Mathil's death in the Lab

This thread is truly amazing. I am truly happy that masters of the game who has hidden profiles, less than 15 challenges or level 90 characters bothered to come down to us and teach us how to play the game. I feel truly enlightened, thank you all very much. I learned more than I ever know about Path of Exile in the 5 minutes I spent in this thread then I have learned in all my play time.

It's interesting seeing people argue about reflect. Most people seem to have a strong opinion that it is either good and balanced, or the worst thing since fascism. If you take it from a purely mechanical standpoint, reflect (maybe bladeback aside) is actually perfect for its role, which is a counter to super high burst damage or uber clear speed. It certainly punishes some builds disproportionately but for the most part it works as intended.

The thing people seem to neglect to talk about is whether or not reflect feels like a fair challenge. This is a game, no? Perception and fun matters. Even if reflect serves a real purpose, if it feels like shit and drives players away, then I would argue it still needs to be looked at. Not sure about you, but I die a little inside when my map is like 1% damage taken, 2%, 1%, 5%, 3%, and suddenly FATALITYYYY OVERKILL 3300% DAMAGE just because I attacked the wrong monster in a breach with a storm call whose aura was completely obscured by monster effects, particles, and bodies (which I can't even turn down). Certain skills (like storm call) are so badly crippled by reflect that I'm tempted to use it with traps, even though it has a super fast cast speed. Does anybody enjoy reflect? Does anybody really, truly *enjoy* being punished for doing damage? I know I don't.

A much better way to counter uber clear speed is to reduce player damage or increase monster health by (don't kill me for suggesting it) roughly an order of magnitude. It's a little silly that I can go a whole map without really knowing which types of white mobs spawned because they evaporate 2-3 screens away. Such a change would incentivize balancing dps and defense in a way that doesn't require reflect because fights will last longer and thus require more interaction with monsters. Also, you wouldn't be punished for increasing your damage (except if you sacrifice defense to get it).

Tl;dr, reflect feels bad in my (and others') opinion, and whether or not it performs its purpose mechanically, it should be seriously reconsidered in its current state because of that. I applaud the devs for looking into a change now that VP + ES is gutted. 10k ES gone in 0.5 seconds even with elementalist reduction feels fucking bad no matter how you slice it. It's a game folks, reflect is annoying as hell and it doesn't need to be, especially since there are other solutions to the clear speed problem besides instagibbing the player for dealing too much damage.

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Shazamarang wrote:

If you actually manage to kill yourself to a reflect rare, at least consistently enough to make you need to complain about it, your build(s) are shit. That's not me being a dick, at least not entirely. That's just a fact. It's a mechanic of the game that you can't deal with, and because you can't deal with it you need to complain about it until it gets changed. This shit has happened in the past with reflect as an aura, and is happening with volatile rares now. Just because a mechanic is designed to slow you down a bit doesn't make it lazy. It makes you lazy for not bothering to deal with them.

Reflect as a map mod is perfectly fine, you're literally warned about it and have the option to re-roll past it. And it's actually pretty fun to run reflect maps every now and then for the challenge.

The invasion boss Mathil died to is fine as well, though I play soft-core so that may cloud my perspective a little bit. You can visually tell if it's reflecting damage, so the only way to die to it is being careless. He off-screened the pack of invasion bosses, knowing well that they were there, and that one of them has the ability to reflect damage.

Well said.

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MeWhenum wrote:

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Reflect in general: There are 2 things which I dislike most about it:

1. Uncontrollable damage. For some skills this is a lot worse than for others. (And KB is one of the worst.) But many skills can get unlucky and hit several reflect rares offscreen. This turns the whole thing too much into a gamble. Not much of a problem in SC though.

2. Thematically reflect makes no sense to me: It does instant damage from offscreen yet somehow the char can evade/block/dodge it? If it would work like porcupines it would make a lot more sense.

3. There is no (gfx) representation for it. You have to know/guess where the damage comes from.

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Replacing it with monster health: It would be an improvement but the inherent problem (which reflect doesnt solve anyway) is IMO rather the (conceptually/approximately) exponential growth of player damage output. Which (the exp growth) is probably intentional to make players "feel more powerful" with each upgrade.

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Your Storm call: If you are playing Elementalist then it is relatively easy to become immune to reflect. If you even consider using traps it may well be worth the cost.

^^ I thought about going full immunity currently, but I made the build before Sybil's and the new 10% node, so the best I could do was the 58% afforded by elementalist. I 100% agree about the randomness of the damage also being problematic.

I can think of several problems with this game that could be mitigated by capping player damage the same way resistances, block, evasion, etc. are capped.

I though it was funny lol

First mobs dont normally spawn in that room. You had to know that it was possible. Then you chose to offscreen anyway even though he was pretending to be careful by muting his music. Let me mute this cuz i want to hear whats in the next room.... BUT IM GONNA OFFSCREEN ANYWAY... lol fucking stupid.

We all know the truth...Mathil just needs to GET GUD!