Champion difficulty is a disappointment

When I started to try out my first champion difficulty missions what I expected where more, bigger and longer lasting hordes, more roaming patrols that you had to avoid, a lot more boss fights and more roaming enemies. What it really gave was dozens of specials spawning on top of each other, patrols spawning in a way to make them unavoidable and every roaming enemy replaced with an armored elite. Specials in this game are designed in a way that if you don’t deal with them quickly they will ruin your day, that combined with all the armored elites turns this game into something completely different from what I expected.
For me this game is about four heroes hacking their way through entire armies, fighting huge evil creatures and winning against all odds. And recruit and veteran give exactly that (minus the huge creatures since bosses spawn too rarely). Just that veteran for me became to easy and boring after I got a certain hero power. Unfortunately as I said champion turns this into an entirely different game, from a game where you hack through armies it turns into a sniping game.
I believe this is also the reason why the careers that are best for this kind of gameplay are so popular: pyromancer, waystalker, bountyhunter. Weapons that don’t pierce armor or can do easy headshots are abandoned.
What I would have wished from champion is less of a focus on lots of specials and armored elites and in exchange bigger hordes that last for longer with more waves, more roaming enemies that are not all chaos warriors, lots of patrols that you actually have a chance of avoiding if you play smart, and lots and lots of boss fights.
For me a fight against a rat ogre that’s in the middle of a horde of clan rats feels like and epic fight. Sniping the nth blightstormer while two hook rats are running towards you at all times and a rattling gunner is waiting around every corner does not. It feels too much like artifical difficulty and favors certain playstyles while making many careers, weapons and talents obsolete in those higher difficulties.
I’m not talking about making the game easier, I’m talking about a different way of making it difficult, without turning it into an entirely different kind of game like it feels to me now when going from veteran to champion.

This issue - or part of it - is being addressed with the next patch. We seem to have too much horde-clearing, unintended clearing potential. Btw if champion gets too easy youre ready for legend.

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boss fight are probably one of the least enjoyable poorly and designed aspects of v2 currently. I’ll pass on having more.

Could you be more specific? Bosses are basically the only thing in game right now you can’t wreck in seconds reliably with nearly any group composition. Not trying to bag on you, just would like to hear more specifics on what you personally do not like about boss fights. If I provide my own view after, please don’t view it as you being wrong, just my own personal thoughts on it.

Aye, coming back after a busy week, Champion is filled with Veteran players with their bad attitudes and bad ways

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Most bosses are boring and buggy, act bosses only become difficult because of the adds and special spawns during the encounter, In addition most of the bosses don’t have functional mechanics see Bubblebutt Herpes spreader for example, luckily lots of those issues are / were being addressed, however he currently is only difficult if you don’t burst him fast enough and get swamped by adds, running a ranged team dunks him in seconds. If you could change class role or gear at the start of levels like in v1 it would make things a lot less annoying but I still think a lot of the act bosses have design flaws.

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It almost sounds like you want to turn bosses into World of Warcraft style mechanics heavy encounters. If that’s the case I’m sure many would agree with you that this sounds good, but I think it would alienate just as many.

IMO bosses as they are currently are not meant to be challenges on their own, but instead mainly when backed up by hordes and specials or catching you in a bad location. That being said like a solid half of the playerbase still dies to bosses on a fairly regular basis. I’m not sure what you can do to make them more mechanics heavy without utterly wrecking that half of the playerbase.

And if we started adding mechanics to bosses as the difficulty level rises, assuming the playerbase wants that, then we have to be very careful with spawning rules around bosses because a mechanics heavy boss + specials = people saying the game is unfair. We already get a good amount of that from normal situations.

Bosses are in an interesting position. I’m not sure what the solution is, assuming there is a problem in the first place.

are you talking about act bosses or rat ogres and crap?

Yes.

ya special spam is too high.
but try legend after patch and then complain. really odd to complain about the not hardest difficulty level not being hard enough.

In that case you’re an idiot, because they are clearly 2 different ballparks entirely, act bosses are underwhelming because they make them hard because of adds, they should be mechanically challenging, normal bosses are fine minus a few bugs.

You mentioned them all together making a distinction between normal bosses and act bosses in mention but lumping them together with your sweeping complaints, I responded in context to that. You also did not think normal bosses were fine minus a few bugs as you said they were boring.

Then you call me an idiot for talking about both, same as you did. You’re taking the “fair and balanced” approach of changing your opinion from one post to another I see.

False?