A new player's thoughts on Brutal mode (solo) and the recent nerfs

[Oldspice Bodyshots]

I finished the game and every V Blood blind with at-par gear before the latest round of nerfs and I wanted to chime in. Let me preface this by saying I have very little MOBA experience and no MMO experience, so a lot of the positioning fundamentals I had to learn on the fly, so I'm by no means the best player in the world nor should this post be taken with any measure of implied "authority" or "gamer cred". These are simply my opinion and nothing more.

I really don't like the direction a lot of these nerfs are going, at least for Brutal players and I want to break down the specific reasons as for why on the most egregious offenders.

Valencia:
The damage on her Maiden's attacks seems significantly lower and I don't think this is a good change. Was it "overtuned" (or whatever the current buzzword is)? Probably. However, this is one of the first major fights late in the game with an extremely oppressive environmental hazard that will likely wall the player if they just try and cope with it. The maiden being so overbearing is the player's clue they're doing the fight wrong by ignoring it hinting that they could make the fight much easier by interacting with it (destroying it). More importantly, it teaches the player a lesson here that they'll need to apply in a few other later bosses (Adam's generators and Drac's blood crystals). Such a change might inadvertently make the Adam fight in particular harder for players playing blind/without looking up the fights beforehand because they haven't been recently primed that environmental hazards in fights can sometimes be mitigated which I suspect isn't what the developers wanted. Perhaps this implies there's a larger underlying issue at play here with players not necessarily being properly signposted that there's more mechanics in several of the fights than there initially appear to be but that's a more complicated issue that affects more of the fight's design than simply tuning damage numbers or timing delays.

Tristan:
I'm firmly of the opinion this boss is way too strong for where he's located in the game's progression (I had more trouble with Tristan than any other boss in the game until the shard bosses), but the crossbow prediction shot isn't actually the offending element. Much like Valencia, making the crossbow easier to juke robs the player of learning a valuable skill for later in the game as many bosses have predicting attacks that the player will need to learn to deal with early. I'd have preferred the devs address other aspects of Tristan's difficulty that feel jankier like his jumpstab's hitbox being slightly displaced forward, coupled with no telegraph makes it exceedingly difficult to beat on reaction if you're not already strafing or the fact that the unique movement profile of his spin makes it far more dangerous than Octavian or Domina's counterparts, despite the latter bosses having projectiles and being later in the game, which should imply they'd be harder. Tristan's spin glues itself to you and doesn't let you out whereas the other two's can sometimes be escaped with a graze as the knockback pushes you away from the spin. I suspect the knockback on Tristan's spin might be bugged as it seemingly sucks you into it rather than pushing away from it. Needless to say, this creates an attack where the best counterplay is hope there's a rock nearby or that his AI bugs out which isn't particularly fun nor a skill expressive solution.

Maja:
I don't really think she needed any major changes personally, but for the sake of argument if she needed to be toned down, this isn't the way to do it imo. Her tanky adds acted as a hard dissuasion against spamming skeletons against her like you can many other Act 2 bosses and forced you to concentrate your damage precisely when she was absorbing one. If the overall concern is that it's too difficult to do her mechanic and kill an add in time to stop her from healing, I propose an alternative where the amount of health she recovers scales with the health of the ink demon absorbed. I think it's a good idea to keep the max HP of the ink demons high as it encourages the player to ration damage-based cooldowns for a specific stimulus rather than just the defensive abilities like they've already been doing and it also encourages players that've been relying on movement-abilities on their weapon for certain attacks up to that point in the fight to work out how to dodge Maja's attacks without them as they need the damage for killing the add in time.

