That is what PoE has to do now a days with how bad power creep is in their game. PoE have to make fights have phases where a player cannot target the boss and has to do mechanics. These fights where they do this are I would argue the most interesting because it forces the player to actually do the fight to a degree. Even this though for a overpower meta build, you really are still missing 50% of the fight because you can phase the boss so quickly. That is why I have issues with this style as well, doesnt really solve the problem. Everything just seems like a bandaid (even their system currently needs work) to fix power creep, build imbalances with how complex ARPGS are.
I have been playing a poison monolith runner build, kills bosses really fast.
All I get from the DR is annoyance and the fight lasting a few more seconds.
As far as I am concerned they can do whatever they want to make it hard to one shot bosses - players will still find a way. So the only real options to have bosses survive insane dps are multiple phases and mechanics forcing the player to either do something or wait in order to deal damage(such as the soul cages providing invincibility).
Never played PoE that much. Sure it is just another bandaid.
I’m down to any other bandaid to fix the problem of players skipping mechanics because of DPS builds.
Damage reduction on bosses in a game where I choose to build a DPS char, a hybrid or a tank is just one big NO for me.
It corners build diversity, it feels bad and is just so out of touch of what I believed this game was going to be.
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Not sure if you read correctly but I’m saying that PoE is not a DPS race, not whether PoE or LE ought to be. I assume you’re talking about PoE as it has been centric to your post?
Making bosses have an invisible shield will not in any way increase the variety of the builds - completely the polar opposite is what happens and has happened.
If nobody has a reason to build a glass cannon then nobody will build a glass cannon - no?
If it does somehow, I’d like to know how?
There isn’t a single respectable online game which doesn’t gyrate around meta builds.
The more the game has specific checks which the players have to pass, the more the players are forced into meta builds.
What about the fact that it homogenises all builds because there’s no reason to build above X DPS? It’s essentially like capping resistances in PoE but in Last Epoch it’s with damage.
On a philosophical level it is the right direction - make the content meaningful - but this is the direction which every game developer is trying to pursue.
The question is how this philosophical endeavor is eventually implemented which is where I disagree with you. Developers should not force players into sitting with their hands in their pockets for minutes due to their inability to balance the game properly - it’s just not fun for anyone!
4 Likes
Absolutely sign everything @kiss_me_quick has pointed out so far.
The current bosses equalise the different build types and playstyles and force players to do all the same.
What do we need build diversity for if every difference is wiped away when facing a boss?
6 Likes
Glass cannon: kill them before they kill you.
MoF bosses: You’re a glass cannon? Not anymore! Get your defenses like a tank and slap my face with your bare hands!
Imho this makes all chars looking for same stats in skills and gear, in fact almosy mandatory, leaving no place for different game archetypes.
Average gear and any correctly builded char should melt bosses 20 levels below. Any 55 lvl char should experience a difficult 55 level boss with all bells and whistles. Same for any 90/100 lvl char facing lvl 100 bosses.
What else is the purpose of looting, crafting, planning builds for?
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I’d feel a whole lot better about this mechanic if it didn’t trigger or was reduced when there’s a certain level difference between the player and the boss. Something like maybe 10 levels?
Think the idea to rework penetration as a stat to reduce the effectiveness of this adaptive damage reduction is pretty cool too. Would make penetration useful and also act as another gear tax to reduce raw DPS.
Maybe even add MoF buffs the players can earn to reduce the effectiveness of the DR. Add fight mechanics to strip away the DR too even so that the DPS downtime doesn’t feel so crappy.
Or maybe the mechanic could be reworked to only be effective vs the damage type dealing the most damage while maybe even having other damage types gradually strip away the DR buff. Might encourage multiple damage type builds (and indirectly reduce player power).
I can see this mechanic not having much of an impact on early, probably even mid game. But once you start hitting the MoF’s…
I didn’t learn about this mechanic til a few days ago. I thought about it immediately, noted my initial feeling of ‘Gross’ and genuinely didn’t feel good. But I understood it after reading a bit and finding out why this was even a thing.
That being said… as a player, I still can’t get on board this boat made of cheese and vine whips. Be it glass canon, tank, or minion master, it seems nothing will kill a boss faster than chunky burst dps.
