"
"
The biggest issue is that meaningful combat is gated behind time and access restrictions.
I wouldn't mind studying patterns of bosses if I was allowed to retry them in a reasonable way.
But death to a boss means:
Loss of overall access to the map
Loss of experience
Loss of juiced waystone
Loss of expensive access tokens
Loss of time getting to the boss
I'm probably even forgetting some more losses here.
When the penalty of death is so high, I want to minimize the risk of dying. And so I search for ways to one shot whatever is in front of me.
I could have "meaningful" fights RIGHT NOW. All I need to do is to remove my gear and enter the fight. But I won't do that since dying to a boss is extremely time consuming and their mechanics, if not trivialized through gear and build, are very punishing
The penalties are good. They reward skillful play and nudge you toward playing more methodically. The sweetness of victory is ever greater if you overcome such odds. It should not be possible to nullify these risks. You need to face them, risk everything, and overcome them.
People dying to bosses is healthy for the game because it slows down progression overall and gives them a purpose, something to fight for.
If you want it to be a meaningful souls like experience then no, death shouldn't come with more punishment other than the defeat itself.
We already have XP loss, which is another loss I forgot to mention. Leave it at that. But in order to have engaging encounter designs with lots of patterns and required study time, you can't have it be one try only.
GGG addressed this already by having multiple attempts in lower tier encounters. This being said, I don't know what kind of braindead rotten random build you must be playing to NOT one shot T1 bosses.
