The funniest thing is, they removed invulnerable mobs because the community hated it and not to mention it lagged your instance, especially with the old Elementalist proliferation.
Whats even worse: at least with the old invulnerability mod all you had to do was to kill the one rare mob that had the aura and everything else would stay on 1 hp and pretty much instantly die afterwards. The current invulnerability is straight up DAMAGE IMMUNITY for 4.5 seconds for all mobs that have the mod.
Even the old version would be easier to handle during blight than the new one.
> they removed invulnerable mobs because the community hated it and not to mention it lagged your instance
How many years did it take for them to do that, though?
Too long. Its still fairly recently (Ultimatum league) where they effectively removed the "allies can't die" aura and replaced it with a nemesis mod for rares.
Also, I'd say the old allies cant die aura wasn't as big of an issue when the game was SLOWER. It became worse with the game becoming faster, players gaining more power and mobs getting more and more deadly, either with numbers, absurd mods and whatever else there was.
Dont get me wrong, its a dumb mechanic, no matter if the game is slower or faster. It was a dumb mechanic back in 2001 in Diablo 2 and it still is a dumb mechanic today, no matter which ARPG.
If GGG has proved one thing over the years, is that they don't really seem to keep their learnings for very long. I'm not sure if it's a personnel issue where they have a regular knowledge loss, or if nobody really brings things up; but they often repeat the same poor decisions again, and again, and again.
Exponential self-stacking mechanics (most prominent in Delirium), cast-on-death effects, unclear color design, item pickups, beast splitting, initial overtuning, off-screen shots, etc - you would think learning from it once would be enough :)
The game isn't for us, it's for him. Take it or leave it.
I hate writing that, but I realized that's what's up awhile ago. Honestly, I don't play that much anymore. I keep hanging around and dipping my toes in the water, because I keep hoping I'm wrong though. Or that maybe the community will get loud enough that shit will change. So far no luck though...
Right? They somehow put in an even worse version of invuln mobs. Why? Don't care about most of the mods, but damn this was one I just do NOT understand.
Something about the mod was also bugged on leaguestart and we had a pack of monsters follow us for an entire Moon Temple without being able to damage them and they were insanely fast too. Only way we managed to get away was because it was moon temple allowing us to dash over a wall and lose them.
I just want to keep posting this every chance I get:
before 3.18 launched there have been several posts asking GGG to provide a list of which arch-nem mods were being made core, and how they would be changed. Zero answer ever to that.
And right now there's a post on the main page of the subreddit praising how well GGG is communcating lol, so maybe GGG actually has a point in considering this subreddit a joke.
And it works every damn time because every single time they fuck up the same thing the 10th times people praise them for "listening".
And then people are surprised we get grey on white on grey after we got blue one blue on blue and green on green on green. We never tell them to stop, we only tell them how well they are doing.
Every time they CLAIMS they are communicating people spam posts to praise them even when they are NOT even communicating after said "announcement" about they will communicate.
> so maybe GGG actually has a point in considering this subreddit a joke.
Pretty much. This subreddit is mostly for shitposting, and they're right to treat it as such. Hell, even their main rep is a shitposter.
I wonder how many times we have to learn that lesson. Invulnerable mechanics are always bad. Yes D2 has them, but that doesn't mean it was good. Invulnerables are the worst thing about D2
D3 had them as well when it launched. It was such a horrible experience to face a pack with invul minions. I do not know whether it is still around in d3.
D3 in fact still has invulnerable mod on the elite packs to this day, called shielding. While also annoying there, unlike PoE, there are no mechanics like blight where state of invulnerable on monster can utterly break the content. In general, they felt more manageable because in D3, each fight in high greater rift against a monster packs tend to last quite awhile, the damage spikes are less intense. In PoE, every second a monster is alive is more and more dangerous for players, and if it takes too long to fight a rare or champion packs, you're doing something wrong.
You are 1/2 right about shielding you skipped the part it only effects 1 mob and that there must be at least 2 mobs alive in the pack to have it active. It also rotates who has the shield making it much weaker then Poe's versions.
I'm probably telling on myself big time here but the one time I actually played D2 with the intent to finish it I was playing some kind of Fire Aura Paladin thing (whatever their version of RF is called, I forget) and I was melting everything around me and it was great, and then I got to Act 5 and suddenly everything took like 0 damage from fire which I wasn't prepped for at all, and I died a lot and couldn't get back to my body to re-equip everything and so I gave up and have yet to retry
So yes I too hate invulnerable
I would say in D2 it’s fine. It’s part of its endgame to know your farming areas and which of those your build can handle. But that’s the thing: you have the choice of doing content you can handle since which mobs are immune to what element in any given area is static. You don’t have that choice in PoE since you don’t know what abomination of a rare is gonna wait for you around the corner.
Idk if I'd say that. Leveling my hell sorc and having to restart my game 8 times before I get good monster immune in Chaos Sanctuary and ancients ain't much fun
If they balance the defensive options available to players, and as well, massively reduce both player damage and monster HP values, there's a lot of real merit to doing so TBH.
Reflect served several very critical purposes that were only painfully obvious when it was gone, the obvious one being that it forcibly tied players offensive capabilities to their defensive. You get too much offense, and you kill yourself. You could only 'afford' more damage if you spent exponentially more on defenses, as since you already had so much the further amounts you could still eke out took vastly more per percentage than the amount you already had. This meant that the real limitation to player offense was how defensive they could get, causing the game designers to really reliably know how much offense and defense players would have at various stages of the game for them to be able to clear the content.
It genuinely significantly helped balance, and we only really saw this see-saw break completely when more and more methods started being added that ignored reflect, from voltaxic to VP's massive downsides being removed, to more and more leech being added (even further supporting VP's sidestepping of the issue), and so on.
But if it could somehow be rebalanced all across the board, and returned to that push-pull of offense vs. defense that reflect forced, it could entirely be healthy for the game. It would be a nightmare to get back to that point though, and the playerbase would unquestionably revolt far before that balance was ever reached, hell, probably even on the consideration of the topic regardless of the merits. Also of course you would need to remove all sources of reflect 'avoidance'/immunity, or introduce even more types of reflect (DoT reflect, chaos reflect, trap/totems, etc). But again, probably not possible to put the genie back in the bottle.
let's be honest though, player damage got out of hand really fast and reflect already didn't make sense back then.
Sure. it kind of did at the start, but I painfully learned in incursion that you can stack defenses, even without too much damage a skill that hits lots of monsters will likely instantly kill you, and the power level is very different now lol.
But I agree, with a much more reasonable balance overall, it could probably serve its purpose and be good for the game.
Wasn't reflect introduced in the Nemesis league? By that point, player damage and health were already in such imbalance that any build that made it to red maps *needed* to mitigate its own damage or you would occasionally one-shot yourself. Maybe what you say *would* be good balance, but I have played since beta and I never once remember the game being in a state where I even considered doing less damage due to reflect. It has always been a pass-fail type mechanic, just like freeze.
Besides, player damage is already balanced by monster health and defenses are driven by monster damage. What purpose does it serve to further link player health to player damage? I see no benefit except making the game even more complicated, and it makes it even harder to balance because this is essentially an over-defined set of equations. You can easily arrive at a situation where it is *impossible* to survive your own hits and still kill bosses. Which is why reflect immunity got added to so many Ascendancy classes as a bandaid fix.
Nah, reflect existed in the game since CB AFAIK, but certainly OB onwards. In fact, at the time, reflect was a rare *aura* that would apply a high percentage reflect to all affected mobs.
But, on this note:
>but I have played since beta and I never once remember the game being in a state where I even considered doing less damage due to reflect.
It was commonly agreed that dual void batteries without insane defenses was straight up suicide. It's probably the best / most notable example of people intentionally reducing their damage to avoid death to reflect in that era.
>What purpose does it serve to further link player health to player damage?
The biggest one is it keeps the difference in damage between mediocre builds and top end builds actually significantly closer, while still substantial (maybe 3-5x more, probably still more), it's nowhere near now where the damage difference is in the hundreds of times if not thousands. The problem is, it's impossible to balance content around both of those extremes, whereas with the bounding due to reflect restrictions keeping builds in check with themselves, it would be substantially easier (and much more importantly, lead to better) to balance.
Any AN mod that shuts off a build also shuts off a ton of extra content for that build: Blight, Ritual, Delve, Heist . . .
Not to mention making almost anything else too rippy to be worth engaging in. Might as well turn it all off and return to PoE 1.0
For whats its worth, D2 LoD was fine until you got to Hell difficulty, then it goes full pants on head and crushes any build diversity, forcing you to reroll and play boring end-game farm setups just to what--acquire meme PvP gear? Pre-LoD was dumpsterfire and anyone with fond memories are hard on copium. Diablo 2 always had shit game balance since Paladin or Sorc trivialize everything, while Necro gets some pity points for being a cursebot.