Adam:
I think the final phase health nerf is a bit much, but that's not a big deal. What I would strongly encourage the devs to do is roll back the velocity nerfs on a lot of his moves as Brutal-only behaviors. The threat of his lunging grab in Phase 2 (after his health drops below 50% the first time) creates an interesting pseudo-tether where the player needs to move around to address generators, but also can't risk getting too far away from Adam at once lest they risk this extremely dangerous attack (that's now slower and thus can be more safely disrespected) so they're forced to methodically kite Adam in the direction of the generators. That's a big part of what made the boss interesting to learn on Brutal for me and seeing that part of the fight mechanically undermined globally is disappointing to me. I definitely can agree that he's probably way too strong on Normal/Relaxed however and think the nerfs are particularly justified there.

Dracula:
I played solo so I have no input on a lot of the Coop-related changes, but since the sword-shockwaves don't seem to combo you in the air anymore after the changes, This is overall a good change imo, but I feel their damage should be raised from 250 -> 350 or whatever the blood discs in Phase 1 deal. Their damage is suspiciously low for a single hit attack compared to almost everything else he does and I suspect that was because they were initially balanced around the idea they could sometimes hit you twice at certain spacing. Such a change would maintain that they still must be respected without randomly losing half your health as a consequence of being hit by it.

There's a few more I could talk about but this post is already too long. The tl;dr is that every part of a boss that the player is less encouraged to engage with or respect potentially changes the development of the player's personal skillset for how they engage with similar and more complicated counterparts later in the game.

[Vaylos]

I'm happy for you or I'm sorry that happened to you.

[Oldspice Bodyshots]

To clarify, I'm not against nerfs on principle. I just think that the nerfs should be trying to facilitate higher levels of engagement with the boss by enforcing and teaching the player relevant concepts they'll need for other parts of the game than letting them "skip lessons". I also think it's pragmatic for the devs to consider if a nerf needs to be a global one or just a not-brutal nerf which theoretically should be easy enough to do as the codebase already supports unique brutal behaviors.

[Aetemes]

I personally am a little surprised that on Brutal anything beyond Dracula Adam got touched up...however, maybe there is an element to surviving a pvp server that warranted the nerfs to Maja/Tristan?.

Cause if you can't progress due to the bosses your overall experience will be a lot more miserable in pvp a?? maybe, item levels really have too much impact on pvp, I wish they looked at that problem first. Also if only a handful can be "skilled" enough to beat Adam/Dracula...that means they must be skillfull enough to oppress everyone else...which is...while fair..maybe not fun xD.

I dunno though I mean Tristan is so easy to abuse through terrains I find.

I will admit personally trying to kill Maja's adds while she's attempting to absorb them was an issue for me, they felt a lot chunkier, I lucked out and just busted her before she started/completed it.

They must be taking input about something from somewhere...cause I just didn't see Tristan/Maja getting nerfed specifically out of the entire cast of bosses lol?, not for a player interested in playing brutal mode..but whatever really.

[weirdee]

My main argument for Tristan has always been that the fire cluster bomb he throws has always exploded in a way that some of the clusters psychically home in on you no matter which direction you choose to dash in, effectively making the bomb not an actual cluster bomb, but an AOE that covers the entire radius of where the clusters can land. The fact that there's gaps in the flames afterwards is meaningless because it's basically suicide to attempt engaging him in an even smaller area when he has his second tool, the oppressive sword combo.

The stab not having a telegraph is annoying, but what's actually frustrating about his sword attacks is that they functionally have almost no cooldown in his attack cycle (meaning they're his default autoattacks when his other attacks are on cooldown and they're roughly as powerful as his burst attacks????) and he can keep belting them out near endlessly with no pattern of attack order or rules as to which ones he uses which baits you into attempting to attack him after a swing when he can easily chain into another instant sword rush purely at random, and all this combined with the fact that they all have different dodge or counter rules (delayed swings, instant dashes, wide swipes, long swipes, and the ability to immediately turn around so no flanking possible), is a recipe for forcing a wrong reaction with no actual means of counterplay (besides the one everybody knows, two boring counters). Anything you do to him to try to prevent his next attack from cornering you can be rendered immediately pointless because he just randomly picks a move every time.