More impactful rare enemies

[Greytide]

Another post commented that combat felt boring. I think I understand where they are coming from, in that it becomes very easy to not have to pay attention to anything but how many things there are on the screen. I love, love, love most of the rare abilities, but I have a few suggestions for making them more visible/impactful/attention-inducing.

1. Let’s get it out of the way: More ability variety. Personally I don’t think this will have a very large impact, as it adds to learning curve in a bad way, and once learned is just as easily ‘tuned out’.

2. Amp it up: Many of the rare abilities feel like they can be ignored, even on high monolith difficulty. Either punish the player for not paying attention, or reward them for recognizing and playing around an ability.

PUNISHMENT EXAMPLE: The revive 2 seconds after death. This is actually one of my favorite abilities, because it provides a big visual change, and gameplay consideration. However, it ultimately just ends up, like twin, being one more enemy on screen. Proposal: Change to revive after 2 seconds, AND if undamaged for… (lets say a decent amount of time…) At least three-four seconds, heals to full / gains buff.

REWARD EXAMPLE: If player is near to enemy when it dies, enemy drops better loot. (Or far away, or if player is high health, used potion recently, etc.) This could be handled on the backend with a single modifier to gold amount / unique reroll table / etc. Could also be tied in to potential upcoming item weighting system.

3. Visual impact: enemy size changed, enemy darker or lighter (was going to say color tinted but shoutout to colorblind peeps), would provide more visual clarity and an easier split-second read on enemies.
   Pro: Dynamic emergent gameplay of tiny crab zipping around screen or big lumbering void bear
   Con: Scope creep could be huge here unless something like a backend solution was implemented to make change happen dynamically instead of hard-modelled.

I’d love to see others / devs speak to these proposals.

[Gandhar]

I would add lore entries as well for every enemy type you killed and gather that information in an ingame-compendium (no need for 3rd party sites).
Similar like Everquest 2.
In case of Last Epoch each page would show you which type of damage the enemy does and what their resists are.

To unlock the compendium entries you have to kill x amounts of enemies of a given type, etc to get familiar with it.

[Greytide]

That’s pretty cool, let’s take it a step further! What if there was a blessing-style system for a ‘preferred enemy’? Like, you really hate enemies that have proximity bubbles, so after you unlock the full entry, you can choose them as your enemy and get increased damage on them. You’d only have one slot, so if you do a lot of target farming of, say, frost lich, one reward is getting that kill counter ticked up, another is the small % more damage to him in any future fights. You’d need to pay gold to change it to balance it.

[Greytide]

I wonder if anyone else has any suggestions or ideas or thoughts on what we have so far!