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.
Youâre not fighting the LL, youâre âunburdeningâ them .
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, youâre not fighting them, so an âenragedâ one that you do fight and kill kind of goes against the grain. And should you do so, the Merchantâs Guild may become quite unhappy with you. I do believe there is already an existing chance for a âsuper lizardâ if I recall correctly, thatâs 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 youâre 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 youâre freeing them, why do the run away so aggressively? Seriously, my three reactions to âfailureâ in this game are âI need to improve my buildâ (the preferred reaction) âarg, another bugâ and âstupid loot lizards.â
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 âI AM NOT A MAN OF MANY POCKETS!â- Even if they werenât hitting me, Iâd probably still try to make a swift exit.
Though if Iâm 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 theyâre alive, the more damage they take), as long as theyâve been hit in the last 45 sec (iirc), they wonât disappear. and theyâre 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 donât panic when you see them, you have more time than you think.
If youâre having trouble with lizards in late game, itâs a good sign youâre going to start struggling elsewhere with low dps, so a good time to check in on that too.
Itâs not about struggling with them, it just suddenly feels like Iâm playing a different game, and its just NOT FUN anymore . The first thing I looked for on the weaver tree when it was introduced was âloot lizards no longer spawn, more loot elsewhereâ and all there is is a bunch of nodes that make loot lizards more common .
Sorry, perhaps âstruggleâ 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 donât want to at all set this is as the golden standard (I strongly dislike playing âmetaâ myself), though I find generally I donât ever have to âgo afterâ 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 Iâm leveling a melee character.
I have thousands of hours in LE, so itâs a hard thing to quantify for me versus another player that may not yet be as optimized. Please donât 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 itâs important to state when you want a change because somethingâs not fun, and why the suggested change would make it fun.
For developers, trying to provide direct âsolutionsâ is considerably less helpful than providing what something makes you feel, and what parts of it could be improved (and what is âimprovedâ to you). Often thereâs 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 âwhy did they want this?â, âwhat are they having a problem with?â, âwhat is it they want out of this system?â etc.). However, reasoning that answers those kinds of questions can always be worked into a solution. And the biggest thing imo, which youâve done, is keeping everything perfectly civil I do think lizards could see improvements, and hope they take your feedback into consideration.
Iâm 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. Itâs not about difficulty, itâs just about how they FEEL, and they donât 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 donât 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. âfleeingâ AI has also been a part of every ARPG I can think of off the top of my head, so Iâd disagree that they donât 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 isnât a bad thing, so long as thereâs something you can do about it - which mentioned you can by controlling minions. Though itâs 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.)
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 doesnât 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 donât apply any damaging ailments). Itâs 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 donât 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