Removed thornflesh?

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grepman wrote:

I don't like the removal either

reflect acted like a soft cap on crit, as well as prevented blind offscreen possibilities for ranged builds. it also provided the player with a build that could potentially have problem with reflect, account for it.

with it removed, there are things in the game that are useless right now, like vaal pact and acuity

hopefully its just removed for now and similar mechanic will take effect later. however if GGG thinks current meta (which is more defensive and steady damage than crit) solved the crit problem, they might be for a bad suprise soon

The thing is... Thornflesh was a really bad mechanic for it. It simply meant you could not dps at all. A simple accidently hit with an AoE-skill into a group with Thornflesh meant dead and you didn't even need crit for that.

There are surely other mean ways to punish high crit char... in theory you could make a mob-affix that only allows damage with non-crits and charges the mob up with crits. Punishing, but it wouldn't instantly kill you if one fireball flies of screen and crits the group.

Removing Thornflesh doesn't in any way limit builds not getting punished by it anyway. However it opens up exspecially caster-builds that had an incredible hard time getting enough leech to fight it. And those builds aren't even that good right now anyway. Most physical dds could easily go Vaal Pact and high leech to compensate reflect casters could not.

Thornflesh simply punished in a way that worked very different for different classes and damage sources. And I don't really feel it punished the right builds.

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Emphasy wrote:

Thornflesh simply punished in a way that worked very different for different classes and damage sources. And I don't really feel it punished the right builds.

Agreed. It seemed to punish high accuracy evasion-based ranged builds. Mainly elemental rangers (my main toon). And, with ES being seriously nerfed in 2.0, it was probably punishing some casters as well. It has nothing to do with crit or having insane DPS with crappy defenses - 6k hp pool can disappear in an instant if you're doing decent AoE damage and a high enough percentage of that is hitting you right back.

With an AoE ranged skill and a defense that wasn't based on mitigation, Thornflesh could 1-shot a toon offscreen. This includes a whole group of builds, and GGG didn't want to keep screwing them over - even if people who didn't use them said everything was fine. Melee builds with fortify, armor, low accuracy, and skills that don't hit entire groups at once probably didn't have much of an issue, and folks who primarily play those builds are often the ones arguing to bring old reflect back, or Thornflesh back, or for more and more reflect mechanics.

Ironically, people often ask for more difficulty when they know their own characters can handle it - meaning it wouldn't really be more difficulty for them.

I don't want to paint everyone with a broad brush, and I'm not specifically targeting anyone in this thread, but I think some PoE elites feel satisfaction that others are dying from mechanics they themselves can handle. It makes them feel strong and successful in a "hardcore" game, without changing anything in terms of strategy or gameplay for them.

Reflect and the Old thorn were meant to keep high DPS build in check.
But people were not happy. They wanted to do more DPS without drawback and here we are now : Path of DPS, where you can you shoot everything off screen and don't give a f*.

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demon9675 wrote:

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Emphasy wrote:

Thornflesh simply punished in a way that worked very different for different classes and damage sources. And I don't really feel it punished the right builds.

Agreed. It seemed to punish high accuracy evasion-based ranged builds. Mainly elemental rangers (my main toon). And, with ES being seriously nerfed in 2.0, it was probably punishing some casters as well. It has nothing to do with crit or having insane DPS with crappy defenses - 6k hp pool can disappear in an instant if you're doing decent AoE damage and a high enough percentage of that is hitting you right back.

With an AoE ranged skill and a defense that wasn't based on mitigation, Thornflesh could 1-shot a toon offscreen. This includes a whole group of builds, and GGG didn't want to keep screwing them over - even if people who didn't use them said everything was fine. Melee builds with fortify, armor, low accuracy, and skills that don't hit entire groups at once probably didn't have much of an issue, and folks who primarily play those builds are often the ones arguing to bring old reflect back, or Thornflesh back, or for more and more reflect mechanics.

Ironically, people often ask for more difficulty when they know their own characters can handle it - meaning it wouldn't really be more difficulty for them.

I don't want to paint everyone with a broad brush, and I'm not specifically targeting anyone in this thread, but I think some PoE elites feel satisfaction that others are dying from mechanics they themselves can handle. It makes them feel strong and successful in a "hardcore" game, without changing anything in terms of strategy or gameplay for them.

This is a good post.

Still, I believe the core issue with Thornflesh was not the binary of "should it exist or not?" but instead the sliding scale of "how strong should it be?" 14% per enemy was simply way too much. As in, essentially triple what I would consider balanced. Thornflesh should have been 4 or 5%.

Edit: Elemental. For packwide physical reflect, should be 2 or 3% because more difficult to mitigate.

