The shields of the bosses

Feedback and Suggestions
41

The low dps builds have no substantial bonus from the ward mechanic. I would agree if the ward decay held the shield for… 10 seconds or so total that it would showcase a at least substantial amount to warrant the argument.
In the current - really lackluster - stage it does not though, and that should’ve been clear at first sight.

It would still feel awful (and that aspect is really important) but at least better then now.

Would still not do the job it’s supposed to do on the other hand, DR was a better system for that, all that was needed is to counter-math the %-reduction from DR and return it for the leech to the player. That would’ve been the whole solution to the situation.

Instead we got a even worse system.

They are seriously affected. Moot argument.

Raise the level of those builds to make them less affected.

Yes, 1.1 state.
Currently: failed mechanic.

Now general state:

What is it supposed to do? Hinder high DPS builds.
What shouldn’t it do? Hinder low dps builds.
What’s needed to achieve that? A system which influences a player more the higher the DPS are.
Does the system do that? No. So that’s the first design-stage failure. Meaning no matter how you ‘adjust’ it without adding additional subsidiary mechanics to support it… it can’t work. Impossibility.

Now my question is next: Is that a viable route to go? Putting the effort into making a non-working system into a working one which no other game on the market in the same genre needs currently and nonetheless handles a proper outcome?
My answer: No, unless it takes miniscule amounts of time investment from the devs.

The basic premise for the system is not functional, DR had a functional basic premise with edge-cases that caused issues.
That was a system which could’ve been ‘adjusted accordingly’, the current one not because it doesn’t follow the core rule of how different powered characters are affected by it.
You get less affected the higher your damage is, unless you do nigh zero currently… and all you do is reducing that amount with ward decay which then causes quicker kill-times for lower and high DPS players, but affects high dps players more then before…
…but then it fails entirely at the premise to make the boss ‘meaningful’ so it can showcase the skills once more.

It fails both directions. Tell me how you could even fix that without entirely changing it.

That’s just one of over a dozen examples.

Wraithlord alone is a single item messing it all up, no other interactions. It’s a ‘1 step deep’ build.
There’s ‘0 step deep’ builds which will cause the same problem, hence no interactions outside of the internal class + passive ones and you’re already done for. Falconer is a prime example (still now).

But in general… let’s see a list for builds which ‘break’ the game and go clearly quite a but above the 300 corruption:

Sorcerer has a myriad of options pushing vastly beyond 500 corruption, some over 1k without much investment.

Avalanche Shaman at least gets substantially high as well, 600-700 for many of those builds.

Forged Weapons Forge Guard is also a close to 1k candidate and needs nigh nothing for investment.

Spellblade goes also relatively swiftly into 500+ area.

We don’t need to even speak about falconer, that’s a obvious one.

Some more needed?
It’s too many.
As again ‘Outliers are fine, them being the norm is not’

Room is there when the priority is high.
High priority for EHG should currently be: Getting quality of 1.2 content into a great state.
Handling balance.
Getting MG and CoF (especially MG, where’s the promised mid-cycle UI changes? Are the coming 2 days before 1.2 or what?) handled properly.

The ward mechanic? That’s looooow on the bottom of the list compared to those and several more.
EHG needs to stop implementing unpolished badly thought through things and instead enforcing to provide a high quality and cohesive experience as a basis. Because that’s what’s missing in many places still.

The diamond which is LE is starting to be so rough it’s still coal.

42

Yes they do, the ward decay accelerates meaning the lower your dps the less damage you need to do to the ward to get it down to zero. Feel free to ask the devs if you don’t think this is how it works. It’s really not rocket science.

Except the high dps gigachads would still be getting their knickers in a twist because the numbers go down.

43

And any leech build that isn’t low DPS

44

This is completely false, builds with low DPS do not benefit at all, it is simply more time

While a build with high dps adds an extra minute or two to a fight, maybe three, a build with low dps adds 10 minutes, you need to be more pragmatic, I understand your point from theory, because in theory it should be true but in practice It is not, it is as simple as it is extremely detrimental in practice for those low dps builds.

