Arbiter of Ash Fight Feedback

MS isn't a required stat. They said so in the interview.

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FruitLord#0833 schrieb:

MS isn't a required stat. They said so in the interview.

They said so many things that don't translate to in-game reality.

The Arbiter fight was rebalanced having CC/streamers as a parameter, of course it would be easy peasy for any mid-range to causual player.


GGG: "We want people to see the mechanics"
Mr. Twitch NL: "Sure, I'll 2 shot him instead of 1 shot"
Normal Player: "THAF*CK"

Seems like it's the same they did with Sirius again. All bosses are relatively well done except for the very last one which is total BS.

Good to know I can just sell any fragments (if I ever get to a citadel).

So, I wanted to follow up on my earlier post in this thread and reiterate my opinion on parts of the first phase now that I completed the fight.

The fire circles are almost fine, imo. I think they need to be more immediately readable. Like, you know the "wave of yellow" visual ground effect the boss of Decay does when it summons vines? Maybe have that wash over the arena outside of the first circle so you know "outside bad; inside good". I feel like the timing could be a little longer on low levels of the fight (my first attempt with 20% MS boots was... stressful, but these were trivial with 30% movespeed boots; granted, I'm not carrying a shield). I also feel like these give you enough time to "plan" your movement so you can avoid attacks from the boss while the circles are going off. So, maybe fewer with a little longer time between on lower levels and you're good.

The fire waves... I really think this attack should maybe just be removed from lower levels of the fight? or reworked so it's a DoT and doesn't just murder you? It's a clean one shot that, if you misread the direction you need to move at all, ends your attempt. And there's, again, like 8 in a row. The attempt I killed the boss, I did so by doing enough damage to skip this attack. That's a bad solution.

The second phase is pretty good. I felt like I was fighting a boss instead of fighting a turret that teleports around the arena occasionally (this being where I think PoE2 vastly improves over most PoE1 bosses). Attacks were well telegraphed. For one attack, though, I'm not sure how I was supposed to read whether to stand in the circle and eat the attack he was obviously winding up or stand outside the circle until the attack went off and then get in (this was my only death on the second phase). That could be more readable. I'm also not sure what caused the ground effect, but it seemed irrelevant to my build for the most part, so I just ignored it. If there's a mechanic to remove the ground effect, it could maybe be more clear. I really do think the second phase is a vast improvement over the first because fighting a boss that's actively doing things and attacking you is more fun that figuring out where I need to stand for arena-wide one shots.

Edit: Did the fight successfully at level +1 now, and I still feel the above. I do understand the ground effect and removing it now, and I think it's fine as is. I just didn't see the orb the first time I was doing phase 2. I did do the fire waves successfully this time in phase 1, but I still think that attack is a bit crazy. Too little room for momentary misreads.

Hello guys, nice to see i`m not the only one who couldnt overcome this struggle.
i tried him 12 times but couldnt do it.
About the bombs - only failed 2-3 times at first, after that was doing it pretty consistently. I actually used blink in weapon swap - so i could dodge roll main and blink in second. and failed 2 times cause you cant control blink distance - just an inch off and boom, youre gone. If you could control it - it would be much better.
About fire hallways or passages or whatever this unclear mess of a skill is.
failed like 7-8 times cause i cant see the safe zones/were too distant from each other. Maybe there is some pattern - like u need to go up to get less distance.
Encountered 2 times overlaping bombs and fire passages during the same time - this is just unfair. You would need inhuman reactions or insane amount of tries to memorise and muscle memory it (like dark souls or sekiro or bloodborne or MGS Revengence or any other boss related timing based slasher). Despite visuals being very cool and stylish - clarity is non existant, i probably could get accustomed to the timings after like 20-30 attempts but it is still kinda silly for difficulty 1 story boss.

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FruitLord#0833 schrieb:

MS isn't a required stat. They said so in the interview.

What GGG said and what reality is are different worlds.

If you can't reach a cycle with 30% move speed in char-cheet it's clearly not posible with 0% or even negative MS as you get penalties from body armour or shields.

In addition I even spent 4 devine to buy 4 jewels with each 2% movespeed to get to ~38% movespeed on char cheet. But even then some of the cycles had been to far away!

Hard fights are cool and fun and satisfying.
Unfair and/or buged fights are not. Frustrating. Make me stop playing the game (and support).

!! And "luck" should NEVER EVER be part of a good boss fight designe !!

PS: Campain bosses had been GREAT. Clear indicators, great visibility except one (ritual stay/run indicators could be improved).

And then you get to the Pinacle Bosses and notice imidietly they are rushed :(.

Breach Boss T4 just spams more and more and more abilitys at the same time overlapping all of them.

Ritual Boss has this damn tornado which is ALLWAYS on top of the boss. So as melee you must tank that damn thing if you want to land a hit at all. Remove the tornado and the fight is fine for melees! Or make it move much slower then the boss so you can lure him away from the tornado. Or make it de- and respawn so melees get a clear attack-window.

