Giant Enraged Loot Lizards!

It sometimes feels a little bad that loot lizards can never fight back, how about a small chance to be ambushed by a giant enraged loot lizard that is like a champion or tougher in your echos or anywhere in the world.

Maybe a weaver tree additional component for loot lizard shrines to also have a small chance to spawn that same giant enraged loot lizard. This could be added to one of the last two existing nodes for loot lizards to not take up more space.

You’re not fighting the LL, you’re “unburdening” them :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: .

Tbh. EHG already has a weird obsession with loot lizards (and bees). Their appearance is not as exciting as e.g. loot goblins, rather an annoying distraction. They are way too common and diluted for that.

As Shathor mentions, you’re not fighting them, so an “enraged” one that you do fight and kill kind of goes against the grain. And should you do so, the Merchant’s Guild may become quite unhappy with you. I do believe there is already an existing chance for a “super lizard” if I recall correctly, that’s much larger than the average lizard and has improved drops.

I believe the lore is that these lizards were stolen from the MG, and used for illicit smuggling, which you’re freeing them. To match this lore, perhaps something like a black market lizard tamer would be the rare spawn? Bonus points if it had a very small chance to drop a lizard pet cosmetic imo.

If you’re freeing them, why do the run away so aggressively? Seriously, my three reactions to “failure” in this game are “I need to improve my build” (the preferred reaction) “arg, another bug” and “stupid loot lizards.”

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For me personally, If some maniac just started running at me full speed, teleporting all over the place, and throwing fireballs at me while screaming “I AM NOT A MAN OF MANY POCKETS!”- Even if they weren’t hitting me, I’d probably still try to make a swift exit.

Though if I’m reading your last post correctly, this seems to be more about frustration of trying to catch lizards. Lizards take increased damage over time (not DoT, but the longer they’re alive, the more damage they take), as long as they’ve been hit in the last 45 sec (iirc), they won’t disappear. and they’re vulnerable to CC.

Having a guaranteed stun, such as shield bash, or snap freeze, or a high burst damage ability on your bar as a secondary, such as Earthquake or Lethal Mirage to burst them can help a lot while leveling. Alternatively, just let them sit there for 10,20 seconds without hitting them while you deal with trash, let their damage multiplier stack up, THEN smack 'em free of their burdens can help as well. Just don’t panic when you see them, you have more time than you think.

If you’re having trouble with lizards in late game, it’s a good sign you’re going to start struggling elsewhere with low dps, so a good time to check in on that too.

It’s not about struggling with them, it just suddenly feels like I’m playing a different game, and its just NOT FUN anymore :confused: . The first thing I looked for on the weaver tree when it was introduced was “loot lizards no longer spawn, more loot elsewhere” and all there is is a bunch of nodes that make loot lizards more common :frowning: .

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Sorry, perhaps “struggle” was perhaps a bit too strong. What I mean is that by late game, most builds will kill lizards before they really have a chance to even move. I don’t want to at all set this is as the golden standard (I strongly dislike playing ‘meta’ myself), though I find generally I don’t ever have to “go after” a lizard once I get to empowered monos. They tend to just die alongside everything else, maybe having to direct a couple extra attacks in their way. I generally find lizards only cause me to take noticeable time when I’m leveling a melee character.

I have thousands of hours in LE, so it’s a hard thing to quantify for me versus another player that may not yet be as optimized. Please don’t let me detract from your opinion of lizards not being fun for you. I think you should be a bit clearer on that though. You had a good angle for the suggestion to not be negative, but imo it’s important to state when you want a change because something’s not fun, and why the suggested change would make it fun.

For developers, trying to provide direct ‘solutions’ is considerably less helpful than providing what something makes you feel, and what parts of it could be improved (and what is “improved” to you). Often there’s a lot of reasons in the background for something, which they have to take into consideration that would prevent a specific solution from working - such as you ran into here with fairly fixed lore. That lends itself to getting skipped over as the solution has to be dissected to be useful (essentially pulling apart the suggestion to determine “why did they want this?”, “what are they having a problem with?”, “what is it they want out of this system?” etc.). However, reasoning that answers those kinds of questions can always be worked into a solution. And the biggest thing imo, which you’ve done, is keeping everything perfectly civil :slight_smile: I do think lizards could see improvements, and hope they take your feedback into consideration.

Loot lizards much more attractive than goblins. They are cute and funny!

I’m playing puke zombies right now, and the target aquisition time of the zomies is high enough that often the lizards run away before getting a single stack of poison on them, so it actually takes longer for me to kill lizards than it does to kill champions. It’s not about difficulty, it’s just about how they FEEL, and they don’t feel like they belong in an arpg (I hated goblins in diablo 3 almost as much, at least goblins run around randomly rather than always running away).

I don’t think ARPG means every enemy should mindlessly run into the blender - most, yes, but some variance to enemy AI introduces decisions. Fleeing enemies can be frustrating sometimes I agree, but I think having every enemy behave exactly the same way is just monotonous. “fleeing” AI has also been a part of every ARPG I can think of off the top of my head, so I’d disagree that they don’t fit because of how they behave.

More AI patterns means more player decisions, and impact of player agency: for example, those lizards may instead near instantly die if you manually positioned your zombies around it before letting them attack and the lizard fleeing. Having what the player does result in different outcomes is important to me. Frustration to me isn’t a bad thing, so long as there’s something you can do about it - which mentioned you can by controlling minions. Though it’s completely personal opinion on how much manual action to prevent frustration in itself becomes frustration (eg. frustration of needing to tell minions to do something instead of them fully automating themselves.)

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I think a lot of it is just that the trigger for them to run away again seems to be the tiniest bit of damage, even if it doesn’t even move their health bar by a single pixel (my skeleton mages on that build do damage per hit measured in low triple digits and don’t apply any damaging ailments). It’s even worse on the build I just switched to, since my damage options are my thicket of blinding light (have to run past the lizard, and lizards don’t count as rares so the damage is pretty bad) or non aura judgement, and sometimes lizards manage to run out of the aoe before taking any damage :confused: