Was thinking about solutions to poison/death seal overtuning while trying to keep the mechanics powerful and not nerfing them into the ground. Aside from the harder solution of re-balancing other classes to match power levels I’ve come up with another possible solution.
More enemy variety and/or enemy affixes, and enemy priority akin to D2, in order to counter popular/powerful strategies and promote overall gameplay diversity.
As an example; suppose the goatmen shamans could cast a “cleanse” on their allies to remove dots or debuffs? How about enemies that can remove buffs from players or even steal buffs? Ofc you’ve got the popular “iron maiden” and “sparks” style enemy abilities as well, etc.
This solution allows builds to stay feeling incredibly powerful until faced with the build’s “nemesis” enemy typing - instead of having to fine tune ability balance so much. In addition, it will improve overall enemy difficulty curves instead of having one or two super enemy types that are nastier than every other type (>.> siege golems)
On the downside, skills and things will still need some tuning - but perhaps enemy counters will lessen the burden and ease the portion of the player base that gets outraged at nerfs.
While I can see this being useful, that doesn’t necessarily remove the strength of the build, unless you have such a high % of those “cleanse” mobs, the builds will be super strong 90% of the time until one mob that they could theoretically just skip through. So while I like the concept, I am unsure if it stops the super strong builds from getting nerfed.
I just want to make sure that something like this being created wont reduce build diversity. Creating “hard counter” affixes like a poison cleanse, or immune to critical or whatnot can have a huge impact on build diversity, or can just require people to skip mobs entirely if they see it. So its a 50/50.
In conclusion, I think this is something that could be implemented rather easily as a minion type/affix and would have a strong impact to require builds to have balanced stats/piercing/res shred etc, but could have a large potential to reduce build diversity into non cleansable build paths.
Good criticisms. A few things I might do to combat those downsides:
Perhaps have the enemy cleanse/buff stripping on cooldowns to reduce the player-base anti cleanse build response. As for skipping the mobs, that’s mostly ok imo. To dissuage people from always skipping them though you could have them spawn more along side rares and especially bosses - perhaps even moreso in monolith/other endgame stuff.
Also, instead of a simple cleanse you could have the mob aoe cleanse and “shield” the targeted mobs from cleansed effects for a time to further the impact of these enemies if need be.
In the case of damage type immune enemies, maybe they are only immune to a set amount of damage from that type. Once you exceed the threshold their immunity “breaks” and they become vulnerable for a time. Unless you want to encourage multi-damage type builds (or further mob skipping) that is.
You could have more abilities like the void knights skill that removes enemies from the field for a few seconds, that way you “sap” the hexing mob while you clear out the others. Stuff like that to promote builds that don’t focus purely damage.
The point is not necessarily to remove the strength of top tier builds, but to use enemy types and affixes as a balancing tool in addition to nerfs/buffs so that the majority of builds can feel equally powerful and equally exposed to their “nemesis” enemy types overall. That way instead of removing build viability via flat nerfs, it should actually increase build diversity when done correctly.
There could be other downsides I haven’t thought of; keep commenting folks - lets see if this suggestion has a place in Last Epoch.
