Boss difficulty spikes is one of the biggest issues I have with POE2

I know I know, I complain a lot and this is especially silly when you consider that the game I am complaining about the most at the moment is the one that I still play the most. I'm still popping into Path of Exile 2 for about an hour each day to just tool around and make a bit of progress and then after that amount of time I get bored with it and a little frustrated that I haven't gotten any good drops in that hour and just go find something else to do.

Of course the still terrible server issues that they are having with this game are the main reason why I stop playing but there is another issue that I don't think they will address but for me is a major problem and one of the main reasons why I quit for the day.

There have been multiple bosses that I have encountered that absolutely cleaned the floor with me and after a couple of tries I start to think that if the boss is optional, perhaps I am not actually meant to be able to defeat it yet and move on. However, with other bosses they are part of the main story and you cannot progress until you have defeated them. This is where Zalmarath, the Colossus comes into play.

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There have already been a bunch of guides that are available online about how to defeat this guy and to the people that took the time to get all of that information out there, I commend you. game8.com in particular is an amazing resource for POE2 that unfortunately I reference frequently.

Zalmarath is the first truly huge boss that you face in this game meaning that he is larger than the arena that you fight him in (I presume he's a guy) and while big doesn't necessarily mean more difficult, in this situation that is precisely the case.

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It should come as very little surprise that the first truly huge boss you encounter is located in "The Titan Grotto" and this is about what appears to be half-way through act 2 of the game. While there have been several bosses I have faced in the past in this game that are capable of taking out huge portions of my overall health with one hit, this is the first time I have faced a boss who almost all of his attacks can one-shot kill me.

This is acceptable when you have never fought him before but here I am, something like a dozen tries against him and I have failed to get him any further than to half health before being one-shotted. I get that the game is supposed to be difficult and I'm ok with that. What I am not ok is that the difficulty of the boss is not at all representative of the difficulty of the area he is contained in.

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The caves and platforms at the last part of this area is seriously cool with winding elevated platforms, an overall scary ambiance and some winding pathways that will almost certainly have you exploring most of the last level before you get to the boss unless you are seriously lucky in choosing the shortest path there. Then of course there is the mix of enemies. You'll have to excuse that I don't remember their real names but you have, among other things

• giant spiders
• slow moving giants that cause serious damage but stand very little chance of getting to you
• electrocuting bats
• small skeleton enemies that take pot shots at you from range
• some sort of scarab thing that is so useless that I don't know why they even bother to put it against you

And exactly zero of them pose any sort of genuine threat to me even though I barely have a grasp on what the hell I am doing and don't really have a strategy other than to lay down some electro-arrows and wipe everyone. There wasn't a single time that I was in this last part of the level that I so much as even used a health potion and for large portions of it I was just using my basic attack because it was "too much work" to hit the other buttons. I don't think I ever dodged.

Then, you get to the boss area, which you expect to be difficult and it one shots you before you really even have a chance to get your bearings on where you are. You laugh, you reload at the checkpoint which thankfully is right next to where he spawns and then you have a go at him again. You get a bit further and then blammo, he one-shots you again... and again.... and again. Then you finally realize that you need to stay the heck away from this guy or he is just going to always one shot you and make it miraculously to about half of his health and then he has 2 more one-shotting things up his sleeve that you haven't seen before and he gets you with both of them before you eventually give up for the night. Then the next day you have another go at him and he one shots you even earlier than before.

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This unblockable un-dodge-able and highly telegraphed attack likely killed everyone once but now that I know it I will not fall for that again. Oh and it one-shots you by the way just like a majority of all of his other attacks.

The fight is beautiful and what not and I appreciate the design that went into this guy but at the same time I have to ask, why is it 30x as difficult as everything else that is inside this same dungeon? The other bosses that I have encountered have been challenging but were at least somewhat representative of the difficulty level of the area that they were put in. This guy is MUCH more difficult than anything that leads up to him.

For me, this merely encourages me to go back to the other stages and make sure I didn't miss anything and during that time I will level up and come back here and be able to deal more damage but in an ideal situation I would prefer that the rest of the level be a bit indicative of how difficult the boss of said level is going to be. Going from "barely needing to pay attention" to "if I make one wrong move I'm dead" seems a bit of a jump as far as difficulty is concerned.

_{I love this comment that someone put on a YouTube video about exactly what I am addressing}

For those of you out there with extreme levels of patience perhaps you would enjoy this sort of thing. For me, I don't really feel that way. I also don't like needing to "do yer reserch, noob! git gud!" To people with that attitude I will say this: I congratulate you on excelling at this sort of thing but I have a job and other things that I must do in my day and videogames are just downtime for me. I don't need or want it to stress me out. haha

In the meantime I stick with my previous assessment about this game in that I think it could be great once they have finished it but in the meantime they are working out the kinks and well, I don't think that scaling down this difficulty is going to be one of the things they work out. I believe they intend to have the players need to do this over and over and over again, perhaps with the intention being of frustrating them into spending real world money to give them an edge against it. That would be a pretty devious yet effective business model, after all.