This is a rather simple pack of suggestions on several aspects of damage in Last Epoch.
I feel there’s a huge range of damage in last epoch, is hard to know what your damage is, if a skill that deals 500 damage on average ranges from 300 to 700 damage in a RNG fashion. I don’t know the exact numbers but seems you can do about double damage from one low roll to a high roll. Not only is hard to tell what your damage is due to the lack of consistency, also this huge variance hits hard on slow attacks, or high cooldown attacks, please consider reducing the range so damage is a bit more consistent.
I am strongly against the damage reduction on monsters, your damage in your skill tooltip isn’t relatable to the damage output as enemies gain more and more damage reduction as you climb up in levels. Not only that, your sense of progression as you gain more power is dampened due to the DR. We all like to see big numbers on screen, and feel our investment in offenses is there, instead of ‘keeping up’ with the numbers. I would apply an HP multiplier instead of DR, so if the monster has 80% DR, give him x5 HP instead.
Would be great to see different colors for your damage, based on your majority of the damage type done, specially to differentiate between your instant damage and your damage over time. We only see white and yellow numbers. I would keep the colors used mostly white, a but darker for crits and even darker for Dots.
This is just an example:
Also, seems when you kill a monster by culling damage (auto-kill when life is below certain percent HP threshold), you don’t see anything visually. Would be great to see the culling damage applied as a number with some special format/color, so you can track when enemies die from culling and how much damage you have culled.
Last but not least, if you feel big numbers on screen cause too much screen pollution, just use “K” to trim 6 digit numbers, even consider using M if someone ever hit 9 digit numbers (IE: 219,835 damage would be shown as 220K, 103,289,476 damage as 103M)
EDIT: Also to note, is me, or when monsters have crit avoidance and applies, you still see the damage as critical and unchanged even if it’s greatly reduced at the end? Feels weird.
For non-DoT damage it’s a +/- 25% (or possibly 20%) variance.
The DR on mobs helps keep the damage numbers more sensible than, say, the millions/billions/trillions that you can get in other games (D3 & Chronicon being good examples of this). If the damage in LE were capable of similar values then you’d either not be able to easily read it in-game or you’d need to truncate it as D3 does. This came up in the last dev stream on Friday.
Nobody like mobs just being massive damage sponges.
Damage in LE on the very endgame rarely even hits a million with big damage skills. I really don’t understand, as this is a “problem” they created themselves, you get up to 384% increased damage in a single weapon affix. If you don’t want such scaling, just lower the damage scaling in general, is just confusing, and again, doesn’t feel well, and the big range between low and high rolls doesn’t let you get a grasp of any damage increase or decrease in combat.
I agree on the statement, still, my suggestion of changing DR into HP makes monster effective HP the same, just not truncating damage with DR. Is just confusing and devalues your offensive efforts (IMO). In the example a monster with 80% DR is taking damage at 1/5th, is just multiplying the life x5 you get the same effect.
Thanks anyways for the additional insight. Greatly appreciated.
I think there’s two “issues” here at play & the solution to one makes the other worse (unfortunately).
Firstly, the devs want to keep the damage numbers sensible & easily readable, quickly by “normal” people (who may not understand what the k/m/b/t mean, even if it’s just an option like it is in D3) hence they added the area level-based mob DR.
Secondly, having bigger number ranges (& just bigger numbers in general) on the item affixes allows is “nicer” & allows for more of a range as to how good an item can be (an affix range of 10-11 only allows for 2 possibilities, while a range of 10-15 allows for 6). But bigger numbers on affixes mean player damage numbers are bigger (obviously). If they were to lower the damage scaling, items wouldn’t be quite as interesting.
It does, I just feel that increasing the mob’s HP is a very boring way of dealing with the issue and it doesn’t affect the issue of player damage numbers growing out of control.
I thought it was EHG trying to use enemy DR to limit the effects of leech?
Just like in POE or other similar games, when your damage is high enough, the leech ratio doesn’t matter anymore
Nope. They’d have to reduce the percentages available for that. Reducing everybody’s damage just 'cause leech is very powerful would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Yeah, in the end there’s not pure benefit on one way over the other. I only stating my opinion and feelings about current damage system anyways. I am the first that hates the ridiculous scaling for the sake of big numbers of Diablo 3, also the minutia you have to deal with in PoE (needing PoB to see your damage), damage in comparison is really is in a good spot, just the huge variance and the DR ruins the feeling and makes it confusing.
Also, talking about boring: enemies have no armor and unless stated, no resistances, so armor shred and resistance pene/shred act as plain multipliers. I guess don’t want to deal just another layer of complexity, or is not worth the maintenance.
That’s actually a very good point, if we theoretically switch to more HP instead of DR, leeching would have to be tuned one way or another (apply the DR to leech gains or something like that.
It’s a difficult problem to solve. Basically all solutions have to be a bit arcane.
Applying the DR to the leech only would be equivalent to defining a “leech multiplier” which could be defined on a per-monster level and essentially serves to reduce the leech to manageable levels. If you don’t want to have DR on the monsters this is probably the most elegant solution, but I think this would be a bit obscure to most players.
The solution that POE uses is to define a leech rate in addition to the leech percentage.
The percentage is the number we are used to and determines how much damage is leeched back. The maximum leech rate dictates how much health you can recouperate per second from leeching. I don’t think that this is a good solution because it makes it so that the leech percentage does not matter at all, and the overall power of leech is balanced only by the leech rate. This has the very silly effect that 0.2% of leech is often plenty in POE.
That’s because the damage is relatively high compared to how much hp the player has & needs to leech back if they take a big hit. If either player HP were much higher (which would probably require higher incoming damage to keep things similar) or player damage were lower (which would require similarly lower mob hp to keep things similar) then you’d need a higher % leech to keep the status quo (not the band).
