Poorly Telegraphed High Damage Abilities

Feedback and Suggestions
122

Yes, that is a bit of an existential rabbit hole, to be fair. I would assume that they are there to give players a reason to move out of the way & focus on doing something other than DPSing the boss.

That’s trivial to deal with. If you stand slightly to one side of centre, when he does the sweeping eye beam he’ll sweep it from where you are towards the nearest edge. So if you’re slightly to the right of centre, he’ll do his sweeping eye beam from a little to your left through where you’re standing towards the right edge. So all you need to do is move to the left side of the screen & you’ve avoided it without any movement skill. If you wait for too long (ie, when he actually starts the beam) then yes, you’d be hit & likely oneshot but there’s a lot of time between when Lagon rears back & his eye goes red (this is when your position is “locked in”) to when the beam starts.

Quite possibly. My premise is that I don’t believe there are any, or many, boss attacks that require a “normal” movement skill to move out of (I’m not counting Julra’s big AoE explosion as that’s designed to be escaped with the time shifting skill)).

From memory, all of the monolith bosses’ attacks can be walked out of, though obviously they’re easier to use a movement skill to move out of.

  • Fall of the Outcasts, the only one that might “require” a movement skill is if you’re melee & you kill the soul vessels & the area around them fills up with Necrotic DoT.
  • Stolen Lance, you can get out of all of Argentus’ attacks without a movement skill
  • Black Sun, the void DoT line is easy to avoid/position & the “pie attack” is easier to do with less movement speed (since you can go around it closer to the boss)
  • Blood, Frost & Death, can’t think of any big attacks that need a movement skill, the big line attack thing has a lot of wind up time to allow you to get out of it
  • Ending the Storm I’ve already covered
  • Fall of the Empire, as above, you can walk out of all of the AoEs
  • Reign of Dragons, I’ve done with 6% movement speed & that was easy
  • I can’t think of any big attacks from the newer 3 that require a movement skill either TBH
  • Even Majasa’s petrify can be walked out of if you’re in melee range

If you disagree, fair enough, but which ones do you have difficulty with (apart from Lagon’s sweeping eye beam)?

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Heorot has that Arena-sized blizzard that kills you if you’re in it too long. They can do a dash that puts them quite far away, and if you don’t have a movement skill you’re running through the blizzard for quite some time.

I was playing a Marksman and almost ripped because Shift was on cooldown, and Heorot had only traveled a short distance that time.

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124

First off, thank you. After trying several characters and pokeing around the internet that is the first tip about the eye beam that might actually work.

Edit: Tried it, no luck. Maybe its my hand injury but it is what it is. Guess that is an entire class I just do not get to play. Fantastic. End Edit

Its still a poorly designed skill, it still infuriates me and honestly makes me think less of the dev team as a whole. Having said that there are a lot of people who have had difficulty with lagon, and as the example I would imagine a lot quit over it, is that a fair trade?

My point is the vast majority are easily avoidable so the “coupling” of telegraph and high damage is not justified or warranted. keep the telegraph but bring the damage in line with the rest of the zone. Mostly because its just a poor experience to miss the telegraph on a cluttered screen or any other reason and player enjoyment seems worth the sacrifice.

On the other hand if you lean too hard into the “just move” you end up with the lost ark Abrelshud raid, where everything is a one shot and your numbers do not matter because “just do the mechanic” Putting that into perspective look at something like wow shadowlands raiding where the vast majority of the players don’t engage because everything is a one shot.

@queermathsgirl I caught that more then once and was lucky with 5 pots to chug, now I try and herd him into a corner.

125

Yeah this slam is pretty bad imo it oneshot me through reaper form(and I saw something like -5000 life) even with a moveskill(reap) and reaper speed its hard to get to out of its area. Are you just supposed to sit in the kindling area the whole time and tank the rocks that fall there ? makes that phase feel really silly.

126

90% of my deaths are one shots that are impossible to avoid when I have full health. By far the most frustrating thing about this game. Especially when the Arena is all or nothing. That and ridiculous deaths that make no sense like the Earthquake in Lightless Arbor. Beyond frustrating after grinding for 30 minutes to die to nonsense.

127

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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129

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.

130

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.

131

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.

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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

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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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134

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.

135

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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136

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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137

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.

138

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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139

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

140

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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141

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.

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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.