Having trouble with Nemesis bosses

Can you even remove Valdaran’s retaliation aura? I remember using Nullification to try to remove it and nothing happened. Maybe that changed recently, i need to try it.

Can you even remove Valdaran’s retaliation aura?

Yeah, you can.

Ever since the 1.2 update I lowered the FX volume yet again, because of the absurdly loud loot-drop sounds.
Effectively, when I have some music on, I am playing without game sound.
I can still recognize the abilities based on visual cues and timing, but sound cues are pretty pointless for me :smiley:

yes, same as Mad Queen’s, just different FX

I do agree that Valdaran’s aura needs a cd. PB and Stun Jacks builds just get ultra fucked by this aura, basically for 6 seconds those builds can’t touch him or they get obliterated.

how is that different to MQ?
same aura type; MQ just has 100% chance to trigger instead of 15% :laughing:

it’s also sorta untrue you can’t do anything for 6secs, because unlike MQ; Valde’s aura projectile has a much shorter max range - so you can out range it/the “lobbed” projectiles and continue to cast/shoot more easily

  1. You would have to be off-screen to be out of range:


    (and they keep going)

  2. There is some other skulldoggery going on, haven’t quite figured it out. It doesn’t help, that he has another nova proc, when he takes damage (that one has a CD). Hard to tell what is going on, but I have some just recorded some weird deaths when his aura isn’t even up.

  3. Mad Queen should also get snipped. As should Bravna. :sunglasses:

i out range them “constantly” in SR image

no, heck no, f 2 the a to the ! no
and i find it funny you would even suggest that considering multiple of your raised complaints about bosses being either trivial, or their special moves being easily countered turning them into a static facetank fest :smile:

wait, why is Bravna in there?? @_@

done like 10 rounds and he’s not shown up yet :confounded:

*complaint RNGesus work your magick :pray: :man_bowing:

aand ofc i fucked up the recording
anyway, you’re right, i dont’ technically out range them, what happens is the spread gets so large only a single orb hits me :smile:

hopefully this shows what i mean somewhat decently, i’m not that far away, yet barely getting hit

if anything is aura duration is so short it’s almost running out just by the time i’m trying to reposition :thinking:

I don’t want them to be trivialized.

I just don’t think they are good or interesting fights atm.

A tough fight should carry the risk of the character dying - but these abilities are “lul it turned the aura on and now you are dead”, for some characters.
Not very interesting and honestly something that turns me away from the game.

But I won’t stick around to argue in circles with you, it’s just my opinion on that topic.

(Valdaran has a couple other dumb things going on, which I don’t have time to delve into right now. Another time, another topic.)

unsure if i’m taking this too literal, or it’s facetious? - Valde’s aura hasn’t changed mechanically in like 300 years :sweat_smile: so either you mean it was never interesting? or something else happened to suddenly make it not so?

ye but that’s the thing, MQ and Valde does exactly that, and frankly i struggle to understand what the real difference is here vs fabby barrier, benjir bombs, grava nulli or any other enemy that has either a lethal attack you must pay attention to; or “disengage” for a few seconds
“how is this aura any different”, it’s worse telegraphed?
because at worst it’s equally lethal as other "oh sht"effects various builds/players must or should pay attention to, or it’s just a speedbump in the facetank fest making you back off dps for a few seconds (and surely that can’t be the issue with the plethora of boss attacks causing that very thing in different ways?)
Volcanoes, crystals, tethers, Nulli balls, barriers, ground effects/pools, or stuff with “area of effect denial” you can’t just simply sidestep and have to actually move for a couple secs

oh jeebers what else is wrong with him now :sweat_smile: @_@

The new loot drop and nemesis arrival sounds scared the shit out of me when I first heard them, I usually have my volume pretty low and it was the only thing that really stood out …

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love the nemesis sound warning, still scares the crap out of me randomly :smile:
loot sound i could be without for sure tho :pensive:

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I still think Kuba is too OP and definitely not OK when compared to other Nemesis bosses. I can kill every other one without much effort on Ultimate (and I am fully aware my build could still be much better, I just enjoy playing it that way), but Kuba takes me a very long time to kill and I need to pay lots of attention not to die - especially because how he multiplies all the time. Other Nemesis bosses are either fun to kill or could be even stronger in my opinion, but Kuba is a serious nightmare for me. :smiley:

Well, in my case Kuba is a walk in the park. Too easy! Other nemesis are trouble though.
This obviously depends entirely on the build.

