The mobs design is mostly harmless at range and hurts melee a lot

[ZaeN]

Just trying to put some constructive observations and criticism.
I have a VK (which means it has practically no tankiness from the VK passives), it is very versatile with range meaning I can get all in melee or kite and deal damage from far.

There are a couple abilities from the Sentinel that give you some tank & dmg when going melee, namely vengeance and lunge.

So what I noticed when pushing to wave 150+ (stopped at 170) is that more or less i can negate more than half the potential damage received by just staying far and spamming some stuff like devouring orbs or maybe smite & similar, so at like wave 100 i don’t really want to get into melee.

Why? Because of the way the majority of mobs is designed.

So as melee not only you have all the archer mobs shooting at you, there are going to be these packs of monsters that deal no ranged damage but at wave 100+ have nuke autoattacks for 500-1k dmg each autoattack (multiply by like 10 in a pack)

PLUS in addition to those there are others whose best ability is in the form of a 0 range aoe of doom that sometimes also leaves a crater of hot water or something that all it does is ruin the day of a melee char.

Some mobs that come to my mind:

Those with a charge attack or ranged skill that are harmful to kiting chars:

• Osprix meteors
• Lightning and fire constructs/golems
• Fallen osprix charge
• Skeleton goat charge ← these last two basically came with the emperor chapter patch
• Maybe those fast wolves that hit like a truck but are very squishy

The mobs that have the melee mega aoe:

• Fire salamander tail splash attack that leaves a dot aoe that forces you to move out
• Water salamander same as above
• Flesh thing with a boulder with a pbaoe and the rock smash attack
• Sunflower thing with a pbaoe stomp
• All the small sunflowers and some plantmen that shoot a poison aoe that forces melee to move, yea it affects ranged also but they can just move 1 meter unaffected
• Void scorpion tail attack another dot aoe
• The darn chicken skeleton pbaoe that can oneshot you if you don’t move out
• Void blob sometimes activates abyssal aura with large aoe (at least also this one charges)
• Void lady has a pbaoe blade ring
• Void golem has a slam and a range overlapping aoe spam (that especially screws melee)
• Void worms and those fire dogs or something explode on death
• Also green spiders leave that poison dot that hurts only if you are in melee basically
• Small ice golems spam a ground dot and come in packs filling the area with unpassable dots
• Giant ice golem has a slam and then only at close range it spams a shotgun aoe meteor
• Yet another ice golem the “goliath” spams more slams and aoes heh
• Skullen shaman (the cubone monsters) spam a fire cone aoe, only at close range
• Many more, almost every mob has a melee surprise

Moreover the lagon patch added new extra beefy and slow mobs that are slow and fat and harmless at range like the ones before just more annoying:

• Fat shell head monster with a gazilion hp and annoying mods like enrage and resurrection spams some kind of nautilus ult skill
• Siege golem triple hp than the above with a harmless long range ballista shot but a melee fire cone, plus at half hp he just goes ima drop my shield and fart a half screen fire pbaoe and now the melee fire cone is double dmg huh
• That friggin beetle queen at least she shoots cone projectiles but at melee range every other autoattack it starts spamming yet another aoe megadot

So yea these are all fancy abilities for mobs but my question is, did we really need all these melee aoes spamming? And does melee need to get that high damage dot aoe of doom that forces him to move in circles? What i mean is that it’s already a minus having to walk to actually hit something, once you’re there you get some extra slams as a bonus

Also as mentioned these are all fat and slow mobs with strong slams, i am not sure it’s a nice combo for melee they are like shoot me from far i cant get you or else come at me bro ima slam you until night. Fighting any triple combo of these is no fun if you can’t damage them outside their aoe ranges

EDIT:

@ZaeN

I have read a great point on other topics that is about damage that is bypassing: glancing blows, block, and dodge (and some stuff bypassed ward?). And it seems to be those cone and dot and anything dot-like.

So after some calcs I think that this plays a great part in the perceived melee range nuking and moreover if a dot-like ability is bypassing shield it should be made incredibly more weaker than it is now!!!

