Here’s the crux of the issue and why I’m telling you that your opinion is subjective.
EVERY arpg game has bosses that are difficult their first time you fight them. D2 ubers, D4 Uber Lilith, Torchlight Infinite Wanderer, those 20 or so PoE bosses, etc. And I completely agree that if you wipe the floor with a supposed to be challenging boss the first time you fight it either the devs messed up, you got incredibly lucky with drops, or you over leveled.
Now we get into the core endgame loop of grinding for gear so you can progress through whatever endgame activities you fancy. Bosses become increasingly easier as your power goes up because the devs designed the fights to be “balanced” around the first few times you fight them.
That’s the Diablo-Clone balance process. There is 0 boss scaling.
Last Epoch is trying to do something new with their bosses by adding scaling mechanics. We can all agree that their attempts failed so far, but that doesn’t mean the concept is flawed. Last Epoch doesn’t want bosses to become triviialized because you got some better gear.
I’m not talking about the first time you fight a boss, I’m talking about the endgame power loop. If you’re farming runs for gear include bosses that you kill in 2s, I believe the game is fundamentally flawed in it’s endgame loop. You do not. Hence why I said that you want loot piñatas.
Edit: I’ll also add that outside of D2, most diablo-clones don’t include their super bosses as part of their core farming loop. They added them as challenges to farm other bosses/dungeons/maps/Rifts/etc. to beat.
So when I’m talking “bosses being loot piñatas” I’m not talking about super bosses. I’m talking about the farming loop for gear progression. Though, Super Bosses in most Diablo-clones also don’t scale, they’re just incredibly tough, so they will eventually be trivialized as power creep settles in.
Edit 2: Effectively, Last Epoch is trying to treat all bosses as Super Bosses without requiring the player to grind around bosses. By adding scaling mechanics that make the boss more resistant to player power instead of making the player weaker (i.e. You aren’t lowering the player’s power like a level sync would) you can still have players power creep the bosses, but it’s not going to happen as fast as other Diablo-clones. Again, this is the design intent and currently it’s affecting low dps builds too much, while not affecting high dps builds at all. Which requires tweaking boss ward at the low end, and reining in the power of player builds at the high end. Which takes time.
Kinda? You can trivialise bosses with better gear, but then that’s a sign that you can attempt them on higher corruption. So LE gives us the best (or worst, depending on how one looks at it) of both worlds. Since the mono bosses difficulty scales with corruption, you have a choice of whether to have an easier or harder fight (ignoring Aberroth).
Yeah, absolutely. But who said ‘it has to be like D3’?
A ‘Loot 2.0’ situation happens when you realize that your system has inherent shortcomings which needs to be solved.
What is done is not fixated, it depends on the respective system.
First of all… They don’t scale.
There is none of that, this mechanic is not a scaling mechanic.
So that’s inherently wrong from the get-go.
That argument is by definition already a failed one.
We don’t know if that’s what EHG ‘actually’ wants to achieve, you’re inferring meaning into something because you have no idea if it’s the case or not, so you default to ‘This has to be it!’.
No, don’t think like that if you can avoid it, there’s deductive reduction possible which works, when you reduce things far down until nothing else ‘makes sense’ and you give someone the benefit of the doubt (which you in general should).
But in this case there is no sign or showcase that it’s what EHG even remotely wants to achieve with that.
Their reason is directly and clearly stated, and that’s ‘We don’t want players to trivialize bosses’, and that’s a fairly nonsensical design-notion for this genre.
Yes, it includes the end-game power-loop.
If you as a dev realize your progression outpaces your hardest bosses you screwed up in positioning those bosses.
And especially in a endlessly scaling core mechanic the default state of those pushing ever further forward is by design offensive based. The best defense is a good offense fits after all in hack’n’slash games. What isn’t able to hit you before falling down for a nap can’t after all kill you. Defensive measures have inherently less value then offensive measures, and this stays in direct correlation with rising skill levels to boot.
Yes! Yes it absolutely is!
It’s a wake-up call that a dev has utterly screwed up.
