Adaptive damage reduction for bosses removes my motivation to play

[Vidya]

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).

[Vatni]

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

[kiss_me_quick]

@Vatni

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.

I don’t think even chunky DPS would help unless you hit in millions.

@Vatni

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)?

My assumptions( might be completely wrong) and observations( might be completely wrong) are that:

1. It seems to be that it works based on protections
2. It seems that the protections variable is multiplied based on variables - 1) time since the encounter started 2) what the current HP is
3. I assume that every boss is given values what the HP should not be lower of after some conditional time, multiple times
4. If the boss is lower HP than X after Y time, then multiply resistances by some amount
5. 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!

[TheFurnace]

This is a “artificial easy difficulty”, now is need use penetration damage?

[Llama8]

@kiss_me_quick

I don’t think even chunky DPS would help unless you hit in millions.

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.

1. It seems to be that it works based on protections
2. It seems that the protections variable is multiplied based on variables - 1) time since the encounter started 2) what the current HP is
3. I assume that every boss is given values what the HP should not be lower of after some conditional time, multiple times
4. If the boss is lower HP than X after Y time, then multiply resistances by some amount
5. There’s always a constant dividing the protections

I have no idea how to link to discord, but:

Discord - A New Way to Chat with Friends & Communities

They work like “less damage taken” modifiers. They’re not affected by penetration, shred, or anything like that. This does actually mean that penetration and shred are more effective than they would be if it were actually armour and protections that they gained.

and

Discord - A New Way to Chat with Friends & Communities

It’s not per hit. It’s once they lose a certain percentage of their health (currently 2%) and it stacks, so if they’ve lost 10% of their health recently they’ll take less damage than if they’d only lost 4% of their health recently.

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 there is a single rule for the whole grouping of bosses as seemingly they all have different levels of protection scaling.

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.

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%

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.

[Madriax]

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?

[Llama8]

@Vatni

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 think it only affects the monolith quest echo bosses, as I’ve never seen it affect any other boss in the game.

[Vatni]

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?

[Vatni]

Oh sweet. Thats very good to know lol. Ty.

[kiss_me_quick]

@Llama8

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 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.

[kiss_me_quick]

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.

[Llama8]

If you’re taking the boss through a 2% hp threshold every 2-5 seconds, then you’d be correct…

[kiss_me_quick]

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.

[Madriax]

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.

[Madriax]

Here’s a way of speeding things up a bit if you want to try new skills etc on a boss.

Run the monolith/boss you want with the skills you have now and then stop when you get to the boss quest.

Use Arena to reskill and then go and do the boss.

Reskilling in Arena is far quicker (at level 100 you can drop and completely rebuild a skill by wave 30). Always reskill in Arena if you can as it takes much, much longer to reskill in a monolith due to map running vs mobs swarming at you in Arena.

Prior to the new monoliths, dying in Arena used to reset monoliths … but they are no longer linked. So you can die in the Arena and your monolith progress is not reset.

Also, each monolith is independent of the others. So if you die in one, your progress is not reset in the others.

Potentially, you can line up all 7 bosses in the monoliths and do them all in 1 go if you want

[Vatni]

I find the arena boring as hell. But if this is the case, might be worth it. Thanks for the explanation.