Dark Agartha Last Boss

[Vandelay]

@AWOL

Well yeah, if you cover all your bases then you’ll not need to adjust. It’s faster if you switch stuff round, but with good planning, yes, you will probably find a build that can handle it all. It was the same in TSW with Master Planner mode in dungeons - adjusting your build for each boss isn’t a necessity, but it’ll make it quicker.

Based on my own experience, not reading the pre-fight tips and just running into the fight is significantly faster than reading and switching stuff around. Would be tough to convince me otherwise.

@AWOL

It’s not really going to work very well if you increase too much specificity into boss fights - for example making a mechanic which can only be countered with a shield, because there are going to be lots of players who don’t have access to the counter. Making it so that people fail based on whether or not they’ve unlocked all the weapons is unlikely to be popular.

First of all, I’d like to suggest that a player who isn’t done with their weapons yet is really unlikely to be the target audience of Dark Agartha due to the AP/SP costs.

Secondly, I really don’t think you need to unlock all weapons to have access to the things I mentioned anyway.

• Impair: Pretty much everything and gadget.
• Purge: AR, Chaos, Hammer, Elemental, Gadget
• Cleanse: Fist, Blood, Blade, Gadget
• Expose: Shotgun, Hammer, Blade, Chaos, Pistol
• Debilitate: Blood, AR, Elemental, Pistol, Gadget

Regardless, if we assume it is meant to appeal to the undergeared and/or unprepared, then there’s no point pretending it’s a challenge for the end game player that requires you to adapt. It’s just the same things flavoured mildly differently every day.

[AWOL]

@Vandelay

First of all, I’d like to suggest that a player who isn’t done with their weapons yet is really unlikely to be the target audience of Dark Agartha due to the AP/SP costs.

There’s a difference between creating content which people may decide isn’t optimal for them, and creating content which they can’t complete though. Even if you made it so that it was content aimed at the uppermost elite brackets, there’s no guarantee that people would have levelled up enough weapons to be able to mix it up without badly gimping their damage.
If this was only aimed to be attempted by e10+ people, then there’s plenty of ways to make it so only they have access. The fact that there’s an e1 version at all suggests that it’s a deliberate decision.

If you’re an end game player already, then the chances are that you massively overgear the difficulty. Think it said somewhere that there’s more elite levels planned for, but yeah, it’s not going to provide a challenge if you’re putting out more damage than is needed. If they introduce more brackets then it’s possible that you’ll need to work out how to get more damage out of your build. Ofc it’s possible that you won’t, but I can understand it from a design perspective.

[MKUltra]

As the Damaged Gatekeeper is always a guaranteed boss to face every time it does need to keep up a variety more than the others.
The doppelganger was a nice surprise and the fungus-that-follows i appreciate too. In fact more environmental hazards would be great, not just for the gatekeeper but perhaps in-between bosses too, like; disintegrating branches, wind effects, jump pads to nowhere, more fungus…

Edit: Intended or not, those boss tablets are clever environmental hazards. Maybe more like that; e.g. crudely drawn map and anti-grav spore pick-ups from questionable locations.