So let’s make something practical, I have “tank” with a layer of 100% glancing blows (takes 50% dmg), and another layer of 75% block (takes 25% dmg). ← Against auto-attacks dps it is going to receive 12.5% of all the potential damage, this damage will go to the hp+resists

What does it mean? That a dot-like ability that bypasses block and glance deals 100% dmg vs 12.5% and this is 8 times more powerful than normal autoattack dps.

This is (part of) what makes MOF fire construct firedots & similar crazy, what makes Arena 150+ crazy and so on. You are normally receving an X amount of DPS (12.5% dmg), then something bypasses your block and glance (same can be said for dodge) for 100% dmg and the perceived result is that you are getting 8 times more damage

EDIT2:

@ZaeN

3k block effectiveness is more reasonable with the last tier shield, on a 3k ehp it effectively doubles your ehp on a block equaling 50% dmg taken (ONLY on blocked attacks and with 3k ehp). Please ignore health vs heal and regen for now, these exist it’s alright but let’s look at ehp on a monster hit.

So let’s remake some calcs 75% in truth will give 37.5% dmg received, plus the non blocked 25% equals 62.5% dmg received, multiplied by the glanced 50% → 0.625 * 0.5 = 0.3125 → 31.25% damage received (from 12.5%)

Under this light, dot like abilities deal ~3 times more damage than the normal dps, which is less scary but still a considerable 3x

And so far i don’t have a clear idea if and which bypassing abilities by default deal more or less damage than a normal attack

[Flintler]

Nice writeup. Sounds to me like we need more mobs that have mechanics that ranged players have to play around, but melee don’t have trouble with!

[ZaeN]

- YouTube

Here is an example of a triple void lady spamming their pbaoe, it is just a wtf should i do here moment for melee. Later on the char succumbed by a shotgun overlapping aoe spam from that void golem.

I am totally fine for keeping these fancy skills in the game but the slams should do the same damage of an autoattack ← at best instead of it being a nuke,

And all the dot like damages and dot pools should do soft dps much lower than autoattack sustained damage. Why? because the mob is already autoattacking after it slammed and left a pool dot, autoattacks are already a pita with these frenzy and inc aspd mods at wave 50-100+, what need there is to add a large dot that deals more like double+ damage than that?
(and i’d like to remind that it’s stuff that hurts only what is at 0 range while chars with range are unharmed)

It’s really a matter of a big need to review the dmg numbers and making a couple numbers and sums that take into account what kind of damage it means to be in melee taking a: slam + pool dot + autoattacks + from possibly more than one monster

Melee is already paying the price for being in melee, eating a pack autoattacks and getting stuck and bogged down by hitbox and collision, is there an extra need to send it more nukes ground dots and triple aoe spams left and right?

[Llama8]

They could help with the big charged slam attacks by not allowing the mob to rotate in place when it’s started charging, that way at least melee builds have more of a chance to move out of the way.

[ZaeN]

Updated the OP, the list grows longer

- YouTube

A perfect example of ending my arena push, only 3 mobs left which happen to be the fat flesh thing, the fatter beetle queen and the fattest siege golem, ofc i dared to get into melee (after i did stun the flesh thing with timelock) but his half screen pbaoe boulder didn’t stop and 2shotted my char. wave 180+

[kiss_me_quick]

@ZaeN

fat flesh thing

Yeah from the first moment I saw this mob in game I thought how sad melee users must be LOL.

[LastBrat]

One way to balance this ‘realistic’ situation of melee being in a disadvantaged position, compared to ranged (I call it the sword vs rifle problem, where we all know who wins), is to include rranged only attacks for certain monsters. Like a mortar kind of attack.

AOE in melee-ranged moster attacks is positively lame in my opinion, it means the only way to kill such mosters is play ranged or one one those ‘tanky-but-slow’ type of builds being discussed elswhere.

AOE is fine as a delayed on death attack, where every build can move away from after the kill, and is challenging in tight spaces, but at least can be called ‘fair’. Other that that AOE should be reserved for player skills or used in certain boss attacks with enough time and space between them for melee to be able to keep dealing damage. IF you want a fair balance between melee and ranged that is…

[darkdeal]

Needs more ranged attacks that have a minimum range outside of melee.

@LastBrat

One way to balance this ‘realistic’ situation of melee being in a disadvantaged position, compared to ranged

This isn’t always true. Flanking a line of archers put the archers in the bad position because archers are not good in melee range.

