Lowering monster damage would help many problems in this game.

Damn that wall of text.. but yeah with lower monster damage, armour and evasion would work better, less need of getting >200% life nodes to be successful at maps and less frustration in general.

A huge part of the problem is that armor and evasion is just so fundamentally flawed. Neither of those defense protect against big hit at all, which is what is going to kill you. This is the main reason for the Path of Life Nodes playstyle.

Also, I'm just very disappointed in the attitude GGG takes with the game design. They basically force pure gear-check difficulty by slapping on damage, damage, and even more damage. Reflect, thorns, flickers strike, etc, all fall into this category. This is extremely bad game design, and it makes me feel like they simply ran out of ideas, and simply decided to go "MOAR DAMAGE". This is also why I love many of the bosses in this game, such as Brutus, Vaal, and Piety. They aren't simply pure damage machines, but can be avoided by skills and coordination.

The one single thing I absolutely hate most in this game is reflect damage. Why is it in this game? What purpose does it serve at all? It is simply archaic and boring. Why should someone be punished for simply having high damage, or crit multipliers? The only thing it does limit build diversity and create instant RNG offscreen deaths. Is GGG really incapable to using just an ounce of their brain power to think of up something better?

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PolarisOrbit wrote:

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Obsidus wrote:

I wrote all of this in one sitting at 3 in the morning, so I honestly didn't have the patience to write it up properly, but was eager to get it posted. I've also got finals for the next week, starting today, so I'll bullet point it and all that jazz when I can.

I am impressed by your ability to write a full novel at such an odd hour. I have my own long book that I've been working on but I haven't posted it yet because I can't get everything out in one sitting.

I have an odd combination of genuine insomnia (not lol I have bad sleeping habits, so I'll call it insomnia, real insomnia), combined with a sort of ADD that makes it so I go through on and off spurts; where I either cannot concentrate AT ALL, or I hyper-focus on things. I also tend to have a very free association/stream of consciousness way of conversing, which leads to me just spilling things out as they come to mind, which is often a bad thing as my last thread demonstrated (most people didn't know what the hell I was talking about and drew false conclusions). It's also conducive to mistakes and oversights, since I tend to not review things after I tunnel vision spit them out.

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tinghshi wrote:

A huge part of the problem is that armor and evasion is just so fundamentally flawed. Neither of those defense protect against big hit at all, which is what is going to kill you. This is the main reason for the Path of Life Nodes playstyle.

Also, I'm just very disappointed in the attitude GGG takes with the game design. They basically force pure gear-check difficulty by slapping on damage, damage, and even more damage. Reflect, thorns, flickers strike, etc, all fall into this category. This is extremely bad game design, and it makes me feel like they simply ran out of ideas, and simply decided to go "MOAR DAMAGE". This is also why I love many of the bosses in this game, such as Brutus, Vaal, and Piety. They aren't simply pure damage machines, but can be avoided by skills and coordination.

The one single thing I absolutely hate most in this game is reflect damage. Why is it in this game? What purpose does it serve at all? It is simply archaic and boring. Why should someone be punished for simply having high damage, or crit multipliers? The only thing it does limit build diversity and create instant RNG offscreen deaths. Is GGG really incapable to using just an ounce of their brain power to think of up something better?

I have to agree that damage reflect is ridiculous overkill considering how easy it is to be killed in this game. Glass cannon builds are practically non existent, and even tankier builds can own themselves on reflect as it is now.

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Bowlslaw wrote:

I don't have much of a problem with monster damage, because it really only starts to become a problem towards the end of cruel and in merciless. I like how you have to be a moderately hardcore player, and be GOOD, in order to beat the game on all difficulties. Any casual can tear through normal, that's fine; it makes the game more accessible. But, GGG also has to cater to the hardcore players who want maximum challenge within reason.

High monster damage is fine, and the game SHOULD be difficult; the problem is that the difficulty in this game in regard to monster damage, is very "peaks and valleys". I know that one of my characters (which I've since abandoned), which was a full melee 2H Marauder, was able to absolutely facerolled stuff through all of normal and cruel; all I did was stack armor and HP and I was even able to take a direct hit from cruel Vaal Oversoul's hammer smash attack, and live (albeit barely, and I HAD to have Iron Skin Gflask up + 75% fire resist), and I did NOT have remarkable gear at all.

