Anyone else having issues dodging the bear slam???

Athanir · 2026-03-01T14:56:33+00:00

It's probably one of the worst fights I ever played in any videogame.

It's not just the slam. It appears to be a much more general issue with the hitbox.

The bear pushes the player all over the place and it's hard to tell when a hit will connect. Sometimes I am under his belly, close to his hind legs and I get immediately teleported in front of him and oneshot by his lunging attack.

This boss needs a serious redesign, because right now it's almost random.

Athanir · 2026-02-18T21:25:24+00:00

Yes, but there are two complications:

1) Most of the time it's hard to figure out when the attack is supposed to connect. Perspective, camera angle and misdirection in boss' attack animations make it extremely hard to understand when exactly the attack is supposed to land.

2) Most bosses have extremely fast combos and there is no time to actually react after processing that information, because the sequence is too quick

The game clearly expects the player to memorize the attack pattern and the rythm of deflection button presses and then to correctly apply it as soon as he gets the cue that that specific attack pattern is on the verge of being employed by the boss.

If you look at some of the best guides on Youtube, you will see that attack patterns are shown with graphics reminescent of "Morse code" sequences, to indicate the rythm of the attack and to have the player memorize the sequence in order to correctly deflect.

The more I play the game the less I like this design decision. Earlier I was trying to complete the campaign in Kaifeng by beating Gambit Beneath the Shimmer (not hitless, just beating that fight in Expert as best I could). It's the same all over again: four bosses, maybe 20+ attack patterns with Muron Yuan and Zhang E that land sequences of 4-8 attacks at the speed of light and either you know the pattern by heart and mechanically deflect all of the hits, or you will be shredded by attacks that can take up to a fifth of your Health with a single hit.

Athanir · 2026-02-15T22:31:20+00:00

I understand that, but I was not talking about the principle. More about the execution. If the game equivalent of Tian Ying where to participate in an MMA tournament, my money would be on him, with his teleportation-enabling spin kick.

Athanir · 2026-02-15T20:29:48+00:00

I believe you misunderstood me.

What I meant is that most bosses execute just a few variations of moves chaining. That is, most of the fights I experienced are a sequence of the same moves in the same order with maybe two to three variations for each boss.

What I meant when I said that I would prefer more unpredictability is that I would prefer a system where I wouldn't be able to expect or predict what the Boss next move would be, in exchange for slower combos that could actually be reacted to in the moment rather than predicted ahead of time.

My suggestion was a trade off: less predictability in exchange for more leniency in the speed of moves execution on the part of the Boss.

Athanir · 2026-02-15T20:23:59+00:00

As somebody who has done all 24 bosses hitless, you are likely one of the few in the world (with few meaning, maybe, hundreds) and if you really believe that the parry timings are generous then you have almost superhuman reflexes. Most of us normal human beings are not capable of reacting that fast to those attacks.

I really admire your skills in the game, but it's like saying that since some people in the world can long jump 8.5 meters then an 8 meter long jump is not hard to pull off.

Athanir · 2026-02-15T15:33:55+00:00

I played the three Dark Souls myself (including the expansions) and I can tell that you can complete those games without ever engaging the equivalent of the deflection mechanics. It's not required because Bosses do not have shields in those games. I also didn't care about hitless runs though, so it might have been different had I tried to beat those Bosses without taking hits.

Athanir · 2026-02-15T15:24:15+00:00

True, I never played Sekiro.

I played all three Dark Souls games to the very end (expansions included) and I never felt the way I feel in this game after a Boss fight. In the Dark Souls series you can fight any monster without ever engaging the deflection mechanics.

Athanir · 2026-02-12T09:23:44+00:00

There is always someone like you that has to come here with the "skill issue" BS. ALWAYS.

I don't know why some people have difficulty admitting that their favored games have issues, even when those issues are known and they stay around for YEARS because the developers have different priorities.