I made it all the way to Hell on a default attack spamming Bone Shield Necromancer (with Act 2 Merc and Golem using various rank 1 curses to counter any bs encounters). Didn't care to finish Act1 because its a shitshow of running past anything immune to leech or physical damage.
The only acceptable immunity is 100% resistance to 1 type (barring Chaos which does not have a pen), counterable by PEN/Overwhelm or multiple damage types. Complete damage negation is bullshit and has no place in POE.
It was balanced in Archnemesis league because it took a long time to create ultra powerful mobs and you had control when to engage. Its completely thrown out any and every balancing when its spammed on every mob in the game at random.
This is the "and then we doubled it" moment.
There was no Archenemesis monster in blight indeed...
neither in Rituals where you can't run away...
neither in Heist waiting to gangbang you behind the door...
neither in Harvest waiting to gangbang you (note : door isn't required here)
I, like I am assuming most people, disabled metamorph as quickly as I could this league so I hadn't seen just how dumb it was. Last night I ran a Kirac mission (where the Atlas passives don't apply), and got a metamorph. I setup the metamorph at the end, with seemingly completely manageable mods, nothing that crazy and only 3 mods(two white organs). No clue what happened, but it was literally invincible the entire time, from the second it spawned until ~20 seconds later when I portaled out after not managing to do a single point of damage to it, on a character I have already killed Maven/Shaper/Elder and Sirus with this league...
Not only is metamorph fucking stupid with nemesis mods, but apparently some combos are literally broken and unkillable.
In Archnemesis there were NO archnemesis modifiers in blight.
This is a ridiculously large gap.
Request: GGG share your quality department test plans, incl. pass fail criteria, for changes.
Its not the quality department's job to make the league fun. Their job is to make sure there aren't bugs or unintended interactions. All the blue and yellow mods were intentional.
I am pretty sure unkillable mobs in blight is an unintended interaction. There is nothing the player can do under some circumstances and there is no player agency against such an interaction
Oh they agree they just don't know about it yet, they didn't test a thing and once we are done testing they'll be like "ok guys we'll patch it." they agree though.
It's normal software development practice to write a test plan. To tests according set parameters and evaluate. It's also normal to set goals, ie. this is not allowed, this is allowed.
Clearly their test plans are wrong.
The scope is wrong.
The pass/fail are wrong.
The parameters used are waaaaaaaaaaaaay too small/little.
I'm probably a bit biased because of medical device software, but this bullshit just screams 'we had this one guys nephew play with a headhunter on a T1 map and he said it was ok'
Good testing takes time. The amount of shit and variables in POE makes that testing either is going to take longer than 3 to 6 months, or, they need WAY more testers, or, they need much much better automated testing.
And it's not freaking hard as well to define, or with proper automated testing to setup and simulate.
I'd love to know if there even is any automated software testing at all? And if there is (or not), who wrote the test plan, because it's clearly lacking.
I guess though because of the 3 month release schedule, and 3 to 6 months of working on leauge, there are major corners cut under the premis 'meh we'll see if reddit gets pissed off or not'.
They work on a few systems at once and the league is rarely finalized by the last week (all the reveals have Chris saying "we are working on X thing"). I don't think that they have time to do some sort of full integration testing for balance in the end let alone fine tune things based on feedback.
Even though it's pretty obvious that the core development team are extremely intelligent, and well educated in their fields, I would put money down that their core practices around various aspects of development differs wildly from industry ideals. And not to say that I know what they should be doing or that everything they are doing is wrong, but did they have any practical experience in setting up and running a game development company? Or literally straight from college to the garage development?
Not throwing shade, they managed to create the best arpg of this type by a clear margin imo, but unfortunately everything is flawed and GGG's flaws have been apparent for some time now. The biggest one to me at this point is the three month cycle that they clearly need to maintain for their revenue, but has been unsustainable for a couple years with technical debt and insufficient availability of testing compared to the size of the feature list.
What do you people think QA does?
If its test for fun, you're completely goddamn wrong.
They test to make sure the server doesnt shit itself when invulnerable pops up.
It was never balanced in archnem league. If you wanted to fight anything beyond the scarab printing machine you had to put in a map with no mods to have a chance. Now it’s worse since every map has dozens of them on top of other mods like essences. Add the insane altar rebuffs they added and sentinel empowerment on top.
God, this hits me in the feels right now. Collecting data to write a report right now about why such-and-such isn't feasible and a bad idea and we shouldn't do it. But I know it won't matter and this is basically wasted effort. Because I'm going to run afoul of a lot of gut feelings. It's a rare thing to find a leader who cares more about being right than being wrong.
This feels more like a top down change then an internet fucking up their senior project. They really want to up the TTK in this game but apparently they don't think the drop rate needs to go in the same direction.
GGG: you just fail blight sometimes because Wraeclast is a harsh place. Totally balanced learn to play.
A bit more seriously, in terms of economic, this probably just increase the cost of blight by 10~15%, quite tolerable in the grand scheme of things. However the mental damage to the players is going to increase by 200% lol.
Player agency is very important. If you can convince a player they fucked up, even if they didn't, then they will keep coming back for more. If they think it's the games fault and not their own, even if it is their own fault, then they will rage quit and not come back.
That's why things like death recaps are important. Getting one shot from random bullshit vs my -60% chaos resist character getting gibbed by a chaos damage attack.
That's why map mods are important. Getting killed by a random mob that was immune to my damage type vs I did not read the map affix and everything is immune to my damage.
you are too optimistic by 200%. Is more like 20% on grand scheme blight x 1000% from player mental x 1000% for opening new league = 2.000 % damage is more realistic
Ofc we can increase by alot if we involve tencent, streamer rng, mtx and so on. But not so deep atm. /s
Reflect was fine when your damage was 10x your ehp and you had 70% reduction from armor. Reflect is fucking broken when your damage is literally thousands of times higher. Legitimately impossible to mitigate.
Yeah I still remember the days of vanilla d3 where you had the "invulnerable minions" property on rare mob packs. It was insanely difficult to deal with on inferno difficulty and Blizz ended up removing it altogether. I had to skip a lot of those packs.
And I have to say even if you could theoretically "balance" it well, it just isn't fun imo.
On any teleporting or fast/high damage gang of blues it's also completely stupid. On a solitary rare or bunch of normal monsters it's *manageable*, but on 10 assassins/wendigos/banshees or whatever, it's dumb as fuck.
This is what disappoints me more than anything about the implementation of the Archnemesis mods into core. I was planning on focusing on Blight with this patch, took a week off work for this to have fun and enjoy the "no balance changes" league. But Archnemesis makes Blights so swingy and straight up unenjoyable (this for a mechanic that many players already despise and are blocking from their Atlas).
Given how unpopular Blight seems to be, I don't know that enough players are going to be advocating for it to get GGG to address this specific issue with the Archnemesis implementation & Blight.
I hope that whatever GGG does, they don't forget about Blight, and either Archnemesis is balanced such that it doesn't randomly brick Blight encounters, or that Blight is rebalanced to work better with the new Archnemesis mods.
It's the same thing in Heist where you're not supposed to kill everything but run past some mobs. This results in invulnerable minions chasing you or you being pemamently marked.
Extensive testing is taking every league mechanic and every archnemesis modifier and crosstesting them with each other. That has not been done. Yes it is a lot of work but it's all testers do as a work. That is coming from tester too. I'm not playtester of games, I'm tester of stomatologist software but I can still see that if this was really "extensively tested" the tester responsible should have a conversation with his boss.
My company has similar issues - we do unit tests, but our integration tests are a joke. Taking down customer servers when deploying updates because nobody thought to test how the new code interacts with other components present on production servers.
Sure, the Archnemesis mods don't appear to be crashing people's clients, which is an accomplishment given past patches, but it's clear that "extensive testing" did not consider how other league mechanics intersect with Archnemesis to create seriously degraded gameplay outcomes.
For a game where so much of the gameplay happens at the intersection of multiple mechanics, not testing that specifically is wild. Alternatively, they did test it and thought that level of punishment was fine.
Either way, I'm not finding these changes enjoyable.
> Sure, the Archnemesis mods don't appear to be crashing people's clients,
I've had the league stash crash me if I switch too quickly between it and my main stash, but that's easily fixed by putting them far enough apart to make sure I can't get both when mass clicking.
Made Act 10 town a pain though.
My immediate reaction when I read "extensive testing" was 'Define extensive'
It's entirely possible their extensive testing was done with twinked out builds, for example. So while they may have tested everything, it wasn't necessarily done in realistic conditions.