Either a massive balance issue is existing (is it or not? Do we have a balance issue? What do you think? ) or you as a dev have failed to provide respective content which aligns with your progression (And that one is also the case. Harbingers are the first step of several more).
Either/or, if it happens you’ve got a problem at hand since players outpace your bosses and have ‘nothing left’.
Which is when you realize you should:
A) Get your whole progression system fixed.
B) Get a boatload of more content beyond your current one.
C) Make a heavy-handed and harsh balance overhaul.
Depending on situation those 3 are the main options.
Never is it D) Make a arbitrary extra mechanic that tries to cover your failures.
Yes, which is very good actually, it allows the more casual players to enjoy the game without feeling ‘deprived’ of the enjoyment. Which is also something PoE has gotten. Maven herself is the end-game for the ‘more casuals’ (and that’s already a really hard fight for many) but beyond that you got the whole range of Uber-Boss variants, like Uber Maven, Uber Exarch, Uber Eater of Worlds, The Feared Boss Gauntlet and more.
Yes, that’s general good design, agreed.
Yes, when a ‘super boss’ is trivialized what do you think happened to the bosses before?
And why would that be bad and not the contrary?
It’s such… massive… backwards development.
It’s a dynamic power scaling system what you’re talking about.
It’s what Bethesda has done in Fallout in the most pronounced way possible. Enemies getting stronger as you get stronger.
Always did and always feels like shit since it messes with the perception of the power progression.
The only viable ways to avoid that perception bias is to create a static scaling system which takes away enemies and instead populates places with other enemies after progression.
Neither is in Last Epoch. A good example of the static one which isn’t player driven is to be seen in ‘No Rest for the Wicked’ and good ones with player agency are for example D2 with the 3 difficulty stages, Chronicon with the area slider or D4 with the world level for examples in the genre.
You never dynamically scale enemies which have already existed before. This design had failed the first time it was implemented and did without exception since then.
You actually deprive their psyche from that though, which makes your game vastly less enticing.
And that’s heavily pronounced in this genre since players have a completely different expectation.
Again… the same argument. Like a darn broken record it comes over and over.
Is there some general learning disability going on as to why people seem to default back to that? Does nobody read?
To tweak ward at the low end you would need to know the damage output of the player beforehand. That’s the only solution. Then you dynamically create the ward relative to that.
It’s a static system though, it doesn’t change if you’re high- or low-dps.
Hence it - by design - *is unable to affect high-dps players more then low-dps players.
Which is the whole darn friggin argument from start to finish which I’m making.
There is no ‘tweaking numbers’ for a mechanic which does inherently the opposite of what it’s supposed to do damnit.
Sometimes this forum is like arguing against brick walls.
You explain how something works, someone comes along and tries to re-frame it entirely while ignoring the core aspect that’s important and then says ‘Oh here, it’s fixed! See?’ as if they’re expecting to get some sort of ‘enlightened’ moment out of you… and instead all they did was showcase that they don’t understand the problem at all.
You’re literally using a shape-game for little kids here and are currently proud of putting the round piece into the slot for the square piece, deeming it as ‘correct’.
That’s where we’re moving on this discussion.
We can’t even come up with fitting solutions until EHG got their shit fixed because here we are… discussing why you are expected to put the right shape into the similarly shaped hole.
Except it IS a scaling mechanic, whether you like it or not.
Dynamic Damage Reduction, the original system, reduced player damage dynamically based on their dps output. Scaling the damage the player dealt to make the boss more durable. This didn’t work against burst damage and could easily be circumvented, and just generally felt bad for the vast majority of players. So they replaced it.
The current system of Boss Ward has phases where the longer the ward lasts the faster it decays… Almost as if… gasp it scales to your dps!! How shocking!
You can insult my intelligence all you want, but the fact that you can’t even understand the design intent of the mechanic you’re complaining about when the developers themselves have told us what it’s meant to do says more about you than me.
Well, balance is a thing that doesn’t piss folks off. I get that it’s really hard. In a bunch of other ARPGs (Wolcen and PoE are the ones that most strongly jump to mind) there were periods of time where they implemented boss-phases and other stuff to try to make all classes have a similar experience… because they struggled with balance. Wolcen just crashed. PoE has made a lot of progress with balance and also, to a certain extent, said, “ok, that’s good enough, a quest for absolute balance will make fun disappear”.