The ward decay does not compensate at all for the time you lose, perhaps I should explain it from a broader perspective:

Why do you kill the bosses? Items

How much do you need to kill a boss: 800 stability

How many echoes to complete? Depending on the corruption, ten to fifteen echoes at least

Now, add the time that the ward gives to the bosses that you find in the echoes, in fifteen echoes suppose that you find three to four echoes of bosses, going to the minimum, to each of them you add a few seconds.

Then you go to the chief and herald, to which, in my case, it adds at least three to five minutes, not counting that I can die

How much extra time do you think it takes? about 10 extra minutes for each run of eight hundred stability, let’s put it this way, now, what is the probability that the boss will give you the item and then that it comes with a good legendary potential? How many times do you have to repeat yourself to the boss?

I’ll make my case, I have all the bonuses from the heralds and the guild that make the bosses have a better chance of dropping the specific item, I look for, in the stolen lance, the quiver, I have killed it about 35 times so far and it has I dropped the quiver about 12 times, not once, at 250 and 300 corruption with legendary potential, I will continue doing it until it drops with at least three of legendary potential, what is the probability? That extra minutes for each run turns into dozens of hours, in my case, although I don’t think my build is very low dps and this is the problem, the bosses have to be repeated hundreds of times, it is intense farming, when you add minutes to a mechanic is hours in farming, this is observable, again, many seem not to take into consideration that this is an ARPG and that it is about grinding, it does not make the bosses more difficult by giving them an absurd amount of ward, It just makes them longer and therefore less fun.

2 Likes
45

Like the Ward Mechanic? Which is part of their game balance.

46

It takes 30 seconds for ward to decay.

How long does a common boss-fight take?

1 minute active fighting? 2-3 at worst for a low-damage build?
15 seconds for a high damage build?

Given there’s 3 times this ward mechanic popping up we talk about around a probably up to 50% increase in fighting time without taking into consideration the damage on the shield. A direct example would be:
Given we take 3 minutes of fighting we add around 15 seconds to it per ward-time, which should take the damage as well as the decay roughly into account.

This means my 3 minute fight turns into a 3 minute 45 seconds fight.
That’s a damn 20% increase in fight-time right there.

And that’s solely taken the factual math side into consideration, not even the perception side.
Perception wise we get presented with ‘This boss has 100% health’ mid-fight it changes to ‘now you do no damage’.
That inherently feels bad, from a psychological standpoint alone, and should be avoided overall.

Missing the point entirely and trying to then divert it with ‘this is not rocket science!’ is a piss-poor argument from your side.

Also it’s entirely miss-represented.

Yes, your argument is right in words, but nobody cares jack-shit about that.
Do you know what people care about?
How much time will I need to spend to make it happen?
That’s the only argument which counts. Your wording avoids that entirely.

So?
Instead we screw over the low dps people now?
What is this? Circle-jerking for who gets the short piece of the stick? What’s the next one? ‘With today’s mechanic we’ll mess with the mid-dps range! Have fun!’

Neither was good. One functioned better then the other from a gameplay standpoint, which was DR.
But ultimately… both DR and Ward are inherently band-aids for a former mess which shouldn’t even exist in the first place.

If you get a black eye you don’t paint over it and then say ‘See? It healed!’ nah… it’s still there, just nobody can see it as easily. Nothing’s fixed.

Which I addressed by enforcing returning leech to be handled by base damage before reduction and not after reduction.

Not even in theory…
Only if you look at the wrong numbers, which is ‘percentile’ and not actual time.

No the ward mechanic is not a balance mechanic.

I’ve said it already… why have it when you got balance? You don’t need it since you don’t evaporate bosses before they can do things.
In a balanced state bosses provide a modicum of challenge to a character.
If a boss is evaporated despite being at the expected point in power progression both from a level as well as from a equipment point then it’s not balanced.

I’m still waiting on what the mechanic does in the position that the game is balanced.

The current arguments are:
The ward mechanic is fine (it’s shit, and math has showcased that it’s not)
We have it because we don’t have balance (then balance it)

And now yours… ward is a part of balance.
Why does no other game need it? Seems like EHG simply screwed up. A lack of quality I’ll outright name it.