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Thotor wrote:

Reflect and the Old thorn were meant to keep high DPS build in check.
But people were not happy. They wanted to do more DPS without drawback and here we are now : Path of DPS, where you can you shoot everything off screen and don't give a f*.

You're the only few that care about it.

Now if GGG was to make it comeback then I propose they do what D3 did for it's reflect mechanic; Turns on and off quite simple really.

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demon9675 wrote:

Nobody felt Thornflesh/mob reflect was some essential pillar of PoE until it was taken away. Mostly, people will defend any mechanic that's difficult just because it's difficult, even if it's a hamfisted form of difficulty that turns the game's incentives on their head and punishes certain builds while ignoring others.

its not an essential pillar in any way, but I definitely think it was better when we had it than when we do not

also, there is nothing 'difficult' about reflect; it's simply a mechanic that 1)capped high dps/high crit builds 2)made people more aware of mods on mobs. kinda like melee should be aware of []bearers.

it also made planning how to mitigate reflect interesting, because every build that utilized high crit multi, you had to avoid reflect

finally, lack of reflect is what made trap builds powerful. for example, I had an ice shot trap build. but now what is the point of traps if you can just stack crit multi without a trap and not worry about reflect ? skills on traps are limited, clunky and altogether inferior to me just shooting shit from bow.

so people are right, removal of reflect hurts build diversity. there are plenty of builds that were 'suboptimal' but usable because 'lack of reflect' was a feature that they had. now they are all in the basura bin

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Emphasy wrote:

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grepman wrote:

I don't like the removal either

reflect acted like a soft cap on crit, as well as prevented blind offscreen possibilities for ranged builds. it also provided the player with a build that could potentially have problem with reflect, account for it.

with it removed, there are things in the game that are useless right now, like vaal pact and acuity

hopefully its just removed for now and similar mechanic will take effect later. however if GGG thinks current meta (which is more defensive and steady damage than crit) solved the crit problem, they might be for a bad suprise soon

The thing is... Thornflesh was a really bad mechanic for it. It simply meant you could not dps at all. A simple accidently hit with an AoE-skill into a group with Thornflesh meant dead and you didn't even need crit for that.

There are surely other mean ways to punish high crit char... in theory you could make a mob-affix that only allows damage with non-crits and charges the mob up with crits. Punishing, but it wouldn't instantly kill you if one fireball flies of screen and crits the group.

Removing Thornflesh doesn't in any way limit builds not getting punished by it anyway. However it opens up exspecially caster-builds that had an incredible hard time getting enough leech to fight it. And those builds aren't even that good right now anyway. Most physical dds could easily go Vaal Pact and high leech to compensate reflect casters could not.

Thornflesh simply punished in a way that worked very different for different classes and damage sources. And I don't really feel it punished the right builds.

well thronflesh replaced the reflect packs. so its not about thornflesh but more about reflect packs in general (aside from maps), if they bring the old reflect packs, Im fine with it.

and again, you're not correct about limiting builds. the only real reason to use traps, like Ive wrote in the previous post, was because you could stack crit multi as you wished and not worry about reflect. whats the reason to use traps now ? please do tell.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

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demon9675 wrote:

Ironically, people often ask for more difficulty when they know their own characters can handle it - meaning it wouldn't really be more difficulty for them.

I don't want to paint everyone with a broad brush, and I'm not specifically targeting anyone in this thread, but I think some PoE elites feel satisfaction that others are dying from mechanics they themselves can handle. It makes them feel strong and successful in a "hardcore" game, without changing anything in terms of strategy or gameplay for them.

This is a good post.

I disagree with that excerpt completely

first, again- there is nothing 'difficult' about reflect. aside from visibility issues on mobs in water, it can be avoided for most part by being aware of surroundings and playing carefully.

the main issue is, people are conditioned to play a certain way in poe endgame to the point they think that certain way is the norm and shouldnt ever be changed.... and when you are forced to play in a different way that involves more cautiousness, they bark at it. this happens every time a major concept is nerfed/buffed in poe, with almost everything. I mean, people straight up said 'pfft mana flasks ? fuck that shit'. ironically, people who denounce reflect are people who don't want to change strategies or their gameplay to account for reflect. people don't want to let go of their AOE burst damage. no, god forbid you'd use single target skills to probe packs or (gasp) traps or totems to scout ahead. no, god forbid you don't offscreen shit.

second, I dont get why the conclusion I quoted is being made. for example I had crit and high dps caster/bow toons that struggled mightily against reflect, and yet I still think the mechanics should exist. in fact the struggle is an indication its not a fluff mechanic, because when your build is in endgame, a 'good' build has very minimal struggles. or at least prior to 2.0 it was that way