I think D4 is definitely in that, “absolute balance is the enemy of fun”, camp. Which I agree with.
Weirdly, I think D3 is actually the one game that has pretty much nailed balance (based upon the rift stats from every season), but they did it at the expense of giving the player agency over their build. So, yay?, but also, boooo!
I’m bummed with Boss Ward because I, possibly incorrectly, don’t get the feeling that EHG considers the Boss Ward system a temporary measure while they work hard to improve balance (especially since it replaces DR).
I do get that LE’s number one priorities are more content and bug fixing (especially in terms of a stable economy).
No, I definitely can’t say I loved every PoE seasonal gimmick. I definitely can say that I really appreciate them as a company saying, “we’re going to try weird shit, it’s not always going to work”. I love that about GGG.
Boss Ward isn’t new, it’s a replacement of DR. It’s not experimental. And both of which should be considered stop-gaps toward balance where there wasn’t huge differences between damage output between what are considered viable builds. I honestly don’t understand why developers love adding multiple multiplicative damage skills/attributes/affixes into games and then are surprised by huge numbers.
… that’s a bit dishonest, actually. Players love huge numbers. So, we’re complicit in this issue.
I don’t, I criticise your ability to comprehend and read. Which has nothing to do with your intelligence.
If your reading comprehension and pattern recognition isn’t enough then the obvious outcome is misconceptions.
I actually wanted to answer in more detail but then I read this:
Followed by:
Bolded even. So I would’ve expected to read and comprehend it at that time.
Can you read? If yes then you can’t comprehend.
I ask again.
Can. You. Read?
Agreed!
I’m not mad at them for ‘trying out new things’.
But GGG sure as hell also heard from me ‘Well, that went like shit, definitely don’t even think about doing that’.
7 years long I’ve called out for asynchronous currency trading, I was ridiculed, talked down upon by the community.
And 3.25 comes around, asynchronous currency trading comes in and now everyone’s going ‘It’s the greatest thing in the world!’
I also got ridiculed for saying that end-game needs player-agency from start to finish when the prophecy and sextant mechanic were there, as well as all side-mechanics being fully random and enforced upon the player.
Then they added the atlas passive tree and everyone went ‘such a great invention!’ as well as the re-work to put all the leftover situations into the scarabs and once again ‘Oh wow, GGG did such a fantastic thing!’.
Yeah, screw that, same shit here. No difference.
I called out campaign progression and perception of progression (Lagon, monolith to empowered monolith, difficulty and gradual rise of it), the loot-drop calculation, the 2/2 affix split on items, Boss Ward and long-term versus cycle-term grinding goal (Blessings are cycle-term for example).
I got talked down here for all of those, nobody sees it.
EHG will likely come around in 2-3 years, fix that stuff upon - finally - realizing it’s become so bad that it negatively affects their game since years (did the first second it appeared but now only the most inept people can ignore it) and then change it… and voila, every time the game will get a sudden general rise in retention.
Yes, absolutely.
Going all ‘pikachu face’ because people push and use the methods given is baffling. It’s to be expected. You don’t ‘reign that in’, never do. You see where it comes from and address the root cause, not the direct symptom. This allows people to still push huge numbers, enjoy the outcome but not affect them directly in a negative way.
Wow, aside from me changing my position on if it’s working as intended being up for debate, with the new information presented in this discussion, it’s almost as if I’ve been talking about the system as a goal and how it’s intended to work the entire time.
The goal of going to the Olympics is to get the Gold in your event. Just because you got silver, or bronze, or didn’t get a medal at all doesn’t make your goal wrong.
The goal of Boss Ward is exactly what Kain said it is. The goal of Boss Ward is to not impact lower dps players and give bosses a fighting chance against high dps players. The goal isn’t the problem.
And just because you really don’t seem to understand what goal means here’s the three top definitions of goal.
Goal: the result or achievement toward which effort is directed
Goal: The goal is the intention of an activity or a plan. In a figurative sense, a goal is the mission of a person or group.