There aren’t really any mobs that currently do better against ranged than melee. It seems like all ranged attacks also hurt melee, but all melee attacks don’t hurt ranged.

[DioDeUbi]

How about the reverse way, make ranged feel the PAIN.
For example some boss skills will only be used when player is outside of melee range, like a jump attack that have very low delay and deals tons of damage.
Or another classical POE style annoying skill that shields all damage from outside of melee range, which means you have to be within the melee range, or you deal zero damage to monsters.

I’m just kidding, I don’t want any of these. I would rather they fix those freaking SIEGE GOLEMS. I literally die ONLY to them 0.7.8. The rest monsters mentioned are at least somewhat reasonable, but siege golems are rediculously strong.

[LastBrat]

@darkdeal

Needs more ranged attacks that have a minimum range outside of melee.

I’m glad we agree on that then.

@darkdeal

This isn’t always true. Flanking a line of archers put the archers in the bad position because archers are not good in melee range.

Ture, this would translate into desgin changes where you can find cover behind objects (like in the Warhammer 40k system) or some heavy redesign of most areas, to be able to flank those ranged mobs without taking damage. Even so, this only helps if you have the range-attacking monsters deal ranged only attacks, with a minimum attack range that is larger than their AOE… which is the point I think we agree on

[LastBrat]

@DioDeUbi

Or another classical POE style annoying skill that shields all damage from outside of melee range

Yeah, proximity shields are annoying… and unfair if you play a summoner, since even if you minions attack from close range, the game still requires your character to be within the shield to deal damage… but their whole summoner class is a poorly hacked ‘tack-on’ to their old system, so I’m glad LE has that sorted out from the start.

[Macknum]

It’s easy. If you only have a melee weapon vs ranged weapons you do 2 things. 1 run like hell untill you are in afavourable spot where ranged weapons are useless. 2 If you can’t you charge the ranged attackers, flank them, overwhelm the, as fast as possible.
Easy solution: Every enemy should be able to charge or leap or whatever so everyone who isn’t inside X range will be pounced on. Most “realstic” thing to do in a world full ofa magic, time travel, revives and so on and so forth. Problem solved and ranged dudes need to build tank as well.
On a more serious side… ARPGs suffer from this for a long time. Ranged classes simply have more controll and therefor most of the time more dmg output untill they need to kite. Kiteing in a ARPGs suxx balls bigtime so ranged classes get CC as well, disengages and all the neat stuff. There need to be tradeoffs for being pretty save… less dmg… maniacly charging enemys… enemys that pull out their shields and have a good laugh… range dmg over X units away is ignored bubbles… ranged DDs do less dmg so they have to kite more and use their skills to it’s fullest and so on and so forth.
Now this will result in a lot of troubble because almost all ranged class players will dislike this pretty much. I think the best way ist to balance the dmg of all ranged skills arround the ease of gaming vs melee skills or disable stuff like leech from ranged skills reduce status effect chances or stuff like that.
I have no realy good idea as you see and I’, pretty sure there will be no real middleground here. I still think the best way to make things better are enemys with more movespeed, that dodge attacks, don’t run straight at people and stuff like this. Right now the AI of LE is so bad I can’t remember any swear word to put there that mirrors how bad it is… and I’m no native speaker and the first things I was teached is how to swear like a maniac.

[ZaeN]

I am not preaching for ranged to get blapped by teleports or leaping monsters as it won’t solve this problem, just add more to other classes.

If you go more in detail with RPGs or MMORPGs of which the latter require quite a high balance because they also have a strong PVP you will see that the melee classes and all archetypes and roles have good defined strenghts and weaknesses which have been improved over the course of by now 30ys of mmos.

I will leave the squishy melee dps archetype but will describe the tank that does exist in mmorpgs and is quite a pillar in there.

It has not the best damage, many times it needs a healer/buff/dps behind him to complement but standalone it has the strongest CCs and debuffs, it is incredibly thick near to unkillable and also in many games it has a mount so it basically can lockdown its target, normally in pve it has a signature weak single target but a good deal of aoe so it plays/farms by ‘mobbing’ a large number of low hp trashmobs and kills them all together. Normally tanks are neutral towards other tanks, strong vs squishy dps as they outtank them, strong vs ranged as they can’t escape a tank CC, weak vs mages as they have some antitank magic skills.

