Monolith Modifiers - Build-oriented vs General

Greetings, Creators-of-Worlds, and fellow Travellers:

Just finished watching last week’s Dev-Stream, and didn’t see an open thread to follow up on Mike getting cut off at the end; so here we are!

As I understood it, the thread of conversation was going about like this:
Community(C): “Monsters have x% Critical Hit Avoidance mods feel bad, because they hard-nerf some builds, but not others”
Mike: “That’s by design - though it feels a little less threatening at low levels, which can lure you into a false sense of security”
C: “That’s not what we meant…”

To expand on that, I wanted to highlight the important difference between Build-Breaking Mods and Build-Challenging mods; and then follow up with a few suggestions for other build-challenging mods that our lovely Devs might mull over before throwing out a window :slight_smile:

Build-breaking mods are ones where the monsters can simply ignore you - like Critical Avoidance, Damage Immunity, or Avoiding-being-hit (High Dodge chances). These mods will forever feel bad, because a build cannot on-the-fly fix the problem that they’re presented with. A player cannot suddenly get a bunch of extra accuracy, remove an immunity buff, or target something that perpetually runs away.

By contrast, some mods might challenge those same builds without the emotional “I just cannot play this build” feelings - Like Reduced Damage from Critical Strikes, Enhanced Damage Resistances/Reduced Penetration Effect, and Glancing Blows. Allowing our characters to play the way we have designed feels good, even if it doesn’t work as well as we had hoped, and we need to adapt to the situation. In the same breath, the tougher the monsters are at their most basic level, the more important this becomes. Rare mobs, Mini-bosses, and Boss monsters should only sparingly use actions that can hard-counter a build, and mostly for dramatic effect, at that.

The other theme from that conversation, was that it felt like Critical Strikes were being targeted more than other builds - for example, there is no mod that causes enemies to Avoid Ailments (not that I think there should be one - Reduced Damage over Time would be much better) or mods that cause enemies to intentionally avoid Ground-Targeted skills, whether they’re hitting or DoTs. This has the unintended effect of making skills that rely on those mechanics much stronger than intended (looking at Drain Life and Hail of Arrows, here…) and while this can be compensated for by reducing their damage/duration/utility, that also feels like taking a tool away from a player. Why use a low-utility, low-damage skill when you could slot another skill instead?

I promised a list of potential mods the Developers might consider, so just bullet-points from here on out:

Reduced Bonus Damage from Critical Strikes
Reduced Effect of Ailments
Chance to Receive Glancing Blows
Chance to Block (with or without added block effectiveness)
Favors Ranged Attacks (and vice-versa for Melee Attacks)

Note that the general theme is still “play the way you built, but don’t have as much effect as without this mod” - behavior changing mods are fine, so long as they don’t disrupt the engagement between a player and the monsters too frequently.

Kind Regards,
someone designing their own game, but who LOVES playing yours…

3 Likes

Greetings! Welcome to the forums :3

I hard agree with this! I can understand balancing challenges is a difficult task for developers, and there may be exceptions to the rule, but I feel challenges should add something to the enemy and not take something away from the player.

I feel like immunities in general just suck (including crit avoidance), especially if you mostly or completely deal one damage type. The Abomination is a well-designed boss in this respect as its immunity is solely tied to an objective players must complete.

Other challenges that take away from the player could be things like mana leech or high levels of reflect, or a combination of things that are good on their own but awful together (like resistance to fire + high block + high regen basically being like fire immunity). Those don’t give you a sense of accomplishment for overcoming a challenge, but more “fuck that! wtf!”.

Some good examples I can think of may be applying ailments on hit (players are rewarded for having higher res and ways to build around this, but it’s still a tough fight), armour shred (less of a threat to those with high armour, but still a challenge), exploding on death (extra mechanic to play around), leaving a trail of some gunk that applies a DoT (players need to adapt to terrain changes, but are also rewarded for being specced into DoT reduction), extra projectiles, buffs to allies and so on.

Players may still dislike these, especially the exploding on death one and extra projectiles, but in these situations they are rewarded for their choices and their ability to play, rather than punished for playing a certain build.

