Either make the boulder survivable or change him so he only throws the damn thing when you can actually see him on screen doing it. 
he needs to be able to target you to throw it 
zoom out/increase your resolution if your “screens” are just 5inch wide 
1 Like
Isn’t his green meteor pretty slow? You could dodge it easily so it’s fine imo.
2 Likes
Genuinely the only time I’ve died to his rock is when I first tried to tank it on purpose. The only other times I’ve died to this boss is on lower difficulties when I didn’t mind poison resistance and stood in his stuff without thinking.
That being said, as much as I like a challenge, he probably should only initiate his throw when on screen.
2 Likes
- Only throw rock on screen
- Can throw spear 3 screens away
I’m playing on a 40in 4k screen and he was way, waaaaay, off screen. Dunno what to tell you man.
It’s dodgeable if you know the silly thing is there. If he’s not even visible when he throws it, you’re possibly not looking for it.
I was skeptical that actually happened, but your indiscriminate usage of caps lock really sold me
1 Like
The actual elephant in the room is the multiproj shotgunning. It’s not just him.
As long as this beauty is in game, developers can’t neither properly balance, nor design “fair” encounters. Outcomes are literally unpredictable.
And with continuous game development and inevitable accumulation of power creep, this shit is just out of control.
Underking barely has anything going for him, let it throw his rock from outside of the screen.
1 Like
Damn, rip HC character.
That said, if you’re willing to hear some advice for it, whenever a nemesis appear, check the minimap to see who it is and their direction. I’ve never been caught unprepared since doing this no matter which nemesis it is.
I’ve been offscreen’d by nemesis a few times before (Aleksander’s meteor for example), so I do have some experience with how to not get offscreen’d. I’ve not seen offscreen Underking boulder before, but checking minimap should at least prepare you on what to deal with and potentially give you some reaction time if the offscreen boulder start flying. Doing this has also helped me survive an unholy encounter of nemesis + Dread + several skeletal priests around.
1 Like
sure, but you had run away from him there right? ie already aggroed him iirc from your thread?
It’s not like he spawns out of nowhere and just nukes you from a screen away 
Crucible says hi. Keeping any sort of track of that bastard in later waves is a full time job and there’s all sorts of geometry for the rock to shotgun you off of.
He’s an example of a thing that has become a bit too common in FoA. There’s projectile shotguns all over the place. Enemies that fire off a projectile nova that, if you just so happen to be on top of them when they do, altF4s your health bar. Enemies that fire off a volley of 5 projectiles in a cone so if you’re in melee you’re eating all of them. Projectiles that split on impact.
These sorts of attacks are visually interesting and a different take on enemy AoE, but the issue is their outcome is very unpredictable. Sometimes it barely tickles, sometimes it takes your whole healthbar because the second time around, you were 2 inches to the left.
how is that any different? - crucible is a certain size, you’re always “on” screen
you mean the thing you’re supposed to do, in the mode that’s reliably doing something, you don’t feel like doing and want to close your eyes through it instead?
*just to (naively) preempt this; you know crucible has fixed spawns, so you always know what waves spawn nemesis and were… - if you chose to not deal with that, it’s hardly a distance aggro/range issue
aaaany relation whatsoever to?
see above
and?
everything is unpredictable the first time you encounter it, until it’s not
*ignoring currently nova bug, which is its own issue, shotguns are not new and thus shoudlnt’ be unpredictably dangerous.
If you’re trying to say some volley shotguns are badly telegraphed, that would again seem like something different, and totally unrelated to a telegraphed slow moving boulder…
But at this point, why don’t we just remove all projectile and ranged attacks from the game and make Crucible not aggro player + prevent certain dmg amounts to be applied to player at all 
^unironically feels where we’re headed with some of those silly comments 
I can’t speak for his case, but in my case it was in the SR room, so he was there the whole time but wasn’t aggroed (I mean, presumably he was aggroed when he threw the rock at me, but how would I know that, he was still just standing in the same spot he had been since the map loaded, ya know?)
you can aggro stuff at a distance, SR is no different on this - but you usually don’t aggro stuff from multiple screens away
You can chain aggro stuff in small rooms (ex immolation), but then you’re usually also aware of it/see the trash mobs etc come rushing from you. (since you can’t just pull a single enemy “behind” while not pulling all the ones in between)
if it’s boss room it cant’ be 2 screens away/boss rooms arent’ that big - and wouldnt’ be any different than other ranged attacks/long distance enemies you might ass pull then (ie expectation should be bigger as should awareness)
Guess i’m the only one that checks out what bosses are in the SR boss room before i do anything. But i guess that’s wasted time.
I’m not sure you’re even worth replying to, but this is a ridiculously, over the top bad faith interpretation of his comment.
Like, are you trying to get a job on fox news or something?
Maybe, just maybe, consider that this person (and everyone else) is honestly reporting their experiences and their feelings about a game we’re all playing and is doing so with the intention of making the game more fun for everyone.
