Echo Knight is not fun

Wicked Feedback
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1

Echo Knight phase 2 is one of the least fun fights I have experienced. I have tried killing him around 50 times already, starting from level 15ish all the way to max level where I am now. I tried different builds, I tried being aggressive, being defensive, dodging, blocking, glass cannon and tanky setups. My current setup is strength build with cold infusion on a straight sword and a two handed weapon that does massive physical damage, medium roll and around 800 armor. I still can’t beat him. The problem is as soon as I get damaged once, the fight is basically over. Even if I bait out one of his attacks and dodge at the perfect time and then eat, before the eating animation is done he will damage me again. If I run to the other side of the arena to heal he will plunge at me or throw some projectile that hits me before I can heal.

The crucible itself is really easy, I can get to him with my eyes closed. I also haven’t had any issues with any other boss in the game, at most I’ve died once or twice per boss, and I one shot the majority of bosses.

As for what the “problem” is: I don’t mind having to redo the entire crucible just to get another attempt at him, or him being so much tankier than any other enemy in the game, or him being so aggressive that you can’t let your guard down even for half a second, or him doing so much damage that he will two shot most builds, and I don’t mind him being able to do damage from the other side of the arena, but I certainly do mind all of these things put together. Something’s gotta give. Not to speak of the rng component where sometimes your run can be bricked by a random echo, or you just can’t find good echoes that synergize with your build.

The average player, like me, is probably not going to spend 20 hours of their life attempting just one boss. They will get frustrated and stop. If this is supposed to be an enemy that only 1%-10% of people are able to kill, the game doesn’t really make that clear.

I understand that for some people the boss is fun as is, but if it is indeed intended that the average player is able to beat him, then please either nerf him in a way that brings him in line with other bosses, or allow for more or different meta progression in the crucible. As for A suggestion: after buying all of the offerings from the Seneschal, there isn’t much to do with the Gloamseed we get. We could have some sort of stackable upgrade that increases our stats or the effectiveness of echoes or grants more revives or anything that either gives the player more power or removes power from the Echo Knight. It could be balanced so after 20-50 runs of the crucible, most players have gathered enough gloamseed to make the fight be a similar difficulty to the other bosses in the game. This would also be optional, so players who like a massive challenge like current Echo Knight can choose not to upgrade further. People with immense skill will be able to kill him in the first few tries, while people with average skill will be able to kill him after some number of attempts.

As it stands, he is the least fun part of the game for me, by far.

Create Topic. :slight_smile:

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2

This boss has few basic patterns and they are very, very well telegraphed. Besides plague specials and charge (in phase1) all attack can be parried as well.

Avoid being hit by plague attacks or his charge. That’s it. Also a lot of videos showing the fight, so you can prepare in advance.

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How you are getting two-shot on all builds is a mystery to me. The only character I’ve had, that didn’t have the health and armor+res to survive multiple hits, was my full glass-cannon caster.
And in 50 runs, you probably would have had a good enough echo combo, such that you can basically one-shot the boss, no?

I understand that the boss might be hard for the average player, but focusing on learning to dodge all his attacks comfortably might be your best shot.

Also, have you been optimizing your gear? 70% plague res is easy on everything but full plate, and having 50-60% armor should also allow you to survive a 3-hit combo.

And with regards to your problem not being able to heal in phase 2, (though it is actually two phases, jump back + scream indicates he has extended combos) I don’t see how this is the case, when he has 2-3 seconds of downtime between most of his combos?

4

He’s my favorite enemy in the game and among my favorite bosses of any video game. The problem is that he requires precise timing and positioning from the player, which are hard to learn when you have to run through all the Crucible levels first. Maybe you could try rolling those “skip ahead” echoes just to get some practice on learning his patterns.

1 Like
5

There absolutely should be a way to keep trying to fight just the boss until success within a specific time period. Maybe the more we die, the lesser rewards we get? I don’t know, but it’s unbearably boring and nerve wracking for the most to repeat the whole place again and again. Especially when you retry already frustrated and fail before the boss because of fkn falling.
I know it’s fun for some mad gigachads who grew up on Malenia’s bosomjuice, or even cathartic for the first time after shitloads of try for the stubborn with a lot of time, but come on…
At least a way to fight it without any rewards (and durability loss) just for the practice and fun?