Now that we’re all on the same page.
Boss Ward, as it’s intended by the developers to work, is a good thing to strive for. I want my bosses to not be as weak as a regular enemy. I believe in the goal of Boss Ward and similar mechanics and believe with some tweaks to the current system that’s not working as intended that Boss Ward will be a good addition to the game.
I infer the answer that you can’t read or understand hence.
We’ve proven that the system affects low-dps more then high dps.
EHG writes it’s to affect low-dps less then high-dps.
That by design failed.
That means the mechanic is non-functional.
And you couldn’t receive this information from neither the text you linked nor from the discussions made, hence there is no point to argue further.
Your ‘up for debate’ is already done, you’re regressing back, we have the answer and it’s ‘no it’s not’. Next step, which you also add with a further quote, so why mention it? Those statements are ‘not up for debate’ anymore henceforth.
Nobody stated that their ‘goal’ is something different.
The arguments are:
This mechanic can’t achieve the goal.
The goal to achieve is a direct consequence of balance.
The goal is unachievable in a reliable way through symptom solving rather then root-cause solving.
Are we finally on the same page?
Nobody gives a shit what their goals or good intentions are, we’re the players, the consumers, we’re saying ‘what is’ the case. That crap doesn’t interest us, it’s solely to excuse the existence in the first place… hence… it’s excused.
Why are we arguing if it has to go if the logical conclusion for the logical progression has already been made?
What are you arguing about?
I hear from you ‘it should stay’. You admitted ‘it doesn’t work’. Hence what are you doing?
You’re so caught up on the fact that if it doesn’t work now, it will never work. And that’s a logical fallacy.
The devs can get the system to work as intended with tweaks. Just because it didn’t work as intended initially doesn’t mean you just chuck the system out the window. Do you give up as soon as you fail once? I don’t. I try again, because… You know, that’s how you improve?
I believe, and so do others, that the mechanic can be modified to achieve the necessary goal that the developer wants. You, and others, don’t believe that.
I’m not saying no system can work which would be entirely wrong.
What I’m saying currently is that it’s extremely unlikely that a extra system does present a solution while also be in the allowed perimeters of resource- and time-investment which leads me to say fixing the balance is the faster, easier and more long-term solution.
Is any of that factually wrong?
We can argue if my statement about the chance of a alternative system proving a solution is wrong or right, because I don’t have all parameters for that.
We can’t discuss if this current solution though is, because it’s a proven non-functional one.
Good intention, bad execution.
Also you seem to still have a inherent misconception here. A non-functional system is one which inherently can’t fulfill the intended function. It’s not a ‘this needs some tweaking’ thing.
PoE’s animation re-work was a ‘this needs tweaking’ thing. PoE’s elder/shaper ping-pong mechanic for handling influence was a ‘non-functional mechanic’ which was impossible to fix in comparison. Which is why they removed it over time.
There is a very very important distinct difference.
Ok, then tell me a ‘how?’.
Not a detailed plan, just the direction. What needs to be done?
I heard ‘raise the Ward value’… which does the opposite of the intended outcome.
I also heard ‘reduce the ward decay’… which also does the opposite of the intended outcome.
The current only solution which is visible is to raise the Ward value to extreme levels, I’m talking about 5-10 times as much as we currently have… and also increase the ward decay-rate to thrice of what we have now.
What would this achieve though?
A low-dps build solely focuses on sustain and positioning during ward-times. There is ‘0’ meaning to attack the boss.
A mid-dps build could speed it up a few seconds maybe.
A high-dps build will be able to at least make a dent, but still be enforced to go through the phase.
Decrease boss health by half, increase ward value by x2 or x3, increase decay speed so it goes away after 10s.
Now you have a better shield for high DPS while actually making it easier for low DPS. All while using the same system.
But then look into the detail. ‘What does it actually do?’
Are you intending for a low-dps build to just stop attacking unless they have leech?
If you answer ‘yes’ then you go with this. If you answer ‘no’ then you can’t include this.
So once more:
‘Is this the intended solution for the existing issue?’
