The whole fun of fighting Aleks is swerving out of the way of his meteor.
And destroying his crystals ASAP.
Underking boulder shotgunned, which was nerfed.
Comparison was made because both have one big attack that you probably don’t want to get hit by. Doesn’t matter if the rock does 20,000 or 40,000 damage if it still 1 taps you. Granted, Alex is a bit easier to read if you play melee.
literally makes a difference 
and as was said, Aleks’s also doesn’t 1tap you and has been ignored for years… that’s the issue on top when it’s guaranteed easier to avoid/“requires much less reaction”.
It’s not in anyway the same comparison…and Alek’s should 1tap you, even if Underking doesn’t have to… tho i’d argue Underking should also do that as long as it can’t be used in melee (same reason why Zantarin doesn’t use his shotgun in melee “harder to react to”)
IMO Aleks should not 1tap everything, there should be a point to shield builds, otherwise the damage tradeoff isn’t worth it.
shield defence suck tho, so why should that be singled out over “real” defences 
*also don’t mean MC aleks should 1 tap everything, but SR 36 pretty much should, and sr 31 meteor should gib stuff that isn’t tank built 
How do shields work with 0 s recovery? Do they effectively work like flat damage aborption? Only with % chance to block tho?
“yes”, and no
it absorbs flat dmg value, but at the beginning of the chain instead of the end 
, and unlike absorb, only works on specific attack types (part of the problem) - even if you have 100% block recover and 100% block chance, it’s still thoroughly meh in many scenarios [1.2.1.6] [HC] Dawnbreaker Warder SR 39+, Facetank* Callagadra - #11 by grey-maybe , unless you somehow manage to get omegazillion block amount on top(which you don’t)
order of defence:
So after a couple of tests, here is the correct order:
% total damage reduction
Fumbles/Impaired Aim
DA evasion
Evasion/Deflect
Low OA damage penalty
Block
Racial Reduction
Resistances
Armor
Limited Absorb (i.e. Crab)
% absorb
Flat absorb (i.e Ascension)
Health
ex being; block doesn’t even work on Aleks meteor attack types to begin with
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I’ve written a post or two about difficulty and balance recently. I tend to think that Aleks got easier once sunder was introduced because his meteor attack is that much more telegraphed.
Personally, I am fine with people being able to make builds that can disrespect a lot of the content in the game as long as there is a tradeoff in damage. If it takes 3x longer to clear SR with your tank, go ahead and ignore an Aleks meteor. I think being able to tank certain things if you are willing to sacrifice to do it is fine. Perhaps not everything in the game, but most things. If you are willing to take 3x longer to do your farming, that seems like a reasonable choice to me.
That’s one reason why the 20k vs. 40k damage not mattering is a point I disagree with. It’s the difference between a hit you can plan to tank and a hit you really can’t plan to tank. It does seem that GD is becoming a game where dealing damage is more important than tankiness with some of the new content. Sacrificing damage for survivability seems like a worse choice in 1.3 / FoA than it was before, and this is not an insubstantial change.
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I just fought again Reaper of Rot in SR 39. It took a few minutes to get him to half of his life just facetanking him. I quit then. It is stupid.
Something should be done about his healing. He is just a stupid damage sponge on steroids.
Kuba´s healing is fine compared to him. Just… not balanced 
Yes, I hate it.
I think that’s true. There are probably some other examples, but I can’t think of them this late in the evening.
Aleksander’s meteor 100% deserves to be buffed back to its former glory in Ascendant difficulty.
I am 34 years old. I am rusty as hell. I have not been hit by this meteor ONCE since my return to Grim Dawn. Not in SR, not in campaign. Well to be more accurate, I tested tanking its blows on tank builds (survived), but have not been hit otherwise.
Mind you, I am an aggressive and lazy player who dies plenty from not paying enough attention. In tough fights, I just focus a bit harder and actually mind my positioning more, but my default is “let’s see how much I can get away with tanking.”
There have been ZERO instances, without hyperbole, of the meteor hitting me while I’ve been trying not to get hit by it since FoA’s release. You don’t even have to use dodge… a charge mobility skill, or just… running around when you know it’s coming; those strats work fine too.
Anasteria and the enemies that can spawn volcanoes under you catch me off guard way more often, by comparison. I’m fine with the volcanoes too, though I admit I have at times wondered if Anasteria’s missiles are just a tad too punishing.
They are. Shattered Outcast in high SR shards is just OP. The same goes for Salazin and his Sigil.
Stand in a doorway and projectiles from the sky won’t hit.
Have to agree with this one. You don’t even have to be that high in SR and you can no longer even be on the same screen as her when she dies due to the 14m wide insta-gib nuke.
That is 3K raw damage, before any of the % damage bonuses from SR level, difficulty and Spirit get accounted for. Good luck melee builds.
But then again, as has been said many times, SR in the 35+ territory is no longer really meant to be balanced. The same way you have to fish for good rifts in Diablo 3, you have to hope for good RNG with the bosses in Grim Dawn. It’s just how it is. You can’t balance infinite scaling forever. The game will break at some point.
Salazin is even worse with his damage. You must not stand even for a short while in his Sigil. And in the mess of effects that is hard to do…
Do not care. It was and it should be again.
I will second a nerf request to Ozmald. The damage he deals is insane, wildly out of step with every other nemesis, with no real mechanic interaction to reduce it. And his summoned crystals are just broken, no summoned add has business being that fat.
Idk if you intentionally cut off my quote to make it seem as if I felt more strongly about it than I do. I’m not a fan of homogenization; I quite enjoy when enemy performance, even within a similar classification (boss), can have a wide range of possibilities. I simply meant it’s your stance with which I sympathize the most.
Just being frank with you Mav, I tend to disagree with you on most things. That doesn’t mean I’m saying I’m right and you’re wrong; I just want to give context on how far apart we are in how we experience the game.
Which is why I highlighted Anasteria from your list, because it’s the only one where I’ve felt her main killing attack, the falling projectiles, is at times a bit hard to track/dodge. Maybe it’s a skill issue on my part, but because they have a decent radius, fall quickly, and can fire off at slightly different angles, in the heat of battle it can be pretty difficult to determine where they’re actually going to land.
It’s just a personal anecdote, but I feel like Anasteria has given me more WTF/“oh come on!” reactions to dying in SR than any of the other SR boss.
Though haven’t done much SR pushing since FoA so can’t say I’d still pick her for that claim.
am i wrong or isnt’ her rocks fixed placement once cast? - or did that change?
it’s like devastation but multi volley instead of drip-fed, assuming she doesn’t waste it on you on the runup (which she often did), you move over to new fighting ground
Her on death nova is the bs move because it can be kinda hard to gauge exact timing of death, if you don’t wanna just run away and try let leftover dots handle it, or pre-emptively pop a cluster