Replaying through Titan Quest (again. What a masterpiece!), I have rediscovered a feature I had forgotten.
Simple but great idea: when a rare monster spawns with a unique, they actually use it!
It is really fun, because the same monster can act completely differently in each playthrough. Keeps things fresh, adds a lot of replayability.
For instance, I have just met a rare skeleton-mage I usually beat quite easily just by avoiding his fireballs. But this time he was carrying a cold staff with a lot of life and mana leech: no fireballs, he was trying to freeze me instead, and it took me ages to beat him as I was out of mana all the time (and he was stealing my life too). Felt like a completely different enemy. Of course, after finally beating him, I got to loot this very cool (pun intended) staff.
Now, I am not suggesting to add that to Last Epoch straight away, I know there are enough suggestions around for the next 20 years or so. And it feels like it would be a huge amount of work to implement such a feature.
But it is really excellent, so I thought I’d mention it, in the “maybe-one-day-in-the-distant-future-when-we-need-ideas-for-some-cycles” category.
Many people are talking about (and praising) Titan Quest. I think it’s one of the very few hack&slash / iso aRPG (or whatever you want to call it) that I’ve never played. It’s probably the best time to remediate that.
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And yeah, any new cool behavior for monsters would be great. That was one of MrLlama (the streamer, not the old forumer here ) critics of LE and D4 : not enough original / creative behaviors; most monsters just run at you and use their 1 ability.
In D2, Fallens runs away when one dies, tainted starts spitting lighning balls after being hits, swarms occupy your spot and drain stamina (and were annoying lol), etc.
In Poe2, there is some beasts that lurks around looking at you and waiting to prowl.
I hope to see new monsters with fresh mechanics in the future! Mobs that makes you… react against them, instead of brainlessly spams your abilities. You already have to dodge attacks and knows a few patterns (which is great), but they are quick to learn, not that numerous and never change.
It would be nice, but it would also be a complete rework of everything to do with mobs, the stats available to them, their scaling with level & corruption, everything.
) critics of LE and D4 : not enough original / creative behaviors; most monsters just run at you and use their 1 ability.