Adaptive damage reduction for bosses removes my motivation to play

Feedback and Suggestions
1

for me, and i assume many others, the core experience of an ARPG is improving your character. there are three ways to do that: clearspeed, boss DPS, and defense.

clear speed in LE is mostly finished by the time a character starts endgame. you have all your skills and they’re all level 18-20, and there’s little to no clear speed bonuses on gear (such as AOE increase, explode on kill, etc). i think that’s fine. LE isn’t a game about clearspeed, and it doesn’t need to become one.

some people enjoy building their defense, but personally i just try to get as much as necessary for the content i’m doing. i see it as a ‘necessary evil’.

that leaves one avenue for my character development: boss DPS. but every single character i have, regardless of if their single target DPS is extremely low or extremely high, takes the exact same amount of time to kill bosses after this adaptive DR was implemented.

i know that you have been and plan to continue tweaking this mechanic, and that your stated goal is that 80% more player power should result in 50% faster boss kills. i don’t think this mechanic will ever achieve that with the way that it works, and there’s way too much of a downside to it. it’s depressing trying to increase your character’s DPS and seeing no increase in kill speed. i understand the intentions behind this mechanic, but it’s throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

additionally, the mechanic can be cheesed by designing your character to do extreme burst in very short periods of time, circumventing the adaptive DR. meanwhile, characters who deal a steady stream of DPS experience the maximum possible ‘punishment’ of adaptive DR.

my suggestion: don’t be afraid to kill your darlings. you tried this mechanic, it hasn’t worked. remove it, and instead take a surgical approach where you find which sources of damage scaling give players excessive DPS and tone them down individually.

29 Likes
2

reasonable analysis. i posted on this somewhere else not too long ago. I think the devs just want people to experience the boss fights for what they are. In my opinion the best compromise to your point and theirs would be to just give the bosses a ton more hp. Then high dmg builds kill them faster than others but at the risk of dying etc.

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Hi, sorry to ask, but couldn’t find it in a forum search, can you please explain about this adaptative DR and how it works?

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4

Bosses get damage resistance as you damage them. It degrades slowly over time. Its meant to be a way to make hard DPS not the be all end all. Its a bit overtuned though. Think doing 10 damage to a boss at level 100.

The OP is too pessimistic. Its overtuned right now but I see a really easy numerical fix (implementation I can’t say, coding is hard). Put a cap on the resist gained from this mechanic.

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5

I’ll be blunt with my opinion of this whole system.

The very idea comes off as a very contrived and artificial way to extend boss fights.

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6

yeah, not a fan of this system.

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7

This might be the way to go

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For me the whole system looks like a weak idea to artificaly stretch the content. Making enemys take less dmg because you reached a certain powerspike is just wrong and it should be the other way arround.
Most of ARPGs “difficulty” comes from the fact that we have HP sponges at a certain time and thus for a bigger chance to mess up while players tediously whack a mole on enemys. Right now all the the devs do is increasing this mess even more while there could be different ways to make things more intresting like more boss mechanics. This is just the easiest and most blunt way to make stuff harder and it’s a shame.

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9

Maybe they shouldn’t try and make a level 55 boss remain a challenge for level 90+ players. What if every timeline could be empowered and there was a level 100 version of each boss.

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10

I already preached this when this mechnic hit the first time with 0.7.9.

The intended goal is well-meant. The implementation is punishing for good character building.

The whole mechanic got a little bit more subtle with 0.7.9c, but is still present.

I think adjusting the scaling of bosses specifically is the way to go. Give them a ton more HP and remove this adaptive damagereduction mechanic entirely. Bosses because of their for the most part well designed encounter mechanic don’t feel just like “hp-sponges”, which is often the case for other aRPG’s where bosses just have massive amounts of hp and you can just tank and spank them down.

And for very well thought out builds it is ok to kill a reasonably fast. It is ok to kill the “low-level” timeline bosses relatively fast, even if good dps builds don’t experience all their mechanics.

And here comes the scaling part again, that what the empowered timelines are for and generally the higher levle time lines. Just adjust the scaling curve soooo much that bosses will get tons and tons more hp the higher the content is.

I really hope that this or a similar solution will replace this mechanic, since i really feel punished for my best builds character atm.

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11

I agree the mechanic could use some work and balancing, but just adding boss hp doesn’t solve the problem they are looking to address. As stated in the notes introducing the mechanic, the overall intention is to increase boss kill time without overly punishing builds with low dps.

If you’ve ever tried to kill primeval dragon wheb you first meet him on a low dps character I’m sure you can agree that it’s not a fun experience. I think the intent here is good, but the right balance hasn’t yet been struck.

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12

Generally i agree.

