Final Boss isn't fun to fight

[GamingStrategist]

I've been exploring the game with a friend recently, having a lot of fun.

We managed to have a good run, unlock a couple dudes, and get to the final area. Couple really hard fights due to poorly constructed decks, and not having correct answers (Darkness hurts). We get past the twin guardians, get through the final zone, and fight the wizard.

Hanshek was a really fun, intense fight. It was close, we failed our first attempt, but at no point did I feel like we had the fight in the bag because of how much damage Hanshek could pump out in one turn.

Then boom, Hanshek isn't the final boss, it's this otherwordly demon shade whatever thing named Archon. He looks super cool, and I love how he's literally carrying Hanshek in one hand during the fight.

And he's extremely boring to fight. The Doom mechanic just slows things down, but doesn't really effect the fight. It sounds interesting at first, but in reality it's just "keep playing Martyrdom so you have one less card in hand". And at no point did his damage get high enough to risk killing anyone but Magnus, which is unfair because poor Magnus was killing himself.

It felt like a really poor ending to a run, going from the intense, high stakes fight to a slow slog that's just a matter of time until you win.

Still looking forward to that next run though.

[Skoga]

Try to play with madness levels if you think it's too easy

[Ahoge-dono]

I totally agree, out of the two forms of the final boss fight Hashnek is more difficult. Archon purpose is only testing how efficient or inefficient your builds are, with a lot of his damage scaling with what auras you stack .

[ToastMunchie]

Well yeah if it is your first time reaching him and you have a (self-admittedly) poorly constructed deck, of course the largest hp boss in the game would feel like a slog. I'm sure your next run will feel a lot better.

I do admit the Doom mechanic isn't very fun. The Doom itself will never kill you, and the only real negative is the slow it applies to your heroes. But it isn't that bad.

[Tsuru]

Originally posted by ToastMunchie:

Well yeah if it is your first time reaching him and you have a (self-admittedly) poorly constructed deck, of course the largest hp boss in the game would feel like a slog. I'm sure your next run will feel a lot better.

I do admit the Doom mechanic isn't very fun. The Doom itself will never kill you, and the only real negative is the slow it applies to your heroes. But it isn't that bad.

The slow is actually a very important thing. There are phases the boss goes through you want to slow yourself down to get him to phase shift before your characters go.

for instance the phase where he dodges every other dmg on him. You would want to be faster them him before he shifts to that phase, then you want to slow yourself down to after him during the next round so he shifts out of it before your characters go.

[Nyx (She/Her)]

Originally posted by ToastMunchie:

Well yeah if it is your first time reaching him and you have a (self-admittedly) poorly constructed deck, of course the largest hp boss in the game would feel like a slog. I'm sure your next run will feel a lot better.

counter-point
a well constructed build that shreds everything in less than four rounds is *still* a slog against him. It's just a badly designed fight

[Archaon The Never-Chosen]

Originally posted by Nyx (She/Her):

Originally posted by ToastMunchie:

Well yeah if it is your first time reaching him and you have a (self-admittedly) poorly constructed deck, of course the largest hp boss in the game would feel like a slog. I'm sure your next run will feel a lot better.

counter-point
a well constructed build that shreds everything in less than four rounds is *still* a slog against him. It's just a badly designed fight

i mean, a well constructed build can slap him in one round if your damage is nuclear enough

[el Darkness]

While there are clear benefits to having comboing Heroes and decks in the game, I actually dislike (a little bit) comboing everything to nuke most enemies in 1 turn. Do not get me wrong, I know it is difficult to design such combo, I know it should be rewarding, but it also takes away some other aspects of the game. Sure you can nuke everything and end all fights quickly, you will progress quicker, but you will not get hit, you will not learn how enemies work, you will not learn to counter them, because you dont need to...

I love the game, unfortunately I like very much defensive builds, every game I play I first consider defensive options. If the optimal way to play is to nuke everything in 1st round, we no longer get to see if our defenses work. In this game splitting your attention to both attacking and defending makes you kill things slower (it does in most games) which feels not optimal. Even combast rewards are better if you optimise your offense, not defense. So the best way is to focus 100% on your damage output. Maybe what I'm saying is just a wishful thinking (or madman rambling), but I would love to play a game where defensive build is actually valid option and does not feel like a slowest and boring experience...

[[EOGa] Shade]

I don't know how either of these would scale with madness. But me and a buddy have tried thorns build. (Going for some poison shenanigans on top)
And currently we are trying out a "Reinforce" focus on our tank. There are 2 new items. 1 in each of the new subzones. Each Reinforce ends up dealing decent cold damage and chill (I can't recall what the frost effect is called right now. I guess I don't really store that info when I'm not in game).
It's all defence.

[Corydonn]

Originally posted by GamingStrategist:

And he's extremely boring to fight. The Doom mechanic just slows things down, but doesn't really effect the fight. It sounds interesting at first, but in reality it's just "keep playing Martyrdom so you have one less card in hand". And at no point did his damage get high enough to risk killing anyone but Magnus, which is unfair because poor Magnus was killing himself.

Matyrdom isn't a card you need to play every turn. You can skip it a few rounds to make sure everyone has -just- enough doom to live while dishing out full damage.

[el Darkness]

Originally posted by EOGa Shade:

...And currently we are trying out a "Reinforce" focus on our tank. There are 2 new items. 1 in each of the new subzones. Each Reinforce ends up dealing decent cold damage and chill (I can't recall what the frost effect is called right now. I guess I don't really store that info when I'm not in game)...

Reinforce dealing damage? I think I missed that, can you tell more?

[Kario]

The fight against the demon use to be a lot more fun before they reworked him and many of the other bosses with the Yogger DLC. Before the shade boss who I don't even care about his name after the rework, he didn't have the cards to reduce his curse stacks or change a curse into another like Darkness into Maddness and so forth. He did not have those before, as me and my husband use to have fun with him getting a stack of madness up to around 2k with Nazglek in party to than nuke with a mind blast for an unholy amount of damage.

But after the rework fighting the shade demon is just a slog of a fight. I've suffered through it three times now as did 2 runs alone and 1 with husband today, and all 3 the battle wasn't hard or difficult. Just long and tediously boring, on my second run I even kept everyone at 10 Doom to have something to do while slowly widdled him down with no threat.

Before it was a actual fight, but now its as said, long slog to slowly chip away at his 5k+ HP bar while he changes curse types every round to either nuke himself by changing 50 stacks of Madness into 50 stacks of Darkness, or 50 stacks of Madness into 50 stacks of Sanctify so everyone heals to full when they slap him. It took us about 40 minutes with Magnus, Andin, Wilber, and Nazgleg with pretty good decks and gear. We only got to do damage to him every like 5 turns as he'd change madness on us into sanctify and do the fire storm to heal himself while only doing armor damage to us thanks to my deck.

Long and short. They reworked him with the DLC to make him a drag of a fight instead of being challenging as it was before.

[Nyx (She/Her)]

Honestly the archon is disgustingly over tuned and it only gets exponentially worse with madness level. He punishes anything that isn't straight "Do 100 damage per hero per turn", and even that strategy suffers badly. Anything involving use of inspire, energize, or any kind of debuff is effectively invalidated too.

Genuinely this fight sucks any fun out of a run just because it forces one strategy above madness 0