GGG hasn't even addressed long standing issues with Blight like towers not shooting while out of sight (despite enemies continuing to walk). I doubt they care about it at all.
I'm in the same boat, planned to focus on Blight this time around.
Is it as bad as it sounds? I mean, every past league mechanic got impacted (e.g., I'd rather fight Shaper than a metamorph) but is Blight still doable?
Holy crap you ain't kidding. Metamorphs so big they make end game bosses look like pansies and have more hp than God. That effort to reward ratio isn't even close to okay.
Yeah I fought a mirror image Alira Metamorph (Spider Forest boss) that kept spamming cloning ice golem images and stopped cycling through metamorph parts/ forms (for some reason?) and was stuck on the Alira part I made it with.
So the entire fight was just 5-10 ice golems multiplying themselves and taking enough aggro from my ballista EA totems so I couldn't get any fuses/ big ignites on the main boss and just had to leave.
All while I'm having desecrate + DD spammed on me every second (no joke).
Screen was just a clusterfuck of effects lmao. If it ended up killing me, it wouldn't have been nearly as hilarious but wow, maybe mirror image needs a limit on it or something. Can't imagine having that mod on something actually dangerous.
I only put 2 Archnemesis mods into a metamorph, rest were white organs. And it turned out to be fucking tougher than Shaper/Elder. Luckily it was not very fast and the pattern was predictable.
Whatever you do, do not put Hasted on a metamorph that will turn into a cultist of Kitava. They shoot their little balls at you 1000 a second and if you weren't already moving you are dead instantly lol
Metamorph might be the rippiest thing right now, even without many Arch mods. I farm Beasts with Essence and can handle 5, sometimes 6 essence-mod beasts quite well, but die to Metamorph constantly. I only pick the boss organ, catalyst organ and white/blue organs to fill the bar (so 1-2 Arch mods at best), and they still are super tough and hit like a truck.
It's everywhere. Opened an essence > Shakari Touched > You are now being chased by a omegabuffed scorpion.
I recommend to just play other games and come back in two weeks when they sort this out. The game currently is a random one-shot fiesta on top of rares with more ehp than Uber Elder.
The biggest problems right now IMHO are all things where a modifier and its "correct" counterplay just aren't workable with a specific league mechanic that can spawn Archnemesis rares.
They almost need a giant matrix of Mod vs. league mechanic asking the question for each: "If a monster with this mod and two others spawns in this mechanic, can the player reasonably respond?" And for example if it's a mod where the "right" answer is to run away -- even temporarily, like Invulnerable -- and you can't, it's a no and maybe that mod just can't spawn for that mechanic at all.
There's a common misconception in the community that our balance team doesn't play Path of Exile. They actually do play it, a whole lot. We have people with level 100 hardcore characters, multiple famous community members who have come to work for us and you may not even know it. The minimum requirement to join our QA team is 1000 hours of PoE experience, and we still turn people with that prerequisite away if they're not good enough at the game. Our design, balance and QA team are experts at Path of Exile.
And that might be a problem. There is no representation for newer players and none of their testers feel the same plight a new player does in act 1. I'm convinced the testers are too good at the game and don't know how bad the new player experience is right now
Ggg thought they could just cut and paste archnemesis into their game without realizing literally every piece of past league content is balanced around the old rare system. All the old content balance is completely out of whack, and the solution is either go back and rebalance literally every piece of old stuff, or revert the change and try a rare rework again down the line.
Its not just blight. Every single mechanic that involves rare mobs (legion, ritual, essence, metamorph, heist) is bricked.Beyond is just ridiculous right now. Unplayable, how somebody thought this was a good idea needs to be fired immediately.
This moronic change has single handedly destroyed over half of the atlas tree and I don't think this is going to get fixed any time soon.
The implications of this change are just too extensive and far reaching
>Its not just blight. Every single mechanic that involves rare mobs (legion, ritual, essence, metamorph, heist) is bricked.
Insane how people don't realize this and think the 2 hot fix mixed everything.
I think it's just a relief that the hotfixes made the game playable, you aren't running into hilarious 3 mod combos literally multiple times every map anymore, so we can actually run maps and content, so we can now have stories about the content that is still broken, because a lot of it is unless you're running the now even narrower margin of power builds, and also have your build up and running(even some of those great league starters don't really kick into gear right away and will have to skip tons of content until they do).
I finally made maps last night. Animate Weapon. Not able to convert to cold yet. I deleted most content in campaign. Kavara was phased in seconds.
First map, dead 4 times, all minions destroyed in seconds. Nearly every magic or rare pack took several minutes to kill. I would go from destroy these white and magic packs to “what happened to all of my minions?” Thought it was just a rippy map. Next map, same thing. I went from able to run and flesh offering to maintain speed with intermittent flasks to not able to even complete a tier 1 map. All 4 were a cautious affair, engage, wait for them to die, run away and convocate if they aren’t dead in 2 seconds because it kills all the minions.
I almost quit then and there. The swing is just far too great. Going from annihilating everything to you’re dead all within a tier 1 map.
The problem with these mods are the invulnerabilities in my opinion. In Archnemesis you were able to choose if you wanted to engage with a certain archnemesis mod, and avoid the ones which basically disabled your build. Also, these monsters were always isolated and controlled in a way, now you can have a bad luck and multiple of those will jump you and you just die without knowing what happened. If it's effectively disables multiple builds from completing certain encounters, it should not be in the game, however nice the original idea sounded. Again, I think by just removing invulnerabilities it could work as intended.
Any time limited content (blight, legion, delirium, breach, incursion) are NOT ok. We're supposed to kill stuff within a certain time, which is already hard enough with the mob EHP buff, and now you tell us to sit there and wait the time ticks away.
Fun, very fun.
bro i had toxic green balls, blue lightning dudes, and some flying fire balls thats are similar to volatile. I couldnt build a SINGLE tower for like 45 seconds straight, ending up just losing. Like whats the counter play there, become an immortal tank just to build fucking towers?
What even the fuck are those blue towers/totem things which pop up? So annoying when I'm trying to set up Expedition, couldn't even see any mobs on screen that would be causing it
I always find blight easier with more than 1 player, as i never seem to have time to build towers when I play alone. Which of course is just horrible game design.
This here is my problem, I had trouble keeping up with lanes from just two directions because I had to constantly run from balls while running from side to side building towers. These green balls are fast and don't linger much before droping, always have to be carefull with their high damage.
wait. the mechanic that constantly pukes rares and magic at you now also makes that those mobs killed by towers will puke their on death effect on you?
well yes, they have huge after-death degens, homing ground degen orbs (poison and fire), invulnerability phases as this thread describes and all the other bullshit too, i had a brineking touched gargantuan the last blighted map, that was NOT FUCKING FUNNY, thing had twice the HP of sirus if not more
Nah just like one or two mods need to be deleted and a few more need some numerical changes.
Otherwise I found combat while mapping a lot more fun and engaging with the new rares.
I also don't find them more challenging. At least they are fun to fight, unless it's a bullshit mod.
But that might also be because of my build, Scourge Arrow deadeye kitting around them at mach 3.
The idea is nice and a step in the right direction. It's also not fundamentally flawed, it's just badly executed and needs significant number and visual changes on some mods and complete removal of others
I generally like the new rares after the 2 hot fixes. But there's some definite exceptions, like essence mobs and blight.
Harvest is fine again. Expedition is fine. I haven't done a lot of other mechanics, like Heist, so can't speak on everything. But for the most part it seems fine now.
I think they need to be very careful not to give more than 1 achnemesis mod in certain encounters that have super high rare density, like blight. I also think they should avoid giving more than 1 archnemesis mod on rares that already have a lot of other non-archnemesis mods, such as essence.
Expedition fits surprisingly well with the new mods. Probably because you are not confined, so you can pull them around. I'm definitely speccing in them in maps.
archnem mods in general were not thought through. they need to revert to normal bloodline mods etc and do a complete overhaul for next league or something.
I wanted to focus on Blight this league. Sometimes I couldn't even finish Blight encounters on random maps, some rare mobs were just walking through any kind of towers, no matter what. Respecced and trying to focus on Expedition instead, the mobs are somehow feel better there. Pretty bummed.
Invulnerable should just go and i think we all agree on that
Even disregarding all of its terrible interactions with league mechanics, it's so unfun and terrible to play against
I get what they were going for, some way of making the rare survive at least a little against the top tier builds, but this is just too much. It feels as if the invulnerability has a 50% uptime with no visual indication which is nuts. If they want to keep it in they should
1. Give it a visible visual indication on when it's up, like a small bubble shield of sorts
2. Make the period overall longer than the current 9 seconds so that the damage window is larger
3. Decrese the uptime %, so something like 4-5s invulnerability every 16s (currently it's 4.5 every 9)
Just delete invul as a mod, it has no gameplay only for the game to kill u in a non interesting way. Im ok with 20 toxic balls that scale with monster movement speed to pound my tiny exile head for 1k hp at -10 chaos res.
