Spoilers, here in the first post and likely any comments. Do not view this thread if you have not found and completed Fangs of Asterkarn’s secret quest yet and are interested in its contents.
You’ve been warned.
I’m padding the top part of this post to keep from spoiling anything unduly.
But I can only shove the meat of this feedback so far down.
Aaaaaand here we are. In public view, this time.
I do not like the N’erfatal fight, but I do love most of its moveset. Its heal is an absolute dealbreaker for me though.
All the secret superbosses have some commentary/joke about the state of the game prior. Bourbon Clones were poking fun at Early Access. Lokarr was the community’s catharsis from his taunts in the Crucible (with more Bourbon Clones). Crate is an attack on the overproliferation of high-AoE builds at the time. Yet if there’s something tongue-in-cheek about N’erfatal, I feel like it totally backfires against much of Crate’s prior opinions.
Time and again we’ve seen Zantai say that superbosses should not be a benchmark for the evaluation of builds. But, is that not what N’erfatal’s heal makes him? No prior superboss was outright unbeatable by suboptimal strategies; if you wanted to risk it and fight Crate on a Callidor’s Tempest build, you could in theory still stand a chance, even if you are making things unduly hard for yourself. But N’erfatal is a binary and intangible yes-no check of whether your build is good enough to beat it. No amount of skill, piloting, positioning, or counterplay* is able to overcome N’erfatal. It’s not hard, it’s not difficult, it’s not challenging. It’s just buildcraft, and at that, the exploitation and favoring of some inherently more potent strategies over others.
If your build can’t outdps N’erfatal’s heal, it’s shit.
Is that really the lasting impact of 10+ years of feedback? Is that where Grim Dawn’s final secret superboss leaves us until GD2? Is the idea of ‘tankiness’ or playing slower but sturdier and more methodical characters just dead in this genre?
How much feedback for how many blanket buffs are going to powercreep builds to meet the N’erfatal bar at the cost of jeopardizing other challenge content? Which builds should be allowed to defeat N’erfatal? What’s the metric they must pass?
*steps back from the keyboard to take a breath*
Alright yeah I’ve let pixels on a screen impart some negative emotions in me. Sue me. I’m just…dejected by this scenario. Grim Dawn is a story of "so close"s for me. It’s come closer to perfection, as beheld by my eyes, than any other ARPG ever has. But it’s never gone all the way. Some would call that compromise. Yet I’d be too disgruntled and jaded to settle for that.
N’erfatal is a great fight. Almost perfect. You could take its heal out without replacing it with anything and I think it’d be there. You could take out its heal and just simply give it moar health and/or resistances and I think it’d be there. Or you could take its heal and make it do something other than heal and I think it’d be there. Maybe N’erfatal could use one roar in melee range and one at long range; the melee one might give him temporary DR to force a breather into the fight, and the long range one could give him more movespeed and crit damage to hunt down and eliminate those trying to kite it. Something that makes the player react to what the boss is doing.
But there’s no reacting to the heal other than walking away. From the game, I mean. Putting it down, going over there, and picking up a book instead.
There’s a lot of talk in this genre about “Aspirational Content.” Whether you agree with the notion or not, I find myself just having nothing to aspire to when it comes to N’erfatal. There’s no drive to try again, there’s no push to improve or git gud. No amount of skill expression will overcome a dps check. If I find myself really wanting the Huge Wood for a character, I’ll GDStash it in.
It’s not like there’s much enjoyment to be had or a challenge to overcome from the alternative.
…well, as far as theses go, I guess this one wasn’t so long.
