Why is astrogha such a pain in the ass? And other thoughts

I feel this warrants its own topic. The level of frustration is incredible.

Why is this boss designed the way it is designed? It makes no sense to be honest. You design a boss that heals if you touch his totems with any kind of damage (they have extremely low hp) and you put him in a very narrow dungeon where he absolutely spams the living shit out of those totems. It's basically the only thing this boss does and feels extraordinarily cheap in a way I can't describe. It feels I'm robbed of a good charm. That or I take like 5 hours going 1 hit at a time until he dies. BUT WAIT, he often teleports on you because there's not much room where he can teleport and then you accidentally hit his totems and heal him anyway, undoing a good chunk of your progress. How's this hard? It's just menial and extremely tedious. I appreciate difficulty when I see it and that includes assur, baal etc., but this is laughably badly designed.

Now please explain this to me, because I have never met such design in any games I played and I played arpg for thousands of hours. I need to mention I also played median since median 2008, although with huge breaks in between and I always wondered about this. So here it goes.

Why are some bosses extremely fair and well designed (baal, azmodan etc.), while some are just a time sink, trial and error and/or die until you kill them? Athulua comes to mind as well. Why do I need to die every time I get hit by her guided arrow that stuns (which by the way lasts forever and you will eventually get hit, so you get stunlocked and die)? I killed her, but simply had to cast barrage whenever she came on top of me, die and repeat when stun arrow hit me. Don't you want players to feel like they actually outplay the boss or play around him? Why do we NEED to cheese some bosses? Like, there's absolutely no legit way to kill some bosses, at least not with certain characters. I'm genuinely asking.

Lastly, maybe this is a personal preference, but why is median xl so hard overall? I mean... ever since I started playing it, I found some uberquests or uberbosses to be absolutely impossible or just needing hours to kill them by either cheesing them or repeatedly dying. This is coming from someone who played thousands of hours all kinds of arpg (poe, torchlight, diablo 3, diablo 2 vanilla/various mods) and I have never met such degree of difficulty for the sake of difficulty.

As a side note, I am very impressed with the current version, including with stuff that I never thought possible from a mod (new towns, special modifiers similar to diablo 3's on unique items, basically a lot of hardcoded stuff that takes a lot of work) and the progression actually feels nice. But I feel like it is shooting itself in the foot with certain aspects. That's just my opinion, take it as you wish.

Well, the whole thing really is designed to be Hardmode diablo. I kinda agree Astrogha is bullshit too, but I'm sure there is something that you need to do to make him less difficult.

I CAN tell you that Athulua is made way easier when you can slow her (debuffs, slow on target/slow attacker)

Design is a relative term when it comes to a modded game, because your "design choices" are always limited. Since its inception, MXL was all about endgame and ridiculous difficulty, borderline masochism (less so in 2019). The argument of "I havent seen this in any other arpg" can be applied nearly to the entirety of MXL. Since you've been around, where have you seen things like 1000 attribute challenges, startled witches, purify, heroic shields, detonators, firebloods, vizjun, toraja, ureh, k3k, bremm, ureh, dunc, jday, laz, qt, astro, bpr, etc? I don't think atypical challenges are a synonym of "bad design". Maybe it's those things that made MXL good or enjoyable to some. Though I see where you're coming from, I don't see the point in dissecting mechanics. It's better to look at the big picture and try to understand what you're expected to do (disclaimer: certain dungeons hard-counter some builds, though rarely). It took me a few years playing MXL until I beat astro for the first time, but it felt great

astro tl;dr
- use specific single-target skills with very small or cone-like/aimable aoe, you avoid killing totems and that's it
- reach critical damage up to the point where you can afford mistakes and still get the kill

hit & running to reset the AI is very important, you dont want darklings in the way

good luck

Managed to beat him in an hour. Felt like an eternity.. I did it with trinity arrow. I would reset the fight when too many darklings would spawn. My main 'complaint' about the fight is that he often casts totems into walls if you're behind a wall, ending up landing on his head, so you need to face him symmetrically (so he has a clear line of sight to you), wait a bit until the totems near him die (that if you can survive the darklings) and hit him then to unstuck him. Though you most likely die due to followup totems and darklings. So that's pretty much it, too many 'mandatory' deaths. I think he could be way less frustrating and tedious if he wasn't in a cave that has so many irregular walls that allow for corners in which he gets stuck and spams totems.

But yea, I agree. Median xl used to be significantly more unforgiving back then.

Yeah, you have to run away and get his hp bar to stop showing for a good 10-15 seconds so he de-aggroes and his AI can reset. Usually you can blink nearby, clock him once or twice, then run the hell away, rinse and repeat and it's a pretty safe kill.

Celestialray wrote:Lastly, maybe this is a personal preference, but why is median xl so hard overall? I mean... ever since I started playing it, I found some uberquests or uberbosses to be absolutely impossible or just needing hours to kill them by either cheesing them or repeatedly dying. This is coming from someone who played thousands of hours all kinds of arpg (poe, torchlight, diablo 3, diablo 2 vanilla/various mods) and I have never met such degree of difficulty for the sake of difficulty.

Is this a bad thing? I feel like this is what makes me like the mod in the first place. Many games that are released today do not push the boundaries of how hard they can make encounters (barring difficulty settings which I hate and is it's own rant) so MXL kinda stands out to me for this reason. It feels so good when you FINALLY beat an extremely difficult encounter, whereas if it wasn't so hard maybe it'd feel more just.. eh?

This season is the easiest of them all...

Hrishi wrote:
Celestialray wrote:Lastly, maybe this is a personal preference, but why is median xl so hard overall? I mean... ever since I started playing it, I found some uberquests or uberbosses to be absolutely impossible or just needing hours to kill them by either cheesing them or repeatedly dying. This is coming from someone who played thousands of hours all kinds of arpg (poe, torchlight, diablo 3, diablo 2 vanilla/various mods) and I have never met such degree of difficulty for the sake of difficulty.

Is this a bad thing? I feel like this is what makes me like the mod in the first place. Many games that are released today do not push the boundaries of how hard they can make encounters (barring difficulty settings which I hate and is it's own rant) so MXL kinda stands out to me for this reason. It feels so good when you FINALLY beat an extremely difficult encounter, whereas if it wasn't so hard maybe it'd feel more just.. eh?

Also, there's a reason for these dungeon being tagged VERY HARD or higher. I have a feeling that people complain that this mod is not idiot compatible ...

Only bad thing I see in these dunegons is doing them on multiplayer(like dc while getting sets for Yshari or Kingdom of Shadow that I probably don't need to explain xD)

During the years of Median XL development a number of uberquests and bosses were added. Back in Median 2008 Cathedral of Vanity was one of the hardest uberquests to pass, and Ureh was the impossible one. Then Median XL started to slap heroic bosses that were hard for the sake of being hard such as Astrogha. This is where I gave up even trying to beat them and just downloaded a save that had the charm (plenty of those over the internet, usable with MXL offline tools)

I spend like 90% of time playing this game...leveling new characters and trying out different builds.

Conquest wrote:During the years of Median XL development a number of uberquests and bosses were added. Back in Median 2008 Cathedral of Vanity was one of the hardest uberquests to pass, and Ureh was the impossible one. Then Median XL started to slap heroic bosses that were hard for the sake of being hard such as Astrogha. This is where I gave up even trying to beat them and just downloaded a save that had the charm (plenty of those over the internet, usable with MXL offline tools)

I spend like 90% of time playing this game...leveling new characters and trying out different builds.

Oh man, I remember the joy I had way back when I was able to do everything in the game with a fortress barb...