So after some extensive MoF runs i feel like this mechanic is bothering me.
It is so hard to predict how much damage you are doing, i jump on a boss/rare and burst like 50% of his health and then he becomes literally 100x as tanky for a short period of time.
Then i sometimes kite the boss/rare or try to kill smalelr adds that are still around and i hope the next time i jump on the mob it’s resistances are already lowered.
I see where the devs wanted to go with this, as i like content to be meaningful and not just kil leverything in mere seconds without having to look out for mechanics.
And to be honest, i don’t have any better solution for this, other than changeing the overall game balance and scaling.
Unsure if they gain protections or damage reduction, but if the case is that they gain DR it might be nice to have them gain armor and prots instead. This would make armor and protection shred (shock, frostbite, etc) more attractive as secondary offensive stats.
Im personally against this mechanic due to it feeling less rewarding for building my character well. I understand the devs want to make sure the bosses matter, but if I built my character well enough I should be able to shred bosses. Being rewarded for good character customization has always been part of arpgs for as long as I can remember. and I really don’t want that taken away from this game. But that is just my opinion, I’m pretty sure there are others who feel otherwise.
While I agree devs slowing down gameplay can be a good thing, for my personal build, (Harvest Lich) bosses are so freaking slow. I already did poor single target but now the boss takes longer than clearing the entire rest of the zone. I have so much health leech I still ignore all mechanics because i’m unkillable as long as I’m swinging, but now I just close my eyes and be bored for several minutes while the hp slowly whittles away. I go from 400 dmg crits to like 50. My first thought it maybe have bosses equipped with some sort of version of glancing blow, or have some protection where they can’t take more than X% of their max hp per hit (Similar to how bosses in Final Fantasy games are immune to Gravity spells) but that might feel clunky or unintuitive, I’m not sure.
The only damage reduction mechanics (ontop of normal damage reduction ie resists/armor) that a boss has is MAYBE a 3-5 second window when the boss spawns they take less damage - to avoid players setting up ‘death traps’ so soon as the boss spawns it dies
This happens in PoE - Traps/Mines/Minions whatever can be presetup before a boss spawns they all detonate at once and they die - adding in temp dmg reduction in the first few seconds isn’t bad but constantly and dynamic is just silly
Devs should tweak the general scaling of tougher enemies/bosses.(I am ok with bosses take a little while). But with the current system it just feels unpredictable and punishing to do alot of damage.
Maybe this will even become less of a problem as soon as we reach timelines that are more appropriate to our level, not sure though.
Honestly, I’ve found the most successful strategy is to super-duper-ultra burst, then just wank around for a few seconds doing nothing while waiting for their DR to go back down, then rinse and repeat. It’s way faster than just trying to pour on damage the whole time in my experience.
This seems like an enormous mistake to me. The meta is going to shift to being ultra-defensive without caring at all about DPS, because everyone’s DPS against bosses is now equalized. So who cares what your DPS is? Normal mobs die very quickly even on mid-tier builds, so once your DPS is even mediocre, focus everything else on defense because the returns on further offense are so negligible they feel like a total waste - you might as well not even have them.
This system is so frustrating and feels so bad. I like the feeling of trashing a boss very quickly because my build is so good. Now it doesn’t matter how good my build is; all build damage has been capped at C-tier, so I never get to feel powerful against bosses any more.
As Heavy mentioned, I feel like I’m being punished for doing too much damage. That’s a major bad feeling. It makes me wonder why I even bother to work on my build at all, if I’m just going to get punished for being too good.
I thin maybe they could scale the damage reduction (hopefully it’s additional protections instead) by the amount of damage dealt. That way the apparent disparity between high attack speed/sustain builds and burst builds would be reduced. Bigger hits would give more damage reduction/protections that lasts for a longer amount of time, smaller hits would give less damage reduction/protections that lasted for a shorter amount of time.