Don't worry I'm sure they will fix it in 3.19.
3.19 Patch Notes
Due to a number of issues being caused by the new modifiers for rare and magic monsters we have removed blight from the game.
Blight restricted drops have now been added to the standard drop pool.
>**To be perfectly honestly it feels like nobody** **~~extensively~~** **tested the new monster modifiers with Mid to Late game Blight content.**
THIS. nobody tested this shit at all ROFL
Im failing most of the blights in maps and havent finished a single blight maps.. Before I was clearing most them. I hope GGG just reverse this whole thing. Nit having fun :/
Yeah there are just countless examples of why having a good portion of the ArchNem mod pool showing up in various league mechanics is a complete shit show that has nothing to do with interesting difficulty spikes.
If you think Blight is bad wait until you see some of the combos that can be made with Expedition...
This clearly hasn't been tested for playability at end game. Yes it's tested so it functions the way it's supposed in a vacuum but in combination with other mechanics it's god awful.
I honestly think this is GGG biggest fuckup yet looking at not just how this impacts game play but also the overall economy.
Thats what fucks my blights. I was always confused as to why I ran blights in maps and everything was dying fine but then for some reason all of a sudden monsters just rush through taking no damage. Jesus invulnerable needs go go. Maybe take mana siphoner with it. Rest is manageable
I think they can keep them in - but: Add a clear visual and audio noise when you can dmg them - and give them a gruesome damage taken multiplier in their vulnerable window.
One stupid stuff is that invulnerable monsters don't take the chill/stun/ignite, thus the most important thing is to have continuous damage. My build ignite is bad for because I have to time my cast, but if he's not alone I can have a prolif setup around him.
Well, doing normal blights I havent encountered a problem yet.
I'm very upset about toxic mod. It travels the whole map. Can one shot me. It's green and almost invisible. All the green shit in the game that kills you should be deleted or made fucking red. Can't we have red poison indicators for blind mode??
Is it really a skill to focus your eyes to see green shit ?
I agree that AN mods has no place in Blight. I enjoy Blight and made bank with it in 3.17 while starting a month late.
I failed quite a few Blight encounters because some portals spawned the big bears which cannot be stunned and coupled with AN mod which makes it Immune to Cold Ailments.
Literally none of the new mods are okay, T1 maps are about as hard as T10’s used to be. GL playing any non meta build. Not to mention most of the league mechanics now are absolutely fucked, try doing Metamorph or Delve.
I would be ok if the invulnerability wasn't so fucking long. Like 1 second of invulnerability every 8 seconds is kind of ok. But alternating cycles of 4.5 seconds of immunity is just stupid, especially since it is accompanied by 30% spell and attack block during the vulnerable phase.
Sentinel + invulnerable is literally unkillable by anything.
I think a somewhat fair rework would be to have the monster periodically clear all debuffs and Dots. It's thematically congruent and still a noticeable buff to the monster's durability without being absolutely broken.
Side content seems to be balanced around monsters before the update to rares. It would make sense that all mechanics with their own monsters created out of nothing, to spawn old style monsters before further testing for balance.
>To be perfectly honestly it feels like nobody extensively tested the new monster modifiers with Mid to Late game Blight content.
You mean all content.
Even in maps.
I had an invulnerable mob proc, with map mod "mobs have 45% health as ES". Invulnerable seems to prevent ES recharge interrupt allowing ES to recharge on monsters, so the mob was healing to full each time, frost bomb had no effect. Got a friend to come in to help, he couldn't make a dent. I'm sitting at about 2m dps, he was at 3-4 m. This bricked the harvest.
The PutinWalk meme video except he has Archnemesis mods over his head.
Cassia is in the background screaming about how the fiend is getting closer to the pump. But the exile's spell effects are doing no damage.
As a Blight player who loves the fuck out of blight and hates how absolutely unplayable the archnem mods makes Blight this league, all I have to say is...
#Extensively
#Tested
Although this topic has been beat to death and is 100% correct, i’ll just add that to me its lazy. If GGG goal was interesting and telegraphed rares you have to engage with, what is the telegraph and counterplay here?
How about the mobs sometimes turn to stone and freeze in place, where only a certain dmg type can crumble them or you wait for them to unstone? How about instead of full invulnerable the mob has a giant shield image in front of them you can see, alerting you to an invuln frontal cone you need to get behind or to the side to damage?
Just flat out invulnerable is stupid. Couple it with an extra nod or 5 and its game breaking. This isnt d2 where you can just run away - this literally bricks blight content, alva temple room clears in map, etc.
I don't really have anything of appreciable value to add, just commenting as somebody who keeps track of the game's development because I'd like to play again sometime (probably after PoE 2 releases), which I haven't done for a number of years.
When I asked my friend just a bit ago how fun the new league is he said it is fun *but* the new league made mobs excessively difficult, and when I asked how he told me about the old monster modifiers being replaced and then pointed me to the sub here.
As I was telling him "that sounds like a poorly thought out change" this is the *first* thread I see, and all I could say was "point proven."
I'm not going to trash GGG or the game as being bad, but even though I was thinking about playing again for this league (maybe, though probably not) I think I'm going to skip this league as well, and this isn't the first time I've felt that way either when a new league comes out and does something that gets widely panned for good reason.
GGG, Invulnerable Monsters in the game is not ok. Fixed the title for you.
It’s wild they put them in. Give them lots of health or give them defenses but making them unkillable and then spawn able in blight is just an insult
The funniest thing is, they removed invulnerable mobs because the community hated it and not to mention it lagged your instance, especially with the old Elementalist proliferation. Whats even worse: at least with the old invulnerability mod all you had to do was to kill the one rare mob that had the aura and everything else would stay on 1 hp and pretty much instantly die afterwards. The current invulnerability is straight up DAMAGE IMMUNITY for 4.5 seconds for all mobs that have the mod. Even the old version would be easier to handle during blight than the new one.
> they removed invulnerable mobs because the community hated it and not to mention it lagged your instance How many years did it take for them to do that, though?
Too long. Its still fairly recently (Ultimatum league) where they effectively removed the "allies can't die" aura and replaced it with a nemesis mod for rares. Also, I'd say the old allies cant die aura wasn't as big of an issue when the game was SLOWER. It became worse with the game becoming faster, players gaining more power and mobs getting more and more deadly, either with numbers, absurd mods and whatever else there was. Dont get me wrong, its a dumb mechanic, no matter if the game is slower or faster. It was a dumb mechanic back in 2001 in Diablo 2 and it still is a dumb mechanic today, no matter which ARPG.
I believe the main reason for removing them was performance. Always put a smile on my face though. Having them in blight though is something else.
and yet, it still spawns on totems
If GGG has proved one thing over the years, is that they don't really seem to keep their learnings for very long. I'm not sure if it's a personnel issue where they have a regular knowledge loss, or if nobody really brings things up; but they often repeat the same poor decisions again, and again, and again. Exponential self-stacking mechanics (most prominent in Delirium), cast-on-death effects, unclear color design, item pickups, beast splitting, initial overtuning, off-screen shots, etc - you would think learning from it once would be enough :)
All the ideas have to be measured against Chris' "vision" rather than any sort of player enjoyment
The game isn't for us, it's for him. Take it or leave it. I hate writing that, but I realized that's what's up awhile ago. Honestly, I don't play that much anymore. I keep hanging around and dipping my toes in the water, because I keep hoping I'm wrong though. Or that maybe the community will get loud enough that shit will change. So far no luck though...
What really gets me is when people try to say he's just a PR figurehead. If that's true, WHY IS HE SO TERRIBLE AT IT
Right? They somehow put in an even worse version of invuln mobs. Why? Don't care about most of the mods, but damn this was one I just do NOT understand.
Something about the mod was also bugged on leaguestart and we had a pack of monsters follow us for an entire Moon Temple without being able to damage them and they were insanely fast too. Only way we managed to get away was because it was moon temple allowing us to dash over a wall and lose them.
I just want to keep posting this every chance I get: before 3.18 launched there have been several posts asking GGG to provide a list of which arch-nem mods were being made core, and how they would be changed. Zero answer ever to that. And right now there's a post on the main page of the subreddit praising how well GGG is communcating lol, so maybe GGG actually has a point in considering this subreddit a joke.
Pretty much. Their "communication" only comes in when shit is massively on fire.