Fortunately, LE doesn’t have damage immunities. It would be nice for the crit avoidance to be changed to less bonus damage from crits, even though it wouldn’t actually change anything, with 50% crit avoidance you’d do the same damage as 50% less bonus damage from crits it’d just feel better (& you’d still get the full effect of any on-crit procs, which might be a reason to not change it).

Edit: Also, not entirely sure the game needs a “favours ranged attacks” (assuming I understand what that is), since melee is usually ####ed over more than ranged/casters by mechanics.

3 Likes

I think @Ashes1 is refering to monsters.

Exactly, melee builds don’t need more mobs kiting them.

I kind of agree that spell dot build feel like im cheating compared to crit or even ailment builds.
They totally ignore dodge and GB while mostly ignore crit avoid. These are 100% free mods for that type of build but there is no feeling going the other way. I would want it to be consistent. Either that means crit gets some free modifiers or those mods get something detrimental to that type of build specifically.

I also think that modifiers should be more “universal” or “balanced”. Within the same monolith, it may happen that you pass one echo with your eyes closed, and you cannot get over the second one on the 5th try.

Im not sure this is the correct response.

Because at the end of the day, then we get into pissing contests trying to bring other builds down.

instead they should just do away with mods, or make them much more generic, like health, damage, resistance, and less damage taken globally. They could buff the resistance mods and do away with crit avoid and glancing blows. Dodge is actually a pretty big downside for ailment builds, because you have to hit to inflict ailments.

But stuff like glancing blows and crit avoid specifically punish builds that scale off hit damage, id rather these be turned into generic damage reduction to balance it then giving “free” mods to the other side.

There are also possible modifiers affecting the characters, less regeneration, less movement speed, etc. Such modifiers are not represented in any way at all.

1 Like

Good thoughts from so many of you - @queermathsgirl thank you for the kind welcome and support, as well as some other fresh ideas.

@Enuw - I was trying to avoid directly dictating anything that might be “balance”, since the devs have a whole team of people to help with that; patience will benefit us in the long run, since the game is still being worked on. It is worth knowing that some people strongly favor not having “free” mods in the pool, though. I personally am a huge fan of having both generic mods that will affect everyone (monsters have more health/more damage/more resists/regeneration/leech) and some build-specific mods that are more rewarding, but hugely challenging for some builds (glancing blows/reduced crit damage/reduced ailment effect). I did intentionally try to avoid adding mods that would target the player directly - though they have their place and time, too.

@DiceDragon - I agree, the point is not to try and drag other builds down but instead challenge ourselves. Having mods that specifically affect playstyles rather than builds seems fair - as long as we’re including everyone, and remembering to balance these challenges against themselves, rather than the more general mods. The real danger here is player creativity - finding some method of playing the game that doesn’t fit a challenged playstyle makes all these mods “free bonus loot” rather than the intended challenge.

It might be helpful (and even necessary) to try and define our builds by playstyle, not just gear and skills - and trying to keep this specific pool of mods engaging and balanced is definitely a challenge; but I have faith that EHG can do it.

Some generic playstyles that I had in mind while writing the initial post:
Mobility-focused (I see your tranplant/reap dual cooldown builds out there, EHG… Not to mention all of Bladedancer/Void Knight) [countered by fast-moving monsters to chase/focus the player]
Melee/Spell Hits [glancing blows/block countered]
Ailment-stacking [cleanse countered]
Ground-Target effects [resistance countered]
Non-ailment DoT build (also worth noting that this category currently hosts a non-hit method of stacking ailments, like Drain Life, Aura of Decay, Warcry (optional), and Snap Freeze) [movement/dodge countered]

2 Likes

You are worried about the “dishonesty” of mods for different players. at first glance, there is some truth in this.

I want to draw your attention to the “dishonesty” of mods inside one character.
Pay attention to the screenshot. Let’s imagine that a white mob has 100hp and 50 dmg. at the same time, it is logical that a rare mob will have 1000hp and 500 dmg. With a basic difference of only 10 times, in the end we have a difference of 30-40 times.
As a result, my character passes the entire monolith quite easily, but has almost a 100% chance of getting a fatal blow from any rare mob.

https://ibb.co/sbY9KC3
It’s very similar to what you described for different characters, but for one)

Consider the fact that some skills have stronger reductions for DoT
I just want to note that superficially comparing the mechanics of crit and dot is incorrect.
https://ibb.co/TqJBWrM

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