Obviously this doesn’t mean his proposed solutions are necessarily correct, they may or may not be, but if you’re going to reply, do so in good faith.
All that being said, lets talk about the difference between “hard” and “unfair”.
Elden Ring is an easy example of a game that is generally considered to be “hard” but also “fair”. It has lots of bosses that can one shot you but the moves are generally telegraphed and readable, although I’ll note that it has no hardcore mode, probably because the odds of anyone guessing how to fight a boss before they’ve practiced it is ridiculous, which is a slightly different issue.
Grim Dawn, on the other hand, is generally not a “hard” game, mostly because you can solve almost any problem by acquiring more / better items.
That’s not to say it’s a game that doesn’t require skill, there’s definitely a difference between someone who just started out and someone with experience, where to move, when to use healing potions, even which items to equip and which skills to invest in is a form of skill, so there’s a meaningful difference between a “good” grimdawn player and a “bad” one.
Now let’s talk about the difference between “hard” and “unfair”. “Hard” is a boss you have to learn a pattern of moves in order to react appropriately or find some specialized equipment or maybe fight in a certain environment. Things that you get better at the more you do it, aka increasing skill.
“Unfair” is when a boss you can’t even see hits you with a tiny boulder you have zero reason to be looking for and it one shots you regardless of defensive stats.
Is it unbeatable? Obviously not, especially in softcore, you just respawn and go kill him, or in theory you know there’s a nemesis boss that might be underking somewhere on the map at all times and you’re constantly watching for a boulder entering your screen and so on and so forth. That’s possible.
It’s just not fun. Something being “unfair” is not the same as being “unbeatable” but it’s rarely enjoyable (unless you’re playing kaizo or something, but at that point you’ve signed up for it).
To be slightly constructive, here’s a couple of proposed fixes that I don’t think make the underking meaningfully “less hard” but reduce his unfairness.
!) Don’t throw the boulder unless he’s currently on screen or at least has been on screen at some point.
-
Change his default aiming point for the boulder to be slightly off center of the player, such that if you stood perfectly still when he threw the boulder, it would land within a few feet, hitting the player with several fragments but not shotgunning them to death. You could still walk into the landing spot of course.
-
Add a targeting indicator on the ground. A giant red crosshair showing BOULDER LANDING HERE.
(This gets into the general design philosophy of how end game grimdawn wants to work, it feels like a desire to make bosses and such “harder” but apparently they’ve decided to do that by adding big super moves that you have to dodge or die, and frankly I’m not sure GD is the type of game where that sort of thing really works, for a variety of reasons. For one thing, our movement options are limited to basically… run in a direction you click or every X seconds dash quickly in that direction, it’s not exactly elden ring where you can walk or sprint or roll in every cardinal direction or block or use an immune move or whatever else you have.
Grimdawn is also, frankly, a fairly visually messy game. This is obviously somewhat subjective and it’s worse for me because I’m playing with a dozen skeletons at all times, but even without them, there’s a lot of visual effects playing on screen during a fight, acid plumes, ground fires, volcanoes, falling meteors, boulders, not to mention the monsters themselves swinging swords/tentacles/whatever. Tracking all of that is, uh, tricky to put it mildly, and it’s made somewhat worse because generally most of it is irrelevant, I can stand still and just ignore 90% of the projectiles hitting me because they do like 100 damage and I’m healing 1000hp/s or more, so then suddenly one of the meteors does 40k damage instead of 100 damage and it’s a bit of a surprise because it’s very poorly visually indicated that this one really matters)
6 Likes
if you want to invoke “bad faith” nonsense debating, then please atleast dont’ do it yourself; and pay attention to what you’re responding to because of what i’m specifically responding to.
Crucible is much different, therefor the comparison and interaction is much different.
You cannot not expect a nemesis in Crucible, it’s a fixed format… Enemies spawn in stages, in patterns, and as i said you’re always “on” screen/you’re not deaggroed with 2 screens away like elsewhere in the game thus not surprised.
Likewise nova interactions and shotgun volleys has nothing in relation to UK or said rock or their scaling or mechanic/telegraph comparison etc…
Which is also why UK rock can be begun to even be debated on whether it’s hard/unfair in the first place as it thus has its own interaction, which is completely unrelated to the other attacks like insta nova detonation “bugs” etc…
You might feel that UK projectile does too much dmg, and put it in an unrelated difficulty comparison of hard/unfair, but dmg amount has nothing todo with the comments i’m responding to or pointing out, as they are much different in that regard…
(and UK rock is hardly small)
if you want to argue dmg scaling/dmg amount values for hard/unfair, we can do that, and my stance is very simple on that front; “bring back ohko Aleks Meteor”, but it was not what was being commented on there.
yep, but then you’re surprised the first time, and not the subsequent times, right? →
the game being a visual mess and have highly fluctuating attacks in terms of significance, doesnt’ really change that those are then the ones we adapt/learn to pay attention to.
Red swipe, UK boulder etc/“flying rock”
Which is then reliably dangerous, to avoid, contra a bugged nova detonation