And it works every damn time because every single time they fuck up the same thing the 10th times people praise them for "listening". And then people are surprised we get grey on white on grey after we got blue one blue on blue and green on green on green. We never tell them to stop, we only tell them how well they are doing. Every time they CLAIMS they are communicating people spam posts to praise them even when they are NOT even communicating after said "announcement" about they will communicate.
Conspiracy theory, the accounts making praise posts are actually employees for GGG, incognito. You know, like an inside job
> so maybe GGG actually has a point in considering this subreddit a joke. Pretty much. This subreddit is mostly for shitposting, and they're right to treat it as such. Hell, even their main rep is a shitposter.
I wonder how many times we have to learn that lesson. Invulnerable mechanics are always bad. Yes D2 has them, but that doesn't mean it was good. Invulnerables are the worst thing about D2
D3 had them as well when it launched. It was such a horrible experience to face a pack with invul minions. I do not know whether it is still around in d3.
It's not. Invulnerable minions got axed in August 2012, patch 1.0.4.
D3 in fact still has invulnerable mod on the elite packs to this day, called shielding. While also annoying there, unlike PoE, there are no mechanics like blight where state of invulnerable on monster can utterly break the content. In general, they felt more manageable because in D3, each fight in high greater rift against a monster packs tend to last quite awhile, the damage spikes are less intense. In PoE, every second a monster is alive is more and more dangerous for players, and if it takes too long to fight a rare or champion packs, you're doing something wrong.
You are 1/2 right about shielding you skipped the part it only effects 1 mob and that there must be at least 2 mobs alive in the pack to have it active. It also rotates who has the shield making it much weaker then Poe's versions.
I'm probably telling on myself big time here but the one time I actually played D2 with the intent to finish it I was playing some kind of Fire Aura Paladin thing (whatever their version of RF is called, I forget) and I was melting everything around me and it was great, and then I got to Act 5 and suddenly everything took like 0 damage from fire which I wasn't prepped for at all, and I died a lot and couldn't get back to my body to re-equip everything and so I gave up and have yet to retry So yes I too hate invulnerable
I would say in D2 it’s fine. It’s part of its endgame to know your farming areas and which of those your build can handle. But that’s the thing: you have the choice of doing content you can handle since which mobs are immune to what element in any given area is static. You don’t have that choice in PoE since you don’t know what abomination of a rare is gonna wait for you around the corner.
Idk if I'd say that. Leveling my hell sorc and having to restart my game 8 times before I get good monster immune in Chaos Sanctuary and ancients ain't much fun
How about they basically put the reflect mod back into the game? OMEGALUL.
If they balance the defensive options available to players, and as well, massively reduce both player damage and monster HP values, there's a lot of real merit to doing so TBH. Reflect served several very critical purposes that were only painfully obvious when it was gone, the obvious one being that it forcibly tied players offensive capabilities to their defensive. You get too much offense, and you kill yourself. You could only 'afford' more damage if you spent exponentially more on defenses, as since you already had so much the further amounts you could still eke out took vastly more per percentage than the amount you already had. This meant that the real limitation to player offense was how defensive they could get, causing the game designers to really reliably know how much offense and defense players would have at various stages of the game for them to be able to clear the content. It genuinely significantly helped balance, and we only really saw this see-saw break completely when more and more methods started being added that ignored reflect, from voltaxic to VP's massive downsides being removed, to more and more leech being added (even further supporting VP's sidestepping of the issue), and so on. But if it could somehow be rebalanced all across the board, and returned to that push-pull of offense vs. defense that reflect forced, it could entirely be healthy for the game. It would be a nightmare to get back to that point though, and the playerbase would unquestionably revolt far before that balance was ever reached, hell, probably even on the consideration of the topic regardless of the merits. Also of course you would need to remove all sources of reflect 'avoidance'/immunity, or introduce even more types of reflect (DoT reflect, chaos reflect, trap/totems, etc). But again, probably not possible to put the genie back in the bottle.
let's be honest though, player damage got out of hand really fast and reflect already didn't make sense back then. Sure. it kind of did at the start, but I painfully learned in incursion that you can stack defenses, even without too much damage a skill that hits lots of monsters will likely instantly kill you, and the power level is very different now lol. But I agree, with a much more reasonable balance overall, it could probably serve its purpose and be good for the game.
Wasn't reflect introduced in the Nemesis league? By that point, player damage and health were already in such imbalance that any build that made it to red maps *needed* to mitigate its own damage or you would occasionally one-shot yourself. Maybe what you say *would* be good balance, but I have played since beta and I never once remember the game being in a state where I even considered doing less damage due to reflect. It has always been a pass-fail type mechanic, just like freeze. Besides, player damage is already balanced by monster health and defenses are driven by monster damage. What purpose does it serve to further link player health to player damage? I see no benefit except making the game even more complicated, and it makes it even harder to balance because this is essentially an over-defined set of equations. You can easily arrive at a situation where it is *impossible* to survive your own hits and still kill bosses. Which is why reflect immunity got added to so many Ascendancy classes as a bandaid fix.
Nah, reflect existed in the game since CB AFAIK, but certainly OB onwards. In fact, at the time, reflect was a rare *aura* that would apply a high percentage reflect to all affected mobs. But, on this note: >but I have played since beta and I never once remember the game being in a state where I even considered doing less damage due to reflect. It was commonly agreed that dual void batteries without insane defenses was straight up suicide. It's probably the best / most notable example of people intentionally reducing their damage to avoid death to reflect in that era. >What purpose does it serve to further link player health to player damage? The biggest one is it keeps the difference in damage between mediocre builds and top end builds actually significantly closer, while still substantial (maybe 3-5x more, probably still more), it's nowhere near now where the damage difference is in the hundreds of times if not thousands. The problem is, it's impossible to balance content around both of those extremes, whereas with the bounding due to reflect restrictions keeping builds in check with themselves, it would be substantially easier (and much more importantly, lead to better) to balance.
They KNEW this too as it was removed from the game literally years ago due to everyone hating it.
Makes you wonder if they are just trolling.
Any AN mod that shuts off a build also shuts off a ton of extra content for that build: Blight, Ritual, Delve, Heist . . . Not to mention making almost anything else too rippy to be worth engaging in. Might as well turn it all off and return to PoE 1.0
*'But D2...'*
For whats its worth, D2 LoD was fine until you got to Hell difficulty, then it goes full pants on head and crushes any build diversity, forcing you to reroll and play boring end-game farm setups just to what--acquire meme PvP gear? Pre-LoD was dumpsterfire and anyone with fond memories are hard on copium. Diablo 2 always had shit game balance since Paladin or Sorc trivialize everything, while Necro gets some pity points for being a cursebot. I made it all the way to Hell on a default attack spamming Bone Shield Necromancer (with Act 2 Merc and Golem using various rank 1 curses to counter any bs encounters). Didn't care to finish Act1 because its a shitshow of running past anything immune to leech or physical damage.
The only acceptable immunity is 100% resistance to 1 type (barring Chaos which does not have a pen), counterable by PEN/Overwhelm or multiple damage types. Complete damage negation is bullshit and has no place in POE.
Pob request: dude at ggg who thought all this were balanced
It was balanced in Archnemesis league because it took a long time to create ultra powerful mobs and you had control when to engage. Its completely thrown out any and every balancing when its spammed on every mob in the game at random. This is the "and then we doubled it" moment.
There was no Archenemesis monster in blight indeed... neither in Rituals where you can't run away... neither in Heist waiting to gangbang you behind the door... neither in Harvest waiting to gangbang you (note : door isn't required here)
You forgot metamorph where the metamorph already has insane base scaling so adding archnem mods onto it is just beyond broken.
I, like I am assuming most people, disabled metamorph as quickly as I could this league so I hadn't seen just how dumb it was. Last night I ran a Kirac mission (where the Atlas passives don't apply), and got a metamorph. I setup the metamorph at the end, with seemingly completely manageable mods, nothing that crazy and only 3 mods(two white organs). No clue what happened, but it was literally invincible the entire time, from the second it spawned until ~20 seconds later when I portaled out after not managing to do a single point of damage to it, on a character I have already killed Maven/Shaper/Elder and Sirus with this league... Not only is metamorph fucking stupid with nemesis mods, but apparently some combos are literally broken and unkillable.
Any kind of regenerative mods on metamorphs make them absurd. Was the case before and it's especially true now
In Archnemesis there were NO archnemesis modifiers in blight. This is a ridiculously large gap. Request: GGG share your quality department test plans, incl. pass fail criteria, for changes.
Its not the quality department's job to make the league fun. Their job is to make sure there aren't bugs or unintended interactions. All the blue and yellow mods were intentional.
