The Dark Souls inspiration is missing something important

I played POE2 a lot since the beginning of EA, and am quite used to Souls games. I love that Dark Souls inspired POE2 as much as I like the Hack 'n Salsh side of it. However, I feel there are some important things in this inspiration that either has been missed, or failed to be realized, killing a lot of the fun (ok, I just got downed by Citadel Geonor, but promise this is not just a vent).

The common part of both points I want to make is that, while the Dark Souls games have had a reputation of wishing the player's death, they never wish the player to fail. Death is only a way to have us try again and try better. While you can loose something by dying, it is in fact almost not punished (you can go to the boss without a load of souls, and that's it). Dying mostly mean you cannot progress in that direction yet, not more.


1- The gradual improvement

What makes the Dark Souls difficulty a good thing is that you get all the more satisfaction when you succeed. You die a lot, you try a lot, you learn the patterns, you get better, you perfect your build, and eventually you slap that bosses face. This formula is incredibly effective because you usually meet a boss at a stage where it is not easy to beat it, so you often get slapped first. By persevering you improve gradually, so that when you finally beat a boss it is often after a tough, uncertain fight, making the victory rewarding.

In POE2, the problem is that you can't try a lot and you can't afford to loose, at least not with the endgame content.

The worst part is Citadel bosses: not only are citadels rare, but you fail the map after one death. This prevents you completely to feel the satisfaction of a souls game: if you loose, you don't get another try until after many hours, and if you win, it is because you overgeared and overbuild sufficiently to roll over the boss. Other contents have the same issue, but not as severe.
Add to this that to prepare a Citadel node well, you should get to all nearby Towers to use good affixes tablet on them, so when you enter you usually spent a lot of time getting to it and preparing it. Dying is all the more punitive, and really underlines that you have subjected yourself to a chore while you where supposed to play a game.

There is no way POE2 can provide the Dark Souls Boss experience, it is too different a game, but it should be able to come closer. Among the things that would in my opinion partially bridge the gap:
* earlier access to all bosses, including more citadels, or better much more control over the Atlas nodes,
* more opportunities to fight them (at least do not fail citadel nodes after one death),
* more control over the fight: one should be able to survive a fight out of skill when not overgeared. Less one-shots and crippling abilities seem necessary. Attacks that need to you to react in a clear way over the next second are ok, but getting impaled without a way out is not.


2- Dark Souls wants you to win and teaches you how

The key part of Dark Souls bosses is that they hit slowly, in a telegraphed way. This does not make fights easy, because you are slow too, endurance prevents you to spam attacks or rolls, etc. but the fights are clear, you now what hit you and you have space for (some) errors. This is how you learn, by understanding what you did wrong.

POE2 is currently failing at this: most of my deaths are completely impossible to understand precisely. Should I have played differently, have better defenses? which defenses? I usually have no idea, even after looking at quite a number of videos of better players. My current character does not die as often as he did, but only because he hits hard enough not to meet anyone standing that could hit him back. It should be possible to play a tanky character that needs to at least deliberately aim the rares to kill them, instead of only insta-screen-clearers that are the current meta.

Again, it is probably impossible for a Hack 'n Slash to achieve anything close to the clarity of Dark Souls fights. Again, it is certainly possible to come closer.
* Less one-shotting attacks, more steady paced sequences of weaker attacks that you can escape but that put constant pressure,
* a log of the last seconds before death is probably unavoidable if we are to learn what went wrong. Let us now the damages suffered in the end of the fight (amount, timing, monster, type, and if possible before/after mitigations, e.g. including evaded hits).

There are probably better solutions than the ones I suggest, but I strongly feel that something has to be done so that we can happily get slapped by GGG's bosses and gradually overcome them, instead of feeling like crap that we died and lost hours of efforts without knowing why.

Agreed 100% and was thinking the exact same. Souls games you get to learn the techniques to beat adversaries…Their moves are precise and you can learn to counter them. Some bosses in PoE2 you can as well, but either the hit boxes are too large, or between getting hit and dodging, elemental attacks going off in every direction either without warning or rotating around in circles while other things are going off in between..all without really enough warning…and damage that bypasses all defenses…the list goes on.

Then when you lose, the loss is a set back of hours with Citadels and several other maps (all trials come to mind) not to mention experience.

I mentioned in another thread. Maybe give us 1 life for each waypoint we find on the maps? This way we earn our way a bit on each map.

Dark Souls is my favorite franchise, and it rankles me when people say that POE2 has anything in common with Dark Souls. From what I gather, people say this because they added a dodge roll? Get a grip, people.

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There is no way POE2 can provide the Dark Souls Boss experience, it is too different a game, but it should be able to come closer. Among the things that would in my opinion partially bridge the gap:
* earlier access to all bosses, including more citadels, or better much more control over the Atlas nodes,
* more opportunities to fight them (at least do not fail citadel nodes after one death),
* more control over the fight: one should be able to survive a fight out of skill when not overgeared. Less one-shots and crippling abilities seem necessary. Attacks that need to you to react in a clear way over the next second are ok, but getting impaled without a way out is not.

First Point: dont think more citadels are necessary.

Second: I agree

Third: One shots are a pretty lazy way of doing a boss fight. If a boss has a one shot ability it should be combined with you special actions by the player. If you dont do this get ready for a one shot ability. Or some strong skills that are harder to Dodge. Games that did this really well in my Opinion are Lost Ark and Neverwinter.
For example Neverwinter had a fight (its a really old one) where every palyer in the group had to coordinate to destroy Caskets. If the party didnt manage to destroy all of them every Casket that was not destroyed would spawn an Add. Which makes the fight way harder. Thats a good way to design a fight.


Now in POE that is not the case. There are no mechanics like that. A good example of this is either the Draven Boss Fight or the Draven boss fight. One of those did spawn a Knight as an Add. You cant prevent the spawn.
Draven and Asinia are actually really good fight overall.

Giving a boss One shot abilities on regular Abilities/Attacks is lazy. It makes a fight hard in a bad way.

Also dodge roll is supposed to have iframes.

The inept POE2 developers missed the mark.