Absolutely, the difference in kill time with burst vs sustained builds is ridiculous. My meteor build is almost unaffected while my spark charge build is ramping towards 2% of it’s normal damage.
I cannot play two weeks but has anyone tried with two different damage types? I would welcome this mechanic if the ‘learned’
resistance/protection is based on the type of damage they receive, the solution for the player is to not go for one single maxed skill. Sounds like a very good way to introduce more diverse builds and strategies.
From my experience with some physical + another damage type build is, that it doesnt make a big difference.
The game forcing you to build multiple damage types shouldn’t be a thing, there are already mobs highly resistant to one damage type, which is fine. But as a base mechanic against bosses,… don’t like that.
Problem at the moment is that due to the low level time lines the mobs are way below all my chars, but with that mechanic they still last very long. When doing content that is way below the performance of your build you should be able to “cheese” it.
When doing content that is on your levelthis whole thing might be not as bad, but still i feel like that devs could tweak the scaling of bosses. I know devs wanted to give low dps build a little bit of an advantage, so that they don’t fall behind super much, but as generous of an idea that is, atm it just feels like a punishment for really perfomant builds.
And the tactic @SirRaiuKoren mentioned, of doing bursts of damage, then kite for a while just seems stupid as a baseline mechnic. Don’t get me wrong if that is a mechanic if a particular boss that’s fine. But not as baseline.
The major endgame goal as a player is to build the most badass character I can. When I do, the last thing I want to see is the devs make the boss more tankier because he’s getting his ass kicked.
I get that the devs want mechanics to matter. But this is the cat n mouse game we play. You make em hard to kill, we figure how to make em easy to kill. Please don’t take this away.
This mechanic needs to be chucked into the same fire pit as the monster level scaling mechanic.
It is insane to me that in a game that revolves around character progression the devs implement a mechanic that punishes it. What is the incentive to build/find a more powerful weapon if the bosses damage reduction is just going to scale with my characters increases to damage?
It feels good to struggle with a boss, then spend a few days getting more powerful then coming back and dumpstering the same boss with your improved character. This gives the player a sense of progression and a metric to feel that progression. With the implementation of this mechanic this feeling is lost.
I really hope the devs listen to all the feedback and steer clear of these kind of mechanics in the future.
Totally agree, especially with the introduction with the non-scaled content which is great(except some of the flaws devs already adressing like exp gain for already high level characters).
It’s kinda working against the whole non-scaling thing, were the goal is to improve and see your character progress.
And sorry @all for me replying what feels like a million times already on my own thread, but as much as i love LE and almost everything the devs done so far. THIS is the first time were i really feel that this was a bad decision. (even if the intended goal was ok-ish)
My very short and honest opinion is that such mechanics are terrible and completely counterproductive. This doesn’t do anything else but create unnecessary frustration and essentially gaslight players with invisible mechanics.
This should be solved the other way around: bosses that take ages to die, should periodically lose resistances to not make it a complete snorefest.
And I’m an advocate for as difficult of a game as possible.
I agree with almost everything here. This mechanic is absolutely working agains the whole “progress to get mighty” concept of this game.
I was happy to see that there is no scaling on monolith anymore.
Bioware did the same mistake just the other way round with Anthem, where they upscale the players damage when he had bad equip. This meant your made the most damage with low level gear.
Please take this mechanic out of the game. While it may be easier to balance the game with this kind of “tricks” we players feel kind of betrayed when the super duper gear we put so much time in to find and tune, is getting equalised during bossfights.
It feels horrible. I crit the boss for 2,300 then after some time I crit him for around 300. I don’t think the devs understand that high-damage characters usually don’t have that much sustain so gimping them artificially creates a massive disparity where bosses are way harder but the other mobs aren’t.
Any kind of dynamic difficulty scaling based on character effectiveness completely misses the point of this game genre- 11th Hour need to go watch some Gamasutra videos or something about player motivations. My goal is to build a character that trivializes the content, and if you punish me for accomplishing that then you don’t at all understand what makes people play these games.