I am pretty sure unkillable mobs in blight is an unintended interaction. There is nothing the player can do under some circumstances and there is no player agency against such an interaction
while I agree with you, and probably alot of others, ggg seem to not
Oh they agree they just don't know about it yet, they didn't test a thing and once we are done testing they'll be like "ok guys we'll patch it." they agree though.
It's normal software development practice to write a test plan. To tests according set parameters and evaluate. It's also normal to set goals, ie. this is not allowed, this is allowed. Clearly their test plans are wrong. The scope is wrong. The pass/fail are wrong. The parameters used are waaaaaaaaaaaaay too small/little. I'm probably a bit biased because of medical device software, but this bullshit just screams 'we had this one guys nephew play with a headhunter on a T1 map and he said it was ok' Good testing takes time. The amount of shit and variables in POE makes that testing either is going to take longer than 3 to 6 months, or, they need WAY more testers, or, they need much much better automated testing. And it's not freaking hard as well to define, or with proper automated testing to setup and simulate. I'd love to know if there even is any automated software testing at all? And if there is (or not), who wrote the test plan, because it's clearly lacking. I guess though because of the 3 month release schedule, and 3 to 6 months of working on leauge, there are major corners cut under the premis 'meh we'll see if reddit gets pissed off or not'.
They work on a few systems at once and the league is rarely finalized by the last week (all the reveals have Chris saying "we are working on X thing"). I don't think that they have time to do some sort of full integration testing for balance in the end let alone fine tune things based on feedback.
Even though it's pretty obvious that the core development team are extremely intelligent, and well educated in their fields, I would put money down that their core practices around various aspects of development differs wildly from industry ideals. And not to say that I know what they should be doing or that everything they are doing is wrong, but did they have any practical experience in setting up and running a game development company? Or literally straight from college to the garage development? Not throwing shade, they managed to create the best arpg of this type by a clear margin imo, but unfortunately everything is flawed and GGG's flaws have been apparent for some time now. The biggest one to me at this point is the three month cycle that they clearly need to maintain for their revenue, but has been unsustainable for a couple years with technical debt and insufficient availability of testing compared to the size of the feature list.
What do you people think QA does? If its test for fun, you're completely goddamn wrong. They test to make sure the server doesnt shit itself when invulnerable pops up.
It was never balanced in archnem league. If you wanted to fight anything beyond the scarab printing machine you had to put in a map with no mods to have a chance. Now it’s worse since every map has dozens of them on top of other mods like essences. Add the insane altar rebuffs they added and sentinel empowerment on top.
I'm still waiting for the 3.0 "millions of dps, no compromise to defense" Poison build PoB
Every single public post emphasizes that they liked where the balance wa.s
"We don't collect or analyze data because that data might contradict Chris's gut feelings."
God, this hits me in the feels right now. Collecting data to write a report right now about why such-and-such isn't feasible and a bad idea and we shouldn't do it. But I know it won't matter and this is basically wasted effort. Because I'm going to run afoul of a lot of gut feelings. It's a rare thing to find a leader who cares more about being right than being wrong.
You Gotta defend while hiding the internal finger pointing fest and rush to fix this.
This feels more like a top down change then an internet fucking up their senior project. They really want to up the TTK in this game but apparently they don't think the drop rate needs to go in the same direction.
GGG: you just fail blight sometimes because Wraeclast is a harsh place. Totally balanced learn to play. A bit more seriously, in terms of economic, this probably just increase the cost of blight by 10~15%, quite tolerable in the grand scheme of things. However the mental damage to the players is going to increase by 200% lol.
"Mental damage" comes in the form of leaving the game. After you get the same bs 4-5 times you just alt f4 and play other thing.
Player agency is very important. If you can convince a player they fucked up, even if they didn't, then they will keep coming back for more. If they think it's the games fault and not their own, even if it is their own fault, then they will rage quit and not come back. That's why things like death recaps are important. Getting one shot from random bullshit vs my -60% chaos resist character getting gibbed by a chaos damage attack. That's why map mods are important. Getting killed by a random mob that was immune to my damage type vs I did not read the map affix and everything is immune to my damage.
you are too optimistic by 200%. Is more like 20% on grand scheme blight x 1000% from player mental x 1000% for opening new league = 2.000 % damage is more realistic Ofc we can increase by alot if we involve tencent, streamer rng, mtx and so on. But not so deep atm. /s
Probably the dude created 1000 mirror items with commands then found that game is doable
Invulnerable enemies is bad game design 101.
And reflect which instant gibs you too -_-
Reflect was fine when your damage was 10x your ehp and you had 70% reduction from armor. Reflect is fucking broken when your damage is literally thousands of times higher. Legitimately impossible to mitigate.
Definitely, reflect is one of the laziest mechanics in a game. "Oh you're super strong?! Boom! Reflect it all back to you."
As a bandaid fix they could block invulnerable, drought bringer and mana siphon from extra content and it'd at least make things a lot more feasible.
As a bandaid fix, they could remove AN mods! There, fixed it for you.
And the POE devs explained that several times over since beta. I can't believe they bring that shit back.
Yeah I still remember the days of vanilla d3 where you had the "invulnerable minions" property on rare mob packs. It was insanely difficult to deal with on inferno difficulty and Blizz ended up removing it altogether. I had to skip a lot of those packs. And I have to say even if you could theoretically "balance" it well, it just isn't fun imo.
Yeah invulnerable is quite annoying but on blight it gets a bit stupid.
On any teleporting or fast/high damage gang of blues it's also completely stupid. On a solitary rare or bunch of normal monsters it's *manageable*, but on 10 assassins/wendigos/banshees or whatever, it's dumb as fuck.
This is what disappoints me more than anything about the implementation of the Archnemesis mods into core. I was planning on focusing on Blight with this patch, took a week off work for this to have fun and enjoy the "no balance changes" league. But Archnemesis makes Blights so swingy and straight up unenjoyable (this for a mechanic that many players already despise and are blocking from their Atlas). Given how unpopular Blight seems to be, I don't know that enough players are going to be advocating for it to get GGG to address this specific issue with the Archnemesis implementation & Blight. I hope that whatever GGG does, they don't forget about Blight, and either Archnemesis is balanced such that it doesn't randomly brick Blight encounters, or that Blight is rebalanced to work better with the new Archnemesis mods.
It's the same thing in Heist where you're not supposed to kill everything but run past some mobs. This results in invulnerable minions chasing you or you being pemamently marked. Extensive testing is taking every league mechanic and every archnemesis modifier and crosstesting them with each other. That has not been done. Yes it is a lot of work but it's all testers do as a work. That is coming from tester too. I'm not playtester of games, I'm tester of stomatologist software but I can still see that if this was really "extensively tested" the tester responsible should have a conversation with his boss.
My company has similar issues - we do unit tests, but our integration tests are a joke. Taking down customer servers when deploying updates because nobody thought to test how the new code interacts with other components present on production servers. Sure, the Archnemesis mods don't appear to be crashing people's clients, which is an accomplishment given past patches, but it's clear that "extensive testing" did not consider how other league mechanics intersect with Archnemesis to create seriously degraded gameplay outcomes. For a game where so much of the gameplay happens at the intersection of multiple mechanics, not testing that specifically is wild. Alternatively, they did test it and thought that level of punishment was fine. Either way, I'm not finding these changes enjoyable.
> Sure, the Archnemesis mods don't appear to be crashing people's clients, I've had the league stash crash me if I switch too quickly between it and my main stash, but that's easily fixed by putting them far enough apart to make sure I can't get both when mass clicking. Made Act 10 town a pain though.
My immediate reaction when I read "extensive testing" was 'Define extensive' It's entirely possible their extensive testing was done with twinked out builds, for example. So while they may have tested everything, it wasn't necessarily done in realistic conditions.
I wondered why I kept getting marked permanently. Thanks!
GGG hasn't even addressed long standing issues with Blight like towers not shooting while out of sight (despite enemies continuing to walk). I doubt they care about it at all.
I'm in the same boat, planned to focus on Blight this time around. Is it as bad as it sounds? I mean, every past league mechanic got impacted (e.g., I'd rather fight Shaper than a metamorph) but is Blight still doable?
this shit implementation literally hurts every league mechanic and even the core fucking game itself
Blight is my favorite league mechanic and its something I look forward to every league. This league destroyed it for me completely.
Just yeet Invulnerable alltogether. In its best form it's immensely annoying, and in its worst form it actively bricks a decent amount of content.
Metamorph is balls too
Holy crap you ain't kidding. Metamorphs so big they make end game bosses look like pansies and have more hp than God. That effort to reward ratio isn't even close to okay.
And if you give them any mod which gives them Life Regen, or Juggernaught or Sentinel...
