Damage anguish
So this post stems from a question i tried to ask last Friday on the dev stream. The question i provided was unclear and i was asked to clarify. As the message i prepared was too big for discord character limit i am posting here. I did my best to get what was in my head on paper but not everything that’s in my head comes out clear. So i apologize if it reads poorly.
I have an idea for a new type of damage for the game. Specifically a base damage type like fire or void damage and not ignite or time rot. As well as a mechanic or buff that would work along side it.
The name I came up with is anguish and the mechanic would be named rage. The new base damage would be a conditional damage that would require you to fulfill certain conditions to enable the ability to do anguish damage. And the mechanic would either be incorporated if the conditions to deal anguish damage were met, or an item enabled mechanic.
Starting with the base damage anguish, this as stated before would require to fulfill certain conditions to allow you to deal anguish damage. There are three activation conditions I have attached to anguish being; within the low life threshold of remaining hp being between 1-33%, having taken damage recently “4 seconds”, the damage has to be direct damage to health and not ward and has to be from an enemy and not self harm (such as using health to cast spells or life conversions to ward).
As for the reasons of these conditions they are as follows. First and foremost is the idea of creating a suspenseful play style which allows for high stakes high rewards. Rewards that will become apparent in the rage description. Second is the hope to bring health based builds into a more desirable situation. For the damage requiring to be direct health damage and not to ward there are two parts. One is if you can have endless ward protecting your low health value it defeats the idea of a high intensity low life situation. And it makes a situation where damage mitigation becomes increasingly important. Now for the requirement of having to received a blow recently this is in hopes of creating an engaging play style over the overused ranged one shot style that bypasses enemy damage scaling. The recent requirement will also become a safety feature with the incorporation of the rage mechanic.
With the requirements to stay between 1-33% health there is a hope to increase the importance of the defensive layer of endurance and endurance threshold. With the increased value of endurance the importance to balance the defensive mechanic as to prevent to much defensive creep. And thus the starting reasoning for the rage mechanic.
For the rage Mechanic to activate the buff you have to have damaged an enemy with anguish damage. And at its core it is a buff that scales your damage done with anguish damage and damage received from enemies as a whole. Rage would be an endlessly stacking buff that increases with time. For the damage ratio per stack my idea would be 20% increased anguish damage dealt and 5% more damage received from all types of enemy damage both hit and dot per stack. And each second while in a valid rage one stack of rage would be added until the rage state is lost. Rage would have no effect on other types of damage. The idea being creating a situation where you have ramp up damage that has a cost but has to be carefully managed as to not lose it and do no damage or scale it too far and become unable to survive a hit.
Now some justification for the way rage is structured. Starting with the need for anguish damage to be active, this is to prevent players to stack the buff prior to combat and just one shot enemies with no draw back. The reason for the damage scaling over time is it is designed to prevent long drawn out battles so long as the player can manage to stay engaged with the enemy and stay alive. The reason for increased player damage taken outside of preventing a lopsided benefit, is the reason of elevated playtime intensity.
And with the need to be hit recently it ideally makes enemies more of a threat and makes it so the player has to manage killing enemies fast enough so they don’t kill the player. While also needing the player to ensure there are still some enemies around to take damage.
Now as for the situation where you lose the ability to do anguish damage and therefore the loss of rage. If a situation where a player has not been hit recently or has a health value above 33% total health the player will lose all stacks of rage. And all skills that do anguish specific damage will have anguish damage set to zero regardless of how much anguish flat or anguish damage scaling the character/skill has. One of the justifications for this loss is to steer away from the habit of stacking health as high as you can and just using leech to stay alive. Ideally the player would have to use other healing methods such as flat amount of healing on skill use or health on hit. To reactivate anguish damage and start building rage again the player must fulfill the conditions to enable anguish.
Two notes I should mention are; a player may have ward and deal anguish damage its just that damage to ward will not fulfil recent health related damage conditions, and the 20% increased damage dealt and 5% more damage taken are not a must value. And the importance is less about the amounts and more about trade off reward and cost based mechanics.
To close this idea stems from the desire to create “new” and an ideally interesting play style to the arpg genre, specifically last epoch. The concept of engaging content is far from new but I feel there’s a missed opportunity on creating new player play styles. This referring to how the player plays and not the skills used or skill tree set up. It’s more about adding to the current used play styles of tank/glass cannon/ balanced. This is by far a universal idea what everyone would welcome and want and that is not the idea of the concept. This idea if ever possible would be to target those who have yet to find a way to enjoy the game, or add to the variations current players have adding new “life” to the arpg gaming experience.
