Poorly Telegraphed High Damage Abilities

i seen they were mentioned already long time ago, but I will add it again:
on death effect from Smoldering Lithrac.
drop few flames drops around it in rapid succession, all hitting quite hard and you don’t have much time to move out if you already used your movement skill when you rushed into them.
I’m currently playing a tanky void sentinel with 100+ all res and about 63% armour and 41 block chance with 30 block efc. and still, half my hp can be gone on no damage mode 100 corruption time line to this thing.
imo, the time from this mob death till the explosion hit should be longer and there should be a clear visual indication that it’s coming, like the big shiny circle other mobs drop sometime when they have an on death effect.

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i have been complaining about offscreen attacks A LOT. i was beginning to think it was only my set-up as impossible as that seems.
glad to see it’s not just me.
was in a mono the other day and was being attacked by enemies that were a full screen away, off screen.
wtf is it with games that off-screening is such a problem ? PoE is every bit as bad.
it’s just not that hard to fix.

I created a separate post about it, and left it in my review on steam, but I’ll say it here so it’s easy to find.

I play hardcore exclusively. I found the game too easy on normal, so I’ve spent most of my time on masochist. I have had little to no problems with the sort of thing most people are talking about here. Yes, I have died several times, but I always knew what the problem was and how to avoid it in the future.

The reason I have stopped playing the game is because of two particular boss fights, the lightless arbor dungeon boss, and Lagon.

In the first, the boss has a one-shot ability that takes up a large area in an enclosed space. This is prima facie unbalanced. Even worse, if I recall correctly, the ability is telegraphed by an increasingly large circle. It starts small, but then gets larger over time, until it overlaps with the border of the arena. You can easily find yourself running out of space with no time to react. That’s what happened to me.

The Lagon fight is different. I still don’t know what killed me. I believe it said, “smashing wave,” but there is so much going on in that fight that I didn’t see it. I actually had ward left over on my death screen. Zero health, but 167 or so ward. I don’t know about that one.

I’m not against one-shots in the end game, after the player has had ample time to learn which abilities do the most damage and how to avoid them. However, in the early to mid-game, there is no way to know beforehand that any given ability is a one shot, and no particular reason to avoid it at all costs. Death should be the result of failing to properly plan by leveling and optimizing gear, neglecting to learn boss fight patterns and damaging abilities, and making several consecutive mistakes in critical situations. This is one of the things I have appreciated most about Last Epoch, and the main reason why I put it down. The difficulty generally curves well, but massive difficulty spikes should be avoided.

I would be happy to come back to Last Epoch when the types of issues I have discussed have been addressed. I’m really happy with everything else about this game. I look forward to its release.

I think that’s intended and you’re supposed to hide in whatever the things are at the edge of the screen. This can be problematic if you’re the other side of the screen still trying to kill the barrier.

Problem is you actively chose to get one shot before even learning the attacks because the early game is ‘too easy’ so you chose the unbalanced route designed for experienced players, at the end of the day the issue is on yourself and deciding the game was ‘too easy’ before you even got that far was your downfall

Dont worry if you ever did make it further ie 200 Corruption you can enjoy getting one shot from no telegraphed attacks from white mobs

Important Background info on Masochist mode: Masochist mode exponentially inflates the difficulty of play in that previously normal hits from mobs now have the capability to one-shot you… And normal hits are not telegraphed… so for any previously hard hitting attacks, that are now one shots - you need to be aware that they were not designed as one-shots or intended to be one-shots. Because of this and a lot of other things, the devs have expressly stated that they would not take any “balancing” related feedback into consideration for masochist mode play… They have no intention of changing anything based on masochist mode feedback.

Now, onto your two boss issues…

The Light Arbour boss (fight guide: Lightless Arbor Dungeon Boss Guide (In-Depth Mechanic Explanation))) can be dealt with if you understand the mechanics… However, you are playing under masochist mode, so depending on the dungeon tier, things that are intended to be optionally tanked by some builds are unlikely to be tankable for you…

Lagon fight… There are two issues here… The smashing wave is likely to have killed you because of its increase damage in the mode you play… The issue about having ward but zero health has come up a few times and is usually attributed to the UI updating incorrectly - i.e. you died with both zero health/ward but the UI updated after the fact with something like ward or health regen/on hit. This has happened in a fair number of cases - usually with hard hitting boss deaths (not just Lagon). The devs are aware of this issue but it doesnt indicate anything wrong with the fights specifically.

It is very hard to take your comments about one-shots, difficulty curves or anything really into consideration if you play in masochist mode - again, the devs have said that they will not entertain balance issues / feedback from this mode.

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It’s not an exponential increase, the player takes (100 + zone level)% more damage & does (50 + zone level/4)% reduced (could be less, can’t remember, I think it’s additive rather than multiplicative) damage. That’s linear, not exponential. Egregious hyperbole will be the downfall of civilisation and does nobody any good in a discussion!!!1

Yeah, this isn’t the first time a complaint about masochist mode has come up from a HC player. I kinda agree that masochist mode can shine a light on potentially problematic areas/mechanics, but as you said, the devs aren’t going to balance the game around it.

Trust you to correct my math & grammar choice in one post… but I suppose someone has to keep me in line… :stuck_out_tongue:

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Indeed, apparently I am the only one capable enough/“cares” enough/enough of a pedantic b#####d (delete as appropriate) to do it.