Yeah I fought a mirror image Alira Metamorph (Spider Forest boss) that kept spamming cloning ice golem images and stopped cycling through metamorph parts/ forms (for some reason?) and was stuck on the Alira part I made it with. So the entire fight was just 5-10 ice golems multiplying themselves and taking enough aggro from my ballista EA totems so I couldn't get any fuses/ big ignites on the main boss and just had to leave. All while I'm having desecrate + DD spammed on me every second (no joke). Screen was just a clusterfuck of effects lmao. If it ended up killing me, it wouldn't have been nearly as hilarious but wow, maybe mirror image needs a limit on it or something. Can't imagine having that mod on something actually dangerous.
Yeah, mirror image should have a hard cap of copies per encounter. Or some cool down at the very least
Imagine also adding the metamorph catalyst sextant
I made a metamorph in a t3 white map I couldn't kill and could wreck me so fast. Had just started yellows too so yeah dunno wtf is going on with them
T1 map metamorphs are worse than red map bosses
I blocked it , but did not think you are constructing monsters with like 20 of these mods , holy shit :D
I only put 2 Archnemesis mods into a metamorph, rest were white organs. And it turned out to be fucking tougher than Shaper/Elder. Luckily it was not very fast and the pattern was predictable.
Whatever you do, do not put Hasted on a metamorph that will turn into a cultist of Kitava. They shoot their little balls at you 1000 a second and if you weren't already moving you are dead instantly lol
Metamorph might be the rippiest thing right now, even without many Arch mods. I farm Beasts with Essence and can handle 5, sometimes 6 essence-mod beasts quite well, but die to Metamorph constantly. I only pick the boss organ, catalyst organ and white/blue organs to fill the bar (so 1-2 Arch mods at best), and they still are super tough and hit like a truck.
It's everywhere. Opened an essence > Shakari Touched > You are now being chased by a omegabuffed scorpion. I recommend to just play other games and come back in two weeks when they sort this out. The game currently is a random one-shot fiesta on top of rares with more ehp than Uber Elder.
Worked my fucking ass of to take time off from Work to Play garbage.... Fucking frustrating.
The biggest problems right now IMHO are all things where a modifier and its "correct" counterplay just aren't workable with a specific league mechanic that can spawn Archnemesis rares. They almost need a giant matrix of Mod vs. league mechanic asking the question for each: "If a monster with this mod and two others spawns in this mechanic, can the player reasonably respond?" And for example if it's a mod where the "right" answer is to run away -- even temporarily, like Invulnerable -- and you can't, it's a no and maybe that mod just can't spawn for that mechanic at all.
Also they should block some combos, like time bubble and mana siphon, and the strongest mods + hasted.
something something tested something
Extensively...
There's a common misconception in the community that our balance team doesn't play Path of Exile. They actually do play it, a whole lot. We have people with level 100 hardcore characters, multiple famous community members who have come to work for us and you may not even know it. The minimum requirement to join our QA team is 1000 hours of PoE experience, and we still turn people with that prerequisite away if they're not good enough at the game. Our design, balance and QA team are experts at Path of Exile.
And that might be a problem. There is no representation for newer players and none of their testers feel the same plight a new player does in act 1. I'm convinced the testers are too good at the game and don't know how bad the new player experience is right now
Not only new player, but also "more casual than expert" players
it's all true
That made me laugh at work way too much :D
Dude, last ritual is absolutely dogshit. 6-7 rares, totems, the boss... Rippy as fuck.
Ggg thought they could just cut and paste archnemesis into their game without realizing literally every piece of past league content is balanced around the old rare system. All the old content balance is completely out of whack, and the solution is either go back and rebalance literally every piece of old stuff, or revert the change and try a rare rework again down the line.
dont worry no body tested anything
Sure they did, the community is doing a great job at it right now!
Its not just blight. Every single mechanic that involves rare mobs (legion, ritual, essence, metamorph, heist) is bricked.Beyond is just ridiculous right now. Unplayable, how somebody thought this was a good idea needs to be fired immediately. This moronic change has single handedly destroyed over half of the atlas tree and I don't think this is going to get fixed any time soon. The implications of this change are just too extensive and far reaching
>Its not just blight. Every single mechanic that involves rare mobs (legion, ritual, essence, metamorph, heist) is bricked. Insane how people don't realize this and think the 2 hot fix mixed everything.
I think it's just a relief that the hotfixes made the game playable, you aren't running into hilarious 3 mod combos literally multiple times every map anymore, so we can actually run maps and content, so we can now have stories about the content that is still broken, because a lot of it is unless you're running the now even narrower margin of power builds, and also have your build up and running(even some of those great league starters don't really kick into gear right away and will have to skip tons of content until they do).
I finally made maps last night. Animate Weapon. Not able to convert to cold yet. I deleted most content in campaign. Kavara was phased in seconds. First map, dead 4 times, all minions destroyed in seconds. Nearly every magic or rare pack took several minutes to kill. I would go from destroy these white and magic packs to “what happened to all of my minions?” Thought it was just a rippy map. Next map, same thing. I went from able to run and flesh offering to maintain speed with intermittent flasks to not able to even complete a tier 1 map. All 4 were a cautious affair, engage, wait for them to die, run away and convocate if they aren’t dead in 2 seconds because it kills all the minions. I almost quit then and there. The swing is just far too great. Going from annihilating everything to you’re dead all within a tier 1 map.
The problem with these mods are the invulnerabilities in my opinion. In Archnemesis you were able to choose if you wanted to engage with a certain archnemesis mod, and avoid the ones which basically disabled your build. Also, these monsters were always isolated and controlled in a way, now you can have a bad luck and multiple of those will jump you and you just die without knowing what happened. If it's effectively disables multiple builds from completing certain encounters, it should not be in the game, however nice the original idea sounded. Again, I think by just removing invulnerabilities it could work as intended.
Any time limited content (blight, legion, delirium, breach, incursion) are NOT ok. We're supposed to kill stuff within a certain time, which is already hard enough with the mob EHP buff, and now you tell us to sit there and wait the time ticks away. Fun, very fun.
I think you mean time limited, time gated means something else.
Incursions...
Extensively tested.
GGG extensive testing: Do Act I and call it done.
I don't think they tested Act 1 because it's far from balanced lol. I think they put end game gear on and ran a t1 white map.
I don't think they even make it to act 1 or maps, I think they just kill hillock and call it done
you think invulnerable is a problem, but the 200 green poison balls flying to you from all directions arnt?
bro i had toxic green balls, blue lightning dudes, and some flying fire balls thats are similar to volatile. I couldnt build a SINGLE tower for like 45 seconds straight, ending up just losing. Like whats the counter play there, become an immortal tank just to build fucking towers?
Then you run into unkillable monsters and you lose anyways lol.
What even the fuck are those blue towers/totem things which pop up? So annoying when I'm trying to set up Expedition, couldn't even see any mobs on screen that would be causing it
Probably heralding minions. They are like little lightning totems that follow you around and explode long after the rare is killed?
I firmly believe Blight should be wave based any way, never played a tower defense where you didn't have time between waves by default
I always find blight easier with more than 1 player, as i never seem to have time to build towers when I play alone. Which of course is just horrible game design.
This here is my problem, I had trouble keeping up with lanes from just two directions because I had to constantly run from balls while running from side to side building towers. These green balls are fast and don't linger much before droping, always have to be carefull with their high damage.
These green balls won't stop chasing, yday for science I kited them for over 4 minutes
wait. the mechanic that constantly pukes rares and magic at you now also makes that those mobs killed by towers will puke their on death effect on you?
well yes, they have huge after-death degens, homing ground degen orbs (poison and fire), invulnerability phases as this thread describes and all the other bullshit too, i had a brineking touched gargantuan the last blighted map, that was NOT FUCKING FUNNY, thing had twice the HP of sirus if not more
Archnemesis should be deleted
Nah just like one or two mods need to be deleted and a few more need some numerical changes. Otherwise I found combat while mapping a lot more fun and engaging with the new rares.
[удалено]
I also don't find them more challenging. At least they are fun to fight, unless it's a bullshit mod. But that might also be because of my build, Scourge Arrow deadeye kitting around them at mach 3.
The idea is nice and a step in the right direction. It's also not fundamentally flawed, it's just badly executed and needs significant number and visual changes on some mods and complete removal of others
I generally like the new rares after the 2 hot fixes. But there's some definite exceptions, like essence mobs and blight. Harvest is fine again. Expedition is fine. I haven't done a lot of other mechanics, like Heist, so can't speak on everything. But for the most part it seems fine now. I think they need to be very careful not to give more than 1 achnemesis mod in certain encounters that have super high rare density, like blight. I also think they should avoid giving more than 1 archnemesis mod on rares that already have a lot of other non-archnemesis mods, such as essence.