On that note, 1: does this mechanic scale only with ‘hits’? 2: Would dot damage scale this up too per tick? 3: If 2 not be true, would poison pools be an effective way around this mechanic (for example)?
Apologies if these have been answered or if I’m repeating anything. I’m at work and have little downtime, but Im passionate about this game. I can’t help myself lol. <3
I don’t think even chunky DPS would help unless you hit in millions.
My assumptions( might be completely wrong) and observations( might be completely wrong) are that:
- It seems to be that it works based on protections
- It seems that the protections variable is multiplied based on variables - 1) time since the encounter started 2) what the current HP is
- I assume that every boss is given values what the HP should not be lower of after some conditional time, multiple times
- If the boss is lower HP than X after Y time, then multiply resistances by some amount
- There’s always a constant dividing the protections
I don’t think there is a single rule for the whole grouping of bosses as seemingly they all have different levels of protection scaling.
I don’t believe poison would help and you need to stack poison with constant hits anyways.
Your best way around it is to use skills or weapons which cull the opponent at low hp - this can be from 10% to 25%
OR
Engage with bosses and content which don’t have these variables adjusted as heavily.
As an example you can pretty much instakill Effigy of Oblivion as it should not have the protections scaling at all, probably because the developers forgot about it.
I also might be wrong!
This is a “artificial easy difficulty”, now is need use penetration damage?
It would only help if you could one-shot the boss. The moment you don’t one shot it, the boss then has many stacks of damage reduction making your second hit equivalent to slapping it on the arse with a wet towel.
I have no idea how to link to discord, but:
and
So every time you take a boss down by 2%, it gains a stack of “% less damage taken” that lasts for a decent amount of time (dependant on the boss but can be in the 30s area). If you have a high damage build then you will take the boss down through multiple 2% thresholds so they gain multiple stacks of the damage reduction in a short time frame. Lower DPS builds will take the boss down through the thresholds slower so the “older” stacks will be more likely to have dropped off so the boss has fewer stacks at any one time.
I don’t think that question was asked, when @Trasochi was explaining it he didn’t mention anything was boss-specific (other than potentially the duration of the stacks) but he could just have been giving a general example of how it works rather than diving into the details immediately.
Ailments won’t have any special benefit for this, but having skills, passives or weapons that cull the boss at a % of it’s health will help since the boss won’t last as long.
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The damage reduction can be viewed as a bell curve … regardless of the type, quantity and speed of damage, there is always the curve to deal with.
And it’s giving players the hump. Yes, I know - good one, eh?
I think it only affects the monolith quest echo bosses, as I’ve never seen it affect any other boss in the game.
Apparently it seems like if someone were to figure out roughly what the dps would be for a good spot in dealing with the boss damage reduction (BDR), one could simply build to that dps (which is likely plenty for casual farming mobs) and then pump the rest into defenses. Is this line of thinking flawed?
Oh sweet. Thats very good to know lol. Ty.
I see I see! Thank you for seeking these messages out for me!
I was entertaining an idea analogous to this as well but I somewhy couldn’t accept it because all of the scenarios seem to egress a heavy damage damage fall off at ~40% HP and way too drastically for it to be a simple linearly stacking mechanism. I guess I was expecting the game to do a check and apply a buff for it every 0.5s with this method but I assume it’s more like every 2-5 seconds?
Memory and perception are such flawed things anyways so I might be wrong here again.
This could work if it would calculate and apply it’s DBR every 0.5s but my assumption is that it stacks every 2-5s.
If you’re taking the boss through a 2% hp threshold every 2-5 seconds, then you’d be correct…
Yeah, you’re right. Durr, I was thinking more about not getting any DBR at all and doing high enough damage. High enough damage for what? I don’t know.
I’ve tried various builds on my Mage, respeccing and using different skills at the bosses - burst damage, big dots, high penetration etc … and all are about the same.
They all encounter the “speed bump” of the damage reduction mechanics.
So, until they address it and make it more “comfortable” for players to deal with …
It doesn’t matter if you are in a Ferrari or a G-Wiz … you will have to go over the speed bump.
1 Like