I know ARPGs are a different breed because it is only rng PVE and you cannot choose your farming area and are expected to kill everything presented to you, but here and in POE and on the contrary of Grim Dawn (where you can become really thick) there is basically no balance and moreover when you go into melee you may get some temp buffs but these are more than neutered as you get swarmed by extra 2x dmg slams + ground dots which i find unnecessary and unneeded.

If LE wants mobs to have some melee nuke spam then make melee have a true flat 90% dmg reduction from all sources or make it have 5k hp before resists and reductions.

[kiss_me_quick]

@ZaeN

make melee have a true flat 90% dmg reduction from all sources or make it have 5k hp before resists and reductions.

And make melee have ranged melee weapons.

[Llama8]

@kiss_me_quick

And make melee have ranged melee weapons.

Please, this isn’t PoE… Melee weapons/attacks should have 2-3m max range, not clearing the entire screen with a “melee” skill.

If one doesn’t want to give melee classes significant damage reduction, or massive amounts of health (since most of them can have ranged builds as well), give the melee skills (all of them) a baseline debuff to the target’s outgoing damage (like Vengeance but the other way round). You could even give different melee skills different effects, one might reduce the target’s hit damage by 25%, another might reduce the target’s attack/cast speed by 25%, a third might make the target’s chance to hit lower, maybe a fourth might buff the user such that any mob that hits them gets knocked down, a fifth has a debuf where the mob has a chance to damage itself instead of the player.

Melee builds need to have ways to be tankier by default because they spend more time in the danger zone, in addition to taking longer to get into a position to damage the target compared to ranged builds.

[kiss_me_quick]

@Llama8

Please, this isn’t PoE… Melee weapons/attacks should have 2-3m max range, not clearing the entire screen with a “melee” skill.

I was making an unoriginal joke and I don’t know if you know but I’m most known for my Reave build
I personally really enjoy ex-nu-pseudo-quasi-melee skills which blast the whole screen - there’s just something about waving your sword in the air and monsters dying to it.
I was also slightly disappointed when I first started up Last Epoch and wasn’t able to murder air around me.

[ZaeN]

VK already has time rot stuff that reduces attack and movespeed and it is basically useless when 10 monsters hit for 1k each and then some 1mil fat mob starts spamming until it’s dead 3 waves later

[Macknum]

@ZaeN

If LE wants mobs to have some melee nuke spam then make melee have a true flat 90% dmg reduction from all sources or make it have 5k hp before resists and reductions.

I like the approach of TL3 in that department. As soon as you hit with a melee attack or skill you get X% dmg reduction. This makes life easier for melees while ranged players mostly stay untouched. It closes the gap s oto speak because the dmg intake for melee skill users is flatten by a good junk.

I was joking a bit on the first paragraph of my post ^^. I would setup enemys behaviour in another way and would make faster overall so you need to kite as a ranged DD or you need to build tank. Right now it looks a bit wierd if you can make some big CC happen and have the opportunity to stay save in the back while dealing a load of dmg.

[Llama8]

@kiss_me_quick

I personally really enjoy ex-nu-pseudo-quasi-melee skills which blast the whole screen - there’s just something about waving your sword in the air and monsters dying to it.
I was also slightly disappointed when I first started up Last Epoch and wasn’t able to murder air around me.

You can murder air around you, just not around mobs in the ruined era when you’re still in the ancient era…

@ZaeN

VK already has time rot stuff that reduces attack and movespeed and it is basically useless when 10 monsters hit for 1k each and then some 1mil fat mob starts spamming until it’s dead

Yeah, time rot, that slow isn’t big enough, I’m not talking about a measly 15% slow. Additionally, if different melee skills had different effects, it might encourage people to not just have 1 attack & 4 buff skills as they might want to take advantage of multiple defensive effects.

[Dallaen]

It’s indicative of an overall issue with the base game itself. Maxing out Defensive skills because it is required is sickening enough. the fact that even when you go as far as you can one shot still happen and they can happen in a situation you cannot avoid or even see coming. How is that fun for a system that builds on your victories when you know it can all end through no fault of your own?