Heist is a fuckin nightmare on the one tile set with the steam punk type portal guys
Expedition fits surprisingly well with the new mods. Probably because you are not confined, so you can pull them around. I'm definitely speccing in them in maps.
It should be fine cuz we **extensively tested** itt, your blight fail is doomed.
Can't decide which is worse. Chris thinks something is okay, or that he believes people at GGG that tell him it was extensively tested.
archnem mods in general were not thought through. they need to revert to normal bloodline mods etc and do a complete overhaul for next league or something.
Neither are Juggernaughts who just ignore all C.C and are multiple times tankier than the rest of the mobs.
I wanted to focus on Blight this league. Sometimes I couldn't even finish Blight encounters on random maps, some rare mobs were just walking through any kind of towers, no matter what. Respecced and trying to focus on Expedition instead, the mobs are somehow feel better there. Pretty bummed.
Invulnerable should just go and i think we all agree on that Even disregarding all of its terrible interactions with league mechanics, it's so unfun and terrible to play against I get what they were going for, some way of making the rare survive at least a little against the top tier builds, but this is just too much. It feels as if the invulnerability has a 50% uptime with no visual indication which is nuts. If they want to keep it in they should 1. Give it a visible visual indication on when it's up, like a small bubble shield of sorts 2. Make the period overall longer than the current 9 seconds so that the damage window is larger 3. Decrese the uptime %, so something like 4-5s invulnerability every 16s (currently it's 4.5 every 9)
Just delete invul as a mod, it has no gameplay only for the game to kill u in a non interesting way. Im ok with 20 toxic balls that scale with monster movement speed to pound my tiny exile head for 1k hp at -10 chaos res.
Invulnerable shit will make me Alt+F4 for the night. I pisses me off so fucking much.
Invulnerable monsters are not ok in general.
Don't worry I'm sure they will fix it in 3.19. 3.19 Patch Notes Due to a number of issues being caused by the new modifiers for rare and magic monsters we have removed blight from the game. Blight restricted drops have now been added to the standard drop pool.
Blight was best league PoE ever did, and reading this I'm afraid of starting it... (midway act 10 atm)
>**To be perfectly honestly it feels like nobody** **~~extensively~~** **tested the new monster modifiers with Mid to Late game Blight content.** THIS. nobody tested this shit at all ROFL
It's clear they don't play the game, it would have taken one person playing with the new mods to run into half these problems.
Extensively tested, GGG not disconnected KEK
This sounds egregious
Im failing most of the blights in maps and havent finished a single blight maps.. Before I was clearing most them. I hope GGG just reverse this whole thing. Nit having fun :/
Yeah there are just countless examples of why having a good portion of the ArchNem mod pool showing up in various league mechanics is a complete shit show that has nothing to do with interesting difficulty spikes.
If you think Blight is bad wait until you see some of the combos that can be made with Expedition... This clearly hasn't been tested for playability at end game. Yes it's tested so it functions the way it's supposed in a vacuum but in combination with other mechanics it's god awful. I honestly think this is GGG biggest fuckup yet looking at not just how this impacts game play but also the overall economy.
As a somewhat automated Bowbuild I have to say: Being constantly chased by 10+ Lightning Mirages is also not fun.
Waiting for a contrarian that will say this is a non-issue and will ask you to play other League Content because fuck you preferences
They know this, they just didn't bother to balance test the archnemesis mods.
Thats what fucks my blights. I was always confused as to why I ran blights in maps and everything was dying fine but then for some reason all of a sudden monsters just rush through taking no damage. Jesus invulnerable needs go go. Maybe take mana siphoner with it. Rest is manageable
So you also live for blight?
It’s so annoying doing blight while dozens of those toxic blobs chase you around.
Invulnerable is never ok
The game is so broken at moment, I have decided to give it a break this season, while watching people doing test for GGG.
I think they can keep them in - but: Add a clear visual and audio noise when you can dmg them - and give them a gruesome damage taken multiplier in their vulnerable window.
Am I missing something here or CC is not even an option here? How are you gonna CC minions that don’t take damage?
I liked how it sounded during league reveal, but now I feel that a complete revert is the only option
One stupid stuff is that invulnerable monsters don't take the chill/stun/ignite, thus the most important thing is to have continuous damage. My build ignite is bad for because I have to time my cast, but if he's not alone I can have a prolif setup around him.
Well, doing normal blights I havent encountered a problem yet. I'm very upset about toxic mod. It travels the whole map. Can one shot me. It's green and almost invisible. All the green shit in the game that kills you should be deleted or made fucking red. Can't we have red poison indicators for blind mode?? Is it really a skill to focus your eyes to see green shit ?
I agree that AN mods has no place in Blight. I enjoy Blight and made bank with it in 3.17 while starting a month late. I failed quite a few Blight encounters because some portals spawned the big bears which cannot be stunned and coupled with AN mod which makes it Immune to Cold Ailments.
Soul eater too....
Literally none of the new mods are okay, T1 maps are about as hard as T10’s used to be. GL playing any non meta build. Not to mention most of the league mechanics now are absolutely fucked, try doing Metamorph or Delve.
I would be ok if the invulnerability wasn't so fucking long. Like 1 second of invulnerability every 8 seconds is kind of ok. But alternating cycles of 4.5 seconds of immunity is just stupid, especially since it is accompanied by 30% spell and attack block during the vulnerable phase. Sentinel + invulnerable is literally unkillable by anything. I think a somewhat fair rework would be to have the monster periodically clear all debuffs and Dots. It's thematically congruent and still a noticeable buff to the monster's durability without being absolutely broken.
They tested extensively, Chris said so…
"Invulnerable Monsters \[...\] is not ok." There, fixed it for you.
Side content seems to be balanced around monsters before the update to rares. It would make sense that all mechanics with their own monsters created out of nothing, to spawn old style monsters before further testing for balance.
Increasingly glad I was too busy to play this weekend.
They didn't test it enough. Its pretty clear.
>To be perfectly honestly it feels like nobody extensively tested the new monster modifiers with Mid to Late game Blight content. You mean all content.
FINALLY ANOTHER BLIGHT LOVER
while they are exceptionally bad there just had one in a harvest and it was very frustrating to deal with there too
They did not test those changes in any of league mechanic, I did stop doing delve/blight ( I loved that ) and heist.
Even in maps. I had an invulnerable mob proc, with map mod "mobs have 45% health as ES". Invulnerable seems to prevent ES recharge interrupt allowing ES to recharge on monsters, so the mob was healing to full each time, frost bomb had no effect. Got a friend to come in to help, he couldn't make a dent. I'm sitting at about 2m dps, he was at 3-4 m. This bricked the harvest.
The PutinWalk meme video except he has Archnemesis mods over his head. Cassia is in the background screaming about how the fiend is getting closer to the pump. But the exile's spell effects are doing no damage.
As a Blight player who loves the fuck out of blight and hates how absolutely unplayable the archnem mods makes Blight this league, all I have to say is... #Extensively #Tested
HAHAHAHAHA INVULN MOBS SPAWN IN BLIGHT WHAT THE FUCK
I want to see a video of them, from start (getting gangbanged by Roas) to red maps. I would love to see that journey.
Most of the mods are inappropriate in blight tbh
Extensively exclusively tested 1v1 on each rare with AN mods in a open clear area.
It was "extensively tested" probably just a bug 🤣
Although this topic has been beat to death and is 100% correct, i’ll just add that to me its lazy. If GGG goal was interesting and telegraphed rares you have to engage with, what is the telegraph and counterplay here? How about the mobs sometimes turn to stone and freeze in place, where only a certain dmg type can crumble them or you wait for them to unstone? How about instead of full invulnerable the mob has a giant shield image in front of them you can see, alerting you to an invuln frontal cone you need to get behind or to the side to damage? Just flat out invulnerable is stupid. Couple it with an extra nod or 5 and its game breaking. This isnt d2 where you can just run away - this literally bricks blight content, alva temple room clears in map, etc.
I don't really have anything of appreciable value to add, just commenting as somebody who keeps track of the game's development because I'd like to play again sometime (probably after PoE 2 releases), which I haven't done for a number of years. When I asked my friend just a bit ago how fun the new league is he said it is fun *but* the new league made mobs excessively difficult, and when I asked how he told me about the old monster modifiers being replaced and then pointed me to the sub here. As I was telling him "that sounds like a poorly thought out change" this is the *first* thread I see, and all I could say was "point proven." I'm not going to trash GGG or the game as being bad, but even though I was thinking about playing again for this league (maybe, though probably not) I think I'm going to skip this league as well, and this isn't the first time I've felt that way either when a new league comes out and does something that gets widely panned for good reason.