But with my suggestion i would recommend an overhaul on the scaling of bosses for the entire game(or at least endgame). If you play for example the level 55 timeline a almost fresh cahracter that finished the story should be somewhat able to beat that. But as soon as we go down further the “higher timelines” the content should get harder and bosses can have tons more hp. Because you can expect people to build mroe damage when trying to engage higher content. Defense in LE is still king, but you need to scale your damage accordingly to the content your are trying to face.

And if you going for the lvl 100 timeline or for the empowered timelines you should build more dps in addition to all other stuff that you want to scaled further with character progression.

Dps progression is core to each aRPG, you don’t just build more tankyness without increasing your dps. Even if you go for a more deliberate “tankbuild” that can facetank all content you still want to scale your damage somewhat.

So if they would do the scaling of the bosses correctly it would turn out fine. Lvl 55 timeline can be done on almost all chars and exceptionally well build chars will just “stomp/cheese” that content, that’s ok. And for the higher timelines the “low dps” builds (for the reason of being exceptional tanky or just have a bad build doesnt matter) should take longer for bosses. Period.

Trying to make life easier for bad builds/low dps builds while punishing the good builds is very unfair.

If they hit the scaling right it will be fine. At at some point for the very very very endgame you will HAVE TO have good dps.

Sorry for the rant here, this is by far the first subject i have a very strong opinion about.

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The whole idea of these types of games is that when you’re struggling with something you can go back to earlier content and farm better gear to help you progress. It’s meant to be all about gear and builds. This isn’t dark souls where you have to repeat a boss over and over until you learn the attacks. With good gear you should feel powerful and the boss should die quickly.

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There is no “whole idea of these types of games”. The only thing for a game to be categorised as an arpg, is to be action and rpg. Everything else can change, or else we would still be playing D1. The implementation of that feature might not be perfect, but its still beta and its good that they are thinking of ways to make things DIFFERENTLY from other arpgs.

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15

Very well said @Jdahl22

I also like that LE at least try some different things. Not everything works out perfectly but that’s why we are here at Beta/EA and i never had the feeling that devs are deaf to anykind of feedback, devs respond very well to community feedback.

I am ok with learning bosses and probably even need to do them multiple times to learn the fight. I would also be ok to die to a “low level” boss if i am not playing the mechanics right.
I am ok with not be able to facestomp everyboss.

BUT, if a very very very powerful character will lead to some of the “early/weak” bosses die within seconds so that you don’t need to play any mechanics, that’s the lesser evil. As long as the “high/meaningful” content for this characters stays relevant

Gear should not be a free pass on all content, it’s ok when some content/especially bosses stay lethal/dangerous. But if for some balancing reason some bosses fall of in lethality/time to kill for very well geared chars/builds that’s ok too.

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16

I can see the rationale behind these changes and it’s a good thing that we should experience bosses and not oneshot them.

I don’t like the execution however. Not only does it make your character feel weak, which is one thing. For me at least, it also makes fights very unpredictable, with sometimes bursts of damage, and then no damage, it’s just weird. And potentially dangerous, because where in other games you could finish off a boss before he does a big attack, because you know your damage output, in Last Epoch this suddenly doesn’t work anymore, and it may even get you killed.

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17

Maybe if the bosses hp and resists would be calculated before the fight, based on the player’s stats, it would be less of a problem?
There would be none of the weird ‘rubber banding with damage dealt’. Also, this would allow you to scale the fight difficulty in a controled way, so powerfull players won’t feel bad for needlessly investing in power.
But yes, this implementation is well meant though counter effective for most players.

18

Thanks for explaining the mechanic, I was not aware of it.
If the content level is well balanced I don’t see a problem on a lvl 100 destroying a lvl 55 boss in seconds, because that player really should be doing other content. If the best use of time of a high level character is doing low/mid level content, there is something wrong in the way loot drop works.

I feel its a very counterintuitive mechanic, and even detrimental to the immersion in game.
Whats the point of building a powerful character if they don’t let you feel its power?

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19

I agree with this post entirely. I think the intent behind the design has some merit, but the design itself perverts the entire core gameplay loop of IARPGs - kicking ass due to carefully crafted mathematical advantage. I think it is okay to let weaker builds struggle against bosses. That’s a motivation to gain more skill, improve the build, and hunt down the gear. But if my sweet build is going to be punished for being “too good,” then what’s the point?

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20

If you have no incentive to do lower content, then why does it matter how much time it takes to kill a boss? If we are talking about being able to ignore boss mechanics on content that matters, as a reward of farming gear, when does it hit a ceiling? Or it should not, should gear make obsolete the mechanics of even the toughest bosses? Are we talking taking a road similar to killing sharper guardians in few secs?