Plechi: First of all - I do enjoy Grim Dawn A LOT and everything else is amazing or above, but I feel like bosses are mosty awful.
I may be just bad - I don´t play ARPG games much, but Grim Dawn really got me hooked.
(Beat the game on Veteran on 2 characters, just now completed the expansion and I enjoyed most of it).

I have played Torchlight, Torchlight 2, Diablo 3 (before and after the auction house patch), few acts of Path of Exile and I enjoyed fighting bosses in those games much more then i am in GD.
So many time I find bosses crumped in small area with little to no room to avoid anything that is thrown at me. Bosses having little to none winding time before attacks. Getting stunlocked to being instantly killed by something else like second later.

Am I the only one ?

ZombieIX: while the bosses of the base game are ok, i cant recommend ashes of malmouth to anyone who plays with a glass cannon build...as sad as it is to say that but the bosses (or boss areas) there are shitty designed....

i did play through the base game on ultima with no problem but some of the bosses in the add on are nearly unbeatable for glascannons (pure damage arcanists for example) and the levels are annoying as hell (for example malmouth, where you get stuck every few meters when you run away from horde of mobs with dash attacks)

for example the gate guardian boss...a giant with an nearly unavoidable dash attack that kills you in max 2 hits you have to fight in a tiny area...and thats a main quest boss...the only way i was able to kill him was to nuke and run till he went back and repeat that like 20 times...thats no bossfight thats bullshit.....or the giant plant in the swamp...a small area which is covered with attacking thorns, acid pools and spawned mobs...the only way to defeat her was to stand in a tiny spot where noone could reach me and nuke everything away......

i had to skip a few bosses already, like the swamp kraken und the aetheral behemoth boss in the severs just because there is no way to avoid damage.

as good as the add on is, as poor is the bossfight/mob/level design

i would say the bosses are one of my biggest critism about grim dawn...
while the bosses in titan quest and other similar games are unique encounters, some of them are even unforgettable big badasses (who doesnt remeber the hydra or typhon from titan quest), the bosses in grim dawn are awefully designed:

nearly all of them are just slighly(if all) retextured versions of existing mobs, so you dont even recognize a boss when you meet it...even the only real unique, big badass, the loghorrean, lost its status with the kraken from ashes of malmouth.....so the only unique boss model that comes to my mind now is the warden....yay....

edit: ok i guess the meat crab metal guy in the fort is unique too, but im not completely through malmouth, maybe his model isnt anymore

MaceyNeil: They were designed after a number of minmaxed number crunched builds came out and gained traction.
They were meant to be firm counters for these builds,
grim dawn ended up being a shallow single player grindfest where interesting builds take a back seat to ordinary necessities of generic balance more suited to some form of esports competitiveness.

MaceyNeil: They were designed after a number of minmaxed number crunched builds came out and gained traction.
They were meant to be firm counters for these builds, but of course the strength of most of these builds centered around general survivability & damage output; as such the bosses for 'fun builds' became much harder.
The bigger problem is that bosses throughout the game seem to weild everything including the kitchen sink meaning the reason such builds floated to the top was because of poor decisions in game mechanics in the first place.
Bad game mechinic decisions like having many necessary resists & correspondingly damage types.
So when you build a character regenerating health pays more dividends then specializing a resist, which would of paid more dividends if you were playing multiplayer and could have one player take agro for the monster dealing that type (tanking if you were) as a different design direction that could of been taken.
As such grim dawn ended up being a shallow single player grindfest where interesting builds take a back seat to ordinary necessities of generic balance more suited to some form of esports competitiveness.

ZombieIX: while the bosses of the base game are ok, i cant recommend ashes of malmouth to anyone who plays with a glass cannon build...as sad as it is to say that but the bosses (or boss areas) there are shitty designed....

i did play through the base game on ultima with no problem but some of the bosses in the add on are nearly unbeatable for glascannons (pure damage arcanists for example) and the levels are annoying as hell (for example malmouth, where you get stuck every few meters when you run away from horde of mobs with dash attacks)

for example the gate guardian boss...a giant with an nearly unavoidable dash attack that kills you in max 2 hits you have to fight in a tiny area...and thats a main quest boss...the only way i was able to kill him was to nuke and run till he went back and repeat that like 20 times...thats no bossfight thats bullshit.....or the giant plant in the swamp...a small area which is covered with attacking thorns, acid pools and spawned mobs...the only way to defeat her was to stand in a tiny spot where noone could reach me and nuke everything away......

i had to skip a few bosses already, like the swamp kraken und the aetheral behemoth boss in the severs just because there is no way to avoid damage.

as good as the add on is, as poor is the bossfight/mob/level design

i would say the bosses are one of my biggest critism about grim dawn...
while the bosses in titan quest and other similar games are unique encounters, some of them are even unforgettable big badasses (who doesnt remeber the hydra or typhon from titan quest), the bosses in grim dawn are awefully designed:

nearly all of them are just slighly(if all) retextured versions of existing mobs, so you dont even recognize a boss when you meet it...even the only real unique, big badass, the loghorrean, lost its status with the kraken from ashes of malmouth.....so the only unique boss model that comes to my mind now is the warden....yay....

edit: ok i guess the meat crab metal guy in the fort is unique too, but im not completely through malmouth, maybe his model isnt anymore

ZombieIX: that would be halfway ok if it would just affect the optional bosses, but some of them are quest or even progresstargets...i finished malmouth now on ultimate and its really a pain in the ass for mage only classes....

Whereaminow25: What do you mean bosses that can't be killed by a normal build?

Plechi: I´m glad I´m not the only one.I had exactly those examples in mind + the new bosses in FG expansion.

Yeah, I agree 100%, the base game bosses were alright, nothing special, but nothing completely awful either. I guess the worst thing about them were the boss arenas. They weren´t great for dodging and so many times they had spots that seemed passable, but weren´t.

I remember when I died to the gate boss for the first time. I have not been that confused in a long time.
Then the hit abilities and run (grenades and bombs with my Purifier - Demolitionist/Inquisitor), (bloody pox and doom bolt with Cabalist - Occultist/Necromancer) did the job, but yeah, that is not a boss fight. That was test of endurance.

I have never beaten the Kraken and I probably never will because having a bullet hell boss (that freezes) in a quite small arena with clumsy ARPG control is not fun time for me.

The plant was really tough the first time when I had almoust no poison/acid resist, but that was at least understandable.
(Super minor spoler for FG) Having a max fire resist and get bodied by a fire boss is another thing.
The FG bosses were much easier with Cabalist (my second character, although I got killed by the fire boss like twice anyway and then my pets finished him while I was trying to heal myself without getting body slammed... again) but they weren´t fun either way. The final boss is quite fun (to a point) even though with my first playthrough (with the purifier) I was so frustrated after the bossfight that I forgot to take the loot from the boxes. I realized that back in camp.

I need to create a mellee character and play the game once more.

Anyway, now that I know I am not the only one to get really annoyed/frustrated with the bosses I feel much better.
Thank you.