However the second I got to merciless, I couldn't even stand toe to toe with a pack of blue zombies without running the risk of having a sudden spike of damage floor my HP; and that's the key sudden spike of damage. When enemies that have no special attacks, they just stand there and slowly melee you, go from tickling you a little, to all of a sudden wrecking you, that's indicative of a fairly easy to identify problem: that their crit damage modifier at the very least, is insanely high. This isn't even mentioning elemental damage, chaos damage, crazy affixes on rares, rare auras, special abilities like the dreaded charge, etc, just regular melee hits from slow swinging enemies was producing the peaks and valleys effect.

That's the point of my OP; that various problems and complaints you see on the forums, in addition to whatever other issues might be behind them, have the common thread of being related to spike damage being ridiculous in this game. It is my belief that this is because of a combination of enemies critting too often, critting too hard, and the huge resist penalty in merciless; further compounded my crap like lightning thorns, charge, arc spam, etc. What I propose is that they even out the ground a little bit, take some of that damage away from burst potential (the peaks) and redistribute it to base damage (the valleys), make it more consistent and less spike prone. This would make enemies far less likely to one-round you with a string of crits, while at the same time making them more dangerous over a longer period of time in the absence of such crits, because they'd hit for more on average, applying more pressure to the player.

Basically I'm not suggesting a lowering of difficulty, but rather a adjustment to how the difficulty is served in regard to incoming damage.

I guess I'm the only one that read the entire post, lol.

Anyway, I kinda agree. Before you bash me know that everyone is different. There are people that prefer this game to be a tad easier, and there are also people that think it's fine or even want the game to become harder. I respect all of these things, and something like monster power could prove to be an excellent addition to fit everyone's needs, without completely overhauling the game and changing mechanics that people might like while others don't.
This game is built from the ground up to be challenging. I like a challenge, but not when it's basically all gear dependent. I'd prefer it if I could at least beat merciless with simple NPC gear if I know what I'm doing. I don't mind gearing for endgame maps tho.

The problematic situation is this:

1) The game is built from the ground up to be challenging and gear dependent.
2) CB testers got their back and are very hardcore.
3) The game went in OB, and a lot of (pissed off) d3 players joined in.
4) GGG did not expect this game to become so popular worldwide.
5) Feedback differs because everyone has their own opinion and taste.
6) Because GGG is awesome, they don't want to disappoint the players that supported them and change the game and want to continue making the game the way they want to.

There are middle ways to satisfy everyone. Builds allow us to play our characters the way we want and that's cool because there's a build for everyone. Something similar can be implemented into the difficulty of the game. As long as the mechanics don't change and just add monster power, I doubt anyone would be disappointed. You can even do this by making another league so nobody interferes with anyone. Maybe I'm wrong, but oh well I tried.

The complaints aren't all coming from new players, and it really isn't just an issue of new people being whiny about the game. Their whining about various things all stem (at least in part) from the underlying problem of mobs just doing too much damage. Death penalties, build diversity, and the gear hunt were never even discussed because the game was very different. The more you increase damage, the more it seems like those previous 3 things are the problem, since that's where the players feel it. Especially new players, who don't have a reference for how things used to be.

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theyedi wrote:

The complaints aren't all coming from new players, and it really isn't just an issue of new people being whiny about the game. Their whining about various things all stem (at least in part) from the underlying problem of mobs just doing too much damage. Death penalties, build diversity, and the gear hunt were never even discussed because the game was very different. The more you increase damage, the more it seems like those previous 3 things are the problem, since that's where the players feel it. Especially new players, who don't have a reference for how things used to be.

QFT

The core issue is, they overtuned the monsters output instead of taking the bull by the horns and mess with the RNG to gradually become more crazy as the difficulty increased which was the right way to work in tandem with the RNG heavy systems on monsters in the first place.

Then there's the mostly complained about monster effects, charging, leaping and general massive movement. Why do these skills afford mobility AND huge damage? that's not balance that's just...

Well read any RPG maker forums and the "don't's of RPG development" threads. You'll always find.

"Don't make your bosses and monsters 99999999 hp and 999999 atk and assume that's adequite and is a well made and difficult challenge, because it's not..."

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theyedi wrote:

The complaints aren't all coming from new players,

In fact, the majority of them are coming from CB players, because we actually experienced what the game was like before the random 90000000% increase in monster damage, and before things like chain existed to make ranged builds so much easier and less gear dependant to use.

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Undon3 wrote:

Hence, GGG do not even try too hard to balance the content, they actually encourage players finding ways to play the content in completely OP farming mode, basically "breaking" the game. There is a very relevant Brother Laz interview about this kinda stuff.

and there you go. the game is about figuring out how to break the game, then find items to use to break the game in more stylish ways. and when youre finally bored with that you find ways to break people faces in pvp

thats arpgs for you