2 Likes
6

I want him to stop falling off the platform and dying when we hit him. You lose the legendary loot he can drop when he falls off.

7

His charge and plague projectiles have the same wind up making it a 50-50 on whether you can parry it or getting hit by massive unmitigated damage.

This is a common design problem with the game, enemies often have identical wind up for two very different attacks.

8

I think the move you are talking about has the same windup for the swing, but with the physical attack he is stationary, and for the plague attack he moves around.
This is at least my best guess right now, because I’ve never had any trouble discerning which attack is coming.

9

I totally disagree. He has a ton of switch ups and does too many powerful ranged attacks that make it hard to recover. Its not as bad in crucible, but it he spawns as your pestilence boss, he can be very challenging without the additional power from the rogue like buffs.

10

One of the problems is that he started out as the “final challenge”, and as such needed to be at another level than the rest of the bosses. With enough practice, my experience was that the boss was really well designed, both in attack patterns, telegraphs, damage numbers, health, and the switch-up halfway through phase 2.

I do agree that having him appear in pestilence outbreaks feels unfair to new players, and those with a little more restraint than myself, as he also seems to spawn into phase two with his full move set, making the fight even tougher. Combine this with 30% increased health and the “reduced damage at high life”, would probably have broken me, had I not had my many kills of experience from the earlier patch.

11

He just needs to spawn with less HP as a Pestilence boss to account for the lack of crazy crucible echo boons.

I feel his attacks are pretty fair if you can bait out his ranged attacks and charging stab, he becomes pretty vulnerable to punishment every time he charges.

But he’s one massive HP sponge of a boss while doing a lot of damage if he does hit you, so nerf the HP or the damage, or both moderately while in Pestilence.

12

With half the stages and no falling would solve everything.

13

The first and 4th huge wind up float animations will always end up in Plague arrows.
If 1st is a huge float in air wind up it is plague arrow with 2 more arrows, or 2nd Sword slam.

For the plague teleports, just have enough stam, to roll around the min you see flash on him, then roll fast on consecutive 2nd and 3rd!

You will have i frame at rolls helping you.

Finally his most brutal are the 3 swipes, when you are too close he can trigger this with 3 swipe combo!

One of the best boss designs, shame hes hid behind the worst part of this game “Crucible”

14

Yeah, lets nerf the last remaining somewhat challenging enemy in the game.

1 Like
15

The boss can be difficult, especially for the end-game boss.
The problem should be on the study cost.

16

Done him twice so far, first try I died within seconds, second try got him to 60% hp in phase 2. I don’t feel the same way you do, I just see attack patterns and that I need to get the timing right.

You need to shift yourself out of this “I’ve tried, it’s too hard, nerf it” mentality and into more of a “How can I do better” mentality, you’re only going to look for excuses if you keep up the former.

Also as other people have mentioned, if you’re getting two shot by the boss I think it might be a build issue. Some of his attacks will do high damage sure, but others might only hit for ~20% hp, and they are all very telegraphed.

17

I don’t agree, this is very optional boss that can drop afaik, every iconic weapon in the game, so once you get him on farm your build strength can skyrocket. I think making the study cost high is completely fair.

18

In my case it is even worse, I upgraded to some end game gear, fully upgraded, but there is no plague resist (I only saw it after), I cannot even do the boss I was able to do before.
I created a bug for it but not sure if it is actually expected to have armors with 0 plague resist. But it literally make this boss almost impossible. And most importantly, 0 fun.

19

One thing I will say, though, is that dying to Echo Knight should not end the run.

You should be able to keep trying him until you run out of durability and then teleport out.

The reason for this suggestion is that if you want people to use Parry and practice it in this game, you need to give them room to try and fail.

But nobody is gonna risk a Crucible run trying to nail down parry timings if you die and end up with zero loot as a result.

I think game telemetry will bear out my suspicion that most people still are not using Parry at all and are just dodging.

Parry is not quite there yet in terms of tuning.

20

Yep the reward is good. But we are talking about the process, not the reward.
Many people do works they don’t like for living in the day, I think they won’t work for this game in the evening.