This mechanic is a showcase of low-quality balance and a lack of design knowledge.

1 Like
47

Correct. He also said if a build can reach 1k+ they have messed up some where.

Mike also said the games built around 100s of corruption not 1k+. So players gettting to 600c or more isnt really a balance issue.

48

Yes, you’re missing the grand picture here though.

We’re talking about the boss-ward mechanic, we’ve agreed ‘there’s builds which get into 1k’ and several one of them even. After all I’ve not talked about heavy investment, just where you’ll be after decent playing for a while.

So 1k means they screwed up. Builds reach 1k, hence they screwed up.

But back to the ward-mechanic of bosses:

Given that they already screwed up with balancing we can take a look at the mechanic itself.
The mechanic is meant to make bosses actually display their abilities since there’s a whole range of characters which just ‘delete’ them.

The follow-up logical argument is naturally ‘Well… then give them more HP, so they last longer’.

Which then the argument is ‘but that’ll make it feel awful for low-dps builds’.

Ok, understood, what’s the next logical step?
Right! Buff the low-dps builds. That solves the issue, doesn’t it?

Now EHG wanted to be extra smart and made it extra complicated. ‘Nono, lets not make proper balance of the weaker builds… instead we’ll implement this extra mechanic which is supposed to hinder high-dps and not low-dps as much and we’ll do that by making a ward, but once isn’t good instead we’ll do it thrice so it’s staggered but also make the ward decay to make sure that this decay doesn’t mess with the low-dps builds so much, which means each of them shouldn’t be full life but only…’

You get the gist?

A stupid and simple solution right there… and they went along and made it uselessly complex.
That’s their solution for screwing up balance.
I say ‘no’, it’s a massive minus in my book, if I see more of such measures I’ll not touch this product anymore since that’s not doing your job properly. I’m fine with messed up balance… I’m not fine with making the life of already struggling builds harder because you tried to be ‘smart’ and instead became ‘dumb’.

49

Do you realy think EHG should balance their game arround low dmg builds? Sure there are 2 kinds of low dmg builds:

  1. underperforming skills that will most likely be buffed or that will be good when overperforming skills are nerfed.
  2. People who play the way they want without looking at numbers and then complain… rightfully sometimes.

My personal problems with the visuals aside I think the whole system is kind of a joke. All of the sudden bosses pull up a shield out of one of a orifice and there is that. I think the whole mechanic is a big loss for a hack and slash game because it’s a power fantasy thing and at some point you should be able to instagib a boss. That is why LE has an open celing and at one point the enemys will wipe the floor with our toons because they outgrow our progression potential.

I think the whole system would balance itself out at a certain point without adding useless mechanics to it that make “playing a game” a chore.

At the end of the day EHG will most likely say that balancing is an ongiong journey and they will find at least the continent where the sweet spot is in the future. 100% balancing boring and never achived anyway I know I know but right now the ball is in EHGs field and they have to do something to make the game fun and to keep some sort of balance. Right now we have an unfinished construction site and to me personaly it isn’t looking well.

On the other hand I would be the first happy dude if they remove this shield crap so I don’t get triggered anymore :smiley: .

1 Like
50

And here we have dude doing 3000:

We can say that game is balanced about 300cr but for good half a year it isn’t and won’t be for a long time :stuck_out_tongue:

1 Like
51

So if a high dps build had to chew through 400% hp but a low dps build had to chew through 300%, that’s not better? Would a low dos build take the same time to do 400 damage compared to 300? 'Cause last I checked, 300 was less than 400.

That means, as I think I said somewhere, that the ward should be a higher % of the health but decay slower. That would raise the threshold required for high dps builds to kill the boss quickly without affecting the low dps builds. Though if you go too far it’ll just feel like the old dynamic damage resistance.

Or they could balance builds better, but that’s hard.

52

No, I’m saying ‘They should balance their game’.

That’s a difference.

