This is like PoE’s Sentinel league all over again. Individual packs are harder to kill than map bosses. Got really pissed off, quit for two weeks, came back, hit my first mob in my first echo, and no, fuck this. I’m not wasting any more of my time on this content again.
And while i"m at it - and separate from the mob I just referred to - also, fuck giving rare monsters ward invulnerability phases. I could deal with it on the bosses, and maybe 1-2 large rares per echo, but giving fucking normal-sized Wengari (not even a matriarch or patriarch) ward phases is fucking ridiculous.
I bought LE two years ago because it was being positioned as a fun ARPG with decent complexity but whose content wasn’t as difficult as PoE. I am not a player who feels like I need to practically kill myself in order to feel alive. I already have a life that’s challenging enough. I don’t need games with insane barriers too.
My damage doesn’t reduce each mob’s ward at the same rate as it reduces their HP. I assume this has to do with some metric (threshold or something) that’s different from one mob to another. But for the ones where my DPS does nothing to their ward to make it go down any faster than the ward diminishes over time then as far as I’m concerned that’s an invulnerability phase.
“They” don’t. Axe throwers, the shaman (the ones that cast totems & buff other Wengari), berserkers & the mounted Wengari don’t get ward bars. The only ones that do are the Beast/Houndmaster as they were a campaign mini-boss. Bizarrely, the Patriarch/Matriarch don’t when they spawn as “normal” mobs.
Ward doesn’t give mobs % DR, the most likely explanation for what you’re seeing is that they get more than their normal life bar of ward (so if you did 100 damage & that was equal to 1% of their hp then it might only be equal to 0.75% of their ward). The amount of ward they get per breakpoint could be different per mob.
That spunds more like a bug. I can’t think of any boss invulnerability phases (I’ve not done Aberroth yet), but even Lagon when he’s preparing to phase change can take damage. Lightless Arbour phase 1 you’re damaging the things on the side rather than the boss.
From what I understand is they reduced their health and added the ward. Ward doesn’t have any resistances so it should go down quicker than their health, the issue is they get a full bar of ward which makes it look that way.
They have incredibly high ward retention which is dumb if you ask me, and sneaky.
For a high dps late game build, this isn’t an issue, but it’s a big hindrance to leveling.
Let’s do some basic loose bs math.
Mob has 1.000 HP, and the ward they get matches that.
If we ignore resistances, a mob with 3 ward stages has 4.000 HP until it dies.
Stage 1: 250HP then full bar of ward or 1.000 HP.
Stage 2: 250HP then again full bar of ward or 1.000 HP.
Stage 3: 250HP then last time full bar of ward or 1.000 HP.
Then you’re left with the remaining 250 HP.
So if they really reduced the health of those mobs, it means they reduced it by 300% before they added this silly ward mechanic, and I doubt this is the case. That’s why I said it’s sneaky.
Only like 10% of their total ward disappears on its own by ticking away.
It’s more likely they reduced the health by 100% and added 300% of ward.
It will go down quicker if you have penetration that takes it in the negative.
They didn’t reduce the health, they removed the dynamic damage resistance bosses got & added decaying ward instead.
Neither does the health, they’re just different coloured hp bars (though the blue one decays over time at an accelerating rate, so that is a difference).
No they don’t.
Yeah, this is basically what they did.
That depends on how quickly you do damage. If you left it alone completely then the ward would drain to 0.
My build has phys pen, but some there are some things that get ward stages where I can quite noticeably see that I do way more damage to their HP than I do to their ward. It’s just not worth trying to nibble them down in their ward phases with my lower-DPS attacks because their damage is so much greater than mine (comparatively) when they have ward up. So I end up saying screw it, and kite them, only using my highest DPS skill in between its cooldown until their ward drains off, then going back in with all my attacks.
I don’t know how or why it’s happening, but it’s extremely noticeable on certain mobs. It’s transient, so I can’t say it always happens to one specific mob, nor can I say that it’s related to any one specific mod they’re being given. But between this and other current issues with the game I have no interest in playing at all.
These new skeleton mobs are way too OP, and when they spawn next to a mob that has Allies Take Less Damage … just no. About a week before the last patch I had two Siege Golems spawn right next to each other that both had Allies Take Less Damage (in addition to two smaller mobs around them). I can’t remember if it was 100 corruption or 150, but either way, there’s nothing being dropped by that echo worth dealing with that.
It would be nice if I can actually click to target the enemy that power up the other mobs like the ones that give damage reduction. They’re always surrounded and mis-clicking is challenging when you have a blob of enemies on top of one another. I don’t think they are that difficult but the interfacing makes it more challenging than what’s needed when it impacts the user’s vision.
I’m finding that class and build has a lot to do with enjoyment of the Imperial zerg waves. On my falconer, one flip over the screen with aerial assault and everything dies. On my paladin, it takes like 30 seconds of spinning to kill them.
