Make rare monsters rare repost (props to author)

Rares are worse than mop bosses and Ubers. Saw this post by Impious (sp?)... Think it still needs people at ggg to read it. Especially this league.

Make rare monsters rare
I think that the AN implementation is missing its intended purpose by some way. From what I have gathered watching the CW baeclast pre launch the goal for AN was as follows, this is at leats how I interpreted it :

1. Rare monsters need to be meaningful encounters.
2. A single AN mod should not stonewall a build but it should be possible for a combination of mods to create challenging encounters.
3. Players should be able to more quickly interpret what a rare mob does as to adjust their gameplay to counteract the threat it poses.

I think the implementation has failed on all fronts in achieving the goals set for a couple of reasons :

1. Risk/reward and time/reward balance : In its current state it is best to ignore a mob that is dangerous or takes a long time to kill. Spending a long time attacking a mob that happens to resist the damage you do is not worth it. The rewards for killing these is not substantial enough so those difficult encounters that were designed to be meaningful are simply being skipped. If you do not reward the extra effort required that is implied by making the encounters meaningful then players will not do them or become frustrated at them. Seeing a rare that doesn't die quickly or dying to a rare with a specific mod is currently a very negative experience. You dislike when it happens. Ideally seeing a rare mob should be a positive experience because of the potential loot they represent. That is not the case.

2. Visual clutter : In it's current state with all the effects that come with the AN mods the game is extremely visually cluttered. This severely impacts how meaningful a single mob is. They are not discernable in any way because there is simply too much going on. On death effects, ground effects, aura's..In maps with a high monster density you are not fighting a meaningful rare but a group of things you need to kill. Most of the time you don't even see very well what you are fighting. It is hard to see what is what so you cannot quickly interpret which monster is doing what and what is going on. No single rare is impactful in a screen full save for those that are left standing because they again resist what you are doing.

3. Mod imbalance : Because of how the AN mods are designed many of the mods are quite simply meaningless and others are very challenging depending on what you are playing. I play a smite build and electric themed An mods are very annoying while others are hardly noticeable. Because of the nerfs to the AN mods most mods have become unnoticeable in individual encounters while some are simply frustrating and add no real value other than taking long to kill or negating your defensive layers. Many single mods have exceedingly fargoing impacts on certain builds to the point where a mob with just that one mod can be more annoying than a different one with three different mods. Personally I think all rare mobs should get an inherent buff to life and damage so that each one is meaningful but that is not possible in the current state of the game due to the following point.

4. Overload : I think this is a core issue. Single rare mobs are hardly an issue but it is the combination of several of these mobs that make the game frustrating and is the reason why so many league mechanics are currently very punishing. When too many rares spawn together the difficulty is scaled exponentially. 1+1 in this case does not equal 2. Because of this the individual rare mobs have been nerfed. The result is that a single rare is no longer very meaningful but a group of them is still harder and more frustrating than it should be. A single on death or ground effect is very manageable but several on top of eachother is not. You don't really see what you are doing most of the time, you just know you shouldn't stand still for too long. A lot of the frustration from players comes from overload where too many rare monsters spawn together and become exponentially difficult and annoying.

Lets be fair. How meaningful can something be when you encounter hundreds of them in a single hour of gameplay. In a single juiced map it is not uncommon to fight dozens of rare mobs. A single delve, ritual or blight encounter will have a dozen of these rare mobs in them. You cannot have something that common be meaningful every single time. It is not logically possible. I think that AN would have been fine its very first implementation pre nerfs if rare monsters were actually rare.

I think that a lot of the issues with AN could be solved if the spawn rate of rare mobs was a lot lower.

1. Because they become less common it is possible to significantly buff their drop rates without overflowing the economy. Say that hypethetically an exalt drops once every 1000 rares currently and you encounter 1000 per hour you get on average an exalt per hour. Now say an exalt drops every 100 rares but you only encounter 100 per hour. The average drop rate per hour is unchanged but the incentive for players to interact with rare mobs is much higher. Seeing a very strong and dangerous rare should be a positive experience. "oh wow a rare with 4 AN mods. This guy might give me an amazing drop". The map mod "maps contain xx% more rares" becomes desireable and is a good risk vs reward proposition. Skipping rares becomes worse than taking the time to kill them. Taking the atlas nodes to add AN mods and more rare monsters add value other than completing challenges.

2. Because they become less common you can make them harder and meaningful without running the risk of overloading players with too many in combination. You can rebuff the AN mods and rare mobs because you have less instances where a group of rare mobs make an encounter exponentially harder. Each rare could be an actual challenge without being an issue because you encounter them less often. You cannot have 20-30 meaningful encounters per map but 3 or 4 is fine. All mods could pose unique challenges rather than just having certain mods per builds posing a threat.

3. You reduce the visual clutter cuased by such large amounts of AN modifiers. The game becomes more visually clear and rare monsters will stand out. Seeing what one rare mob does on your screen is perfectly possible. Seeing what each of the 4 or 5 on your screen do is not. You also reduce the insane amounts of ground effects. Player gameplay and movement becomes more than simply " don't stand still for too long ". As a side note this is actually a buff to self casting skills and skills that require a player to stop moving. Current gameplay heavily favors skills that can be used efficiently on the move.


To recap. Make AN mods more rewarding and hard to fight but make rare monsters rare. A single rare monster now is never meaningful because of how dangerous they become in a group. How common they are ruins the ability to make the encounters meaningful. I would prefer to see only a small handful of rares in a map and be excited at the prospect of killing them even if it takes some effort rather than seeing a couple of dozen each map that don't mean anything unless they have one of the "annoying" mods for my build. Like I said. If you want something to be meaningful it needs to be rare.