There’s a good slew of baseline skill combinations that seem to make sense and are specifically designed to synergize. But when you play them they’re ass. Do no damage, are clunky, lack the ability to be ‘viable’ in the terms of providing a reasonably expected progression throughout the game.

I’m not talking about screwed up builds.

I’m also not talking about special interactions through synergies which the devs never expected and hence go vastly beyond what they’re supposed to achieve. Look at Wraithlord, look at the summoning forge guard, look at falconer. They outperform comparable builds in terms of damage output and ‘delete’ bosses. And are absolutely and 100% directly intended in functionality as they’re presented.

They also shouldn’t exist in that state.

What I’m talking about is:
Just the normal basic baseline balance a game of this genre should strive to achieve. 95% of the time failing to get it perfectly right but at least working majorly in those constraints.

Exactly.
Or at least a visible amount of distinct progression showcasing you’re getting clearly stronger and start to stomp it into the ground.

Also 100% agreed.

If the devs want bosses to be reasonable… make them reasonable at the low end. They’ll show you what they can do, it’s EHGs task to provide the game in a way we get through the campaign + the normal monoliths in a way that every single boss along the way generally showcases their skills to us. Meaningful fights.

Yes, at least finding the ‘continent’ would be a good start.

Path of Exile currently works in the range of ‘It’s in the city’, Torchlight infinite ‘In the country’.
With EHG I’m not sure if they’re starting to fail to find the planet at the current situation.

Guess that’s one big mistake by EHG :rofl:

No.
Because the high-dps build does it in 3 seconds and the low-dps looses a minute for doing that extra work.

Who’s worse off? The one loosing 3 seconds or the one loosing a minute?

Nobody cares about percentages when the actual number presented in time showcases the reality.

You’re… as backwards as EHG.
Math it out… please… that actually hurts. And it’s not meant offensively or anything but that answer literally made me facepalm in front of my PC because it describes the opposite, and the mention that you’re as backwards as EHG is my measure to not strangulate my screen.

If you raise the shield from 70% to more… then a low-dps player has even less effect on it and can just wait it out.
If you make it decay slower then a low dps player will loose even more time.

It’s backwards.
You need to make the decay faster, and affect less HP total.

But that doesn’t help now, does it?

It’s a prime showcase as to why this system is rotten from the core.

And DR was better functional then ward. I love the ward as a high dps player! But it’s absolutely dumb to have it since that was not the goal, the opposite of it. You can’t make high-dps players love a mechanic which slows them down, that would be nonsensical.

Not really?
Sure, getting it ‘right’ is.

Starting it? Not even remotely.

‘Hey, we saw build x struggles to do bosses this cycle, they should’ve had 200k dps but only had 50k dps. Rampt their dps up by 250% towards this point. Are we still in the range before that? No? Ok, change the exponential power curve for this skill then. Should work, lets see how well it works now!’

That’s how you do it. It won’t reach ‘100%’ but it’ll get to a baseline.

But since EHG seemingly has:
No knowledge of how long they want a player to take for their campaign.
No knowledge of how much damage any specific skill should do at any specific stage in the game.
No knowledge on which items a player should possess at any specific time in the game.
No knowledge on how their singular mechanic should stand in comparison to a single base mechanic it is derived from.
And more…

Yeah… yeah it’s hard.
Teaching a blind man to do gymnastics and have the proper form is quite hard, I agree.

3 Likes
53

“Player 1 with ‘build x’ has Y1 gear with Z1 stats. Their version of Skill1 doesn’t use Node Y but Player 2’s does. Player 2 is using Y1 gear as well but has Z2 stats…” repeat for the, let’s be generous, 10 people using build x.

All of them have different gear (or different prefixes and suffixes, or different rolls on the prefixes and suffixes at the bare minimum), not all of them are going to be using the exact same skill nodes (because let’s face it, no one is posting a build guide for people to follow for a build that is barely able to kill a boss. People are posting build guides for op/strong builds. So these 10 people just happened to come up with the same build out of all the possible skill combinations for their set Class, already a stretch.)

