I would like to stoke a conversation about the distribution of incoming damage.
I often feel untouchable for ten minutes of increasingly difficult end-game play, then suddenly get one-shot. I would guess that as many as 1/3 of my deaths are one-shots in a zone where I otherwise stayed above 80% health the entire map.
I found this especially true of ranged classes which typically avoid sustained damage or sampling the average enemy damage frequently enough to feel the difficulty scaling. It leaves the player wondering:
…how much more mitigation would have been enough?
…how close did I come to making it much farther than this?
…was this avoidable with a little better positioning?
…do I need to re-think my build somehow to avoid this?
…if my decently defensive build gets one-shot like this, should I instead just go glass cannon?
None of these questions are we want LE players thinking, especially in this scenario where the question is virtually unanswerable because end-game content isn’t instantly redoable. i.e. if you die to a map boss or arena boss, you can’t try again and see whether it was really just bad luck of your build/gear are wrong. You’ll never know whether 10% more hp might have saved you, unless you dig through logs.
I would propose that perhaps more frequent but balanced and non-instantaneous defense checks (checks upon a player’s gear/build) would help players better appreciate the scaling defenses they are building, ward retention, the life regen, their reflex with potions, etc. It just feels more empowering to die slightly slowly once in a while, instead of instantly and helplessly. It doesn’t feel like RNG. It doesn’t feel like your defensive stats don’t matter.
Anyhow, just my two cents. The point is really to get others talking about theirs. Maybe when we have a few dollars in the pot, we’ll be able to come to some conclusions about player sentiment or some ideas for improved balance.