Yagluth needs to be tweaked

[Luxspes]

Good afternoon,

I don't normally post in these fora, and there might already be something planned in the roadmap to address this, but Yagluth needs to be tweaked.

I wanted to love this boss. Pre-Mistlands, despite all the hype, he turned out to be a damage sponge that requires max armor, fire resistance barley wine, and a proper arena to tank his attacks.

However, I just played through to him on Very Hard difficulty. Moder was already spongy, but with 70% damage on Yagluth, it's an absolute slog. And, if you have terrible geography like I did for this altar, there's no neighboring biome to kite him into for less obnoxious adds. With maximum defenses for that point in progression, the player cannot tank his double damage. If I dodge roll his slam in order to get a few hits in while standing in the fire DoT AoE and kiting to his rear, I can finish a single melee combo before needing to regenerate, even with the best health food available pre-Mistlands (about 230 health). Moreover, since there's no melee weapon in blackmetal tier to which he has a weakness, the player's best bet is probably a fully upgraded Frostner. Initiating with a jump attack, I can barely finish a three hit combo despite constantly kiting to his rear.

So, if the player cannot melee him, and if no other biome factions will attack him, then the only other option is ranged. And, it's horrible. Since Yagluth is resistant to pierce, the only feasible option is frost arrows. I have burned through over 500 frost arrows, including cheesing his pathing in order to get him stuck running in two different directions, and I can barely keep up with his passive health regeneration. It is definitely doable on Very Hard, but it's purely dependent on patience and RNG with pathing & add spawns.

Anyways, I'm probably putting down the game again despite loving it up to that point and anticipating Mistlands content. After the hours I've put into grinding through Yagluth, I can only imagine how borked scaling will be for Very Hard in Mistlands proper as of this writing.

Either Very Hard scaling needs to be altered for Yagluth or Yagluth himself needs some kind of tweak. Just nerfing his passive health regeneration might do it.

Thank you for reading.

[Mharr]

Nothing's really balanced for the new difficulty options, like at all. It's just an optional 'break the combat engine' lever.

[Nerevar]

very hard combat isnt balanced very well overall. it was just added to give some extra flavor.

so no. yag doesnt need to be tweaked when you can just lower the difficulty in an instant aswell.

yag is totally fine on the default mode and that is what matters.

world modifiers are modifiers. games isnt intended to be played with em nor is it balanced for em. you even get a warning about them when you open the window the first time. think about why you get that. its basically the devs saying "here is some stuff to mess around with but use at your own risk"

if they started nerfing based on world modifier users the games default balance would turn into a mess.

[glass zebra]

The game straight up tells you "not intended for these modifiers". I don't think that new option means that the boss needs to be changed. They are just not balanced and I don't think they will spend a significant amount of time to balance all enemies for that. (Parry, sneak or stagger focused weapon builds are also much less viable in general). In general it does not make sense to nerf difficulties, since they are there to be hard, not for beating.

Yagluth also does not need heavy armour at all, since you can use a mobile build and the openings to attack him. Even on hard I found the heavy armour + resistance approach to not work that well anymore and needing way too much time to regenerate between attacks, even though it makes the boss pretty easy on normal. I just changed to a mobile attack pattern that uses the opening instead and that worked out very well.

Bow combat on bosses past elder pretty much only works well if bow is your main weapon. Bosses are balanced with the extra resistance (Queen also has 50%), because bows scale up so high in dps due to the extra added speed that other weapons do not get. I've done Yagluth with frost arrows on normal and with melee and it was only slightly slower with decent bow skill. Yagluth is probably the boss with the least openings for melees, so that 75% resistance feels pretty fair.

Frostner is also not the best weapon against him. An upgraded silver sword is by far the best weapon against Yagluth. 113 dmg from Frostner vs 137 dmg from silver sword. It does more damage than the black metal one, while also costing less stamina (but immense resources). I'd probably still go for Frostner on most chars though, since it is such an awesome secondary weapon in general. Yagluth has no weaknesses, not just not against plains weapons. Everything does 100% dmg or less. The thing with the silver sword is that the spirit damage is "for free". Swords and bows are the only 2 weapons that get a damage raise on their primary AND secondary damage type (Frostner only gets frost damage raised), so the upgrades on spirit damage are really strong against the few enemies where that works. I am rather sure the silver sword was made explicitly for Yagluth, since before the Cave update there was only the Fenring that took spirit damage and lower tier enemies. The extreme cost of the sword underlines this role.


If you want to melee him, try triggering his hand raise directly after the sky rocks. Try to get rather close to him after a short time of running from the rocks, so he does the hand raise really soon, dodge the fire but stay really close and get behind him. With most weapons you can start hitting him after he turned a bit but is still standing in the fire. With that pattern you have a decent amount of time before he starts the sky rocks again and you can probably get 2 full attack combos against him with a sword (I did it with the crystal axe on hard and could still get more attacks out than 1 full combo. It was a horrible choice both for dps and stamina management, but worked very well still).

[Mharr]

If you want longer, more difficult fights I'd suggest avoiding the presets for a custom combination of increased elite spawn rates, reduced player damage and reduced stamina regen. Still makes you work without invalidating core mechanics like parry.

I think there are pre-hildir commands to simply boost the hit points of various creature types, bosses included, but I've never played with those.