And my counter-question:
‘What is the major way to discern it from a simple invul phase when it acts functionally nigh identical for a low-dps build?’.
Is this a mentally acceptable level?
Which level is mentally acceptable?
How high is the portion of people for which this is not mentally acceptable?
When would a low-dps player just ‘stop’ attacking and treat it as a complete invulnerability phase?
And since that happens at a specific point… why not simply make it a invul phase and force everyone through it in a identical way since the time spent is nonetheless higher for low-dps then high-dps builds still, just not as extreme?
That’s not the goal of the mechanic though.
We know the distinct goal.
‘A mechanic which allows players to experience the boss mechanics like a low-dps player does, without negatively impacting low-dps players but only high-dps players.’
That’s the goal from EHG.
Does the solution uphold this goal?
Currently the issue is that low dps builds are affected too much while high dps builds aren’t affected enough. There’s also too many ward phases on too many enemies. Agreed?
Step 1. Reduce the number of ward phases (maybe one around half HP, or two: one at 66% and 33% each) with more ward per phases based on a percentage of Boss HP.
This would make the system feel less oppressive for all players.
Step 2. Remove Boss Ward from anything that is not an act boss (or equivalent), pinnacle boss, or mono boss.
This would limit how often the system pops up and stop it from being on mini-boss enemies that don’t need it.
Step 3. Lower the boss’s actual HP so that the ward phases act as buffers and not bonus HP.
This is to make sure that when a low dps build has to wait out more of the ward it’s not punishing them by overly inflating the boss HP through ward.
Step 4. Ramp up the Decay so it takes ~60s to expire if 0 damage is dealt. Setting a baseline for how long they expect a boss to take. Ideally a mid dps build should clear the ward in ~30s, a high dps build in ~15s, and a low dps in ~50s.
This would require the most tweaking to get right and would be a baseline amount as every build is different. The purpose of this is to make sure that high dps builds aren’t feeling nerfed and low dps builds aren’t being punished as the boss fight isn’t taking unnecessarily long but they’re still incentived to improve their dps for faster kill times.
Edit: obviously my numbers are up for debate and more being used as a “for example.”
It does, because if you decrease the boss health in half, it will actually be faster for low DPS builds than it currently is or was in 1.0.
And the high DPS build has to go through x10 the eHP because they mow down the ward as well, rather than letting it go down.
And you could further tweak this: make ward x5 full health and only require 5s to decay.
The point is: you can make this system work.
EDIT:
Because a invulnerable phase slows both the same, whereas with this system you can tweak it so it slows high DPS more.
Step 1… yeah, sure?
Step 2, yes.
Step 3 is bad long-term but good for the mechanic, actively hinders balancing but… can be done at least.
At step 4 it falls apart.
A mid-dps build currently clears the ward in around 5-10 seconds, which is the intended goal after all. 30 seconds is the baseline it lasts without attacks. So it reduces it to 1/3rd.
For low-dps builds this time is around 20 seconds though, which is substantial.
And the outlier: for high-dps builds 2 ward-phases are 1 attack at times currently.
This disparity is so high that you can’t adjust it in such a way sadly. It would be nice ‘if we were there’ but sadly… we aren’t. Not even remotely.
Because if we were then the whole situation wouldn’t even need to exist, there would be no reason for the Ward mechanic anymore in the first place.
High-dps builds outperform by 1000%+ compared to mid-dps builds and by 2500%+ to low-dps builds currently.
Balance is meant to achieve a line which is roughly inside the 200% disparity between low-end and top-end, which means the highest base-line build does around 3 times the damage from the lowest baseline build. Which is… acceptable, still a bit high but doable.
And by that time there is no Ward mechanic needed anyway.
That’s not an answer to my question, I don’t know what question you’re answering there.
I’m not comparing between pre-existing situations, I don’t care, and neither should you.
This is the question if it’s upheld with the solution.
The answer though is clear: ‘No’.
It affects a low-dps player more then a high-dps player.
Hence by definition you can’t see it as ‘success’.
So here I’ll go into comparison then, because that’s a important aspect to understand:
A invulnerability phase affects everyone over the spectrum in the same way. Hence 10 seconds invul means low-, mid- and high-dps builds will need to wait… 10 seconds.