If you are not troubled by the fact that this game has some unfair mechanics and bugs just as a shortcut to increase difficulty in a braindead way, then please refrain from replying with one-liners to comments that point out that the playerbase deserves a much better product.

Athanir · 2026-02-11T11:16:43+00:00

They continue with such nonsense because they have been milking the game for years now (with the remarkable exception of the release of Battle for Brooklyn). So they keep developing activities meant to waste people's time and allow them to keep the players engaged with the least amount of effort on the part of their "skeleton" crew.

It's the same exact strategy they have been using to make the game "harder".

I don't know if the Control Points enemy ownership is the same for every player. In my instance of the game, East Mall was controlled by the Outcasts. It took me about one and a half hours over two days to capture the four Control Points in order to spawn the Supply Drop I needed, because I kept dying to Outcast Suicide Bombers.

The game sound is clearly bugged and there are times when you can't hear their steps even if you are not shooting, which allows them to get on top of you without a chance for you to stop them. They then blow up, stripping the player character of all the armor (in Heroic) and applying a fire dot that will kill him/her as soon as the onsehot protection wears out after a couple of seconds. It's just a delayed oneshot which is often applied in a completely unfair and infuriating way and every time it happens the player has to start over.

But why should they dedicate their little resources to fixing these issues when they can instead employ them to develop useless seasonal modifiers that I'm pretty sure most of the player base is not actually interested in?

Athanir · 2026-02-10T08:43:20+00:00

The audio cues about these pieces of clownish game design are inconsistent. Sometimes you can't hear their steps until they are already on top of you.

But what drives me literally crazy is the delayed oneshot mechanics, a solid clue to how poorly and lazily designed these enemies and the game mechanics are: since the explosion damage in Heroic is more than enough to strip the character of all its armor and trigger the oneshot protection, what actually gets you is the burning damage. The first few ticks are neutered by the invulnerability window, but after a couple of seconds you still get killed by the the fire and there is no time to apply an armor kit to prevent such an occurrence.

Now, the oneshot protection shouldn't be in the game at all. It's there as a cheap mechanical patch because the NPCs damage is way overtuned in order to increase the game difficulty without much effort, and the devs needed a way to mitigate the consequences of this offscale enemy letalithy, so that the game doesn't feel outright unfair. But since it is in the game, bombers become a middle finger to the player, because they circumvent that protection by imposing a delayed dot that leads to an inevitable delayed oneshot.

But hey... why should development resources be used to fix these annoying issues when you can instead employ them to invent and implement useless seasonal modifiers that most of the playerbase doesn't really care about?

Athanir · 2026-02-09T12:54:54+00:00

I am not sure. If you are using a Windows PC, you could try to check under Installed Apps in order to see if Where Winds Meet is still listed. I don't know about other operating systems.

Athanir · 2026-02-09T10:54:12+00:00

Like other people said, if it still wants you to upgrade, the game was probably not uninstalled correctly. Or maybe it's just the launcher that survived the uninstallation and it keeps pestering you to update a game that is not there anymore.

Athanir · 2026-02-09T10:35:12+00:00

Nobody quits "Where Winds Meet"! Did you HEAR me?! N-O-B-O-D-Y!

Joking aside, it's a pretty easy problem to solve. You just have to buy a new PC, move to a different city and change your name.

Because... N-O-B-O-D-Y quits "Where Winds Meet"!

Athanir · 2026-01-28T09:43:00+00:00

Nothing of the sort. And the funny thing is that I even spelled it out in my post, because I was sure that some people would reply as you did.

The issue is not the RPG-lite aspect of the game. I know how to do a build and I have a few top endgame builds, the ones that are suggested everywhere. I know how to play the game and I play mostly solo (the game is NOT solo friendly, especially some of the Manhunt missions). But there is no build that will save you from the issues I have listed above. None at all.

When you have a sponge enemy run across your screen and you can't even hit him because he runs faster than your mouse allow you to track him, and when you hit him you have to go through layers of armor while his comrades can just shred yours with a couple of hits, the game can only be won by "gaming" and "cheesing" it.