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Agreed. For both of these issues, I have checked for other feedback to similar effect on normal mode, and found similar complaints, so it’s not a masochist-only issue, and the idea that “your feedback does not count because you play on masochist mode” is absurd, especially when I’ve given clear reasons for my position that don’t depend on that circumstance.

I don’t expect the developers to balance the game around it, but I do expect the game to be balanced, and I do expect my feedback to be considered. If it’s too easy, people are going to play on the higher difficulty. If they want to make the early game more robust on normal, I’m open to that as well.

EHG are going to have a difficulty rebalance when all the content is completed - this was confirmed a long time ago, mainly on feedback that the game IS too easy generally and has some odd difficulty checkpoints which can make it seem like hitting a wall for casual players and difficulty can see-saw back and forth rather than increase in a gradual /expected way. Afaik this is going to include balancing the campaign difficulty all the way through to adjusting the XP curve (esp. at higher levels) to changing mob densities etc…

Feedback is always considered… and yes, masochist can highlight potential cracks in the woodwork in the same way any extreme / outlier / test the absurd situation can… The key is that in some cases, this approach & masochist mode can highlight an issue that isnt actually possible in normal modes and would arguably never happen to normal players - even someone playing hardcore mode…

So saying feedback does not count because you are using a mode that is outside the parameters of the game design isnt absurd… its realistic. While it may spark some consideration because it shows outlier problems, it doesnt mean that it should be given as much weight as feedback obtained within the expected experience most players would have…

If someone tried to test an obstacle course with a 100kg backpack and provided feedback that it was impossible to jump over the mud pit, I doubt the obstacle course designers are going to change the course because they never intended someone to use a backpack, let alone a 100kg one. At most they would put up a signpost at the start saying ‘Not intended to be run with a weighted backpack’.

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Well, I’m glad to hear you’ve come around to my way of seeing things. And that rebalancing is in the works.

corrupted forge boss
armory
lava spew

the specific issue i have is with the lava spewing attack that leaves behind a large AOE ground effect that lasts a good while. on melee or minion builds it makes the fight frustrating to deal with as the ground effect has no indicator, the windup is pretty quick and similar to the fire cone attack, and most crucially the habit of the boss to not move much combined with the length and short cooldown of the attack means you are often have a very slow and boring fight.

I think a good change would be to make the lava spew attack to be less of a pool and more of a cone as well as increasing the cooldown so there is less total uptime on the pool.

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Majasa’s petrify cone interacts with her 2nd phase’s movement and turn speed to make it basically unavoidable. I had a fairly speedy void knight and not only did she hug my character to the point of models overlapping the entire second phase she would also “snap” to facing me instantly with no windup or cooldown.

Shade of Orobyss’ concentric explosions are just unclear as to where exactly is safe and when they’re going to go off. They’re definitely highly visible, but their height off the ground and the nature of the graphics just left me a bit confused plenty of times thinking I was going to take a hit that I actually didn’t.

Also just as a general note: lot of ground marker only warning signs are really easy to lose if you’re running something like an Anomaly/Devouring Orb void knight. Your own permanent flashy purple bubble just plain covers up the enemy’s. If these are placeholders that’ll eventually get replaced with actual thematically appropriate special effects it’ll probably be fine. Something like a lightning attach showing sparks along its route, flames having sparks and embers, etc.

Yes and no. If you’re in melee rang and can be reasonably responsive then you can eat or or two stacks of petrifying but you’ll be able to get out of the cone well before you’re fully petrified. Clearly this will be significantly harder if it happens at range (like Rahyeh’s pie attack) as you need to move much further.

So like I said it’s not JUST the attack in and of itself. It’s that her movement design is such that she seems to instantly snap to being centered on the player. You can be completely behind her through skillful play and then in a single frame she’s dead center on you and already petrifying.

The issue is primarily that she can hug you perfectly and single-frame snap to aiming directly at you instead of actually having a turn speed. That it doesn’t seem to happen every single time makes me think it’s actually unintended behavior.

Yes & that is absolutely an issue which hopefully the devs can “fix” in some way, though it’s still not an issue if you’re paying attention & in melee range (which you likely will be in the second phase).

The dragon bosses do this and it’s really annoying.

I’d like to put forth Ruby Captain Arjani’s overhead punch. It’s fast, but hits way harder than anything else around him, including much slower moves in his own kit.

I fought him as a Bladedancer at level 77 in the “Ending the Storm” timeline (lvl 75 zone). Only active enemy damage modifier was “enemies deal 50% increased elemental damage.” All res except for elemental are capped, with fire res sitting the lowest at 40%. Armour is 606 (21% reduction). I have 1526 health and ~40 ward most of the time. Critical strike avoidance is capped and glancing blow chance is 70%.

My assumption is that his right handed overhead punch does phys damage, but if it has fire damage that would explain why it was hitting me so hard. If not, it might need a look over, because it was chunking me for over 50% while everything else in the zone was tickling me. Again, even the Captain’s slower aoe attacks weren’t much of a threat and I could just leech or walk out of them at a leisurely pace.

Edit: Just fought Ruby Captain Arjani again, and it appears that they have two overhead punches. One with fire and one without. There were a lot of screen effects from other rares the first time, so I’m willing to bet it was just the fire punch combined with my low res and damage boost mod from monolith. The fire effect at Arjani’s “feet” during the windup is pretty easy to miss though, it’d be nice if there weren’t two overhead punches with similar animations so it’s easier to read.

Agric wolfmaw arena champion avalanch skill needs a telegraph. its damage is so high it usually one shots and it just starts immediately falling with no warning at all, it usually stuns you in place too.

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