The current - and without fault all suggested changes - affect different builds differently. If a high-dps character is affected by 10 seconds then a mid- is by 30 and a low by 60 seconds.
So functionally… the invul phase is infinitely closer to the goal then the Boss Ward system.
That’s important to understand.
Does anyone here like invul phases just for the sake of showcasing what the boss can do rather then having a distinct meaning… like a special attack or animation?
And I’ll even point out the thought-mistake you have in your example:
This measurement is of no meaning.
We’re talking about effective disruption caused for different builds.
Does the low-dps build need to invest more time to get through this mechanic meant to slow down a high-dps build or not?
You need seconds as a measure, not damage, hp or anything else.
This is out value for comparison.
If at any point a low-dps build even has 1 ms more then a high-dps build then a invul phase is superior to achieve the goal.
The system enforces that a low-dps player always has 1 ms more effect on them then a high-dps player. Hence the core-design of the system can’t be adjusted to avoid that.
This is all I’m saying.
It does the work backwards simply. Value-wise we can’t ‘fix’ it.
Then what do you care about? Your objection was that the current system penalizes low DPS builds while doing little to high DPS ones.
I proposed a change that would benefit low DPS builds (less eHP to kill) and penalize high DPS ones (a lot more eHP to kill).
How does it affect them more? They literally need to mow down x10 more eHP.
We’re not talking about the current system. We’re talking about the one I proposed.
If you use 2 5s invulnerable phases, high DPS will require 1s+5s+1s+5s+1s=13s.
A low DPS will require 5s+5s+5s+5s+5s=25s.
So invulnerable phases affects low DPS much more than high DPS.
But if you tweak the current system you can make it so that it takes about the same time for both to kill the boss. Just decrease the health and increase the ward/decrease the decay until phases are similar for both.
That’s what I care about.
I talked against DR as well, for a reason.
We have 1 viable option to make the current situation ‘better’, which is adjusting values. But is a time-intensive balancing problem, so I’m pushing that to the side. Could be done, ‘not worth it’ though.
Then we have 2 options which are infinitely better, one which is very easy to make and one which is extremely time-intensive but has a good long-term outcome.
The first is ‘make it a invul phase’. Nobody likes invul phases, the current system is though even worse then a invul phase… so this is actually an improvement.
The second is ‘focus on the balance as it naturally solves it’. Which is the high time-investment method but does solve it by design automatically.
A low-dps player needs more seconds in the ward phase then a high-dps player. This means comparatively it affects a low-dps player more.
They already have the issue that their fight is more dangerous and more drawn out by the fact that they have to endure or avoid more attacks from the boss, this mechanic causes them to endure or avoid even more comparatively then before.
And as said, time is the only factor which is of importance there as time is the segment which defines the danger for our character in a boss-fight.
Offense is the best defense for a reason.
This… what? Nono, that’s not upholding.
You’re explaining a ‘invul phase’ there, which yes… is better!
How can low-dps and high-dps have both a 5 second phase?
Neither their Ward-phase nor their ‘normal’-phase are identical.
For a high dps it looks at best:
1s + 4s + 1s + 4s + 1s
And for a low dps:
5s + 5s + 5s + 5s + 5s
Now if we remove the ‘normal phases’ which are the baseline health we’re left with:
4s + 4s
vs
5s + 5s
Which means a high dps character saves 2 seconds compared to a low dps character.
That means the low dps character is ‘punished’ (yeah, not the right word but I don’t have another one) by 2 seconds extra fight time in comparison.
Hence a invul mechanic causes both to at least have ‘10 seconds’ of the boss showcasing skills.
Which is the next step towards a functioning system in the logical progression.
The current one causes low dps to be affected more.
The invul phase causes both to be affected the same (improvement, low-dps has no downsides at least for this duration compared to high dps)
Our goal though is that the numbers are switched, a low dps needs less time investment then a high dps.
That’s our end-result needed.
) or you as a dev have failed to provide respective content which aligns with your progression (And that one is also the case. Harbingers are the first step of several more).