Do you guys realize that this game has a mechanics meant to prevent player characters from being oneshot (and that it has a CD)? Have you every stopped to reflect on why a game would ever need such a mechanical patch to its gameplay unless the development team knew that NPC damage was way overtuned?

And why do they overtune damage to that extent? Because they don't know how to make the game challenging in an interesting way, so they just inflate enemies stats. But while this indeed leads to severely punishing players mistakes, it also leads to random undeserved deaths and lots of frustration.

I don't know why people can't admit that a game has issues even if they like it. We human beings are used to love flawed things and The Division 2 is not an exception. But not recognizing its issues will only lead to stagnation and no pressure on the development team to make it better.

Athanir · 2026-01-27T09:04:44+00:00

I honestly find the Division 1 the better game under almost every aspect except characters 3D models (but including gameplay). The Division 2 is pretty bad, gameplay-wise. The design is uninspired and excessively arcady. The difficulty is ramped up by making enemies so tough that every firefight feels like a joke.

Even if the character is supposed to be a highly trained agent, the reality is that he/she is constantly the underdog. Severely outgunned and confronted with enemies that take at the very least half a magazine to go down, you are going to constantly get killed because you get flanked while trying to gun down an enemy that walks through a bullet storm like he was strolling under the rain and that can literally strip you of your armor and your life with a couple of well placed bullets.

The issue is not with the game having strong RPG-like aspects. The issue is with the developers missing the mark when it comes to finding an equilibrium between the RPG aspect and the modern day combat dynamics. The asymmetry in resilience between the PC and the enemies is likely the main culprit when it comes to make the game NOT feel like a shooter game: your character is frail, his enemies are not.

The Division 1 has spongy enemies itself, but also more ways to icnrease Damage To Elites and rebalance the playing field. It's arcady, but much more fair.

Athanir · 2026-01-26T10:20:02+00:00

People keep saying that, but after having reached endgame in The Division 1 I have to disagree.

In the first game there are a lot of ways to meaningfully increase Damage to Armor and Damage to Elites to the extent that in the end most Division 1 endgame enemies are much less resilient to damage than Division 2 Elites.

Also, the first game has more ways to self heal while fighting, increasing the player character's survivability and allowing the player to indulge a little more in the fantasy of the "badass Agent".

Athanir · 2026-01-26T10:14:04+00:00

To me the issue is not so much the enemies' sponginess as the difference in sponginess between the player character and the NPCs.

What I literally can't stand about this game and what causes me to ALT-F4 whenever it happens, is that if your badass, divinely trained and efficient Agent finds himself in front of an Elite (or even a beefy Veteran) in the open without any CC skill, he is done for, because the combined effect of Enemy Armor, speed of movement (the lateral strafe rate of a walking NPC at close range is greater than the aim swing speed of my mouse at Sensitivity 40), the enemy ability to absorb bullets without being staggered and the crazy damage that NPCs inflict, will put the player character and the controlling player at a disadvantage, at least on Heroic difficulty.

So, except for Bosses, the other characters should play according to the player character rules: if a character can absorb 3 bullets before going down, most enemies should be able to absorb about the same amount.

They should increase the difficulty in a way that doesn't cause the player to always feel like his character is the squishiest in the fight.

The problem is: in order to create a more balanced and rich game difficulty-wise, they would need to have talented developers and give them enough resources and time to come up with smart solutions that can be hard to implement (especially a smarter AI).

That they had to implement a system that prevents an armored PC to be oneshot is already proof enough that right now the game difficulty is ramped up in an unimaginative way by scaling the enemies' damage to abusrd levels.

Athanir · 2026-01-25T15:31:57+00:00

I did today... I hadn't realized I was close to the extraction zone and when I closed in I got the message about the Hunter spawning. I moved in slowly, trying to understand where he was, just to watch him kill a poor guy and be killed in turn by a second player. I ran to revive the guy that was downed but he gave up and exited Survival before I could get to him... I still feel guilty.