I have to second this, the imperial mobs are a bit overtuned. It’s made getting through monos kinda insane, so many mono rewards lost to these things. A small health nerf should be ok.
You can wait the ward out if you want, that’s certainly an option, but damaging the boss is always going to be quicker than not.
Fair enough & that sucks.
I was pointing out how it works. The boss ward has an accelerating decay such that higher DPS builds need to chew through more of the ward than lower DPS builds. As I mentioned, damaging the boss is always going to be quicker than not.
As an additional point of clarification: My lower-DPS skills require me to be closer to the mob (and this is true for all mobs with ward, not just bosses).
I know it’s not that I’m literally doing ZERO damage. I’m saying that in these cases my damage is being reduced so badly that it’s so damn close to zero that it might as well be zero. I mean I’m seeing numbers between 200-800 per hit, some above 1k. Only my highest DPS skill is worth even doing at all.
Doing my lower-DPS skills puts me into range of being hit, and it’s not worth taking the risk of being hit/killed if I cannot do any damage to them. Why should I stand there doing basically no damage and leaving myself open to being killed?
In these cases I kite them, only doing my largest-DPS skill when my cooldown allows it, wait for their ward to die off, and then come back in with all of my attacks.
In any case, this is only one of about three overlapping problems, with the net effect of it basically not being worth even attempting a single echo anymore. Even the first mob I run into is just such a pain in the effing ass that it’s completely sucked any enjoyment I was getting out of this game.
I was making good progress progressing the build I was working on, but with these changes it appears the build I was working on is no longer capable of doing 100 corruption. And it’s been the best build I’ve managed to make so far. So I’m really just not in the mood to have to go back to square one and find someone else’s build guide to start all over again.
I accepted their ward to be part of their total HP pool, which is considerably higher than the red bar. Now they are just a tanky mob, similar to the cage skeleton undead from PoE or any other bullet sponge in gaming history.
Again, to be clear, the ward is not the main reason I made this thread. It’s a secondary issue. The main reason I made this thread is to say that I’m thoroughly and completely done with the new mob mods.
One of this game’s major selling points for me was that it was supposed to be somewhere between D4 and PoE in terms of difficulty. I’ve played I think 6 different builds over the last two years. The first one I followed a build guide just to get a feel for things. The next 2-3 I made myself. Then I got a lucky drop so I tried another build guide that used that item, and since then I’ve made another build of my own. All but one of these were able to do empowered monos with at least 100 corruption.
My current build was getting up to 150 corruption, and I think I only have 1 item that I’d consider BiS. I was really looking forward to progressing on this build, despite the annoyances with enemies with ward and multiple heavy hitters being spawned with Allies Take Less Damage right next to each other.
But with this most recent release not only can I no longer complete empowered monos at 100 corruption, I’m getting my ass handed to me so badly that even the very first pack I encounter in each map makes me want to rage quit. That’s an EXTREME spike in difficulty. Way too extreme. And I don’t want to be forced back into needing to stay on top of playing meta builds just to be able to enjoy this game. That’s not why I bought this game.
In that sense, I do agree with you since the progression seems to be a spike after the corruption re-work. I didn’t play the last update prior(Harbringers) to this rework and ran into the 100 corruption and was constantly getting 1 shotted until I re-speced into all various types of resistances and that crit reduction since the modifiers on mono’s always seem to give mobs high crit chance. This did take me a while to redo my build and I had to do stuff like T3 dungeons with a bunch of COF drops to then head for empowered monoliths.
Well, I agree that the event mobs are quite overtuned for the stage of progression many builds are in, and understand your frustration in that regard very much.
I don’t think the problem is that they’re overtuned. After all, it’s supposed to be a challenge league, so they should be challenging.
The problem is that they can’t be avoided if all you want is to progress your build and are forced to use sub-optimal routes to do so (like the before mentioned running T3 dungeons).
They’re overtuned. If they were just more health and damage, maybe inconvenient numbers, etc. they’d be a challenge.
They do all that AND auto teleport into melee with you. Your build needs to be completely overtuned in order to survive. You have to be able to survive barrages of melee range attacks and stuns against over health and damage enemies you can’t run away from. For many players that run their end game builds on auto pilot through the monos like loot pinatas, this isn’t that big a deal because they’re already just watching a screensaver and have 20k ward. For regular players who treat each level as a comfortable challenge, this is an auto death spike.
Which isn’t always an option. Before the last patch I had been farming empowered blessings to upgrade the non-empowered ones I’d had. I can’t remember which timeline it was right now, but I’d spent two weeks farming one blessing - I’d literally gotten every single other blessing possible from that timeline except the one I needed - and then, just before the patch, I finally got the one I needed … but it was the lowest possible roll.
Which is basically no better than the one I had, so I still have to farm that blessing, but now I can’t because the difficulty on these things spiked so frigging hard that it’s just not even worth wasting my time on. I’m better off doing other things with my time, and hoping they fix this on the next cycle.