My previous char had some trouble with Kuba too. It helps if you move around every 5 seconds or so. Otherwise, if you stay in one spot for too long, the accumulated pools of blood on the ground might become a problem (damaging you, healing Kuba). Also, try to evade his breath wave attack, that’s the most damaging one: Kubacabra, the Endless Menace - Grim Dawn Monster Database
It’s the first one that says “Fire a damaging wave”.

kuba should be one of the easier nemesis, regardless of his splitting (since baby kuba’s has less stats than big kuba)
what might impact your kill time is he heals with the pools, so if your dps is “low” (dps check is on the higher side compared to others/maiden), you can alleviate the healing by constantly rotating and stutterstepping out of the pools a bit
(tbh i find it easier to just out dps the heal pools now)
*reason i say that is Kuba doesn’t actually have much of a “hard” hitting attack like others do, nor any debuffs to lower your stats/defences or debilitate your unlike ex Maiden armour and da shred or Grava’s fumble pools

I am not sure what they mean with this.
As far as I can tell there are 2 ways to look at this:

A. This is EXACTLY as Grim Dawn does it. (except for the not dying part)
I am sure you know this, but for completion’s sake:
At 0% resist you take 100% damage
At 80% resist you take 20% damage
8% under cap, at 72% resist you take 28% damage, which is a flat 8% more.
However, in Ultimate (and to a lesser extend in Elite), 20% damage is the maximum amount of damage you want to take (100% of acceptable damage)
Players were wondering why they were taking so much damage at 72% resist, so people started explaining the difference between taking 20% damage and taking 28% damage as “you are taking 40% more acceptable damage.” (20%=100% acceptable damage so 28% = 140% acceptable damage)

B. You have to rescale damage and create an arbitrary scale (in which percentages don’t really represent flat percentages)
Basically you have to scale damage to 180%
At 0% resist you take 180% damage
At 80% resist you take 100% damage
8% under cap, at 72% resist you take 108% damage.
In this case 8% damage is also 8% acceptable damage.
However, all this means is you effectively just have a maximum of 80/180=44% resistance and scaled to an arbitrary scale and using percentages for that scale makes no sense. You might as well change resistance to a resistance rating with a cap of 1000 and rescale that to whatever percentage of flat damage reduction you want to have.

Correct me if I am wrong though.
How does Last Epoch do this?

Resistances are up to 75% but enemies have 75% resistance penetration. Overcapping doesn’t help against it.

that sounds like resists are useless then :sweat_smile:

Roughly the equivalent of what tqFan said: simply use Actual Res = (Current res - res Cap) in your damage calculations.
I don’t know whether that’s what LE does or not, but it would yield the expected result.
Overcap by 25% => actual res = 25%, take 25% less damage
Short 40% of cap => actual res = -40%, takes 40% additional damage
It just becomes a question of an unintuitive mechanism for new players where they need to understand that Cap = Base. But that’s basically what GD does… in a more punishing way.

I actually liked how Sacred handled it: resistances and armor were lumped together (you only had “armor” values, but they were split by damage type).
And iirc, the formula behind that was: Actual Damage = Damage / (Damage + Armor)
So if you had the same armor value as what you were hit for, you’d take half damage.
If your armor far exceeded the incoming damage, you’d get hit for nothing.
Conversely, if the incoming damage far exceeded your armor value, your armor would be useless.

Sacred and its sequel were deeply flawed games, but with very interesting mechanisms, and I wish ARPG designers had tried to improve on that template, instead of all going mostly for the Diablo template.

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Which basically boils down to my 180% damage example thing, but with different semantics.
The problem with these systems is that percentages make no sense at all.
Any of these linear systems can basically be recalculated to flat % damage reduction.
In LE’s case it is 75/175 ≈ 43% damage reduction at cap. That is the actual damage reduction you have. They just make the calculations needlessly complex. (Maybe so they can go “unlike in other games…” )

The “problem” with GD (in comparison to LE) is not the way res is calculated I think. It is the amount you need at cap which makes it difficult for people to inherently understand why things go wrong (?).

If the game was designed around 50% res, you’d take twice as much damage at 0% res as you would at cap. That is something people would probably inherently get more easily than the current situation in which 0% res means you take 5 times as much damage as you would at cap.