Arbiter of Flames is bugged many many times AND has bad designe with far to short timers at T1, more or less all insta-kill mechanics (you can not learn if there is just 1/0 yes/no make/die patterns) and bad/missing indicators.
The hole fight needs a rework and fixes all over!

One-Shot builds are boring as hell. But I do understand why people use them. Else they would smash their hardware every second attamp in the current state :(.

I beat the fight 1 time now and I never want to do this phase 1 ever again. This is the first piece of content in PoE2 that makes me feel this way - I'll gladly farm all the other pinnacle bosses but this one.

So here's my feedback: it's bad

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C4Guy#0918 schrieb:

Seems like it's the same they did with Sirius again. All bosses are relatively well done except for the very last one which is total BS.

Good to know I can just sell any fragments (if I ever get to a citadel).

He's not nearly as bad as Sirus, thankfully. Sirus was way worse, imo, due to all of the screen-lagging ground clutter and overlapping visual effects. Arbiter's worst offense is that his bomb donuts can spawn super far apart from each other, which really punishes builds with low movespeed. Same with the stage cleaves going off so quickly; you have hardly any time to spot the bluish-grey lines for the safespot before the fire waves explode. I have 55% movespeed total, and even this mechanic catches me every now and then. I can't imagine what it's like for a slow class.

The second phase is, thankfully, much easier than the first. The one thing that usually gets people is when he does the bomb donut + fire beam combo. You need to bait the beam outside of the donut first, then quickly dodge inside. Second phase is also much easier for melee, which is welcome because the first phase has so much melee downtime.

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Gwonam#5505 schrieb:

You need to bait the beam outside of the donut first, then quickly dodge inside.

Well ... NO!

Not for Tier 1 of the Boss.
You just told the player "go inside the bomb" which is allready 100% contra intuitive as absolut everyone runs as far away as posible from any ground effect as learned during the hole campain and maps.

And then in the very same fight the player should learn "go inside except some times when he BUGS OUT and then with all the stress and panic you allready have to get your personal first kill for the Atlas Points you should learn to bait him. As when you do what you just learned he insta-kills you AGAIN with his beam"?

Just NO. As said not for Tier 1. Do it in Tier 2 or 3 fine. New Tier new stuff to learn. No problem.

But then again just to overlap old mechanics to rise the stress-level of a player is BAD and boring and when it becomes unfair as you have no chance if you don't play 110% perfect and can be done just with a selected view builds ... it's neither hard, interesting or exiting anymore.
It becomes PUR FRUSTATION!

EDIT: and as addition unfair == not respect player time!
No matter if you play SSF or Trade. In one case it takes a whole week to farm the keys for normal players. in the other case it needs maybe even several weeks to get the divines to buy the keys.
And with normal I don't even mean the causal dad/mom but the "normal" PoE Junky who plays3-5 hours each day.

Want the fight to become harder? Bring new (FAIR!!) Abilitys each tier.
Want the fight to last longer? Bring imun-phases (not perfect but well).

I know, the common ADHS quick quick quick player hates imun-phases and loves insta kills. But if they are needed to bring back motivation ... then they are simply needed!

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Gwonam#5505 schrieb:

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C4Guy#0918 schrieb:

Seems like it's the same they did with Sirius again. All bosses are relatively well done except for the very last one which is total BS.

Good to know I can just sell any fragments (if I ever get to a citadel).

He's not nearly as bad as Sirus, thankfully. Sirus was way worse, imo, due to all of the screen-lagging ground clutter and overlapping visual effects. Arbiter's worst offense is that his bomb donuts can spawn super far apart from each other, which really punishes builds with low movespeed. Same with the stage cleaves going off so quickly; you have hardly any time to spot the bluish-grey lines for the safespot before the fire waves explode. I have 55% movespeed total, and even this mechanic catches me every now and then. I can't imagine what it's like for a slow class.

The second phase is, thankfully, much easier than the first. The one thing that usually gets people is when he does the bomb donut + fire beam combo. You need to bait the beam outside of the donut first, then quickly dodge inside. Second phase is also much easier for melee, which is welcome because the first phase has so much melee downtime.

Sirus is not hard. Ive killed him many times in hcssf with 400k dps. I haven't fought arbitor yet because im in hc and it sounds like bs so im not planning on doing it until i can kill him before mechanics.

It seems like unless you are evasion/es then the movespeed requirement is toxic. I would like to see someone do this fight with armour and 0 movement speed on the build if movement speed isnt a requirement. I'm assuming theyre saying you can do it with temporalis without movement speed. Or some other blink setup that you wouldn't be doing on warrior most likely. Its possible they want you to reconfigure your character completely for this fight to use blink in your offhand. Problem is, i tried this and you couldnt bind blink from mainhand. You had to use an ability to get offhand up then use dodge/roll button to blink