So where does EHG begin? Is the build under performing because the primary skill is lackluster? Is the primary skill lackluster because they’re not taking a specific skill node? Or is the skill just bad? Why is it bad? Is the core skill bad, or are there no nodes that make it worth using? Could the nodes be good but the paths and requirements between them cause the issue? What if the primary damage skill is perfectly fine but their other skills they Specced in don’t have any synergy with it so their damage is lacking? Are those skills bad? Or are they just not good for this build? Could all the skills be fine but their gear not be good enough? Is the gear not good enough because of the rolls or the effects?

I could keep going, but I hope you realize by now that your example just does not work in this game where you can specialize into 5 skills each with 20 points (minimum) to customize the skill, and each having unique interactions with other skills. It’s not as simple as “just add more damage” because “where” is that damage coming from?

54

It’s not one mistake looks like a whole family of mistakes :smiley:

1 Like
55

lol obviously it’s not, you think this is a matter of comparing one build to another instead of focusing on the problem, I don’t want to be rude, but this is not a question of one build doing more damage than another, this is a question about boss mechanics.

In addition to the fact that your comparison is wrong, if a high dps build lowers those 400% health in 3 minutes and the low dps build lowers those 300% health in 9 minutes, the problem persists, the central point is how useless is adding more time to bosses and how it affects casual players, not everyone has or wants to farm high dps builds, there are no competitions, it’s a pve game and people just want to hang out and again, it’s not about difficulty, it’s about time.

I couldn’t have said it better, that’s the problem.

1 Like
56

But the mechanic in question (ward breakpoint things) has come about because build X can do 10-100 times more damage than build Y. If all builds did roughly the same amount of single target damage (which is impossible to achive in an arpg & I’d say it would probably be a bad thing over all) then the devs would be able to balance the boss stats (hp & damage) around that expected dps figure.

Boss stats (hp, damage, etc) don’t exist in a vacuum.

57

The answer is simple: balance, the builds do not need to do the same damage, they do not need to be equal, a tier1 build plays at 1000+ corruption, a tier3 build plays at 300, the t1 build kills the Boss faster at 1000+ of corruption than the t3 build at 300 corruption, do you understand the problem?

2 Likes
58

They kinda do though, not the same damage, but within a few % ideally (which LE is clearly not even slightly close to). I think this is a fundamental difference of opinion between the two sides. I believe that the devs want all players & builds to be able to experience the boss mechanics but due to the gargantuan difference in power between builds, the highest tier builds can kill bosses in seconds while the lowest tier builds would take minutes. So if the devs balance the bosses such that the highest tiers take a few minutes & get to experience all of the mechanics & have an enjoyable challenging time (& I’m well aware that that is a subjective thing) then the lowest tier would take significantly longer & probably not enjoy the experience.

Now, why is corruption not the balancing point in that scenario? It probably should be & one answer to the question of wtf do the devs do about high tier builds killing bosses in seconds may well be that said builds are doing the bosses at too low a corruption.

59

Really miniscule differences.

Each branch has more or less a direction in which the skill goes and hence a basis for a respective build direction.

For example with a spellblade focused around Mana Strike.
Will you go cold? Then you’ll not go into Spark charge and instead make a pure Frost claw build which simply stacks damage over that.
If you go spark charges? You also go Frost Claw but use by guarantee the lightning conversion.
Are you using lightning? Then you’ll go into spark charge and make a
Also if your main skill is Mana Strike you won’t go into Mana Cleave since it gives a cooldown, would do dumb. You’ll also take the ward nodes with guarantee since you wanna survive and you’ll likely go to ‘Star Guide’ to avoid the pitfalls of melee.

This means you’ll have choose a ‘direction’, this is the same for every single skill in the game. This ‘direction’ decides upon several others in the skill trees by design fairly often.

EHG has done their design surprisingly simple which allows them to do those things relatively easily, what throws the wrenches into it are uniques used in ways which cause utterly new synergies.

Out come the core builds which are specifically pre-planned and designed by EHG (duh) and those are the ones I’m talking about.

