitty to be honest.
whole fights is allso just a dps race cause of stacking debuff

unlike poe there are certain classes with broken builds who can only kill her by bug like sorc or by exploit like necro
legit barb kill is 8 minutes long spinning around like an idiot. is this fun for you ?
legit rogue kill is standing in 1 place spamming poisions

poe at least admitted they can not win with players lmao
and made straight up 1 shotting mechanics xD

lilith uber boss fight is uber dogshayte :D

Better means too hard? Then yes, echo of lilith is a retarded oneshot mechanic.