Enrage timers

Hi all,

In another post I pointed out how I feel that the defensive side of builds could use some more diversity (vs ground effects, corpse explosion, etc.). To feel relatively safe in the spiky increase of the challenge in, for example, red maps one must stack alot of defenses (blueprint) or go with super dps and accept a bit of a leap of faith (scramble). In responses from hardcore players here and there, I regularly notice how they must stack everything defensive in the game, especially when it comes to melee.

With a larger range of defensive options to choose from, the issue would arise is that people would be able to build overly tanky and slow-dps anything down with a guarantee of success. World of Warcraft is an example of this: in the older days the strong tank and a couple of healers could, even if the raid dps was down, still manage to kill the boss. This was not how things were intended to work and because they could not possibly nerf tanks (central role), they added enrage timers to many, many bosses.

After a while, they got a bit creative with this to still enjoy the same effect without having a hard timer. For example, certain additional targets needed to be handled by dps and if that would fail, the boss would get boosted to a point the tank would break guaranteed. Basically the same pattern.

Path of Exile doesn't have these enrage timers, and I wanted to suggest considering implementing them. Not that these are so fun in the gaming experience necessarily, but it allows to open a broader variety of defensive options. People can build incredible tanks, but if their DPS is not high enough they couldn't solo down vital targets for high end loot drops. In a group, using the next gen pattern enrage timer, the dps would still need to do their stuff in order to make it.

So the design of the challenge must work in favor of it, which requires additional thoughts and tinkering. The reward is more freedom when designing defensive options for a greater diversity in builds. And I know these options are hard to make as offenses and defenses are correlated through lines in the passive skill tree.

An example could be a buff (not aura) that reserves a portion of mana, that increases %life, but decreases damage output (my example is not very creative, I know). Multiple increase/decrease buffs could be stacked by players individually, for solo or group play regardless. Going overly defensive would mean to hit the enrage timer. Overly offensive would risk being oneshot.

As a side note, the heavy cost defensive auras seem to boost group defenses while the number of people in the group has no impact on the incoming damage. This leans a bit towards more freedom in build diversity when considering group play while I'm confident PoE aims to please solo and group experience equally.



Thanks,

Cheers

So you want to penalize people with low DPS? This would not affect the OP builds (making them even more OP) and make life harder for everybody playing builds without great gear. Seems like a bad idea to me.

Edit: If anything, they should do the opposite. If you take monster's life too fast, monster defenses increase. The more dps, the more defense increase.

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mark1030 wrote:

So you want to penalize people with low DPS? This would not affect the OP builds (making them even more OP) and make life harder for everybody playing builds without great gear. Seems like a bad idea to me.

No, I think your interpretation is the result of too many issues stacked up in the current game balance. I intend to point out the freedom in design of defensive options related to the enrage timer pattern.

The OP builds are issues on their own and require balancing. That they are called OP is the emphasis of this.

If people have too low dps because of bad gear, they should not be able to make the challenge from a dps perspective. This is inline with gear progression.

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mark1030 wrote:

Edit: If anything, they should do the opposite. If you take monster's life too fast, monster defenses increase. The more dps, the more defense increase.

This goes completely against the concepts in the entire design of, for example, this game.

We prepare for build Y investing X amount of time to deal with challenge Z.

Z has a fixed base and comes with added difficulty levels. Y and X are our options to deal with Z.

Z should not change on the spot to deal with how we handled X and Y. It goes against the system of reward for preparation.

Worst idea since the lab

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Chadwixx wrote:

Worst idea since the lab

If you'd post your arguments, you could convince people (me included).