Really? Affixes on standard gear is the piece that you’re going for?
Ok, you wanna cap resistances, you wanna have life or ward in high amount… leftover goes into damage.
It’s a piss easy system, it’s not a ‘let’s convert phys into fire into cold into lightning to the make it into chaos while being multiplicatively affected by specific affixes along the way to scale…’ like PoE does, and they got their shit together where a player which hasn’t played the game will struggle against their core bosses in the game throughout the playthrough.

They surprisingly don’t need such a awful shield mechanic for some reason. Torchlight does neither. Diablo 3 or 4 also do not… and Blizzard had been the prime example on self-destructive game-design since a long time now.

You see… all of those systems are generally something which seems like they’re complex, but in reality you use a reductionist method to balance it.

How much damage is it supposed to have? 200k? Ok.
First, get base damage.
Then the increased damage, singular multiplicator.
Then more damage multiplicator comes after.
The crit multiplier after that.

You generally got 3 layers to work into, which is base, increased and then either more or crit in LE. Rarely will it be both since it would be another multiplier.

Those multipliers lead to a few different situations which make it seem like you have build variety but it’s actually nice tricks for developers to make the human brain go all excited simply, with the same outcome.
You for example base a specific skill around base-damage, those then get no easy access to crits… or have no ‘more’ multipliers… but a wide variety of increased options for example.
Others get low base-damage but instead high crit.
The next gets more increased damage and crit… but has no access to more. The next one has decent more multipliers but not as much increased and crit.

This is how it’s generally handled. ‘How much access has this class to a modifiers type?’ and hence it’s adjusted accordingly, you solely shift numbers around a bit.
If you get to 200k by expecting 20% crit with 200% multiplier to leave us at 120k (after base + inc + more) or go with 200k by having 5% crit with a 300 multiplier to leave us at 170k (after base + inc + more) has no meaning.
You pick a number and then go top-down through the measures with a bit of variety in the rolls.
Yes, one player will find 250% inc and another only 60% inc. The one with 60% will have some flat damage though… those stand in relation to each other. Sure, one will have less damage then expected… the other more then expected. But you know what? That’s fine and even wanted.

‘Hey Bob, I played this character and found such a great weapon! Now I’m melting enemies at my stage!’ ‘Awesome!’
That’s what a player wants to feel and talk with their friends about. Found something nice and now you’re blasting through.
The other way around as well ‘Ah damn, I really need some better gear since I’m slogging through it! Where’s that better sword-base I need?’ while having to give it their best to not die against enemies.

Stuff’s getting balanced with a method, within a range and with variant methods to create the illusion of variety
But at the core you balance everything the same way, just other multipliers, and you don’t add stuff willy nilly or change numbers willy nilly. You have mathematical systems standing behind that.

And I hope you realize that their competition is a game which offers every class to pick between 275 skills which can be adjusted by up to 5 secondary ones out of a list of 177 available.

So mildly spoken… if LE is so so complex then Path of Exile must really be a unbalanced mess which nobody can even think about ever taming even remotely.

Alas… exactly that is done.

It’s a really poor excuse.

Edit to add something:

This is inherently impossible and will make the experience of everyone worse.
Even during progression someone with lucky drops will stomp a boss from time to time… or multiple ones.

And that’s fine!
Don’t let it be the norm though.
And don’t let it be the norm that you tickle a boss to death with 1% damage per 5 seconds either.

60

D3 doesn’t because D3 doesn’t actually have any real bosses. The bigger difficulty in high GRs is the rift itself. Fights with mobs of 2-3 rares take longer than the boss does. The only purpose of the boss is to signal the rift is over and give you your loot. They have no difficulty and they never had.

D4 doesn’t do this because it uses immunity phases (and some quite long ones as well), much like PoE does (even to an extremely aggravating extreme like Avarius and his multiple variants).

Yes, but PoE was very unbalanced for many years before they managed to rein it in. Like D4 is as well. That’s something that only time can fix. There really isn’t a magical formula to fix things when most system interact with each other.
That’s not to excuse EHG. While I wasn’t expecting perfect balance for 1.1, I definitely was expecting better.