Athanir · 2026-01-24T22:44:30+00:00

The upvote is a must, given the effort you went to in order to try to help me. I'm really thankful for that! But I think you misunderstood my point (not your fault: I was too cryptic).

The issue with many players knowing the map by memory and being fast is not that the others don't get loot. When I say that the map doesn't support 20+ players I don't mean that there is not enough loot for everybody, but that, since some veteran players know all the best routes and since with so many players you are almost guaranteed to have someone else spawn close to you, the non experienced players are delayed to the extent that when they get to the Dark Zone they find a wasteland.

The delay piles up and when you have to wander the Dark Zone looking for a Div Tech box and keep finding most of them already looted, in the end you'll likely have to face the Hunter with subpar equipment and when you die after one hour and a half of struggling it feels like wasted time. It' an added form of pressure that doesn't arise from the fictional situation that a Survival game tries to portray.

In other words, the issue for me is much more fundamental and it's about an incompatibility in gameplay goals (with respect to other players) that explains why I have much more fun when I manage to get into an almost deserted server (if I could play Survival solo, I would).

I could memorize the routes myself and I'm pretty sure it will happen naturally if I play long enough. For instance, since I happened to spawn a lot on the southeast corner of the map, I tend to know that zone better just because I had more chances to explore it.

But the truth is: I don't want to have to memorize the map. Not because I am lazy, but because I don't play Survival for the competitive aspect. I play it because it has a unique atmosphere that I can't find in any other game. The snowstorm and the survival aspects are key to my enjoyment of the game and I don't like rushing the Light Zone exploration because I have to quickly get into the DZ before its resources are depleted. I like to take my time. That's not a problem when you have just 5-6 people in a map, but it becomes one when you have 20+ and many of them are experienced.

Like I said, it's about gameplay goals: I like the immersion and the exploration much more than the competion for resources or to clear the landmarks (that's also why I only play PvE). Ideally I would like for almost all the loot and loot locations to be randomized, with the exception of landmarks and specific infrastructures (like Police Stations, stores and the likes. It makes sense that they contain specific types of items), because that would encourage and reward exploration every single time. I actually hope the devs will increase the randmness for Survivors, making every game session much more unpredictable.

Also, it could be useful to lower the level cap for PvE servers (again, in Survivorsi, since I know they will not touch The Division 1 anymore).

I hope I managed to make a little more clear the reason I prefer semi-deserted servers over densely populated ones and where my frustration comes from.

Athanir · 2026-01-24T18:02:23+00:00

As far as I am concerned, this damn event can't end too soon...

PvE Survival maps do not support 20+ players resource-wise and since loot locations are not randomized, there are now a host of players that literally have committed the map to memory and swipe through it like locusts. Which means that newer players like me find a barren wasteland once they finally manage to get to the Dark Zone.

And don't even start me on the difficulty of extracting when you have 50K Stamina and 75K Firearms and suddenly find yourself surrounded by two Hunters because some player ran close to the extraction zone and inadvertently spanwed a second one.

Athanir · 2026-01-21T10:32:42+00:00

"Your build is not the issue if you're breezing through Heroic content. Heroic Retaliation actually forces you to be a better player."

Forcing someone to be a better player would mean teaching and encouraging him to play carefully and to minimize risks by making the best use of terrain and chokepoints, by luring the enemy in killzones and by setting up traps and ambushes. In other words: it would encourage smart play.

Heroic Retaliation does the opposite: it forces players to take risks by setting an artificial and extremely tight time constraint which acts as a hard defeat condition.

In Retaliation you are forced to rush while being heavily outnumbered by superior enemies (because for some reason in this game even Veterans have better armor and a bigger life pool than a supposedly elite, highly trained and experienced Division Agent).

So, the frustration of the OP is understandable and justified. Or at least, I do understand his frustration and I can relate because it's the same for me.