[Luxspes]

Thank you for the thoughtful responses. Yeah, I want the difficulty. Very Hard honestly felt pretty balanced up until Yagluth; I can handle no hit runs. I just lowered the difficulty and easily dispatched him on Normal in less than a minute. It's his regen that makes the fight especially obnoxious, especially since the windows for damage are so small given the double damage on everything including DoTs. Very Hard basically lowers your gear 1-2 tiers from normal, so that you aren't clearing an Age like you would on Normal difficulty until you've already acquired all of the Age's upgrades.

[Luxspes]

Either another damage option should be added to blackmetal tier specific for Yagluth so that people aren't relying on Silver Age gear, or Yagluth needs his regeneration nerfed. Then, I think Very Hard Yagluth would be consistent with the rest of the scaling.

[Nerevar]

use frostner. bm stuff sucks for yag in any difficulty. no reason for nerfs of the boss itself.

[Admiral Chowderpants]

Try epic loot. Get a legendary Frostner that has "throwable" and "recalling" as attributes.

[Mharr]

Heh, I don't think Epic Loot is really ideal for their stated goal of making combat harder.

[Stonehorn]

I think that Yagluth has a bit too much HP on the normal difficulty, as well. I've beaten the Yagluth relatively recently myself, and I thought that the fight was a terrible slog, even as I was armed with a Frostner.

I think the fight is otherwise fine, fun, and even well-balanced (gobbo god hits like a truck, but his attacks are clearly telegraphed, and generally easy to avoid), it just feels like it goes on forever. My Frostner broke mid-fight, so I had to resort to my backup weapons to finish the fight.

[Nerevar]

Originally posted by Stonehorn:

I think that Yagluth has a bit too much HP on the normal difficulty, as well. I've beaten the Yagluth relatively recently myself, and I thought that the fight was a terrible slog, even as I was armed with a Frostner.

I think the fight is otherwise fine, fun, and even well-balanced (gobbo god hits like a truck, but his attacks are clearly telegraphed, and generally easy to avoid), it just feels like it goes on forever. My Frostner broke mid-fight, so I had to resort to my backup weapons to finish the fight.

if your frostner broke mid fight you never upgraded it fully to begin with. 300 durability is way more than you need to bring yags hp down over the course of about roughly 10-15 minutes. and this is playing it very safe you could kill him faster. if it broke with maxed out upgrades you let yag regen hp for extended periods.

he doesnt have too much hp. he has 10000. moder had 7500. mass is 5000. queen is 12000. totally normal hp progression.

if you struggle with yag you will hate the queen even more.

[Stonehorn]

Originally posted by Nerevar:

if your frostner broke mid fight you never upgraded it fully to begin with. 300 durability is way more than you need to bring yags hp down over the course of about roughly 10-15 minutes. and this is playing it very safe you could kill him faster. if it broke with maxed out upgrades you let yag regen hp for extended periods.

he doesnt have too much hp. he has 10000. moder had 7500. mass is 5000. queen is 12000. totally normal hp progression.

if you struggle with yag you will hate the queen even more.

You calculated correctly - I had only upgraded my Frostner once. But I was also being cautious, and taking my time with the fight, since I was also wearing a set of completely unupgraded padded armor. I was only striking Yag when I could safely do so.

If I recall correctly, it took me about half an hour to finish the fight altogether. Bosses, and all creatures for that matter, regenerate health at a rate of about 10% of their max health every six minutes. Since it took me half an hour to beat the boss altogether, Yag had around 15000 health for me to deplete altogether.

Perhaps my gripe here is... I don't want to waste time grinding to upgrade weapons and gear I don't like using. All the more so, if I am technically skilled enough to just beat the fight and move on to other stuff.

And I actually beat the Queen with some pals last week - it'll likely take me a while, before I get to that point in my solo world...

[Stonehorn]

Perhaps the devs should consider reworking the boss regen mechanics for fights that can become prolonged? A 10% regen per 6 mins isn't a big problem for a boss with 1000 HP, but it's going to be a massive problem for a boss with 1 000 000 HP.

[glass zebra]

The max HP scaling is there to accommodate that players get stronger weapons each tier and higher skill levels. The HP reg is there so that not every single player just uses a bow with wooden arrows or similar. It makes you not always just "playing it safe", but rewards taking risks to increase your dps. They made it so players trying to use all openings get rewarded vs. players only hitting once in a while to not risk getting damage.

Upgrading all your stuff (especially your armour) is only relevant if you want to ignore more of the mechanics and be able to play riskier without getting player skill up. I've beaten Yagluth with a fully upgraded silver sword and fully upgrade padded armour in 8 minutes and I think that was with slightly under 100 hits done. I realised midfight that I can actually play a lot more "risky" and frankly just stand in the fire AOE and keep hitting him. Might have been able to do it closer to 5 minutes if I realised that earlier. That was of course basically ignoring attack patterns apart from dodging other stuff and using material grind to kill the boss (so not really risky, since I could just ignore damage).

With other characters e.g. in light armour I had to do it differently, but for most bosses for me it was: takes a long time to learn pattern and boss is basically still at 80% hp after quite some time, but then it took only a few minutes to beat that rest since I gotten better with the pattern.

The difficulty and progression scaling works fine. If you want bosses to have less HP, make bosses have less HP. You have the sliders to make the game and encounters more fun for you (and console commands to tweak them more to your liking). You can thankfully change those on the fly and are not stuck forever with a server difficulty, so you can down it for a boss and then up it again.