I don’t think this enemy is too difficult, but I do think the current design is very tedious.
His sunder lasts 3 seconds and is on a 4 second cooldown. If you get hit with it and then run away, by the time you’re back he’s going to do it again. If you DON’T get hit by running away, he’ll almost be ready do it again by the time you run back to him.
His obsidian clusters also sunder you for 6 seconds on death. Although he can apparently only summon these every 13 seconds, he can have 24 of them up at once. His movement is so slow that getting him out of the range of these things takes too damn long.
As a result of the above two points, my melee character essentially spends more than 70% of the fight running away, and if I choose to do otherwise, I have to fight while sundered.
If the design philosophy is that players should be avoiding sundering, basically this is an exercise in running around in circles with very limited damage up time — not difficult but tedious.
To be clear, I am happy to be expected to avoid telegraphed dangerous attacks rather than facetank. I just want it to be a bit less frequent in this case.
It would be nice if this was changed somehow, but following the suggestion in a pinned thread, I will let the developers decide what makes sense rather than suggesting a specific solution myself.
why are you running away ? you can just sidestep or evade 180 degree through him and keep attacking on his regular stab.
Clusters will make you move, true, if you can’t tank the dmg
As Gnomish says, his main sunder can be avoided by just evading through him. Nice thing about him is that the telegraph for that is very slow and ponderous. The cluster sunder is pretty much unavoidable - at least by me. Hopefully he is almost dead by the time he uses it.
I actually quite like this design to be honest other than the frequency. I think it’s fantastic that you have a solid two seconds to see, and then move away from something, but if you stand in it, it is gonna be pretty devastating. Zantarin shotgun is similar. I would like all telegraphs to behave similarly tbh. Very big and obvious and slow, but devastating if you’re hit. Grim Dawn doesn’t quite have the graphical fidelity when lots of effects are going to use anything less obvious or slow IMO.
I didn’t realize you can evade iframe through him though, that’s a hot tip. Definitely a strategy I used in Hades but didn’t realize I could do it here too!
not just evade btw, (evade just has iframes while moving), you can leap or VM/rush through too, enemies aren’t solid unless we’re “walking” - difference just is those movements requires moving the cursor and evade simplifies a-b travel (often/mostly) regardless of targeting
This I can agree with. Others have addressed that you are intended to Evade his Sunders in general, however this is an experience of dealing with Benn for years that is rarely super fun to engage with.
I think it’s worth considering reducing the rate at which he spawns clusters (burst summon) at once. Perhaps from 6 at once to 4 at once.
Quite frankly, his single target sunder could be a giant hurricane of red death that comes out of him and that would be fine, instead of the kinda ignorable one swing it is.
It’s the clusters which are functionally unavoidable, if you actually want to do any damage to him as melee, which I find objectionable.
That, or the combination of those two above things which mean I’m running around for more than 70 or 80% of the fight instead of actually hitting the enemy.
On the subject of Grava I also think he could stand to have his null projectile turned into a sunder as well assuming he would get the sunder animation above his head before launching it. I like big obvious telegraphs that aren’t movement animations, unless the enemy in question is enormous like beronath.
One way of dealing with Benny’s crystals is sending in player scaled pets. They’ll explode the crystals for you. That sorts out nightblade, oathkeeper and shaman, meaning you’ve got the majority of melee builds covered.
- difference just is those movements requires moving the cursor and evade simplifies a-b travel (often/mostly) regardless of targeting