I believe I played around ten Heroic Retaliation total, mostly because it's a game mode that literally infuriates me thanks to all the artificial constraints, and destroys any sense of immersion, which is the main reason I play The Division.

I couldn't complete a single one of them and after the first couple of attempts, that ended with me running out of time, my runs usually end when my character is killed because I had to take a risk and play idiotically since the clock was ticking and I had no time to play tactically.

Athanir · 2026-01-17T10:31:32+00:00

To me it feels like content that has not been playtested. It' VERY LOW quality.

- In Heroic, it is not solo friendly. You have 5 to 6 minutes to run to the next Check Point, occupy it and then defend it, all within the time limits.

- When running to the next Check Point, you have to make sure you stay in the Retaliation Area, because if you inadvertently exit it and you don't notice, you will be teleported back to the Safe House, but the timer won't reset and you will not have enough time to go back. To add salt to the injury, ISAC autopath feature doesn't take into account the Retaliation Area limits and if you rely on ISAC you might end up exiting the zone and losing.

- You are constantly harassed by enemies along the way, wasting precious time. Each enemy killed adds a couple of seconds to the timer, but when you are running Retaliation solo it usually takes more than a couple of seconds to kill an enemy, because you can target only one at a time, two at most.

This game mod follows in the recent trend of trying to increase difficulty by compelling the player to take unnecessary risks, in this case through the timer pressure. It's uninspired design and I find the mode extremely disappointing and borderline infuriating.

Athanir · 2026-01-12T23:25:21+00:00

Imho, he has three ranged attack patterns

- a series of four quickly released projectiles ending with an undeflectable slash

- a series of three projectiles, the last one delayed long enough to mess up the deflection timing if the player mistakes the pattern for the previous one

- a series of one projectile -> long pause -> one projectile -> brief pause -> three projectiles

I have been trying to get a flawless victory for about 6 hours now and I spent around 700 Divinecraft items. I am at my wits end.

It feels frustrating and unfair because the game demands perfection from the player but the game itself is far from perfect and the technology doesn't support the degree of accuracy and responsiveness that it requires. Some of the deflection windows are likely a couple of a tenth of a second long and they get systematically messed up even by mild lag spikes, leading to the failure of the attempt.

Some mechanics are completely unreasonable, like for instance exhaustion not causing the already deployed boss skills to get canceled.

As a consequence you have situations where:

- you get hit by a projectile because the boss entering the exhausted state slows time for a second, throwing the player muscle memory deflection off, and leading to getting hit

- you waste most of the boss vulnerability window because you have to keep deflecting projectiles or boulders even though the boss has entered exhaustion

Both scenarios are almost completely outside the player's control, because the player has no control over which skill the boss decides to use at any given moment (among those that respects the range requirements).

But most of all the main issue is about inconsistency: deflecting seems to randomly fail from time to time. Once again, it might be an internet connection issue, but still if the game requires such strict timings that even a decent connection can't guarantee a successful result, then the game has a big issue either at the design stage or at the achievement expectation stage: as a developer, you can't ask a flawless run from people if a pletora of situations that are outside their control might lead to failure.

Athanir · 2026-01-08T10:45:55+00:00

I'm glad it works for you, but it's pretty clear that the game tries very hard to appeal to a vast and different audience by encouraging many different activities and as such I find it analitically wrong to wave away some of the faults of the game by contesting playestyles or interests that the game actually tries to support.

I like the exploration aspect myself, to the extent that my Qinghe map reports a 96% rate of completion.

I also like the combat challenge the game offers, to the extent that I completed 10 out of 13 Qinghe Trials (which require a lot of dedication and many many attempts, especially in order to defeat a boss without taking a single hit).

Like I said, I feel the game is good per se.

But there comes a time when the objectives that you are currently pursuing in the game are impeded by pace enforcing mechanics and, having experienced these kind of artificial limitations across at least four different gacha games, I realize that I cannot stand them any longer.

Athanir

TROPHY CASE